Why Did You Choose To Register & Enter This Thread?

Fable said:

Gems of Infinite Potential MCU SI

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That and 'The Diary of Living Tank (ME Krogan SI)'.

Unhappy Anchovy said:

I'm not conservative!

Gah! This drives me crazy. How many times do I need to point to my past posts, or my voting record, or my church engagement, or the like? If you'd been in PM threads with me you'd have seen an awful lot of whining about racist ultraconservative church people.

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Just curious. What's wrong with being conservative?

Fleiur said:

Just curious. What's wrong with being conservative?

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It depends on how you define 'conservative'.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having a conservative disposition, which is to say cautious, change-averse, low-openness-to-experience, and so on. Some people have more conservative dispositions and some people have more progressive dispositions, and it's possible to generalise a bit here. We can talk about caution, epistemic humility, prizing stability, how people calculate trade-offs, and so on. I think a healthy polity will contain people of different dispositions and that's fine. Sometimes it's the progressive's job to drag the rest of society along into a big change whether they like it or not, and sometimes it's the conservative's job to stand athwart history yelling no.

However, conservative politics is a different question, and that can mean quite a few different things. To cut a long story short I think there are some policy platforms labelled conservative that I think are ruinously unwise. My experience is also that, particularly in America, right-wing politics tends to silo itself off and adopt a paranoid, angry, pugnacious style that has terrible effects both on the people doing it and on society at large.

I spend most of my time on SB's politics boards criticising progressives or the left, because I think I mostly talk to people to my left on SB. But this site is dominated by the right, and that means I'm probably going to spend most of time here criticising conservatives and the right. To the extent that I post much here at all, which to be honest I may not. We'll see how it falls out!

ShieldWife said:

I can anticipate his commands before he makes them.

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So you're obedient in the method of the Sergeant Jackrum School of Outright Rupert Management?

As for myself, Zoe asked me to be an admin at her new web forum. As we're good friends and I want her to succeed, I said yes.

I'll add that while the initial allegations against the PM did concern me, at least in terms of doxxing, I was quickly disappointed in the mob outrage being allowed to control the response thread in question as it did. It's clear that a lot of people have allowed political or personal passions to overrule any sense of judgement on the matter.

I have not left SB like others, and will continue to post there. And I mostly post stories anyway.

Big Steve said:

So you're obedient in the method of the Sergeant Jackrum School of Outright Rupert Management?

As for myself, Zoe asked me to be an admin at her new web forum. As we're good friends and I want her to succeed, I said yes.

I'll add that while the initial allegations against the PM did concern me, at least in terms of doxxing, I was quickly disappointed in the mob outrage being allowed to control the response thread in question as it did. It's clear that a lot of people have allowed political or personal passions to overrule any sense of judgement on the matter.

I have not left SB like others, and will continue to post there. And I mostly post stories anyway.

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Just curious but Zoe uses the same name in SB or is it a different name?

I didn't recognise her name as someone who has used SB before. Do remember you commenting when SB was still undergoing heavy purges for NSFW content and you did post something about battle tech if I recall right.

I know Zoe from places other than SB, actually.

Unhappy Anchovy said:

It depends on how you define 'conservative'.

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having a conservative disposition, which is to say cautious, change-averse, low-openness-to-experience, and so on. Some people have more conservative dispositions and some people have more progressive dispositions, and it's possible to generalise a bit here. We can talk about caution, epistemic humility, prizing stability, how people calculate trade-offs, and so on. I think a healthy polity will contain people of different dispositions and that's fine. Sometimes it's the progressive's job to drag the rest of society along into a big change whether they like it or not, and sometimes it's the conservative's job to stand athwart history yelling no.

However, conservative politics is a different question, and that can mean quite a few different things. To cut a long story short I think there are some policy platforms labelled conservative that I think are ruinously unwise. My experience is also that, particularly in America, right-wing politics tends to silo itself off and adopt a paranoid, angry, pugnacious style that has terrible effects both on the people doing it and on society at large.

I spend most of my time on SB's politics boards criticising progressives or the left, because I think I mostly talk to people to my left on SB. But this site is dominated by the right, and that means I'm probably going to spend most of time here criticising conservatives and the right. To the extent that I post much here at all, which to be honest I may not. We'll see how it falls out!

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I see. I think that the key principles of being a conservative are self awareness, taking responsibility of your actions, having values, objective morality and standards.

Hmmm conservatives are more open to civil discussion and conversation as far as I know. But I get that there are extremes on both sides.

I get the to each their own. However, I believe that there's should be standards and core values to uphold to.

Fleiur said:

I see. I think that the key principles of being a conservative are self awareness, taking responsibility of your actions, having values, objective morality and standards.

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I agree that those are good values and I try to live according to all of them.

However, I don't think that contemporary right-wing politics necessarily show all those principles. This is a cheap shot, but one only has to point to a certain president of the United States - clearly those values aren't always there in practice!

I'm inclined to say that there isn't such a thing as true conservatism, politically speaking. Modern conservatism is a coalition of all sorts of different people with different ideologies who are brought together in opposition to the left. Many of these groups have ideologies which are mutually exclusive. It's problematic to make wide sweeping generalizations about people with the same ideology and people who identify as conservatives often don't share the same ideology.

Personally, if I had to label myself, I would say that I am more of a nationalist conservative, so I believe in peoples and culture, in the preservation and value of both, and that distinct peoples should have autonomy to government themselves. This puts me in a broadly paleo-conservative grouping, as opposed to neo-conservatives who I disagree with on just about everything. I also have my issues with religious conservatives, libertarians, and corporate* conservatives.

Are conservatives more open to debate with people of differing belief systems? I don't know. From my personal observations, the answer is yes, but I'm extremely biased and I don't have much objective data to go on. I'm guessing that because the left have more power in most public spaces and the conservatives have such a broad coalition that conservatives have to be a bit more open by necessity. In a space where conservative belief is more dominant and monolithic, maybe we would see something different.


* I have actually been formulating a rant (maybe for a post here) about how the interests and influence of big corporations undermines important foundational aspects of conservatism (such as family, community, values) and replacing them with materialism.

Unhappy Anchovy said:

I agree that those are good values and I try to live according to all of them.

However, I don't think that contemporary right-wing politics necessarily show all those principles. This is a cheap shot, but one only has to point to a certain president of the United States - clearly those values aren't always there in practice!

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Good. Good for you. I believe as an individual, we should have standards and core values to uphold to in dealing with different aspects in our lives.

Hmmm It is not the President's job to be moral or nice. A polite man with bad policy will still be a bad president and a rude man with good policy will still be a good president. It's un-Christian to look upon a president as a moral leader. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and what is God's unto God". Was Constantine a good man during his reign?

Fleiur said:

A polite man with bad policy will still be a bad president and a rude man with good policy will still be a good president.

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And how do you feel about the rude man with bad policy?

Big Steve said:

I know Zoe from places other than SB, actually.

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SDN? That the same place SB had some star trek lore fight over with someone called Wong?

Still quite a relatively young chap to not get involved much with the sci fi communities you frequent.

Fleiur said:

Hmmm It is not the President's job to be moral or nice. A polite man with bad policy will still be a bad president and a rude man with good policy will still be a good president. It's un-Christian to look upon a president as a moral leader. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and what is God's unto God". Was Constantine a good man during his reign?

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A progressive would point out here - and I think they would be entirely correct to do so - that this is not the argument that conservatives or evangelical Christians made twenty years ago. Character used to matter. It mattered when conservatives had a problem with Bill Clinton. But it doesn't know?

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talks about "can I?" and "must I?" reasoning. (Reasonable summary.) The brain often works like more like a lawyer than a detective: it starts with what it wants to believe, and then concocts the strongest argument it can for that conclusion. So, for instance, if you start with wanting to believe Clinton is unfit for office, well, the strongest argument against him seems like one based on personal character or morality. But if you start with wanting to believe that Trump is fit for office, despite his terrible character, then instead your brain goes off and starts producing reasons why character isn't that important.

The progressive argument, and here I think they're correct, is that many on the right have reversed their position along these lines. As long as the allegiance (pro-Republican, anti-Democrat) stays consistent, all of the arguments can change.

Now, one response you might make here is, "You're just assuming things about me. Maybe some people are hypocrites - but I haven't said anything about Bill Clinton. I always believed that character wasn't important in a president." If so, then my response is, "Congratulations on your moral consistency. However, as I personally believe that character is important in a leader, I think character is a compelling argument against Trump. Further, I believe that the most common or mainstream conservative position has indeed been that character matters. You yourself said that values, self-awareness, responsibility, and adherence to an objective morality are key principles of being a conservative - if so, then it seems to me that Trump is not personally a conservative. Do you see any problems with conservatives voting for a candidate who so thoroughly transgresses key conservative principles?"

As far as Christianity goes: I think that argument is very weak. When scripture discusses qualifications for church leadership, personal moral character seems to be paramount: 1 Tim 3 has lists of virtues that bishops or deacons must show. You might argue that church leadership is different to political leadership. In response I would say firstly that there is no separation of church and state in the ancient world, and leadership is leadership; and secondly I would say that scripture talks about great length about the importance of character for kings. The prophets constantly criticise kings for poor personal morality, as do historians and chronicles. Psalm 101 is a coronation vow for a monarch, and it includes oaths to "study the way that is blameless", to "walk with integrity of heart", and to "not set before my eyes anything that is base". The king vows "perverseness of heart shall be far from me; I will know nothing of evil".

The Hebrew prophets would speak the word of the Lord by condemning personal immorality on the part of rulers. The most striking example is probably 2 Sam 12. The prophet Nathan does not excuse or ignore King David's immoral behaviour, on the grounds that the king is not a moral leader, or that political leaders should be judged on policy rather than character. He goes before the king and demands he repent of the evil he has done, and mend his ways. Psalm 51 picks up that story with David's repentance: David not merely asks God for forgiveness, but pledges to "teach transgressors your ways". Part of David's repentence is promising to serve as a moral example, and to encourage righteousness throughout Israel.

You mention Constantine, and ask whether he was a good man during his reign. The short answer to this is that the sort of Christians who revere Constantine believe that yes, he was. Eusebius' Life of Constantine is incredibly unsubtle about this. The early Christian defense of Constantine was not "he was a bad man but did the right thing in defending the faith"; it was absolutely that Constantine was a good man. I would note further that Christian history is full of examples of the church demanding penance from political leaders for when those leaders have sinned, or been of poor character. Think of Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the road to Canossa; or of Henry II of England's public penance after the death of Thomas Becket. There is ample precedent for the church challenging and even punishing, through excommunication, political leaders who have behaved poorly.

Thus I would encourage Christians who support Donald Trump's policies to nonetheless criticise Trump's character, in the hopes of provoking moral reform and perhaps even personal redemption. I admit that it seems a really long shot to me - I cannot imagine Trump mending his ways - but all things are possible with God.

I realized SB is full of crazy people, especially the debate forums. The rampant TDS epidemic is one of the major things wrong with it.

The final straw was when I got infracted for arguing it's inappropriate to call migrant detention centers in the USA as "concentration camps", since it's nothing but a cheap move to score some political points and show how Orange Man is Bad. I said the term was so politically charged and tainted by the nazis, it's very inappropriate to call them such, since we all know they are using the term as a further smear and to draw the nazi comparison. The mod in the message I received upon being infracted made a statement of fact that concentration and death camps are different things, and, long story short, I just can't argue the point.

Other people there were claiming that concentration and death camps are totally different things, and not at all related, but also they actually are related and what's happening now is simply a prelude to genocide, which I somehow want to happen because I don't want to call them concentration camps. Of course, no infractions for them, they made fair and totally non-contradictory points. Not like me, who was told by the mod in the appeals that "polish sources (I provided and translated) can and will be dismissed", despite SB debating rules clearly stating otherwise.

I am willing to giver the benefit of the doubt to the staff and say they may be overreacting to the whole PM fiasco, but a lot of the userbase in those parts is genuinely crazy, and I really don't want to try my patience further with their nonsense.

Then A Fighting Chance got transported here, and so I arrived.

Guardian Box said:

Then A Fighting Chance got transported here, and so I arrived.

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*HUGS*

Now go and help fill up the Creative Writing Thread....that place is rather silent in-comparison to SB

@Guardian Box Sorry to hear that, hope you can have a better time here.

I do recommend that if you are maintaining the same username you are on SB, you do go though and do a bit of sterilization of your post history on SB. A lot of us have certainly left a lot of information that we are probably able to connect to our real identity without much effort on many people's parts and I'm suspecting that people are going to turn posting here into a list of political enemies if we get much more traction from the behavior in the PM leaking thread. SB can only claim to control on-site behavior and even then I don't know how much influence the ousted staff members still have.

Given that someone was willing and able to do a hack of the Mass PM, who’s to say these SJW’s don’t exist-type-SJW’s won’t stoop so low as to try destroying this site?

That said, I think a number of tied have already been more or less severed, willingly and unwillingly

I like to have an alt on each of the xenforo forums I know about. Keeps me in the loop for interesting things.