Unstuck has done an incredible amount of good, both for its individual and collective members and - through political organization and charitable collaboration - the broader world.
Watching this place deteriorate is a legit tragedy, and feels like losing family over a trivial Thanksgiving argument. It seems especially absurd that a place with so many socialist and communist ideals is being torn apart by our unwillingness to set aside short-term personal affronts for the greater good.
I hope we can turn things around and keep this place going, because there’s a lot more I’m interested in learning from you all. But damn, there’s still a lot worth grieving here.
I apologize for being obnoxious and heated, in trying to lay out my point of view I only added to the toxicity.
Seeing all these long-term regs leave over middle school BS is very frustrating and sad after this group has held together through so much. Weren’t we just talking about expanding and making podcasts and shit?
The best thing any of the grownups here can do is ignore the drama completely, keep posting your usual bullshit, and hope it simmers down with minimal losses. Engaging the trolls only accelerates the rate at which the mods get frustrated and leave.
The good news is that this community has always had blatantly disruptive posters who would be snap-banned from any other forum. Lirva, ikes, the SMP crew, etc. Somehow it survives. I think Wookie derives sexual gratification from having posters who constantly whine about him, tbh.
Seems unlikely as we have a very small group of people trying to destroy it. A decent size group who are not fully grasping this and / or want to deal with it with an unending string of super short temp bans and community voting.
It’s likely going to be gone before the second group realizes it.
It certainly is unfortunate. I tried again to stay out of all this dumb threads but this one is where most of the work to undermine this place is. So we can’t have people keep ignoring the drama.
Yes, it was like someone who went to xyz ideology meeting, learned the talking points to respond to someone else and if I said something that he wasn’t trained to respond do he would just pick a random bullet point from the brochure until I gave up.
Notice the edit of my post, removing “reverse cargo” so he can claim I’m being condescending.
Anyone interested can follow the dreary exchange from there. But basically I start out giving him the benefit of the doubt, then eventually just end up muting the thread for the sake of my blood pressure. So sabo wins by just spewing paragraphs that look on the surface like a real argument - but really just amount to asserting that capitalism and police can never be reformed - over and over.
He refuses to ever state what his alternative for capitalism (but we know form other threads it involves not voting), and he doesn’t answer any of my points.
I don’t think he actually gives a shit about police brutality except as a useful tool to get to the revolution he dreams of leading someday. It’s pretty clear he keeps trying to establish a premise about capitalism by hitching it onto the sky-high emotions swirling around police brutality at the time.
I thought that this was both obvious and a view that’s shared by others. But I could have the wrong read. I still don’t understand the ban as I held similar opinions of him and still enjoyed my limited discussion with him and enjoyed reading his posts. At worst, he seemed like a spankthebadwookie but I see 10% of what you regs do.
Yeah I had a similar exchange in the Climate Change thread, here’s a summary:
Like to establish that capitalism is at fault for climate change you have to demonstrate not just that climate change is happening under capitalism, but that you have some alternative system in mind that would prevent this. Sabo will never actually make any positive proposals, he’s only interested in poking holes in things because that’s what allows him to take this didactic, lecturing tone all the time. He’s one of those guys who bolds the parts of his own posts he regards as most educational for the dummies he’s talking to, which is my #1 tell for a narcissist who is never going to take seriously the idea that he might learn anything from others.
Sabo points out some of the problems of capitalism wrt climate change
You jump to the incorrect conclusion that he was going to post a full breakdown of an entirely new economic system and how it would impact the environment.
Sabo says lol no I was just pointing out how bad capitalism is for the environment don’t be a weirdo.
And because he didn’t do what you demanded of him he’s the narcissist?
“Pointing out capitalism is bad for the environment” - as compared to what? An earth with no humans? Granted.
The Soviet Union, Mao, North Korea, Saddam Hussein, King Leopold ||? Not granted.
Humans have been destroying the environment since they first massed in large numbers. Native Americans had to constantly move after they’d deforest a given area and bring on drought. The Easter Islanders cut down all their giant palms. Humans suck at tragedy of the commons, period.
Chris is a scientist ( don’t remember his specific credentials) and is well versed in matters of climate science. Have you not read any of the myriad times he has weighed in on the matter?
If you’re going to challenge someone like that you better have a cohesive argument otherwise you are dumbing down the board.
It’s a pretty big insult to his intelligence to suggest otherwise.
Almost everyone here believes in anthropogenic climate change. Most, or at least a substantial plurality, believe that the best, or at least most immediate and non-violent, way they can think of to combat this is via using representative democracy to heavily regulate capitalist excesses. If you have a better alternative, state it and get people on board. If you don’t think there is an alternative that will work, there is no glory in successfully predicting inevitable doom. If you are correct, there is an incredibly high likelihood that you won’t be around to be congratulated or at least that anyone else will be around to congratulated you. And, any congratulations you do receive for successfully predicting inevitable doom are ultimately worthless.
Capitalism is concerned with the profit motive about all else, including sustaining the human species. Any attempts to regulate it will be fought tooth and nail and torn down eventually-- that’s been borne out by the last 40 years of America pretty well, I think.
I don’t see climate change being meaningfully addressed until we build a society whose core value is the dignity and sustainability of human life, not profit.
Aside, Americans criticizing socialist or communist countries would do well to consider the degree to which they’ve been drowned in propaganda their whole lives about how capitalism means freedom and America is the world’s most moral actor despite invading and overthrowing more countries-- again, for the profit motive-- than the rest of the world combined since WW2.
Just my .02; I can’t tell you how to set up the perfect society, but I have a pretty good idea what is going to happen if we keep going the direction we’ve been going.
Sabo is not incorrect because he’s not even making a point. It is pointless to drag capitalism into a thread about climate change unless you have a better idea. Get rid of capitalism, replace it with ???, then underpants gnomes solve climate change - isn’t a plan.
@R.C - of course the US isn’t some guiltless bastion of freedom. We’re utterly horrible. And capitalism is terrible for the environment, sure. But so is every other economic/governmental system ever tried on a mass scale. That was the whole point. Sabo turned a climate change thread into a referendum on capitalism and then got evasive when asked what he’d replace capitalism with that would do a better job.
Every other system that has been tried has had the United States putting the full force of its resources to undermining or overthrowing it, whether to steal the country’s resources and labor specifically or to break the idea of public / worker ownership-- or the idea of a system that genuinely valued all human life over profit-- generally. Part of the point of my first statement was to get people past “OK, the US is bad, but so are those other countries,” and get them thinking “How much of what I think of as bad about them was in direct attempt to defend themselves from the efforts of the US?”
I’m not a details guy, I’ll admit. I am a guy who’s good at the fundamentals, seeing the core values of people and their society, what they will ultimately choose when push comes to shove. All I’m saying is that we cannot solve anything without a system that puts human life over profits, and capitalism by definition will never be that, because it is defined by its need for constant growth and profit. And when push comes to shove, it will always, always choose that growth and profit, even if human extinction is the tradeoff.
This isn’t exactly what you’d call “on topic,” so I’ll stop here (and because it’s late). I’m happy to keep discussing the details of this sort of thing (despite my earlier statement about details) somewhere else or by PM. Like I’ve said, my only real problem in talking politics is with people who immediately condescend to me and treat me as stupid and naive because I think the human race needs better than the Joe Biden Democrats.
I don’t quite agree with this, but even if I grant it for argument’s sake, I can’t begin to see where it builds to “And that’s why Sabo should be permabanned”. Like if I think someone is engaging in a pointless line of argument, my response is to stop engaging with them.
That’s most people’s response. But you get one guy responding and before you know it there’s just pages of nonsense everywhere and guys stop bothering to sift through them all for a few nuggets of normal conversation and the place turns to shit. Good posters stop posting, lurkers even stop lurking, the place dies on the vine. Relying on everybody’s individual responsibility to not feed the trolls is naive, not everybody will do it all the time. So sometimes the most egregious trolls need to be disinvited. And it’s perfectly rational to look at a poster’s body of work as a whole, looking for a smoking gun is semantikesing and worse than useless – it’s obfuscating and a huge time sink. If a poster’s participation consistently leads to content free acrimony and has done for years the a ban is overdue.
Hard disagree that Sabo is a no content poster. Just because he asks you to think a little and doesn’t hand you things doesn’t mean he should be ignored imo. And certainly not perma’d lol
