Originally Posted by DVaut1
Lord, I find A_C_Slater an interesting character and am not looking to ban or silence him or lock this thread but holy ****, this thread is hot garbage. A_C_Slater is to blame. His posts are almost all bad. Literally all of them in this thread have some or many of the following failures:
1. starts off with a bunch of binary quips ("You are now free to choose a new side","The New Globalist Order says "more for the refugee and less for the American citizen."). How can you refute this? Can I not choose a side; does anyone have agency to work for other outcomes, or a mix of both? I'm quite confident we do. And which New Globalist Order member is saying precisely "more for the refugee, less for the American citizen"? Twitter's a big place, maybe people are saying that? I have no clue. I know A_C_Slater says it but that's uninteresting. It seems like a trivial strawman, but to entertain the alternatives that it might not be, YOU NEED AN ALTERNATIVE. A_C_Slater is not providing anyone actual content to work with and respond to here. Of course it devolved into some nonsense from there.
2. he sort of walked into a predictable rat's nest by claiming he gets news from Reddit and Yahoo comments, which I suppose as a heuristic to determine popular opinion is one thing but to gauge and learn observable facts about the world an entirely different thing.
3. Throughout are the hallmarks of the paranoid mindset: strange tones of apocalyptic warnings and various claims about his past musings on the gold standard and Hillary Clinton's election chances and other things which all ostensibly build into dire warnings about refugees and a coming climate-change borne global crisis along with a moderate amount of whining about how's being victimized by people recognizing his history of posting (e.g., the Hitler stuff). In the end, we're informed of his past mixed historical record of predicting stuff and how he was sometimes correct and sometimes wrong but led him the global order is in a state of upheaval and he has been predicting some of its movements and he is ultimately on the precipice and standing guard on watch for collapse, but also, his past historical postings expressing wonderment and admiration for Hitler's command of populations absolutely cannot be discussed or yet again he has been victimized. In the end: please listen to him babble on about his personal history and how it informs his worldview and the threats he faces and wants to share with you, but please do not consider this other stuff he has posted which suggests he's serially unorthodox and has views far outside the norm.
As I said, I find A_C_Slater interesting! He should keep posting. But have some self-awareness! If you post hundreds of times about how you're a world-renowned expert on Hitler AND you come bringing exasperated warnings about the coming refugee crisis about to inflict America, recognize your exasperation and the lack of credibility with which the world treats your anxiety might have been bred in all of that outside-the-box thinking you're PROUD OF. It can't be both ways.
4. MOST IMPORTANTLY. He makes a set of non-sequitur but ultimately empirically testable claims:
- he lost a bet, so he set out to discover where the American public was at and discovered: 1) these working class people are the same ones that voted in Obama twice and 2) he came to the conclusion that the current political atmosphere is about Nationalism versus Globalism. Yet again we get an empirically dubious, entirely questionable claim (Obama's voters became Trump ones, they are working class, they represent the entirety of the American public) and then from there a conclusion about the global order.
- he declares that we should be aware that the parties are going to be perceived in a Globalist/Nationalist way from now on as opposed to the old Rich/Poor dynamic. Again, I sort of appreciate the point but it seems overly binary and empirically testable. Pollsters often survey the public and gather their views on the two dominant political parties; is EITHER formulation about the past and present-and-coming-future true? Maybe? I'm skeptical that either the formulation is precisely true. Why are we zooming past this?
- he claims global warming is going to make the entire Middle East unlivable in the coming decades. Yet again, empirically dubious. Also the implication, obvious later, is that climate change is going to result in Middle Eastern refugees seeking to settle in the United States. Or maybe Europe? Yet again, not clear, but here we are asked to believe something rather drastic in scope and entirely unproven.
- Apple has realized the 'CIA dream' of 'having psychological profiles on everyone.'
- 'We would still have Google efficient level search engines if Sergey Brin were never born.' -- unknowable counter-factual history but ultimately tangential.
- claims that Middle Easterns uprooted by climate change are going put more resource pressure on the dwindling arable farm regions in America as the temperature continues to rise here as well -- again, bundled in here are least like explicit and potentially many more claims worthy of examination: climate change is going to uproot Middle Easterners, we havea dwindling arable farm regions, climate change inexorably means rising temperatures everywhere, our national carrying capacity is exceeded, humans can't or won't adapt.
All throughout a bunch of empirically dubious claims are various binary choices or just exhortations to embrace his worldview ("lifeboat ethics.")
This thread is garbage but it was totally A_C_Slater's fault for posting drivel. He should try harder next time.
It's unfortunate but I can tell my post here is wasted effort because I'm sure you, A_C_Slater and a cadre of others are basically clueless as to why it's garbage and why this style of posting is tedious and bad.
If you take anything away from this, and I suspect you will take less than nothing, and in fact further retrench into self-pity, but if you take only one thing: you can have some premises and assumptions, you prove them, then you make some conclusions. The proving them is the most important part! Your conclusions are empty and meaningless without them.
I know that is hard, I get it bro. No one particularly likes it. But when you don't, the arguments are garbagey and bad and uncompelling.
