You can see the ruins of the old blown up bridge under the Danube in Budapest. Pictures are wild. Cargo barges aren’t running at all now as far as I know. Hungary has to shut down the nuclear plant that provides something like 40% of the nation’s power during this heat wave.

Just continuing a conversation you started. It does at this point sound to me like your behavior might have played more of a role in your ban than you might be crediting.

Categorically, as you claimed before? Why not? If we can prove intent of an individual action beyond reasonable doubt, why not an action by an organization of people?

Or are you now acknowledging intent can be proven beyond reasonable doubt but that it hasn’t been in the case you were banned for arguing it?

In science, there’s absolutely a value in tribalism, i.e. respecting consensus (being a woolly “centrist") when one does not have expertise.

This isn’t analogous, though; consensus is a category reached through reason and proof. Expert consensus is by definition a reasonable position (can still be wrong, of course, but it’s a reasoned consensus).

Centrism just means a relative position between two others. It is not definitionally reasonable, so your analogy of what I’m doing doesn’t hold any water.

Do you not think this is what a flat-earther (or climate denier) would say?

But just because they say it doesn’t make it a valid argument in their case.

My point here was just categorically being a centrist doesn’t necessarily make the position reasonable enough that it should be tolerated. If you’re a centrist between a reasonable position and an unreasonable one, you might still be being unreasonable. It really depends on the specific issue. That’s really all my point was.

That seems to be just hoping for no critical mass though. If it ever grows large enough, you’ll definitely get people willing to put the time in to disrupt things for their own entertainment.

I can’t respond to such a circumspect answer.

I can only answer generally that there still sometimes not room for reasonable disagreement where intent is involved. Courts absolutely do prove intent for some crimes beyond a reasonable doubt… someone could still disagree, but by definition it isn’t necessarily a reasonable disagreement.

Murder (vs manslaughter) in most jurisdictions is a question of intent. We prove it to the point of no reasonable disagreement all the time. That’s the very standard we use.

again: I’m a frigging centrist

I’m not saying this is the case in your case at all, but depending on the issue this isn’t always an ironclad defense. We certainly have historical examples of political centrists aligning with very extreme ideologies in an attempt to cling to power.

And just logically, some issues don’t have a valid centrist position. There’s no valid centrist position between a flat earther and one who believes the earth is a planet in space. For example, in a science community, I would expect people pushing flat earth to possibly get banned and could see the logic in someone trying to find a middle between those two positions getting the same treatment. Just because there are two sides to an issue doesn’t make a moderate position between them reasonable or defensible. Sometimes one side is just wrong.

I think the merits of the situation are more important than affiliation.

But what about the problem of trolls just continuing to create new instances to circumvent bans and defederation? Is there really a solution to this beyond hoping we don’t reach a critical mass where this becomes a real problem?

Again, I do not have a personal opinion on it and never expressed one beyond refusing to endorse the progressive party line, which seems to have taken on the quality of a religious purity test.

I think it would help to know in more detail what went down here. If we’re talking about justifying, perhaps even unintentionally, genocide in either the sense of mass killing or mass removal by other means… I think it’s pretty understandable that civility starts to go out the window a bit. Arguably the position itself is uncivil, whatever words are used to support it. When your start to talk about the right to exist or not, to not be killed or forcibly removed by a state… that’s a life or death question and people will react that way. There are some issues there’s no room for reasonable disagreement on.

That said, on wider issues, as someone firmly on the left, I do completely agree that the left can get kind of ridiculously emotionally invested and toxic over even minor disagreements from other leftists that absolutely don’t meet the above threshold, even on questions as banal as pure strategy vs actual ideological disagreement. But it’s hard to say if what you experienced was the latter and not you possibly being oblivious to your part in the former without more detail.

It’s all good, man. 😁

Dude… you started the banter and now you’re getting upset someone is bantering back with you?

I was just playing along in good fun, but that is legitimately twat behavior, dude lol.

It’s okay, not everyone can get into a sport beyond just watching it casually. 😉 When you live and breathe the sport, you’ll understand lol.

If you liked your sport, you’d be obsessed with them, too. 😉

Baseball fans are pretty ride or die. I think it’s the necessary induction into the sport due to the arcane nature of it, similar to cricket fans.

@[email protected] these are both very good points, QFT.

I really am tired of people pretending like this kind of thing is purely an American problem and that Europe has no issues with authoritarianism. coughHungarycough (might be coming to an end, (maybe not, we’ll see) but living in 16 years of it… some stuff here would make Republicans blush). Incidents in the UK with pro Palestinian movements are similarly discouraging…

I have a few hundred hours (481 between my wife and I… my guess is about 300-350 of that is me). That’s a lot of time. Remember, I said I tried to get through it multiple times, and each time I got bored with it near the end of Act 2, so that playtime adds up. I’m just past the point in my life where I’m willing to put up with much slog to get to good parts near the end, I’ll just watch a video with dinner and call it a day. I actually feel like I wasted too much time on it as it is, but I guess if you have lots of time on your hands some might not consider it much… I do, though.

Again, I’ve seen the rest of the game and don’t agree with the characterization that it’s just the halfway point. It might be in terms of actual time played, but again, turns tend to take quite a bit longer in 5e at higher levels.

Eh, I don’t buy that you need to play an entire game before deciding it’s overrated. There’s this game criticism catch-22 among gamers that is used to invalidate all criticism… if you don’t finish it or play X hours you’ll be told you didn’t play enough. If you do, you’ll be told by someone else it can’t be that bad because you finished it or played too many hours for it to be bad.

I watched the rest on YouTube and didn’t feel like I missed much. I really don’t feel like what I missed was half the game… actual hours don’t mean much here because 5e naturally takes a lot longer to play at higher levels.

Baldur’s Gate 3. Game falls apart after the first act imo. Voice acting was great, first act is very fun and I can still play it, but I just can’t manage to make myself even finish act 2. I do get why people like it, but maintain that as a game it was very much overrated. It’s made my wife swear they should only do GOTY selection for the previous year after the full game has been released and played through entirely. I get the sense their early testing allowed for lots of tweaking an adjustment in the first act but they ran out of time to give the rest the same treatment.