Anonymous asked:
argumate answered:
Surprised he hasn’t announced a plan to build a wall emoji and make the Powerful Owl the national bird.
Anonymous asked:
argumate answered:
Surprised he hasn’t announced a plan to build a wall emoji and make the Powerful Owl the national bird.
learn-tilde-ath asked:
argumate answered:
Wow that’s a tough one. At first I think that version of me would be completely unrecognisable, but then I’m not so sure. I already have very strong moral inclinations, even though I am aware they are not baked into the universe; perhaps if I believed that these moral principles were fundamentally real then there would be few observable differences in my behaviour, besides what I might say in discussions about moral realism!
To think otherwise is to fall into the Jack Chick fallacy, where an absence of the god of Abraham immediately gives one a license to kill, cheat, and steal.
That’s actually my estimate about what would be different in the Moral Owl Argumate AU, but the Argumate fanfic writers disagree with me.
funnily enough “two perfect squares” is what I’d call my pop group if I had musical ability and a partner in crime as square as me
Receiving @argumate posts like:

(The musical, of course, is based on the original script by Erika Moen.)
@argumate‘s Grandfather Discoursebogan Prepares for (Cancelled) Australian Space Program (Black & White, Rotterdam Timeline, 1953)
More work towards achieving Total Artist Unemployment.
Aloha Argumate-Senpai!: Discourse Beach inches closer to defictionalization.
sad that Britney Spears lives in a world where “Britney Spears” does not exist.
anyone else can say ‘it’s Britney, bitch’ and achieve a certain effect on the listener that Britney herself cannot; she remains isolated, aloof.
in the scenario depicted by …Baby One More Time in which Britney Spears plays a besotted schoolgirl, “Britney Spears” does not exist, otherwise her classmates would immediately stop their synchronised backup dancing and say holy shit, that’s Britney Spears.
this is in stark contrast to I Want It That Way, in which the Backstreet Boys appear to their fans “in character”, trying to collapse the distinction between reality and musical fantasy.
Ocean’s Twelve attempted to have it both ways by having a character played by Julia Roberts pretend to be Julia Roberts, implying that “Julia Roberts” exists in the world portrayed by Ocean’s Twelve. However the movie “Ocean’s Twelve” does not exist in this world, otherwise the characters would say wait, isn’t this just what happened in Ocean’s Twelve?
Mel Brooks went one step further and took advantage of temporal anomalies to place a VHS copy of the movie “Spaceballs” within the movie Spaceballs itself, allowing the characters in the movie to gain insight into their own future, though they remained curiously incurious about the revelation that they were merely figments of the script writer’s imagination.
all of our minds contain a reference to “celebrity performer Britney Spears”, but the mind of Britney Spears does not; we can never be her, and indeed to be her would be to lose her.
Argumate Movie AU where there is no Argumate
While I’m all for “self-criticism” of antifascists who go too far and use excessive violence or attack innocent people, that’s necessary and too often ignored, it’s worth noting no leftists have killed anyone in the US in decades, while the far right are killing people every couple of weeks now.
this kind of accusation, while tempting, gets awkward because it sort of relies on pushing all the violent people out of the category “leftist” and all the non-violent people out of the category “far right”, resulting in what is basically a tautology.
but at least we can all agree that killing is bad
I mean if you wanna include reactionary black nationalists under the category of leftist, that’s understandable even if I wouldn’t include them. They’re monstrous and have killed innocent people.
But if you ask me, and no one did, it’s the very logic of nationalism that leads to aimless murder, the viewing of entire ethnic groups as The Enemy and therefore legitimate targets, and it’s why actual anarchists and socialists in the US, who are internationalists, rarely if ever kill innocent people.
entire classes as the enemy and therefore legitimate targets is a thing too, even if ethnic hatred certainly does suck.
To be honest I don’t think anyone believes that, the entire class as a literal enemy in the military sense. No ones out there shooting landlords and business owners at random. No one but the fringest of tankies imagines that any revolution consists of literally murdering the entire former ruling class.
Me thinking it wouldn’t be so bad if someone iced an oil company CEO or war criminal US official is not at all the same as thinking every human being in the entire capitalist class and state apparatus is a “legitimate target”.
right, but we’re kind of haggling over price, now.
On the contrary, I think your acceptance of a “minimal” level of state violence that’s just allowed to go on unpunished and that doesn’t reasonably give credibility and justification to retaliation by victimized nonstate actors, is an unacceptable moral imposition on my conscience, a price too high for me to pay.
I’m not willing to take the position of a black-hearted school principal who just tolerates a certain level of abusive victimization by bullies as acceptable but would never allow for a victim to hit back and “start a fight”.
I think the problem in the scenario you describe is tolerating state violence, and the solution doesn’t involve molotov cocktails.
The unprincipled principal may punish both sides equally while the principled principal assesses the situation and delivers justice, but they still have to stop the fight!
No! The fight IS justice. Justice consists of the victim delivering a well-deserved fist to their assailant. Some investigation and punishment afterward will only ever be a second-best outcome, unless in those (admittedly quite common) situations where there’s confusion about who actually did what and who’s responsible.
The partisans shooting Mussolini and the liberated Jews who picked up a cane and beat up their former SS captors were better deliverers of justice than the war crimes tribunals as far as I’m concerned.
Extreme cases make bad principles; concentration camp guards directly committing heinous crimes are clearly asking for it, yes. But that’s hardly the typical case of political violence, is it.
And ideally we would have both more and better war crimes tribunals; Saddam Hussein may have deserved the noose, but it should have been for a clear accounting of his crimes, not because he was overthrown by a different gang of thugs.
“The fight IS justice!” says political Tumblr user, “but any unpunished incorrect state violence is too much.”
Yeah, that’s just acceptance of a minimal level of violence by another name. Confusion of who intiated what violence and/or manipulation by social adepts is the dominant case, not the edge case.
mitigatedextras sideblog for stuff that doesn’t make the cut for the main blog exists, if that’s your thing, dear readers
can you imagine if I had a sideblog for things that I thought weren’t good enough for this one
Mathematically, assuming a uniform distribution in the Tumblr space, as the number t of Tumblrs goes to infinity, the probability of a blog with the same contents as argumateextras existing approaches 1.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.