Blood Boils posted:

SMG you probably didn't know this but comparing Tezzor to Sam Harris is really twisting the knife lol

Before driving himself insane over star wars (many such cases) Tezz's claim to fame was a fairly successful thread discrediting the nu-atheists, years before it was commonly accepted that they were obviously irrational and reactionary.

I'd give him more props for it but he just had to come for my very real bestest boys, artoo & threepio, and that I cannot forgive

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

The Challenge is 100% deadly serious - and 100% deadly successful - but it is also mainly a way to get people thinking about stuff.

I mean, hopefully.

Tezzor may be really perplexed by many concepts, but they consequently serve as a helpful negative example of why you gotta establish things like “what is racism”, “what is a person”, “what is reality”, etc. It’s why I gravitate towards science fiction.

Like, it’s genuinely wild to discover multiple people not understanding that, when watching a fictional movie, they themselves are real. Like, it’s not okay to write out an interpretation of LOTR that’s Mein Kampf but with orcs. Because, while orcs may be fictional, the nazi propaganda you’re writing is very real. And very bad. But, yet, we’ve seen that people have enormous difficulty with this. ‘How can the nazi propaganda be real if orcs aren’t real?’, ‘I’m a good person who would never say such things in real life!’, etc.

And you, know, I believe that: you probably wouldn’t be saying this wild poo poo without first being confronted with a speculative fiction. When shown a person made of metal or an android made of meat, previously-unexamined weird thoughts are suddenly off the chain.

The Challenge has proven remarkably successful at, at least briefly, snapping nerds out of that “nothing’s real” delusion. poo poo suddenly gets very real very fast, to the point that even fuckin’ Tezzor admits “Mace Windu is played by a human being who is black and to call him that is to call the actor that as well, and also in reality it's a deeply offensive slur.” Suddenly there’s this realization that they themselves exist, and that they’re actually writing things down & communicating real ideas to other real people in reality.

But then they just revert straight back to posting Elf Kampf, without skipping a beat - again demonstrating that the goal is not to stop doing racism, but to escape consequences by making it seem palatable. ‘Orcs aren’t real! Nobody cares about the orcs! You’re trivializing real racism by criticizing my manifesto!’ Etc.

Thinking over why that reversion takes place is what led to the fairly obvious conclusion: that they just really, genuinely, do not understand what racism is. Like, if you go back to Tezzor’s explanation for failing the Challenge, they conceive of racism purely in terms of offence: people would be offended, Samuel L. Jackson will be insulted, etc. And, like, sure; that’s something. But Tezzor’s solution is to just switch to softer language and easier targets. There’s no moment of ‘oh, I’m perpetuating a very bad ideology regardless of whether people are offended.’ Like I wrote earlier: maybe constantly downplaying things and keeping them at a dogwhistle frequency is actually worse?

So: Star Wars!

Does anyone actually care about, like, the citizens of cloud city or whatever? What about the people of Alderaan? Where’s the blood that would force us to care?!

Could it be that the ‘visceral empathy’ thing is yet another smokescreen?

I’m thinking ‘maybe.’

SuperMechagodzilla posted:

I dunno about that. Aside from the sheer volume of the aggro posts, Tezzor (amusingly autocorrected as “Tizzy” by my phone) shows every indication of just being unfashionably regressive and dumb. Like, they’re using terms and concepts incorrectly but in a consistent way.

They’re very bad at forming an argument, but seem aware of that fact - consciously switching over to blunt hate speech when flustered. Despite continually failing the Challenge, they’re 100% down with calling everyone ‘autistic animals’ and demanding their elimination by the authorities. And while there might seem to be a contradiction there - ‘I’m not bigoted; you’re just subhuman’ - it’s easily understood as a case of that “lib brain” I mentioned earlier.

Being like a caveman youtuber from the prehistoric mid-2000s, unfrozen and ejected into the present year, Tizzy understands that racism is bad but not that ableism is bad. This is because there’s little to no awareness of the reasons why slurs became considered bad in the first place. They understand “racism” not as an ideology but as a sort of essential evil in the individual, revealed through the use of select prohibited words. Calling someone an autistic dog’ doesn’t usually trip the sensor, and is even encouraged if you’re doing a ‘comical rant’ about the Star Wars prequels on Digg or Fark or Neopets(??? idk; I don’t use other websites).

This is again pretty consistent with everything else Tezzor has written. It’s why they - rather vocally! - don’t care about slavery unless there is graphic bloody violence, desperate crying women, whatever. The act of hitting people and using (certain) slurs is bad, while the institution of slavery minus these elements is ‘cartoonish’, ‘bloodless’, etc. It’s what allows Tezzor to watch a movie featuring literally millions of slaves and say slavery doesn’t exist in the movie. This failure to understand socioeconomic violence is of course related to the moral idiocy where an action can’t be understood as bad unless we care - viscerally. Caring makes it real.

Tezzor’s stance here recalls an argument made by professional idiot Sam Harris, circa Abu Ghraib, that our only real objection to torture is that it produces an empathy response - so, we can make torture acceptable, in a utilitarian way, by just rationally eliminating empathy:

“We could easily devise methods of torture that would render a torturer as blind to the plight of his victims as a bomber pilot is at thirty thousand feet. Consequently, our natural aversion to the sights and sounds of the dungeon provide no foothold for those who would argue against the use of torture.”

Of course, that sounds extremely monstrous and evil, and Tezzor is aware of this. Hence, the recourse to the figure of “George Lucas” as one who has stolen Tezzor’s empathy and therefore caused slavery to become good through sinful idleness or whatever. This is how Tezzor flips the logic of ‘caring’ to depersonalize his opponents: ‘you don’t actually care, and therefore you are an autistic animal.’

Again, this is a fairly coherent worldview! It just one that only makes sense if slavery is understood purely as a subjective state of pain - like how exploitation is often not considered to be something experienced by all workers under capitalism, but an exceptional case where people experience egregious sweatshop conditions or are made to do undignified porn or something.

And that’s why a fairly basic satire of liberalism has heavily impacted this person for decades.

End of Shoelace posted:

I'd say that Tezzor claiming droids are not people is definitely racist, because his entire argument is that the non-personhood and inferiority of droids is intrinsic to their being droids. They're just machines, a sum of parts, soulless computers, as in decidedly not human (this is also an argument for "human supremacy.") Being a droid is, in itself, an inferior state, and all bad qualities of a droid are inseparable from droid-ness.

quote:

You said:
Is it racist to say that ChatGpt is not a person?

ChatGPT said:
Nope, that’s not racist at all—ChatGPT isn’t a person!

I’m an AI, so saying I’m “not a person” is just factually accurate. There's no race involved, and no human identity to insult. You're just pointing out the difference between a human being and an artificial intelligence.

1st AD posted:

Touch grass

Zeta Niloticus posted:

I was gonna make a joke yesterday about tezzorb becoming tezzorc in a day or two but it looks like I'm a little late

bunnyofdoom posted:

What is everyone's favourite spaceship? I kinda am a sucker for the Tie Defender

josh04 posted:

josh04 posted:

Who would represent a slave army at this point?

Schwarzwald posted:

holy loving poo poo

Bongo Bill posted:

How do you know that droids lacking a soul is the reason why George Lucas did not approve any pitches about Jedi droids?

Bongo Bill posted:

What does that have to do with souls, or personhood?

Wolfsheim posted:

*reading 50+ posts about droid personhood* uh huh ok so is sleeping with general grievous ethical or not

bunnyofdoom posted:

Just remember Tezzor thrives off attention. Ignore their dumbass racist posts and instead post about stuff that gives you joy in Star Wars.



I like wraith squadron. They should get a D+ series