naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
Petty nitpick, curious if there's other reporting that suggests it was targeted for some reason
Not petty at all! I should probably have worded that a little differently--as you say, "motivated" rather than "targeted," despite the language used by the police. The targeted bar seems to have a vaguely patriotic theme to it (red-white-and-blue logos, flying an American flag but no pride flags that I can spot on the Google Maps page). It would be interesting to know whether the shooter regarded the bar as a hotbed of "LGBTQ white supremacy" activity, but it feels like in most of these cases the powers-that-be would prefer to suppress clues along those lines as best they can.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
the fact that he said LGBTQ
That's a good point, I missed that entirely.
personally I put them in a category that I think of as 'Jesusists', that is, religions that take Jesus as their central figure, but which are too different from historical Christianity to be understood as the same thing
I feel like this is an obvious place to taboo "Christianity," though of course--I can't imagine any self-identified Christians lightly acceding to that. In my years I have been fascinated to hear from Evangelicals that Catholics are not Christian; from Jehovah's Witnesses that Protestants are not Christian; from Wokists that Christians are not Christian. I have heard arguments about the "historical Jesus" and the "historical creeds," I've met "restorationist Christians" in the form of Seventh Day Adventists and Mormons, and I have to say: it sounds like a whole lot of wildly unproductive verbal disagreement to me. I've read my share of Kierkegaard and C.S. Lewis and others who have weighed in on the debate, I'm not ignorant of the stakes. But I haven't got a horse in the race, so to speak, so while that probably makes me a nicely impartial judge of the matter, it also seems like maybe the kind of disagreement for which none of the relevant parties want an impartial judge!
(FWIW, my own heuristic is that anyone who thinks Jesus was Divine can be comfortably regarded as a "Christian" for every practical purpose imaginable, and people who gatekeep categories with such practical value can in almost all cases just be safely ignored. Surely Mormonism as at least as much a "Christian faith" as, say, Denmark is a "Christian nation." I assume that I would probably feel differently if I subscribed to a different metaphysics, though!)
So it's hard for me to say that Trump's interpretation of the shooting is wrong, even though it is almost certainly clumsy. This was a targeted attack, and it was an attack on self-identified (if plausibly heretical) Christians, and it appears to have been an attack on their faith for adherence to their faith (as opposed to e.g. for their race or their presumed politics), which is a surprising and unusual thing here in the United States--though, crucially, not a historically unprecedented thing for Mormon congregations.
And I have to seriously wonder--did Trey Parker and Matt Stone have something to do with this? Did Hugh Grant, or Netflix, or FX, or Netflix, or Hulu, or Netflix? Other than the musical, those are all productions from the last four years--at what point would it be plausible for the Mormons to begin to worry that society is prosecuting an active vendetta against them?
One response might be that (at least some--there is no "Quran the Musical") other faiths also catch Netflix shade--Unorthodox and One of Us are relatively recent productions touching on Judaism, Midnight Mass and The Sinner seem arguably critical of Catholicism, etc. The Mormons aren't unusually persecuted, rather, Netflix (and perhaps Hollywood more generally) portrays all religion in maximally negative light!
And this is where I think Trump's comment becomes clumsy--or, if you believe some of the more extreme things sometimes said of him, not clumsy but deliberately Christian nationalist. This appears to be a possible case of genuine sectarian violence. How often does that happen, here? This Wikipedia list of attacks on churches in the United States is quite interesting to me, especially the "motive" column. "Anti-Christian" violence is clearly a thing, but it would probably be more accurate (and inclusive) to suggest that anti-religious violence is a thing.
Whether or not they are ultimately part of the "Christian" coalition, the Mormons are clearly part of the coalition backing Trump. I don't personally think Trump is actually trying to move the United States toward Christian nationalism, but if he were, it would have to be a Christian nationalism inclusive of Mormons--or else a Christian nationalism with no hope at all of maintaining rule over the Rocky Mountains.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
Right-coded violence reasserts itself (?)
It's sobering, that this morning someone might have asked you "did you hear about the 40-year-old Iraq war veteran who committed a 'third space' mass murder over the weekend?" and you might have reasonably responded, "Which one?"
(Insert Dr. Doofenshmirtz meme here!)
Of course, like any normal American, the instant I heard that someone had shot up a Mormon congregation and burned their house of worship to the ground I crossed my fingers and prayed the perpetrator was a member of my outgroup immediately wondered if the shooter was a right-coded wingnut who somehow blamed Charlie Kirk's death on the Mormons.
(I've never managed to determine whether Tyler Robinson and his family are actually Mormon, or maybe were Mormon at some point, but nobody seems to care; apparently all anyone else wants to know is whether he was really a gay furry, a groyper, or both. But living in Utah seems sufficiently Mormon-adjacent that a psychotic killer could draw the association.)
So far, no apparent Kirk connection! However the Michigan shooter indeed regarded Mormons as the anti-Christ. Perhaps that's the whole story: he just really, really disliked Mormons (sort of like everyone else). This makes Donald Trump's commentary interesting; the President immediately declared that this was a "targeted attack on Christians" and was met with an Evangelical chorus of "Mormons aren't Christians" (which to me seems a little tone deaf, under the circumstances, but times being what they are...). In any event this is probably the deadliest case of targeted violence against Mormon congregations since the 19th century.
(There was apparently a bomb threat in 1993 that could have been a mass casualty event, had the explosives been real. Other than that, I'm not an expert on hate crimes but Google does not seem to think that Mormons are very often the target of such things.)
The North Carolina shooter got less attention (he did not burn down any churches), but that didn't stop Newsweek from digging into some peculiarities of history:
They also confirmed on Sunday that “Mr. Nigel Edge actually changed his name some years ago,” adding that they are working to identify “all of his past.”
One authority referred to him as “Sean,” and according to public records that Newsweek obtained, he previously identified as Sean DeBevoise.
...
According to a 2020 self-published book on Amazon, Headshot: Betrayal of a Nation (Truth Hurts), DeBevoise wrote that on tour, he took "four bullets including one to the head." He said from that moment on his "life would never be the same," adding that "all of this was at the hand of friendly fire that would provide the most crippling mental damage."
This fellow has quite a colorful record, and part of that record includes the fact that
...Edge has been behind several bizarre lawsuits filed in North Carolina this year — including one accusing a Southport church of trying to kill him.
The suit, filed in May, claimed the Generations Church was behind a “civil conspiracy” masterminded by the LGBTQ community and white supremacist pedophiles to kill Edge because he’s “a straight man.”
In January, Edge filed a similar suit against the Brunswick Medical Center, accusing it of being part of a conspiracy launched by “LGBTQ White Supremacists” who were allegedly out to get him because he survived their attack in Iraq.
This reads like schizophrenia to me, but on balance it seems more right-coded than left-coded, concerns over "white supremacists" notwithstanding.
All this seems to have the usual left-coded social media spaces crowing; they have spent the past few weeks assuring us all that right wing extremism is far, far more common and deadly than left wing extremism. But to my mind, neither of these cases quite reach that "political extremism" threshold. The Michigan shooting appears to be genuine sectarian violence of a kind rarely seen in the United States, and the North Carolina shooting looks like a textbook mental health event. Nevertheless, I have no difficulty seeing these as right-coded, for the simple reason that they were carried out against minority groups by white, middle-aged, ex-military men. That's red tribe quite regardless of what their actual political views are--indeed, whether they have any coherent political views at all.
This got me thinking about all the other violence that I see as a blue tribe problem, quite regardless of its ideological roots. The obvious one that Charlie Kirk himself occasionally gestured toward was inner city urban gang violence; that is blue-coded violence, to my mind, though it is arguably "politically neutral." A couple weeks ago I suggested that we should be paying closer attention to the role that "Neutral vs. Conservative" thinking has to play in the national conversation on identity-oriented violence. This weekend's events strengthen that impression, for me. I do not really like the "stochastic terrorism" framing, particularly given my attachment to significant freedom of speech. But neither can I comfortably assign all responsibility for these events strictly to individual perpetrators.
I wish I had something wiser to say about that. I would like there to be less violence everywhere, but certainly the trend toward deliberately directing violence against unarmed, unsuspecting innocents seems like an especially problematic escalation, and one our political system seems to be contributing toward even when our specific political commitments do not. I don't know if drawing a distinction between "tribe-coded" and "tribe-caused" is helpful. But it is a thought I had, and have not seen expressed elsewhere, so I thought I should test it here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
18d ago
This is a current culture war issue, please feel free to post this in the CW thread.
naraburns
nihil supernum
24d ago
Apropos cancellations from the right, is there any way to get a professor in trouble for teaching about social justice instead of the content they were supposed to teach?
This will depend on how far from the subject matter you've strayed. Class in politics, law, literature, philosophy? Probably not. Class in calculus? Almost certainly.
Especially if they are assigning most of the semester grade for writing and talking about social justice, not what's in the course description?
This certainly would strengthen the case.
Especially if it is a required course, with no option to change sections?
This probably doesn't help you much.
The first step is to talk to their supervisor, usually a Department Chair or Dean. Bring clear evidence. Explain that you have some concerns and be sure to mention that you are afraid to talk to the professor directly, because you are concerned about retaliation. If the Chair seems unsympathetic, go to the next step up (Dean or Provost, usually). If they seem unsympathetic, escalate again. If you try to escalate prematurely, you'll be sent back down ("we don't handle that directly") so you have to be able to say "I already spoke with $SUBORDINATE, they were not helpful." If you get all the way to the President, you will most likely be talking to someone who is very annoyed to have you in their office, and who will seek the quickest, most effective way to ensure that you never darken their doorstep again.
If by now the problem still has not been resolved, you have to choose between taking your lumps, and going nuclear with a social media offensive. If you're at a public school, then the next level of escalation is your state representative. If they're a Republican, they will appreciate the opportunity to get some TV time advocating for you against the tide of Woke. If they're a Democrat, your options are fewer, but not nonexistent, depending on the particulars of your case.
(At some point it will become clear that this whole process is much, much more of a hassle for you than just giving your professors what they want. But obviously not everyone finds that sufficient deterrence.)
Do any of you spend any time with or around Native Americans? What are they up to these days?
This depends dramatically on which tribe you're talking about. Tribeless natives are just integrated into the general population, though some remain within tribal orbits. Very generally speaking, the tribes with casino money and relatively small populations are doing extremely well, functioning as basically very large, very wealthy families (thinking here of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux in Minnesota, or even the Seminole in Florida). Those with sizeable reservation land are also in pretty good shape (most obviously, the Navajo tribe in the Four Corners area), though larger population and land area also means larger disparities between members. There are still a fair few Navajo grandmothers out there raising their grandchildren in derelict homes where they have to haul in potable water and get electricity from a generator. Smaller and more isolated tribes face similarly impoverished circumstances.
I have some experience living near different reservations around the country and I think maybe the best way to put it is that class differences are exaggerated for enrolled members; wealthy Native Americans are some of the wealthiest Americans, poor Native Americans are some of the poorest Americans, and those in the middle may as well be invisible. The wealthy and educated families are basically aristocrats, and they spend a lot of time and effort to keep it that way, often training in law and business to keep up their "most favored nation" status and ethnically inherited superprivilege. But the poor and drug- or alcohol-addicted are some of America's neediest people, living in squalor in homes they didn't buy, spending money they didn't earn. This leads to an interesting sort of "noblesse oblige" where the well-off tribal members sometimes dedicate significant time and resources (their own, as well as the federal government's) to "uplift" programs, building schools and homes for their downtrodden brethren, enacting jobs programs, and otherwise practicing a geographically and ethnically constrained form of communism. But no small number of this quasi-nobility also walk away from the reservation entirely, washing their hands of the fruitless frustration and thankless toil to seek their own personal fortune. These return to the reservation, if at all, only for a comfortable retirement.
I am if nothing else impressed with the shrewd leadership and entrepreneurial initiative that the quasi-nobility has shown, particularly in those tribes where the genetic remnant is so vanishingly small that they really are more plausibly white (or sometimes black) than "Native American." The Supreme Court some time ago asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment did not alter the constitutional status of Native Americans because tribes are political entities, not ethnic or racial ones. This fig leaf has been a boon for most Native Americans in America's post-colonial phase, to the extent that the tribes are land rich, government subsidized, and exempt from numerous regulations of general applicability.
But the boon is unevenly distributed, in ways that suggest mere resource redistribution might not address the core of the problem, and might even be a part of the problem. Very probably, I think, Native Americans would be much better off overall if we abolished tribes and reservations entirely, awarded the land to its residents in fee, and worked to integrate and mainstream them into American society. But this would undermine their tribal identity and heritage, as well as their aristocracy. And so the unflattering stereotype of the poor, drunk, welfare-dependent "Indian" persists as the reality of a permanent Native American underclass--not, as is sometimes suggested, as the byproduct of white colonial oppression, but as the "cost of doing business" for their own wealthy, educated tribal leadership maintaining the hierarchical status quo.
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
I have often puzzled over Emerson's words, here. Consistency has long been the political right's Achilles heel. This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in late 20th century jurisprudence, where the right was closely tied to textualism and originalism and precedent while the left went whole hog on the "Living Constitution." Then, when the right started rolling back stare decisis on "Living Constitution" decisions, suddenly the left was very interested in the hypocrisy of conservatives overturning precedent, as if they had not themselves pioneered the politicization of the Court.
I don't know what to say about it. I am not comfortable with the "Charlie's Murderers" website. I am not comfortable with the tone of comeuppance and vengeance and the right taking its pound of flesh. Perhaps Emerson is right--perhaps I am small minded, constantly reaching for consistency and coherence in the interest of social stability and quiet comfort.
But conversely--what alternative remains to them? If the left gets to run cancel culture while the right refrains on principle, it's no longer a culture war, it's a one sided culture slaughter.
People sometimes talk about "norm violation" but really we're still dealing with the fallout of the political norm violations of the 1960s. I don't know where we get a "reset" button on that. Unfortunately, history seems to suggest that the usual reset is "war."
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
It's not clear to me what your point is, here. My point was that we do in fact live in a liberal nation; if your point is "and that's a good thing," like--okay? I happen to be a liberal myself! My point was simply that we should presumably therefore expect "political violence" to generally not come from liberals, given that liberals pretty much live in the society they want to live in. And indeed, both right-wing and left-wing political violence appears to generally come from the illiberal factions of those political tribes.
But we did just recently have a discussion on the Motte about the criminalization of heterosexual norms, if this is something of particular interest to you.
I really think that Conservative v. Neutral indirectly but adequately explains why this is not a cut-and-dried issue. People readily get caught up in the minutiae ("why did you include J6 but exclude the Floyd riots? why do you count white gang violence but not black gang violence? what do you mean, 'trans is not an ideology?'"). But in many people's (especially, academic researchers') minds, violence motivated by right wing thoughts or policies is ideologically driven, while violence motivated by left wing thoughts or policies gets parsed as neutral. Combine that with the historical emphasis on combating Nazi-style authoritarianism, and we (Americans) just live in a world where right wing political violence is more legible than its counterpart.
Plus, we live in a liberal nation; even Trump is basically a lib. American society is racially integrated, and as a matter of law we often actively oppress efforts to argue or demonstrate that this is working out poorly for us. The leftist position is the "neutral" position; there is no ideological violence available to them to strengthen their position. We live in a secular society, and more than that, as a matter of law we actively oppress efforts to argue or demonstrate that this is working out poorly for us. We live in a nation that requires and enforces gender egalitarianism, prosecutes numerous historically attested heterosexual norms while protecting and even privileging what was once illegal sexual deviance, and imposes exorbitant taxes to fund dubious redistribution schemes. The leftist position in all these cases is treated as the "neutral" position; there is no ideological violence available to them to strengthen their position!
There are still some things leftists get violent about (capitalism, for example) but it is sometimes suggested that political violence is first and foremost the practice of people who feel so excluded from the national conversation that violence is all that remains to them. If more political violence does come from the right, then presumably they are the ones most often being excluded from the national conversation. But by the same token, when people do lash out violently in ways that say, "we do not feel our voice is being adequately heard," we should recognize that is ideological violence. People who think a given act of ideological violence is warranted, often persuade themselves that it is, therefore, not ideological. But that's just wrong.
In short, low political violence depends on a significant degree of ideological homogeneity--or highly functional values pluralism--or totalitarian repression of heterodox ideas. Asking "which side does more violence" is not a meaningless inquiry, but it tells us less about the virtues or vices of any particular ideology, and more about how well our nation presently treats its various outcasts.
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
it's decent evidence the roommate didn't help carry it out if they provided access to everything and strong evidence if no arrests have been made of them after
I wasn't trying to speculate concerning the actual facts of this case. I was speculating about the thought process of the kind of person who finds himself (herself?) receiving the kinds of messages this person found himself receiving. The fact of not being an accessory to murder is a good step toward not being charged with accessory to murder, but we do both prosecute and even convict innocent people, sometimes, and people should always take that into account when considering how their situation might appear, to a jury, from the outside.
Supposedly the roommate who showed the FBI the discord chats is actually his... girlfriend (MtF)?
I have no idea, but this would explain the weird caginess around the reporting of those chats. I kept noticing that I was confused--"this doesn't sound like someone talking to a roommate, this sounds like someone talking to an accomplice."
Charitably: imagine being MtF with a boyfriend who has left his faith and family behind, speaking (perhaps in jest) about how he would do anything for you, even kill Charlie Kirk... and then one day he texts you or DMs you on Discord or whatever, talking about where he hid the murder weapon, and you must suddenly make a quick but calculated decision regarding the extent to which (A) you want the public up in your personal gender business and (B) you want to spend the next 20 years of your life in prison (and not the girl prison) for accessory to murder. (Less charitably, of course, this could straightforwardly have been Robinson's "guy (gal?) in the chair," in which case there might be further prosecution on the table.)
I'd be interested to know at what precise point in the timeline the "roommate" came forward with the chats--whether it was inspired by Robinson's capture, or what. I'd like to say that "all will presumably become clear in time" but I said something similar about Stephen Paddock's Vegas shooting spree 8 years ago, and I still don't know what that was actually about.
Like I said elsewhere, deep in my heart I fear he could be, I donno, a Groyper or something. Not like I have any reason to actually think that, it would just be the worst of all possible worlds, and the depressive part of me thinks that makes it the most likely.
This is certainly an argument being made.
The explanations on the pictures all seem to boil down to "yeah this is a known Antifa/LGBT thing but Groypers also use it mockingly or ironically, therefore this guy must be a Groyper." This does not strike me as impossible, but it also pattern matches to motivated reasoning from someone hoping to dissociate their preferred movement from these events.
Robinson was apparently a very high-achieving high school graduate (picture of a 34 ACT score on his mom's social media) who dropped out of university after a single semester, then spent two or three years studying to become an electrician at a local trade school. That's a pretty by-the-book "disappointed genius/failure to launch" story. Whichever group ultimately radicalized him, it clearly wasn't a group of Free Speech absolutists.
But given that past is prologue, I am skeptical that these matters will ever be cleared up to the satisfaction of any committed doubters.
EDIT: This link may not stay fresh but it says:
In a phone interview on Friday, someone who said they were friends with Robinson in high school, who wanted to remain anonymous, said that the suspect was “pretty left on everything” and was “the only member of his family that was really leftist”.
“The rest of his family was very hard Republican,” the friend said.
Around sophomore year, the friend said, Robinson became more extreme in his political views and would “always just be ranting and arguing about them”.
It's a common enough pattern in young people from conservative households that it seems more likely, to me, than the "Groyper" story, but at this point there is still sufficient vagueness that people can (and will) believe what they want to believe.
naraburns
nihil supernum
28d ago
Would you count journalists?
Possibly? Most of the deaths on that list look like interpersonal grudges, accidental deaths, warzones, etc. Robert Stevens (casualty in the Amerithrax attacks) looks like the most recent cleanish fit, to me--but he didn't quite have the political notoriety, I think. @professorgerm's identification of Alan Berg as a candidate looks like a better fit, to my eyes, and even there Berg does not seem to have been at Kirk's level.
The longer I think about this the more I find myself puzzling over the relative rarity of political celebrity without other celebrity (in particular, political office, but also e.g. Hollywood fame). I remember in the early 1990s there was a lot of "Elect Rush Limbaugh" merchandise floating around, to the point where Rush finally had to very publicly say (to the best of my recollection) "I'm an entertainer, not a politician, I'm not seeking office." It's not like there are no people out there who fall into the "professional political celebrity" bucket, but they're so few and far between that it probably shouldn't be a surprise that there aren't a lot of historic examples. Who else is arguably on Kirk's level? Cenk Uygur, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro? It's probably more common at the level of local or even perhaps state politics, but then people who take it upon themselves to become assassins do not generally prioritize "low value targets," so to speak. Well, depending on their level of derangement?
Commenters are going to say they hated him because he told the truth. Because he was somehow uniquely "dangerous" to a nebulous leftist project. But if that were enough, this wouldn't be so unusual.
I think both things can be true. If reports of trans and antifa slogans on the weapon are true, then "they hated him because he told the truth" looks like a pretty straightforward explanation of events. And no--of course that's not enough by itself. I think a person has to have pretty significant underlying mental and emotional derangement to go down the path of murder. But I'm increasingly concerned that we have not taken adequate account of the ways in which our cultural approach to politics now channels such derangement. Reading the comments on reddit celebrating Kirk's assassination is doing super effective damage to my hopes for America's future.
naraburns
nihil supernum
28d ago
I'm definitely team "Nothing Ever Happens" most of the time, and I suspect the same will be true of today. This is very unlikely to be the straw that broke any particular camel's back.
But it is different, I think, in important ways that do increase the feeling that this one could lead somewhere.
I have been trying to put my finger on why this one feels different, and a Facebook post from Nick Freitas has I think cleared it up for me.
Charlie tried to win that fight through argumentation, through discussion, through peaceful resolution of differences.
And the other side murdered him.
Not because he was “extreme” or “inciting violence” or any other hyperbolic slur they hurled at him. They murdered him because he was effective. Because he was unafraid. Because he inspired others and made them feel like they had a voice, that they were not alone. And he did it at the very institutions which have fomented so much hatred toward conservatives.
Charlie wasn't an elected official. He was a young man who was willing to speak up for his beliefs. His arguments were often not all that sophisticated; he did a better job as an avatar of free, heterodox expression in academic settings, than as an advocate for any particular position.
This was not an untargeted massacre, as sometimes happens. It was also not the assassination of a government figure or candidate for office, quite. When was the last time someone like Kirk was assassinated? Someone who stood for a political view (or, arguably, a tribe) but who was strictly involved at the level of discourse, rather than politics or government operation (e.g. the Israeli staffers)? What would that even look like, with tribal positions reversed? Would it even occur to a violent right-wing nutjob to go after someone like Kirk? Who even is the "Charlie Kirk of the Left?" What other figures in history occupied this peculiar niche? Maybe Martin Luther King, Jr.? Or (less effectively) the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, though that was an Islam thing rather than a red tribe/blue tribe thing.
Whatever the case, this one bothers me a lot more than any of the other recent violence. It feels like a truly, purely ideological hatred--not activism or civil disobedience, not "mostly peaceful protest" or even "unapologetically violent protest," more of an absolutely unhinged, Excessively Online commitment to "fuck the outgroup." Kirk was harmless in a way Donald Trump obviously isn't, even in a way state legislators and law enforcement aren't; he was not in any position to oppress the way even the lowliest of government officers and officials sometimes might. Kirk had no power but that of his voice.
Kirk was just talking.
And he got murdered for it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
@WhiningCoil edited links into the comment. I clicked a few. They seem basically adequate to me, and I appreciated the effort of their addition. Your copypasta has no power here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
It's that sufficient?
Do the tweets have receipts? I mean, I assume there is some external evidence that e.g. North Carolina has criminal trial judges without law degrees, a public list (and maybe photograph) of all the members of the relevant "council of black women," etc.
Linking to a bunch of people just saying stuff on Twitter is not any better than just saying stuff here. But "amateur" journalism from Twitter users is fine, provided they are doing something recognizably journalistic, like linking sources, posting credible video evidence, etc. Randos doing journalism on Twitter are at least as good as those working for the New York Times (and often twice as honest!).
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
I'm tagging this post as borderline low-effort for the lack of links, which nudge it toward "weak man" territory. Assuming you've characterized the facts accurately, the post itself is basically fine, but I'm not going to go link hunting to chase down every single one of these claims to determine whether you're identifying sufficiently narrow groups, being sufficiently charitable, etc.
So basically, more effort than this please: bring evidence in proportion to how badly the facts seem to reflect on the group(s) under discussion.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Thought I'd be clear by now but the mods will have to do it manually I suppose.
Top level posts must all be approved manually, no matter how long you've been posting. Unfortunately this has proven to be the only way to keep the site from being overwhelmed with botspam.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
The amount of money listed on Patreon isn't per patron, it's the combined total given by all Patrons per month.
Any takes on what made our lifeboat more successful than other Reddit pilgrim colonies throughout the internet?
I'm sure the emergent property of "success" in this context arises in several ways. For one, we do just have a great userbase. But one important aspect, I think, is probably that there is a real demand for spaces like this, and very little plausible competition.
It has been interesting, to me, to watch the SSC subreddit really struggle with CW posts lately. It's clear that a lot of people posting there want to talk about CW issues in a rationalist-adjacent way, and the most active moderators joined post-split and are a lot more tolerant of CW content (often going so far as to make tortured arguments for why this or that post isn't really CW, even though, uh, it clearly is). The CW thread was originally a pressure release valve, basically, keeping CW out of the rest of the sub (usually!). It improved the quality of the rest of the sub--but by being a part of the sub, the quality of the CW thread was itself increased.
But this only works if the mod team is genuinely committed to a "tone not content" moderation policy. In committing themselves to advancing one certain approach to American politics, Reddit admins made this increasingly difficult to achieve. Some of our own spinoffs, right and left (CWR and TheSchism, respectively), never really went anywhere, because they abandoned the one thing that people actually want from this space: content-neutral moderation.
And I say that, knowing full well how often we moderators are accused of thumbing the scales for the right, or the left, or whatever. But even those accusations are a reaffirmation from the userbase that it is content-neutral moderation that is desired, even if people don't always agree on how that looks in practice.
In short, what makes this place as successful as it is, remains the foundation of the space:
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.
People actually want that, but almost everyone out there promising such a thing are actually trying to build a "neutral" space where they can prove that their particular views are the actually neutral ones. Literally millions of dollars in grant money have flowed to university research projects promising to "improve political discourse" and yet we do more to accomplish that here every single day, on a Patreon shoestring, than every single one of those universities combined.
I think that counts for something!
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
To the best of my understanding, that is not actually a function of the site--maybe leftover code from rDrama? I would need @ZorbaTHut to say more about that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Happy birthday to the Motte! If nothing else, it is a good time to remind myself that I am bad at predictions and should never play the prediction markets, because I didn't think we'd last this long. But here were are today, entering year four!
Just like last year, I will point out that the server costs continue to be borne by about 25 patrons, making us the Internet's leading (possibly only?) independent user-funded (ad-free!) open political speech forum.
As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
(Proverbs 27:17)
Great writeup, thanks for sharing. As I have asked in the past,
This is a very old problem. In Plato's Republic, he speaks occasionally of the lower castes in his ideal system, but the great bulk of the work is an obsessively detailed examination of the proper upbringing of the ruling class. Aristotle calls him out on this, suggesting that Plato's vision fails to adequately capture the breadth of human experience. Today, rather than frankly acknowledge the mental incapacity of the masses, we push free compulsory public education (substantially modeled on Plato's prescription!) as a way of supposedly "leveling the playing field," bringing everyone up to some minimum level of functioning (and insisting despite the evidence that everyone has basically the same potential to achieve and succeed).
Occasionally I meet people who are spending their retirement years caring for dependent adult children. Sometimes that responsibility falls to siblings instead, or even more distant relations. The ability and willingness to be a conservator for an adult of diminished capacity is not the stuff of romantic Hollywood aspiration (Love Actually notwithstanding!). Of course we talk about prisons and mental institutions and the government curtailing of important individual rights--because there's nothing any of us can do to fix the damage that liberal individualism has done to the institution of the family. There are all sorts of reasons why strong tribal ties might be undesirable, particularly in a Western liberal democracy, but as Thomas Sowell says--there are no solutions, only trade offs. The same forces that liberate some of us from the oppression of a tyrannical tribal chieftan also liberate the Hassans of the world from the moderating influence of tribal support.
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