FtttG

Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.

7 followers follows 0 users joined 2022 September 13 13:37:36 UTC

https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/

User ID: 1175

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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 1hr ago

Ah, by themotte I assumed you were referring to the current iteration, not the subreddit. Obviously Reddit is its own thing.

But this is my point: SecureSignals is free to post here.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 2hr ago

Oh shit. Did I fall for the trap?

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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 2hr ago

How do you thread the needle between not banning/algorithmically deprioritizing people for supporting Trump (sounds good), QAnon, holocaust denial (uh...), kiddie porn? I grant that it's probably feasible to separate out kiddie porn, actual terrorists and criminals from the rest, but you're left with a broad spectrum of shit that most normies just don't want to deal with.

There's long been an argument that social media companies cannot be held legally liable for the content that appears on their sites, as they're just a facilitator, not a publisher: it wouldn't be fair to hold Facebook legally responsible for Rohingya massacres anymore than it would be to hold a telephone company responsible for a bank robbery which was planned over the phone by two of their customers. Fair enough. But if that social media then starts banning people for legally protected speech, they ought to lose this protection: they are explicitly making judgement calls over which content they will and will not host, which is publication.

I don't know what the solution is, but I do know it's not fair that Facebook gets to act like a publisher, but only gets treated like a utility provider in the eyes of the law. Can't have it both ways.

Even themotte has to crack down on holocaust denial, HBD and other topics from time to time.

Does it? Certainly mods have handed down bans to posters who talk about these topics, but generally because they violated other rules in the process of doing so, not for the mere act of bringing the topics up in the first place. I'm not aware of someone being banned simply for bringing up Holocaust denial or HBD.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 4hr ago

I explicitly acknowledged all of that in the OP. And it's over 4,000 signatures now.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 6hr ago

No one thinks the veil of ignorance can actually exist. It's a thought experiment meant to guide our intuitions, basically a more sophisticated version of the golden rule.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 7hr ago

I meant "in everyone's best interest" in the Rawlsian veil of ignorance sense. In a realpolitik sense, obviously it's best if you can design the rules so that they always benefit your ingroup and hurt your outgroup. Most progressives at least pretend to believe that justice is (or should be) blind.

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Wellness Wednesday for August 19, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 10hr ago

New Year's resolution check-in:

Went to the gym three times last week and again on Monday evening. I can deadlift 1.76x my bodyweight, squat 1.26x and bench press 0.71x.
Have not consumed any pornography since waking up on January 1^st.

How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?

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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 10hr ago · Edited 10hr ago

If the progressives arguing "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want" really meant it, I'd have no problem with this line of reasoning.

But after Musk bought out Twitter and started banning people he didn't like, these same people were rending their hair. They didn't actually believe the libertarian principle that privately owned social media companies can do what they please: they just mistakenly believed that these privately owned social media companies would always be owned by people sympathetic to their progressive worldview.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

FtttG Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo. 11hr ago · Edited 9hr ago

Censoring journalists to prevent suicides is a fool's errand

In 2015, Scott published a post called "What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?" He described a variety of cognitive-behavioural milestones that might seem innate but in fact have to be consciously learned, examples including "theory of mind" (the understanding that everyone's minds are distinct, and that just because you have access to a piece of information doesn't mean that another person does) and foreign languages (many young children take their native language to be the default, and people speaking foreign languages "really" know the e.g. Japanese word for a thing, but insist on converting them into their own special code before talking about them). He then moves into more controversial and potentially elitist examples of potential milestones, describing his reaction to a piece by Nathan Robinson, in which Robinson acknowledged it's hypocritical to criticise conversatives trying to get Fun Home removed from a college syllabus while also defending students' boycotting a screening of the film American Sniper:

He proposes a bunch of potential counterarguments, then shoots each counterargument down by admitting that the other side would have a symmetrical counterargument of their own: for example, he believes that American Sniper is worse because it's racist and promoting racism is genuinely dangerous to a free society, but then he admits a conservative could say that Fun Home is worse because in their opinion it's homosexuality that's genuinely dangerous to a free society... I’m not sure what I think of this conclusion, but my main response to his article is oh my gosh he gets the thing, where "the thing" is a hard-to-describe ability to understand that other people are going to go down as many levels to defend their self-consistent values as you will to defend yours. It seems silly when I’m saying it like this, and you should probably just read the article, but I’ve seen so many people who lack this basic mental operation that this immediately endeared him to me.

I would like to propose another possible developmental milestone that some have reached and others haven't: the complete inability to generalise a proposed solution outside of the narrow specifics of the problem it's intended to solve.

Following Nathan Cofnas's exposé regarding Jason Arday's plagiarism and fabulism, and his subsequent suicide, many are pointing fingers at the media's handling of the case. The more charitable framing holds that Arday was "hounded" to his death by a racist, right-wing harassment campaign; the less charitable framing (furnished by none other than Ibram X. Kendi) claims that the way Arday's story was covered in the press amounts to a modern lynching. Even people who concede that the allegations against Arday were not baseless insist that the amount of coverage he received was massively disproportionate (an opinion I do not share). The good people over at Change.org have a legal solution in mind to prevent future Ardays:

Proposal for Arday’s Law: a limit to articles published on one person within a timeframe.

249 articles were published across 15 major British news outlets in the period between 24th July and the date of his death (14th August). Worryingly, 188 articles were written in the 9 day period between his resignation and his death (5th-14th August). These articles scrutinised every area of Professor Arday's life.

This petition calls for legislative action to impose limitations on the number of news articles published about a single individual within a defined time frame. By doing so, we can ensure that individuals are not subjected to undue public pressure and potential mental anguish caused by excessive media coverage. The government must hold media outlets accountable for their role in amplifying potentially damaging narratives.

3,642 people have signed the petition at the time of writing.

So, guys. Let's walk through this step by step.

How could such a law possibly be enforced? Imagine the UK government has a massive centralised database of every news article published in outlets domiciled within its borders, updated in real time, listing the primary subject of each one. As soon as the number of articles about a particular subject exceeds some threshold (e.g. 80 articles in 7 days), the UK government issues a presumptive gag order against all media outlets warning them not to publish any more articles on this subject until the articles-per-day metric has declined somewhat. Any article published after the threshold was exceeded will be issued a public order demanding the article be taken down. This petition is effectively demanding a nationwide digitised Stasi surveillance body employing dozens if not hundreds of Winston Smiths (not to mention an initial outlay of billions of pounds just to get the news article-crawling infrastructure up and running), all to prevent – I mean, how many people commit suicide in response to "excessive" media coverage every year? Aside from Arday, can you name a single British person meeting that description this year?

And needless to say, this legislation would be utterly pointless for any news story of international interest, as Arday's was. (Arday: "The New York Times and the Atlantic are calling me a plagiarist and a liar." His legal counsel: "True, but we made damn sure the readers of the Daily Record wouldn't hear about it!")

But even if there was some way to enforce such a laughable piece of legislation, it surely goes without saying that the primary beneficiary of it would be Donald Trump, who would see the number of UK articles criticising him drop precipitously. Hell, an even bigger beneficiary would be Boris Johnson, whose latest paternity scandal would be reduced to a footnote. It's even trivial to imagine how such a piece of legislation could be gamed. Nigel Farage gets wind that a scandal is going to break on Monday morning. He immediately springs into action, buying a regional newspaper with triple-digit circulation for pennies on the dollar, launching a website to go with it, and flooding that website with nothing but AI-generated articles about said scandal. Under Arday's Law, there's no way for the BBC, the Guardian or the Observer to cover the scandal: their hands are tied.

I know, I know: of the 3,000+ people who signed this petition, most surely have no expectation of any legislation being passed. Signing the petition is just an applause light, a way of saying "I feel sad that Jason Arday killed himself, and wish that he hadn't", with a fig leaf of having Called for Something to Be Done.

But I genuinely feel that some people (most likely including the person who created the petition) simply lack the imaginative capacity to generalise a hypothetical solution outside the narrow confines of the problem that prompted its proposal. During the 2010s, when conservatives were getting banned from social media left and right, a common smug refrain I heard from progressives was "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want". I continually pleaded with these people to understand: it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion. You really do not want to set a precedent that social media companies can ban anyone they disagree with and they have no recourse. Every company undergoes ideological drift, whether slowly or all at once: the fact that Facebook moderators share your worldview now is no guarantee that they will a year from now. "They're a private company, they can do what they want" will come back to bite you in the ass when some billionaire who doesn't share the progressive worldview buys a social media network and moulds it in his own image.

And then a billionaire who didn't share the progressive worldview bought a social media network and moulded it in his own image. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of hair. What could I say other than "I told you so"?

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Friday Fun Thread for August 14, 2026