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After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
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User ID: 355
Hah, that's catchy, but I don't know. Per the second paragraph that I edited in, I really do think that something fundamentally divides us from SJWs and even their ideological ancestors - even during my middle-school-era political awakening when I didn't have an older version of any political firmware to cling on to, I felt firmly alienated from the class of leftists that wanted to ban and prescribe individual behaviour (in Germany, at the time, the Greens), even as I would want to march with them against the corporations and governments. Without American Citizens United gaslighting, the two views are really not incompatible - I have never had trouble distinguishing corporations from people.
I don't know if "social liberal, fiscal conservative" is a fair gloss of the people that self-identify as classical liberals. What would you label people that are fiscally left-wing (for taxes, regulation and redistribution) and socially liberal as in for the freedom to abort and take drugs and also the freedom to use slurs and misgender and sideline minorities that are statistically rarely good enough for high-status jobs?
I think there's an unfortunate impulse to take the default political compass too seriously - "we are auth-right, so our archenemies must be lib-left". I think reality is explained much better by putting the entire SJ movement in the auth-left quadrant - just because they are noticeably and loudly for allowing some things that you don't like, this doesn't mean they are permissive in the anti-authoritarian sense. Even the Mao-era CCP, a type specimen for auth-left if there ever was one, allowed and tolerated some things that the auth-right wouldn't, such as parading people through town naked, vigilantism and (locally) cannibalism. Conversely, it's easy to come up with lots of things that are allowed in the perfect MAGA world and forbidden in the perfect BLM world.
Outside of what DOGE has been up to, how are "things moving very fast"?
There is at least the cluster of things that amount to a rapid shredding of the previous arrangement where the US has a network of allied nations that enthusiastically follow it as a Big Good/moral leader - see the tariff tussles, and the public snubbing of Ukraine and especially the EU over the Ukraine war. All the German papers have spent the past few days apoplectic about Vance's comments at the Munich security conference, ranging from NO Uing Europe with accusations of democratic backsliding and comparisons to the Soviet Union to declaring that they will not have a seat at the table in upcoming negotiations over Ukraine. As much as I get a "you tell them, bro" feeling about those remarks, this does amount to kicking the lapdog for no good reason.
In terms of internal politics, there are also the ICE deportation raids and the drama about Adams discussed downthread.
I feel sorry for OP. Classical liberals have already left the running decades ago, when they failed to formulate a response to the logic of fear-driven engagement bait from either side.
I'm taking into account that Amadan's reaction here was to issue a warning, not to ban anyone. I do think there was room for sockpuppet2's request for a source to be worded in a more diplomatic way, and ultimately left-wingers being also forced to maintain decorum would indirectly encourage right-wingers to do so as well in a way that will have effects beyond what even a hypothetical even-handed and strict mod team could possibly enforce. Either way, left-wingers have no shortage of alternative places to go to - whether they will leave, as they do, because the community sasses them with impunity, or they will leave because the mods chew them out, the outcome in terms of number of left-wingers present will be the same, but in the latter case at least the forum was cleared of some boring zingers. If not all of them leave under either regime, the "chew both out" strategy is more likely to select for left-wingers that are happy to not be allowed hot takes, while the "leave both alone" strategy is more likely to select for left-wingers that are ok with an environment where everyone is just tweeting at each other.
Besides, even if I am more sympathetic to the "source?" demand here, last time I complained about moderation and actually went as far as suggesting an inversion of the verdict, I was just flat out dismissed as, quote, "engaged in the same special pleading that nearly all rules-lawyers and mod-critics bring to us, as if we'd never seen it before: 'why don't you moderate my enemies more, and my friends less?'". It's fairly disheartening to learn that merely suggesting more even-handed moderation is also sufficient to earn a lazy dismissal.
I continue having a fairly straightforward prescription to put mobs in their place, which is to apply progressively higher standards to posts in proportion to the number of upvotes and approval they get, up to "it better be an effortpost that could stand up to adversarial lawyering of all the rules" at +40 or so. Circlejerks would quickly get the air taken out of them if any attempts to boost a take you like are tantamount to condemning it to have to live up to a less attainable standard, and you could only really feel like you are helping your team if you are upvoting takes that will actually live up to it. I was thinking of pitching a meta discussion about this at some point, if I can muster the time and energy.
Fair, sort of. I'll settle for the public signal that having my objection sit there sends as a lesser desirable outcome, and hope you can tolerate that I will continue bringing this point up when it applies. I do want to force an argument on this topic - if not with you, then with others.
That in similar cases, going forward, you either admonish/moderate everyone involved, or nobody (in this particular case, "everyone" seems to me like it would have been the most reasonable choice) - and perhaps more generally that you adjust the perception you seemingly have that there's nothing you can do to make this forum less hostile to non-right-wing posters without either putting in a lot more work, compromising on fairness or changing the rules.
edit: It might be a relevant piece of context that I actually wound up in this subthread because I was looking for the very same evidence that sockpuppet2 asked for. A normieleft friend asserted to me that the quid-pro-quo of judicial relief for political favours is norm-breaking for the US; I had a nebulous feeling that it's in line with how corrupt US politics always had been, but couldn't think of a concrete example, so I went looking in the bowels of the thread figuring that if some comparable action by Democrats had happened, someone would have posted about it.
Time to return to the scheduled programming in which I complain about moderation! I believe the tropey term for statements that are impossible to corroborate or refute is "not even wrong". Either @2rafa's statement was in that category, in which case she should not have made it to begin with; or @sockpuppet2's request for evidence was in principle reasonable, in which case he shouldn't have been mocked for it, nor implicitly unilaterally dinged by the modhat. Even if the request was in fact unreasonable, a mocking one-liner is certainly not mending any broken windows in the neighbourhood.
You looked at an escalation spiral that started with 2rafa's low-quality post (red valence), which invited a low-quality reply (blue valence) by sockpuppet2, which invited an even lower-quality response (red) by jeroboam, which in turn invited an equally lower-quality response (blue) by UwU, which then invited a mercifully higher-quality meta-discussion by the last two, and modhatted it casting blame on the blue-coloured entries in the chain only. Is this not a clear case of selective enforcement (more colourfully, "anarcho-tyranny")? And then you go and act like the community's rightward shift is an unfortunate natural phenomenon that you have nothing to do with and can't do anything about.
Would you also be happy to apply that reasoning to Biden (Sr. and Jr.) and Ukraine? Surely "get Ukraine tangled up in US patronage networks" was part of the Biden admin's agenda.
And I'd argue that signalling "I'm a male feminist" is about as cheap as it gets. It is basically free, you literally just affirm what a woman says and denigrate males as a class while subtly implying you're not really a member of that class.
I think that this part is a bit of a cope/emotionally comfortable belief about the triviality of the outgroup. The dating market is not so uncompetitive that a priori one would expect any successful strategy to be cheap. Gaiman's schtick was hardly just that he is "a male feminist" - he is a bestselling author, gregarious convention-goer, and supposedly a commanding storyteller in person and all around magnetic personality, on top of being a male feminist. It is this whole package that allowed him to enrapture groupies so easily - of course there must be some natural predisposition involved, but he nevertheless would have worked hard his whole life to become the New Feminist Man that a particular type of woman finds irresistible. Neither you nor I would get anywhere by just suddenly going out there, affirming what women say and denigrating males as a class; people like that are dime a dozen, and they are more likely to wind up as sad caricatures or give up in short order to churn through other cheap-and-ineffective approaches than to even get to the point where they would be #metoo-ed.
I have encountered a good number of guys who fit the same archetype in my life, and it is always abundantly clear that they pour a lot of effort into verbal skills and social standing, like by volunteering as DMs for D&D sessions, volunteering for all sorts of things in general, or attending improv theatre. One of them even forced himself to pretend to be bisexual.
I too was actually invited to Zorba's wild ride once (for two non-consecutive iterations, no less). The discussions I remember taking place seemed to come down to something that amounted to "solidly right-wing, but demonstrated grace and level-headedness in interactions with the outgroup" - the specific mechanism was talking candidates up for instances where they demonstrated particularly impressive feats of tolerance, but because no particularly extreme left-wingers were in the running, this naturally favoured the extreme right as their room to impress was greater.
Well, the times I have butted heads with you and naraburns (and that's just the recent ones I remember) over moderation still stand out to me as the most hostile interactions I have had on here with anyone. Of course this could just be a consequence of everyone who is not a moderator routinely keeping their offense at me and others to themselves for fear of the mods above, so the level of anger I felt from your responses in those contexts was actually below the ambient SNR...?
Two AAQCs seems like something a monkey on a typewriter prompting ChatGPT should have outperformed in expectation over the course of >1000 posts. I'll take my "upstanding mediocrity" achievement, I guess.
Whether or not Zorba uses his "doge" mechanism next time he needs new mods, the way to become a mod is not by kissing our asses.
Eh, that just makes it into a countersignalling game. The way to most any favour is to kiss ass in such a way that not even the target realises; as a system designer the duty falls on you to achieve alignment between your system's value function and easy entryways for ass-kissing ninjas.
I think there is a class of "sex pest" that has always been around, which is men who are hyperattuned towards what is popular with women and optimise their personality and social strategy around charming and bedding new partners. They only become "pests" in that their handling of partners, once bedded, is essentially consumptive - rather than trying to build a relationship, they just speedrun whatever sexual acts they feel amount to having "used up" the sexual partner (often by maximising extreme/degrading acts, which register as conquest milestones), and then move on to the next.
This is not to say they don't believe/inhabit the personality they arrived at by optimisation - much like Mr. Beast is an honest product of reinforcement learning under the YouTube algorithm, the pump-and-dumper is an honest product of reinforcement learning under the female attention algorithm. It's just that any attendant preference structure remains strictly subordinate to the "conquer more women" terminal value. The actual manifestation depends on the fads of the day: in the '40s, it could be a dashing young GI, an Elvis-like character in the '50s, a philosophical druggie rogue in the '70s, ..., or a soft-spoken feminist alpha nerd since around 2015.
Thanks for the sentiment, but - no, there's something to be said for "don't pick people who are too interested in the job" as a perfectly reasonable heuristic for any sort of policing/powertrippy occupations. Also, it seems far-fetched to not expect people to consider personal affinity and vibes in picking future colleagues, and their use as a criterion is easily steelmanned. Moderators are people too. Amadan all but stated that his modhat actions are constrained by his aversion to "getting flack" in public for unpopular decisions. It presumably wouldn't exactly help him moderate if he already had to engage with individuals he finds aversive at the backchannel stage that seems to precede every mod action.
Also, cities like NYC pick Chinese beat cops to deploy to Chinatown etc. for good reasons.
In what way are reports an "enforcement mechanism"? They do not enforce anything - unlike votes and comments, they don't even leave a public record. Reports are a mechanism for drawing the attention of moderators, and nothing else.
I do not come here for a discussion that is curated solely or primarily by the demos, as defined by everyone who has an account and bothers to click arrows getting a vote. There are plenty of spaces like that all across the internet, many with bigger crowds, and they generally don't work, or at least they don't work to produce a space in which political discussion that is worth reading can be had. An internet forum, in its natural form, is an island in Scott's meta-libertarian archipelago, not a community of people who are chained together by birth and geography and are thus compelled to organise in a way that to them feels fair - it is easy to join, and fairly easy to leave. The appeal of the archipelago is that any island can offer whatever it wants, be it democracy or compulsory-two-buckets-of-shit-a-day Soviet hell; and if you don't like it, you can just leave for a different island, or go and create your own and hope that the customers will come. The Motte's pitch was not a democracy, but a carefully tended autocratic garden with a particular prominently stated set of rules. If it devolves into a democracy, and if these rules are being enforced selectively or not at all, then in the best case it is simply because its operators are inattentive, in which case reporting helps draw their attention to the right place. In a worse but more realistic case, they are failing the criteria they promised to uphold due to bias or the human fear of social censure, as hinted at by @Amadan in his parallel response, in which case reporting serves to convey my disapproval, thus levelling the social censure incentive landscape a little. In the worst case, they are simply committing sticker fraud. I cling to the hope that that is not the case, because exit, while cheap, is not free, and the archipelago is actually finite and shrouded in a fog of imperfect information.
On top of this, on the object level, the main signal that our demos sends by up- and downvoting is "we want more content that helps the right wing". I can see that from my own posting history easily enough - I generally make posts in a fairly narrow range of length, type and sophistication, and the only ones that reliably get over +20 upvotes are those that contain strong unhedged defenses and concurrences with right-wing talking points. Conversely, any attempt to directly argue against right-wing positions is capped at +10, and without careful hedging and gratuitous but-of-course-leftists-also-bad disclaimers it's easy to land in the negatives.
I can't recall the last time I reported anyone. That's how little I use the feature.
That's perfectly consistent with a scenario in which the community heavily leans towards your preferences, and you trust that the mods will take care of it when it doesn't even without your prodding.
Do you want to be a moderator? You have a thousand posts... a lot more than me. Obviously you have opinions on what the Motte should be.
At this point I am so exasperated with the moderation that the answer to that is "yes", which of course categorically disqualifies me. So, reinterpreting your question, the reason I am reporting is not that I want to be a moderator. If I were to aim to become one, what I did (picking fights with and getting myself personally loathed by most of the current staff, antagonizing the ideological core of the community and saying we actually need more of that, ...) would be among the dumber approaches - I should instead have made a point to defend the mods in public, posted solidly right-wing but slightly more thoughtfully and measuredly than everyone else, and perhaps helped Zorba with backend work at some juncture.
I am also aware that the Motte has problems with ideological diversity. But that isn't my fault, that those on the left evaporatively leave.
Of course it is also your fault. When you make posts that are actively unpleasant to a class of readers, such as ones that are pitched to rally your tribe to bring about their defeat or ones that say it's "always acceptable to [engage in the act of harassing, intimidating, or abusing them, especially habitually or from a perceived position of relative power]" (circumscription courtesy of dictionary.com) (here), you encourage them to leave. The obvious mirrored example is unfortunately not so effective because American online right-wingers have all grown a thick skin out of necessity, so maybe try to imagine how inclined you would feel to stay in a forum where a bunch of Mexicans are circlejerking each other about plans on how to illegally immigrate into the US and defraud dumb gringos out of their money, or Russian soldiers planning torture of American volunteers they caught in Ukraine if you want an even more colourful example.
It would be helpful to understand sometimes why you don't mod particular posts, such as this one. Reporting, most of the time, just feels like a waste of clicks these days; raising a stink in a comment sometimes attracts a statement, but between poisoning the atmosphere (you can't really publicly call out a comment without it coming across as a personal attack) and most likely putting whatever moderator chooses to respond on the defensive from the outset, it's also not really a good way to go. Would it be possible for the mods to aim to make a public statement on every post that receives more than a certain number of reports, even if just to explain why they disagree with the reporters' view of it violating rules?
(I don't think "you are the only one who reported that particular post though" would be a slam-dunk retort; if you look further downthread, there were definitely more people who were unhappy with it, so if this didn't translate to reports that is just a sign that this part of the community has given up on the reporting mechanism)
I think it depends on the place and individual. In Austria, two out of three pharmacists will look at you like you eat puppies if you ask if they have any chemical options (and like a potential druggie or vexatious patient if you name a specific active ingredient), but once I was passing through Munich and the lady at the pharmacy in the Marienplatz subway station enthusiastically and unpromptedly gave me two of Big Pharma's finest (this was also in a blocked nose situation).
There is a number of people on this forum who clearly would like to see it as a place for smart right-wingers to organise and rally, rather than a carefully tended neutral ground. Unfortunately, the mods don't seem terribly interested in acting against it unless directly called out for inaction, so the only way to reduce it would probably be to persuade the majority on a grassroots level that it is not in their interest either.
Wouldn't you have to pay capital gains tax on the dividends you collect right away, if you were to follow the collect-and-buy-manually algorithm? If you get $1 in dividends and buy $1 in shares which you later sell for $3 from a cost basis of $1, you pay tax on $1 initially and $2 at sale. If you use your DRIP to auto-buy the same shares, you pay no tax initially and later sell an $3 share with $0 cost basis and hence pay tax on $3.
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Poor countries find new sponsors, like China or Russia
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Poor countries start advocating for China and Russia and against the US on the world stage
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Europeans, who think of poor countries as intrinsically virtuous, pick up the tune
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Europeans become more anti-American and wrestle their governments into reducing support for US plans and military logistics
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Core US interests abroad, such as supporting Israel, suffer or become significantly more expensive
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More money winds up being spent on workarounds than it would have cost to continue bribing the poor countries
Well, but it wasn't always so, was it? I still have memories of a different Germany, where children and their parents would throw Polish firecrackers at the other kids and families who pissed them off for catharsis, where a bunch of 9 year olds could walk into the local OBI, buy a hammer and nails and go build a treehouse in the woods from trash collected in the local gravel pit, of looking for a flatshare in Berlin for a summer job and finding that the place I contacted was actually a ruined squatter house, of taking a ride from a ride-sharing side and the driver turning out to be a construction worker driving a decrepit Opel station wagon at 210km/h the whole way to Munich. Some generations back, I hear, kids would still collect discarded car motors and build human-sized soap-box cars to race each other in.
Germany is the country that begot the CCC and actually saw its foreign policy being made to yield to popular protest time and time again. German is the language that has words for something like the natural sovereignty of an adult individual (Mündigkeit), with attendant rights and responsibilities, and the taking away of it (Bevormundung), which don't even translate into any other language I know. I don't think this aspect of the culture would have shriveled as it did without enemy action; but to see culture as a static inevitability when the enemy sees it as a target is just surrender. What can I do if I want to bring back these things?
Well, the mistake is in thinking that "left" and "right" as used in practice represent any object-level political positions at all. The true extensional definition, as I understand it, is that "left" means that you imagine yourself as a rebel fighting against an oppressive system, and "right" means that you fancy yourself holding the line against chaos and decay. These are constraints on form, not on content, and even the form is merely a constraint on mythology that can survive a lot of friction with reality (so Trump's unpredictable bulldozing of norms and institutions still can be perceived as "right", and the SJWs' reliance on the same and treatment of their opposition as a wild element that needs to be dealt with by managerial techniques is "left"). However, the Left can never rest easy without believing in the existence of a greater, more powerful and more organised enemy they are fighting as underdogs against, whether it is the Patriarchy, Trumpism or international capitalism; and the Right needs to believe that its enemies are less structured, more unstable, and ultimately incompetent.
But liberals, for the most part, don't even seem to know of the existence of these people. Most of them seem to think there are no enemies to the left of them, or if there are any, it's just a handful of crazy college kids. The largest criticism I've seen is "nice going you berniebros, you got Trump elected", but nothing besides. It's a far cry from how the right wing tends to exist in this country, where they are all very cripplingly aware that there are enemies to the right of them that must be disavowed when discovered.
Is this perception not an artifact of awkwardly projecting onto a 1D left-right axis? To the Western normie, "more left" now means "more LGBTQI+ and environmentalism" - if pushed on it they might actually contend that tankies and Bernie bros can very well be enemy because they are actually to their right. This in fact tracks with some local instances of discourse I have seen - there's often a sense of betrayal when casual SJWs learn for the first time what old-school commies actually believe, and how even though they were sold as the legendary leftiest of them all the positions of theirs that the normie cares about actually reek of "fascism" and "right-wing disinformation".
Well, if I become single-issue for anything it would make sense for it to be my top entry (civil rights), which however has the distinction of presenting a dilemma all by itself - the only apparent civil rights party on paper (FDP) turns out to actually more often function as an, uh, Steigbügelhalter (handmaiden?) for the most anti-civil-rights party (CDU).
At least at the German school I attended they covered in sufficient detail the beliefs associated with communism and the various skull mountains associated with it, but apart from the one token card-carrying neonazi kid (who wanted to become a tank driver but I think grew up to be a ski instructor instead) everybody still walked out with the standard differential assessment of the two. Of course morality rarely spontaneously materialises out of nowhere and people ultimately believe that aiming to advance one race at the expense of others is intrinsically evil because they are instilled with this message from early on, but all I am saying is that this is the deontological moral package that most people wind up with, and given that package the conclusions that they arrive at are correct in the sense that no amount of additional information about communism or Hitler is likely to change them. If you want to rehabilitate Hitler or throw communist leaders in the pit with him, there is no shortcut around convincing a majority of people to actually change their morality, rather than merely exposing them to some "glossed over" forbidden information.
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Wasn't the kickoff event of Gamergate to do with artsy SJW types capturing some sort of indie game award, though?
My sense is that the drama about wokeness in expensive "AAA games" actually came later - the community was instead taken over from below, with the points of incursion being along with the gaming-liberal arts border (journalism, awards, small-scale narrative games). I vaguely recall people asking an evil genie that video games finally be recognised as an artform in the years leading up to it.
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