4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
<3
User ID: 355
I know you wrote elsewhere in the subthread that "some questions are inherently antagonistic", but this makes it seem like you consider any instance of what you call "flipping the script" to fall under that category. I think that that is wrongheaded, and in particular I really don't think that this question was "inherently antagonistic" - if it were, then surely basically every interaction here where people talk about each other's opinions rather than those of abstract people who are not part of the conversations would be inherently antagonistic, and everyone is posting on borrowed time while moderator goodwill lasts. If you want to retain that level of potential for anarcho-tyranny, you ought to put some thought into it before threatening its application.
The "with" in that sentence was intentional - I'd say there is ample evidence that the post contains a sentiment that could be summarised in that way, not that the sentiment is all there is to it (though I would go as far as saying that it's a central component of it). As for that ample evidence, just excerpting the sentimental terminology,
incessant leftist whining
infantile tactic
"we win (...) or we whine and complain"
sore losers
scream bloody murder
infantile
still salty (...) and act like he was the worst
Apart from the literal references to "whining", there are also two mentions of "infantile" and ascriptions of bad sportsmanship and emotional deregulation (scream, salty, act, the babytalk in "he was the worst"), which I think is a picture it's appropriate enough to gloss as "bitchy". I don't think this is cherry-picked from a longer post describing the behaviour of leftists, either; apart maybe from the much more indirect statement you ascribe to your "workplace and all local institutions", this seems to be the totality of behaviours you ascribe to leftists in your post, and there are quotes in the collection from every longer paragraph in it.
Well, I'm definitely not one of those people. I rather dislike that kind of weird zoomer tendency. But I'd say that the desire to have proper whitespacing is less like this sort of weird zoomer multitasking trend, since it's a desire for a simplistic and clear mechanism for consuming text. What you're describing sounds to me like it has more in common with old Reddit, since it lumps everything together into an information overload.
To be clear, I'm talking about this stuff (Googling revealed the term is apparently "sludge content"). I would have considered it less of multitasking/information overload thing and more of one where the user has trouble pacing their own information intake, with the Minecraft videos' most important aspect being that they convey the text a few words at a time at a fixed pace rather than presenting an overwhelming wall of everything at once. In other words, the users require something that's more IV and less pill (with the Minecraft video in the background being the saline in the metaphor). New Reddit seems to go in exactly that direction, as there is less on the screen at a given time, you have to take delaying actions to "advance", which results in a new morsel of information being displayed, and there is a lot of "incidentals" (whitespace, "designer" UI elements) to make it go down more smoothly.
I'm not clear on what you mean by this. Can you elaborate?
Comparing new [edit: themotte seems to autoedit new.reddit links into old.reddit...?] to old, for example, the latter immediately shows all of the discussion under /u/HyperConnectedSpace's post. The former is first gated under a "(+) 3 more replies"; when you press that, it still doesn't expand fully, but instead leave you with a "(+) 1 more reply", which, when pressed, sometimes (I still can't figure out what the conditions are) takes you away from the rest of the thread to a "you are looking at a single comment's thread" page. I've also seen a scenario in different threads where you have to press the (+) repeatedly for it to show even one additional comment; this may have to do with comments that were downvoted.
I don't know where I saw the picture thing (might only be some subs), and I also am failing to rediscover another obnoxious pattern where a small slice of a post's comments were expanded inline in the subreddit view instead of on its own page. In general, there seem to be a lot more distinct mystery interactables resulting in subtly different behaviours on a new reddit site, with the boundaries of each of them being unclear.
No
Superior hardware, I guess
I think this is very bad moderation and the equivalence between the GP and the post you are responding to is false. This is already the case on a purely syntactic level: the OP makes an assertion, while the response asks the OP for his opinion (even if you could argue that the question is more of a "have you considered this" type than of the "I want to know the answer" one). Moreover, OP uses wording with insulting baggage ("sore loser") while the response is more neutral ("good", as opposed to bad, loser).
More generally, as I see it, prompting culture warriors who ascribe bad qualities to their outgroup to ask themselves if their ingroup is actually different in that regard is an important technique for keeping the heat of the discussion low: it promotes empathy, as one is encouraged to wonder why both sides act the same if one of them is so right while the other is so wrong, and prevents the "deathballing" dynamic where one tribe reaches a critical mass of common knowledge that everyone agrees their outgroup is worse than them and starts feeling more confident about coordinating meanness.
Finally, you noticeably did not threaten the original poster with a ban, despite the open egregiousness there. I don't know if it was intentional, and might well be a consequence of OP having been a singleton in your eyes while you spent hours dealing with separate anti-OP posts, but the way it winds up looking to anyone reading the thread top-to-bottom is blatant favouritism. The result of moderation leaning one way is that besides making some more people check out altogether, everyone who still cares about the balance of the community will try to counterbalance - i.e. go out of their way to make those perceived as receiving the moderators' favour feel a little less welcome. This means more antagonism going around. I'm trying to be charitable of your perspective here, but choosing which patterns/bandwagons to ignore and which ones not to is also a way of expressing favouritism: a moderator with opposite biases could have considered the responses to OP in isolation, while moderating OP (or any of the recurring posts in the same spirit!) with something to the effect of "next person who makes a top-level post with a sentiment amounting to 'DAE leftists are whiny bitches?' eats a ban" (and actually following up on it).
Huh, very surprising indeed. The possibilities I can see are:
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He expects that Russia will produce such conclusive proof that it was a clot that even normies abroad will have to concede. In such a scenario, this is a very strong way to build a reputation for accuracy, and counter what seems like an emerging narrative even in the West that the Ukrainian government may be Baghdad Bobbing (I've seen a lot of palpable irritation about Zelenskiy's recent implausibly low figure for Ukrainian casualties, and before that the stories like the Kramatorsk air defence accident already strained the relationship). The latter purpose may be served even if no proof is forthcoming from the Russians.
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The pro-Putin part of my family is convinced that Ukrainian intelligence somehow got to Navalny in the camp and assassinated him, because with the given timing (just before the Munich conference and as the aid vote in the US was heating up) it brought maximal benefit to them in terms of reinflaming Western sympathies. Perhaps this implausibly turns out to actually be true, and he thinks the Russians are about to produce a smoking gun and wants to get ahead of the story.
I also think that the current pearl-clutching narrative is robust enough against the clot scenario: "sent to the camps and died of stroke because of insufficient/denied medical aid" does not read much better than "deliberately killed". Also, clots that cause infarction elsewhere afaik can form as a consequence of various forms of otherwise non-lethal physical abuse, such as circulation cutting to limbs - in fact some form of "unintentional death as a consequence of intentional roughing up" is my own leading theory for what actually happened.
I find it fascinating that I would encounter someone who likes it here. I find new reddit to be so thoroughly infuriating and unusable on every level that I truly can't empathise with how someone could stand it, and until now it seemed that nobody I could actually talk to did either - its fans, I thought, would perhaps be found among the same zoomer shadow-people who find longer stretches of text easiest to consume when they are overlaid piecemeal on an unrelated 5x speed video of someone running around a parkour circuit in Minecraft or Roblox.
How do you deal with the circumstance that it defaults to hiding everything? Do you just make a habit of clicking to expand the picture, text and comment section repeatedly? Do you not bump into the more aggressive child filters (new reddit straight up blocks guests from "nsfw" forums, while old reddit just requires you to click "I'm 18") or are you just constantly logged in? Do you not run out of RAM,/CPU if you have more than a handful of tabs with it open?
Commons has always been a bit sketchy, but it was a small town "dumb and poor people who go way back and have a mixture of old beefs and enabling habituation to each other's antisocial tendencies" kind of sketchy that should be familiar to those who watch a certain genre of police cam videos for fun. I'm wondering if the homeless in the post are part of that web; Ithaca is not a place where unconnected homeless could easily survive the winter.
I think there's something about trans women being baristas in particular; the first transwoman I interacted with more than a single time in my life was a Starbucks barista on the US east coast, and the first one I encountered in Europe was one at an indie coffee shop.
It's not like members of the blue tribe don't have cultural memory or even (due to the patchwork nature of American legislation) personal experience of the red tribe "punching" them, such as in the case of abortions, labour laws or drug prohibitions. On top of that, the tribes have conflicting aesthetic preferences that they wish to impose on the same commons - a young Democrat prefers the joint proposition of ethnic restaurants and ethnic gangs in the same measure as the boomer Republican would prefer their absence as a package deal. Finally, there are those things that still have a majority but are carried by a red-tribe backbone - car culture, militarism (though this one is shifting?) and relative libertarianism in matters such as food safety.
I think a more probable theory is that children are just too damn^W^W^W^W^Wthere are lot more pedophiles than is commonly believed or accepted, especially "circumstantial rather than obligate" ones, but there is some combination of elites being more likely to be caught, it being more widely publicised when elites indulge in it, and elites being more likely to indulge in it in such a brazen and well-networked fashion simply because elites are more likely to have brass (more hobos than religious leaders may be pederasts, but nobody will put the former in charge of lots of children) and a network of underlings and supporters that could be mobilised to enable it.
I think this is proving too much, or at least using an inappropriately strong definition of "dominate". The total population of the EU is also greater than that of the US, and the total GDP is at least in the same ballpark, and yet it's quite fair to say that the US dominates it, at least in the sense that a hypothetical future in which China has the level of economical power and social influence over Asia that the US has over Europe would be terrible for US interests in Asia. If you consider the entirety of the US empire that is the "western world", it exceeds the US in population and GDP for sure. Dominance is not just about "more bulk wins"; it is also about how much of that bulk you are willing to use on dominating others, rather than on hookers and blow, and how much will to power and good maneuvering you are actually capable of engaging in. In that regard, the US, Russia and China are all far superior to the hapless prize damsels of the international sphere that are Europe, Japan etc., because the former would to some extent rather go sick and hungry than be weak, but the latter generally reinvest any surplus to be a bit more lazy, comfortable or self-satisfied on some ideological metric.
Why are the Houthis relevant to evaluating a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine? As I understand, they used the general atmosphere of chaos and anger to take a handful of potshots at Israel and adjacent shipping, but had negligible agency in bringing about that general atmosphere to begin with. Without the mutual slaughter preoccupying everyone, chances are they would not have stuck their necks out here.
I don't understand why this framing would have more validity than the one that says that this all started because they colonized/set up shop in Palestine, then there were multiple iterations of attacks and counterattacks and we are here. In the same vein,
To be honest this war doesn’t even have anything to do with the Jews. It’s a Saudi-Iran proxy war.
seems rather far-fetched (what percentage of combatants do you figure would say that they are doing this for the sake of the Saudis/Iranians?). This war has been going on since before the current Iranian political system existed.
And if we do a 2-state solution and Israel isn’t allowed to fight back what is your proposal?
Who is saying Israel isn't allowed to fight back in that scenario? If there is a two-state solution, and then the Palestinians cross the border to attack, then they should by all means fight back, and I'm even okay with us Europeans contributing material military help to make this happen. Conversely, though, if in that scenario some settlers with military backing still cross the border into the Palestinian state, then I think the same should apply for the other side.
I mean, of course I'm not saying it's impossible to define a distribution on arbitrary strings or anything; but I don't think that this is the intended interpretation of any putative "anything has a probability" maxim one would ascribe to LW-style Bayesianism.
The idea that you can have a prior on bloxors being greeblic strikes me as a type error. The domain of priors are propositions, that is, assignments of truth values to possible world-states, not strings of words; to the extent that we pretend assign a probability to a string of words, this is only enabled by us having an understanding that the string encodes a world->bool map (or at least a distribution on such maps, to allow for linguistic uncertainty). Without knowing the definition of "bloxors" and "greeblic", I'm not aware of any canonical interpretation this sequence of words has that yields a truth value; and it does not seem reasonable to expect that any string actually encodes a valid map, any more than it is to expect that any line noise encodes a valid polynomial.
In fact, my prior on strings of Latin characters tells me that the bloxors statement is very likely to not encode a map/proposition, and therefore to not have a probability.
I thought that the framing of this as "Iran attacking Syria" by Western media was somewhere between misleading and downright manipulative, considering that the Syrian government is still facing an insurrection backed by a myriad of internal separatists and outside interests and not in control of its entire territory, the attacks were targeted at one of those insurrectionist factions, and if anything Iran is now geopolitically on the same team as the Syrian government (via Russia). This is like framing the Battle of Manila as the US attacking the Philippines, or the landing at Incheon as the US invading South Korea.
How do you propose attaining a state that can not be described as anarcho-tyranny in this fashion? If you write your ban on this instance of "fucking around", the next guy writing a post like yours will just get to say something like "basic research to understand how to best fight emerging pandemics? Not without billions spent on paranoid safety procedures! Fuck around with [new thing that has no motivated political constituency fighting against it yet]? Why, of course(...)." The things that are seemingly unreasonably banned and encumbered today are just noncentral examples of yesterday's irresponsible-scientists-have-gone-too-far scenarios.
In practice I think a group dedicated to harassment and social shunning would probably be very effective without the need for violence.
How is that working out for similar groups in the context of anti-abortion in the US, which I imagine attracts a lot more passive and active support than opposition to something as niche and insular as GoF research could? The theory that COVID was due to slick and eloquent scientists (as opposed to something like unmasked overweight deplorables heavily panting in others' faces at the strip mall) is already thoroughly coded "icky right".
Which one of your categories does the idea that it's all about status and posturing correspond to? One tribe has pulled out all stops and staked a lot of prestige and institutional power perception on the idea that Trump must be prevented, and when that tribe's power is based on the perception that it can and will get its way in the end anyway, it is necessarily diminished if that is shown to not be the case. If the Democrats had spilled as much ink arguing that no orange piñata must be allowed within the boundaries of the National Mall as they did on the orange man in the White House, forcing through such a light act of cultural appropriation might likewise turn out to be a rational goal to use billions of red-tribe campaign money for.
(cf. also prison stories where they say that displaying crazy violent overreactions a few times is the key to being left in peace)
There are some attempts at statistics, claiming 46% female. You could of course choose to extend your argument by saying that these too are fake, but at that point, what would be sufficient evidence to persuade you?
Could you link some concrete examples of banned mods and the attendant backlash?
In almost every sense that matters, to my eyes, the parties considered "left" have become the same incumbent authoritarians that we fashionably rebelled against when we were young, in the sense that their declared agendas amount to "we would like to prescribe and proscribe more things, but the antisocial forces of chaos aligned against us prevent us from doing so".
Is it surprising? The only thing that would stop me from openly expressing an opinion like that is that I actually have to go there for professional reasons sometimes (and even more so to its occasionally protective big brother), and I would like to not leave anything on my digital record that could be caught by a very crude crawler after some unlucky accident correlating me to my Motte account and cause me problems at the border.
(Being catchable by a more sophisticated crawler is less concerning because at that point so many people would get caught that a "reject them all" policy may not be sustainable.)
I really don't think so - if I wanted to say that was the whole post, I would have gone for the shorter "post amounting to 'DAE(...)'".
I also really don't think that "I could've done much worse" is an argument for what you did being particularly good. That being said, I perhaps should remind you that I put the accusation in the mouth of a putative moderator who I took to be taking cjet's action with inverted polarity - given that I was against what cjet did here, it should stand to reason that I'm equally against what Bizarro cjet would have done... (not because it'd be a wrong claim about your post, but because I think that the implied collective punishment is not a good modding strategy).
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