JulianRota
3mo ago
Why wouldn't there be a second chance? Everyone I know who preferred Trump liked DeSantis too, just thought it wasn't his time to be President yet.
JulianRota
3mo ago
Do you have a source for this? There's video of him still breathing after he was released. I'm not aware of any witnesses or video that reliably puts the chokehold time at 6-15 minutes. Exactly who made that "estimate" and based on what?
Considering the normal timing of NYC subways, usually 1 to 2 minutes between stops, it would be extremely strange for someone to be in a chokehold for "6-15 minutes".
JulianRota
3mo ago
A question that sounds snarky and rhetorical, but is actually serious: Why don't you guys just argue with each other privately?
Why indeed? If you move to DMs over any of a hundred systems, you can sling as much crap as you want at each other, and nobody will judge you or mod you or ban you for doing so. So why not? The only reason that makes sense IMO is that the audience matters. Everybody here has to see it, or at least be able to see it.
But what of the effect that has on the place? I see that you don't feel offended or put off by the argument. What of the audience though? They're important - they must be, or you wouldn't be interested in posting it publicly. I've come to think that, to use another Wire quote, all the pieces matter.
Regardless of whether you or BC are super offended by the debate, when everybody sees it, and sees it not being modded, it changes the tone of the whole place. It becomes just that little bit more acceptable to trash your debate partner rather than discuss civilly. People who love that are more likely to come and stay, and people who don't will disengage and drift away. Even more importantly, it changes peoples behavior just a bit. Nobody is perfectly combative or perfectly civilized. It's a signal to turn off the civilized part and dial up the combat part. And that does in fact matter, even if we'd rather it didn't or it isn't immediately obvious.
The same points can be made perfectly well without the personal attacks. Perhaps even better. Even if I think User X is a great big jerk, it's not conducive to a reasonable conversation to just call them a jerk. It's perfectly possible for me to be the calm and reasonable one and make my points without the insults. If I do it right, and I'm right that they're a jerk, then they will show themselves to be one to the audience in short order. The audience is a lot more likely to believe it when they see it for themselves over just me telling them.
JulianRota
3mo ago
You probably noticed after that unfortunate subway incident that left-wing reddit was quick to say "We failed Jordan Neely", and if you understand that statement, you understand the Blue Tribe. To the Blue Tribe, Jordan Neely acted the way he did because the group failed to include and empathize with him. Penny is a murderer not because he killed Neely, but because he acted without the consent and validation of the group. Tutto nello feelz, niente al di fuori dello feelz, nulla contro lo feelz
I understand that they think this way, but I think that it represents a hole in the Blue Tribe thinking. They, or rather this segment of them, believe with a religious fervor that they have the solution to all societal ills. They believe that their ideology covers all cases of everything, so nobody will ever feel compelled to do anything bad once everything they want is implemented.
I call it the Theory Of Nice. It's the belief that Niceness Fixes Everything. The root cause of all hostility and meanness is that somebody else at some other time was not sufficiently Nice to that person. If anyone is being mean, we can cure them by being exclusively nice to them for a sufficiently long time. We can construct a world where nobody is ever mean to anybody, therefore there's no source for meanness to start from, and everybody will just be nice to everybody else all the time. Any time somebody of the Ingroup is mean to other people in a manner severe enough to require some form of suppression, the real meaning is that we failed that person by not being sufficiently nice to them earlier, because if we had done so, obviously they would never have done that. They're our Ingroup after all, so it's not possible that they're just inherently bad.
Meanwhile, everyone in our Outgroup, i.e. Red Team, or people who don't just accept our assertions that our ideology will fix everything, is just incorrigibly evil. They're brainwashed monsters, all hatred against them is justified, any measure against them, no matter how harsh or mean, is acceptable. Obviously doing any of those things doesn't make us mean or corrupt us in any way. Don't you understand, they're the Outgroup? It's different for them! It's just different, that's all!
I think any ideology that purports to fix the world and be the one solution to everything must account for everything and everyone everywhere, and do so provably. You can't just hand-wave away that this person wouldn't act bad if we did things my way. You'd have to demonstrate in practice that it actually does handle every single case in the promised way, no exceptions. And you can't dismiss some other group that is clearly your Outgroup as unfixably evil. If you do those things, you don't actually have a glorious new ideology that fixes the world, you just have plain old Ingroup-bias, the exact same stuff that's been in our hindbrains for millennia and powered countless atrocities around the world.
JulianRota
3mo ago
getting killed seems a bit of a reach
Shortening the description of what happened like this IMO really does a disservice to understanding the incident. At no point did anybody, Penny included, set out to kill Neely. No weapons that were not appropriate to the situation were deployed. No physical techniques that were not reasonable considering what was happening were used. He was merely physically restrained for a brief period to make him stop doing whatever it exactly was that he was doing. This was highly likely to have been reasonable and appropriate. That he died from it is an unintended consequence, most likely due to him being in comprehensively terrible health.
The class of people that Neely represents has wildly different health than anything most regular people can conceive of. Which touches back to the giant hole concept that HlynkaCG was talking about. These people start out severely mentally ill, the type that would likely be institutionalized for life in another era. They do lots of illegal drugs, not checked at all for purity or cleanliness. Possibly including injected with dirty needles. They probably sleep on the streets somewhere most of the time. Constantly in and out of jail and hospitals. You can bet they never follow up on any health or legal suggestions offered in those places. Eating whatever comes to hand, no thought to it being clean or healthy.
I know there are legal doctrines covering this sort of thing, which I'm not meaning to debate right now. But morally speaking, exactly what responsibility do we have to this sort of person? If you're both so crazy that you're antagonizing and scaring people on a train, and also so unhealthy and fragile that a brief period of mild restraint is at risk of killing you, then what exactly do we do with you? I have a hard time feeling like society has any responsibility towards such a person.
JulianRota
3mo ago
One of the things about having existed in a world outside liberal society is that you cant help but recognize that there is a world outside liberal society.
Agreed. I've been to a lot of places and done a lot of things, and in doing so have met and worked with a lot of people who think very differently from the norms expected in "liberal society". It seems to me that there's something of a cult, of people who have only ever been in "liberal society" places and can't begin to even conceive that there are people out there who really do think very differently. They speak of "multicultralism", but all they really know is that those other people sure dress in some cool costumes and have fancy dances and tasty exotic food. The idea that these people also have very different values from them is unthinkable.
The type of person I have described is of course not every single "blue team" person. They're probably a minority in most places. But they definitely do exist, and I've met a number of people like that. I get the impression that their numbers are growing, spreading into more places, and becoming even more strident in their beliefs. I don't know how this ends, but I can't help but think something ugly is going to happen eventually. And along those lines,
Thing is that for all the talk of "fighting the power" one gets the impression that a liberal does not really understand the implications of those words because the've never been in a position to to actually do so.
It seems rather funny in current year. Especially back in the 70s or so, there was such a culture of "revolution" and "overthrowing the system" and other such things being cool. They're still in love with the idea of protests and riots. Look how they cheered on the BLM protests of 2020! But then, Jan 6 happens, and oh, it's the most terrible horrible thing ever! Well, when you were talking about protests and riots and revolutions and overthrowing things being totally super cool, exactly what did you think it meant? It's hard for me to see it as anything but, oh all that stuff is great only when we do it, but if they do it, then it's terrible and unacceptable.
JulianRota
3mo ago
The details in the story are even wilder
admitted to failing to make a $3.75 million quarterly licensing payment
Is it just me, or is that kind of not that much money? If you have over 100 full-time employees and the infrastructure to print a news magazine and distribute it nationwide, that ought to be a pretty small part of your budget. You've got to be hurting pretty bad to have to miss something like that.
Oh, and they had already cut back to monthly publication in 2020.
The linked article on publishing AI-generated content under the bylines of fake reporters is really something else.
JulianRota
3mo ago
No doubt. I've had an account there since 2013. Under a different username though.
JulianRota
3mo ago
I don't suppose anyone noticed that we got our first link from the orange site?
I think the moderation is just fine. The Kulak example you gave is actually one of the most wholesome things I've ever seen while debating on the internet. Seriously, I've been writing and debating on various internet forums for decades now. I don't think I've ever before seen a heated argument get started, the mods say "knock it off you two", followed by both posters apologizing for overreacting and restating reasonable points in a calm and civilized manner. Fucking magic!
I actually still remember to this day, one time like 10 or 15 years ago, I got in an argument/discussion with somebody on some forum, I think it was Slashdot. They were very hostile and insulting and I remained calm and reasonable. After 2 or 3 exchanges, I asked him why he was being so hostile and insulting when I hadn't insulted him once and he actually calmed down some and apologized. Not mentioning that to make myself sound awesome or anything, but to say that it's really remarkable and rare to actually move conversations from hostility back to calm and reasonable discussion.
Burdensomcount is the only one on your list who got a harsh-ish punishment. But the explanation from FCfromSSC seems quite reasonable. I don't have access to mod notes and I don't follow everything that goes on here in enough detail to know stuff like that, but I have no reason to disbelieve the explanation.
In every listed case, the mods have calmly and patiently explained their position, even restating it multiple times in multiple places for the benefit of people who could plausibly be claimed to be behaving disingenuously. 99% of the internet that's moderated gets "Fuck off, troll! ::clicks permaban button::" to that behavior.
JulianRota
3mo ago
I'd agree that it's political. The political situation is either A) You know the Feds will stop you, so you be a good boy and do nothing. Your meek compliance gets you zero enthusiasm from the right, and whispers start that you're an open-borders sympathizer, or B) You do something like this, stick to it as long as possible, make the Feds physically stop you. It'll help for a little while with the actual situation, and being seen to try to do something is good for his political support. Forcing the Feds to actually physically stop it and showing video of them doing that will help his political situation, making the case that he's on their side and is a fighter, and it's the Feds' fault that it isn't working.
JulianRota
3mo ago
There appear to be two paths to US citizenship. A legal route, which is nearly impossible for most people, and an illegal route which gets easier and easier.
I am given to understand the situation is more an abuse of the asylum system. Somebody comes in, gets caught, and requests asylum, with a halfway-plausible story. It gets provisionally accepted, but the backlog for formal evaluation is like a decade long, so they get to stay in the US until that happens. Even if the formal hearing results in them getting booted out immediately, they still had a decade in the country, and can do it all again the next day.
JulianRota
3mo ago
Whether "mostly military-age men" it is or isn't true, it would be astronomically unlikely there wouldn't be at least one adorable family among the body count. All one has to do then is find them, take a bunch of pictures of the bodies, and distribute them widely, while completely ignoring the rest, and your work is done.
Even if there are literally zero adorable families naturally coming over, the cartels running the operation on the other side aren't stupid. Surely they would be willing to ensure there are a few like that and make sure they get covered.
JulianRota
3mo ago
I'm sympathetic, but "The judiciary is captured" is a little too broad for me. There's a lot of Federal judges out there, do we mean all of them? I'm perfectly willing to believe a substantial number of Federal judges are extremely biased against the right and will bend over backwards to ensure harsh outcomes for anyone deemed too right-wing, but I don't think we can reliably say all of them.
Of course, if as least some of them are and you know who they are, it's quite powerful to be able to ensure all appropriate cases get heard by one of them. As far as I know, most of the most frivolous cases against Trump have been filed New York, which probably holds some of the most biased judges and jury pool.
JulianRota
3mo ago
Perhaps that was a bit over-stated. I think it has a little truth, but more qualified, like that something that vaguely resembles that may happen to like a single-digit number of people, not anywhere near even a whole number percentage of everyone who's ever possessed such content. And "coming to the attention" would look more like far-left activists being majorly annoyed at you for some reason and digging up things you've wrote or sold somewhere to make a case about how bad you are. It may not be super common, but such things occasionally do end up becoming prosecutions, often including an extra step passing through a "mainstream" activist group.
If you're looking for an actual case, the best example that comes to my mind is Paul Miller. His prosecution was on weapons charges, for laws that are pretty commonly flouted and rarely prosecuted on their own, reportedly at least partly thanks to the prompting of the ADL (though he wasn't exactly doing himself any favors either). None of the documentation mentions any particular radical literature, though it would be a little surprising if he didn't actually possess any.
JulianRota
3mo ago
Oh yes, that reminds me - if I tab away from a Substack page, when I go back, the page hangs on a blank display for a second or so before appearing again. Including if I'm nowhere near the comments, which I mostly don't read anyways. No idea what they're doing there, but it can't be good.
JulianRota
3mo ago
The thing is, they don't have any ads though. So I guess all of the engagement-hacking is aimed at trying to get readers to purchase paid subscriptions to more creators? I guess that's a strategy, seems pretty weird and annoying to me though.
Maybe it is true that they're financially underwater from paying and promising too much to their initial set of authors. Which could make them desperate enough to try any number of things.
I don't expect they're listening to me or anything, but it'd be great IMO if they worked more like Nebula - you don't directly pay for individual publishers, you instead pay Substack itself $5 or $10 a month or whatever. Most of that minus a cut gets paid out to authors based on how much time you spend reading them. Then Substack doesn't care how much you engage because they get paid either way. But it's now further in every author's interest to keep putting out content that keeps people reading, since the friction for the money slipping away if they let up is much smoother. But they don't have the ability to do much except put out more high-quality content.
Maybe that could even apply to anybody who writes on the platform. I don't expect I'd ever make enough to live on from people paying to read what I write, but it would probably feel cool if I earned a few bucks a month from such an arrangement. That's about the price I'm suggesting though, so maybe it's also an incentive that your paid subscription is essentially free if you manage to publish stuff on there that gets at least a little bit of engagement. Maybe it would be just a simplification - say my account is -$10/month for a subscription. If I get $2/month from people reading me, then they just bill me a little less that month. If I get $15/month from that, then my account goes positive, and maybe they only actually cut me a check if I'm over $50 positive. So there'd be a big cloud of unpaid readers (or maybe they're paywalled off?), a smaller cloud of paid readers, a smaller one yet of people who mostly read but also write some stuff that only gets read a little, and the smallest one yet of the people who write things that gets millions of reads and make significant money from it.
JulianRota
3mo ago
These books aren't samizdat you obtain from a guy who stapled it together in his garage after photocopying it over at work(or I guess which come in a word document on a flash drive today). They're freely available if you want to spend the purchase price(which is often high). Some of them are banned in parts of Europe, but I don't think it's enforced particularly strictly and they're definitely not banned in the US.
It's true that the majority of these books aren't really all that banned, at least in the US. It's hard to consider something to be banned when you can mail-order a copy off of Amazon. The Turner Diaries is a pretty good case for about as banned as you can effectively get though.
In the way of modern cancel culture, it's not technically banned in the sense that the Government will explicitly send you to jail specifically for possessing it. But Amazon and GoodReads removed the page for it entirely. I don't see it on any other online book sellers. I actually found a few paper copies on eBay, running around $100, apparently published by a Barricade Books, which according to Wikipedia went bankrupt in 1997. I would expect dire consequences if any publisher dared to do a new run now - in the form of every other author refusing to do business with them, credit card processors, shippers, and banks dropping them, etc. If you wanted a paper copy, something like printing it at home would in fact be pretty reasonable. PDFs over the internet are easier though - a DuckDuckGo search for it finds a downloadable PDF on the first page, so you don't have to work too super hard to find a free copy if you really want it.
While it's not explicitly illegal to have it, if it ever comes to the attention of the wrong people that you do, I would expect you risk getting busted for something made up or trivial that everyone else normally wouldn't be prosecuted for and some kind of sentencing enhancement citing the fact that you possessed it to document how dangerous you are.
The hell of it is, I don't see it being that great or dangerous. The ideology is pretty racist and anti-Semitic, but no part of the book actually advocates for it, it's just taken as a given that it's correct. The terrorism tactics seems to me like grade-school level stuff, the kind of thing where if you couldn't figure that out already, you really have no business conducting any sort of insurgent activity. It's kind of fun as an adventure story, and a circle-jerk if you actually believe in that ideology, but otherwise pretty meaningless.
This is more of a blindspot from the regime/cathedral/progressive-industrial complex, which takes for granted, sometimes with truly fallacious explicit justifications, that prejudice/oppression/authoritarianism only runs in one direction. Like the term "authoritarianism" literally is not used in the social sciences; instead it's "right-wing authoritarianism", and of course this is only measured in ways which make right wingers look more authoritarian.
I pretty much agree. I don't really follow social sciences much though, it seems pretty remarkable if they actually pay no attention to left-wing authoritarianism.
JulianRota
3mo ago
It seems like just about everything does that now. At least the prompts to enable notifications seem to have gone away, but for a while, basically every website would nag you to subscribe by email, turn on notifications, and watch a related video before you could even start reading the actual article that you clicked on.
JulianRota
3mo ago
Is it just me, or is Substack's UI incredibly annoying?
Apparently Substack desperately wants me to read every post in my email inbox. I do not want to read posts in my email inbox. I want to read them on the website. Nevertheless, every time I open a post in Substack, it does the thing where it starts dimming the page as soon as I scroll down to try and read something, which I find distracting, so I have to scroll down further to get to the box where they try to get my email, then click to dismiss it. Doesn't seem to matter if I've logged in or do give the email address, it still prompts me every time. Naturally, every search result about this on every search engine I've tried is about blocking the emails or users.
What I'd like it to do is, let me log in to an account on their site, then see an RSS-reader-like list of recent posts by every writer I follow in time order. Then, if I'm logged in, let me read a post with no popups or distractions, and if I open a post from somewhere else from a writer I don't follow, give me a button or something to click to follow them too. It actually appears that it's supposed to work like that, but it doesn't.
Instead, when I log in by email, as it seems to want you to do, and follow several writers, there doesn't seem to be a way to see things they've recently written. There's a page for that, called "inbox" for some reason, but it only shows content from one writer. "Home" mostly shows recent short posts by people I don't follow and don't care about, and I have no idea by what criteria it selects them. There's also a "reads" section in "profile" but it claims I'm not subscribed to anything. I can't find anything that even lists what I've subscribed to, but there's like 3 places where it tries to get me to read random content by people I haven't subscribed to. How is it this terrible? Has Substack also been taken over by the enshittification trend before it even really got going? I just want to read interesting effortposts in peace.
JulianRota
3mo ago
If I'm watching at home by myself, I'll usually watch a movie in 2 or 3 sittings. I don't have a problem watching a whole movie at once in a theater though. I suppose that's more likely to be planned out or going with other people though.
I suppose I'm more likely to watch in 1 sitting or make the breaks short if the movie is actually really good, which not that many are. Or, another way to look at things could be that I watch more movies than otherwise because it's acceptable to watch in multiple sittings rather than having to wait until I am ready to devote a solid 2h+ block to it. Which also means that I'm more willing to take a chance on something that I don't know much about and might not be that good, rather than only watching things I have high confidence that I'll enjoy. If it's really awesome and would actually benefit from watching the whole way through in one sitting, I can always watch it again when I am prepared to do that.
JulianRota
3mo ago
Interesting post! I have several of those on my shelves and in my Kindle already. I actually just finished reading Turner Diaries - quick summary, it's fun as an action-adventure story, but the politics are pretty unsophisticated and not discussed in much detail. I've been trying to find more books on Irish Loyalism as well, maybe I'll try and find a copy of Paisley's book next (though I have read from some Loyalist militiamen post-Troubles that they were rather annoyed at his tendency to swoop in to a volatile situation, stir everyone up with a firebrand speech, then be whisked away before any actual violence happens).
The meta questions are what this really gets into though. All regimes in history have banned books that they considered threatening to the Powers That Be. What's curious is how the current regime is obsessed with promoting the reading of "banned" books while simultaneously actually banning other books. It seems critical to the identify of the current power structure that they were formerly out of power and had their core ideologies banned, so it's both a dunk on the former Powers That Be which they overcame and a sop to the idea of Free Speech to promote them, but they're at least as totalitarian as those former powers, so of course they continue to ban things that threaten their new ideology, while of course paying no attention to the contradiction.
It's also interesting how we all seem to seek the authenticity of these types of books. Whatever they think, at least they actually meant it! Even the wildest-eyed radicals tend to become dull if they ever do manage to become the Powers That Be, only sometimes returning to authenticity once they're out of power but still alive and not in some terrible prison, and inclined to write more about what they really did and why.
JulianRota
3mo ago
Some of those writers dodge the issue (others embrace it), but the central issue under dispute was slavery, full stop. Yes, there were absolutely other political disputes between the South, broadly, and the North or the West, but none of them held a candle to the central dispute over slavery. Take away slavery, and there would not have been a secessionary movement. It was both a necessary and sufficient cause of the Civil War.
Yes, the American colonists succeeded at seceeding, and the Confederacy did not; that's a fact of history. However, when we're evaluating other secessionary movements in different times and contexts, I think it's much more useful to realize that the American colonists were fighting for free expression, the right to self-defense, the sanctity of the home against intrusion, the rights of the accused and convicted, etc., while the Confederacy was fighting for the right to own slaves. If your modern movement bears more similarities to the first, then I will probably agree that it's justified; more like the second, and no.
I think I would at least partly disagree with this. In my view, the best description of the role of slavery in the Confederacy's secession is that it was the lynchpin that made the secession and war possible and dictated the way it would be fought. I don't think most of the people actually fighting would describe their cause as fighting for the right to own slaves, and I don't think it's the true cause of the war. I think the real cause is the cultural split that goes back before the founding of the country, as described by Abilon's Seed and Scott's piece on it. I've been meaning to write a longer piece on this idea, but consider - why were the borders of the Confederacy what they were? Why did these people decide to embrace a plantation slavery economy while those other people rejected it in favor of industrialization?
JulianRota
3mo ago
Why can't both be true? It's both an objectively pretty reasonable set of conditions for secession and also a piece of propaganda for a particular side of a war that could plausibly be argued to be stretching the truth a bit. In fact, it's decently effective propaganda specifically because many people would consider it reasonable.
It's probably also worth considering that, at the time, basically every country in the world was a monarchy. So if you ever want any allies for a cause like theirs, it's very much in your interest to paint yourselves as having very reasonable objections to your specific king and definitely not any kind of general objection to the concept of monarchy. This is very much in contrast to the Marxist cause later on, which paints themselves as a danger to any regime that doesn't follow their ideology.
I think it works okay if you view things in a more fuzzy way. The idea of abolitionism didn't just magically appear at the time of the Industrial Revolution, just like the IR itself wasn't a single thing at a single time but a gradual progression over hundreds of years. Going from an idea written about by a few privileged elites to a movement endorsed by nation-sized populations and that nation-states are prepared to wage full-scale wars over is not an instant or automatic process. It seems very plausible to me that the IR powered the growth of abolitionism from something that they were willing to pass in places that didn't really have any slaves anyways to something that they were prepared to enact and enforce by force of arms in places where the entire economy was built on slave labor and the controlling imperial power was getting a fat chunk of the profits.
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