TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I'm coming here from the QC thread, and I must agree that this is an absolutely fantastic post. I was wondering why the gender divide was so huge in Korea, and this answered it quite nicely.
How did you get this info? Are you Korean yourself? Do you have friends that live there? Or is this all from reading articles/online discussion boards?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
The bill barely does anything to eliminate asylum.
The bill eliminates a huge loophole with asylum...
At this point I think we're just talking in circles so I'm going to bow out.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I'm pretty big into the political scene, and I haven't heard of any major campaigns using Reddit bots to any degree. There's two problems. The first is the tradeoff between price and effectiveness, where cheap stuff isn't particularly effective and effective stuff isn't cheap (at least relative to traditional advertisements). The second problem is that it's against ToS so most strategists and consultants shy away from it. It would be pretty obvious if they used typical campaign advertisements and just had bots upvoting them, so to get around that they'd need a second ecosystem of secret internet-only advertisements which would make costs balloon further. What you're saying isn't wrong, but I just haven't seen it happen to any real degree.
Microtargeting has been tried a lot but is just not effective.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
"I have a great, on-topic and timely post to share with this reddit community, but my account is too new. I'm going to purchase an account with a pre-existing history so I can share this incredible post with a community that I have no pre-existing engagement with."
I didn't say anything like that so I don't know where you got that.
Spotting accounts like this harvesting karma is like spotting people who are in the middle of getting their robbery tools ready
Comparing Reddit upvotes to burglars ransacking peoples' homes is laughably hyperbolic. Again, I've only ever seen these bots end up either 1) getting banned, or 2) advertising for porn on NSFW subs, which is fine. The assumption that they have to be doing something bad doesn't really hold up to the benign results I've seen.
The Motte tried to actually avoid breaking the rules of Reddit, and we split because we knew that not actually breaking the rules wasn't going to be a defence against the eye of Sauron
I was referring to rules as they're enforced. Reddit's rules might be fine if applied evenly, but they're still problematic with how they're enforced.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
When people say "close the border" with no conditions, it usually implies they want to close the border unconditionally, like for military or pandemic reasons. When people are just talking about illegal immigrants, they can pretty easily specify "we should do something about illegal immigration.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
When people say "close the border" they typically mean closing it to all traffic entirely which would be utterly silly. There's tons of trade that goes between the border, and plenty of American nationals come and go all the time.
I agree the asylum stuff is BS, but again, this bill does crack down on much of that. I'm fine with a few statistically irrelevant dissidents coming through if they're seeking to evade persecution from a genuinely authoritarian government torturing them, but I'm not fine with people fraudulently claiming they're a refugee for essentially no reason, which is what a lot of the economic migrants are doing now.
Even if you think all asylum should be ended, surely no asylum > a little asylum > a lot of asylum. So I don't know why you'd oppose the bill.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
nobody is going to buy or create a fake account because they want to do something good for the original community.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Reddit has a lot of silly or dumb rules... that's part of why this site decided to separate in the first place! I'm fine with Onlyfans sloots slinging their wares on the proper subreddits if that's what they want to do, and I really haven't seen much of an issue with pornspam on unrelated subs. All purchased accounts that I saw advertised on NSFW subs.
I'll believe political manipulation via bought accounts is a problem when I see actual evidence, but so far it's mostly been lacking. At least, I don't think it's much of an issue in comparison to the stuff the Reddit admins themselves are already doing via biased moderation policies.
Why can’t we just have a clean bill that closes the border?
I presume you mean "close the border to illegal immigrants". I agree that would be the best, but it's like saying "why don't we make murder illegal". It already is illegal, it's just a question of enforcement. This bill would have beefed up enforcement.
You say the golden triangle. The south is richer than they have ever been. There is always going to be some excuse. America will always be richer than every where else so there will always be economic demand.
I presume you did an autocorrect error and meant to type "Northern Triangle", not golden triangle.
The causes I listed aren't excuses, they're explanations that lie on a continuum. It's like judging the performance of a CEO based solely on the stock price, when you really need to understand the whole underlying environment to make a proper judgement. If the company grew by 10% but the rest of the sector grew by 50%, the CEO probably screwed up. Similarly, extraneous factors affect enforcement at the border.
I prefer Trump over the bill because I know the bill does nothing when the wrong party is in power.
You keep saying this but that doesn't make it true. At the very least this bill would have given more money for enforcement and closed an obvious loophole that illegals were abusing to enter the country. If Biden actually used the bill to its full effect (which he said he would) then it would have done even more.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Right, these politically motivated reposts are interesting to me simply due to novelty so I wanted to investigate more, but alas it seems that the duplicated post with comments has been scrubbed.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Well, I know some subreddits ban accounts under a certain age, and Reddit likely has additional filters for accounts that come on and immediately start advertising for porn. Buying someone else's account that has at least some legitimate-looking activity probably goes a long way to evading that.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
The Border Emergency Authority is a "break in case of emergency" tool that's specific to the crisis happening now. It sunsets in 3 years, so it won't be relevant if AOC takes office in a decade unless it's renewed. If it's not used then it would be no different than the status quo, but the rest of the bill expanding funding for border security and plugging asylum loopholes would still be in place. It's in no way formalizing that 5k migrants a day is "fine", it's simply a trigger when opaque and extraordinary measures can be taken.
Trump did NOT need to pass this bill to stop immigrant caravans.
Trump was really no better than Obama when it comes to border crossings. A lot of it is driven by the relative strength of the economy, but also by non-US factors like the state of Latin American countries especially in the Northern Triangle. Your answer of "Trump didn't need this" is exactly the handwavey "Biden Bad" thing I was talking about in my earlier post. The assumption you seem to be coming to is that the tougher laws are all just a ruse, that Biden must be doing something sneaky, but this is effectively unfalsifiable.
It’s toothless. If the POTUS is of the wrong party then the border is open.
This law doesn't open the border. If you think it does, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what the bill does.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
You really have to jump through mental gymnastics to get to this conclusion.
"We must not enact tougher immigration laws so that the guy who says he wants to use the tougher laws loses, in order to get a guy who I say will enact even tougher laws but who failed to actually enact any lasting changes".
Or, you know, we could just enact tougher laws now, then continue fighting for them later?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I followed a few of these types of accounts, the ones that would repost old stuff to farm karma. Some of them were on /r/4chan, some were on bigger subs like /r/pics or /r/funny. What I saw was that a lot of them get banned pretty quickly, but some of them turned around and sold their account to a third party. The most common client seemed to be porn actresses trying to sell their videos. It seemed like the ones farming accounts were typically from 3rd world countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh, although I bet there's pretty stiff competition from chatGPT now.
Reposting something popular is pretty common, and I don't think it's particularly harmful even if it's a little annoying to see the same thing (but how many of us even remember Reddit posts from years ago)? There's a big difference between that sort of thing, and political manipulation via buying upvotes, which is theoretically doable but I don't think anyone has shown real evidence that it's widespread. The layman's idea is politics is an arena drenched in money with moustache-twirling villains engineering everything behind the scenes, but in reality it has a lot less money than the power it wields would presumably incentivize, mostly due to coordination problems.
Seeing an entire Reddit thread with similar comments is very strange, and it's a shame that the new thread you mentioned got taken down as I would have very much liked to examine some of the accounts to see what they're up to.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Here's the summary of the bill, and here's the full text. Can you point out what specifically you object to? I've been accused of being uncharitable on this topic before, but whenever I press for details I typically get little but handwavey "Biden bad" style arguments. Which, to be clear, he was bad early in his presidency on this topic, but then he did an about-face and has signaled that he would have used the law quite aggressively.
Too much discretion.
Most of the bill is funding increases or rules changes that have little discretion involved. The big point of discretion was the Border Emergency Authority, which could be used if there were an average of 4000-5000 immigrants per day, and must be used at 5000+.
Formalized a lot of bad things like the asylum system
What is this referring to? The US already has formalized laws on asylum, like its signature on the Convention Against Torture. Right now, a big loophole in immigration is that immigrants can stay in the country until their asylum application is heard by a court, but courts are clogged and they often just miss their appointment anyways. The law would have plugged that.
Trump as POTUS is better for limiting immigration than Biden with the bill. This tells you how weak the bill was.
What does this even mean? The bill was never passed, so comparisons to "Biden with the bill" as if it was law are nonsensical.
It was always better to use the up coming elections to press the Dems for a good bill than a bill with Swiss cheese loopholes.
What "Swiss cheese" loopholes are you referring to? Trump was effectively no better on immigration than Obama, and most of his changes were executive orders that cost little political capital, and were trivial to repeal or ignore. Trump himself often went back on his more aggressive immigration changes whenever he got negative coverage on Fox News.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Your anger reminds me of the Liberation Pledge that vegans did, where they aggressively pushed their principles to their non-vegan friends in the form of ultimatums, "either stop eating meat or we can't be friends". When their non-vegan friends didn't comply with their craziness, the vegans got extremely mad and essentially said "well I guess they weren't ever my friends anyways!!!"
Losing friends and making enemies for pointless battles is just dumb. Politics has always been overwhelmingly about vibes and direct personal interest. Leftists of the e.g. feminist+pro-Muslim variety irk me as much as anyone, but it's utter silliness to think you'd accomplish anything but your own harm by raging at those types of people. And if you think your outgroup is the only side with a large amount of contradictions, then you're hopelessly naive. The Bible has so many contradictions that it's worthless as a philosophical guiding light, yet it's served that purpose to basically the entire Western world for centuries. Individual rulers or religious leaders just cherry-picked whichever parts happened to suit them. For another example, it wasn't too long ago that a large chunk of the alt-right cheered when Trump sank the most conservative immigration bill in a generation for blatantly self-serving reasons. When pressed, most of the alt-right just mumbled out explanations that showed they had no idea what was actually in the bill, or the state of current immigration laws. In practice it didn't actually matter, since the fact that they like Trump's vibes easily overrode their ideological pre-commitments.
How would you feel if I did what you plan on doing to Christians or Trump supporters? How would you feel if I "say something friendship-ruiningly impolite because I just can't hold in the anger at this stupidity any more"? You'd probably think I'm being silly and dumb, right?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Are you suggesting everyone just not use exchanges, or only use exchanges that let you still "hold your keys"? That's fine for committed crypto enthusiasts, but most people just want the financial system to work hassle-free. It's like the difference between an iPhone and some hacky Linux system.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
You make good points. I usually balk whenever I see crypto as the only option for payment, but if these businesses actually invested in a bit of digital infrastructure to make stablecoin payments hassle-free then it'd probably be fine. And considering the other option is "go out of business", it seems kind of strange that they haven't done this yet.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
The problem with crypto is that it's used for a lot of fully illegal things, and so the government has cracked down on it quite a bit. It's also somewhat difficult for the average person to use, at least marginally more complicated than something like Paypal. Then there's the issue of risk, where plenty of people use crypto as a form of speculation so you can never be sure if the crypto held will have the same value as before unless you're using a stablecoin. Then there's the risk of exchanges just running off with your money like FTX did.
Most people beyond the small niche of ideological libertarians only use crypto when they're doing something sketchy or illegal, otherwise conventional banking is the easier option with far more guarantees for standard transactions.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
rising anti-semitism on the right.
Anti-semitisim has historically come from the right, but is it "rising" still, especially compared to what's going on in the left?
Also, what exactly has Elon Musk done that's so anti-semitic?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I remember reading this a few months ago. Yeah, he makes a pretty compelling case.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
With Dems increasingly opposed to Israel, this makes me wonder if we'll see a broader realignment of American Jews towards the Republican party. Most are currently overwhelmingly leftist, although Orthodox Jews (a small minority) are conservative.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
It's positive-sum in terms of material resources, which is what I was responding to given the OP's message.
I agree that not everyone shares the same system of values, with some diverging or even outright conflicting. For some, like Nazism, military conflict is required, but that does not necessitate "elimination of large masses of populations". Just some humiliation for the Holocaust and other crimes. For most others, persuasion will suffice. Communism was defeated simply by capitalism existing as a viable and better-seeming alternative. The great thing about democracy and the modern world order is that it heavily emphasizes persuasion as opposed to force of arms to solve ideological disputes. I'd prefer to keep it that way.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
let's assume there's a Dyson sphere around the sun. Where to from there? That's it, that the ceiling. Would you rather share the energy with a hundred billion others, or a hundred thousand?
Humanity is thousands if not millions of years away from achieving Dyson Sphere tier technology. Your argument here is the equivalent of saying we should ignore life-extending medicine due to the eventual heat death of the universe. Maybe at some point in the distant future that will become relevant, but for now it's unabashedly a good thing, just as it has been for the entirety of human history. And who knows, maybe at that point in the distant future we'll be able to pull energy and matter from nothing.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I believe there are malicious, intelligent, competent agents which plan for humiliation and elimination of large masses of populations, because, respectively, social status is zero-sum and material resources are finite.
This is a silly position to hold. The world is positive-sum given that scientific advances in productivity combined with returns-to-scale have allowed us to make humanity richer than ever before. I presume you are right-wing but this horseshoes pretty well with the leftist idea that European civilizations only got rich by plundering brown countries, and that whites will forever be tainted by this until reparations enforces equity upon all nations (and perhaps not even then). It's utter tripe.
This gets at the heart of it. It's not that it's unusual to rate people by attractiveness, as everyone does that implicitly if not outright explicitly. But people still don't like that it occurs, and some people will be rated lower which when combined with humanity's natural "MUST PROTECT WOMEN" impulse creates situations like this, where an entire country explodes at the very normal behavior of some random adolescent boys.
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