TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
No bio...
User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
Yes. I wrote four paragraphs to explain my reasons.
I replied that your reasoning is a defacto state of eventually arbitrarily banning anyone who goes against the dominant ideology of this forum unless they adhere to a much stricter ruleset.
Someone with right-leaning views makes a borderline bad post --> nobody gets upset, so it scoots by just fine.
Someone with left-leaning views makes a borderline bad post --> right leaning posters are upset, snap back and get warned themselves --> left-leaning poster is seen as a troublemaker and is eventually banned for nebulous reasons.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
Is there a reason you're modding a post made by one of the few consistently left-leaning posters, while not modding posts like this? Arguably this post and this post are borderline too. If the issue with this post is that it's making a generalization of a group in a somewhat mean way, then there'd be plenty of posts the mods ought to come down on even in just the past few days. There's also WhiningCoil's post comparing nonwhites to "virulent invasive species" that's been sitting for over 24h without mod action, although you said up above that you weren't equipped to handle that one so OK I guess, as long as it eventually gets handled.
If the issue is that other people are getting triggered and snapping at him, they should be the ones to pay the price alone. Otherwise it's just an informal rule of "anyone who goes against the dominant ideology on this forum (i.e. leftists) gets banned eventually when people get mad at them". The 3 borderline posts I linked don't have this problem because they're going with the dominant ideology.
My personal opinion is that none of these should be warned/banned, except for maybe WhiningCoil's that's a little too egregious.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
Interesting, thanks for that.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
Thanks for sharing these.
Your first example is one of the few places where MAGA and Trump actually strongly disagree (Epstein stuff) so it's not a great example. Your second and fourth examples are a bit better but still generally places where MAGA disagrees with Trump, although its much weaker and they just go with the flow.
Your third example is a genuinely good example and is mildly shocking for me to see. You're anti Trump in a place where MAGA agrees with Trump -- MAGA generally likes authoritarianism, or at least thinks classical liberalism is for "cucks" or "losers" of the David French variety. It stands at +50 | -19 and reads like the same tone of voice that I could have posted. I'm not sure if it's a rare anomaly or if you know of some pattern where it won't be net downvoted or at least a lot closer to neutral.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4hr ago
Is there a way I can use that somehow? I'm a professional programmer, but I don't do a bunch of stuff in CSS...
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4hr ago
For one thing, they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience.
This is a pretty good analogy.
I write contra-MAGA opinions on here all the time, and they get upvoted more often than they get downvoted.
Care to share an example or two of this? My experience has been stuff like this conversation, where I said I doubted that Biden was pocketing bribes.
I've had contra-MAGA posts that go slightly positive if they're very high effort, but the difference between me posting that and say, posting an antifeminist piece is that the contra-MAGA post will be like +50 | -45, while the antifeminist piece will be +50 | -2 or something.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4hr ago
Some are evidently hardwired to care more than others.
Sure. I would have been right there with you thinking it was silly to care about downvotes if they didn't soft-censor your post like they do on Reddit. But then at least a portion of my views started diverging from the dominant thought paradigm on this forum, and the downvotes for well-researched posts started feeling pretty obnoxious.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5hr ago
If you don't want to be fixated on vote tallies, the site shouldn't have vote tallies thrown in your face on any post over 1d old.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5hr ago
Humans are basically hardwired to care about that sort of thing. For any average human, arguments between people are mostly just popularity contests, not truth-seeking exercises. Even though the Motte might be composed of people who are several standard deviations away from being "average" in that sense, it's still bothersome. If the downvotes happen on posts you also thought were not your greatest, that would be one thing, but having them happen only on posts with a particular type of political persuasion makes it start to seem like a BOO OUTGROUP button.
The WSJ has a new article (archive link) out detailing a certain incident where Trump was composing fanfic of himself and Jeffrey Epstein bonding over their shared secret interest in the same kinds of women, and then signing his name to it. This was sent as a gift for Epstein's 50th birthday.
“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began.
Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.
Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.
Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
Trump: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.
The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.
I personally don't think it's that bad, but I've been heavily radicalized against conspiracy theories over the past few years. I highly doubt Epstein was blackmailing huge swathes of wealthy/influential people with pedophilia. However, if I was given towards conspiratorial thinking this probably wouldn't be a great look for Trump.
EDIT: Trump has responded, and he's furious. It appears he desperately tried to have Rupert Murdoch crush the story, but that Murdoch apparently wasn't able to do so. Now he's promising to sue. Also, Hillary.
The Wall Street Journal, and Rupert Murdoch, personally, were warned directly by President Donald J. Trump that the supposed letter they printed by President Trump to Epstein was a FAKE and, if they print it, they will be sued. Mr. Murdoch stated that he would take care of it but, obviously, did not have the power to do so. The Editor of The Wall Street Journal, Emma Tucker, was told directly by Karoline Leavitt, and by President Trump, that the letter was a FAKE, but Emma Tucker didn’t want to hear that. Instead, they are going with a false, malicious, and defamatory story anyway. President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly. The Press has to learn to be truthful, and not rely on sources that probably don’t even exist. President Trump has already beaten George Stephanopoulos/ABC, 60 Minutes/CBS, and others, and looks forward to suing and holding accountable the once great Wall Street Journal. It has truly turned out to be a “Disgusting and Filthy Rag” and, writing defamatory lies like this, shows their desperation to remain relevant. If there were any truth at all on the Epstein Hoax, as it pertains to President Trump, this information would have been revealed by Comey, Brennan, Crooked Hillary, and other Radical Left Lunatics years ago. It certainly would not have sat in a file waiting for “TRUMP” to have won three Elections. This is yet another example of FAKE NEWS!
It also looks like he might cave and actually publicize it? I don't know if the grand jury stuff is all that people are interested in or what:
Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5hr ago
I also think having an upvote/downvote system on what's supposed to be a neutral discussion forum is just completely idiotic. Everyone just uses it as an "I agree" button for upvotes and "I disagree" for downvotes. This functionally means any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I've had plenty of people then use this as an excuse to claim the equivalent of "uhhh, can't you see you're getting a lot of downvotes!?! Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe this is because you're wrong and stupid!?!?!?!?" Pure heat, negligible light.
However, you can actually block yourself from seeing the score if you use Ublock Origin and add the following to your filter list:
www.themotte.org##button.m-0.p-0.nobackground.caction.btn
I consider this 100% essential if you want to use this site and ever substantially disagree with MAGA talking points.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
7hr ago
Here are my results from asking it the bordering states of Nebraska. Note that I ask this in a bit of a tricky way to check if the LLM is actually comprehending my question. Frontier models can almost always get it correct with the notable exception of the Wyoming test (they usually don't think a 'y' is a vowel in that word). But K2's performance is just pathetic, it's like 4o-mini levels of bad.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
10hr ago
People have often claimed that a wunderwaffe would soon massively shift the tide of the war, and they've been wrong every time in this conflict so far. Some like HIMARs have legitimately moved the needle, but it wasn't a revolution, just a needle-change that was soon adapted to (with some minor costs associated with the adaptation).
I haven't heard Perun talking about this much and he's been a pretty good barometer for the tempo of the war so far. He actually had a video out recently that went into the use of drones as anti-drone weapons, so I don't see why those couldn't be adapted to this.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
10hr ago
I'm not familiar with that anecdote. Is this article an accurate summary? If so, I don't see how that's really related to ambition. She couldn't forge her own path that much when she was the nominee because 1) Biden was fairly popular with Dems, and her campaign was all about not rocking the boat to hold the fractious coalition together, and 2) people wouldn't believe her anyways since she was the VP.
I don't get how here strategic choice on the campaign trail is reflective of her ambition.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
11hr ago
Harris was out there too, it was just on more "typical politician" stuff like holding speeches on the migrant crisis. Trump's administrations have both been anomalous in how much you heard about non-presidential actors, e.g. Jared Kushner was practically a household name in Trump 1 but almost nobody heard of Mike Donilon during Biden's term, despite the latter being almost certainly more important and influential than Kushner ever was (and Kushner was quite influential!).
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
13hr ago
Or, for that matter, whether a stronger VP might have pushed Biden to the curb years before. An ambitious, mildly evil VP, like a young LBJ or Bill Clinton, would have stuck a knife in Biden as soon as he looked weak.
If there's one criticism of Harris that's untrue, it would be that she's insufficiently ambitious. The VP just doesn't have a lot of formal power to do anything, and even leaks will get found out in a non-Trump administration if they're consistent. The VP is just utterly at the mercy of the head honcho, and this was doubly true in the uncertain times around Biden's dropout since plenty of people wanted to have a mini-primary.
I'm not impressed by K2 so far at all. I did a check with one of my usual questions, and it did horribly. It hallucinated that North Dakota borders Nebraska, and then claimed the vowels of North Dakota in order were o, h, a, and o. I'm also getting quite bad results on programming questions as well, things that the trio of frontier models (o3, Opus, and Gemini 2.5 pro) handle with relative ease. It's not even that cheap, only being on par with Gemini 2.5 flash in that regard.
I hear it's decent at creative writing, but that's sort of a wishy-washy benchmark. Maybe it will become the smut model of choice like R1 was for a while? That's... something at least?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14hr ago
Its annoying as hell to strike up a decent convo with a woman you find attractive, only to find out she doesn't do much aside from Netflix, Starbucks, Shopping at Target, and maybe Music Festivals or something, and is generally not in great financial shape to boot. Often times they advertise their mental illness diagnoses.
This struck a little too close to home for me.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14hr ago
Strong agree with this post.
Some young man sated by porn, twitch, games, TikTok whatever might still want a girlfriend, might still take one if she fell into his lap, but he is often still going to put less effort into looking for her than his father did at his age.
This is basically where I am in my life right now.
It's a combination of how good the expected rewards are, and how much effort would be required to attain it. I could probably get a wife if I expended an enormous amount of effort, but... why bother? I'm happy enough as it is, and living life as a single man in the modern world with all its comforts really isn't a bad deal at all. A highly-compatible girl could improve my life of course, but there are a bunch of very well known failure modes too. Not just divorce, but that kind of empty relationship where the man falls backwards into doing a greater share of the work and doesn't even really like his wife any more, but divorcing is too much of a hassle so he just stays where he's at. My dad fell into this hard.
If I were to put in a lot of effort into my life somewhere, going for a better job to earn more money would almost certainly have a far higher ROI for me.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14hr ago
There's a lot of stuff that could have been done with that money. I guess in a Keynesian sense that having that extra economic 'activity' is somehow better overall, maybe. But there's no doubt that we'd both be wealthier and have a better financial future.
This is a silly strawman of what economics says. Economic activity is only useful if people are getting something they want out of it, otherwise economists would advocate for going around breaking random windows to generate "economic activity" by repairing them.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14hr ago
Problem 1: God isn't real.
Problem 2: Many societies have done fine enough without God, like East Asia up until a few decades ago. They had watery "spirituality" like Shintoism's ancestor worship or Confucianism's philosophy, but those are very different from God.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15hr ago
There is a small but substantial fraction of Trump voters who are willing to break with him on foreign interventions and military support of foreign countries.
Strong disagree here. Foreign affairs consistently ranks as one of the issues voters are most likely to "trust their leaders" on, i.e. be sheep about. MAGA quite vehemently wanted no more interventions in the Middle East... until Trump started bombing Iran, then they switched to being more or less OK with it. He even threatened full regime change and the response from MAGA was lukewarm at worst. Much of MAGA was unequivocal in how much they wanted Trump to dump Ukraine and "not give another dollar to Zelenskyy", right up until Trump promised to arm Ukraine a few days ago, when most of MAGA flipped to saying it was OK due to the minerals deal (or something like that).
Likewise, voters DGAF about tariffs, but might be more concerned if they manifest as inflation later on.
Things like immigration and to some degree the Epstein files are less likely to evoke sheep-like responses from the right.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
15hr ago
I've started to read up on this whole Epstein thing, and your take in your first 3 paragraphs seems much more realistic than the crazy conspiracies. WAY too much of this whole affair is sourced from Virginia Giuffre, a serial accuser and known liar.
The question I have, though, is why Trump proceeded the way he did.
A mix of incompetence and disinterest. Trump only has an implicit, gut-feeling on his base which is good enough for him in most ways, but has limitations. That's why he messed up on H1-Bs in December, and it's why he messed up now. He probably didn't really think this whole Epstein thing was that important so he let his lieutenants (Bondi and Patel, among others) hype up promises they couldn't keep, and now its blown up in his face. He's trying to backpedal like a malfunctioning ChatGPT doing a slurry of outgroup hate that usually works -- mentioning the Steele Dossier, Hillary, Obama, Biden, Russia investigation, Comey, etc, etc. I don't think this will actually do much to dent the Trump coalition in the long term -- there will be a few defections and disillusionments, but not a critical mass since the human brain is quite adept at rationalizing away cognitive dissonance. However, it's sure been good pickings for hilarious blatant hypocrisy, e.g. example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, example 5.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
16hr ago
Good post. I agree way too many people take their wishy-washy vibes, put them on a chart and then zoom off to infinity.
I'm glad we can agree this is what's happening. I wish this was universal knowledge here.
Is MAGA really that concrete of a group? I always understood it to be fairly amorphous -- I doubt many people would unironically identify with such a label on this forum, yet I know plenty of people here are effectively in it by the points they argue.
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