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1 follower   follows 4 users   joined 2022 September 05 08:05:16 UTC

					

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User ID: 502

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The xkcd Free Speech comic [1] from April 2014 was very influential and memetic - as much so as any Stonetonss comic - on Reddit and Reddit-adjacent parts of the internet back when those websites were much more pro-free-speech than they are today.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1357/

To me, 'psyop' has the connotation of an organised plot, rather than a largely benign corollary of the day-to-day workings of nation states.

Yeah and I think it's a shortcoming of the site. It sometimes feels like you can say anything you like so long as you avoid pithiness at all costs and use enough rationalist jargon.

A glass of water for every drink, and then a few more at the end before you go to bed. As much time as possible (ideally at least an hour) between stopping drinking and going to bed. Isotonic drink first thing when you wake up and then try and sleep off the worst of it.

It would have been much more prudent for him to step aside and let his more popular and less likely to die in the next 10 years son William take the throne.

The key argument in favour of monarchy remaining as part of the British constitutional architecture is that it abides by a fixed set of rules that are so old as to almost transcend human influence. Of course, this isn't actually true, but the impression that it is true needs to be safeguarded if the monarchy is to keep its credibility. Popular or unpopular, wise or foolish, bright or dull, handsome or ugly - it matters not; the King becomes the King by the ancient system of hereditary transfer upon death of the previous monarch. It's true that such things have happened before, but public support for the monarchy is no longer as unanimous as it was at the time of Edward VIII, and I doubt people would tolerate such happenings again. I can imagine many people thinking: "if they're not going to do it properly and play by the rules of monarchy, what's the point of having them at all?".

No doubt to many people these events will serve as further proof of the failure of Britain to integrate South Asians, yet if anything the reactions I've seen to them have bolstered rather than eroded my faith in multiculturalism. It's quite clear that many Leicester residents, both Hindu and Muslim, have strongly condemned the disorder and violence. Many are self-evidently proud of their city, and proud to be British Asians. They appear to deeply resent the fact that due to the actions of a proportionally small number of miscreants, very many of whom seem to be neither Leicestrian nor British, a negative light is being cast on their communities—for they understand that when it comes to brown people, many white Britons are not inclined to draw distinction between local and foreigner.

For those proud Britons, born and bred here, who have always struggled for acceptance because of their ethnicity, their religion, and the colour of their skin—I feel profound sympathy. When an Old Firm derby descends into carnage it is viewed with nothing more than muted disapproval, but when sectarianism involves South Asians it is framed as tribal warfare. Let me be perfectly clear: I wish that the offenders be dealt with—yet I hope also that all those here who consider themselves to have a more clear-eyed understanding of masculinity than the progressive orthodoxy can recognise that the anger of listless young men who seek a flag to rally around is a trait shared by every swathe of humanity that lives under modernity.

† A proposal for reconcilliation in Leicester: a flag with three coloured stripes, one orange representing Hindus, one green representing Muslims, and one white in the middle representing lasting peace. Stop me if you've heard this one before...

I believe she is fundamentally correct that we have robbed society of their identity and tried to replace it with whatever pronouns are.

Pronouns are words that serve as stand-ins within a sentence for nouns, including the names of people and things.

You should be more precise here. Have we robbed the individual members of society of their individual identities? Have we robbed the individual members of society of some shared collective identity? Or have we robbed society, considered as a gestalt, of its identity, separate from the identities of its members?

The consumer stuff gets a little silly but whatever it sounds good. Need to have an enemy your fighting against.

I'm surprised that you consider modern society to be rootless but don't see this as downstream of consumerist ideology. This is something that is widely agreed upon in anti-neoliberal circles on both the left and the right. I think that you've actually misunderstood Meloni's argument - you think she positions herself as opposed to the nebulous enemy 'pronouns', as you yourself have. In fact, she positions herself as opposed to the globalising and commodifying trends in modern capitalism and views pronouns as being simply detritus strewn in the wake of these forces. Her vision is of a reactionary and illiberal opposition to neoliberalism; I would favour a more socialist and egalitarian approach - but in any case, we would find common ground in the idea that global capitalism makes homogenised consumers of us all. You say it yourself - empty people. Consider that this may be a direct consequence of the consumption patterns that we are subjected to.

there's only so much we can do to foster that

I would like to see a higher standard of charitability for criticisms of progressive leftism. I would like all posts criticising progressivism to be required to start from the sincere premise that the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place, and for any subsequent argumentation that rejects this idea to be required to explicitly demonstrate it. Far too many posts here are along the lines of 'as we all know, the woke progressive left are trying to force their ideology down our throats and the throats of our children to achieve cultural hegemony, and here's the new way that they're doing it'.

I make this request in the interests of the medium-to-long-term ability of this website to live up to its stated raison d'être. I definitely don't consider myself woke, but I'm not a reactionary either, and my most common response to reading Motte threads is a vague mix of annoyance at the monotonality of the know-it-all-white-stem-guy vibe and a creeping suspicion that most of the posts I'm reading are by fascists hiding their power level. Please forgive the lack of charity in this admission: I share it only to demonstrate that if this is my response to reading these threads, as a know-it-all-white-stem-guy with the habitual chan-browser's acquired tolerance for edgy politics, I worry that most visitors here would be far more strongly repulsed.

As much as it winds me up, some of the best long-form effortposting I've ever read on the internet has been on The Motte and I would be sad to see that end. Any moderator who cares to check can see that I have made source code contributions to the site, so I hope readers of this post do not assume I don't have its best interests in mind. I would appreciate any responses from anyone else who has had a similar experience to me, or (for that matter) from anyone who feels I am misrepresenting things.

Let's be clear here: pocket knives are legal to carry in the UK, at any time, without any specific reason. I carry one myself, for such varied uses as cutting sticks for cricket stumps and opening mayo packets at Weatherspoons. The catch is that such knives must be no longer than three inches and must not lock. For day-to-day usage, this is perfectly sufficient, and if you need anything more heavy-duty it's likely that you're camping or otherwise obviously engaged in outdoorsmanship, which is a problem that solves itself since such activities would count as a valid justification were you to be stopped by a policeman.

I'm not sure how I feel about the UK's knife laws personally, but they do often get misrepresented, and their nuance is not often fully considered.

A virus that predominantly kills people who are five pension cheques from the grave hardly seems worth the effort to me.

I think the null hypothesis for all discussions relating to media preferences should be stated explicitly: you form your media taste when young from a variety of sources (included but not limited to critics), and then retain them for the rest of your life, slowly become more-and-more alienated by contemporary media and criticism. It's not your fault, it's not their fault, it's just the natural way of things.

This is a fair point. Let me amend my grievance: many posts here take it as a given that progressives are intent on enforcing their worldview not on altruistic grounds of morality, but rather out of a self-serving desire to further their own prospects and those of their in-group, composited with a wanton and nihilistic urge to destroy tradition and structure.

One thing that occurs to me is anti-GMO / anti-vaccine discussion, which has historically been equally if not more left-coded than right-coded, however is extremely taboo outside of quite fringe subreddits.

I really think that coal-mining chapter is one of the finest pieces of journalism there is. It's one of those texts I wish that everyone would read.

active media psyop

It's called diplomacy and it's ten-thousand years old.

Germany and America not making a public display out of their misgivings for each other is quintessential diplomacy.

You shouldn't feel bad about not caring much about the politics of a country on the other side of the world from you, and whose political system you don't understand. But you would do well to not embarrass yourself by publically rolling around in your own ignorance.

And Bill Clinton was forced to adopt Reagan’s Neoliberalism which is now considered a leftist politicial philosophy.

The fact that it is the predominant economic paradigm in America, with the consequence that it has many adherents within the Democratic party, does not make trickle-down neoliberalism a 'leftist political philosophy'. You would be laughed out of every economics faculty in existence if you claimed such a thing.

This is really bugging me and I think someone here will know: I'm trying to find an article, I think written by one of the Scotts, which mentioned the existence of an obscure monk who invented the concept of algorithmic runtime complexity in the 1900s and was completely ignored for being way too far ahead of his time. Can anyone link me to it?

On the radio last night they mentioned she had a distinctively Roman accent. Is Rome perceived as a southern or northern city, or is it indeed viewed as its own distinct thing? If the latter, could this aid her efforts to be a unifying figure?

Yeah, it's the part of the law I have the most problem with. I've nearly done myself serious damage a couple of times (ab)using non-locking knives.

I don't think GMO is bad, but I think there are some principled reasons to be opposed to it. You know how tomatoes are worse than they used to be because they optimised for redness? I feel like GMO makes that sort of trap easier to fall into.

I didn't want to make a separate thread for this, so I'll leave it as a comment: I think we have a serious issue with diversity of opinion. This was already pretty bad on Reddit, but there seems to have been a step change for the worse in the few days this new site has been up. I'm not against people sharing reactionary or anti-woke points of view but when there's nothing to counterbalance them it feels less like a forum for debate and more like the world's highest effort Daily Mail comments section. I foresee this being an increasing issue, since now the Motte is moored in the digital equivalent of international waters, there is a far lower chance that progressive voices will chance upon the community by accident. Moreover, lack of diverse perspectives induces a harmful feedback cycle, since if someone sees at least some representation of their viewpoints they are more likely to pitch in, while if they just see a load of right-wingers competing to be the most critical of 'wokeism', in all likelihood, they will leave as quickly as they entered.

I accept that I'm not the first to raise this point (I believe this was a motivating factor for the removal of the bare-links repository) but since this isn't a problem that looks likely to solve itself I feel obliged to raise it again in the hope that we can work towards a solution.

Terminal contrarianism.

Interesting post, much of this mirrors my thinking in the last few days. The members of this grim little cabal are rationalists in the first degree, each one of them a type specimen. And though they claimed to be effective altruists - and would have been proudly lauded as such up until two weeks ago - it turns out they're degenerate gamblers and crooks whose amoral recklessness has hurt millions of people. It is statistically nearly certain that some victims of FTX will kill themselves, if they haven't done so already.

You can't delegate morality to mathematics. All it leads to is arrogance, and the 'freedom' to always be able to justify your own behaviour to yourself, even when your actions are those of a base criminal. Rationalism is not a wholly failed project; effective altruism is an important and useful dogma - but these ideas must be alloyed with traditional morality to be effective at inducing virtue.