drmanhattan16
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User ID: 640
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Well was the meaning carried across in the OP post?
The OP clearly defined how they use barbarian, and I'm fine dealing with idiosyncratic definitions to engage with a post if I wish. It's this justification for why it's necessary to make the idiosyncrasy obvious that I reject.
Books, movies, video games seem to have reformed the "barbarian" label into a somewhat high-status designation; a "noble savage" archetype of sorts.
Certainly possible! But the way in which people use that word does not only reflect the new definition. While it's true you can find inoffensive definitions (DnD 4, to my recollection, lets players be Barbarians as a class, with greater emphasis on the martial prowess part and the spirituality), I do not think my social studies teacher in high school meant it in such a manner when he said the conservative world view was to see the world as divided between the civilized and the barbarians.
Put another way, if the word "barbarian" had come to mean "noble savage", then people who use it as an insult against IRL groups seem more interested in focusing on how ignoble those groups are. My father hates Muslims and I'm fairly certain he does not see anything noble in them when he calls them barbarians.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
I didn't ever mention progressives, but everybody knows who are the clowns, right?
When a Nazi talks about 108 countries in a vague manner, both sides are aware that it's a reference to the Jews. Likewise, "clown world" is largely a right-wing word used to condemn liberal/progressive/materialist things.
This usage is specific usage in context, and I explained the context and the intent.
And I am criticizing your justification. You do not get to handwave away the accuracy of that justification just because you don't want to talk about it.
I do not require your "charity" here - it's not "charity" to not call me a liar and attribute me something that is contrary to my explicitly expressed intent, it's just basic decency, and default expected behavior for which one gets no bonus points.
"Basic decency" is precisely to be charitable. It's the same thing.
I talk to them (us) every day, and what I usually find is that they (us) are much less triggered by words - especially taken out of context - than the clown crowd.
You are telling me that you go around and tell those people that they are uncivilized savages who are culturally inferior and don't even speak a proper language, and they don't mind? I'll believe it when I see it.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
It's hardly a refutation if the meaning isn't carried across. Tell them that you mean they are uncivilized, inferior, primitive savages who only babble and don't speak a proper language. They may laugh it off because you are not part of their status hierarchy, but I doubt they'd be so eager to claim that description.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Were they really? As far as I know, Romans didn't have the racial hangups Americans do, and in general most empires were quite tolerant to who they include. That's kinda the point of the empire - to assimilate as much of the other people and territory, and it's easier to do if you don't have weird hangups about skin colors.
The use of race or ethnicity as the basis for the higher or highest classes of society was far more explicit in previous empires, that's my point. Telling me that it makes no sense doesn't change that, because people are not always rational.
So, after I explicitly told you I am not trying to insult, you are saying "no, I know better than you, you actually are!".
I offered you charity, actually. I'll repeat myself.
"You are free, of course, to idiosyncratically define "barbarian" as those who don't belong to the culture of the US (insofar as such a thing exists)."
See, here's the thing. I don't think you're lying about not intending insult. I don't think you're trying to "as a black man" me when you say that you are a "Barbarian-American". I'm more than willing to grant your use of the term as you want.
But where I draw a line is in trying to claim that the only reason someone could object to the use of "barbarian" to describe immigrants (illegal if you want that qualifier) is that they are some kind of social progressive. That's precisely the point of invoking "clown world", one is explicitly appealing to a nihilistic viewpoint that is often socially conservative to say the least. The word "barbarian" is understood by non-progressives as an insult, and that should be obvious in the way that people use it. No one appreciates being told, to their face, that they are a barbarian. If you doubt this, go and talk to any of the non-progressive immigrants you are talking about and call them that, see what happens.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Yes, it is possible that what kills the supposed Empire is its lower-class citizens. But the OP is explicitly about the "barbarians", hence why I'm talking about them. It's a common talking point amongst those who don't like immigrants and/or a "loose" immigration standard.
the benefits of supporting the Neoliberal Empire don’t really come to those outside of the elite circles of power
What counts as a benefit? There are many pieces of technology that drastically improve my QoL that I couldn't or wouldn't own if said empire didn't benefit. I'm about as tangential of an elite as you can get. A farmer may very well consider it a benefit to have an automated tractor that can't be made without an empire that doesn't even think about him.
The White working class doesn’t get much of anything from support for the NLE, nor do recent immigrants who get shunted into jobs that don’t pay well.
The latter part isn't true. They wouldn't come to work under an NLE if they didn't think it was worth it.
The outer providences don’t see much benefit. And I’d class most of these as barbarians.
Spoken like a true Blue Tribe heretic! You retain mostly the same definitions of who is or is not a barbarian, you just tweak them a bit!
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
(Side note: since we live in the clown world, I feel compelled to add a disclaimer that the word "barbarian" is used in purely descriptive, not pejorative, meaning - as "somebody who is not part of the imperial culture" - and, in fact, for the purposes of this definition, I am a barbarian myself and many of my friends are Barbarian-Americans)
It has nothing to do with "clown world", you are straight up analogizing the US to older empires that were far more explicitly formulated on a racial or ethnic basis, likewise analogizing illegal immigrants as less-civilized. You are free, of course, to idiosyncratically define "barbarian" as those who don't belong to the culture of the US (insofar as such a thing exists). But let's not pretend that this is some "clown world" shit, and that everyone in a "saner" world would understand that you weren't trying to insult those who are the "barbarians" here. It was an insult long before the advent of the "clown world".
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Your post is a bit on the snarky and sarcastic side, but I do see the point a little bit. If we're keeping a little perspective, this is still just an internet forum we're talking about.
It's not just that. It's the fact that people here act so blindly hateful some times that they will celebrate literally anything if you frame it as hurting the "Blue tribe". Doesn't matter how far you go to the right, it's all about hurting the left.
We call that waging the culture war, and the reason I call it out here is because we're supposed to be above that fucking shit. What the fuck is the point of having a platform where people are supposed to set aside their biases if people get upvotes for doing the exact opposite?
Goddamn, this place prides itself as having better discussion norms for freer debate, and yet the number one thing I see here are a bunch of slaves parroting the same talking points every single time. You point to the existence of /r/SPS, but I literally hate their kind as well! The difference is that I never expected any better from their kind.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Does it grant that premise?
Yeah, the logic seems backwards. "Gender-affirming care" does not make anti-hair loss or other such interventions supportive of malleable gender, those who want to push that view of gender decided to start calling things that cis people do to feel better about themselves "gender-affirming".
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Are they only a problem if they actually get some sort of power, or cause some sort of harm? Or are they a problem for simply expressing that they want to cause harm? Is that what they're even expressing?
What else are they going to do? For all that it is considered legitimate, never forget that democratic violence via law is still violence. You can't send a nice letter to a non-white family telling them to evacuate the premises without the law being willing to beat them into submission literally.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Why are there so few modern surveys of what IQ researchers think? I was reading a comment on Reddit the other day which was citing surveys from the 1990s.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
That's my understanding, yeah. Supposedly, Huffman is in Cali (which is a 2-party consent state), but the Apollo dev is in Canada which is 1-party.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
But attributing it to ignorance gives it too much credit and is pretty uncharitable in its own right.
Ignorance isn't exactly the word I'd use either, I think you're right that it paints too rosy a picture. I think progressives, like all groups, are guilty of having Crystalized Metaphysical Heuristics, and they aren't completely unaware of what they do, but they are only as good as any other human group at updating beliefs. It's made worse by the fact that they don't optimize for truth for its own sake.
"Some progressive hate white people" -> "other progressives provide cover for, tolerance for, ignore, and generally let such bigotry spread; their beliefs cause them to be indifferent to such complaints" -> "to an outsider, there is little discernable difference between progressives that do or do not hate white people because the results are likely similar."
I concur! But I think it can and should inform the response when engaging in intertribal dialogue. "Progressives hate white people" gets no traction, "progressives are indifferent to white people, and indifference is an insidious thing" has a chance to go somewhere.
(but the opposite equivalent wouldn't be, a la the fiasco last month with Impassionata- I strongly doubt the mods would've tolerated a right-wing rant half as long), etc etc.
There was a rant only a few months ago in which the poster effectively called the concept of privilege, but more importantly its public practictioners, idiots. It's not particularly "right-wing", but it's far more hostilely-written than one would except for a forum characterized as "for lefties who may have some issues with social justice". That person is not banned and the discussion went on for a while.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
The difference matters a great deal.
Firstly, it keeps our worst impulses in check. It is too easy for people to assume the worst of others and also generalize off of that assumption. So "some progressives hate white people" becomes "progressives hate white people".
If we're here to culture war, by all means, go ahead and engage in this kind of generalization. If we're not, then it's actively harmful to the effort.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Ah yes, how could I forget to celebrate bad things happening to people who disagree with me? Truly, not a sign that every slight lives rent-free in my head.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
I misspoke, but my general point is that there's probably not a disparate impact on the political makeup of either the users or mods.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
The pushshift thing is a fight over automated moderation tools, apparently they'll break without API access or something and the concept of paying to moderate is too far for even reddit jannies.
Partly that, partly that pushshift also enables dataset creation (it was literally made for that purpose). You can very easily download comments in bulk, and Reddit may have deemed it a financial boon if they are able to price that in their favor.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Reddit is not going to die even if the TPAs all go away. There's hardly a better platform for communities to gather in one place with easy discoverability of related communities. The people at AskHistorians have said that they constantly debate this and most don't like the idea of having to go to one site just for that. Reddit has inertia and network effects on its side.
July 1st will come and go, and I guarantee most of the big subs will remain right where they are, doing the same as they did before the change.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
According to the industry, Reddit's users are the least valuable of any social network. Some of that is attributable to the fact that the official Reddit app and New Reddit are designed for showing more ads and infinite scrolling. But people who use TPAs may sometimes use those because they dislike the focus on ads (the deceptiveness of hiding promoted posts is what really grinds my gears).
No one is saying that Reddit shouldn't try to stay in the black if it allows TPAs to exist. The complaint is the speed and absurd pricing of the new system.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
The problem is that the pricing is way beyond the cost of allowing TPAs. Here's the creator of Apollo explaining it:
As for the pricing, despite claims that it would be based in reality, it seems anything but. Less than 2 years ago they said they crossed $100M in quarterly revenue for the first time ever, if we assume despite the economic downturn that they've managed to do that every single quarter now, and for your best quarter, you've doubled it to $200M. Let's also be generous and go far, far above industry estimates and say you made another $50M in Reddit Premium subscriptions. That's $550M in revenue per year, let's say an even $600M. In 2019, they said they hit 430 million monthly active users, and to also be generous, let's say they haven't added a single active user since then (if we do revenue-per-user calculations, the more users, the less revenue each user would contribute). So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly. These own numbers they've given are also seemingly inline with industry estimates as well.
For Apollo, the average user uses 344 requests daily, or 10.6K monthly. With the proposed API pricing, the average user in Apollo would cost $2.50, which is is 20x higher than a generous estimate of what each users brings Reddit in revenue.
In other words, Reddit has to pay $0.12 per user per month, Apollo would be charged $2.50 per user per month.
The creator was willing to negotiate pricing, he believes like you do that Reddit should not sustain a loss with TPAs. But this is far beyond that in the opposite direction. What's worse is that the CEO of Reddit accused him of making a threat in a call, only to have the recording of that call be shown to have nothing of the sort in it. There are ways Reddit could have monetized more of itself, but this was greedy.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Nope, not at all. This change is uniformly impacting everyone, and there is no reason to think "powerjannies" are likely to leave and get replaced by people who are more sympathetic to the average person here.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
This change is neutral towards them. There is no biasing towards them because the fundamentals of moderating have not changed. The only possibility of it changing is if many of them en masse resign and are replaced by those of a different political alignment. I consider that to be unlikely.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Blackouts are dangerous in that Reddit holds total power over the subs themselves. They can just undo the blackout and throw out the mods and replace them with those who will keep it up.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
Will this hamper the power of jannies to continue to turn Reddit into a woke echochamber?
The fact that this is where the conversation always goes is telling.
This is a blanket change that affects a great many people of all political ideologies. You might as well ask if a planet colliding with the Earth is harmful to Globohomo.
drmanhattan16
2yr ago
There was always a charge for using Reddit's APIs above a certain rate. An individual toying around with a kiddie script was not going to hit it, but third-party apps (TPAs) like Apollo, RedditIsFun, and BaconReader have to pay for the number of API requests they're making. They're alternative ways to view Reddit and not owned by the company.
You have to understand, these apps are popular. People do not like the way the official Reddit app is built, as it promotes the infinite-scroll and hides ads as normal posts. There are also features in TPAs that are not present in the official app which make the experience better. An ad on RedditIsFun is not nearly as hidden, meaning you can avoid it. It also gives a better indication of how many "pages" you have scrolled, compared to the official experience.
In short, there are millions of users of these apps, many of whom do not like the official app for a variety of reasons.
Now, Reddit is coming down and saying that they will drastically increase the cost of using these apps to the owners. The creator of Apollo said he would be paying millions, and he can't afford that. Monetizing the app is always a risk as well, people are sufficiently turned away by even paying a penny. Apollo is notable for just how many mods use it, as it offers many features that making moderating easier.
This is just the outrage that got a lot of people upset en masse, the prior one was the Pushshift issue. Pushshift is an API that lets you search Reddit's comment and submission database. It was made for people to gather data via parameters (between dates, by a user, containing certain text, etc.) but is also very useful for mods to look up archived comments that were deleted by the user in case they need to take action. I can't stress enough just how valuable Pushshift is, it's the only way to search for comments with any reasonable power, Reddit's native search abilities don't let you do nearly as much.
Pushshift was taken down because they archived comments that were user-deleted and that was against Reddit's privacy terms. It will come back, but you have to be a mod of a subreddit now and you only get access to anything within the subreddit. No more doing broad searches as before.
This is a long-standing issue users and mods have had with Reddit - it is not responsive to their needs. They don't provide features people have been asking for for years, they remove or modify existing ones that people like, and increasingly made the end-user experience disrespectful.
The latest issue of increasing API charges is yet another thing that is entirely unnecessary, as Reddit in no way demonstrated that they were seriously being harmed by these TPAs or even by Pushshift. On the latter, it certainly didn't require taking the full thing down for everyone.
As for motive, people suspect that it's money. With the rise in demand for lots of data for training LLMs, Reddit has possibly realized that it can make a lot of money offering researchers the billions of comments people have made. In addition, there's the IPO coming up, and some speculate that this is an attempt to get more people seeing ads on the one official platform.
And that's great, but that's not how people use it when they trying to describe IRL people in a negative way.
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