drmanhattan16
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User ID: 640
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Twitter Files 8
Lee Fang is joining the fight. Link
This one is very much disconnected from the rest of the TF releases, and consequently more interesting. Fang argues the following.
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Despite publicly declaring they combat state-backed information ops, Twitter has worked with the US military to help its ops for years.
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As early as 2017, CENTCOM (US Central Command) was sending Twitter lists of accounts they use to "push certain messages" and asking for them to be whitelisted (and verified in one case). The Pentagon also wanted help in doing better at these campaigns (like how to not accidentally reveal related accounts and what not).
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These accounts were typically writing in Russian and Arabic, promoting pro-US messaging like accusing Iran of organ harvesting against Afghanis, or flooding Iraq with crystal meth.
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Twitter was lauded for its efforts to combat these information ops, but had been actively complicit in helping them and knew what they were being used for.
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Twitter worked with journalists closely and was quite happy when reporting on these campaigns focused on the Pentagon instead of Twitter.
This release is much shorter, but damn, this is exciting! I feel like this is the kind of bombshell expected of all releases, but I've definitely noticed engagement going steadily down with each release (2 days and the first tweet in this chain doesn't even have 100k likes).
Anyways, this seems like a much more open-and-shut case. I don't know what you could say that wouldn't indict Twitter. Even if the messaging wasn't explicitly known to Twitter, they could not be so credulous as to imagine the Pentagon wasn't trying to push pro-US messaging via fake accounts and what not. That said, a few details seem weak. In particular, I'm not sure which reporting Fang is referring to when he says that Twitter was lauded for its efforts in removing those types of accounts.
I also read the emails posted as pictures, I don't see them "congratulating" each other, just acknowledging that the WaPo won't focus on them in its article. I think the article in question is this one. Anyone know of a case of the media lauding Twitter/Facebook for this?
There's also an interesting report from the Stanford Internet Observatory which digs into how these accounts were generated and what they were doing. Most of these apparently didn't get very much interaction
The vast majority of posts and tweets we reviewed received no more than a handful of likes or retweets, and only 19% of the covert assets we identified had more than 1,000 followers. The average tweet received 0.49 likes and 0.02 retweets. Tellingly, the two most-followed assets in the data provided by Twitter were overt accounts that publicly declared a connection to the U.S. military.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Twitter Files 10
Another thread, another author writing for the Twitter Files. Link
David Zweig writes the following.
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Twitter and other important internet platforms (Google, Facebook, etc.) were in meetings with the Trump WH since the start of the pandemic to help combat misinformation. The Trump WH was concerned with 5G conspiracies, "runs on grocery stores", and "panic buying".
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The Biden WH on the other hand was concerned about Covid. They wanted high-profile anti-vaxx accounts taken offline, noting people like Alex Berenson. The justification was that Covid misinformation was killing lots of people.
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Twitter did not immediately capitulate, they were internally hesitant and debating as to whether to suppress people spouting arguments that went against government positions on the topic. But this does not mean that they didn't suppress people.
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Twitter's moderation, as you might expect, consists of machine-learning bots at the first layer, then contracted moderators from the Phillipines, and lastly review by "higher level employees" (implied American, or familiar with the culture).
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Twitter took the establishment position on Covid, sure, but this went far beyond just applying the "misinformation" tag to people saying vaccines don't work or that Covid is a hoax. It went as far as slapping that label on anyone saying anything that contradicted the mainstream CDC position on anything Covid-related or Covid-narrative-related. In most cases, the same message was seen ("Misleading: Learn why health officials recommend the vaccine for most people") and could no longer be interacted with. Some examples:
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Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, argued that not everyone needed to take a vaccine, and that it was good for old people and their caretakers, but children and people with natural immunity were fine.
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@KellyKGA cited CDC statistics to argue that Covid was not the leading cause of child deaths from disease.
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@_euzebiusz_ cited a study which argued that mRNA vaccines were associated with cardiac arrests.
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I have to say, if there was ever a case that reeked of TDS to me, it would be Jim Baker complaining and asking why Donald Trump saying "Don't be afraid of Covid" wasn't a violation of the company's Covid policies, to which Yoel Roth reminded him that it was a "broad, optimistic statement". Or maybe Baker just had a day of Covid-brain, who knows?
In any case, I'm really annoyed that Zweig doesn't talk at all about the Trump WH and what Twitter did or did not do during that time, or about any other requests the Biden WH might have made. Yeah, it's Covid and all that, but are you seriously telling me the Biden WH didn't ask about other topics? At least tell us if so. Tell us about how many requests were made, percentages of fulfilled requests, etc. You could very much do that here and make a stronger, more principled point.
As for what was said, I don't really think it's new. Even if you didn't have the Twitter Files, you could look at the cases that are given as examples and come to the same conclusion - Twitter was suppressing anything that was against establishment narratives on Covid.
P.S: whoever got him his evidence/screenshots should be fired, who uses Twitter even semi-professionally and posts pictures of a computer monitor instead of screenshots?
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Twitter Files 9
Wake up babe, time for your 3 a.m. Twitter Files dump: Link
Matt Taibbi wrote this one, arguing the following.
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The FBI has finally made a statement about their activities, denouncing the leaks and implying people like Taibbi and others are conspiracy theorists trying to make them look bad. Taibbi responds to this by saying he's got no problem going after other agencies as well.
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Turns out that other US government orgs were involved in discussing misinformation with Twitter. The DOD and OGAs (other governmental agencies) were frequently in touch and in meetings with the same set of tech companies we think of: Microsoft, Verizon, Facebook, etc.
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Of note was the role played by the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a task force about fighting the interventions of others into US politics and discourse. There were countless people from other agencies in these meetings as well.
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These people, through the FITF and FBI, were sending hundreds of reports of problematic accounts. Requests were always framed around the idea that the account had violated Twitter's policies. Twitter was aware the FBI had people literally trawling the site for policy violations. They were very thorough - it didn't matter how impactful a piece of media or a post might be, it would be reported no matter what.
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Twitter felt a bit overwhelmed by how many requests they got, with one employee complaining about the backlog they had of these requests.
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Given the sheer scale of requests, there were some number (not clear how many) of requests where Twitter internally said "there's no proof on this".
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There's quite a few accounts seemingly forwarded to Twitter on the basis of being pro-Russia, pro-Maduro, pro-Cuba.
This release seems to confirm something that I had feared from the get-go, namely that the government could apply pressure on Twitter to be more responsive if it demanded certain accounts get taken down. It was not my initial concern upon reading the Intercept article about the DHS, as I felt we were a few steps removed from this point, but it seems I was mistaken in a bad way.
Anyways, I'm honestly just getting annoyed now, because I want to write a full post on the Twitter Files and what they do or don't say, but I can't as long as they keep publishing new pieces. The end of this one suggests we're going to get more. Engagement with these on Twitter is way down, suggesting people are getting burned out or just fading away as they assign the Twitter Files a place in their mind and move on with their lives.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
I'd like to hear from other progressive people what the steelman version of this is.
You're not going to get that here, the number of progressives is countable on one hand.
In any case, the words are largely empty. Talking about a place being too white is similar to doing some kind of land acknowledgment - a perfunctory thing that, after all this time, has no bearing on how they actually act. It's just another phrase you throw around without considering what it actually implies.
drmanhattan16
5mo ago
And for me the essay wasn't even fun to read, it has a lot of Curtis Yarvin-esque beating around the bush.
I'm not sure how much beating around the bush you can get when you say things like "You still have 42 million feral blacks milling around."
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
An excellent argument in favor of seeing biodeterminism in Harry Potter. However, I would argue that you're reading too much into why she's getting attacked now by progressives.
The answer, as far as I can tell, really does have to do with the trans question. People called out the supposed Jewishness of the goblins years before, but it fizzled because people didn't care. Now, they hate Rowling for not being trans-positive by their standards, so they just throw all possible arguments out there. Standard arguments-as-soldiers by people doing some culture-warring.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Twitter Files 7
Another Twitter Files post: Link
Michael Shellenberger writes this one, arguing that the FBI worked hard to prime social media platforms into thinking a hacked release would come out prior to the 2020 election. He writes the following.
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The FBI's regular meetings with people like Yoel Roth were characterized by the latter as telling him that state actors might try a "hack and leak" operation prior to the election.
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The FBI was aware that there wasn't anything to go by on this claim, as Special Agent Elvis Chan testified.
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Twitter found no evidence of significant Russian/foreign interference on the platform, and Roth repeatedly informed Chan/the FBI on multiple occasions about this.
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Twitter repeatedly resisted efforts by the FBI to get data outside the normal search warrant process and was aware that the FBI was trying to probe a lot.
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The FBI eventually got temporary clearances to share top-secret info with Twitter executives regarding APT28, a Russian hacking organization. Roth described himself as being "primed primed to think about the Russian hacking group APT28 before news of the Hunter Biden laptop came out."
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Former FBI employees were so numerous at Twitter that they had their own internal slack channels.
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In September 2020, Roth and others partook of a tabletop exercise to simulate a "hack and dump" operation regarding the Biden campaign. The goal was apparently to "shape" how the media would respond.
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When the Hunter Biden leak finally happened, Roth would argue that it appeared more like a subtle leak, since nothing appeared in clear violation of the rules. Jim Baker would respond that it seemed hacked, so Twitter was reasonable in suppressing it until more information came out. But this is nearly impossible, since the FBI's subpoena for the laptop was attached to the NYPost article.
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Roth appeared to buy this story now, and in an email said that it was likely that hacked materials were uploaded to the laptop and given to the shop.
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There is a pattern of the FBI trying to warn elected officials with a goal of leaking to the news. They did this with Senators Grassley and Johnson, who were investigating and believed that it compromised their credibility. Jim Baker was apparently investigated twice for leaking information (in 2017 and 2019).
As a reminder, the above is what he's arguing, not what I think is necessarily true.
From what I can see, it appears the FBI was very insistent upon the possibility of a 2016 DNC-style hack. I don't think this is necessarily unreasonable until the election is settled - that the hack didn't happen doesn't mean you could conclude it wouldn't were you in the months leading up to the election.
Far more damning is the attempts at getting Twitter's information outside the normal search warrant process. Twitter and its staff are vindicated in this regard, they appear to not have given in to the FBI's requests in 2020. A caveat to this, however, is that we don't necessarily know why they shut off this access in the first place, and how long it was open before that.
A secondary objection of mine is the blurring of public and private boundary with how intelligence officials and agencies were coordinating with and sharing classified information with these companies in an effort to get them on-board with doing work for the FBI. It's difficult to articulate what I precisely find problematic here. The closest I could come to explaining my feelings here is that I don't want these people to ever be more than formal acquaintances because it ends up reducing the chance of them acting as independent stations of power.
drmanhattan16
6mo ago
The reason for losing that support has nothing to do with being pro/anti-Jew. It has to do with the viral videos of Hamas actively massacring civilians who were not threats to them in any way. Right now, the world is entirely aware of what Hamas is doing. That very much sticks in people's minds when they see a person endorse Hamas. The fact that you jumped straight to "Jews are at the top of the progressive totem pole" is insane.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
I was actually just reading Brett Devereux's posts on how pre-railroad armies managed logistics, and he made the point repeatedly that there were many cases where peasants starved to death because foraging armies would steal literally everything they could, especially if they were enemies who might even plan on ruling the land. I honestly recommend people read his world-building series to get an understanding of just how much media about medieval times and their wars is straight up anachronistic and hides the brutal reality of pre-railroad wars.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
If you're going to argue something outside the mainstream, you're going to have to do the work in explaining yourself. None of the "It's IQ" comments are doing that, even the ones that were removed. They're simply attributing the entire reason to IQ and leaving it at that, as if you can reduce all of SSA's failure to develop strictly on their national IQs.
Even if that were the case, you'd have to do a great deal more to explain that position. The comment about institutions cited multiple published books by respected researchers to illustrate its case.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Twitter Files 12 and 13
My apologies for not posting about these earlier. So I thought I'd wrap both new releases up in one post.
12: Link
13: Link
12 is by Taibbi and tied deeply to release 11. He writes the following.
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Twitter was flooded by requests from US intelligence agencies in 2020, to the point they couldn't keep clear who was sending what and what was supposed to be acted upon.
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A new entrant, the Global Engagement Center (part of the State Dept.) was also trying to get into these discussions and calls between social media platforms and intelligence agencies.
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This, however, was not taken well. Yoel Roth defended the work with the DHS and FBI, seeing them as trustworthy, but Twitter's officials were hesitant to let the GEC enter the conversation (there is an emphasis on this being retroactive, the GEC is said to be trying to get in as if they had always been there) and the reason might have to do with Twitter's perception of GEC as "Trumpy".
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Call it turf wars, call it the Deep State, but the end result was that the FBI advocated for and ultimately won the right to be one of two pipelines to Twitter along with the DHS - all others would only be on the industry calls.
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There's also more about the strategy being used by researchers and intelligence agencies (including the GEC) where they went public before consulting with Twitter over any list of provided accounts.
13 is by Alex Berenson. This one is super short and just covers how weak Scott Gottlieb's requests to get some Covid-related accounts suspended were. Gottlieb is one of Pfizer's board members, and Alex very much accuses him of being financially motivated in requesting that certain tweets and accounts get removed, including Berenson's own.
Overall, 12 was more substantial and engaging, though mostly a repeat of 11. 13 was a bit newer, but I'm not quite sure if I trust Berenson's summarization of the medical research being that natural immunity is better than vaccination.
drmanhattan16
5mo ago
Nyberg appears to be some small-time individual who got 15 minutes of fame and has moved on to doing whatever she does now. Her twitter feed is mostly about plugging her own stream/Patreon, quote-tweeting some lesbian novel bot, and talking about trans politics from a clearly pro-trans perspective (and I mean in the normie online progressive way). Of this, most tweets don't even seem to break a hundred likes.
In fact, this whole damn thing seems fairly confined to people whose only power is on the niche pieces of the internet they occupy. The most egregious is arguably RationalWiki, but that site isn't some powerhouse or progressive mainstay. David Gerard's power on that site might be vast, but it's fundamentally limited.
"This story is small-time" wouldn't be a problem necessarily, even a murder in a small town matters. But it's worth considering that when you search up Nyberg on Google, you get her twitter, a LinkedIn profile, and then a Medium piece which clearly comes down on the side that Sarah is an actual pedophile. DuckDuckGo straight up links to the "Why you shouldn't stand with Sarah Nyberg" piece at number 1.
So I don't really think it's obvious that Nyberg and the anti-GamerGaters got what they want. The anti-Nyberg pieces are still up and coming up in top results.
drmanhattan16
10mo 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.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Twitter Files 11
Matt Taibbi writes the following.
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Twitter was initially unconcerned about reports of Russian state-sponsored activity on its platform (think 2016 election-related stuff), the higher ups thought the problem was basically for Facebook to handle.
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However, in September 2017, they informed the Senate that they had suspended only 22 possible accounts as Russian after a manual review of 2700.
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This was intensely angering to Mark Warner, the leading Democrat on the Intelligence Committee at the time, who blasted Twitter publicly for being so inadequate in their efforts.
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Twitter's higher ups were of the belief that this a political stunt by Warner to keep pressure on them hard. In an email to Jack Dorsey, one person wrote that the critics were "taking cues from Hillary Clinton". It is worth reminding that Clinton published a book following her loss in which she blamed FB and other social media platforms for not doing more against alleged Russian state propaganda against her.
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Twitter formed a Russia Task Force to deal with their bad PR, starting off by simply doing data sharing with Facebook. They could not find any evidence of Russian activity. In one report, they noted that there was no coordinated activity, with accounts spending in patterns that were akin to lone-wolves. Twitter used a variety of ML models to try and find suspicious accounts, but they always came up with a very small list of possible suspects.
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Researchers were quick to publicly condemn Twitter. Some created flawed reports via the Twitter API, and Johns Hopkins professor Thomas Rid accused Twitter of being "the perfect platform that Twitter could build if they were FSB contractors".
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This naturally amounted to the possibility of laws enacted to control social media advertising, something Twitter was keenly aware of and tracking. Twitter was willing to remove Russia Today and Sputnik from the website, but the Intelligence Committee (or someone on it) leaked the full 2700 account list, causing reporters from many publications to reach out for comment.
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Finally, Twitter gave up and allowed the USIC (US intelligence community) to declare what was or was not foreign state-backed activity, which would then be instantly removed.
More is promised to come, just like my death approaches ever closer with how delayed this shit is.
Anyways, this release is interesting for the look it provides into how Twitter perceived the reactions against its supposedly inadequate efforts. The bit about "taking cues from Clinton" will undoubtedly be blown up into more conspiratorial ranting by some, but assuming the email was correct, it speaks once more to "Russian interference" being a more dogmatic belief. Warner's refusal to believe that he could be wrong here is probably motivated by both personal belief and political alignment.
Oh, and there's also the bit about "reporters now know this model works". It's not clear to me what the evidence provided actually means, we only have Taibbi interpretation to go off. Assuming it's correct, he's arguing that reporters, government, and researchers are working together (perhaps not intentionally, but still) in a way that can get Twitter, or any company, to comply with their demands. I think that one is going make the rounds on anti-left circles many times.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Trump fans decry the "Deep State" for foiling him, but much of that was simply the obstructionism that was built into our system of government by design.
I think the people decrying the deep state were getting at the notion that Trump was put under an isolated demand for rigor, and that if he aligned with their ideology, they would not have been as obstructive. The essay about resisting Trump from inside his administration was notable for a reason, and it was a man who didn't even work directly for Trump, but for his DHS secretary.
drmanhattan16
6mo ago
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
I've long felt that people who talk this way of such things have never engaged with war closer than playing a Paradox game.
What does it say of our enlightened modern era that two and a half years of bloodthirsty war did more to bring about peace than the preceding 30-something years of talking and diplomacy and give-peace-a-chance rigmarole?
Very true, which is why I support the genocide of all landlords and capitalists because they stand in the way of the socialist utopia and would just keep trying to destroy it if we left them alive. In fact, I might even extend this to genociding all humans because they can't stop polluting the earth.
No one is denying that if you kill anyone who opposes you, you can stop fighting instead of continuing a protracted engagement that drains resources and willpower. What is denied is that this is a moral thing to do. Ending war is not inherently a moral good. To have it as a terminal value is the same mistake the pacifists make when they insist the West should voluntarily disarm or leave the Soviets/Russians alone.
In fact, if I was going to be more cynical, I would guess that for some people, any solution to a problem is better than having to keep hearing about it, as if the real sin is that they were asked to pay attention to something other than their own lives. Funny how this forum would reject that idea if it were leftists calling for a ban on anything that cast black people in a negative light because that is a way of fighting racism.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Wait, wait, wait, /r/politics is considered toxic? Isn't that place basically a left-wing-dominated subreddit? How does that figure?
drmanhattan16
5mo ago
I'm shocked that the most obvious explanation for why this fiction is so popular was missed - it's literally not something most people have experience with! Of course people are interested in stories about that which they know nothing about, because reality is mundane and you have to actively seek out the interesting things in what you are familiar with. Rare is the story that is interesting even while historically accurate, and even then, it's typically because the audience isn't familiar with such things. Shows like White Collar, movies like Avengers, books like Twilight or Hunger Games, etc. are pieces of fiction that the reader has no experience. Why wouldn't they be fascinated at how these could be imagined?
Secondly, look at Tanner's examples of older heroes explicitly seeking out power.
This was not some new ideal in Shakespeare’s day. For the sake of name Athena spurs Telemachus away from home; for the sake of rule she spurs Odysseus homeward bound. Yudhishthira gladly leads his brothers on the path of dharma, but it is a dharma of kingdom and acclaim. Aeneas, Sigurd, Gawain, Gilgamesh, Rama, Song Jiang—search the old epics and annals for the modern distrust of heroics, and you find it in none of them.
Notice how frequently divinity appears. Yudhishthira and Aeneas are the progeny of gods, Rama is a god, etc. Indeed, this should not be surprising - when the hero is given a form of divine mandate, that mandate is often moral itself. To obtain power to carry out this mandate cannot be immoral. These gods are not The Corporation from the Waifu Catalogue or some evil ROB.
In contrast, Katniss Everdeen, Harry Potter, Divergent, etc. are not given such a mandate (I haven't read the last one, but from what I've heard, I don't recall any mention of gods in the Greek or Abrahamic sense). They are products of minds raised in a far more secular society.
This is not a rebuttal to Tanner, to be clear. I have not grappled totally with how one would rank the reasons he and I have listed, or any other reasons people come up with. But I would encourage at least some skepticism towards Tanner's case that this is so obviously an example of how Westerners have been rendered impotent and conforming.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
The worst part of all this "the Nazis and fascists are super good at rhetoric" talk is that it's not even true. Destiny has been consistently demonstrating that they're no different from most debaters i.e garbage for the most part. Destiny's retorts aren't perfect, and he has a certain attitude necessary to deal with this kind of debate, but he's consistently come out on top rhetorically against basically every far-right person he's debated.
If Destiny didn't exist, I would understand, but he's literally spent years doing exactly what they're claiming can't be done. Which is understandable for Breadtube, whose creators are not interested in developing the skills to be internet debaters instead of content creators. But their community is collectively responsible if they can't generate anyone who is willing to do the dirty work.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
I get the sense that this is something most right-wing men just have no idea about.
Boys and men tend to read less. In addition, a lot of institutions involved in publishing and reviewing/rewarding books subscribe to socially progressive ideas, meaning that they're more receptive if a book flatters ideas like "written by a non-white person" or "writing about modern social issues".
The more interesting question is what effect dominates more: a greater population demanding more books of the type they like to read, or a small but powerful group of literary influencers/authorities trying to promote/support social progressivism? Because for all the fire and rage about "woke" novels winning awards for their politics, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that there's something wrong with people democratically wanting more books that fit their tastes.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
What kind of left-wing person do you think comes here and would argue something other than "all rape should be investigated and the culprit found"?
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
I think you are better off just DMing @SecureSignals (the most prominent of those people here) with your questions, your post is too short for a top-level comment.
drmanhattan16
1yr ago
Therefore, in order for the free world to exist it must be possible to change your country at will.
You've talked about exit rights, but what about entrance rights? That is, what happens if no nation wants a person? There are international agreements about not rendering people stateless, but I wonder how you would intend to handle that. Do you envision a global government that will grant stateless individuals some minimum rights or freedoms?
drmanhattan16
7mo ago
Doing whatever the fuck you want with something you own should not be a political act. Alas, here we are.
It's one thing to say that, for example, watching MCU movies because they're "in" at the moment doesn't mean you endorse the idea of capitalism, it's quite another to say that your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are. I explicitly use mods that many others find discomforting or crude because I don't ultimately care. But I wouldn't turn it back around and ask "Why are these people criticizing me????" The criticisms are coherent, I just reject them in the end.
Stardew Valley has had mods that turn the sole canonically black character and his half-black, half-white daughter totally white. I very much doubt this is because people thought he didn't fit in organically, he explicitly has an outsider background (comes from the city to the town). It's entirely valid to ask why someone may want a mod that turns this character white.
I say this as someone who agrees with your position on such mods. I truly don't give a fuck about someone making everyone in a game white or removing LGBT flags from a game, and I think mods that allow you to do those things are ultimately fine, just as mods that do the opposite are equally fine. But I'm not going to pretend the criticisms are invalid - I just don't share the values of those critics.
And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.
Probably because there's a lot of people who seem to think this man had a valid point. But what do I know, maybe all the people making a stand against indoctrination are shaking their heads at a man complaining about the expansion of an option that he could have gotten through in seconds.
By all means, I'll march alongside you when you want to complain about "pale, male, stale" is a thing. But I'm going to look at you quizzically if you also want to defend the idea that games shouldn't even try to be inclusive to people who aren't like you.
I agree with Okun, the things your society deems valuable and appropriate, it will reproduce via its institutions. If you don't belong to that culture, then you will have to either fit in or struggle. You can certainly try to alter what is considered valuable, that's much harder and not guaranteed to succeed. I also agree that there's no objective definition of what makes for a better culture in all aspects.
But the problem with the focus on talking about how "White Culture" reproduces its values is the terrible fucking optics of being so blind to the broader perspective. Not all truths are pleasant, but this is a case where it would be worthwhile for Okun to start asking about how valuable those things are in the first place. Okun certainly doesn't seem to be very positive about them, but I suspect that they are pretty damn important to most people. If I asked people "All else equal, would it be better for everyone to do their absolute best to be timely?" or the same for objectivity, I suspect I would nearly universally get affirmation. I'm aware that in some cultures, not being timely is considered at the very least acceptable, but I have yet to see anyone argue that those people think it is a good practice.
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