magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
· Edited 7mo ago
Disclaimer: I don't actually work in the industry.
The problem AFAICS is that there are so many layers of selection against anti-SJ and no real layers of selection against SJ apart from the end-users, because arts are heavy on SJers and SJ will retaliate against people for helping an anti-SJ game.
Let's assume you're a game dev and you want to make an anti-SJ game. You need: funding, other devs, marketers, friendly-ish journalists, platforms to sell it on, and of course end users.
If you're rich, you can bankroll your own game, but if you're looking for investors you might have some trouble because of the latter stages, and because SJ has a reasonable degree of penetration into the financial system (i.e. people who can invest in you with other people's money, not just their own).
Lots of other devs are SJWs, so they're not going to work with you. The ones that aren't SJWs still are afraid to work with you, because if they do then their career is basically limited to "make more explicitly-anti-SJ games"; SJ will cancel them for the sin of working with you and they probably won't be able to be coworkers with SJWs ever again.
Lots of marketers are SJWs, so they're not going to work with you. The ones that aren't SJWs still are afraid to work with you, because if they do then their career is going to take a rather serious hit; lots of marketing agencies won't hire someone with that kind of black mark.
Lots of journalists are SJWs, so they're not going to promote your game. There is an alt-media ecosystem these days who've already paid the costs of cancellation and will not be deterred by it, but it tends to be focused on politics rather than entertainment; still, this one's noticeably less of an issue.
Lots of platform bureaucrats are SJWs, so you're going to have a hard time getting your game on those platforms. This one's especially hard because of the oligopoly.
End users, as you say, no real issue.
And a lot of these reinforce each other, too, because if the game is going to fail anyway then what the hell is the point?
Even trying to make a non-SJ game has some of these problems, because you still can't hire essentially any SJW devs (or to some degree marketers) without them at some point wanting to insert SJ and then you have the choice of either defying them and being considered anti-SJ by SJWs, or acceding in which case it's now an SJ game. And yeah, as others have said there are also rumours of ESG shenanigans on the "investor" rung.
Now, there are exceptions. Eastern media comes pre-made from a place where these incentives don't apply (although translators may still have a go at "fixing" it, that's actual extra work and thus less profit). Indie games don't have the incentives interlock quite as strongly because you need less people, although outside of single-person passion projects they're still there. But for the main industry? This $20 note is sitting on the ground... in the free-fire zone of the Berlin Wall. It's not impossible to pick it up, but it's also not surprising that it sits there a while.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
The ABC's called it: the Australian referendum to enshrine special Aboriginal representation in the Constitution has utterly failed. They needed a majority nationally and a majority in four of the six states; they've gotten at last count 41% (possibly less; pre-polls are counted last, and while I wasn't expecting it they seem to have more No than the on-the-day vote) of the national vote and have lost in all six of the states (again, I was expecting Tasmania and/or Victoria to buck the trend - Victoria being the most urbanised Australian state, with 75% of its population in the state capital of Melbourne, and Tasmania having a long tradition of hippie-ism and being the birthplace of the Greens; they were also polling the highest Yes).
Most of the Yes campaigners - at least, those the ABC talked to - seem to be going with the line of "the No campaign was misinformation and this doesn't count because they were tricked"*. That's wrong (there were a few people with crazy ideas, of course, but for the most part what the SJers are decrying as "misinformation" is true or plausible), but it's at least wrong about a dry fact and not nearly as divisive as going "this proves Australia's a racist country".
The result does seem to have emboldened people to actually stand up against SJ; Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was very hesitant to go with No (though he eventually did), but in his speech upon hearing the result he specifically said that this result was Australians rejecting activists' claims.
At-least-partial credit to @OliveTapenade, who said:
If No wins, I think it will be taken as evidence that the Australian people are deeply racist and ignorant (hence the need for Truth)
...the last time we discussed this on theMotte. They mostly seem to be leaning on "ignorant" rather than "racist", but yes, they're saying "this demonstrates need for Truth".
*NB: this doesn't, for the moment, include Prime Minister Anthony Albanese; all he's said on the matter of "why No" IIRC is that referenda never succeed without bipartisan support.
magic9mushroom
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11mo ago
It is exactly what you'd expect from the culture war, and the percentage of books written in the last 10 years (much less the last 20) is absurdly high.
No, it's not. It's "books of the 21st century" i.e. written in or since 2000, and 42/100 are 2014 or later. It's been about 24.5 years since Jan 1 2000, so you'd expect 42.8% to be in or since 2014.
magic9mushroom
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25d ago
· Edited 24d ago
To which I say, you aren't offering any evidence that these compromises are offered in bad faith, you're pretending to read the minds of your outgroup and ascribe the worst possible impulses to them.
I feel there's kind of a false dichotomy/definition debate going on here.
Let's talk about Newcomb's Paradox. There is and stubbornly remains some class of people who think the solution to the problem is to intend to one-box, but then to become a two-boxer after Omega has made its prediction. This solution is fatally flawed because, to misquote Minority Report, "Omega doesn't care what you intend to do. Only what you will do". If one will "become" a two-boxer before the decision is made, then one already is a two-boxer, because the definition of a two-boxer is "one who will pick both boxes", not "one who currently thinks he will pick both boxes". If I am programming Omega, and I want to make Omega as reliable as possible, I should count such people as two-boxers because they will two-box; their false consciousness of being a one-boxer, no matter how sincerely believed, is not actually relevant.
(I went looking for the exchange I had with one of these people, but I couldn't find it.)
The shape of the excluded third option should now be pretty clear. There exists a class of people who'll sincerely make a compromise, and then change their minds later. When talking about your ingroup, the natural tendency is to count these people as "good faith", because they believe what they say and you sympathise with them. When talking about your outgroup, the natural tendency is to count these people as "bad faith" because the natural context of analysing your outgroup is wanting to know whether deals will be kept or not.
Hence, under their definitions, "deals have not been kept in the past" is evidence of bad faith, because "your outgroup doesn't care what you intend to do. Only what your movement will do". It's not totally-irrefutable evidence - movements change, and not all deals are created equal - but it's relevant. Moreover, I think modelling social justice as unable to keep its bargains is actually fairly justified, because of two reasons:
-
Social justice is leaderless. Committees are bad at keeping their bargains absent specific effort, because committees tend to include people who wanted to reject the bargain, and turnover might lead to those people gaining control of the committee at some point (and "you should respect a bargain you never agreed to, because others in your movement did over your objection" is a much-tougher sell than "you should respect a bargain you agreed to"*).
-
Social justice is not very interested in keeping historical norms. "Dead old white men", and so forth. So that tough sell is even tougher.
I get that it's really awkward to respond to the claim "you can't make a believable compromise, because you will change your mind and/or others in your movement will overrule you". I sympathise. Unfortunately, that doesn't always mean it's false.
*I'm reminded of the exchange at the end of the TNG episode "The Pegasus":
PICARD: In the Treaty of Algeron the Federation specifically agreed not to develop cloaking technology.
PRESSMAN: And that treaty is the biggest mistake we ever made! It's kept us from exploiting a vital area of defence.
PICARD: That treaty has kept us in peace for sixty years, and as a Starfleet officer, you're supposed to uphold it.
It's very, very easy to be a Pressman. There are probably still circumstances where I'd be a Pressman, despite having assimilated Ratsphere cautions against it.
magic9mushroom
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2yr ago
· Edited 2yr ago
This is a topic I really, really don't want to talk about or even think about, because it's one of the abysses that gazes back and keeps me up at night and also it's radioactive. But I'm already thinking about it and I just went through the entire thread of this top-level post hoping in vain that someone had already said it, so I guess it falls to me to explain the HBD-MRA model of patriarchy and its downfall.
Assumed: HBD, or at least the points of which that men are physically stronger than women, and that women are better at social - in particular covert manipulation - than men. For the latter part, also that women care more about safety than men.
The outcome of this in prehistory and most of history is explicit patriarchy that is somewhat more equal than it looks. Explicit female domination or excessive implicit female domination doesn't work because in extremis men would defeat women physically and rape and/or murder them (and in prehistory, of course, mass abduction and rape of other tribes' women was reasonably-commonplace), but women do better than it looks like they do because of course they do, that's what happens when you're better at covert manipulation and the primary drivers of culture. This was stable.
It went from stable to metastable at some point. Obvious potential contributors include the development of firearms, the immense increase in state power relative to personal power, and democracy + women's suffrage giving women an equal explicit share in that state power. I say metastable, rather than unstable, because there was still the social pressure toward not-being-a-feminist encoded within society and enforced by women at least as much as by men. This maintained the explicit patriarchy for some time, but only against relatively-small disruptions. When a large disruption came along, in the form of the 60s/70s counterculture, the social chaos allowed the "women are better at manipulation" effect to take over society entire. Thus, we get the current system, where there is some explicit pretence of equality but implicitly and even to some degree explicitly the deck is massively stacked in women's favour. This is also stable; rapist revolution on small or large scale is impossible because of state power, and now with both women's material incentives and individual social incentives pointing toward feminism, they aren't likely to steer the culture away from it.
The place where this model gets horrible and abyss-gazey is if you consider a patriarchal society better than a matriarchal one - most obviously to me, if you think that safetyism and its accompanying administrative bloat is strangling our ability to achieve anything, but also if you think that the matriarchal mode's oppression of men is worse than the patriarchal mode's oppression of women, or indeed if you think that matriarchy is incompatible with maintaining replacement fertility and thus with a society that isn't necessarily parasitic on others (I'm not convinced of the latter two, but obviously a bunch of people in this thread are convinced). Because then, according to the model, the only way to fix it is to undo some of the factors that made the matriarchy mode a stronger attractor than the patriarchy mode. And, well, I enumerated the options there, or at least the ones I can see, and the possible ones suck (particularly since - as even Dave Sim noted in his infamous essay - the sex differences in these things are statistical trends and not 100%-accurate stereotypes; revoking women's suffrage would very definitely be unfair).
Like I said, I try not to think about this; I would basically rather stick my head in the sand and hope for a miracle (space colonisation and genetic enhancement both seem vaguely like they might organically lead to solutions, although the latter has its own terrors). But you asked, and I ended up reading your post because of the mod-queue thing (this one wasn't there, but I always look at context), and I'd hate myself more for self-censorship than I would and do for spitting it out. So here you go.
magic9mushroom
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9mo ago
· Edited 9mo ago
There's a speech from Order of the Stick which I'm just going to quote in its entirety because it's easier than re-inventing it from scratch.
Shojo: I mean The Game, the big one. The one that each of us plays every day when we get out of bed, put on our face, and go out into the world. Some of us play to get ahead, some of us just want to get through the day without breaking character. It's called "Civilization" No, wait, there's already a game called that... OK, it's called "Society." Your problem is that you don't want to play the game at all, you want to sit on the couch and eat Cheetos while everyone else is playing.
Belkar: Well, why shouldn't I? What's the point of their Society, anyway? It never did anything for me.
Shojo: The point is that if you laugh and spit in their faces enough times, they'll kick you out of the house—which in this extended metaphor means killing you.
Belkar: So, what, you're saying that the only alternative is to show up and play by everyone else's stupid rules??
Shojo: Of course not, my woolly friend. You can cheat. Twelve Gods know that I always did. Nudge die rolls, palm cards, "forget" penalties... but you have to sit down to play first. As long as the people at the table see a fellow player across from them, they'll tolerate you. A crooked player is a pain in the ass, but someone who refuses to play at all makes them start questioning their own lives—and people hate to think. They'd rather lose to a cheater, than dwell too long on why they're playing in the first place.
The expectation up until Trump was that everyone serious in US politics would at least pretend to stay within the bounds of Polite Society as defined by the Cathedral or whatever else you want to call it. Trump didn't. He didn't cheat; he refused to play the game at all, and spat in the faces of those that demanded he do so. That was a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of Polite Society/the Cathedral/etc., the same way that the Comics Code Authority was fundamentally undermined when Marvel ran a story in defiance of the Code and got away with it - if people can openly defy you without getting immediately punished and forced to repent, you aren't a consensus authority anymore, just another guy on one side of a controversy.
Now, one can certainly say that somebody like Trump was overdetermined to appear once SJ started drastically curtailing what counted as "acceptable for Polite Society". But that's not quite obvious even to me, much less to someone who thinks SJ is "just common fucking decency", and so he gets blamed for putting a bunch of propositions that had previously seemed like bedrock up for debate.
magic9mushroom
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11mo ago
Do I agree with you on the object-level issue? Yes.
I think there's one clear nonsense point there, which is the connection drawn between "Trump found guilty" and "Trump is bad". Under the circumstances, Trump being found guilty should be a null update about his character. There are many excellent reasons to hate the guy, but this one - i.e. "if you can find a kangaroo court to convict someone of a crime, that makes him evil" - is obviously bananas; even divine command theory has question marks on it, and this moral precept amounts in practice to "tyrant command theory".
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
The reason it's happening is quite simple: libraries are a useful weapon in the culture war that only one side has access to (school librarians being 88% Democrat), so the other side is saying, to quote Mr. Meeseeks over on DSL (and he's used it in this exact context), "that position has been completely overrun; commence shelling."
One can argue about whether this is good or bad, but I'll only say that it's sad.
magic9mushroom
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10mo ago
This is a bit of a tangent, but why do women tend to lean left?
My basic understanding:
- The median woman is a lot less liberal (in the proper sense - "supportive of liberty") than the median man. Freedom of speech, in particular, is supported far more strongly by men than by women (e.g. Cato Institute poll - women tend to be far more easily offended and more willing to censor than men, mostly regardless of political valence of the speech). Free speech is now* mostly a right-wing issue, and is pulling men with it (like me!) but not women.
- As a strongly-related but mildly-distinct point, women tend to be more conformist, and the education system has made SJ the "default" among the younger generations*; more men defect from that default than women.
- A reasonable amount of SJ-influenced social policies are just explicitly stacked in favour of women (e.g. investigating male-dominated industries for sexism, but not female-dominated ones; here in Oz removing maths as a required year 12 subject but still requiring English); one should not be surprised that these tend to piss off men more than women, although this is AIUI less important than it sounds like it should be, because neither men nor women are Homo economicus and they don't vote purely their personal interest.
*Note the time-dependence here; IIRC in the 60s women tended to be further right than men.
magic9mushroom
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10mo ago
The meme is "Can we stop restricting supply? Best I can do is subsidize demand".
The pic and snowclone are apparently based off a reality TV show about a pawn shop, with one of the proprietors having a catchphrase of "best I can do is [$X]".
magic9mushroom
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11mo ago
It sounds like you think “they” can simply control what the jury believes.
The thing is, Trump's so polarising that you'd expect most people to vote on the jury based on their opinion of Trump, rather than the facts of the case. And, well, Manhattan voted 90% Democrat in 2020, and ten peremptory strikes for each side easily suffice for an all-Democrat jury (even strikes for each side advantage whoever has a majority, because striking a minority juror will usually succeed at replacing the juror with one of the majority while striking a majority juror will usually just replace the juror with another one of the majority - this is the same way the South could ensure all-white juries until Batson declared race-based peremptory strikes to be unconstitutional).
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
· Edited 8mo ago
The only way, the only way to convince the Democrats that wokeness is Not Okay is to rub their noses in it like a dog. Smack them on the snout with a rolled up newspaper and proclaim "BAD!" in a thunderous shout. In a perfect world this would never have been required. In a better world they would have learned the lesson in 2016. We do not live in those worlds, we live in this one, and in this one they are still on the woke train. So I will vote for the man whose re-election constitutes the philosophical equivalent of smacking the Democratic Party on the nose with a rolled up newspaper before grinding it into the stain on the carpet.
They did learn a lesson from 2016; Biden the 2020 candidate was considerably more moderate. The problem is that Biden the 2021-2024 President, or rather his administration, wasn't moderate at all, because apparently the lesson they learned was "fake being moderate on the campaign trail and then exploit it once in power".
I think your only hope on this path is that the Democratic machine politicians are pragmatic enough to be willing to appeal to the centre and far-sighted enough to realise that tricking them is not a long-term solution and powerful enough to force the SJer groundswell into line; I'm not rating that very highly.
I think the ultimate way to deal with this has to include shattering all of SJ's walled gardens, so that they get to start seeing rightists first-hand as people, and so that their Authority foundation stops locking onto HR ladies and similar types. This, admittedly, does require power, and lots of it.
magic9mushroom
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10mo ago
To your basic question of "why specifically this year", the answer is probably "Elon Musk bought Twitter and this is one of the fruits". Prior to that, this was a banned opinion in mainstream venues, so of course the mainstream didn't hear it much.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
The Taiwanese consider themselves chinese, large sections of their population already support union with China,
That plan was going quite well until they altered the deal on Hong Kong. When they did, Taiwanese support for unification crashed to lizardman and has remained there since.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
One difference, however, was that the French pogrom was labeled a "Reign of terror" in hindsight by its detractors, while the Russian version was called that by its own architects as they planned it out.
Um.
The aristocrats of Internal Affairs are since many days meditating a movement. Oh well! They'll have it, that movement, but they'll have it against them! It will be organized, regularized by a revolutionary army that at last will fulfill that great word that it owes to the Paris Commune: Let's make terror the order of the day!
-Bertrand Barère (translated), September 1793
If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.
It has been said that terror is the spring of despotic government. Does yours then resemble despotism? Yes, as the steel that glistens in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles the sword with which the satellites of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his debased subjects; he is right as a despot: conquer by terror the enemies of liberty and you will be right as founders of the republic. The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny. Is force only intended to protect crime? Is not the lightning of heaven made to blast vice exalted?
-Maximilien Robespierre (translated), February 1794
The term "Terror" as a description of the period (note that in French it's simply called "the Terror") does seem to have descended from these and other invocations by the Terror's architects, even if it wasn't the official name at the time.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
They already did that; there's a $100 million Wikimedia Endowment. But WMF keeps asking for money and then figuring out things to do with it (in many cases, re-donating it).
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
News from Australia: we're probably not going to have a Constitutionally-enshrined "Voice" for Aboriginals.
Background: there was a statement by a bunch of Aboriginal groups a while back that they wanted a constitutionally-enshrined advocate in the governmental system*, along with a couple of other things. Opposition leader Anthony Albanese, of the Australian Labor Party, included this in his platform for the 2022 election, which he won**, and we're a bit under a month from a referendum***.
New information: support started high, and certainly the Usual Suspects want a Yes vote. But support has now crashed to the point that it's considered highly unlikely to pass.
Up until now I'd been thinking "well, maybe the US people are right about SJ having peaked in the USA, but that's cold comfort to me", but this has given me some real hope that it's peaking here as well.
*NB: Aboriginals can vote and run for office, and are slightly overrepresented in Parliament compared to the general population.
**Labor is our centre-left party; the other major parties are the Liberals (city-based centre-right), the Nationals (small-town conservatives, in a semi-permanent coalition with the Liberals), the Greens (historically a "hippie" party, and they still do hold basically all the stereotypical "hippie" positions, though they've gone majorly SJ of late), One Nation (alt-rightists since before it was cool) and the United Australia Party (alt-rightists since after it was cool, because an alt-right billionaire had too big an ego to support the existing alt-right party). I actually wound up voting Labor; the Liberals had gotten too comfortable in government to the point that they refused to discuss a bunch of what they were doing, which I consider a threat to democracy, the Greens want to ban One Nation and the UAP, which I consider a much larger threat to democracy, I live in a city so the Nationals weren't on my HoR ballot, the UAP is a bad joke, and while I preferred One Nation's stance on this particular policy (i.e. "get the fuck out of here with your reverse racism") I preferred the rest of Labor's platform to the rest of One Nation's by more.
***Our constitutional amendment procedure - a majority of citizens and a majority of citizens in at least four of the six states must agree to the amendment. Like most other Australian votes, it's mandatory.
magic9mushroom
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2yr ago
It's a Scottpost, not somebody self-advertising.
Is a defence of doing science rather than "Trusting The Science".
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
· Edited 8mo ago
I agree with @Dean about "Democratic over-reliance on media shaping", but want to take it in a different direction. I don't have the numbers to hand (EDIT: I do now), but I saw an exit poll showing a staggeringly-huge swing among the under-30s - Gen Z, who are extremely online. And what happened online in the past four years? Elon Musk bought Twitter, which shattered SJ's consensus-astroturfing operation; up until then, they'd been seeing a false SJ consensus created by banning everyone who spoke out, but now they see something closer to reality. And I think that gave... call it "social permission" to not vote Democrat; SJ can no longer gaslight them into thinking that voting Republican is lonely dissent.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?
Zvi calls this the Incorrect Anti-Narrative Contrarian Cluster, and he's had a post about it in IOU status for nearly three years.
Part of the answer has got to be "the right is highly suspicious of running sanity gatekeeping, because all the institutions which were supposed to do that went rogue and abused their power to shut the right out of the conversation".
(Also, you mean "kooky".)
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
I don't know a huge amount about GamerGate either. At least, not the start of it. We'll get to that.
The end part, the part that... well, not quite "matters", but the part that turned heads, was basically this: SJ openly declared culture war on nerdy men; the Grey Tribe ruptured fully from the Blue Tribe. I say it doesn't matter because the cracks had been growing for a while due to SJ's increasingly-censorious nature (indeed, Scott's criticism of SJ started a couple of years before GG); something was going to explode sooner or later, and it merely happened to be GG.
...all of which means there's a bit of an issue with reading up on it: since the Grey Tribe as a separate identity didn't actually exist for the most part until GG, it didn't have any narrative-producing institutions of its own, and the Red Tribe didn't care yet. So nearly all the media coverage is Blue propaganda intended to make the "pro-GG" side - the Grey side - look as bad as possible. Frankly, at the time I mostly bought it.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
Neo-Nazis: you're right, not many of them.
Trump: Trump is complicated because most Mottizens are not Trumpists, but a lot of Mottizens tend to downvote anti-Trump views because they associate it with SJ. Anti-SJ posts that also disparage Trump (particularly on a personal level) are eaten up with gusto; I have one at +17/-0.
"Right-wing extremists": it really, really depends on how you define it. The big stumbling block here is racism: obviously there are a vast number of possible views on "what genetic racial disparities in cognition/personality exist and what should we do about them", but according to SJ and much of the centre, literally any view on the topic other than "all numbers are zero" is automatically far-right extremism. And, well, "all numbers are zero" is quite an unpopular view here; it's outnumbered well over 2:1.
(Heck, they'd likely consider me far-right due to this, which is hilarious since I'm also a socialist.)
If you remove that one particular third rail... it still depends on definition (including whether your definition of "liberal" is the insane modern US one or the etymological one; there are a lot more Actual Liberals than there are SJers). There are more Actual Liberals here than there are ethnostate advocates; there are less SJers than there are people who think major reforms are needed to dismantle SJ; there are probably more SJers than people in favour of chucking bombs at SJers.
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
The drones spotted over NJ in December were Chinese kit equipped with gravitic propulsion systems.
No. Pulse detonation I'd believe. Nuclear I'd believe. Antimatter I'd be dubious about, but the stuff you'd need to fuel it isn't impossible to hide. Gravitic, no. Not even if you count "total conversion via black hole" as "gravitic"; an accelerator big enough to make one of those is too big to hide, and if they'd been in use for decades one of them would have gone boom (with a force greater than every nuclear weapon on Earth put together).
Tech like this would be extremely dangerous for obvious reasons. Reasons that would explain the secrecy.
I'm sorry, if you're talking about straight-up antigravity, they're not obvious to me.
If gravity has been cracked, it potentially means that other wild stuff like zero point energy is also on the table.
I'm sorry, but somebody's been filling your head with nonsense.
Zero-point energy is not a type of energy. It's just any energy that can't be extracted, and thus is part of the effective "zero point" of your scale. "Extracting zero-point energy" literally means "extracting energy that can't be extracted", which is by definition impossible - either you can extract it or you can't.
Any time somebody talks about "zero-point energy" as a power source, that's an immediate "this guy has been suckered by pseudoscience".
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
SecureSignals is a neo-Nazi. He has been ordered by the mods to diversify his posting from anti-Jew rhetoric. So he's posting things he finds out about - which, by nature, tend to be things of interest to a neo-Nazi - that are not related to Jews. It should be fairly obvious why the ethnogenesis of white people is of interest to a neo-Nazi.
And I, for one, actually found this significantly more interesting than the rest of @SecureSignals' posts, so I'm not particularly feeling like criticising him for it even if the circumstances aren't ideal.
I loved Wikipedia.
If you ask me the greatest achievement of humankind, something to give to aliens as an example of the best we could be, Wikipedia would be my pick. It's a reasonable approximation of the sum total of human knowledge, available to all for free. It's a Wonder of the Modern World.
...which means that when I call what's happened to it "sacrilege", I'm not exaggerating. It always had a bit of a bias issue, but early on that seemed fixable, the mere result of not enough conservatives being there and/or some of their ideas being objectively false. No longer. Rightists are actively purged*, adding conservative-media sources gets you auto-reverted**, and right-coded ideas get lumped into "misinformation" articles. This shining beacon is smothered and perverted by its use as a club in the culture wars.
I don't know what to do about this. @The_Nybbler talks a lot about how the long march through the institutions won't work a second time; I might disagree with him in the general case, but in this specific instance I agree that Wikipedia's bureaucratic setup and independence from government make it extremely hard to change things from either below or above, and as noted it has gone to the extreme of having an outright ideological banning policy* which makes any form of organic change even harder. All I've done myself is quit making edits - something something, not perpetuating a corrupt system - and taken it off my homepage. But it's something I've been very upset about for a long time now, and I thought I'd share.
*Yes, I know it's not an official policy. I also know it's been cited by admins as cause for permabans, which makes that ring rather hollow.
**NB: I've seen someone refuse to include something on the grounds of (paraphrasing) "only conservatives thought this was newsworthy, and therefore there are no Reliable Sources to support the content".
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