magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
· Edited 6mo 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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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr 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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8mo 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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7mo 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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5mo 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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5mo ago
· Edited 5mo 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
It's a Scottpost, not somebody self-advertising.
Is a defence of doing science rather than "Trusting The Science".
magic9mushroom
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6mo 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.
magic9mushroom
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2mo ago
I would just like to note for the record here that in Australia, it's unconstitutional for dual-citizens to serve in Federal Parliament (there's a minor exception in case of people who've attempted to formally renounce their foreign citizenship and failed; some countries don't allow renunciation of citizenship).
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
There is the slight possibility of an extremely-smart neo-Nazi who wrote (on his own or with DAN) a death threat that deliberately looks faked - a death threat that looks fake would be ideal insofar as the target would be scared (knowing she didn't write it herself) but she'd be in danger of getting accused of fakery if she published it. (That said, if you're smart enough to do that, you might be smart enough to just straight-up kill her and get away with it instead of beating around the bush.)
There is also the possibility, as Amadan has noted, of somebody not National Action but also not Shola sending this - perhaps as a false-flag by Antifa or similar groups, who would plausibly use some of the vocabulary of the letter. In this case it is "fake" in the sense of National Action not planning to kill her, but "real" in the sense of "yeah, she is somewhat honestly scared".
But yeah, probably not sent by white nationalists and Occam's Razor points to her making it up. And if it's actually true that she's gone to Twitter but not to the police, that's evidence of specifically her faking it since going to the police would still make sense in both the more complicated scenarios.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Footnote to post here https://www.themotte.org/post/53/the-motte-and-the-future/5620?context=8#context
I believe that "the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place" is more true than false, but because of a couple of edge cases I prefer the weaker "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil". This felt off-topic there and is long-ish (it could be shortened, but only by abandoning my motte) so I'm putting it here.
Edge case 1: There exists a minority of SJers who like dunking on people enough and believe conservatives are evil enough that they will adopt a hostile approach to conservatives even when this is net-negative for the SJ movement. This is separate from SJers who honestly believe that being hostile and censorious is the most effective way to advance the movement's goals; those people (a majority of SJers TTBOMK) do believe they are making the world a better place. Obviously, this is not especially unique to SJ (any moralistic ideology will attract these sorts) and this definitely is a relatively-small minority, but I'm a pedant.
[Citation: I have a tab open of a forum discussion in which I told someone that a non-hostile approach would be better at converting people and he replied "Yeah, but on the other hand, fuck 'em". He honestly believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil, but he is acting in a way that he admits is suboptimal for making a better world due to spite.]
Edge case 2: There are non-SJers who say or do SJ things because they are incentivised to do so in some way by SJers. These people by definition do not believe that saying/doing SJ things makes the world a better place, or that SJ is good and conservatives are evil, but they are not core members of SJ. Again, not unique to SJ (this is almost definitionally true of any powerful paradigm) but I'm a pedant.
[Citation: I turned down being a dorm RA at my university (a paid role insofar as RAs are not charged rent, and a role I was already somewhat fulfilling unpaid because our dorm had no RA) because I would have been required to recite SJ ideology to my dorm. I can imagine that another non-SJer less committed to honesty than I might have taken the job.]
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
· Edited 6mo ago
Might as well be proactive regarding the "misinformation" issue. Using the top result on Google (the people on the news tonight IIRC didn't specify what they objected to, with one exception that I'll come back to) and the official No case mailed to every Australian at government expense (along with a Yes case of equal length).
1 - "Australians will lose ownership of homes Variations of this claim include: Australians will be forced to pay reparations or the voice will increase taxes (ie, the voice will cost you money)"
Certainly, the idea that the referendum would directly imply reparations, that's false. The more measured case (and this one definitely is in the official No campaign) is that a Yes result would have a) built a Pro-Aboriginal consensus, which might make people more friendly to reparations, b) directly provided some level of soft influence to Aboriginals - that's the whole point, giving them an advisory body - which they might then use to advocate for reparations. I shy away from using this as motive to vote - feels a bit Machiavellian - but it seems plausible enough to me in terms of the facts (on both counts) and the Uluru Statement which inspired the voice does call for a "treaty" of some sort.
As for the latter part, certainly "voting for the Voice will directly raise taxes" is clear misinformation. The official No case merely said the Voice "will be costly" and said we don't know how much funding would be allocated to the Voice. It's not misinformation to say that government bodies cost money - that's extremely, obviously true - and "we don't know how much funding would be allocated" is also true.
2 - "The voice is legally risky Variations of this include claims that the voice is a third chamber of parliament, will dictate laws to the government, or will destabilise democracy"
Basically, the question here is "would the Voice have the power to block legislation". The No claim is that because the proposed change to the Constitution gives the Parliament the power to decide what powers the Voice has, Parliament might give the Voice the power to block Aboriginal-related legislation. The claim of misinformation is that this wouldn't or couldn't happen. To refute that claim, I cite the very article claiming it's misinformation:
Constitutional law experts are largely in agreement that there is nothing in the voice’s addition to the constitution which would lead to legal risk.
"Largely". That is, there are some that disagree (and indeed the official No case quotes a former High Court judge). So on the "could" question, there is some chance that trying it might work.
I ran the numbers, and was quite confident that the Parliament would not in fact do this; even if they tried, it would almost certainly fail to pass the Senate. But "the chance of X is very low" doesn't make "X could happen" misinformation; small probabilities of harm can be relevant to a vote if the harm is large enough. So on this one, I'll go to the wall on "plausible if unlikely; not misinformation".
3 - "The voice will divide the nation"
This is the one which was explicitly mentioned on the ABC coverage I saw. Not by an interviewee - one of the ABC journalists was interviewing the head of the No campaign, said this "wasn't factual" and asked him whether he regretted lying.
I don't understand the claims that this is misinformation. The claims that it's false (including the journalist, although not the article I'm beating up on) mostly just say "the Australian Constitution already gives the power to make laws for a specific race". The Constitution definitely does do that (it's extremely rarely used), but I'm not seeing why that makes "a specific body created to advocate for one racial grouping is dividing people into buckets by race" false.
The article I'm beating up on said that there are lobby groups already. Yes, there are, but not Constitutionally-recognised ones representing specific races. Again, not seeing the relevance.
My verdict: this is entirely true, the claims of misinformation border on misinformation themselves, I'll go to the wall on that.
4 - "The voice will force treaties"
See above under #1. The official No case said that this might lead to "Treaty" via people listening to the Voice and/or activists being emboldened, not that the Voice would directly force it. So the strawman/weak-man they're attacking would be misinformation, but the official case's point on this is quite plausible.
The article gets classy and says "There is no evidence for either, as the federal government has not indicated it will be engaging in those processes no matter what the outcome of the vote is." - do I really need to lay into this?
5 - "There are no details Variations of this claim include: you don’t know what you’re voting for and the voice is a Trojan horse for ‘secret agendas’"
I'm just going to quote the words in the article immediately following this:
There is plenty of detail. None of it is set in stone, because that is the parliament’s job, but we have an in-principle guide of what the voice under this government (because legislation can always be changed) would look like.
Exactly. We didn't know what we were voting for, because they had the legal option to change their minds afterward. Unlikely, perhaps, but not impossible.
Verdict: Largely accurate, not misinformation, I'll go to the wall on that.
6 - "The voice will allow the UN to take over Australia"
This is complete misinformation, no objections. (As you might expect, this one did not appear in any form in the official "no" case; this is just crazies.)
7 - "The Australian Electoral Commission will tamper with your votes"
Misinformation in the most blatant form that they're quoting, no objections. The AEC is highly trustworthy.
However, attention was drawn to the fact that ticks are counted as Yes and crosses are counted as invalid (not No). This is a known fact, the AEC went to court defending it against the alt-right UAP and won. This isn't tampering per se, the AEC told people to write Yes or No rather than to use a tick or cross, and it's not new for this referendum, but objecting to this policy isn't "false", it's an Ought statement saying that the speaker would prefer a different policy. On that one I'd say "not misinformation"; no Ought statement can be misinformation and the AEC 100% did the thing being objected to.
Note also on this one that the Yes campaign chose a colour representing itself that is identical to the AEC's official colour. They got in a little bit of trouble over this, although not a lot. So there were some things in AEC purple that were not impartial - they were Yes campaign material - although that's the Yes campaign being scummy and not the AEC.
Overall, I think it's fair to say that the No campaign's "misinformation" largely wasn't any such thing*, although as I noted there were crazies who said false things.
*There's one thing in the official No case that I think borders on misinformation. That's when they said "there is no comparable constitutional body like this anywhere in the world". Out of context I think that's false, although it's in the middle of an argument that there would be legal questions raised and in that sense it's justifiable because while similar bodies exist, it's not a 1:1 clone of them. Definite side-eye on that one, even if it makes a bit more sense in context.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
TBF Scott's "pseudonym" was originally only intended to block prospective bosses from finding his blog on cursory name search; it wasn't really intended to protect against cancellation. It achieved what it was supposed to i.e. getting him hired.
Also, a decent chunk of these people were literal teenagers at the time that they made those mistakes, and this is hardly limited to Rats.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
First time I've seen the term, so don't give this too much credence, but when I see it I think "someone who wants to try fascism again but doesn't think Hitler was a good prototype".
Like, let's be clear here, by the standards of fascism Hitler was a total failure. The central dogma of fascism is to prioritise the goals of the society and, yes, the race over those of the individual, in order to succeed and compete as a group - and you win if your group is the one left around to write history books. Obviously, Hitler's actions did not benefit Germany, Germans or German culture in any enduring fashion; WWII and its aftermath saw a shocking number of Germans killed, dispossessed or re-educated into Polish or Russian culture, and saw Germany semi-permanently dethroned from great-power status and lose a lot of territory. Hitler didn't intend that, of course, but the whole point of fascism is that it doesn't care about what you intended - it's social-Darwinist and only cares if you won.
Fascism can never truly be nice, but the ideology's not totally meritless even from a "societal virtues" point of view; we yearn for a purpose beyond ourselves, we yearn for a community that cares for us as kin and is free of exploiters, and we certainly yearn for the power to overcome foreign threats to our way of life and culture. I'm not a big fan of the sacrifices fascism makes on those altars (and it has to make a lot of them), but I will grudgingly grant that you can be a Literal (Post-)Fascist without wanting to be Literally Hitler (postwar Japan is perhaps the most positive long-term case of a near-fascist society; there are a few other examples in East and South-East Asia - though I'd exclude the PRC as being too close to Literally Hitler - and 50s America also had significant fascist attributes in a somewhat-positive fashion).
magic9mushroom
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17d ago
· Edited 17d ago
I think jeroboam's claim is that high-profile cases of leftists being jailed for hate speech would cause SJers to realise what a bad idea the laws are and undo them - the lesson of "I never thought the leopards would eat MY face".
I think that this claim is false because my read is that most SJers would react not with "oh shit this sucks, guess this gun's a bit dangerous to have available" but with "how dare they defile our gun and use it on us, we must destroy them so utterly that they can never use it again"*. But still, it seems to be coming from an assumption of Free Speech Good.
*To ironman this argument: a lot of the more-wingnut SJers believe that they have already essentially bet their lives on winning the culture war; that failure already means they literally get executed. This means that there is actual zero capability to deter them from escalation; if they win, then you can't punish them, and if they lose, (they think) they'll be killed either way, so the only thing that matters is P(win). And to be fair to them, in the main situation where I see them losing (voter base existence failure due to nuclear war) I would fully expect my prime political activity to be yelling "please no White Terror" for the next few years. But that's something of a special case due to the suddenness and the lopsidedness of power in the aftermath.
magic9mushroom
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2mo ago
· Edited 2mo ago
But I would like to add that, in my opinion, we are seeing a shift of moral mainstream and normie society going from following the Authority/Sanctity/Loyalty to the Care/Fairness framework.
I don't think that's true at all. Haidt's research is outdated. SJ, the successor ideology, is not really a three-foundation morality. It's what happens when a conservative-by-temperament with six foundations is raised in 90s liberalism (which was a three-foundation morality), sees it as the "standard", and attempts to "conserve" it. It has Authority (trust ScienceTM) and Sanctity (hate-speech-as-blasphemy); I'm not 100% sure about Loyalty since SJ is hostile enough to its "normal" foes that it's hard to spot any additional hostility for traitors, but callouts are to some degree an anti-traitor mechanism.
What you're seeing is a paradigm shift in "what is conserved", and while it's taken a long time to fruit this tree was planted in the 1960s. I don't think that it's new in history; the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire is an obvious example. It definitely is very hard to reverse at this stage absent some sort of large shock* because the next generation's temperamental-conservatives are now your enemies - they're trying to conserve the new ideology. Without such a shock, your best bet is to try to nucleate a new counterculture based on some of the old principles but with the vibrant and consistent ideology needed to attract the next generation's temperamental-rebels (which is the alt-right in a nutshell), but even then it won't be the same and could be terrible in its own way (to take the low-hanging fruit, Nazi Germany was not the Kaiserreich, and even if it had counterfactually lasted long enough to stabilise, it would still not quite have been).
*The most plausible shock I can imagine is if the most-affected areas - i.e. the cities - are literally and specifically depopulated for some reason, be that nuclear war, a plague, civil war causing food disruption, or economic collapse again causing food disruption. There may be other possibilities I do not see.
NB: This post discusses what Is and Will be, not what Ought be. That which works is not necessarily good.
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2mo ago
The way Australia rules this is that if you've made a good-faith attempt to renounce foreign citizenship then you count as being only an Australian as far as Australia's concerned (and thus can be elected to Parliament). There are, after all, some countries that do not allow renunciation at all.
magic9mushroom
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5mo ago
· Edited 5mo ago
I don't know why the Biden administration is being so cautious.
One that you missed: the Far East. Post-Hong-Kong, there is ~0% support for unification in Taiwan, so Beijing wants to invade; the only thing that might possibly deter this is the USA, and that's a full-time job that doesn't leave room for side gigs. If the million-man-swim does happen, the USA faces two incredibly-terrible choices - either it can break its word and throw Taipei to the panda, with a resulting enormous blow to the Western alliance system, or it can fight a Third World War with the likely result of "Pyrrhic victory, millions of Americans dead".
My gut says this last, best hope for peace will probably fail anyway, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's not worth trying, and it certainly doesn't mean that people won't try it.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
Buying the grease through an exchange program just seems way too expensive. Having the grease is pretty important though. They should probably just pay some popular youtubers or ticktockers to do lifestyle viewpoint videos on rural/urban people. Idk, I'm not smart enough to figure out an alternative.
Sometimes there isn't a cheap substitute. And, well, I sure think this is a better value-add than the various ideological projects already in schools (it's not negative, for one thing), and in the limit it costs less than a civil war would, so "expensive" is relative.
magic9mushroom
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30d ago
If you don't intend Mottizens to be able to understand a post, I'd suggest sending it as a PM instead.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I'm not going to go through all his posts to find them, but he's made some good ones and that's enough for me to say "the good solution was Hlynka making good posts and not making bad ones". But he refused. So the lesser evil was taking him out of the picture.
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3mo ago
As AshLael said, one was the leader of one of the parties in the ruling coalition.
The analogy is not very exact, though, because the results of the dismissals weren't "oh hey, your opponent wins by default", they were either "next person on your party ticket takes the seat" in the Senate cases, or "have a new election" in the HoR cases (and in all of the new elections the same party - and in some cases the same person, having resolved the eligibility problem in the meantime - won again and kept the seat). There were only two cases where the same party didn't hold the seat afterward, one because the guy was found to be eligible but resigned anyway, and one because the disqualified person had run as an independent and thus had no party.
This is very different from "a major party is not allowed to contest X position, opponent wins by default".
Should also be noted that the CW is significantly more subdued here in Oz.
magic9mushroom
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4mo ago
What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like?
Look, every now and then I stop watching my footfalls and get pensive. And one of the things I've gotten pensive about the past few days is this: the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?
Two of the answers are obvious:
- If the culture war ends in X-catastrophe, then we won't look back on it at all, because there will be no more historians.
- If SJ wins, it'll look back on now much the same way it looks back on the '50s right now, with maybe a few mentions of Nazis added.
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable. Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it. And that troubles me; it's the scenario I think is most likely, and the one I'm to at least some extent trying to bring about, so if I don't have a good idea of what it even looks like that's kind of an HCF. "It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what."
So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?
(To the SJers here: feel free to answer, if you think you understand your opposition, or feel free to correct me if you think my #2 is uncharitable.)
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7mo ago
The main positive argument of the Yes campaign (as opposed to deflection of opposing arguments) is this:
- Aboriginal outcomes suck
- This is durable against everything we've tried so far
- Trying to fix these sucky outcomes is worthwhile
- This proposal is something we haven't tried yet
- Therefore, vote Yes
Like, obviously this is just the politician's syllogism, and literally the same logic could lead you to sticking all the Aboriginals in re-education camps since we haven't tried that either, but the Yes campaigners do honestly believe it, and I think it is (somewhat) above the level of "clichés and slogans".
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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