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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9mo 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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6mo ago
· Edited 6mo 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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7mo 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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3mo 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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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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30d ago
· Edited 30d 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.
magic9mushroom
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3mo 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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24d 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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1mo 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.
magic9mushroom
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4mo 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
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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".
magic9mushroom
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29d ago
· Edited 29d ago
Discussion prompts- is this a falsification of the narrative, so popular on the motte, that it doesn't matter how conservative a government is, it can't stop the cathedral from doing whatever it damn well pleases?
The narrative on theMotte (and DSL) is mostly one of covert defiance, not overt defiance. That is to say, people "grudgingly agree" and then either don't actually do what they said they would do, or contrive to achieve the same results a different way.
This is a case of a lack of overt defiance - they have said they will comply. Okay. Mostly in accord with that narrative. There remain the questions of whether they will actually comply, and also whether if they do comply, they will come up with some excuse to produce the same outcomes.
If a student spends a day in the local activism space holding a sign saying, for instance, "I think black people are genetically predisposed to crime; ask me why"* and is still a student 6 months later, that would definitely be a falsification - that's real change in outcomes, proof by pudding.
*I am not personally claiming this sentence to be true, merely using it as an example of a sentence which gets one in trouble on purely DIE grounds - it's not threatening or harassing anyone, but is blasphemy against SJ.
magic9mushroom
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5mo ago
I can only speak for myself, but it's some combination of:
- Most of their positions are fairly-well-reasoned from premises I disagree with. I think the fundamental points where I'd disagree with the anti-Semites would be "are Jews biologically inclined to be less moral than white Gentiles", "what proportion of ethnic Jews are strongly identitarian", "what degree of influence does Jewish identity have on Western policy" and perhaps "to what degree can #2 be fixed via melting-pot"; the anti-Semite answers are of course "yes"/"almost all"/"lots"/"none" whereas I tend toward "no"/"significant but minority"/"little outside of the US; significant but narrow within the US"/"near-total". #1/#2 especially are very much empirical questions that need large amounts of legible evidence to convince someone to flip; my opinions are from my illegible personal experience, not studies I can quote, and in the case of #1 I'd probably have to go out and do the study myself given how ludicrously-radioactive that question is. I've explicitly laid out my point on #3 at least once recently (although not in reply to an antisemite), and I don't recall #4 coming up explicitly very often.
- They kind of all blur together and are mostly from a couple of highly-active posters, and it can seem a bit pointless to keep engaging over and over again.
- I don't read the Israel-Gaza thread except from Quincy, which is where I presume most of such comments are. It's just not an area of world politics that interests me very much insofar as there's no obvious way for it to blow up and my preferred action is "do nothing" which doesn't require a lot of knowledge.
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
Primarily, because demonstrating naked, gloating contempt for your neighbours is corrosive to the social contract and provokes retaliation. In particular:
-
Everything that raises the temperature of the culture war from any side gets it that much closer to boiling over. Deciding to remove these statues provoked the Charlottesville rally, which provoked substantial institutional reactions, and so on and so on. Every escalation, and the retaliation for it, get you that much closer to the point of no return when people's decisions flip over en-masse to "this social contract is unconscionable; it's worth the transition cost of starting over". We're horrifyingly close to it now; if the Republicans nominate Donald Trump again and he is removed from the ballot that's probably enough to tear the Union. And to be clear, this would suck massively for all sides.
-
Even discarding civil war, the wheel turns. SJ may feel invincible due to demographic trends, but that's far from the whole story. Black swans happen, and city-slickers have more fragile lives than country bumpkins if there's a pandemic or a nuclear war. And if the Republicans do wind up with total power over you... well, you have a degree of control over how merciful they feel. Even from where I sit I'd prefer to avoid another White Terror; surely you don't want one either?
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
(insert standard HBD argument here)
I think much of this doesn't even need the standard HBD argument of "evolution doesn't stop at the neck". Even if evolution does stop at the neck, Aboriginals had no cities and no domestic animals and thus were not selected for disease resistance to the extent Old Worlders were; same thing as why most Native Americans died in the Columbian Exchange. And they weren't selected for dealing with alcohol because TTBOMK they didn't have any. You don't even need to talk about the brain to get a biologicalist explanation of The Gap (whether or not that's the whole story, I'm not sure).
NB: I think there is cause to put at least some additional resources into figuring out ways around the effects I mention, even if I don't think a failure to get parity automatically equals being terrible. Having shitty immune systems isn't their fault.
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
It's one-drop. I suspect at least a little part of why it's one-drop is because the old classification is kinda inextricably linked with the Stolen Generations (between 1905 and the 1970s, there was a policy of bringing "half-caste" i.e. mixed-race children up white rather than leaving them in Aboriginal camps, which was a pretty-good idea in principle but was done with abusive boarding schools; lately, people have started calling this "cultural genocide", because of course they have).
Of course, when I say they're overrepresented both the numerator and denominator there are one-drop, so that's not a lying statistic. I suppose I could try to work out statistics for full-blooded Aboriginals (there still are significant amounts of them on the mainland, particularly in the Northern Territory, although there are zero in Tasmania), but since all the official statistics are one-drop that would be hard.
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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