naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Oh come on. I post 10x milder takes from the other side and get banned for 90 days instead.
Indeed. And should Kulak post such hot takes as frequently and fervently as you, the bans will escalate in similar fashion. However, given his history and the content of this post, I do not expect him to come right back with another.
We'll see!
This is what the west is now, old men and women telling raped children to shut up and not be racist.
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. Banned for 3 days. The rest is details.
Yes, this is explicitly a token banning. For all your complaining, you do mostly stick to our discussion norms, minus some name calling and weak manning. At least one moderator prefers to not moderate people when they are clearly asking for it. At least one moderator is sympathetic to the point and points out that we do allow the argument to be made that argument is useless. I've had this conversation with other users in the past: sometimes it seems like conflict theory is actually right, and that's something we have to consider if we claim to be open to considering all arguments.
I have a different approach: moderation is driven by user sentiment, you've accumulated many reports, and I try to give people (including you) what they want. As this is a mod message, I set aside the substance of your post without comment, except those portions in which you directly criticize this space:
Rotherham is in large part the reason I don't comment on this forum anymore.
This raises a question: why are you commenting on this forum now? You have a history of doing it well, and then doing it poorly, and then mostly stopping. Why are you back? Welcome back! Would you be willing to post some good stuff again?
If any critical mass of people here or in other rationalist spaces actually valued the truth above politeness we would rationally immediately ditch all the speech norms of rationalist spaces and adopt those of 4Chan.
Where everyday you could have seen exactly this discussed, predicted, and parallels drawn to comparable things happening across the west.
But the Motte won't, because the Motte doesn't value the truth that highly, but rather values endless self justifying discussion for its own sake.
You're mistaken, though it is an easy mistake to make. Let me ask you something silly--do you dance? Specifically, are you a classically trained ballerina, or do you know any? If you spend much time around ballet studios, you will see an interesting phenomenon where little girls (and, occasionally, boys) show up with a dream. They love to dance, because they saw a ballerina do something amazing and beautiful. But real, recognizable ballet is pretty tough, on par with very high level gymnastics, and most people aren't really cut out for it. From ten classes of fifty toddlers in tutus a school might hope to produce one girl capable of dancing corps in a national production. And so along the way each aspiring ballerina reaches a point where she realizes that no matter how much she might enjoy dancing, this is not the dancing for her. This is hard on the ego, so a very common way of stopping ballet is to join a different dance club--pop dance, modern dance, stuff people will say they "prefer" when really what they prefer is not needing 40+ hours per week of effort to excel in their particular sphere.
Suppose one of these girls switches to a "contemporary dance" studio. She generates an argument--"ballet is so hidebound and pedigree-obsessed! It's stupid. In contemporary dance I can express myself without all these hurdles, all these rules and traditions and obstacles."
"Okay," replies the ballet world. "That was always allowed."
But then the girl shows up at a production of the Nutcracker and demands equal time on stage with the ballerinas. She will not be dancing ballet, but she is tired of all the attention ballerinas get for this stupid annual tradition of dancing to a nonsensical Christmas plot.
What should the ballet company say to her?
Kulak, the point of the Motte is not to change the world, or to change politics, or even to change anyone's mind. It's performance art: we're here to dance ballet. If you do not wish to dance ballet, then you may dance other dances in other places. The dance of this space is not, and has never been, truth; it is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Truth is an interesting and important part of that, but so are norms of politeness and, yes, inclusion. Our most vocal critics insist that we are already where you want us to be--that we are a hive of scum and wrongthink, several zillion witches in sheep's clothing. You seem to think the opposite, that we are are a hive of... priss and wrongthink, I guess?
But we deserve neither such praise nor such censure (as Jane Austen once put it).
It is my hope that the world be more like the Motte: more open to the truth, and more able to discuss ideas openly, however so much people may disagree. I cannot force people to be better, smarter, or less evil. I usually cannot even persuade them to be so. Barely am I able to even change the minds of my own children, now that they are adults.
But I know the rules to this particular dance, and I can still dance it.
Any light produced without heat is an illusion, a trick cast on the wall, a fire in a film that illuminates only what the director chooses and warms nothing. Real productive though, real productive discussion builds heat to intolerable levels and then combusts, burning away the lies in it's warming light, and injuring or killing the liars who crawled amongst their tools of darkness.
People once thought that all light was fire--that all light consumed. But my house today is brighter than any pharaoh's court, and it burns not. What we do here is performative art, but art is an act of hope, and hope can, sometimes, change the world. Slowly, as they say--then all at once. The Motte is not supposed to change the world, except to the extent that it serves as a model for what the world could be.
I am sympathetic to your conflict-theory takes. I worry that what we do here will not--maybe cannot--be enough. But it is all I can actually do. I am neither soldier nor politician nor billionaire nor celebrity. The people who come here to do what we do, come here because it is what we want to do. It is the dance we wish to dance, however so hidebound it may be. We who maintain this space--this studio--this garden--are doing what we can do.
Go thou and do likewise.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
it's tautologically true that you would always be able to criticize the first few reports for being incorrect about some details and/or too reticent
I'm less interested in the incorrectness per se, than in the directionality of it, and what that tells us about the people involved in supposedly reporting "facts." Time can lend clarity to matters like this, but it also gives people opportunities to seize the narrative, sanitize it, build consensus, etc. I don't see any clear way to get the benefits of immediate versus eventual reporting both, without also taking on some of the drawbacks of both.
New Year, Same Old Culture War
At least 10 killed in New Orleans after driver ‘intentionally’ rams into crowd on Bourbon Street (CNN)
Apparently, "FBI Special Agent Aletha Duncan said the Bourbon Street attack is 'not a terrorist attack' in comments delivered after the mayor spoke." But then, later:
New Orleans mayor declares 'terrorist attack' on Bourbon Street, FBI confirms investigation (Fox)
Coulter's Law appears to be in force. As a reminder:
The longer we go without being told the race of the shooters, the less likely it is to be white men.
And indeed, this was a shooter, who died in a gunfight with cops... but so far it appears the ten deaths and dozens of injuries were vehicular, not firearm-related. Over on 8chankun (warning: images of death) it's claimed that "FBI Director Kash Patel states killer was 'Middle Eastern Descent'" but I don't see a link to direct evidence of that. I will be interested to learn whether it is a disinformation thing, or whether 8chankun is just better at reporting news than multiple multi-million dollar corporate news media outlets. Can a failed shooting preceded by successful vehicular homicide be used as ammunition (hah) in Second Amendment debates? Probably! Apparently at least one "explosive device" was also found?
There is something to be said for "wait and see," and indeed I expect to hear much more about this attack in the near future (unless, of course, we simply don't). Though clearly Special Agent Aletha Duncan did not seem to think there was any reason to "wait and see" when declaring, contra the mayor, that this was not a terrorist attack.
In unrelated news, Stocks just did something they haven’t done in nearly three decades--and in case you are unimpressed with CNN's clickbait headline,
back-to-back gains of over 20% is the best performance for the benchmark index since 1997 and 1998
Everything old is new again.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
And to you. My thoughts on the matter have not especially changed, except that I would add that very few people in AI discussion circles seem to appreciate (or care?) that copyright law questions are at the heart of future control over artificial intelligence. The political outcome, after all the judges and legislators have had their crack at it, of cases like NYT v. OpenAI should tell us a lot about who is going to have the power to siphon value from whom. This could potentially have been solved 25 years ago--alas.
Nitter link for those who don't use Twitter.
makes him seem like a centrist techlib
He seems to lean left on the environment and animal rights, and of course there's that whole anti-capitalism thing. Psychedelics also code "left" to me, but that probably just means I am old enough to remember the 20th century.
But yeah, this could have been written by a tradcon:
Modern Japanese urban environment is an evolutionary mismatch for the human animal.
The solution to falling birthdates isn’t immigration. It’s cultural.
Encourage natural human interaction, sex, physical fitness and spirituality:
- ban Tenga fleshlights and “Japan Real Hole” custom pornstar pocket pussies being sold in Don Quixote grocery stores
- replace conveyor belt sushi and restaurant vending machine ordering, with actual human interaction with a waiter
- replace 24/7 eSports cafes where young males earn false fitness signals via Tekken fighting and Overwatch shooting games, with athletics in school
- heavily stigmatize maid cafes where lonely salarymen pay young girls to dress as anime characters and perform anime dances for them
- revitalize traditional Japanese culture (Shintoism, Okinawan karate, onsen, etc)
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I do not even know whether it is possible, but I can't think of any reason why we would do that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Also, and this is just an aside... but is the best line of my comment here really the part where I'm qualifying my point?
If you think there's a better single-sentence(ish) quote that should be there, feel free to say so. I'm happy to update.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I have removed this post and permabanned the poster, because it is pretty obviously a copy/paste from an LLM, from a user account with no history. I don't know if it is Substack spam or what, and I don't mind if people want to talk about colonizing Mars, but this is not a place for dumping LLM posts.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Good for him. This was the virtuous thing to do.
I don't know that it was virtuous, but certainly I would have done the same thing, as a parent. I would not, however, have promised in the first place to not do it. The public discourse on this is disheartening but unsurprising; everyone accuses everyone else of being hypocrites, no one makes any efforts toward not being a hypocrite because hey, then you're just giving the advantage to those other hypocrites.
It's weird reading some of the commentary on reddit, where several posters are bemoaning "this is what sucks about being a liberal, we're constantly doing the reasonable thing while the Republicans break all the rules and take unfair advantage of our tolerance and longsuffering." As if this weren't precisely why the Republican party has been moving away from Buckleyan conservatism.
Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case?
I expect @Folamh3 would; probably others also. I'm not sure why you're referencing "TheMotte" here as if it were a hivemind, particularly when you're only the fourth person into the thread.
It seems unsurprising as realpolitik: he's a lame duck, the election is over, and the corporate news media is currently focused on disasturbating over everything Trump is even thinking about doing. What's anyone going to do about it--impeach him? He was a pretty bad president, he may as well take the opportunity to do one last thing for his son (and also maybe cover his own ass a bit, by making the pardon broad enough to ensure the Justice Department can't use Hunter's Ukraine dealings to get to his dad).
Where are all our "no one is above the law, not even the President['s son]" American news reporters? Presumably explaining that a pardon is a part of the law and so there is nothing to see here! Which they will of course immediately forget should Trump deliver on some riot-related pardons of his own. (In fact I already see many social media comments to the effect of "criticizing this makes Republicans the real hypocrites, actually.")
(See, if it were me somehow in Biden's exact shoes, I would pardon Hunter and the Capitol rioters in the same batch, just to screw with everyone. It would also have been funny to pardon Trump at the same time, if only because I suspect Trump would be inclined to turn it down. Of course, my own mischievous nature is likely sufficient to prevent me from ever holding elected office, much less one capable of extending pardons.)
I would be surprised if anyone cynical enough to regularly post here will be surprised by the pardon, but it really does clear the rhetorical decks for Trump to hand out a whole mess of pardons, should he feel so inclined. "Accuse your enemy of what you are doing" apparently equates, in the Biden administration, to "do what you plan to later accuse your enemy of doing."
I'm often as surprised by which of my posts get nominations, as which do not. This seems to be a running theme with many quality posters; the deeply researched effort post gets ignored, while the drunken schizo-post you tossed off at 2am pulls ten nominations and spawns a dozen quality replies.
I expect there's no single reason for this, but nominations tend to predominantly cluster on novelty, insight, authenticity, thoroughness, eloquence, and effort. Length correlates with several of those. In this case I expect the combination of thoroughness and eloquence on a topic of interest was a driver of nominations. But that is only a guess; those who nominated you are welcome to elaborate, or not.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I promised to not be whiny but I am just sad for now and had to post this.
This is the sort of thing Wellness Wednesday threads exist for. I'm sorry for your loss. It's real, despite your brief acquaintance, and your sorrow is understandable.
Nearly every comment is blaming them for travelling, some accusing them of being lesbian communist sluts who were travelling to get dicked by backpackers
This is surprising to me; I heard reports of the Laos deaths on the radio here in the United States, and all commentary was really focused on the methanol angle. But I suppose the Internet will do what the Internet does.
We had a lot of fun apart from the bad parts of the night, got drunk, I did some substances
I suspect a big contributor to anyone blaming these girls for their fate is the tendency of humans to turn tragedy into a morality play. Sometimes bad things just happen, and there's nothing anyone could reasonably have done differently. Other times, there are actionable lessons to take away. Very, very often, that actionable lesson is "drugs and alcohol are a completely unnecessary risk." It's unfortunate that your friends, instead of learning that lesson in a recoverable way, are now being turned into an object lesson for others, which I think probably explains some of your sadness. These girls were not a cautionary tale, to you; they were people you knew. And now they're gone, and that's a tragedy regardless of how it came about, or what lessons may or may not be taken from it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Like many, I have Spotify
Quick question: why?
The MP3 format was a game changer for music. My oldest MP3 was encoded in 1998--the year the format was published as an international standard. I am not an audiophile, I don't worry about lossless encoding or accruing complete discographies or whatever, but the ~40GB of digital music I've accumulated in the last 26 years fits comfortably on most any portable device and provides more hours of music, with no repeats, than I can listen to in a week, never mind a day.
I understand that not everyone has been slowly building their personal media libraries since the 20th century, but you can still buy DRM-free MP3s today, depending on the artist and publisher, and you can still buy CDs or even vinyls and encode the audio yourself. Obviously streaming comes with the convenience of you not needing to take that additional step, but once it's done, it's effectively done forever. Take the time to properly tag the files and it's not long before your personal library is miles better than anything Spotify has to offer (unless you listen to Spotify in hopes of discovering new stuff).
I recognize that I am something of a fossil, in Internet years, but it's amazing to me how much culture has shifted in the last two decades, and how much of that seems to be directly connected to media companies asserting greater control over culture-relevant media (e.g. Netflix blackwashing, social media companies doing bad "fact checking"). Just taking the ever-so-slightly affirmative step of disconnecting yourself from other people's libraries and algorithms has grown to be much more liberating than I ever would have guessed, back when I was more interested in the intellectual property questions than I was in the culture war questions.
Most "trans women" are autogynephiles.
If someone showed me a study concluding that "most men are autogynephiles," I wouldn't have any difficulty believing it. I have seen several studies suggesting that a significant percentage of "straight" men find male genitalia sexually arousing. There is also quite a lot of evidence that men are extremely sexually adaptable, i.e. will have sex with anything, if necessary for release--historical accounts of homosexuality at sea or on long military campaigns contribute much to this perception, but also further edge cases like the cross-cultural recurrence of bestiality. So I'm not sure where arguments like this really get you.
I am sympathetic to "empathy" arguments. I gain nothing, personally, through cruelty to others. However "be nice" cannot possibly mean "always affirm that what others are doing is good for them and/or for society." You say:
So anyway, next time you see some dude in a dress, with long hair and breasts but a face and voice obviously male despite his best efforts, think about what kind of emotions must have driven him to that place, and have a little empathy.
This seems fair, but what is the actionable content of that empathy? When I see a homeless person passed out in the street, filthy, half naked, and clearly stoned out of his mind, surely the empathetic response is not, "aw, look at that guy living his best life. It's not what I would choose, but hey--different strokes for different folks!" Similarly, if I see a man wearing a dress, I'm unlikely to say anything to him about it--but if I see a man walking into a ladies' changing room, I might quite reflexively say, "Hey, do you know that's the ladies' room?" So: what should I do if I see a man in a dress walking into a ladies' changing room? Do I try to help him the way I would try to help any man making that mistake, or do I exempt him from the care I normally afford to others, to help them avoid embarrassing and possibly dangerous errors?
("How do you know he's a man!?" Well, if a man in a dress really looks like a woman, then it would not occur to me to stop him from entering the ladies' room. It's true that I am not always a perfect judge of an individual's sex, but I generally do not permit my own fallibility to stop me from helping others when it seems warranted to do so, and see no reason to deviate from that policy in response to the existence of edge cases.)
I have no reason to defend moralizing busybodies who make a hobby of policing even the tiniest of deviations from the social status quo. But I think there are many reasons to, politely but firmly, refuse to go along with trans advocacy of this kind. For one thing, I suspect that for every person with serious gender dysphoria, there are at least dozens of people whose lives will be made worse by indulging trans advocacy--for example, by giving edge cases a nudge to behave in ways that will actually make their lives worse, than if they had just not. When I read that "28.5% of Gen Z women and 10.6% of Gen Z men identify as LGBTQ+," but in 1992 "3.2% of men and 1.6% of women aged 18–49 identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual," I find it very unlikely that this is the result of people being more free to behave as their "true selves." Rather, that looks to me like a serious mental health crisis born of a toxic memetic environment. That is: it looks like social contagion. How does one treat social contagion? I don't know, but I feel pretty confident that acting as if there is just nothing wrong or bad or sad or regrettable or even worth mentioning about transsexuality is the opposite of helping.
Not accidentally, your entire post could just as easily have been written about drug addicts, schizophrenics, preppers, Nickelback fans... people like what they like. Tautologically! People do what they do. I don't think there's any reason to be cruel to any of those people. I think it's a better world where we are all kind, and thoughtful, and polite, and treat others with humanity and respect. But that doesn't free us from the hard work of making value judgments, and finding ways to act on those judgments. There is a large-breasted man I see on my walks, sometimes. I have never commented on the fact that he looks like an especially tasteless parody of a woman; I'm pretty sure he knows, and I suspect it's even deliberate. There is also an anorexic woman I see on my walks, sometimes, and I don't comment on her obvious mental issues, either. But if either of them were a family member or particularly close friend--I would definitely comment, and it wouldn't be to affirm the validity or goodness of their choices.
I have never used Twitter. Mostly, because I have read Amusing Ourselves to Death. I knew that absolutely no good could come of engaging in 140 characters.
As the platform evolved (threads! 280 characters!), I was occasionally tempted, but never tempted enough. It sometimes seemed like a place where interesting people were having interesting conversations--but with the caveat that, in terms of depth, insight, and "popularity contest" dynamics, Twitter is like attending a very large, very angry high school. Sure, you have some wild conversations at your lunch table, but is it really worth the cacophony? The kibbitzing? The sophomores?
The amount of coordinated astroturfing and, admittedly, occasional not-just-astroturfing I've seen for Bluesky in the last week is quite sufficient to ensure that I will not even dip a toe into it. I think their current marketing is clearly intended to capitalize on the current perception that it is Truth Social for Leftists.
Further strengthening everyone's filter bubble will surely have no negative knock-on effects whatsoever.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
That one is doing that which is approved by the Cathedral, yes? Left-wing speech is activism, right-wing speech is delinquency.
Well, it's been a while since I was really on the bleeding edge of these cases, but my experience is that it's rarely overtly political, except to the extent that "good student" sometimes codes "left"--which is less often the case in high school than it is in college. Kids who get detention and bully others don't get free speech. Kids who get good grades or excel in athletics do. Leftists may be more inclined toward activism? But at the high school level it tends to be silly stuff rather than serious culture war issues. Though perhaps in the last few years that has changed.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I don't necessarily disagree, but pretty much every decision with a through-line to Tinker has eroded Tinker in some way without bothering to overrule it; why would they overrule it now?
(There is actually a discernible pattern in student speech cases post-Tinker and it's not "substantial disruption." Rather, in most cases, juvenile delinquents tend to get slapped down, while "model students" doing activism or whatever mostly win.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Thanks for adding context. It would probably be better without the somewhat blatant culture war bits.
I'm a little ambivalent as to the extent to which this arguably constitutes "recruiting for a cause," but I will, tentatively, allow it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
In Aristotle's Politics, he observes that families hold property "in common" while cities hold property privately (but for public benefit). He thinks this is natural, because if cities treated property as communal, no one would have stewardship and freeloaders would be a problem--but with our true intimates, it's actually normal and natural to live communally.
What you are saying sounds to me like kind of a modern take on the same phenomena, or maybe even just a more granular take. The reason we have the law of contract is to facilitate agreement between non-intimates. But the line between family and stranger can be more of a spectrum, and in many circumstances we find ourselves treating strangers as near kin, at least temporarily.
I don't think I have anything substantive to add, really, I just think it's always interesting to observe that these questions have been the subject of philosophical inquiry for all of recorded history.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Referring to the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes as "mutilation" seems like a supportable framing, but context and charity matter.
Referring to a major medical condition as "aesthetic purposes" also seems pretty uncharitable.
No--this would require your interlocutor to assume the conclusion under debate. Here you are treating a genuine disagreement as "uncharitable." That is not how charitable discussion works. You should be trying to read the best possible version of the argument being made, without actually departing from the substance of the argument.
You cannot charitably read this to say "children are being mutilated,"
I disagree.
Then you are wrong; I just gave you a more charitable reading which adheres to the substance (and literal wording!) of the line under discussion, and you have furnished no warrant for believing your less charitable reading to be true. This may be a problem with your perspective on "charity," since you don't seem to grasp what "charity" means in this context--maybe this is why you also have failed to read others charitably.
A lot of posters here are in fact doubling down on "actual under 18 children ARE having surgeries".
Indeed, several have provided you with evidence of this actually happening. You seem to have learned something from them about the world, though you do not seem interested in revising your beliefs accordingly. That's okay, you're under no obligation to do so. But you remain under obligation to read others charitably. I have done my best to explain what that requires; at this point I don't know how I can make it more clear what you did wrong. So hopefully you've figured it out and can avoid it, next time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Some distinctions: zeroth, you didn't get the job, and you didn't find out until later, and both of those things matter. First, even had you gotten the job, the laptop would not have been the difference between you and "tens of thousands of dollars," but between you and the opportunity to earn tens of thousands of dollars. Options are valuable, but they are not equal in value to the exercise of the option. Second, "only" a twenty is a similar offer, proportionately, to $10,000 to a multi-billionaire--or even a million dollars, if we factor in diminishing returns. So while I do not think it was cheap of you to sacrifice a twenty, I do think it was maybe impolite of you to ask. People are conditioned to refuse rewards for their good deeds. Aesthetically, I would have offered her the twenty; aesthetically, it would still be appropriate for her to turn it down, if she just had no particular need of twenty dollars.
But probably I get most of my aesthetics from fantasy novels and video games.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
How much of a debt do I owe the person who lent me their charger?
Owe? Nothing! In the scenario outlined, there was no offer, and no acceptance; no bargain was struck.
If I were personally made a muti-billionaire in this scenario, and the real alternative was in fact me becoming destitute, I would probably give the cord lender a million bucks as a show of gratitude. Someone who gave the cord lender less than, oh, $10,000 in this scenario I would regard as tastelessly cheap. But I would also regard it as tasteless of the cord lender to anticipate such a reward. In moral or legal judgments, it is appropriate to feel that one is due what one is owed, and that one owes what others are due. But I think aesthetic judgment applies better to scenarios like this one, where no contractual or moral obligations seem to be in play. It is a more beautiful world, where people penny-pinch neither their helpfulness nor their gratitude.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I'd actually be curious if you'd ban gwern for the 2012 comments linked in that thread, btw.
Maybe! But Gwern seems pretty cognizant of context in those comments:
real-time chat cannot and should not be held to the same high standards like, for example, LW posts or comments
Gwern perceived IRC as a sort of "locker room," speech-wise, while Startling disagreed. I wasn't there so I have no opinion as to who was right, beyond a tendency to suspect that it's always a bad idea to bet against Gwern. My guess is that a hypothetical Motte-posting Gwern would express himself a little differently, when posting here.
The SSC subreddit and the Motte are different contexts, too. Has the Motte shifted left? I don't think so, but then I am pretty regularly accused of bearing some personal responsibility for this place shifting right. We're not explicitly conservative, so Conquest's Laws say we will eventually become progressive. But maybe the foundation counts as an explicitly conservative alignment, for such purposes? We've definitely had more mods bail because they found this space insufficiently progressive, than because they found this space insufficiently conservative. On balance, I remain pretty satisfied with this space (when I'm not feeling surprised that it has managed to continue existing for as long as it has!).
But like... if you don't like entryists, you really should stop giving the mod team shit over moderation decisions, ever. We're not perfect, we make mistakes. But even our most progressive moderators are much more committed to the foundation than they are to advancing any particular political narrative.
Yes, it's a metaphor, metaphors are like that. But it seems pretty clear to me that the closer the asymptote of consumption efficiency approaches the hard limits of entropy, the better off we are.
Likewise: it's easy to notice (or Notice) that there are a host of fairly serious problems that civilized discourse has (at least so far) failed to solve. It's harder to notice the ones it has solved, as they are by definition solved and, so, rarely even enter into our consciousness. "Burn it to the ground" is not a solution; at best, it may result in a different set of problems. At worst, well, it potentially only makes things worse.
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