naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
Nice to see you outside the Morlock tunnels!
I think one reason we get so much interest in being expanded to a "reddit alternative" is specifically because people want to have a discussion website that isn't hopelessly overrun by ads, AI, and low-effort engagement. The closest thing I'm aware of is StackExchange, but the focus there seems to be clear answers on particular topics rather than discussion (and also for some reason the whole design of that space just seems cluttered to me). Also they are apparently mostly existing to reap profits from AI now? I'm not a coder, y'all probably know more about this than I do.
Anyway my point is that one thing to seriously consider from the outset is organizational structure. Where the data is hosted and who controls it is something that will always matter. Right now the site is functionally a sole proprietorship run on an open codebase (to the best of my understanding) and I think everyone is basically fine with that--as the saying goes, Julius Caesar was a much beloved tyrant. But expanding the community might open you up to publicity that could be easier to navigate if the Motte was e.g. a full-fledged 501(c)(3) with a board of trustees and an explicit mission.
Another thing to seriously consider, on my view, is images. Maybe don't host/display them? Ever, or beyond avatars or something? Many of us can remember the rise and... slump?... of Imgur, which basically came into existence because reddit did such a terrible job handling that sort of thing, but then realized it had a business interest in not sending the bulk of its low-effort engagement off to a different website. If the goal of the Motte is not specifically profit, then someone finding a way to profit from hosting images for the Motte does not represent a threat (the way it did to reddit), but rather an opportunity.
I also think that the CW thread was a great innovation as a pressure valve for the old SSC sub and it would be good to have genuinely non-political subs that could say "hey, here's a link to the irradiated zone if you want to peddle that shit." Defining the CW and clearly cordoning CW communities (but for real, not in the "we just ban rightoid/leftoid causes" way) would be a vast improvement.
But broadly speaking, I am in favor of the site developing in this direction.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10d ago
I’m 42. It wasn’t always like this.
William Baumol (yes, that Baumol) coined the term "pink collar" in 1967. The category referred to teaching, nursing, secretarial and social work--the kind of work disproportionately done by women. You might not have noticed it 30 years ago (and certainly you would have seen less obesity and fewer tattoos) but the basic dynamic has been in place for decades at least.
I would suggest that these people are not so much miserable as they are irritated by the presence of patients. In most medical practice today, the patient is not the one paying the (lion's share of the) bill. And if you are not the one paying the bill, you are not the customer. A really good day for most medical office workers is one in which a large number of cancellations or no-shows allows them to spend the day scrolling their phone (or, a touch less cynically, getting a lot of insurance billing paperwork done because there are no humans distracting them with questions or, worse, complaints). They get paid the same either way.
And the office workers you're talking about were probably not attracted to "this field" so much as to a flexible-hours, prestige-adjacent job with air conditioning and low physical demand. Ideal conditions for parents of young children, of course, but also not a terrible compromise position for childless individuals who would prefer to not be working at all but aren't in a financial position to actually take that route.
Did he mean this as criticism of the Holocaust industry?
I don't think so. It's rarely publicly acknowledged for various culture war reasons, but there is a lot of anti-Semitism baked into black culture in America, not least because we know that individual Jews were often the people profiting handsomely from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Thomas seems to have wanted to defuse that animosity, and as a black Jewish philosopher he was a plausible figure for the attempt. The thesis of the book, if I may be forgiven some significant oversimplification of his argument, is that tragedies are incommensurable and we're better off acknowledging them on their own terms than trying to rank them (or each other).
naraburns
nihil supernum
18d ago
The "victimization crisis" is just unfounded Bulverism
Is it, though?
Peggy McIntosh's 1989 essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" is one of the most culturally influential reframings of victimhood in history. That same, year, Kimberle Crenshaw coined the use of "intersectionality" in a law review article (PDF warning) to make claims like
As a result, Black women--the class of employees which, because of its intersectionality, is best able to challenge all forms of discrimination--are essentially isolated and often required to fend for themselves.
By 1993, the phrase "oppression Olympics" was in sufficiently wide use that it was referenced by feminists in terms of something to be avoided in favor of coalition building:
There are various forms of working together. A coalition is one, a network is another, an alliance is yet another. ... But the general idea is no competition of hierarchies should prevail. No Oppression Olympics!
And that same year (1993), black Jewish philosopher Laurence Mordekhai Thomas published Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust, in which he (from the publisher's description) "denounces efforts to place the suffering of one group above the other." So it seems like people have definitely been noticing this approach to "victimization" for a while now.
I have written often and extensively on leftist identitarianism, and one of the things I've written on most frequently in this space is the emergence of right-wing identitarianism as a mistake made by ostensibly conservative people trying to use the weapons of the enemy and thus becoming the very thing they swore to destroy.
I would actually argue that there are some interesting features of normative ethical reasoning that explain "victim mentality," namely that we often do have genuinely good reason to prioritize those who are "worst off" (see Rawls or, you know, any medical triage process) and this incentivizes people to either disingenuously cast themselves as the "worst off," or to genuinely come to see themselves as the "worst off" even when that's not really a reasonable position to hold. So I don't think it's a new attitude, but I do think that in the last three or four decades we have granted a shocking degree of deference and, through it, political power to irrational individual claims concerning just how badly-off people actually are.
I think you can draw a direct causal line from there to, for example, here: "Universities from Harvard to Hampshire have admitted significantly more students with disabilities over the last decade, as diagnoses for A.D.H.D. and anxiety increase." "I did poorly because I didn't get the right accommodations, not becuase I never do the reading" has become the bane of many a college professor's pedagogical efforts, and it is just one small example of an observable trend.
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
Can you imagine the courts doing "interest balancing" on whether the government can restrict your speech?
Yes: "time, place, and manner" restrictions on speech are exactly this. I don't point this out to disagree with your substantially correct point that the Court is much less deferential to the Second Amendment than to the First, and frankly I don't think they're nearly deferential enough to the First. But they do engage in "interest balancing" on basically all issues. There is a reason Iustitia wields a balance scale.
This all sounds basically correct, I think (I haven't really studied "business associations" since I was a law student, though). Provided you're up for taking some individually-directed heat (and I have no reason to think you're not up for this) then by all means: be our beloved tyrant! It just seemed like an option worth mentioning.
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