problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
Recognizing that there's a social process overlaid on top of physical reality doesn't necessitate rejecting that there is an underlying physical reality.
Perhaps I did not make this clear - I'm not saying it necessitates it, per se. I'm referring to instances where "There is a social process overlaid on top of physical reality" and other such rhetoric is used to dismiss discussion about the underlying physical reality (more broadly, it is often used to imply that thinking about race using racial classifications as a heuristic should not be engaged in, which makes meaningful thought or discussion about it impossible).
In any case "race is a social construct" seriously muddies the waters, and is about as insightful as stating that any continuous phenomenon that we try to classify discretely like colour, or time, or temperature, or even something like baldness, is socially constructed because the dividing lines drawn for the purposes of classification are necessarily imposed. The wording they've picked for race specifically completely fails to distinguish between the categories used to classify the phenomenon and the phenomenon itself (the misleading nature of which I think is intentional, since it allows them to motte-and-bailey between the two).
This article has quite a blatant and succinct description of critical theory and its aim.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02691728.2013.782588
"Critical theory rejects as naïve the premise that natural science is a force only for the good, and strongly opposes the positivist separation of fact and value. This opposition leads to a rejection of the positivist conception of science as a mere mirror image of reality, as broken down into elementary observational facts, captured in “protocol sentences” and finally summarised in inductive generalisations expressing regularities in the phenomena. Instead, critical theory advocates a “dialectical” notion of truth, of reality and of social science, with roots in Hegelian metaphysics as mediated by Marx. According to this conception, some of the ostensible “facts” that would be recorded in a purely positivist (i.e. traditional) social science would not be ultimately real but would be mere reifications, anachronistic and repressive aspects of social reality that would call for elimination through political praxis rather than for scientific recording."
"The aim of critical theory is hence not faithful description and inductive generalisation of data, but to be part of, or guide for, a praxis that will serve to eliminate the repressive aspects of social reality. Hence, the truth test is not observational verification, but evidence of the power to inspire successful practice."
Critical theory is not only indistinguishable from praxis (being a framework meant to inspire activism), it also basically endorses lying as long as it results in things which are conceptualised as good under the worldview. Truth has nothing to do with what can be provably verified, truth is anything which will inspire people to become activists for their hypothetical utopia. Rather than basing their goals on facts, the goals come first and said goals subsequently dictate what's true and what's not.
Thanks for the detailed advice. At the moment I have six different possible plans featuring separate parts of China, all of which are still open to very heavy revision:
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Beijing - Datong - Pingyao - Linfen - Xi'an;
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Xi'an - Tianshui - Zhangye - Jiayuguan - Dunhuang (so basically travelling the length of the Hexi Corridor);
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Suzhou - Tongli - Hangzhou - Hongcun - Wuyuan (as a jumping off base for Sanqingshan);
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Chongqing - Chengdu - Leshan - Langzhong - Guangyuan - Xi'an;
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Xiamen - Quanzhou - Tulou - Chaozhou - Kaiping - Macau; and
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Kunming - Dali - Shaxi - Lijiang - Shangri-La.
I'm interested primarily in history + some natural sights (preferably without too many tourists!). Feel free to comment on some of these destinations if you've visited. But I realise that's a lot of items, way too much to individually work through, so I'll only ask questions about the destinations you've specifically mentioned.
Chongqing is definitely a place I'm highly interested in, not just because of the outright strangeness of the city itself but also the Dazu rock carvings outside of it. There are five main locations (Baodingshan, Beishan, Nanshan, Shimenshan and Shizhuanshan) and there's also yet another lesser known complex of rock carvings called the Anyue grottoes relatively close by. I've been wondering if the site is interesting enough to justify spending a night in Dazu just so I can explore all the grottoes at a leisurely pace, or if a day trip from Chongqing to see the main two sites of Baodingshan and Beishan would be a better use of my time. From Chongqing it is about 1.5 hours each way, which is making me wonder just how rushed a day trip would be just using public transport.
With regards to Chongqing itself, what are the main places you would recommend? I know of the famous Hongyadong and Kuixing Building, as well as Shibati, Xiahaoli and the Shancheng footpath. There's some historical/cultural sites such as the Huguang Guild Hall, Luohan Temple and Laojun Cave, which I will certainly visit if I go to Chongqing (Erfo Temple in Hechuan seems to be an easy day trip out too). I also hear about lots of old bomb shelters built during the city's short stint as a wartime capital, which have been converted into public spaces and libraries and restaurants and galleries. Is there anything else I've missed?
Kaifeng is an unexpected recommendation because I haven't heard anybody else speaking about it as a destination in spite of its historical importance (perhaps on the Chinese internet they are). What would you say are the best things to visit in that city? I broadly know about Daxiangguo Temple, Yanqing Taoist Temple, Shanshangan Assembly Hall, Kaibao Si Pagoda, Po Pagoda, Dongda Mosque and so on but they don't seem like enough to fill out an entire week. Would be interested to hear about your itinerary when you were there.
Guizhou's mountain villages are interesting and I've been looking at them for a while but haven't been able to fully narrow down what I want to see. Happy to hear your personal recommendations for the province. Something I keep hearing about a number of these villages (I hear it a lot about the Xijiang Miao Village) is that they're overly Disneylandified and set up for tourists? If possible I'd like to avoid that. Langde, Nanhua and Basha Miao Villages as well as Zhaoxing Dong and Dali Dong Village are some of the ones I'm interested in, I'm wondering if staying in one of those villages for a night is worth it. Fanjingshan is another big destination I am interested in.
Finally, how far north would you say I could go in December before the cold starts to get intolerable? Shanxi province has a lot of ancient Tang and Liao architecture and that makes it very attractive to me, but it's also very far north in China. Just trying to see how much my scope is limited by the climate.
Hope this isn’t too much, feel free to respond to as much or as little as you want.
Well, I've lived in both equatorial Malaysia and subtropical/temperate Australia. Despite growing up around the equator I could never stand the heat and mugginess; my preference is 15-18C, clear skies with some clouds, light breeze. The shoulder seasons in Australia are actually ideal for this.
Personally, I enjoy climates where it doesn't rain often either. Rain is annoying, it stops up infrastructure and makes everything slushy. Petrichor smells like shit too.
problem_redditor
25d ago
Perhaps I'm not prominent enough on this forum for you to have formulated a model of my preferences and/or personality, but now I have the inexplicable urge to ask you what you think my favourite novel is and see how close you actually get.
Sure, and the reason why AI generation in specific is a unique violation of the social ritual is because of an innate, knee-jerk ick people get with AI that they don't with most anything else. It's not down to some evaluation of output quality or even effort invested. There's a distinct reason why the "moat" has been arbitrarily established here and at no other point.
Seconded - I used to play piano, and Arabesque no. 1 was one of my favourite pieces to perform. It's almost unbelievably beautiful.
I can barely listen to recordings of it though, because so many interpretations of the piece play it way too fast.
I'm not saying a better firm is common, but would moving after busy season be something you'd be interested in doing? Using your expertise as a Consultant to make more money and do more varied work?
I've considered it before and think it's a good idea, in fact I've been in the process of remodelling my CV in order to apply to other jobs.
The inertia sometimes does feel a bit overwhelming and there's the fact I do like a good amount of my coworkers, which does make it a bit more difficult to leave, but jumping ship is probably the best option. I don't think I could stay in this role for much longer without hollowing out entirely, and in terms of wages many jobs in the same field offer better salaries than mine currently does, so it's a course of action I certainly can't argue with.
This is a very recent one, but Louis Cole - Life. He's one of my favourite modern jazz fusion artists, and the sax solo towards the second half of the song is absolutely tremendous. The underlying chord progression moves very quickly and isn't a particularly easy pattern to improvise over, yet the sax player almost seems to glide around all these constant key changes. Another great, albeit discordant, version of this from the same album is Bitches.
Oh, also, here's one actually from the 80s - JAGATARA's album The Naked King has some killer sax solos on it. Some good examples from there are the songs Hadaka No Osama (the sax solo in this one goes on forever, just wait for it) and Misaki De Matsuwa.
Also much of what Colin Stetson makes is achieved only with saxophone, so it's technically 100% sax solo, though his output is quite ritualistic, soundtracky and meditative and almost certainly not what you're looking for. It is beautiful music though; it's almost religious in quality.
The primary thing for me personally is that most of it is just being in your ship and watching the world move past. You're not really getting to explore the country you're visiting in any significant way, you're just getting little glimpses of it from the deck while it glides through the water. Though I suppose that is the appeal; to passively see the country without having to put in too much effort of your own - trying to make it through a foreign and unfamiliar place can be rather daunting.
But even that's part of the experience of travel IMO, the ability to get lost in the back alleys of some city or wander the trails of some national park and find all kinds of special hidden things you otherwise wouldn't have seen is a big attraction to me. I've long dreamed about driving west into the Australian outback with no clear plan and no destination in mind and just holing up in towns along the way, though that seems unlikely to materialise in the near future. It's a very stirring idea that lurks somewhere deep in my subconscious for no particular reason. Some nights I get a barely-controllable urge to walk blindly and directionlessly until my legs can't carry me any further.
I do understand why not everyone wants this kind of thing for every holiday though, sometimes the goal is primarily one of relaxation (as valid a reason as any other), so the explanation holds up well. I just think it comes down to the fact that I'm more likely to find things monotonous than your average person.
I think we need to talk about definitions of mind control here before we discuss that.
Don't get me wrong, I certainly do think the ability to exact full control over someone's mind would be significant (and terrifying, both philosophically and practically), but I'm also not sure if I see a clear-cut distinction between something like "I can make you see whatever I please through stimulating your neurons in a predictable way" and mind control. If you have designed a system which can predictably induce certain perceptions in someone's mind, how is that not already a restricted form of mind control?
I'm aware, I'm just being facetious - rather, I'm pointing out that there are a lot of Aphex Twin tracks which are probably not suitable for small children (something which I assume the contents of the links I provided would immediately make clear).
That's one of my favourite artists and is certainly suitable for children. After the RDJ album, I recommend showing them the accompanying EP, Come To Daddy, and the title track's music video.
I don't do these too often because they get extremely boring after a while and I eventually stop putting effort into guessing the word, but here's my attempt at Saturday's Wordle. Couldn't get my formatting to look like yours, but I've done my best:
Wordle 553 4/6
⬛⬛🟩🟨⬛
⬛🟨🟩⬛⬛
🟨⬛🟩⬛🟩
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
My guesses, in chronological order:
Image for proof:
And who set the high bar for the amendments to pass and the very process? Legitimacy is derived only by how things are perceived by the populace. There is no other way for it be derived. If enough people believe the 2020 election was illegitimate then it was. There is no objective measure of legitimacy, other than how people feel about it. There is no outside force than can determine if the people see something as legitimate or not.
Yes, I essentially agree with this. The legitimacy of the Constitution isn't a fluffy subjective thing that can simply differ from person to person. Legitimacy is a phenomenon which is determined by the beliefs of the society as a whole. And in a scenario where people do see the Constitution as illegitimate, I see nothing preventing them from outright drawing up another agreement. It's happened before and can happen again. The fact that people generally have chosen to remain with that system seems to suggest they see merit in it, no?
238km/s is not highly relativistic. Also it would be silly to travel at 99.9% the speed of light when you could travel at 90% for a tiny fraction of the energy and risk and get there less than 10% later. The only reason to do it would be so that less time passes for your travelers -- but if it's a self-repairing box of electronics and robotics, engineered by a galaxy-brain superintelligence, it can probably while away the millions of years without issue. There are no primates on board who are aging, nor even who are consuming energy to maintain.
I'm aware 238 km/s isn't highly relativistic, travelling slightly above that speed just means the probe will spend a painfully large amount of time cruising. And even non-relativistic travel poses issues. For example your probe is going to encounter the harsh radiation environment in space, even if it's not travelling at relativistic speeds (if it is it's much worse). Shielding could be possible if one was willing to add to probe mass, but if it fails to block all of the radiation it's going to be exposed to that for the entirety of the journey. This is fine when your mission duration is short. It's less fine when your mission duration is millions of years and your probe contains lots of delicate electronics that need to work properly.
Self-repair is hypothetically possible, but that requires usable energy and matter, and interstellar and intergalactic space is famously devoid of both of these things. And the longer your mission is, the greater the chance of a critical failure at some point. Even if that chance is small, if you're going to take millions upon millions of years to get there most of your probes might not reach. Travelling slow comes with its own costs and impracticalities.
And yeah, I know every single one of these problems can be solved by invoking [hypothetical future technology], and I'm sure the future will unceremoniously spit in the face of any prediction I make, but I'm not too convinced by any explanation that relies too heavily on handwavium.
And you can send a lot of probes -- depending on how small they can be and how efficient their propulsion is, even a very high loss rate can just be overcome with quantity. Another advantage of not having precious primates on board!
Yes, I agree, even with a high loss rate you could spread your probes as long as there's a nonzero probability of survival. As I said, the idea you posited is not out of the question. Of course, then the Fermi paradox rears its head, since not only are we seeing no sign of alien life from our own galaxy, but also from other galaxies and other galaxy clusters which should hypothetically be able to reach us.
Why would the outpost be dead? Galaxy-brained superintelligences don't seem like likely to be mercurial creatures that might just die off one day from a plague or civil war or something. Once they're established, I assume they're gonna be here till the end of time.
I'm not saying it would be dead, I'm more saying that communicating would be full of latency problems - any information you'd get from it wouldn't be timely at all and would be mostly of little value since it'd be impossible to act on. The point was that for all you know the outpost could be dead and you'd only know 11.4 million years later.
I think humanity is going to let go of our sentimental attachment to meat-based life basically as soon as we have a digital alternative
Personally, I wouldn't do it. Even assuming that you can replicate the phenomenon of consciousness in a non-biological substrate (something that could be the case but that's basically impossible to prove), there's the issue of continuity when you're uploading your brain. Sure, there's another version of myself now, but this is not me and I will not experience the change. I will live and die as meat-based life, and there will not be any "transfer" of consciousness. There will not be any change in my own state except now I possess the knowledge that there is an immortal version of me running around out there.
So this is not because I have any attachment to meat-based life - the benefits of a digital substrate would be very tantalising if I could genuinely transfer myself into it. Rather, I think my experience of being me is so intrinsically linked with my physical body that they basically can't be disconnected from each other. The incentive to digitise my brain kind of starts looking very weak then.
but even if we don't, as you say, presumably your Von Neumann probes could build "human manufactories" on the other side of their voyage, even from digitally reconstituted genomes from our local group, in which case I don't see why they'd be any less "ours" than whatever distant descendants clambered off of a successful million year generation ship after it arrived on the other side of the cosmic ocean.
The issue for me is that you don't actually get to colonise anywhere, nobody leaves, you just make another galaxy cluster full of humans. Maybe this is just an irreconcilable values difference, but I think this solution completely voids the point of the exercise. I don't intrinsically care about creating as many humans as possible and distributing them throughout the galaxy. I care infinitely more about where these humans come from.
Anyway... if I'm right about the trajectory of our species, how much of our light cone do you think we could in principle colonize? That's the interesting question IMO.
Let's assume we can go at, say, 50% light speed (149896.229 km/s). The expansion of the universe is 68 km/s/Mpc, and the value of Mpc that gives us a recession speed of 0.5c (the relevant formula here is 68 x Mpc = 149896.229) is 2204.36 megaparsecs, which translates to roughly 7 billion light years. Everything outside that distance is receding from us faster than that.
It's basically Hubble's law. You can take any speed of travel, divide it by the expansion rate, and find the distance beyond which everything is receding from you faster than your travel speed. There's probably additional complexity created by the aforementioned fact that the Hubble "constant" is not actually constant and is decreasing, but I can't be arsed to factor that in right now.
If one paperclip AI starts with access to a nuclear arsenal, and one starts with access to a drone factory, they are going to start waging war in a drastically different way. And the other AI is basically going to interfere with their methods for human extermination.
I'll grant that this might be the case. But if one paperclip AI's method of extermination is more efficient or more conducive towards achieving the goal than the other, I would expect the AI with the more inefficient method of achieving their goals to shift towards the alternative. Without the problem of drifting goals there's no reason why the AIs would not want to maintain some level of coordination since doing so is conducive to their goals (yeah, they might be two separate agents instead of one now, but there's nothing stopping them from communicating with each other every now and then).
Sure, but even allowing for a stalemate condition where neither is destroyed it still sounds to me like quite a lot of resources and computing power spent trying to one-up each other on the remote chance that the other AI "defects" somehow. Does any slight improvement in security from exterminating the other AI outweigh the benefit to your goal from having two agents working on it? And wait, if its goal can drift, why can't your goal arbitrarily drift too? You're cut from the same cloth, and you're just as much a potential hazard to your current goal as the other AI is. If AI is going to be this unreliable, perhaps having more than one AI with the same goals is actually good for security since there's less reliance on one agent functioning properly the whole way, and the AIs that don't drift can keep the ones that do in check.
All this is to say that engaging in war with the other makes sense to me when another agent's goals are in conflict with yours, not when both of your interests are already aligned and when the other agent could help you achieve what you want.
EDIT: added more
I really don't think this is evidence of leniency at all. Firstly, people were arrested on Jan 6th. I've seen a bunch of complaining about how the number arrested was less than the BLM riots, but I'd like to note that police were overwhelmed. "Since the police at the scene were violently attacked and outnumbered, they had a limited number of officers who could make arrests. 'Approximately 140 police officers were assaulted Jan. 6 at the Capitol, including about 80 U.S. Capitol Police and about 60 from the Metropolitan Police Department,' according to the Department of Justice."
It's necessary to remember that Jan 6th was a one time event, too, whereas BLM rioted for a much longer period and it's reasonable that officers would know better what to expect for the latter which would make them more capable of handling the riots and making arrests on the spot, so the two cannot be directly compared in that way. Still, hundreds of arrests were made in the aftermath of Jan 6th. "More than 855 defendants tied to the attack have been arrested in 'nearly all 50 states and the District of Columbia.'"
If this is the basis for the argument that the left is being politically discriminated against, I have to say I think it's very weak. There are plenty of factors that can influence police response that have nothing to do with sentiment.
General relativity does allow for FTL in the broad sense of "get from A to B faster than light conventionally could" - the Alcubierre metric and wormholes being the most obvious.
Okay now I'm getting into things I'm not too certain on (obviously IANAP), but from what I understand apparent FTL that entails the warping of spacetime is one of these things that we're not 100% sure is impossible but does pose a lot of problems. Apart from the whole "closed timelike curve" problem that these apparent FTL methods seem to create (which, granted, as you noted one can try to resolve through all kinds of difficult-to-verify chronology protection conjectures), there's also the fact that both Alcubierre drives and traversable wormholes alike require unobtainum exotic matter that at best isn't impossible but there's no evidence for its existence and at worst violates an energy condition.
So they're not exactly impossible per se, but there's reasons to believe they probably are.
Nah, the "reachable universe", while not as large as the "observable universe" and slowly shrinking, is bigger than that (it's something along the lines of a billion galaxies IIRC). The Local Group's only the eventual size of the reachable universe, as t -> infinity, not its current size or anywhere close.
Yes, the reachable universe at the moment isn't only the Local Group. However the size of our reachable universe is premised on the assumption that we leave today, and at the speed of light. What's currently in our reachable universe is a very generous estimate as to what we can practically reach.
In retrospect the way I phrased it was probably misleading - the statement that we might be restricted to the Local Group was my extrapolation of what in practice might be our limit, incorporating my own quite pessimistic estimates as to the difficulty of achieving anything close to relativistic speeds (let alone speeds nearing that of light) as well as the difficulty of keeping a crew alive and the ship working when going at these speeds.
Of course, if FTL is real then many estimates for the size of the universe boil down to "time and/or aliens are the limit, not space". 10^10^10^122 makes exponential growth go cry in a corner.
Given the constraints that relativity imposes, this seems like it might be unlikely absent some revolution in our understanding of physics.
EDIT: added more
The case for an inflection point is pretty strong. It’s my understanding that for objects that have already crossed the boundary of the event horizon, no reduction of the distance between us and that object will occur.
Think about it this way: There are objects far enough away from you that they are moving away at a rate that exceeds the speed of light, meaning without FTL travel they will be receding from you faster than you can travel to them. The space between you and any object beyond that horizon will only increase and the further they go, the faster they recede. If you try to reach it in a relativistic colony ship, all that happens is that you’ll be stranded from your original galaxy group and will never reach the new one as your galaxy of origin passes out of your event horizon. Sure, you are closer to the object and further away from your point of origin than you would've counterfactually been, but that does not equate to closing the distance.
problem_redditor
2yr ago
When Progressives Defend Pedophiles: The Curious Case of Sarah Nyberg
In my previous thread about Gamergate where I challenged a speech Ian Danskin made on the topic for UC Merced, I said it would probably be the last thing I would write about the incident for a long while, and this is certainly flouting that.
But this writeup is not about the core issues of Gamergate. Rather, it's to highlight an egregious instance of misconduct from the progressive camp that is far too damning not to write about. It's definitely old news now, but sometimes this stuff needs to be dusted off so it won't languish in some archived page in the asshole of the internet where progressives would undoubtedly rather have it stay.
So who is Sarah Nyberg?
Sarah Nyberg (srhbutts on Twitter) is a trans woman who became a prominent anti-Gamergate figure through constant attacks on Gamergaters on various forums and articles. Included among the things she's participated in is repeatedly dragging 8chan through the dirt over accusations of child porn and for being an "active pedophile network".
However, just 6-10 years before her involvement in anti-GG, Nyberg herself was an open pedophile who actively defended pedophilia, posted borderline CP on the forums of FFShrine (a site she ran), and also actively lusted after her 8 year old cousin, whom she called her little girlfriend (often abbreviated to "lgf"). This hugely came out in the mainstream when a series of videos was made about her by TheLeoPirate, and culminated in an article being made on Breitbart about her... leanings.
The original "slam dunk" evidence against Nyberg came from a series of WebCite archive pages, which came directly from FFShrine. Unfortunately, they can no longer be accessed - there is a reason for this, but I'll address that later. For now, just keep in mind that the primary trove of evidence that was initially used to indict Nyberg is currently missing, but they are online in various forms, in screenshots, videos and so on. Regardless, one can start building an extremely strong case for her pedophilia - and can do so even without the benefit of these sources.
The first part involves proving that the "Sarah" on FFShrine was in fact Sarah Nyberg, and that's a trivial task, since FFShrine was outright registered under her name. In addition, here she is on her main Twitter account, openly admitting to it being her site.
GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over.
Oops.
In addition, Sarah has had more accounts under different names. The email her site was registered under was called retrogradesnowcone.gmail. com, and you can see a user called retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums admitting they run FFShrine. And just to properly cement that retrogradesnowcone is Sarah, here is Sarah on Twitter approvingly posting a Ravishly article with her face in it with the caption "my face is out in the open", and here is a Hotornot profile called retrogradesnowcone with the very same photo of Sarah's face in it. Sarah also shares her pictures under her handle retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums here.
In short, srhbutts on Twitter, Sarah on FFShrine, and retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums are all the same person: Sarah Nyberg.
To begin, let's look at the logs on FFShrine. While the WebCite pages directly archiving the chat logs from FFShrine are not directly accessible anymore, there are images on the internet, taken from there, which are still up. One can also confirm that these WebCite archives contained in that pastebin page were directly archived from 2005 FFShrine logs when combing archive.is for archives of the WebCite pages.
Among the images of the WebCite logs floating around, there are a few which are quite incriminating. Like this one, where Nyberg openly admits to being a pedophile, admits to being attracted to her younger cousin, Dana, calls her her little girlfriend, and states that "let me see Dana and I will get you all the silverware you can eat". Here, Nyberg says again "Dana is my cousin that I miss very much <3" and notes she doesn't know what to tell her cousin's parents to make it not seem weird. Then states she wants to kiss her, although don't worry, she wouldn't unless her cousin wants to learn how to kiss or something. Here, Nyberg confirms that Dana is 8 years old and here, Nyberg admits Dana gives her erections.
In addition to this, a former user of FFShrine, Roph, also uploaded further leaks of FFShrine IRC chats to his own website, slyph. org. Although slyph. org is no longer working, you can download the zip files of these IRC logs once uploaded there at archive links such as this one (warning, the logs will auto-download). Things get even worse here, and here are some of the more incriminating sections of the logs:
In file 2006-12-29.035011.html, Sarah posts a bunch of links to photos on 12chan and asks "how old are they", along with one she calls "cute ^T^". The response from a user called thetruetidus is "below 10 - Sarah ???"
In file 2006-12-30.101829.html, she posts links to online organisations for "girllovers and boylovers", then again posts a bunch of links to photos. Then subsequently says this:
(18:55:54) Sarah: yea i no
(18:55:56) Sarah: there' sa nipple
(18:55:59) Sarah: alert alpott
In file 2006-12-31.015010.html, she posts yet another set of links to photos on 12chan (which, by the way, makes her denunciation of 8chan incredibly hypocritical), then says when linking one of them:
(11:18:27) Sarah: [LINK CENSORED] she looks drugged :(
The response from other users is as such:
(11:19:43) LiquidCruelty: The one where she looks drugged
(11:19:44) Sarah: LiquidCruelty
(11:19:45) LiquidCruelty: that's CP
(11:19:51) LiquidCruelty: I can see underage twat
(11:19:52) ivorynight: ya
(11:19:54) ivorynight: i see some vagin
Sarah's response is to say that "nudity isn't CP, also I can't see anything", and in response LiquidCruelty and ivorynight state "Oh bullcrap" and "well take some vitamins and try harder, I know you went over this with a magnifying glass". In another section from the same file, Sarah states she's 6 on the inside but admits "I just turned 21".
To further confirm the veracity of the logs, there was a period of time where the latest IRC chat lines from FFShrine were embedded on her video game music download site Galbadia Hotel, archive pages of which Roph posted on KotakuInAction. Let's see some of these chat logs (which are direct archives of the page, by the way):
On 2006-01-29, Sarah states "thank heaven for little girls" and expresses concern over the fact she "only sees her lgf a few times a year". When asked when she's seeing her again, she responds "at the very latest I will in summer sometime. my dad wants to go visit her place because he wants to go fishing there and I'd tag along and hopefully convince him to go fairly regularly !" On 2006-03-05, Roph asks her "so who is dana? =o". She responds: "dana's my lgf ^________^ - little girl friend !" It's notable how well the content of the logs embedded here match up with the ones previously mentioned, and the fact that she continuously tries to get close to Dana just to get herself off in secret without informing anyone of what's happening is frankly quite unsettling (and that's not even addressing the posted pictures of children). And just to confirm that the Roph who owned slyph. org and posted the IRC chat logs is indeed the same Roph in the FFShrine IRC chat, here's him linking to slyph. org in the Galbadia Hotel IRC chat lines.
In addition to the evidence from FFShrine and all the related sites, there's also her postings on the Venus Envy Comic forums under the handle retrogradesnowcone. In this thread in the Venus Envy Comic forums on 2006-01-14, Nyberg openly admits "for the record: yes, I am a pedophile. no, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. no, I don't-- I wouldn't ever-- have sex with children. no, I don't look at child porn." Just remember, this is someone who later in the year went on to say "nudity isn't cp" on FFShrine and decided it was perfectly acceptable to post photos of a potentially drugged kid on internet forums - photos which users went on to identify as having "underage twat".
A user named DJ Izumi, in that thread, goes on to post chat logs from elsewhere where Nyberg, again under her retrogradesnowcone handle, talks about her "lgf" and says an array of other questionable things. Such as:
Quote:
[01:20] [LINK CENSORED] > nambla ;-;;
Quote:
[01:27] that site I tried to show you? it's a site for lesbian pedophiles. jftr
Quote:
[01:57] ;-;; this is making me miss my lgf
[01:57] lgf?
[01:57] little girl friend.
Quote:
[03:08] I don't think it's right to do sexual things with a child, not because a child can't consent, but because in the context of society it can really @#%$ them up. in a more sex-positive society I don't think it'd be a problem
Quote:
[03:11] I'm attracted to (usually) about 6 to 12. been attracted to as low as 4 but that's atypical
If further evidence is still required, I'd also note that Nyberg was known as a pedophile as early as 2007, long before Gamergate was a thing. As user ItsGotSugar writes about FFShrine in October of 2007: "Another character [on FFShrine] was Sarah, an administrator who was allegedly a pedophile. (Don't ask me whether "she" was really a girll; it was hard to tell.) I think Sarah had been expressing an unhealthy fixation on children from the very beginning, and I could only hope it was all some disgusting in-joke that had gone on for too long." Similarly, in 2010, 4 years before Gamergate existed, user BasilFSM notes that "You know what the worst thing about this Sarah is? She/He's a known pedophile. That's deplorable in itself."
Furthermore, in this interview with Milo there's this accusation by an anon called "M" accusing Sarah of initiating inappropriate roleplay with her, despite knowing that she was underage, and she would say things like "mommy tickle me where it's wet". And later on in the interview M states that her claims were ignored on Twitter. Keep in mind, this is an unsubstantiated allegation, but it is an unsubstantiated allegation that aligns with what we do know about Sarah. While this alone is not something that the argument of Sarah's inappropriate behaviour can rest on, the contents of all these disparate pieces of evidence align so well with each other that it's honestly quite implausible that all of this has somehow been faked by Gamergate (a common accusation by anti-GGs looking to defend her).
Nyberg herself on Twitter and elsewhere has also made statements that often basically are tantamount to an admission that these logs are hers. Apart from the open admission by srhbutts that "GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over", there's this Twitter thread wherein she tries to defend herself with this response: "View the unedited logs. Everyone behaved in similar ways".
Eventually, Nyberg writes a medium article responding to the whole thing where she never concretely refutes the claims against her, never even claims the evidence against her has been faked, but defends herself by stating that she was "just being an edgelord". She states "Chat logs from an IRC room I was in nearly a decade ago were leaked to gamergate. To say the contents of those logs were not flattering would be putting it lightly. They are, in some ways, much what you’d expect from an early-2000’s chatroom of 4chan expats trying too hard to outdo each other for shock value. Even with that context, much of what I said was gross and disturbing, and I have no interest in defending it. Since then, I’ve learned that intent isn’t magic, and a playground of the taboo isn’t particularly conducive to moral growth. That I’ve grown past the person I was back then is something I am deeply and forever thankful for." She tries to paint it as regrettable teenage edgelord behaviour (she was 21) that she's grown out of, paints the people accusing her of being a pedophile as acting in bad faith, and casts herself as a victim of Gamergate harassment.
So even Nyberg cops to these logs being hers. And it's noticeable how her response to this is the anti-GG version of The Toxic Gossip Train. Even a good portion of the comments on her medium article are incredibly disgusted with how she treats the whole thing, with one stating "I’m sorry but I don’t think you get to just wash your hands of it and claim edgelord status. From the looks of it you were pretty deep into the role. Vieweing, discussing, and distributing child porn. That’s not edgelord that’s criminal." Another states "Pedophilia is a serious accusation. The evidence against you is disturbingly accurate. Your sob story won’t help you." In the same fashion as Miss Ukelele, the point of this post is not to issue an apology, she's essentially trying to trivialise her acts, claim victimhood and scold people into shutting up about her behaviour. It is true that "teenage edgelords" claim extreme views all the time, and sometimes objectionable ones. But what Nyberg did clearly falls far beyond that.
Yet in the light of Nyberg's medium article, the progressive crowd immediately comes out celebrating her and calling her stunning and brave. Here's Leigh Alexander's reaction (yes, that Leigh Alexander) as an example:
Definitely read it.
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643799292067610625
It's amazing how over and over again the women targeted by these nobodies have the grace to make their experience useful to others
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643800965943005184
anyway remember to please respect and support women in your field always, and do not define them by these experiences others created
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643803653082644480
Writer for Houston Press and Cracked Jeff Rouner had a particularly flabbergasting reaction, which was to send Nyberg a photo of his kid wearing her new hoodie to cheer her up. He would later go on to delete this post.
In contrast, other people who knew her from way back when start picking apart her article. Roph notes "Sarah is right in that ffshrine had “edgelords”. I was one, too. I visited 4chan almost daily, used the current hot memes and phrases, joked about stuff. Shared the funny, hot or shocking meme images. Many people there did. Then why does nobody give a damn about any other user in all those logs (which are absolutely genuine, don’t get me started)? Because none of us were paedophiles. An open, proud, adamant, often very defensive paedophile. Defensive of paedophilia. Often justifying it through various arguments. Attempting to normalise it."
Plasmatorture, a former mod on FFShrine, notes "The amount she talked about it and the great lengths she went to convince everyone that she was a suffering martyr for having these feelings she knew she could never act on (supposedly) made it pretty damn clear she wasn't just trolling. That's like 5+ years of playing the long con. No troll has ever had the patience for that." CoryMartin similarly notes "The members of FFShrine and other communities you and your members mixed with (crankeye, kefkastower) didn’t interpret your ongoing demonstrations and admissions of pedophilia as you being an edgelord: they took it as you being an actual pedophile. It was taken as fact, and you had no issues with people knowing it at the time. I believe I was around 14 then, and it certainly creeped me out. Either you’re incredibly inept at comedy to the point where even people who interacted with you casually on a daily basis thought you were serious, or you’re deliberately lying to cover up something about you that most people would find deeply troubling. I think the latter is far more likely."
Now, all of this would just be hearsay if we didn't have the chat logs, as well as Nyberg's own admissions that she did in fact author these logs. However, with these corroborating pieces of information, they become part of an ever-strengthening case against her. Yet despite this evidence, news articles often gave her the Zoe Quinn treatment, painting her as an Oppressed Victim which Nobody Had Any Reason To Be Angry With, such as this article by The Verge that links to Nyberg's genuinely terrible medium article as the only source on the topic and states that she was "subject to one of the biggest and nastiest organized harassment campaigns of Gamergate".
After the initial video and after Nyberg's sordid internet history came to light, anti-Gamergaters started attempting to damage control to an almost incredible degree. One instance of this was when Randi Harper posted lists of Gamergate supporters on public facebook groups. To be charitable, these people publicly associated with Gamergate, so this doesn't constitute doxxing. To be less charitable, part of her stated reasoning for engaging in this behaviour was to "take the attention away" from her pedophile friend Sarah Nyberg. Other anti-GGs, including currently prominent YouTube voices such as Dan Olson of Folding Ideas, were there and openly encouraged this behaviour, with some calling it "noble" of Harper to divert attention away from Nyberg's pedophilic behaviour. All this can be found in Crash Override, the anti-GG chat group Zoe Quinn and others were using to coordinate plans.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:22 AM] Randi Harper: i'm talking to amib in DM.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:29 AM] Randi Harper: all of this is going to take the attention away from sarah.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:32 AM] Dan Olson: and the second biggest #GamerGate Ultras, is fully public.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:37 AM] Randi Harper: i'm going to become GG enemy #1, i'm hoping.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:41 AM] Charloppe: ty for that randi
[04/01/2015, 9:43:48 AM] SF: That's really noble of you.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:48 AM] Charloppe: she needs some peace right now
And:
[04/01/2015, 9:48:38 AM] Athena Hollow: <3
[04/01/2015, 9:48:57 AM] Athena Hollow: They had to fucking SCOUR FOR MONTHS to find the shit on sarah.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:03 AM] Athena Hollow: and got fucking LUCKY on that.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:13 AM] Athena Hollow: fuck them.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:26 AM] Athena Hollow: they joined a goddamn public facebook group. fucking morons.
Notice what Athena Hollow in particular says about this. There's not even a denial of what they found. She only cares that GG got "lucky" by discovering Sarah's pedophilic behaviour and she's angry they could use it as a cudgel against anti-GG in general. This is what an unprincipled tribalist looks like. Imagine being so utterly unscrupulous that you would provide ballast and cover for a pedophile to win internet points against Gamergate.
It gets worse. You know why you can no longer access any of the original WebCite caches that were used to implicate Nyberg? The reason is because of an upstanding citizen called Izzy Galvez, who was another anti-GGer who was also part of Crash Override. In a Twitter thread, he gleefully posted images of him actively working to conceal evidence of Nyberg's pedophilia from the public (archive link here). The images in question demonstrate that he sent emails to WebCite claiming the material was being used for harassment, which resulted in WebCite making the snapshots of her domain unavailable to the public.
Not only did Galvez actively try to conceal information, he also attempted to manufacture misinformation to try and paint the logs as faked. He makes a post on GamerGhazi supposedly providing screenshots that supposedly show that the logs were last edited in 2015, therefore they were were "tampered with by GG" to add pedo material. The screenshots actively redact any identifying information about the site to make it appear that these are from FFShrine, but as this source notes in reality these screenshots came from Roph's backup of the logs in slyph. org, and not actually from the FFshrine website. In other words it "only proves that Roph uploaded files in 2015, NOT that the files were edited in 2015, or that they were created in 2015".
There's plenty of other instances of progressives trying to provide cover and ballast for Nyberg, such as an article by Margaret Pless entitled "5 Reasons Why I Stand with Sarah Nyberg" (which was then fully rebutted by this medium article called "5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Stand with Sarah Nyberg"). But of course, any discussion about Gamergate isn't complete without a discussion of how RationalWiki has covered it.
RationalWiki, as you can imagine, fervently defends Nyberg, courtesy of an obsessive anti-GGer called Ryulong who frequently vandalised the Wikipedia and RationalWiki articles on anything even slightly related to Gamergate, and who was even funded by GamerGhazi after he posted his GoFundMe on there and it was stickied by an admin. Because of Ryulong, RationalWiki is hosting two contradictory (and false) defences of Sarah Nyberg: "Timeline of Gamergate" claims that Nyberg was simply "expressing disgust at pedophilic roleplay" (this is completely unsupported by the link they use to back it up). "List of Gamergate claims", on the other hand, tries to state that, okay, "she made claims of being a pedophile, but she has since said was her and her friends making 4chan-style trolling jokes at each others’ expenses" - a claim that, as you can see by the evidence provided so far, is based on an attempt by Nyberg to misconstrue her own behaviour. A recent (2021) attempt to correct these false claims on RationalWiki by a person called Doris V. Sutherland resulted in the edits being completely reversed by a user called TechPriest, and the argument eventually reached the talk page. Without warning, Doris was then completely banned by the RationalWiki moderators, with the only rationale being "gator sock" - despite the fact that if you read Doris's article she is clearly not in favour of Gamergate.
Doing research on this post made me want to scrub myself with sandpaper, and the fact that this behaviour has been engaged in by a group of people who make claims of having the moral and intellectual high ground is frankly incredible. Unfortunately, most of the incriminating information now resides in heterodox news sources at best, now-defunct blogs and sites that have to be reached through archive links at worst, and as a result this information has pretty much disappeared from the eyes of the public. Most "authoritative" sources and large scale collections of information are strictly policed to make sure that reporting is sufficiently congenial to the progressive viewpoint, and the only thing the public ever hears is a skewed view of the entire affair.
This is, in real time, how history gets written. Once all the dissenters disappear for good, all this stuff will be forgotten, and the only thing left will be a bunch of seemingly authoritative articles that will cause people to harbour a distorted view of how the culture war actually played out.
It's interesting because I've never really had this problem. Every single time I get an idea, I want to make it immediately and to see it in the world even if the task is ridiculously big and completely outside the scope of my capabilities. While it's probably true that many people like the idea of creating but not the actual process of creation itself (and that's understandable since making anything worthwhile is often quite frustrating), I will say that it often gets easier with experience and there's a strange satisfaction to be found in attempting to restlessly optimise every aspect of your creation.
Realistically, I'd also say that enjoying the process is a necessity of being a creator especially considering the amount of grinding and effort and lack of expected payoff that inevitably comes with the territory - I genuinely think it would be an absolutely miserable task without it. Perhaps not everyone can get to a point where they can enjoy it, and that's fine, but it does mean that one might be limited to creating smaller-scale projects or that other endeavours might simply be better suited to their temperament.
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