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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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I'm removing this comment. I am writing this reply but I don't actually know if this reply will still be visible after I remove this comment; I apologize in advance for whatever problems that creates!

The comment I am removing was recognized as uncredited copypasta by users. If the mod team had immediately recognized it as such, we may have removed the comment more quickly, as uncredited copypasta is a form of spam. But we had to verify, and there was some inter-moderator discussion going on.

I remind everyone that while our default position is not to remove comments--and certainly not to censor debate or stifle discussion of difficult topics--some users are not interested in discussion, as Zorba talks about in the latest META post. Sometimes it's hard to know who these users are. Sometimes we make bad calls as moderators. I apologize in advance if that's what I'm doing now.

But I admit, for the moment, that I doubt it. I'm also perma-banning the user for spam at least until such time as I am persuaded that they are not, in fact, just a spammer.

You could have just posted the article and talked about why it’s interesting in the OP

"This will be the first in a five part series on Jewish influence on Austrlian immigration policy."

You can stop at one part, buddy.

Seems like a lot of words to say very little. You needed 1069 words to say Australians wanted to be white untill 1960?

Although I cannot find the link (@2rafa's Google fu is apparently better than mine), this certainly looks like something copypasted from Kevin MacDonald, complete with citations of his own works.

I'll give you an opportunity to convince me otherwise or explain yourself, otherwise you are looking at a ban for bad-faith engagement. (You are allowed to link and quote people, you are not allowed to copy an entire essay from elsewhere and pretend it's yours, just to test for reactions.)

Imo you should delete first and ask questions later, he’s abusing your charity with his alts. He wants eyeballs for far right blogs, and you’re cooperating with a defectbot. I don’t understand why banning SS and hoff is even on the agenda, when this guy is constantly flooding the forum unprompted, and just far far worse.

We will never satisfy everyone, between those who want us to ban first and ask questions later, and those who think we should never ban anyone without absolute proof of wrongdoing.

I don’t understand why banning SS and hoff is even on the agenda

No one has suggested banning Hoff.

I'd likewise prefer to see this thread deleted and the poster banned. Copy-pasting someone else's essays is low-effort by definition, and they're clearly making a habit of it. Leaving the post up gives them a limited win, and I see no benefit to allowing them to see their strategy rewarded.

As always, though, I defer to the judgement of the mods.

I think you should delete the comment, it's a bad look, it takes up space in the thread, and it's a clear troll and a sign that people who violate the rules blatantly and repeatedly can have their trolling stay up.

I thought Hlynka was too trigger happy too (still think he was, most of the time). I don't support bans generally, but this is a clear-cut case.

You asked for proof this entire OP was quoting a blog, you got it. You asked him to explain himself, he didn't. And it appears his other post on peterson was also copy-pasted.

He's used up all the benefit of the doubt he's entitled to. Treat him as guilty and let him appeal if it's some insane coincidence.

You asked for proof this entire OP was quoting a blog, you got it. You asked him to explain himself, he didn't. And it appears his other post on peterson was also copy-pasted.

Dude, give us a minute. I am not going to make a snap decision ten minutes after I post the warning.

link: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/10/01/the-war-on-white-australia-a-case-study-in-the-culture-of-critique-part-1-of-5/

quotes around the entire thing for exact matches are good for trying to find a source for a verbatim sentence

Thanks. I tried the quotes thing but for some reason didn't get that hit.

From my experience working in a job where the use of the quotes feature was vital: Google will randomly and without warning place users into experimental variations of their features as a form of A/B testing. If you get placed in the "Google prioritizes words in quotes" user bucket and not the "Google demands exact string match of words in quote" bucket, your search won't turn up the exact results and you're just out of luck.

I managed to escalate this issue quite high into Google support at one point, and the above was more or less everything they told me. Was quite stressful when I needed the exact match for my job.

Do you not get the option for verbatim mode, or does it not work for you? It's buried in there for me, but if I do a search, I get a little "Tools" button below and to the right of the search bar, and then from there I can switch from "All Results" to "Verbatim", where "Verbatim" actually respects quotes still.

If they're removing even that escape hatch I think it's time for me to find a new search engine.

Admittedly it's been years since my experience with it, but I don't recall that being an option at the time. Could've just missed it though. Thank you for mentioning it, it'll likely help me out in the future.

deleted

Now unlike the above, this is merely "something I read somewhere at some point" and not official, but:

I've read that it's worse than that. They've frequently messed around with search function, and how they evaluate the changes is how many searches a user makes. I.e, if you type in a search, immediately find what you need, and leave Google, that's bad, while you search 4 or 5 times to get Google to finally show what you wanted, that's good.

The A/B testing is specifically trying to make the experience worse for users.

They've frequently messed around with search function, and how they evaluate the changes is how many searches a user makes. I.e, if you type in a search, immediately find what you need, and leave Google, that's bad, while you search 4 or 5 times to get Google to finally show what you wanted, that's good.

I was not in search quality, but that would not match my experience at Google. The idea was to return a useful result, not to keep the user searching.

The only thing I've encountered in this vein lately is that their bot-detection algorithm seems to interpret "many searches for slightly different search terms in rapid-ish succession" as bot behaviour, resulting in a captcha -- which kind of adds insult to injury when one is trying to nudge the algo to stop serving an infinite selection of (bot-generated?) obvious clickfarm results as the first page...

Good to know, and I'll take your word for it over random-poster-on-other-forum.

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Just copy-pasting articles from Kevin MacDonald's blog in 2018 (Google said it might originally have been from a site called 'Expel The Parasite' although it was reposted by the 'Occidental Observer'), or anyone really (especially without attribution) isn't acceptable on this board, sorry. I suggest that you take your ban and, instead of making another alt this time, think carefully about how you might actually contribute to this forum in future.