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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30718 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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I stumbled upon your forum

This is completely off topic, but whenever we get a newcomer I'm always intrigued, since we don't advertise too much (at all). How did you end up finding us?

We should ask the pseudo-communist. He was genuine. How did you find us, @MillardJMelnyk?

I‘ll also note that the harsh moderation pushed him away (He‘s also obviously been downvoted for disagreement, but I‘m just wasting my time complaining about this, and it‘s not the main factor).

I‘ll also note that the harsh moderation pushed him away

The Motte is a debate site and he wasn’t remotely interested in debate. At best, he was interested in, “accept all of my assertions and let’s discuss the implications” but prefaced that with insults and demands. He was quite clear in his last message that he regards talking to 99% of people as a waste of time and his usual MO was to turn up, start an argument, and listen for anything interesting in the shouting.

Oddly, the poster he reminds me most of is Hlynka. Hlynka employed the same refrain of ‘oh, I can’t tell you, you can only choose to see it for yourselves’ and by his own admission thought of himself as a shepherd nobly taking it upon themselves to lead us poor lost sheep to the true way.

Well, if he‘s really not interested in debate, let him leave, don‘t ban him(or threaten to ban him). Call it keeping the moral high ground. I don‘t see anything wrong with ‚starting an argument‘.

But bottom line, I think millard or hlynka are reasonable people, who should not be banned for their overconfident tone.

Well, if he‘s really not interested in debate, let him leave, don‘t ban him(or threaten to ban him). Call it keeping the moral high ground

I don't see how not enforcing against blatant rule violations is keeping the moral high ground. The rules are right there on the right sidebar, and he refused to follow the ones around things like speaking clearly or being no more obnoxious than necessary or proactively providing evidence, despite being given ample opportunity to do so. Letting the forum be polluted with the type of content that the forum was specifically set up to prevent seems to be immoral, if anything, in making the forum worse for the rest of the users who use this forum because of the types of discussion that is fostered by those rules being enforced (though I'd argue that there's no real moral dimension to it regardless). I don't know if Millard is a reasonable person, but he certainly did not post reasonable comments and, more importantly, posted comments that broke the forum's rules in a pretty central way.

Those rules are so vague they can apply to anyone. And when you‘re facing a hostile community, they apply to you.

The ‚they‘re obviously not interested in debate‘ talking point is an absurd, but very common justification for censoriousness. Just dumping the responsibility for one‘s negatively- coded actions onto the victim. Here or on reddit, you hear that every time an OP doesn‘t cave immediately to the social consensus. To the stake with OP! He „has been given ample opportunity“ [to repent].

Maybe I started this off on the wrong foot. I too miss hlynka. I was on the mod team when his problems started, and none of us wanted to have to kick him. I think his case makes it clear that this is not an inevitable consequence of bucking the local consensus, because he would post the same ideas sometimes productively and sometimes unproductively. He also didnt claim to be treated unfairly, and often the opposite. This makes a lot of sense given his general approach, and I dont like you claiming it on his behalf

I have no ideological affinity to hlynka, quite the contrary, since he was once the most pro-censorship of all the mods of this place, and I think they should ease up on it.

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The ‚they‘re obviously not interested in debate‘ talking point is an absurd, but very common justification for censoriousness

It may be petty, but I made one of the very few comments to engage with his claims without going into unsaid implications/communism generally, and he didnt respond.

Im pretty sure I do understand what hes asking for and didnt make a bigger response because its largely pointless, and he really wasnt very clear about what he wanted. The top level was just enough for me to be unsure, and I had to read quite a few of his responses to know, and hes being condescending to everyone for not knowing it right away. I still wouldnt ban someone for one thread like this, and he wasnt: he was warned and then self-deported.

That‘s not evidence of anything. He had like 50 responses, he can‘t be expected to respond to all.

How interesting the discussion he was trying to have is, is really beside the point.

If you threaten to shoot me and I leave I did not ‚self-deport‘ of my own free will. If you threaten to put me in jail and I cop a plea I did not willingly go to jail. The man was bargaining in the shadow of the law.

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Those rules are so vague they can apply to anyone. And when you‘re facing a hostile community, they apply to you.

I don't think those rules are that vague, except by stretching what "vague" means to such an extent that all rules everywhere can be declared "so vague they can apply to anyone." If you don't think that his comments were pretty obviously unkind and failing to make reasonably clear and plain points, on top of making extreme claims without proactively providing evidence, then I don't take your judgment seriously.

The ‚they‘re obviously not interested in debate‘ talking point is an absurd, but very common justification for censoriousness.

I don't care if he was or wasn't interested in debate. What matters is that he was posting text that wasn't conducive to, and actually quite deleterious to, debate.

Right, I disagree that "his comments were pretty obviously unkind and failing to make reasonably clear and plain points, on top of making extreme claims without proactively providing evidence" and 'deleterious to debate'. So at least take out the 'obviously's and 'blatant's.

Else I'd have to report an "attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity." (illustrating the point about the rules applying to whoever we choose).

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Nine times out of ten, they are not a "newcomer."

User has been banned. Username made obvious troll obvious.

Gotta admit, I didn't read much past the first line, just saw that Southkraut responded.

The username was fairly damning and I don't disagree with the ban on that basis, but was the post in itself objectionable?

No, the post itself was innocuous if rather banal, which is why it got out of the new user filter. I did a double take when I saw the username and realized it was either a new or returning troll.

This topic interests me greatly, but I doubt I have much to add.

I'm someone who seek outs kind environments. I come from a small village where everyone knew everyone, lived in a nearby small town where people are already almost entirely anonymous to each other, spent a few years in a much larger town in which I was pretty much a rootless atomized cosmopolitan when not on campus or at work, and eventually returned home to the village. My wife would like for us to move to her home village, but it's 10x the size of mine and people there are already much more closed-off than here. I now work at the largest company in the region (thousands of employees), and it has an aggressively kind culture in which you are required to use familiar second-person pronouns (a language feature comparable to calling someone by their first name in English) and everyone, without exception, greets everyone else.

So here are some random thoughts I take away from all that:

  • Even in the big-town apartment block, you can socialize and form fragile, tenuous but productive bonds with people you see semi-regularly. Immediate neighbors, gas station attendants, that guy you regularly see in the elevator, the fruit seller at his market stand, roommates of course. It takes effort and isn't as rewarding as in less urban settings, but it's still better than giving up and retrating into the mode of "cool guy who never interacts with anyone".
  • Socializing in the tiny village is so easy it does itself. Take the kid to the playground, meet other parents, bam. Walk out the door, greet your neighbor, have a chat. Go to the festival. Go to church. Work your garden. Talk to the neighbor. Fiddle with your car or bike, someone will come over and ask what you're up to and whether you need any help.
  • I have the social skills and graces you'd expect from an autistic German software engineer, but I do make every effort to be polite if not friendly with everyone I meet regardless of the setting. I feel it pays off immensely - for any one person who's put off by the directness or lack of isolation, there are at least two others who are glad to be able to skip the whole "let us dance around each other so that our bubbles may never intersect" anti-social game.
  • True urbanites aren't human. They don't return the politest of nods, in any setting in which normal people would share their observations of the situation you can bet your balls they'll pull out their phones put on their earbuds and ignore the hell out of the world, and if you ever are forced to interact with them have fun trying to establish so much as eye contact. Young people love this lifestyle because they're all damaged beyond repair by their all-encompassing doomscrolling addictions.
  • The top-down imposition of kind norms at the company I work at seems to have worked. There are some holdouts who refuse to use the familiar address with the top brass, and I can understand that it may feel forced if you've been used to the previous culture for decades, but overall it has a very open and humane atmosphere and I had no trouble assimilating within mere weeks.
  • Foreigners suck. The more foreigners there are in the area, the worse the norms get. Having a Pole, a Balkanian, a Russian, an Ukrainian, an Italian and a Frisian in the village is harmless. I wager we might even be able to absorb an additional Turk and perhaps something more exotic. This does not disturb social cohesion very much, because even if those people arrived relatively recently and aren't as deeply rooted here and still maintain connections to their countries of origin, you can at least seamlessly integrate them into the daily goings-on so long as they speak the language. But as soon as there are two foreign families of the same ethnic background, you've lost. It's over. They are now their own parallel community, will maintain their separate identity, will raise their children to speak their language, and will strongly prefer interacting with each other over interacting with the natives. Scale it up, see even just the larger villages with their Russian or Turkish enclaves, look at the towns with their Muslim quarters and nascent African ghettoes, and see how young people gravitate towards "migrantisch" culture once the Leitkultur is no more, and you can tell what the future looks like. The future is someone with sunglasses on, headphones over their ears and a smartphone in his hand, walking past everyone he meets in the street, forever.

Okay, so now let's speculate.

Can you engineer people to be more kind? I'd say yes, but there are some conditions that must be met and doing so may be very difficult.

  • You need a high level of preexisting social trust. I'm not sure whether this can be synthesized.
  • You need a high level of ethnic homogeneity, or else you just get parallel societies.
  • The social norms czar needs sufficient authority to order everyone to maintain eye contact, greet each other, use familiar forms of address and mandate other forms of highly accessible social interaction.
  • Profit. Everyone sees their quality of life skyrocket as a consequence.

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