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Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore. It makes sense. The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China. The unemployment rate is only low because these people are so dispirited that they've given up looking for work. We need to drastically remake our economy to help these unfortunates, who are incapable of helping themselves. This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans. They see whites like people have long seen the American Indians, a "noble" race who ought to "own" the country but who are ill-equipped to deal with the evils of modernity that more advanced peoples have introduced like liquor or fentanyl.[1] But where this worldview makes some sense in the case of the Indians, it is utterly nonsensical to apply it to whites, who all the statistics show have higher incomes, higher IQs, higher educational attainment, and lower unemployment. Even opioid overdose deaths, initially a "white" issue, are now highest for blacks and American Indians, as with most social problems. (Whites do die at higher rates than Hispanics or Asians.) Labor force participation rates have indeed declined, mostly because there are more students and retirees. 89.2% of men aged 25-54 are in the labor force, a figure that is likely higher for whites, and the 11% who aren't include students, prisoners, stay-at-home dads, and those who can't work because of legit disabilities.
The Online Right has often been compared to the woke left. The woke black looks at his race, disproportionately poor, uneducated, and working low-skill jobs, and demands affirmative action so that more blacks can work in medicine, law, business, and politics. The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain. Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?
Now, you may be asking, "what about the real unemployed drug addicts?" For one, this is a disproportionately non-white group. One study found that blacks are 3.5 times more likely to ever be homeless in their lifetimes than whites, while Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely. Still, while not as common as some of you think, they do exist. Tariffs aren't going to help them. Law enforcement, drug treatment, mental health care, and legalizing SROs might, though the real issue is that these people need to help themselves. If I believed, as many of you profess to, that my race was at risk of going extinct, I wouldn't be centering my politics around helping the least capable members of said race who refuse to help themselves. Don't you have bigger problems? It's not like you should feel any "political" loyalty to them, Trump's working-class base work, homeless people rarely vote.
Congratulations! You’ve advanced from lazy, uncharitable snarling at your enemies to. Uh. Marginally higher-effort snarling at the same people.
It doesn’t look like you are arguing to understand anything. It looks more like you’re picking fights. This is an immense pain in the ass and against various rules.
One week ban.
Terrible ban. We get stuff posted here of a similar level of snarling, but pointed at the left, and it regularly doesn't catch these types of bans.
Which of his statements was actually even worthy of the ban here?
I answered you already downthread, but since you've spun into multiple sub-arguments with different people about your grievances with various posters, how we handled Darwin (unfairly, disproportionately, and with great bias, according to you), and alleged personal attacks against you that we have refused to mod, I have a few points to make in addition to those I made here.
First, regarding Darwin aka @guesswho.
Have you noticed, perchance, that @guesswho is not banned? During his last pass, he earned a bunch of warnings, one tempban, and an AAQC. Hardly indicative of unfair treatment, for all that many of our users (and, being honest, half the mods) hated him.
I didn't hate him. I found him annoying and disingenuous, but I agree with you that to some degree, the hatred of Darwin was excessive and ideologically motivated (he was one of the most persistent and antagonistic leftist posters willing to argue a leftist position down to the ground).
But you know what? I also totally understand why he drove so many people absolutely bugfuck crazy. Because that was more or less his entire reason d'être. He had mastered the art of poking people in the eye until they'd rage back at him. I don't think he was a literal troll - i.e., someone engaging in a performance just to piss people off, without really believing the things he argued. I think he really believed the things he argued but I think he argued for the joy of it, the joy of "conquering" his enemies (i.e., driving them bugfuck crazy with his tactics) and he wasn't particularly interested in, you know, accuracy or sincerity or ingenuousness. "Owning the righties" was his game and he played it with prejudice.
You know who drove him away?
Me.
The thread you were already linked to, about J.K. fucking Rowling. Here you go again. The one where I finally lost it with him. But I "lost it," not by going bugfuck crazy, but by deciding I was going to nail his feet to the ground, pound on each and every one of his arguments, and drill him until he either stood and delivered or ran.
Guess what he did?
Been a year, and we're still waiting for him to get to it "in his queue."
But he's still not banned! He can starting posting again whenever he wants. And while I'm sure if he did, a lot of people (including me) might say "So, about that JK Rowling thread?" - most likely he'd waffle and dismiss it, and go back to his old ways forthwith.
Your thesis that "Darwin was ganged up on and mistreated just because he was a leftist" is mostly bullshit. Sorry.
(@Tree's claim that we bent and made up rules just to go after Darwin is thus 100% bullshit.)
Now about all these other threads you point to as examples of us "Letting righties be mean and not modding them."
@gattsuru has a ton of AAQCs. That gives him a very long leash. This is by design and it's not secret - people who generate a ton of quality comments get away with more. That said, every comment you've linked to as an example of personal attacks? Being aggressive in interrogating you is not a "personal attack." I say this as somone who has been the target of @gattsuru's interrogations more than once and who can hardly be considered a fan of him or his tactics. He's a dedicated hater and I'm on his hatelist. No bias here. Worth noting that at one point we pretty much did issue a "Stop using this particular tactic" rule regarding throwing walls of links to every single past conversation every time someone he hated posted something, because it was obnoxious and degrading to the discourse (and we got some flack and resentment over it). And I mention this, not to continue to persecute @gattsuru (hey buddy, at least I guess we can have civilized conversations about which SF authors suck) but because you think we make up or bend rules just to prosecute our ideological biases, when in fact, if we bend or make up rules at all, it's because someone is being particularly and uniquely obnoxious (a point I already made about @AlexanderTurok) and it's not ideological bias at all, we do it to people who are being particularly obnoxious.
You (and @Tree, and a couple of other people) hammer this argument that we are absolutely seeing for the very first time (that was sarcasm), that the Motte picks on leftists and they get unfairly dogpiled until they get banned, and meanwhile we let MAGAs get away with anything. We've been hearing it since the Motte began. You've all read my "if I had a nickel..." speech about a dozen times now. Because yes, kids, the righties, especially certain categories of righties (the ones who really like talking about Jews, bitches, and fucking children - that's a gerund, not an adjective) insist that we're all ZOG-converged tools or something. Or, from the saner but still angry right wing, that we let leftists in general get away with more. That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned even as the mod queue is being flooded with people demanding we ban them. We especially hear it when we ban a rightie for, you know, being particularly and especially obnoxious, whatever his particular hobby horse (even if it's just "hating leftists").
The point of this long screed (besides letting me get some mod frustration off my chest - man, does it get annoying hearing the same tired accusations over and over and fucking over again)? Make a new argument. But not really- you don't have one. None of this is new. Instead- accept that this is how moderation works here, it's by design, and you can nudge us incrementally towards being harsher or laxer with the general feedback that is the overall pattern of complaints and reports, but playing "Why did you mod Johnny and not Suzy?" for the hundredth time is not going to move us. Insisting "You take sides (against my side)" for the hundredth time is not going to move us.
You're wrong. You are observably, factually, and empirically wrong. I say this because I see the mod queue. I say this because I have a pretty good memory of the Motte and its moderation going all the way back to before I became a mod (I wonder if even @naraburns remembers that I was once on the "You're cruising for a banning" list). I say this because I am part of the mod discussions we have. I say this because I have a pretty good mental model of my fellow mods, and of our most prominent posters. Not flawless, I am not perfect and I can sometimes misunderstand people (and I am saying nothing here about the quality of my own arguments - there's a reason my handful of AAQCs are mostly for writing about hobbydrama-type posts), but I have a reputation for having the best spidey sense when it comes to alts and trolls. I could tell you stories, many more stories. A lot of the misapprehension people have about modding is because you really don't see... the stuff you never see. Not your fault.
But a lot of it is because you're just wrong.
@AlexanderTurok got banned because he has been regularly and intentionally obnoxious for weeks now and he's already been warned. Not because we hate his opinions. Not because he's a leftist. (Or a rightist or a whatever-he-calls-himself playing the part of a leftist who claims not to be one.) The one-week ban, specifically, was @netstack's call. I might have only warned him. Or I might have given him three days. Another mod might have actually let it go. We didn't actually discuss this one internally (we do not discuss every ban). But it didn't happen because of ideological biases or unfairness or the Motte hating lefty posters. (A particularly ironic accusation to throw at @netstack, who is the only mod arguably more lefty than me.) It happened because Turok likes to rattle cages and frame arguments in a maximally uncharitable and inflammatory way calculated to be ragebait. He thinks this is entertaining, and if he keeps it up, his next ban will be longer.
To be fair, I don't think Alexander is particularly left or right (I think he's probably somewhere in the spectrum of liberal to centre-right). What he is, is extremely hung up on class and status. He's obsessed with what he deems to be low-class/underclass behaviour (especially around women's sexuality as baby mamas) and hence why he always brings it back to abortion as the social climbing panacea (keep the underclass from breeding more underclass, keep aspirant working class to lower middle class types from falling back down the ladder by not letting them become single teen moms). He wants marriage and family and the rest of it, but on the proper timeline of "get educated, get a job, get married and have the appropriate number of kids, avoid sleeping around as a teen, avoid sleeping around like a ho in general, and if you do get pregnant without planning it, get an abortion so you don't ruin your life and more importantly your social status as nascent middle class". Thus his grudge with the pro-life right, because we want the sluts to keep their bastards who will then leech off the state for life (putting words into his mouth there, but that's the impression I strongly get of how he feels about it). If we were truly responsible right-wingers holding conservative values, we'd be all for discreet abortion to maintain decorum and enforce social conformity around correct behaviour.
I believe that he wants everyone, eventually, to end up as what we currently regard as the peak of society: high-ranking engineers, accountants, screenwriters, what have you. In short, he wants everybody, or at least as many people as possible, to climb the ladder and become Elite Human Capital (in his eyes). He would like the entirety of America to one day look like Manhattan, and feels that his political enemies want the entirety of America to one day look like Bumfuck, Alabama (or Brazil).
Where he and I differ is probably that I don't think this is possible or desirable - lots of non-EHC jobs need to be done, it's best for them to be done locally, and you cannot convert non-borderline-EHC into EHC, although you can certainly wreck EHC with drugs or bad political systems.
I certainly get that impression from him, and I also (where I may well be doing him a disservice since I know Sweet Fanny Adams about his background) get the impression that he's on a lower rung of the ladder, aspiring to a higher rung, and resenting the hell out of the fact that he may be confused with the low-lifes one rung below him.
That's the reason I made the Hyacinth Bucket comparison: Hyacinth plainly comes from a background that is working class/teetering on the edge of lower middle class. She made it firmly into lower middle class territory, then clawed her way by sheer force of will into middle middle class land (and is dragging Richard along with her) and aspires, rather pathetically, to the upper middle class reaches that will always be barred to her. She's terrified of her lower middle class roots being discovered and held against her, in the company she now aspires to, or even worse - to be identified by them as such after all her work to climb out of that level.
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I don’t think this is true, but I suppose it’s rather hard to prove.
There’s no particular statement that crossed the line, but if I had to point to the biggest red flag, I’d blame the scare quotes.
But he's not accusing anyone specifically of believing the things he's pillorying? He's not claiming all Republicans believe what he said. At worst, maybe you could say his mention of the "Online Right" was overbroad, but the way he capitalized it meant it was different than "anyone online who is right wing". Is the issue that you think no single Republican thinks these things? If that's the case I'm 100% certain you're incorrect.
I don't understand how the use of quotation marks in general would be worthy of a ban, or what you mean by "scare quotes". E.g. writing HBD as "HBD" probably just means he thinks it's a euphemism that he doesn't really agree with, but he's using it here for the sake of clarity as that's what it's often referred to. None of his other use of quotation marks seem bad either.
This seems like a ban based on vibes alone. Here's a post from a year ago that came from a right-wing that IMO is far worse, and yet it didn't get a ban or even a warning. Here's another post that I also think is pretty bad, but is actually classified as an AAQC!
At least to me, the problem is that it's very unclear who he means, where he gets these ideas from, and how to even productively engage with all this. KMC's post is very specific, he cites specific things that a certain person has said and then makes conclusions that at least reasonably follow from those. Even if you disagree, you can argue quite well with that. Gattsuru is especially careful to link a lot so again, this makes it easy for me to check everything up and engage at specific points.
Turok's post here claims there is a "new narrative on the online right" (from whom? where?), which is mostly the near-opposite of the things I usually hear from broadly self-identifying rightists (as far as I can see, they usually argue that immigrants suck due to crime and welfare, and that if the native populations then has to do the shitty jobs themselves, so be it). Likewise, in the last paragraph, he directly addresses the reader, claims that "many here" believe certain things (again who? in which post?) and admonishes them.
For me, there is not much except to say that while I agree that it sounds stupid, I've not particularly heard of this new narrative, and that the positions he ascribes to "many here" is actually somewhat rare (though certainly not zero, so much I agree with). And most of his post nowadays are like this. Just undirected sneering about people he dislikes. If anything, it would be better if he cited the specific people saying these things.
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Another way of saying vibes" is "tone." Yes, we moderate based on vibes. It's not quite that fuzzy- we try to follow the rubrics we've developed over the years- but yes, when someone is being an obnoxious trolling shitstirrer, and has been posting obnoxious trolling shitstirring threads for a while that so far have been just barely this side of acceptable discourse, eventually we're going to say "Enough, knock it off." @AlexanderTurok has been there for a while, and he's been warned repeatedly. He just got a 1-day slap on the wrist, and so promptly writes a post absolutely dripping with sneering condescension.
You know what my least favorite category of bitching about modding is?
"Waaah, you modded Johnny but you didn't mod Suzy, obviously you love Suzy more!"
Playing this kind of game is never productive. Every one of us mods has explained, many times, that while we try to be more or less consistent, we do indeed mod based on "vibes" to some extent, and a lot of those vibes are "How obnoxious is this particular person being right now?" "How annoying has this particular person been recently?" and "Does this particular person have a long record of AAQCs, or a long record of being warned to knock it off?" There is also a lot of subjectivity in whether a particular word or phrase strikes this mod on this day as being over the line.
(Also worth noting that sometimes someone is filling the mod queue with reports, and he'll eventually get banned for one of them. Unless you're absolutely sure that the person you're complaining about didn't get a ban around the same time for some other post, don't assume that whatever post you're linking to is an example of "Mods thoughts this was okay.")
Pretty clear violation of the rule cited by netstack two posts upthread. One week ban.
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I also disagree with the ban, but I do understand the frustration.
We have a history on TheMotte of people who show up and intone in a solemn voice, "I'd like to play a game..." At which point they begin constructing an elaborate series of arguments and hypotheticals that are high on word count but light on content, the aims of which are never entirely clear. And when people point out that it seems like they're being evasive about their own genuine beliefs, and they're not being entirely forthcoming about their intentions, they respond with "oh don't mind me, I'm but a humble explorer of political thought-space, my only aim here is to educate..."
For obvious reasons, interacting with these people is very obnoxious, and their threads generate more heat than light. So tolerance for these characters is low. And Turok, while not one of the more extreme examples, does pattern match to this sort of archetype.
Here’s an idea: Just fucking take it. Argue whatever the hypothetical is. Or don’t. But don’t censor. You are among friends here, right-winger. You don’t need to use the mods to crush your political opposition. You have your numbers, your downvotes (Turok is consistently downvoted even for neutral comments, which btw already censors him). This burning hatred for any left-of center commenter is embarassing.
Legit question, how does getting downvoted censor him? The sorting method on here is by newest, not by top rated.
new accounts and accounts with low net upvotes are autofiltered, and have to be manually fished out of the filter by the mods. I think Turok has gotten enough upvotes to get him out of the autofilter ghetto. Calling this "censorship" is a stretch; it delays discussion until the posts are approved, but we approve anything that isn't obviously spam or egregiously rule-breaking; it just takes a couple hours for a mod to get around to it.
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Downvoting can get people stuck in a filter making his posts invisible until the mods manually approve them. OTOH it's also possible to permanently get out of it with enough upvotes (and there was a "charity drive" to do so, where I did my part by upvoting like 5 pages of his posts).
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Unfortunate feedback loop gets generated that the most obnoxiously combative are most likely to stick around, until you get Turoks that everyone hates and provide no positive comments, and after that point anyone even vaguely associated gets tarred with the same brush.
Extremely difficult to undo at this stage.
Let’s say there was a flipped left-wing version of the motte, same policies and everything. Most commenters downvoting/arguing for the ban of seemingly “antagonistic, bad faith” left-wingers like Turok and Darwin would not survive there.
Why wouldn't they survive? Would they succumb to the temptation to be vitriolic and disingenuous too easily, too?
ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr comes to mind. While he gets a little hot under the collar sometimes, certainly I won't cast the first stone for someone getting frustrated, he's never been such a slimeball as Darwin or seethingly hateful as Turok. I think it's quite easy to avoid the particular issues those two represent; it's that the kinds of leftist-progressive types that aren't exceedingly combative don't enjoy playing defense all the time.
The Schism exists back on reddit, the policies are only slightly stricter than here, it's derived from the same Scott-reading social milieu, and it has all of ten regular commenters, in a good month. It has one regular troll now on a yearly cycle of suspensions. Whatever makes The Motte appealing to most of the people here doesn't seem to exist to the left of the motte.
I think it's the arguing! When you have a site that is all "so we do all agree that purple is better than brown" on some topic, then there's not much left to discuss about purple and brown, so there's not much point in hanging around for the fiftieth post on how great purple is. I think TheSchism was a charitable project and even a good idea, but I also think it was mostly Trace's pet project and now that he seems to be busier elsewhere then there's not as much input and not as much drive to get people engaged and recruited.
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I said that I disagreed with the ban (suspension, really, not even a ban).
I have repeatedly argued for "affirmative action" for left-of-center posters here. I think they should explicitly be given more leeway before mods dole out punishments, because their viewpoints are underrepresented.
Personally if I was a mod I'd take a pretty hands-off approach. Permabans essentially never, suspensions only rarely. And I would not have suspended Turok for anything he's posted so far.
I think 1) left wing posters should be given more leash but also 2) Turok’s seething 2005 leftist contempt has used it up.
Seething contempt is fine if it’s expressed politely, which Turok has done imo.
I think his problem is that he doesn't and won't come out and say explicitly what the hell it is that he really believes, his own 95 Theses if you will. This makes it very difficult to argue with him, since anything he may have posted that you want to dig into, he comes back with "that's not what I think so you're wrong".
I don't mind a bit of the ould sneering contempt, I can dish that out myself, but I do want to know what precisely the sneering is about.
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Amen to that. I wanted to express that I do not "understand the frustration". This isn't a therapy session, your feelings aren't valid.
Well feelings are always important. They aren't always "valid", if "valid" means, they should be unconditionally affirmed, or that a person's interpretation of their own feelings is always correct. But they're certainly always important -- as symptoms, as signposts, as signifiers. There's no accurate model of any interpersonal interaction that excludes feelings.
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I'm not saying what you're saying doesn't exist, but I haven't really noticed it that much on this site. Maybe my radar just isn't attuned to that sort of thing. Can you point me to some examples you think demonstrate that? The best example I could think of this is Curtis Yarvin whose prose is meandering and often difficult to parse, but he doesn't post publicly on this site that I know of.
I don't see how Turok would really pattern-match to that sort of problem in this specific post.
Mostly trolls whose names I've forgotten. That guy who keeps making alt accounts here to post WN articles and then delete them is kinda like that.
Apparently darwin was kinda like that, although I never interacted with darwin personally.
He's a nazi who pretends to be inoffensive braindead left and gets banned for ban evasion, he's nothing like Turok.
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People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
The guy who deletes his posts was weird but I don't really think he fits this mold either. His posts were mostly short -- I don't recall him really gesturing at anything particularly bad, but maybe I'm misremembering.
Nah, Darwin drove me nuts because he explicitly stated that sometimes he just posted something that he didn't believe simply in order to start a row (and as Amadan pointed out, that often got people banned for responding). How do you have any kind of productive discussion if the other party is "ha ha, you honestly thought I was serious about that? man, what a maroon!"
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It seems to me that people hated Darwin because he worked tirelessly to lower the quality of discussion in the forum. He did this through a pattern of behavior that was so unique that it made his alts recognizable to people who'd actually tried to argue with him in the past.
The discussion linked above has a number of examples and detailed analysis about his iconic method of argumentation and how or how not to approach it, but the TL;DR is that he routinely presented arguments that he would routinely present arguments through implication and indirection, and then refuse to respond to engagement since he was only presenting an argument, not his argument, thus granting himself license to ignore any counter-arguments or evidence that went against what appeared to be his claims. As a rule, he argued to win, treated the space as a battlefield to be won, refused to speak plainly and absolutely would not extend charity or good faith to those arguing with him. He was also one of the best rules-lawyers I have encountered, and was an absolute artist for riding the line. I learned much from him, and believe others should have as well.
Unfortunately, his personal style of absolute certainty and total inability to admit doubt or error interacted poorly with reality, and he fatally beclowned himself somewhere around the Floyd era.
People, usually Blues, occasionally bring him up as an example of the quality posters we've lost. I challenge those posters to present some examples of his quality posting. We have in fact lost a lot of high-quality Blues over the years. Darwin was not one of them.
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All your complaints just lost 90% of their credibility with this one sentence.
Do you have an actual point here?
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I was there, and he was definitely banned for his political opinions. It's obvious because :
he was the most progressive commenter
he was a capable debater
he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.
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Hard disagree. Darwin had a particular style of bad faith in the way he argued his left-wing positions that made left-wing arguments appear dishonest and manipulative, and that's why I personally was glad he didn't come to this site and stopped interacting with GuessWho once GuessWho revealed that he was Darwin2500 from Reddit.
Do you have a clear example of this? Because every time I saw people get into heated arguments with him and accused him of "bad faith" or being "manipulative", it was mostly just the two sides not understanding each others' positions. I didn't follow him super closely so maybe there are some clear counterexamples, but I have a somewhat strong bias towards the null hypothesis that people just didn't like him because they disagreed with him, so they claimed he was "bad faith". Every time someone has accused me of being bad faith on this site, it's been exactly that: a stronger, somewhat more intellectual way of saying "I disagree with you".
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If I ask you for examples, are you going to point desperate ones by different posters that happened to get away with it, or ones coming from the same posters in a consistent fashion?
The statement "happened to get away with it" seems like it's doing a lot of work here. My entire point is the right-leaning posters seem to "get away with it" quite regularly in ways that functionally give them a different set of rules.
And my argument is that they're not functionally the same. Any right-winger acting like him would be instabanned, he was actually given a lot of leeway.
You're trying to claim that all the instances of different people occasionally being assholes somehow add up, if they come from the same ideological background.
Extremely not true. I've had many discussions with MAGA folks here that degenerate to them doing little more than making a series of personal attacks, I report it, and then nothing happens. Making personal attacks against other people here is far worse than vaguely shaking one's fist at broad political movements, which was what AlexanderTurok did here. Again, I ask as to what exactly was the banworthy part of his post? What specific sentences were the issue that if uttered by right-leaning people ought to similarly catch a warning or a ban in the moderators' eyes?
I actually agree with you about personal attacks being worse, even as a singular instance, so I'm willing to agree the mods could've dropped the ball there. It doesn't make what I say untrue, though, let alone "extremely". You'd have to find an example of a specific person being able to do that over over for this argument to work.
What are you talking about? Moderation never worked on a "specific sentences get you banned" basis, it was always about whether the post as whole, or even the posting history as a whole, is breaking the rules.
I have a laundry list of bad interactions with MAGA aligned people on this forum, but I can't really supply evidence of any specific poster being bad over and over again since I typically just block them if they're sufficiently bad even once. The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue, and not just one or two bad apples that slip through the cracks.
This type of vibes-based moderation is just a glaring invitation for mods to be arbitrary. At the very least there should be a sentence or two that should be close-enough to breaking the rules that it can be cited as the issue, and then the rest of the post's tone can be used as context for whether to pull the trigger. Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.
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Eh, I understand why you had to do it. But man I wish we had more liberals/libertarians posting here. Mister Turok is pretty salty but still. A boy can dream.
I'm suddenly struggling to find a proper term to describe posters like Turok - I understand that, presumably, there's a plethora of posters on the Motte that would identify as left-leaning that don't act in the way Turok and others like him do, but I can't quite find a good way to describe them.
Anyways, the point I'm trying to make - in my experience, posters like him tend to flame out badly when they interact with forums that are neutral and/or lightly-conservative-leaning. It's far from a Motte-only problem.
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I would have preferred to keep him to make the whole "Elite Human Capital" thing ridiculous by his presence, but at this point it's something of a dead horse.
I never quite got that. What is "Elite Human Capital" about?
In short terms (based on my experience), I'd say something like "Blue Tribers who like the movie Idiocracy for being 'so true,'" or "racist Progressives who've figured out they hate Red Tribe 'fellow whites' more than they do blacks or browns."
The first time I ever encountered the term, it was in a Substack essay by a "former white nationalist" who pretty much fit that second description — the moment he got out of his diverse, coastal, urban, Blue Tribe bubble into the >90% white "flyover country" and met his "fellow whites" of the Red Tribe, suddenly he wasn't a "white nationalist" anymore. The essay also went on about how "progressive" his politics were, how they were solidly in the tradition of past progressives like Galton and Sanger, and how eugenics are really the most progressive thing (I'd say he's not wrong about that), and that his "project" to "fix" our politics is about reclaiming "solidly Anglo" progressive eugenics from it's "unfair" association with Nazi Germany. (Meanwhile, I noted that his list of past pro-eugenics "Anglo" progressives that started with Galton included the rather non-Anglo Wernher von Braun.)
Basically, this is one of the places where I agreed with Hlynka, that there's a lot of these sorts who are supposedly on the "far-right." (My primary disagreement with him was always that he held being a "principled loser" as the essence of "the Right," and thus pronounced all atheists — and anyone else who disbelieves in "a future state of rewards and punishments" after death — as automatically and inherently Leftists, and thus The Enemy.)
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It seems to be code for ‘the aesthetics of 2000’s democrats’.
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Some people are better than others. Elite Human Capital is just the stock at the top of the hierarchy.
That seems to be the face-value meaning of the term, but I have a feeling that there's a meme on the Motte that goes by the "Elite Human Capital" name.
It gets thrown around by goblinoids like Richard Hanania to explain why they viscerally hate regular people and instead offer unlimited, unjustified consideration for people with proper credentials, in spite of their decades of total incompetence and failure. It's a sad effort by the untalented to ingratiate themselves into the popular kids table, even as the popular kids are having their lives fall apart.
Exampli gratia and exemplar.
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The basic idea is that you need intelligent high-agency people to win / get anything done, and so movements should try to appeal to such people rather than alienate them.
I don't even think the basic idea is wrong per-se, but the people putting it forward tend to insist, in a childish Joffrey Baratheoneque way, that they are the Elite Human Capital that needs to be appealed to, and so you must do their bidding, They also seem unaware that even if they were accepted as such, it would come with it's share of duties and responsibilities to their followers. I'd also quibble about the appeal / alienate thing, because the EHCs are very anxious about their status, and can be arm-twisted to do your movement's bidding.
This is it right here. If you have to tell people that you're "elite human capital," you ain't elite human capital.
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Sure, but most of us aren't filtering that through 7000 levels of irony and then getting butthurt about it being perceived as pointlessly-hostile nonsense.
The problem is that [too much acknowledgement of] HBD is just as destructive to classical liberalism as it is to progressivism for reasons that should be obvious- once you start treating HBD as prescriptive rather than descriptive then there's no reason to be anything but a hardcore turbo-trad. If your political philosophy suggests society should maximize its "gain" from realizing HBD is true and immediately go full Apartheid, then you prevent those with [the characteristic that predicts poor performance] but perform well anyway from properly developing[1].
This is OK for traditionalist societies in which one Knows Their Place(tm)[2], but there's only one way to compromise such that differences are sanded down over time, and that's by giving them more freedom then their characteristics suggest in the chance that, when members of that group beat the average, we enable both a eugenic effect and more effective suggestion that the HBD-disadvantaged group better assimilates. (Whether those things have worked is an exercise for the reader- I assert that they have, that what is left at the bottom probably can't be fixed, and that it is unfortunate that they look that way but our ruthless market system will pay them what they're worth backstopped by our infinite greed above all other moral principles.)
Since the entire conceit of liberalism is that good performers who are worthy of unrestricted freedom shouldn't be held back by bad performers who are not[3] (and those negative consequences of excess freedom correctly fall on the virtueless, which is the fundamental problem trads and progs have with liberalism since charity for those people isn't mandated), we can understand it, but we can't really do anything about it other than offer our velvet glove before we give 'em the iron fist.
That does mean HBD predicts those most likely to get the iron fist are going to be [characteristic predicting poor performance], which means we can have the potential blind spot of confusing [characteristic predicting poor performance] with [poor performance], and the fact we know that means we're vulnerable to the bad-faith rent-seeking my outgroup defines itself by having the right to do because Muh Oppression or whatever.
[1] And now you know why otherwise high-potential modern teenagers and early twentysomethings are so fucked up- arresting development like this has serious group-level long-term consequences, but we pretend it's OK because "at least it's not HBD".
[2] Knowing One's Place is not unique to Traditionalists; after all, Progressives have the same stack vocabulary, they just put themselves on top of it axiomatically, where with the Traditionalists they at least have the notion (albeit as unenforceable as the liberal claim that charity will fix the problems) that those on top are to perform like they're at the top.
[3] And note that liberalism doesn't inherently conflict with HBD categories from being imposed; you can still have a liberal slave-owning society, or one with limited franchise for certain groups, and nearly every place with a tradition of liberalism has been this way at some point. This is another weakness liberals have to progressives, since progressives will argue using liberal aesthetic but will destroy all protections for high performers in the process if left unchecked.
Yeah I must admit this is a pretty scathing indictment of the whole 'liberal' project. Alas.
Well, you can have that, or you have the traditionalist/progressive projects which are just unironic rewrites of Harrison Bergeron (the only difference between the two is the hair color and name of the antagonist).
(And that story itself is basically just a modernization of Cain's justification for killing Abel.)
Nah, there's a middle ground. "Trad with liberal characteristics" or whatever, where you acknowledge that some people are gonna do what they want and have it mostly work out for them, and encourage them to do it in isolated enclaves like SF, while still discouraging it in the general case.
What we instead got is this monstrous inversion where our successful people generally act conservative in their personal lives while encouraging self-destructive libertinism and emotional disregulation in the rest of the population. This helps those individuals, by hamstringing their competition, but it is virulently anti-social.
Indeed; and while invoking Cain and Abel may flatter my personal biases, there's another one right next to it that very certainly does not: you can perhaps view [those humans given to be] traditionalists as Adam, progressives as Eve, and liberals as the Snake (and the sexes in that story are that way for good reason).
The liberals lie to the progressives so they'd take accept something that was too advanced for them and [that the liberal knew] the only reason they [progressive] wanted it was to be turbo-selfish with it.
The progressives in turn lie to the traditionalists, saying the thing was perfectly fine and good for everyone, don't think about it, just enjoy it.
And now everything's fucked up because beings that weren't supposed to have to deal with knowing [thing] now just have to deal with the consequences of knowing you can do [thing].
That, combined with the separation from God that comes from not being perfect with it, is how the knowledge from the fruit kills you!
Actually, both the Garden of Eden and Cain vs. Abel contrapose when read this way, but then the difference between the snake and Abel was that Abel acted faithfully and the snake faithlessly (and the siren call of the liberal t'was ever thus: did God truly say?)
It's strange that I've never heard anyone explain this in this way. Or maybe not, considering it's quite embarrassing, and especially to those "closer" to the fault (though there is ultimately no degree of "closer" in sin, and the traditionalists are too busy abusing it to shit-talk the progressives anyway in the "hurr Eve ate it first that means I'm better" sense anyway).
And maybe it's wrong, maybe I'm reading too hard into these... but if you're trying to explain how human nature and sin works to a prehistoric people then I'd say it describes the major players/impulses/excuses of the classes of humankind very well.
Of course, it doesn't say what each should do in response; the fact people can be bucketed this way is [and quite importantly] not part of the curse, but "the people more ready to accept 'did God truly say?'-type questions when they're posed in faith will instead desire and be ruled over by that class of people who are not so willing, and they will not be willing because they're cursed with having to work for a living until they die" sure is!
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To give the traditionalists their due, Cain WAS the bad guy in that story.
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Liberalism (meaning, not socialism and not hard right) is the dominant position here, and pretty much everywhere else too. Libertarianism is also popular here.
You were probably looking for a term like “progressive” or “woke” instead of “liberal”.
Interesting. Maybe? Idk I don't know that liberalism is the default view around here. Perhaps 'liberalism if they agree that Christian values are the correct values for their individual flourishing.'
"Liberalism in the way it was meant 200 years ago" is pretty common here, and yes Christian values are part of that because they're significant rootstock of the project.
"Liberalism as used by David French to describe Ketanji Brown Jackson" is not, and is unrelated to the first definition, despite being more common in the common discourse.
Alas! Language evolves.
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