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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   29576 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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Some months ago, someone on Twitter said the following:

The decentralization of the internet liberated heterodox info to the public but Libs are right: there is enormous danger of misinformation and disinformation.

That's the kind of middle-of-the-road statement that, two or three years ago, I would have associated with Right-wing rationalists. People called out the media and the establishment when it was wrong while also being open and honest about the Right's flaws. While that tendency still exists in places like DSL and here, I've found it's becoming rarer and rarer, with those espousing it increasingly likely to be told they aren't welcome. This parallels a wider tendency in American politics: the rise of the so-called "Tech Right." People like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Shaun Maguire. Richard Hanania initially hoped they would infuse the Right with needed level-headedness, after all, such people were urban, socially moderate, and didn't have chips on their shoulders about class. This has largely not happened. You could hardly imagine Musk, Andreessen, or Maguire saying anything like the above statement. Their attitude parallels that of the Right as a whole - "misinformation" is just a left-wing smear and there's no downside at all to every random person with a two-digit IQ having a social media megaphone. Musk did push back on the tariffs, (perhaps because his business interests were being harmed) but you could never imagine him saying "libs are right" about anything. Even when he's broken with Trump, he hasn't reflected on the barren epistemological environment that led to Liberation Day, instead doubling down on conspiratorial Epstein stuff. To get a reasonable, moderate perspective, you have to follow the kind of people who march around with tiki torches and scream "Jews will not replace us!" That's not much of an exaggeration; the statement that libs were right about misinformation came from Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville goon march.

  • -25

This is the last straw, Alex.

Barely a day ago, @Amadan gave you some rather clear operational advice, with his mod hat on:

There is a problem here, and the problem is you.

The problem, specifically, is that you post a lot of these kinds of sneering borderline kinda-making-a-point-but-mostly-just-sneering comments, and increasingly people are getting frustrated and angry and snapping at you, and then we have to mod those people (because you are not allowed to attack someone) and it's starting to look very much like this is your game.

Sometimes we ban someone not because any one post was terrible but because their overall effect on the community is so negative that there seems little value in allowing them to keep throwing shit. We don't like to do it; it's very subjective. We can't read your mind. Maybe you really are sincere about everything you say, you believe you are making good, valid points, and your manner of expressing yourself is just so off-putting and against the grain here that it drives people crazy. But we've warned you enough, and you keep doing exactly the same thing, that I suspect you know what you're doing and you're doing it on purpose.

So I'm telling you now: stop it. Or I will propose to the rest of the mods that you should be banned under our catch-all egregiously obnoxious category.

He said it well, I can't say it any better. Our (very weak, if it even exists at all) Affirmative Action policy for left-wing trolling is, shall we say, not up to the task of tolerating this any longer.

Quoting a tweet that "someone made on Twitter" without attribution or source is a... choice. If it was made with the intent of rules-lawyering our BLR guidelines, by not submitting a link at all, it was made poorly.

That's a minor quibble at the end of the day. You have been repeatedly warned to behave yourself, and you've clearly annoyed both the commentariat and us mods well past the point of being justifiable on merit. You are being egregiously obnoxious, and show no signs of stopping. We tolerate more from those who give the forum more. You're not there, quite the opposite.

Banned for a month. Consider this provisional, since the other mods are asleep and I've asked them for their opinions regarding a duration. Me? I'm open to the idea of a permaban.

Edit: I've elected to cut down the ban to 2 weeks since two respected commenters are willing to speak up on Turok's behalf. Hopefully he gets the message.

I think that a month is much too much, given how many right-wingers here get away regularly with breaking the rules and the ethos of trying to bring light instead of heat. Which I'm not blaming the mods for, given how much content there is to mod, but it's a matter of proportionality. I think a week would be fair. Giving him a month just feeds into the narrative that critics of the right are being persecuted here for being critics of the right, instead of just being modded when they are snarky and so on.

I like Amadan's comment a lot, I think it's one of the best mod comments I've ever read on any forum and is very fair, but I think that "Maybe you really are sincere about everything you say, you believe you are making good, valid points, and your manner of expressing yourself is just so off-putting and against the grain here that it drives people crazy." is not really a good reason to mod people, since people really shouldn't be blamed for writing things that are "so against the grain here that it drives people crazy", which can apply to all sorts of good comments. You can mod him for being repetitively unnecessarily inflammatory, same as various right-wingers are modded for that. If you ban AlexanderTurok for writing things that drive people crazy, you should also give WhiningCoil another ban for the same reason.

I think that a month is much too much, given how many right-wingers here get away regularly with breaking the rules and the ethos of trying to bring light instead of heat. Which I'm not blaming the mods for, given how much content there is to mod, but it's a matter of proportionality. I think a week would be fair. Giving him a month just feeds into the narrative that critics of the right are being persecuted here for being critics of the right, instead of just being modded when they are snarky and so on.

I have no particularly strong opinion on the ideal ban duration here. I'd be open to anything from a week to a perma ban. I did say it was provisional, and I'm happy to change it to a different value once the other mods chime in. If the others think a week is more appropriate, I can change the duration retroactively to make it so.

What concerns me, quite immensely, is that Turok has shown no particular signs of being corrigible. Even after multiple warnings from other mods, I can't make out any difference in behavior. Other people who have been banned usually learn to knock it off. If they don't, they earn a PB. For such people, gradual escalation from warnings to short bans to longer bans usually works! For people who don't seem to give a damn? I'm inclined to reach for the gun.

You can mod him for being repetitively unnecessarily inflammatory, same as various right-wingers are modded for that. If you ban AlexanderTurok for writing things that drive people crazy, you should also give WhiningCoil another ban for the same reason.

WC was just modded by Nara for his comment calling black orphans a "virulent invasive species". He wasn't banned, and did manage to come up with a semi-reasonable explanation for that choice of phrasing. You can review the mod log for details.

We didn't ban him for it, but that was absolutely a formal warning, and will be taken into account should he do so again. I'm not going to go into detail about our internal mod discussions, which happen to include concerns about our neutrality in enforcing moderation decisions as well as community sentiment, but rest assured that bans are very much on the table. Just not today.

I would like to chime in in Turok's defense- as someone who does not agree with him very much- that he has slightly improved. I agree with goodguy- he is obnoxious but a month is too long.

Very well, since the two of you did speak up for him, I'm going to knock it down to 2 weeks. It'll only get worse if he doesn't get better.

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