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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35437 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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This seems to be a troll. It's a new poster, whose first post is a top-level post, about a topic that Sneerclub loves to hate us for, using the terminology "HBD" which indicates familiarity with us, "asking questions" in a way designed to get charitable responses that can be quoted out of context.

The response which says "I am as racist and White supremacist as any can be", also from a new poster, seems to be the troll's ally. Come on, guys. Do you think anyone who actually had such opinions would come out and say it like that, knowing how people would react?

(Edit: Misread the posting history, they are not new posters.)

We can now see that the incessant fears of “AEO” and “Sneerclub trolls” were always just ways to shut down discussion of certain topics. There is literally nothing to worry about now that we’re no longer on reddit but the accusations haven’t stopped

Reddit consequence weren’t necessarily the driving factor. I mean, they probably were for mods, but for normal users?

This is a community for engaging in good faith. If one suspects that a post is not doing so, I think it’s reasonable to avoid giving that poster what they’d want, even if it’s not a material benefit. Sure, a troll won’t get people reddit-banned. They can still waste time and effort, as well as souring other users’ impressions of the forum.

Compare, for example, the JB debacle. Once I got the impression that he wasn’t posting to discuss, but to advertise, there wasn’t much reason to give reasoned engagement. I think it was actually justified to call him out on this bad faith, since I was was interested in saving other users the trouble—and in keeping him from “getting away with it.”

For this case, the OP is probably acting in good faith, and my first impression may have been wrong. I’ve edited my responses to jTiro accordingly.

JB was unusually irritating and uninteresting though, which are worse crimes in my book than trolling that looks kind of like interesting posting.

Well, that was part of the debate. The response to JB-posting was inversely proportional to how many of his previous posts one had seen.

He was also very quick to use those few who were engaging as proof that the critics were hidebound reactionaries, rather than just irritated/uninterested. That sort of cover is part of what rude call outs aim to avoid.

Why do you care what SneerClub thinks? They can't get you Reddit banned anymore, Jiro. We're not on Reddit. It's time to let the fear go. Let the trauma heal.

I am not a troll. I am sincerely a racist, and I am and always have been comfortable admitting that. A black person can be great, but I genuinely hate black people -- their community is rife with crime, abuse, poverty, single motherhood, intellectual oblivion. It sincerely infuriates me to know how much time, money, and effort is wasted on trying to make blacks be something else, a repeated experiment that's been failing for longer than any of us have been alive in bringing the Promethean flame of civilization to something feral. And every time it fails, my people are blamed, even though we had literally nothing to do with it.

But I'm kind. I don't need vengeance. I will settle for my country putting the shovel down. It's time to stop digging the hole.

I'm not a troll. I've been in the rationalist world for almost a decade.

Do we avoid talk like this? What was the point of leaving reddit, then? Should we self censor based on some fringe loons who hate read us? If someone wants to paint an awful picture of us, they already can.

Tell me why I'm so wrong and crazy, then. That's the point of the post

You are correct, I misread your posting history. You do seem to have been around long enough to have heard of HBD and to legitimately want to post about it.

(The actual answer to the question is something like "the value of HBD is that it's a defense--a disparity cannot be assumed to have been caused by discrimination.")

Because I don’t like giving trolls what they want, including status or attention for pet projects.

For what it’s worth, @Minotaur has been pretty consistent about that stance. I think you’re underestimating how much some people enjoy saying edgy things out loud.

Buuuuuuut I’m kind of inclined to agree that the OP reads like bait, regardless of their actual intentions.

You misunderstand me. I'm not an edgelord; I am not thrilling in violating norms and being scandalous. I am rejecting the validity of those norms entirely. They are illegitimate norms. They come from a platform that is fundamentally hostile to what I know to be good and just and right.

I don't want you or anyone else to gasp in horror or think I'm some tough guy, online or offline. I would be quite delighted if the things I said were rightly taken as what they are: absolutely nothing special, eminently reasonable, and sympathetic.

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