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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36240 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I am not sure how big the contingent of "wants to use slurs" is. Certainly I do not encounter people in my right-leaning spaces wanting to use the n-word. I guess I can think of a few if I try really hard, but I mostly think of examples of them being told to control themselves. Even the f-slur gets exasperated sighs.

Or maybe you are being expansive in your use of slurs. You can get quite a bit of power by declaring other people's arguments off-limits and you can do that by calling them slurs. Twitter banned the "NPC" meme because it was dehumanizing, and reddit banned the word "groomer."

RPG.net is very good at making people uncomfortable, because say the wrong thing and you are dead, and "lol just do not say wrong things" is hard when today's wrong thing was a normal thing five years ago. Was ResetEra running "smoothly" on their old server?

I don’t think it has to be very big. That subset gets to be very loud.

It only takes one “KKKILL_ALL_*******” or fedposter to make a lot of people nope out. Not dealing with that, going to hang out somewhere with fewer witches, etc.

Meanwhile, Twitter and Reddit and the like end up cultivating that image of non-witchiness as they attempt to catch the fleeing users. That means alienating the free speech absolutists, but not the garden-variety authoritarians.

I think "free speech absolutists" are noticeably different from "right-wing posters," even if they feel some common ground these days.

That’s where the evaporative cooling comes in. Trimming off the few most vocal is liable to shift the norms and to discourage others.

So long as the few most vocal are either principled libertarians or lost channers, moderation is going to have a pseudo-leftwards bias.

Here on Motte we’ve seen similar effects. Certain high-profile commenters get banned for being inflammatory, and then a few others announce dissatisfaction, followed by flouncing or suicide-by-mod. I want to say the reasoning is usually “Mod X is a partisan hack.” @HlynkaCG, I’m struggling to remember names, have you got anything?

If you are saying that the reason ResetEra or RPGNet became totally insane is that evaporative cooling drove away everyone not-insane, I agree.

But I do not think you are saying that. I think you are saying "right-wing people really really want to say nigger and then when people get banned for saying that the whole left-wing march starts."

Any place useful, regardless of polarity, needs to keep out

  • fed posters

  • glowies

  • fucking idiots who are genuinely "on our side"

and barrels of ink will be spilled saying, in way more words, "our side has no bad people, they are all plants from the other side, and, man, speaking of the other side, let me tell you about them, did you see their claim that the only people posting hate on their forums are outside wreckers?"

Anyway. All that ink is irrelevant because as far as the place is concerned all three of those groups are identical and the antibodies to keep out one keeps out the others.

What’s a “glowie”?

An FBI plant.

They may or may not exist, but getting rid of people who might-just-as-well-be-glowies is an important skill for any group.

So as far as I can tell, fedposters are plants who plant incriminating "evidence" in fora, while glowies are plants that try to coax the same from the real posters? Is there a strict distinction between the two?

no, they're two different modes of the same basic behavior.

Federal agents have a long history of finding disaffected and dim but otherwise-peaceable people and encouraging them to participate, even minimally, in highly illegal activities of the agents' conception and design, with disastrous results for the individuals and often the rest of their community. Disaffected groups also tend to have a small number of not-terribly-bright people who try to do something, with disastrous results for their community. Whether the person suggesting poorly-concieved, pointless, doomed "direct action" is actually a fed or just fatally stupid is unknowable and largely irrelevant. Either way, treat them like they're radioactive.

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