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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   36797 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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What is the response that the US government will have toward Russia if (when?) they deploy nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict?

What's the response other European countries, or NATO will have?

It seems more and more likely that Russia will be facing a choice between capitulation on Ukraine or further escalation, and I personally think its rather likely some kind of nuclear bomb will be detonated somewhere in the next year or two. Would the western response be different if it was the lowest form of escalation, i.e. a "demonstration explosion" over some unoccupied area of Ukraine? Is the response to get serious about forcing Ukraine to negotiate a peace, even if that means giving up territory?

I don't think reciprocal nuclear escalation is really on the table (nor would I want it to be), but what can the US/NATO do in that situation? Clearly there is a plan, I just wonder what it is, if it differs from what was "communicated to the highest levels of the Kremlin" by US, and what you all think it should be.

Personally, I wonder if in that situation, whether there really are any downside to escalating, not on the nuclear front, but on a "special forces boots in Russia decapitation strike" front. Or even a public, US government sanctioned/sponsored bounty on the heads of Putin et al.

obligatory substack article that first got me thinking about this: https://policytensor.substack.com/p/a-nuclear-zugzwang

They (some e.g. former US commander of European provinces) claim they'd to start hitting them with conventional weapons everywhere and destroy all their units in Ukraine, that's counting Crimea too.

That is, a real war would start. I'm not sure about that. By most accounts Russians have killed at least fifty thousand Ukrainians troops so far, if they nuke several thousand would that change anything? Russia is not losing this war, the stakes are too high, so it's going to keep going on. They cannot afford to give up.

Americans must surely know this. We've seen America talk about red lines and then do nothing repeatedly, so what's crossing one more red line for a desperate state ?

US should also be aware that it's far less in american interest to fight a war over Ukraine than it is in Russia's interests. Completely lopsided importance.

And in any case, even a real air war and some cross-border raids by NATO would not be very impressive to the mayfly attention span of cosmopolitan consumers.

The strategic air defense network they have is expected to require weeks to months of reducing till bombing can proceed in earnest with conventional assets. Unconventional assets (stealth) are rather scarce and whether they're truly stealthy to a peer adversary is a rather open question..

Also, escalation wise,it's not clear at all whether China would let Russia lose; they have a very serious interest in not acquiring any more unfriendly nations on its borders, which would be the result of 'decolonising' of Russia.

Arms shipments by the world's biggest industrial power or even 'volunteer' units could make a lot of difference. After all, why should only Ukraine have large volunteer formations? There's a rather amusing precedent for China there.

Russians has a more attractive option of evening out the odds though - closing the skies, destroying all satellites by launching kinetic anti-satellite weapons at their own satellites or just releasing lots of crap in a reverse orbit. That'd prevent Americans from tattling to Ukrainians locations of objects of strategic interests, and make any subsequent war against the hegemony that much easier, as American military uses satellites more than anyone else.

Wouldn't kill a person, no pesky radiation, and will negate most of US advantages in this and the upcoming Taiwan war. Also it's going to make astronomers happy because it'd kill Starlink too and a decades long pause in space launches would mean they won't have to stop being lazy and start designing huge orbital telescopes.

decades long pause in space launches would mean they won't have to stop being lazy and start designing huge orbital telescopes.

What does this mean, was there an accidental double negative here?

Nope. People don't like change that much and going from building huge ground telescopes to building satellites is quite a change.

A lot of vendors are going to be angry they won't make the transition, etc.

There's probably some amount of resistance.

Russia is not losing this war, the stakes are too high, so it’s going to keep going on. They cannot afford to give up

What exactly are the stakes? What exactly would happen to Russia that would be so intolerable if they did give up and just went home? Would it really be so bad?

Ok, try to imagine that China is unified and vaguely democratic. It'd still be China and an enemy country of the US out of sheer rivalry. Hegemons hate competition, China is simply too big. "Democracies aren't enemies is a BS concept" - UK and USA almost came to war before WW1.

Then try to imagine Texas secedes because it's fed up with D.C. and signing up a mutual defence treaty with this alt-history China, that would probably also involve basing Chinese military. Would D.C. crowd acquiesce to this?

That's about how Ukraine becoming an American ally looks like to Russia. Absolutely unacceptable to Russian state.

Yeah, well, Russians didn't give up in '41 when their position was far worse, and they're really not likely to give up now.

Maybe they'd have considered it once, but all the talk of 'decolonisation' made it impossible.

'41 was existential for the Russians. This is, at worst, existential for Putin and the die-hard nationalists/imperialists.

You really think a median Russian would be fine withe the partitioning of Russian federation ?

More fine than dying at war or from a nuclear exchange, I reckon. Many countries were partitioned over the course of history without their entire combat-able population dying in one final hoorah. Many of them, I suspect, more patriotic and less concerned about the value of their lives than a median Russian who just wants to grill.

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The US and UK didn't have global competition like anything the US has done against the USSR or China. The UK just stepped down as world hegemon and let the US take the reigns without any war. There might be some light competition, but if China was truly democratic then the US-China relationship would look very different.

The UK just stepped down as world hegemon and let the US take the reigns without any war.

The UK just lost the biggest war there ever was. Without WW2 which put two great powers very keen on decolonisation onto the world stage, it'd not have given up its empire so easily.

It ended the war broke and in a large amount of debt to Americans, who then gleefuly proceeded to 'decolonise' the empire and snap up the resulting quasi-states for its own sphere of influence.

It probably would look very different, but not necessarily more friendly.

Democracies are vulnerable to demagoguery and there's plenty of genuine grievances for a Chinese demagogue to get people riled up about.

The people running the place would likely end up dead, probably after being tortured, or in a very unpleasant prison for the rest of their lives (if they’re lucky). And it’s their incentives which drive Russian decision-making around this war. On top of that, what many ordinary Russians seem to find intolerable about the consequences of giving up and going home is that they think the subsequent regime collapse would leave Russia as (something like) a Western colony.

Why on Earth would Putin lose his life if he lost the war?

Not very familiar with the history of Russia I see, the Anglosphere's history of relatively peaceful transitions of power every decade or so going back over a century is an aberration rather than the norm.

I don’t understand, who are all of these tinpot dictators you’re thinking of who have decisively lost wars of choice, much less ones with the US or its proxies, and then ridden happily off into the sunset? What is the precedent for that? Mussolini was strung up from a lamppost. Gaddafi died on the end of a bayonet. Najibullah was hanged on a traffic pole. Just to name a few.

Wars are very expensive in terms of political capital and betting your capital on winning a war is extremely different from having the ability to preserve yourself if that bet goes terribly wrong. The question here is really, “How could there be people who can start and sustain a war as long as their populace thinks they’ve got a shot at winning, but not protect themselves from the backlash or the victors when they lose?” And put like that it is self-answering.

Putin is losing a war on what Russian elites regard as Russian soil right now, seeing as they just annexed it, and it’s internal perceptions that matter here. However, there’s nothing unique about losing on your own soil, what matters is the stakes, and wars that impinge on your own country simply tend to be higher-stakes than those that don’t. That doesn’t mean the only really high-stakes wars are of that kind.

I said end up dead or unpleasantly imprisoned, which is what that backlash generally consists in. I doubt anywhere would take Putin as a non-criminal exile were he deposed.

Gaddafi, Milosevic, and Saddam didn't just lose wars on symbolic home ground - they lost wars against people who were explicitly after them. Gaddafi lost a civil war, Milosevic and Saddam lost to foreign interventions that had their removal as a goal.

Putin's loss scenario in Ukraine is humiliating, but the Ukrainians aren't coming to get him.

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I said end up dead or unpleasantly imprisoned, which is what that backlash generally consists in. I doubt anywhere would take Putin as a non-criminal exile were he deposed.

There is a long history of finding small pro-Western countries to offer asylum to dictators the West wants to encourage to retire. Most obviously, the Gulf sheikdoms will admit billionaires no questions asked as long as they keep the vodka and bacon discreet.

Gaddafi died on the end of a bayonet.

I'm not going to disagree with your overall point, but Gaddafi was engaged in direct military conflict with the Reagan administration several times (almost dying in a 1986 US airstrike), but managed to rule for almost two more decades before the bayonet incident. Saddam Hussein survived the overwhelming loss in the Gulf War and ruled for at least another decade. Castro died of old age, despite the Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs fiascos. Kim Jung Un and Khomeini still rule their anti-American fiefdoms.

Being a tinpot dictator isn't alone sufficient to guarantee a bad outcome, although you're correct that there are plenty of examples of it happening. In this particular instance, I expect either Putin loses power (either violently or through some sort of brokered exile) or Russia continues its current path towards irrelevant North Korean-style dictatorship.

Gaddafi's downfall came after a deal was struck where he agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons and America agreed not to interfere in Libya.

The subsequent NATO intervention in Libya was a message to the world that the best way to hold on to your sovereignty is to have a plausibly functioning nuclear weapons program. North Korea was prescient in its nuclear ambitions. Its territorial integrity has not been violated save for some shenanigans at border crossings that aren't reflections of state policy.

Snow Crash is fiction, but it seems to have understood this concept as well. The world's only remaining sovereign tows around a nuclear weapon that is wired to go off in the event of his untimely death.

despite the Missile Crisis and the Bay of Pigs fiascos.

Despite? The Bay of Pigs was not a fiasco for Castro but the United States. It was a victory for Castro.

What exactly are the stakes? What exactly would happen to Russia that would be so intolerable if they did give up and just went home? Would it really be so bad?

Putin would lose credibility and probably his life.

Why would he lose his life? Is not endlessly escalating a war against the US also a good way to lose his life?

That is just what happens when America really doesn't like you and you lose.

If you're a deposed ruler that America never really cared much about either way you can escape to Sweden Switzerland with a plane full of cash and live out your days. Or, maybe America does dislike you but you escape to Russia, like Yanukovych did not too long ago.

If you're a deposed ruler that America doesn't like you may find yourself impaled ass-first on the end of a knife, like Qaddafi. And if you're the ruler of Russia, you can't escape to Russia. If we don't assist your domestic enemies in an extrajudicial killing, we'll still find you, try you in a court for whatever we want, and most likely execute you. Maybe you'll get lucky like Slobodan Milosevic and get a Hague trial so that you die in a Dutch prison instead of being executed in your home country.

Now now, give other people at least some agency. One imagines the opinion of the Libyans had something to do with the fate of the Libyan dictator who just weeks prior had been trying to kill the Libyans who were engaged in an uprising.

And now they're all wishing they never started with the civil war business, just like in Syria.

Could you (or someone) expand on this? Why would a quasi-dictator be likely to lose his position/life over a failed war?

Putin is indeed a quasi-dictator whose control of Russia is based in substantial part on his control of the Russian security state. However, it's important to remember that these structures are made up of actual people, who in fact might choose not to cooperate given the right circumstances, causing that control structure to melt away entirely.

"A failed war" is one of the biggest potential causes for subordinates to question the competence of their superiors. A terror-infused security state is likely to hold together somewhat longer than other structures, as the penalties for being the first to step out of line are much higher, but it's also more brittle--once that preference cascade starts, it moves with blinding speed and totality.

Will that preference cascade be what brings down Putin? Maybe; it's up there with "randomly dies of non-window causes" and "resigns peacefully" as potential endgames. Will it happen any time soon? No idea.

Some real work has to be done to flesh out exactly why Putin ordering the use of nuclear weapons makes that preference cascade less likely, not more.

In my view, "Putin orders the use of nuclear weapons" is more likely to lead to a preference cascade than "Putin ends the Russian invasion of Ukraine and withdraws." However, I think the second case is more likely to occur than the first. The two circumstances probably lead to fairly different preference cascades--in "Putin orders nukes" --> "internal coup," I'd expect the motive to be "Putin's gone crazy with the aggression; we need to not do that NOW," but in "Putin retreats from Ukraine" --> "internal coup," I'd expect the motive to be "Putin's weakness has betrayed Mother Russia; strike while he's vulnerable."

And of course NATO can change the personal risk assessments of a Russian missile silo operator by our public messaging about the consequences of nuclear escalation.

Putin's family might survive in a nuclear bunker. But the guy who actually pulls the trigger - he is looking at the picture of his wife and kids on the shelf and thinking "So, punk. Do you feel lucky?"

For the same reason that Putin is supposed to be simultaneously an irrational madman in madman theory, but also someone who can be placated by via rational concessions: internal incoherence between rationals gives way to allowing evaluators to express their personal bias on the pretext of objectivity.

It's outsourcing personal opinions to theory, without testing theory to practice or from other perspectives. How / why, specifically, should any other party believe that there's such a precise information awareness that Putin can know the consequences of use / not use, and will act accordingly, when the consequence of a coup is only possible as a result of lack of internal information needed to make the evaluation?

'You have to let me do this, or else I face a coup' is naturally going to be responded to with 'Well, if you know that, why don't you crush the coup plotters instead?'

For the purposes of my analysis, I'm bucketing together two outcomes that are different, but I think are sufficiently similar for our purposes--"dissatisfied elements within Putin's regime kill him" and "dissatisfied elements within Putin's regime force him into retirement." In both cases, Putin is no longer in power due to losing control of the Russian security state, and the loss of control came from within the Russian security state. (I'm also agnostic on whether the dissatisfied elements reject what they see as Putin's military overreach or Putin's insufficient resolve--those each lead to very different futures, but share the "Putin is no longer in charge" aspect.)

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One would have expected the Japanese to withdraw from China in 1941 after having their oil supply cut off. They bombed Pearl Harbor instead, knowing full well they couldn't win the war. Russia has weapons far more dangerous than aircraft carriers. They must not be given any reason to use them.

The more knowledgeable and wise parts of their leadership knew that a win against the US would be very unlikely. Others understood they were at a serious disadvantage but thought that they could win a decisive battle or three before the US was fully spooled up and that the US would lose its determination and settle. Then you have the racist fools in their leadership who thought that Japanese were so superior in fighting spirit that they could overcome any materiel advantage.

They must not be given any reason to use them.

What would be a reason to use them? The US using its nukes sure, or a drive on Moscow that they find themselves unable to stop conventionally. The US sending some HIMARS and HARMS and Javelins to Ukraine? Not so much. It isn't an existential threat to Russia, but the US nuclear response to a Russian nuclear attack would be.

There is no "real" war with Russia and NATO. The only threat Russia has to NATO are nukes. Russia's conventional military and technology have been demonstrated to be a joke. Russia is not a peer, and hasn't been in at least 40 years if it ever was, their advanced tech is vaporware. If Russia is fighting Ukraine with one arm held behind Russia's back NATO is holding them off with NATO's pinky.

The only threat Russia has to NATO are nukes.

Yeah, sure buddy. It's not like they have deep diving submarines that can do god knows what, or can launch about half a ton worth of warheads in hard to intercept suicide drones out of one shipping container. Or, you know, launch cruise missiles just off the coast of North America.

What do you think would happen if Russian secret service got a truck into say, Ludwigshafen and targetted a 20 drones against various choice storage tanks in the plant area ? You really think every vulnerable location in old world American provinces has point defense anti-air guns ?

Even if it's just the former biggest chemical plant in the world, if it was set on fire in two dozen places at one, it'd be impressive.

technology have been demonstrated to be a joke

The 'joke' that has killed by UA admissions more Ukrainians in six months than Americans killed by North Vietnam over a decade. We might be getting into Korean war deaths territory if Russian numbers are to be believed.

The 'joke' that has drained NATO arms inventories to the point where they're stopping training because they're short.

Not such a useless joke. Disappointing, sure, but it only shows Putin is no militarist or imperialist, but just a bog standard somewhat competent autocrat.

Unconventional assets (stealth) are rather scarce and whether they're truly stealthy to a peer adversary is a rather open question.

Have to admit I was expecting a link to some Russian wunderwaffen instead of a 1980s tracker that can be completely foiled by turning your radar off (like anti-radiation missiles haven't been a thing for decades).

The strategic air defense network they have is expected to require weeks to months of reducing till bombing can proceed in earnest with conventional assets.

This RUSI link from January is a fun throwback too, I imagine the assessments of Russian IADS have changed somewhat since then. Note that it doesn't say it would take months to carry out effective SEAD, but: "The question is not whether the Russian IADS could eventually be degraded and rolled back, but whether NATO forces could do so quickly enough to avoid defeat on the ground while deprived of regular close air support in the meantime."

Not a particularly relevant concern re: Ukraine.

Have to admit I was expecting a link to some Russian wunderwaffen instead of a 1980s tracker that can be completely foiled by turning your radar off (like anti-radiation missiles haven't been a thing for decades).

a) no, it can't. These systems work by comparing reflections of second hand sources, e.g. navigation beacons, etc.

I imagine the assessments of Russian IADS have changed somewhat since then.

After some embarrassment (e.g. entirely avoidable losses due to Bayraktars), Ukraine doesn't dare to fly their jets above treetop height. The only one who has done so was Russia, and even then in a neighboring country (Belarus).

but whether NATO forces could do so quickly enough to avoid defeat on the ground

Since Russia is unlikely to be attacking, that'd mean NATO, to fight, in response to a desperate Russian move, would have to cross the border into Russia to engage in a ground fight. Russia doesn't have any tactical artillery nuclear shells, but it probably does have lots of tactical nuclear warheads on short range rockets.

I'm not sure how enthusiastic NATO would be about advancing out of the Baltics while dodging nukes daily.

Easy to confuse them, but no, Tamara is a PET (passive ESM tracker) while the systems using second-hand sources like TV broadcasts are PCL (passive coherent location). PET does rely on you having your radar turned on.

I didn't mean TAMARA but the general class of systems. Almost certainly that's not the only such system in existence as both Russia and China have a very strong interest in detecting stealth planes.

PET does rely on you having your radar turned on.

Yeah, because the many electronic and electric systems in a plane have no emissions whatsoever, right ?

just to own the hohols.

No, he specifically says it's to own the Americans and secure a multipolar world accepting of diversity.

The "fuck the world if we can't have Russian glory" mindset is not rare. I do doubt Karlin and the likes are sincere about it, though. Would require either ironclad principles or very low impulse control.

The Gulf War, NATO would drive Russia out of Ukraine like Iraq out of Kuwait with highway of death 10x with most of Russia's surface fleet joining the Moskva as reef enhancement.

What is the response that the US government will have toward Russia if (when?) they deploy nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict?

really bad for Russia? which makes me inclined to beleive it will never come to that. Putin hasn't even unleashed his full military might (no no airforce) agaisnt Ukraine. Why would he resort to nukes.

Putin hasn't even unleashed his full military might (no no airforce) agaisnt Ukraine.

Why is the assumption that Putin is holding back the air force instead that the VVS has little might?

I would suppose that if there were an escalatory option that would significantly improve Russia's performance in the war short of the 'partial mobilization' that's just being done, it would probably be less costly and thus would have been resorted to before. Perhaps there's a reason everyone else knows why unleashing the full might of the Russian air force would be more risky for Putin than bringing the war to the Russian civilian population through the recent mobilizations, but I can't offhand think of what it is.

It would be nice of you to expand on the specifics of how Putin hasn’t even unleashed his full military might, because he’s certainly using his Air Force. We have photographic and video evidence of dozens of Russian jets being shot down in this war, and in fact several just in the past week.

As far as I know they haven't begun to use chemical weapons, which is sort of in between typical arsenal and nukes.

Some chemical weapons are easily created (see: people inadvertently gassing themselves at home by mixing the wrong cleaning supplies), some chemical weapons are very costly to the targets (Novichok lethal doses are supposedly fractions of milligrams), but are there any that are equally easily created (in volumes useful for war) and costly?

Weaponized fentanyl is probably worth worrying about, especially since you can equip your troops with an antidote.

That ... is actually really interesting. The manufacturing process doesn't take state-level support. (this assumes China's bans aren't just "bans", but while I'm sure they're not crying their eyes out over the West getting ironic payback for the Opium Wars, I don't think the OD crisis here is a CCP op either) The lethal dose isn't nearly as low as state-of-the-art organophosphates but it's still in the milligrams range. ... Looks like the biggest issue may be that skin absorption ranges from less dangerous to much less dangerous than ingestion? To get fentanyl or carfentanil airborne you want a dry powder, but to get it to absorb quickly enough through skin to be dangerous it needs to be moist. I can't find any research about whether it penetrates skin when moistened by oil (or anything else that I'd expect could be finely aerosolized without just evaporating) ... maybe that's for the best. Do we know how Russia weaponized it in Chechnya? Might have been easier to make it useful against indoor targets whose ventilation is controlled by the attacker, might simply be that a research team working for a few years could implement ideas that I can't even imagine in a few minutes.

Since I don't know much about either drug, maybe my quick searches this morning are misleading me. In particular, I'm reading that, while carfentanil is 100x more potent a narcotic than fentanyl, the lethal doses are around the same ... so why the hell is anyone still making fentanyl? I know, drug kingpins aren't noted for their overwhelming concern for human life, but killing your customers does still cut short future revenue, and even if it didn't you'd think the relative ease of smuggling 100x less volume to achieve the same potency would pay for any extra difficulty in manufacturing.

I believe that unleashing the air force, unless it's for something like firebombing cities, would achieve little and result in much of the airforce being lost. At this point, Ukraine seems to be able to use its air defense with near-impunity, as it gets US-quality targeting information and incoming warnings in near real-time and has actually functioning horizontal integration of battlefield information, whereas Russia's SEAD and counterbattery fire still operates on the principle of "report all the way up the chain of command and hope they will pass an appropriate order back down within a few hours".

At this point, Ukraine seems to be able to use its air defense with near-impunity, as it gets US-quality targeting information and incoming warnings in near real-time

I've heard it described in scuttlebutt as like one of those shitty safari tours where the guide finds the animals, helps the tourist aim the gun, and then the tourist pulls the trigger and goes home bragging about what a great white hunter he was in the bush. Like the Americans are phoning the coordinates to the Ukrainians, the British trainers are explaining on the phone how to punch the coordinates in, but the Ukies pull the trigger so "the US and UK aren't parties to the conflict" under traditional international law.

I mean, yeah, in a way this war is close to a perfect setup for the Imperium to fight against the Russians - in a properly declared war between the parties (nukes barred), contained by some gentlemen's agreement to Ukrainian territory, one could surely expect the Russians to at least shoot at the AWACS drones that have been circling around Ukraine's borders since the start and possibly even Kessler low-earth orbit for the next few decades (which doesn't seem to be all that hard). As it stands, they get a massive and highly motivated fighting force at no domestic penalty, and can continuously employ outrageously fragile intelligence platforms that normally would not survive in a conflict with a near-peer adversary to their own advantage.

It was described incorrectly then, and you should read on that more

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equipment_of_the_Armed_Forces_of_Ukraine#Air_defense_systems

Ukraine operates mostly old Soviet equipment for counteracting cruise missiles (Like "Buk"), and no American instructor will pull the trigger for a Stinger or some other Western MANPAD. NASAMS are not yet deployed AFAIK.

Probably though, Americans warn Ukraine when submarines with Kalibrs launch their rockets though. But Russia switched to Iranian drones for strategic strikes in the last week.

And even if it was US, and UK personnel doing almost all the work and the Ukrainians "just pulling the triggers" (and I agree with you it isn't). It wouldn't exactly be an unprecedented level of involvement in post WWII wars were one major power was fighting a small power that was receiving a lot of aid from another major power. In Korea, and to a lesser extent Vietnam, Soviet pilots fought the USAF. Also China, while not an open full blown combatant like they were in Korea, had construction and AA units in North Vietnam. In neither of these cases was it considered a reason to go full WWIII on either the USSR or China.

Russia hasn't used much of its airforce because it doesn't have robust airforce capabilities, and isn't really able to conduct enough SEAD to get through Ukrainian air defenses consistently. It's used planes in occasional situations, and there are multiple confirmations of them being shot down.

At this point, Russia has used basically all of its conventional assets. Assertions that it's holding a bunch of stuff back (e.g. best units, best tanks, air force, etc) are not credible.

China, in particular, really likes the nuclear status quo. As soon as non-proliferation is dead, you'll see all of its regional neighbors/enemies get nukes within a few months or years at most. Taiwan actually ends up with an effective deterrent without direct US intervention.

Russia using a nuke would pretty much immediately shift China away from being an ally/neutral in this situation.

Hard to take seriously an article that asserts:

[Putin] was almost surely behind the sabotage of the natural gas pipelines reported by the Swedish and Danish authorities

and moreover, implies that the next best competing explanation is:

to expose the vulnerability of European infrastructure to clandestine Russian sabotage

I don't just mention this because I find the current arguments for these allegations to be really poor, but because Russia right now is talking about the possibility of repairing the pipeline. The Anglosphere seems motivated to put forward the version that these pipelines are done for while Russia is claiming the fix can be made in as little as a matter of days. That doesn't support the theory that Russia is trying to signal a complete point of no return. In effect, all we have is mobilization and annexation, which Russia has already done before. This looks like an exit move. We have all the ammo we need to win the PR war. Russia had to institute a mobilization to fight little Ukraine, Russia captured much less than they had set out to, Russia's pipelines are gone, NATO expanded, and our official stated objective is simply to bleed Russia dry, which we can easily say we did. We humiliated them by just sending our old equipment over. I just don't see nukes happening because for us this is just a sliding scale of how hard we want to win, not an actual objective to restore Ukraine's borders.

Personally, I wonder if in that situation, whether there really are any downside to escalating, not on the nuclear front, but on a "special forces boots in Russia decapitation strike" front. Or even a public, US government sanctioned/sponsored bounty on the heads of Putin et al.

An assassination plot against the leader of a country is a great provocation. The only greater provocation I can think of would be bombing of civilians, nuclear or otherwise.

There will be no decapitation strike or strikes on Russian strategic nuclear assets, special forces or not, because that is equivalent to nuking Russia from a nuclear war perspective. The maximum response I would expect from NATO is the deployment of air and air defense assets in Ukraine to support the war effort and to intercept further nuclear strikes (if that is even possible). This could include limited conventional strikes inside the internationally recognized Russian territory as a supporting effort for SEAD.

The US joins the war conventionally is about the minimum I've seen communicated. Since a non-strategic nuclear first strike by Russia in Eastern Europe or the Baltics is probably the single most examined scenario by the US post-ww2, I'd be surprised if the playbooks don't have the timings down to the minute and statements prepped like a newspaper's obit drawer.

Today I got a response to an old comment in which I'd argued

I'd credit [the positivity of leftist hobby spaces] not to an evangelist reward cycle, but to evaporative cooling. Leftist spaces are less likely to make people feel uncomfortable enough to leave.

...

A subset of the right wing has staked out "being allowed to use slurs" as their Gadsden flag. That circle is near-completely contained within the circle of users who value "owning the libs." As long as this is true, sane moderation is going to have a left-wing bias. To some degree, this must go out the window in extremist left spaces. I'm not going to claim ChapoTrapHouse was a bastion of reasoned debate. It's the hobbyist Discords and niche interests that live and breathe on niceness, community and civilization.

@desolation objected, noting that leftist activism is fully willing to make people uncomfortable:

Have we forgotten the whole phenomenon of "you can't be racist/sexist/whatever against [disfavoured group]" and every mainstream outlet defending using doxing and slurs against targets so long as they're in a disfavoured group?

In the interest of further discussion, I'm moving my response to the main thread.

I'll stand by the first statement, and emphasize that it refers to hobby-spaces-leaning-left, not extremists. I'm not sure what led you to this month-old post, but it was in response to a theory that "Leftists (especially LGBT-focused) congregate in highly socialized communities where every small action toward The Cause is socially reinforced." The OP had constructed a rather elaborate model of left-affiliated communities which portrayed them as hugboxing evangelists. In addition to being rather uncharitable, this overlooks an alternate theory: if a space is reasonably nice, will it end up full of leftists?

As for the second, yes and no. Yes, quoting Kendi or otherwise engaging in that flavor of anti-*ism is more socially acceptable than just being *ist. That's exactly why it drives away fewer users. It's both harder to deploy (and thus more rare) and less likely to offend leftists, centrists, or even most right-wingers.

If a community bans slurs, they will exclude some free speech absolutists. So long as there are more of those on the right, that will select for leftists. Banning slurs is a much more popular mod policy than banning "you can't be racist against X," probably because slurs are cheap and easy to deploy anywhere. Case study: Xbox Live. Would banning any discussion of critical race theory have had any impact on the population of 13yo gamers? What about banning the word "retard"? Apply the same conclusion to Discord, and we have a mechanism by which a neutral community adopts some "left-wing" norms merely by picking the rules with the most relevance. Repeat over months or years, banning the few who get really upset about censorship, and we end up with a left-leaning community which gets along smoothly.

Maybe every once in a while someone in that community gets away with...I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs? "Colonizer?" Maybe someone says that and right-wingers feel unwanted, or doxxing threats make them feel unsafe. It's also possible that the community enters a purity spiral and implodes. But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.

Honestly, I don't see where mainstream publications come into this at all. The comments section for NYT op-eds is by no means a tight-knit hobbyist community. And while the media's stance on doxxing ranges from sympathetic to enthusiastic, I'm skeptical that such outlets have endorsed using slurs.

At least for me this is confounded by demographics. Any “reasonably nice” hobby I am involved with is overwhelmingly made up of college-educated whites and jews. That alone tells you what the slant of the place will be outside of explicitly contrarian spaces like TheMotte

Define “reasonably nice”. It seems like this is a euphemism for blue tribe approved and college educated oriented, in which case obvious selection effects are both obvious and don’t have much to do with niceness.

On the other hand, wealthy blue collar hobbies- guns/hunting, stacking silver, souping up cars, barbecue, etc- are also notorious for being nice to newcomers, and the selection effects are obvious there too. There’s fewer journalists learning to process their own game animals, so it doesn’t show up in the discourse as much, but that’s certainly a community which has very similar effects while pointing in a different direction, politically.

and we end up with a left-leaning community which gets along smoothly.

Left-leaning communities are also notorious for engaging in circular firing squads over being insufficiently pious.

They're also notorious for ham-fisted censorship drives over pet causes that cause mass exodus of users. Remember gamergate ? Well most of the people who were pissed with moderation re: the BPD slut who shall not be named weren't right-leaning. It was mostly random gamers, centrist or left leaning.

Really, they're well known for being very ban happy. Consider e.g. Resetera, one of the left-leaning gaming forums.

re: the BPD slut who shall not be named

Yeah, look. One of the advantages of moving here is that we no longer have to use "***" or "who-shall-not-be-named" evasions, so if you want to talk about someone, just talk about them, by name, rather than flinging epithets.

Insulting public figures is permissible to a point, but just calling someone a "BPD slut" is not a quality contribution to the discourse. If you think Zoe Quinn's alleged BPD or sluttiness is pertinent, go ahead and talk about it, but not just because you think this is a place where throwing random put-downs at your enemies is cool.

It's also not in the interest of clarity. I wouldn't have known who "the BPD slut" is supposed to be - I'd have to (look up Gamergate and) take a guess from context. If a name is used instead, I either know who is being referred to or can easily look it up.

As far as I'm aware, the whole affair blew up because of her BPD & slutty behavior. World would never have learned the allegations that she had sex with people reviewing games had she not cheated on and lied to her boyfriend. Clarification: and because of the excessive nature of the cheating, he got so angry he wrote a very long very salty exposé he posted online, where it still is, which set off the whole scandal.

Anyone with a brain knew gaming journalism was dirty - I've read similar complaints in late 1990s, but it was usually boring stuff related to advertising income, access that few cared about, etc.

This salacious interlude and the coordinated censorship blew the arrangement up for good. Now as I understand gaming journalists are mostly irrelevant, and various amateur reviewers or streamers matter far more.

EDIT:

clarification added

I think this is actually a fairly powerful theory for explaining the situation in random hobby groups, especially ones that otherwise ban political discussions.

I'll stand by the first statement, and emphasize that it refers to hobby-spaces-leaning-left, not extremists.

Then it's not really a meaningful statement, because what you're emphasising is a transitionary state lasting from about 2 weeks to 2 months, before it ends up being run solely by and for leftist extremists.

an alternate theory: if a space is reasonably nice, will it end up full of leftists?

It will end up full of leftist entryists seeking to co-opt it and turn it into a leftist extremist space, if that's what you mean (it probably isn't.) Overly permissive and nice groups simply don't have the antibodies necessary to reject leftist appropriation efforts, which is why they're natural targets for them. Most notably, "nerd culture" saw this happen to it, because nerds, being outcasts themselves, were very reluctant to "become bad guys" by banishing anybody, and look where it's got them: shoved out of their own communities and hobbies that they grew from the ground up, and replaced by plasticky faux-nerds with only the basest knowledge of the hobbies who are there to skim influence and money off the communities they parasitise.

Repeat over months or years, banning the few who get really upset about censorship, and we end up with a left-leaning community which gets along smoothly.

Again, the point in time at which you're choosing to look is not the end of the evolution of the community. More leftists get added to the staff over time, and they start enforcing "no slurs" extremely selectively to weed out the people they hate (non-leftists). This completes the degeneration of the community into an extremist leftist enclave where far leftists can openly call for the doxxing and death of anyone even suspected of being right-wing without consequence, but saying "tranny" gets you immediately banned. (See: twitter, reddit)

But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.

It's not rare at all. If it can happen to a knitting forum it can happen anywhere, and it will, because leftists are always on the lookout for things to subvert. Because extreme leftists fundamentally cannot create, only destroy. They can't meme and have to steal right-wing memes, they can't come up with original concepts for movies and shows and must resort to perverting existing IPs, and they can't create successful communities, only subvert them. And they never have any kind of actual plan for what happens after their fanciful revolution fantasy, that's always someone else's problem -- they're just in it for the burning down and looting of the existing order. Remember the "what will your job be in the leftist utopia" thread where not one person said labourer? No creation. Only destruction.

No, it is definitely possible for a space to avoid the extremists. I have seen ones last years. The keys to success seem like 1) starting out “apolitical” but left-friendly, and 2) having an actual point to the community. Yes, the moment an admin starts getting political it’s in trouble. Yes, if brigaders make a concerted effort to get on staff they can cause damage. No, that’s not guaranteed.

It’s certainly not some magical property of leftists that makes them looting parasites. I don’t know what fantasy land you’re living in where only your ingroup actually builds anything. I’m sure Ayn Rand would be proud.

I have seen ones last years.

Such as? Are you very sure they avoided extremists, or could it be that you were blind to them because you don't see them as extreme due to being one of them? Are you entirely sure you're not standing in the middle of Trafalgar Square and wondering why you can't see London?

It’s certainly not some magical property of leftists that makes them looting parasites.

I'd like just one example of right-wingers taking over a community and, say, instituting rules that say you must refer to everyone as their birth sex or be banned, then, please.

There’s one in particular I can think of, yeah. It’s studiously dedicated to an indie game and enforces a reasonably strict no-politics rule.

It’s very international, with a strong Singaporean contingent. It’s also very gay, to a level which would probably offend more sensitive right-wingers. Neither of these things precludes the mods banning anyone who wants to monologue about politics, left or right. The best example I saw was someone determined to post “America will nevertheless be tried for war crimes!!1!” But usually bans are reserved for trolls. So I’d call it affably leftist, not militant.

The biggest crisis faced by this server occurred when a certain YouTuber reviewed the game. This resulted in a tide of meme spammers making edgy Holocaust jokes.

Your request for evidence is complicated by the free-speech absolutists, who as much more likely to stick around a right wing space. And of course the old school sensibility of “there are no women on the Internet” makes such an unverifiable rule unlikely. I’d be willingly to bet that you could find neutral-turned-right spaces in gun or survival culture, or perhaps on alternate history fiction boards.

I'll just work on the assumption you're in the furry inflation vore fetish community, since he hasn't reviewed many other indie games lately and it'd fit for the gay thing https://youtube.com/watch?v=VqasJcCUAA8

Noooooooo comment, lol.

What about Caves of Qud?

He'd already said it wasn't that in another thread. The part I'm still wondering about is the Singaporean element.

furry inflation vore fetish community

See I read this and I just thought "wait, Pyrocynical made a game?"

Jfc I can't even tell what that is but I want it to get off my lawn. God damn zoomers.

I’d be willingly to bet that you could find neutral-turned-right spaces in gun or survival culture, or perhaps on alternate history fiction boards.

Okay, but I don't want you to make a bet, I want you to actually find the examples of right-wing entryism triumphant resulting in purges of the left in these communities.

We can point to plenty examples of the reverse! It is not enough for you to merely posit the existence of a counter.

I recall visiting a Russian chan-slash-web-culture wiki recently and seeing the Russian-Ukrainian war covered almost exclusively from a hard pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian stance. That's in a space which I recall as rather irreverent to the powers that be.

I'm skeptical that the Russian chans were neutral or left to begin with, but I have no insight into Russian internet culture, so who can say? I was thinking more the western world, though. The relevant chunks.

It's a mistake to view Russian politics through the binary lens of Dems and Reps in the first place. However, the official position of the state is culturally to the right of the West, and that of most dissidents is to the left of the state. Of course, there are also the "50 Putins" types, particularly visible today, who are pissed that Ukraine isn't nuclear ashes/barren wasteland within Russian borders yet.

Crucially, support for the state was supposed to be rare on chans.

More comments

That does remind me, what about the Russian gachimuchi community/ies?

What about them? If you're asking whether they were right-entried or not - I'm not involved enough and they're too ironic to say from the outside. I don't recall anything blatant like "femboy fascism" though.

Was the "certain YouTuber" Sseth? I remember there was some drama around Caves of Qud when he released a video about it.

Yup. The Ssethtide. Different game, though; I actually haven't played Qud.

Dude is hilarious.

Ssethtide was SS13, wasn't it?

Yeah, that's one thing, I think there was also some alledged brigading of the CoQ Discord, or at least some sort of freakout there.

Yes, the moment an admin starts getting political it’s in trouble.

This point is underemphasized. The left--including the center-left--has by now "no enemies to the left" as a default setting. Once you combine that with "the personal is the political," the spiral to the left is inevitable, if on a variable timetable.

I used to run something more or less equivalent to a hobbyist group with the rules "no politics," "no racism," and "don't be an asshat." I know for a fact that the political leanings of the other leadership was everything from hard left to hard right, but we were able to stick to a firm "get your political discussion kicks elsewhere." I have zero faith that I'd be able to repeat the experience, because of the number of times I've heard "it's not political, it's just being a decent person."

As for slurs, it doesn't have to be a specific word or phrase. I've heard "white dude" be used with every bit of the venom and contempt that a Klansman might use the n-word. Didn't get moderated.

Even with the caveat "extreme leftists," this is a little too much boo outgroup. Where's your evidence that "extreme leftists" are just inherently less creative, more destructive, and fundamentally devoted to "subverting" things than "extreme rightists"? It's fine to complain about leftists and "converged" organizations, but do not get too comfortable talking about your outgroup as if it's a given that they are all alien invaders. This is still a place for testing shady thinking and talking as if you want everyone to be included, not for kicking up your feet and shit-talking about how your outgroup is just the worst.

Here's a citation from goofy mail prank man:

"Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.

But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred."

What's the point of being a leftist? Change society? Don't you already have the power within yourself to behave with humility and charity to help those you perceive as oppressed?

Isn't the need to change others the expression of a will to power as explained above?

Isn't the need to change others the expression of a will to power as explained above?

You can write a post expanding on that idea if you like. What you can't do is describe your outgroup in a hostile and uncharitable way as if we all accept as a given that "Yes, they are like that" even if "they" would not agree with your characterization.

Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.

It’s important to remember that the internet is a machine that takes the most hostile and unlikeable things that anybody in our outgroup has done and delivers them to our eyeballs on a daily basis.

So people on the left get a feed of angry Trumpers and religious wackos doing regrettable things in public, meanwhile you are being fed angry protesters and the most extreme things that people in your outgroup have done or said.

leftists are always on the lookout for things to subvert. Because extreme leftists fundamentally cannot create, only destroy

Oh come on this is ridiculous. While leftist entryism seems to be a real phenomenon, blanket stating that leftists are just fundamentally evil like this requires a little justification

I thought I did.

Leftists are not capable of harnessing meme magic, for whatever reason. Most left wing memes are repackaged right wing ones ("snowflake", "NPC", "the right can't meme") or painfully unfunny wall of text screeds. That the left can't meme is an incredibly common sentiment, and I've yet to really see anyone refute it decisively. There is no, say, leftist equivalent of Stonetoss, that I know of.

Leftist-dominated media studios (Amazon, Netflix, most of Hollywood) have been engaged in the cultural vandalism of making politically-distorted remakes and sequels that nobody asked for since, well, the Ghostbusters reboot. Star Wars, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, and so on and so forth. Not one has been even close to the originals. Almost all result in their IP being shuttered into dormancy after their run. Doctor Who has done a spectacular swan dive into the toilet and now looks like its future is uncertain -- more widely, people are refusing to pay the BBC license fee at ever increasing rates each year. The new Saints Row surgically excised all the humour from the game and replaced it with complaining about student loans and look where that's gotten. Where they make any wholly original IP content at all, it swiftly fails or never reaches market. (Crunchyroll's High Guardian Spice as an example.)

As far as communities; SomethingAwful faded from a titan of the internet to internet hugbox after the leftist takeover, antiwork was outed as a clown show on national TV, CHAZ descended into warlordism almost immediately and had a murder rate per capita higher than the deepest darkest shithole you can think of. Kiwifarms documented the insanity of a community called the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch. San Francisco has an app dedicated to reporting actual human excrement on its public pathways. Every communist nation ever has collapsed like an inexpertly made souffle. Purity spiralling is incredibly well known as a characteristic of leftist-dominated communities.

There are plenty of failing or failed right-wing communities, of course, but the difference between the two is that usually the right-wing ones are destroyed by leftist interference (kiwifarms being the obvious example, every sub that's been constricted and banned by reddit on the marching orders of AHS). By comparison leftist communities almost always implode from within, though maybe this is a consequence of nobody being willing to take down websites and subreddits because right-wingers get upset over them.

I see plenty of leftist memes in my media bubble. Especially on reddit, look at the rise of antiwork or /r/collapse etc etc. Just because you don't see them often or find them funny doesn't mean they don't exist.

This is not really an argument, this is just a list of things you dislike.

It's funny to me when people say that the left can't meme. In one sense I get it: the edginess and nihilism that characterises imageboard meme culture is mostly not compatible enough with progressivism for them to create something like the soyjak. And yet, consider that the 'tolerance of tolerance paradox' went from being an obscure philosophical musing to an almost globally enforced rule of the internet in less than a decade. In memetic warfare terms, that's a victory on the scale of desert storm. A similar argument applies to 'stating ones pronouns' and 'the power plus prejudice definition of racism'. These might not be memes in the same way soyjak is a meme, but they are memetic ideas nonetheless and they have won big time.

P.S. There are a few good leftist memes in a format recognisable to the average reactionary shitposter. 'le pol face' is probably the best example.

P.P.S. All souffles collapse, even expertly made ones.

Maybe it's a difference in the type of meme: the right is oddly good at the kind of meme that compresses information/a message into an easy-to-grasp image, the left is oddly good at changing the informational environment itself.

The left can't meme, but it can take over. That's more useful.

(irony intended. the left meme much better than the right, they're just not funny)

'globally enforced rule'

Indeed. Leftist memes are enforced at gun point or delete button point.

Stating one's pronouns is literally supported by a billion dollar DEI industry.

Racism = power + prejudice is not in application otherwise the media wouldn't be so careful handling some cases of racial conflicts.

Isn't racism now understood to be “A collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas”??

And yet, consider that the 'tolerance of tolerance paradox' went from being an obscure philosophical musing to an almost globally enforced rule of the internet in less than a decade.

I hate that that's an actual, real, example, and that it's an even better example of progressive "meme magic" than you seem to have laid out.

Consider the initial, Popperian formulation of the Paradox of Tolerance:

Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. ... But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. ...

This is a milquetoast, classically liberal statement; tolerance in this sense is to literally tolerate other people, no matter how contrary to good taste (or hateful, or fascist, or communist...) they are. It is to tolerate dissent.

This has been morphed to something like:

A tolerant society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant individuals must not be tolerated.

It does not take any more than a cursory reading to appreciate that Popperian tolerance(1) and progressive tolerance(2) are essentially different words, and that the progressive version of the "paradox" in fact has no paradox in it, merely a word game where tolerance(2) is implicitly equated with tolerance(1).

(Consider:

A tolerant(2) society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant(2) individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant(2) individuals must not be tolerated(1).

If I did not make it clear.)

That the nonsensical lack-of-paradox "paradox" is now the mainstream interpretation is at once disheartening and also an excellent example of successful progressive "meme power" in the Dawkinsean sense of the word.

There is no, say, leftist equivalent of Stonetoss, that I know of.

My impression of xkcd the last few years is basically this. And, like stonetoss, the comics that are low-effort outgroup dunks tend to suck. More generally, I think that partisan media, and generally media that prioritizes sending a message over being good, just tends to suck a bit.

The xkcd Free Speech comic [1] from April 2014 was very influential and memetic - as much so as any Stonetonss comic - on Reddit and Reddit-adjacent parts of the internet back when those websites were much more pro-free-speech than they are today.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1357/

That's the problem there, IMO: XKCD is a lot more fun when it's just being nerdy. It trying to be anything like Stonetoss is like throwing a vintage CJ Wrangler into a drag race.

I mean stonetoss being stonetoss isn't exactly funnier - here's the most recent one where it's just a low-effort dunk, vs this one, which is a bit funnier (though still low effort and not that funny).

On reflection I'd endorse both "the left can't meme" and "the right can't meme". Though is also possible that it's "nobody can meme in a way that people who don't spend all their time immersed in the same culture find funny".

I agree it's a bit too much, but they don't have to be evil to destroy everything. I think many of them have good (if unexamined) intentions, at least at a surface level. I think they still tend to fundamentally destroy things, rather than make them better.

In addition to being rather uncharitable, this overlooks an alternate theory: if a space is reasonably nice, will it end up full of leftists?

Being charitable to one side means being uncharitable to their opponents: were you charitable to non-wokes instead, you wouldn't place so much emphasis in your argumentation on slurs, but on poltical disagreements. It was the latter which led to the banishment of /r/themotte.

I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs?

White? Man? Both are by leftists only employed the same way a 4channer uses "Jew".

TheMotte wasn't banished; it was a self-imposed exile in response to an increasingly opaque, arbitrary, and hostile environment. Perhaps a distinction without a difference, but my impression is that it had one or two years left in it before the coup de grace.

In practice, yes indeed. Add to that list: Cis? Oppressor? Privileged? Stale pale and male?

I think you're making an analysis of Libertarian Left spaces and applying it to Authoritarian Left spaces as well. These lib left hobby spaces have sane moderation which needs constant upkeep to keep out the extremists of either side from ruining it. Auth left spaces tend to just ban everyone until either nobody is left or there is no longer any diversity of thought.

As I wrote, I was thinking of a particular hobby Discord. I wouldn’t describe them as libleft but “sane moderation” is exactly what I had in mind. The crux was supposed to be that so long long as free speech absolutism is right-coded, sane moderation is going to hit more right-wingers. It’s not that the left wing is saintly, just that including “don’t use slurs” as a party plank will preempt a bunch of bans.

Most of the responses are interested in talking about hard authleft spaces. I’m not sure if I wasn’t clear or if that’s just more fun.

I guess I don't really associate sane moderation with either the "I wanna say slurs" end of right-wing or the "only 1 opinion allowed ever" end of the left-wing. I generally see good moderation in more IDW style spaces that allow debate on stuff but also don't allow N-bombs. These spaces contain both right and left wing people often. (See here, SSC, ModeratePolitics, etc.)

One of the more successful bits of left-wing/Blue-Tribe propaganda has been to convince a whole generation coastal urbanites that right wing = white guys that just want to be able to use the word "nigger" with out catching side-eye and/or a punch to the nose.

Both sides are inclined to ban. I think Cernovich has blocked more people on twitter than anyone, second maybe to nnTaleb even though they are on opposite sides of the wokeness spectrum. I think it's an ego or control thing more than a political one. It depends who is doing the moderating.

To the extent this is true, I think we're forced to conclude that "controlling personalities" are isomorphic to "normal human personalities". Radical individualism doesn't seem to have a very large or consistent constituency.

An analysis of a social phenomena can’t quite be charitable or uncharitable, only accurate or inaccurate. “Charitable” refers to the interpretation of another’s argument or beliefs. Eg, Moldbug’s stuff is pretty out there, but calling his analysis “uncharitable” doesn’t make much sense.

In my opinion, the OP was dripping with condescension. It was taken for granted that leftist spaces sucked on all aspects except ideological cohesion.

Anything from an uncreative tweet, a poorly conceived thought, an unlikely empowering experience, whatever is usually met with pats on the back snaps (sensory issues!) and good boys persons.

Analyzing a social phenomenon is one thing. Analyzing a strawman...that’s what I consider uncharitable.

A strawman? That passage was describing half of one of the most common abusive tactics in existence. You pump someone up with over the top displays of love and affection, and then you make them feel worthless for minor errors. This way you can convince them that they are worthless and only redeemed by your love. It is stock in trade for some leftist communities and organisations, because those leftist communities and organisations have been taken over by abusers. There have been several examples already in this thread, and if I remember correctly there were more in the original thread. This is no strawman, and it's not that leftist spaces just suck - they weren't always like this! But they have been co-opted by bad actors relying on the concept of no enemies to the left.

Personally I think it is a natural consequence of the leftist claim that domestic violence is a woman centric problem requiring a feminist lens to resolve, excusing abusers if they don't fit the patriarchal model, which allows them to flourish and inspires others to assume their tactics to get ahead.

Now that you can call a strawman, because I can't prove it, I don't think anyone will be able to for at least another decade - anyone who even breathes in that direction in the past decade gets run out of the industry like they were caught fucking chickens. But if you get an advocate drunk and ask them about it, you'll hear horror stories that will make Miranda Priestly look like Leslie Knope.

Yeah, I’m calling that passage a strawman. The whole OP was theorizing how leftist communities—not just extremist ones—were “quasi-lovebombing.” That’s a call to view seemingly positive interactions as the sort of abusive tactics you describe. It was also paired with lamentations about how right-wingers were too good at facing reality:

In contrast, Right-oriented spaces are less keen on compliments and engage in more stressful catastrophization. They consume too much news and complain too much about the news.

The corollary is left unstated.

I think that broad brush demands better evidence than “one time I watched a contrapoints video and it felt parasocial,” which was all the OP offered.

For what it’s worth, your interpretation of feminist frameworks as exploitable doesn’t scan as a strawman at all. It might be taboo, but that’s not because it’s implausible.

That passage indicates that low quality engagement is praised, not that all engagement is low quality

The following sentence is

While this oversaturation leads to an over-sensitivity, not to mention some bad behaviors and creations, it also means that the online community forms strong bonds and is only associated with positive emotions.

It’s an assertion of low quality, papered over with a segue into the main point. Surely everyone can think of a time that someone got a hug instead of legitimate criticism, so the author moves on to arguing why it gives the left a structural advantage.

Anything from an uncreative tweet, a poorly conceived thought, an unlikely empowering experience, whatever is usually met with pats on the back snaps (sensory issues!) and good boys persons.

Analyzing a social phenomenon is one thing. Analyzing a strawman.

Is the quoted part supposed to be a strawman? As a leftist who used to hang out in a lot of leftist spaces, I find that to be a fairly accurate description of them the vast majority of the time. The only parts I would object to are the last parts about "snaps" and "good persons," since those specific phenomena accurately characterize only the most extreme versions of such spaces, but the thrust of the message seems 100% on point. It also happens to be one of the main reasons why I stopped hanging out in as many such spaces as much.

Do you really never notice any of the things people are pointing out to you in this thread? I've always assumed anyone saying they've never seen it is blatantly gaslighting, but is it actually possible to just have impervious blinders for it?

I think you did a better job articulating my point than I did.

It’s not that the left wing is somehow more friendly, it’s that free speech absolutism is the most visible and low-effort way to get banned.

My perspective on 4chan is very skewed, because I pretty much only use the /tg/ board, which has a much lower post volume than the other boards, has tighter moderation (by 4chan standards). What it has is CRITICISM. Everywhere else on the internet, people either shill, hugbox, or bait controversy. On /tg/, they nitpick. It's a relentlessly negative place, and an excellent one in which to hone your writing craft.

Maybe every once in a while someone in that community gets away with...I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs? "Colonizer?" Maybe someone says that and right-wingers feel unwanted, or doxxing threats make them feel unsafe. It's also possible that the community enters a purity spiral and implodes. But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.

Fundy, incel, handmaid, uncle tom, oreo, are all slurs that are by and large directed from liberal social groups to conservative ones. "Insurrectionist" is acquiring that valency. There's also the explicitly political insults- GQP, republicunts, trumptard, etc- which seem broadly tolerated in a lot of spaces that would not allow the same variety of insults with a different valency.

Left-leaning spaces do not equally apply slur, the definition of slur is set in a way that's favourable to left-leaning etc etc.

Sorry, it's just a bit rich to hear that left-leaning spaces are intrinsically nicer after the last three years of people in hobby spaces treating me as subhuman, whether for disagreeing with lockdowns or for not taking whatever injections my government demands of me. Many of these supposedly left-leaning hobbyist spaces are casually, pervasively hateful in a way that only doesn't get recognised as hate because hate gets defined in whatever way is most useful to them at the time. There is real, serious hate and threat of violence in wanting someone locked down. There is real, serious hate and threat of violence in demanding that unvaccinated people be stabbed by needles. (this is why I am relatively supportive towards anti-lockdown people who e.g. shout abuse and threats at legislators - don't dish out what you can't take) And to bring the further-left into this as well, there is real, serious hate in demanding that others live under socialist or communist regimes. Supporting the Soviet Union is as racist towards Ukrainians as supporting the Nazis is towards Jews. It's so pervasive that even people on my side often recognise these things as wrong yet completely overlook the whole hatred angle of it!

Many of these supposedly left-leaning hobbyist spaces are casually, pervasively hateful in a way that only doesn't get recognised as hate because hate gets defined in whatever way is most useful to them at the time.

Man, don't I know it. I've fallen out of every single online hobbyist space I had in the 2000s and early 2010s. None of them are recognizable to me anymore, and every single one of them is permanently hostile enemy territory. The exception is the chans, but even they're different nowadays. For the worse.

FWIW I don't really see this effect in the sports clubs I'm in (granted these are more posh sports like tennis, golf, etc.)

The spaces here are a pretty healthy mix of left and right, both politically and culturally. You get the random misogynistic comment (a more charitable person would call it hyper-masculine) and the random deranged leftist comment (extreme liberal) in pretty equal amounts. Maybe I just haven't noticed the people who are offended enough to leave but everyone mostly just wants to play the sport and then have a couple beers after.

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.

Yeah, but those people shouldn't do that. KKKILL_ALL_blahblah doesn't actually do anything, or affect anyone, it really is just text, and one can just laugh or ignore it. It genuinely doesn't matter!

And... it isn't about a generic, reasonable sense of how harmful something is, there's clearly a larger, disproportionate factor - reddit banned /r/waterniggas for the soft n-word, and /r/legoyoda for vaguely racist memes, but still has /r/opiates, /r/cocaine, /r/heroin, /r/meth, etc. And - this isn't even entirely left-coded, /r/ageplaypenpals got taken down despite being entirely fictional because p*do stuff is considered to be terrible while something like /r/rapekink, despite describing things like likely-fictional (although "All stories here must be actual events told by the person with the victim's perspective" is in the sidebar) "rape-bait".

I think the drugs vs rape/pedo stuff makes sense.

People on those drug forums at least teach each other harm reduction techniques and are usually positive and supportive for those who say they want to quit.

If you click on any of the subreddits, I'm not seeing any harm reduction.

Bear in mind - all of these should be unsuspended. But the a very similar argument, and honestly a more convincing one, goes for the roleplay-fetish subreddits ("it gives them an outlet for their fetish that doesn't harm anyone"). (weird fetish subreddits are also supportive of people who say they want to stop doing the fetish, they are extremely big on consent.)

Ok, now do "punch the Nazis" in a social context where it's clear that Republicans are basically Nazis. Or when the discussion is whether "punch the Nazis" is even an adequate response, since killing the vermin is obviously morally superior.

I think this is a product of the fundamental difference in how the trad right and mainstream republicans view political violence in contrast to how democrats and the bulk of the so-called dissident right/intellectual dark web view it. IE Violence as a switch, vs violence as a continuum.

If you're the sort of person who views violence as a switch, "punching the Nazis" is eminently stupid and frankly cowardly. We don't don't "punch" Nazis where I'm from, we shoot 'em. We murder the bastards and then use their still-warm guts to grease the treads of our tanks the way the lord and George S Patton intended.

If you're the sort of person who views violence as a continuum the above is absurd, and sectarian violence just part of a balanced and complete breakfast.

I think this is a product of the fundamental difference in how the trad right and mainstream republicans view political violence in contrast to how democrats and the bulk of the so-called dissident right/intellectual dark web view it. IE Violence as a switch, vs violence as a continuum.

I can understand some of your beef with contrarians / the dissident right / the IDW, but... I beg your pardon, what now? Did I miss some Jordan Peterson video where he encourages people to get into fistfights with the woke? Is there some hidden Evergreen College footage, where Brett Weinstein is slapping students around? What on Earth are you talking about?

You can't tell me you haven't realized "punch a Nazi" is not literally about punching Nazis. That's just the catchy slogan. The essence of the message is "kill disliked right-wingers".

The continuum theory of violence is cute, but false. The lack of overt calls to murder are merely for plausible deniability. Everyone who unironically posts punch a Nazi is also cool with the Nazi getting righteous comeuppance from a brick to the skull.

Most people are perfectly comfortable with the thought of their political enemies being murdered. What people are not comfortable with is being seen for what they are.

I'm not indignant about leftists being my enemies; I'm indignant about Hylnka taking "punch a Nazi" at face value.

The switch is welded in the off position, or if not, it's close enough. Which means the people who view violence as a continuum uses threats, intimidation, and lesser violence to simply win while the other side is waiting for a red line to be crossed to throw the switch. It never will be, until the "violence as a switch" side has been whittled down to five guys in a broken pickup truck with a single-shot BB gun.

In the specific conversation I was witnessing (left to far left), the "punch vs. kill Nazis" wasn't so much dial vs. switch as it was taking the "punch a Nazi" meme and upgrading it 50-Stalins style.

I think one of the other aspects of dial-style is that it claims to tolerate sliding through multiple dimensions "better." I'm sure you're familiar with the hot vs. crazy graph? Imagine the same concept, but where one aspect is "level of violence" and the other is "badness of target." You can afford to be looser in your application of "Nazi" if all you're doing is, you know, just a punch.

It's the whole "your speech is violence, but my violence is speech" thing. Who, whom all the way down. I honestly don't know how you even have a conversation when the idea of neutral standards, applied regardless of actor, is one of the things under contention.

I honestly don't know how you even have a conversation when the idea of neutral standards, applied regardless of actor, is one of the things under contention.

You realize all talks are for recreational purposes, not means of resolving conflicts or furthering peace between tribes, and otherwise embrace conflict theory.

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.

Am I the only one who remembers when it was trending on Twitter, to seemingly no problem what so ever, to cheer all the old white men dying after the last census? To signal, crassly, how truly enthusiastic you were, and how much better you thought the world was, with more dead white people?

Left leaning spaces, if you take for granted that Twitter and Reddit are left leaning, absolutely support "KILL ALL ******" posts, so long as you are talking about Republicans, or suspected Republicans. If you don't nope out of that just as hard as when you see someone "just asking questions" about the "Jewish Question", it's because you take it totally for granted.

Yeah, that’s fucked up.

I suppose I can’t prove it, but I don’t use Twitter, and my reddit account just posts on /r/rational these days.

#KillAllMen started nearly a decade ago and had quite some staying power too, didn't it? I still see it once in a (long) while.

I think that you make a good point and that it is under appreciated by the average Mottizen.

In my experience the sort of reflexive contrarian that complains about "left wing censorship" getting them banned from reddit for using [insert racial slur] is just as likely to get banded from ARfcom or the old Limbaugh Forums for the exact same reason.

Just look at HermanCainAwards. Leftist space celebrating the deaths of conservatives and it hasn't even been quarantined as far as I can tell. Or all the death wishes and threats of violence on Politics, a default sub.

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?

Certain high-profile commenters get banned for being inflammatory

Where inflammatory is best understood as "in violation of implicitly leftist values".

Implicitly leftist in the same way as tankies regard "having stuff" as an implicitly bourgeois value, maybe.

When you filter against abrasive personalities, you are filtering for leftists, who are on the whole higher in agreeableness.

For this community, that’s a bit complicated, given the more classically-liberal principles involved.

This community descends from a cult of personality based around a neurotic progressive who disliked a bit of the left's excesses (as they threatened him personally and he's highly neurotic), but outside of those personal threats was enthusiastically on board with the entire far-left culture.

So much so he deliberately invested the whole of his private and personal life into those far-left environments!

Of course the values this community enshrines are implicitly leftist. They're less left than they could maximally be, but nevertheless still enshrine leftist ideas.

Perhaps you ought to clarify what you mean by "leftist" and "rightist" then.

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How would this community look and even work if it adopted different values? Are you implying there is a workable and desirable alternative, and one that has no taint of leftism? Or are you merely issuing a complaint with no further implications?

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Where inflammatory is best understood as "in violation of implicitly leftist values".

I doubt that.

Anecdotally, for all the complaints about moderation targeting the right, the sort of "libertarians or lost channers" who make those sorts of complaints seem to have an even rougher time in explicitly conservative/right-wing spaces.

Well Zontargs', flounce over the "True, Kind, Neccesary" rule that lead him and many of our other more "abrassive" regulars to leave and form /r/CultureWarRound up is probably the most notable instance. And I suspect that the memory of that event is what leads to a lot of the older libertarian types to characterize the Motte's moderation as left wing.

I'm not sure how far into the "inside baseball" of the mod team it's appropriate for me to delve, but we did have a few High profile flouncers that I was sorry to see and that lead to some heated discussions in mod chat. Yodacrist, IprayIam and McJunker, being the ones that stick in my mind.

We also had a few serial flouncers IE users who'd show up and post for about a month before stirring up a bunch of drama over some percieved slight, post a long winded rant about how they were leaving because the mods were strangling the discourse only to show up a couple weeks later with a new account and repeat the process.

Disagreements with Zorba and Trace over how to handle this later category was perhaps one of the issues that lead to my leaving the mod team.

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?

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https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/glowie-glowposting

My favourite

I do like that Mokou glowposting reaction picture.

On a completely unrelated note I wonder if anyone feels the same way I do about the Chinese net in that it‘s very heavy on the sarcasm and quite aggressive in tone; it is quite a bit different from older Chinese. (Though I suppose it is the same for any language that makes its way to the internet…)

So I don’t know if those two forums were hit by evaporative cooling or by hostile admin takeover. Couldn’t say. I’ve been thinking about smaller, hobbyist servers. The sort that start out with a “no politics” rule.

There is some subset of users which wants to use slurs. Maybe they’re edgy teenagers, maybe principled free-speech crusaders. They are more likely to lean right.

As long as banning members of that subset disproportionately hits the right, the window gets to slide left, even if the subset is really small. No ideology needed—though it certainly shortcuts the process.

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I am not sure how big the contingent of "wants to use slurs" is.

What is the traffic ranking for 4chan?

For every person on 4chan who uses slurs as a tactical normie-filter there's three people who just enjoy being shocking and hateful.

No, 4channers use slurs because a combination of 'intending to piss people off because it's funny' and 'actually disliking trans/gay/black people'. ("based?") The ratio between the two probably has changed over its history. But it isn't to keep out speech policers!

4chan only hates gay tranny nigs because 4chan is self-loathing.

How would we know

Because I know a bunch of long-time 4channers personally?

As a counter point, I offer the regular posting of gore, which is usually upped whenever there is a perceived "raid" from outsiders going on

Again, in that case the point of the gore is to piss off the outsiders, not to 'prevent them from censoring us'

and I would guess that even among channers, most people do not like looking at gore.

probably, but most channers don't post gore most of the time, whereas they constantly use slurs.

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Well, you did said it was akin to rdrama's banners, which are consciously chosen. But even if we accept that 4chan slur-users are unwitting or subconscious implementers of an anti-normie immune system, their conscious actions are obviously those of people who enjoy using slurs, so they fall into the contingent originally described in the comment above.

I don't think this is really an important difference.

Couldn't American white southerners (circa 1850) say their culture is about enslaving black people? Abolitionists wouldn't go, "huh you're right I didn't notice that. We wouldn't want to culturally genocide you, so carry on!" they just say: your culture is not worth preserving. Maybe more realistically, abolitionists would say: You can keep your southern food and your southern hospitality, but you don't need to keep slaves.

To the extent that 4chan's culture is dependent on saying mean words, why would "it's a defense mechanism!" convince anyone? Also, what exactly is "that culture" and can it be separated from saying mean words?

  • If it can be separated, then this is what a lot of people are asking for

  • It it can't be separated, then 4chan has enemies

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You reminded me of KF which I should have needed reminding of.

That may well be true, but it's still, well, abrasive. Which indeed may be a counfounding element: Channers use "fag" as a suffix, for example, and this is just part of the culture. It's probably done more for the sake of edginess than being actually homophobic, but it's also a thing that most of the Blue Tribe would never countenance. Abrasiveness isn't entirely alien to the left, however, but they tend to approach it in a different way than channers do.

I'd just like to register that it is very annoying for a non-native speaker when Americans refer to the "X-word" or the "Y-Slur".

Trust me, it's annoying for plenty of native speakers, too. I made a sacred vow that every time I see "the n-word" I raise my hands to the sky and scream nigger at the top of my lungs to balance the scales of the universe.

Your sacred vow does include waivers in case someone attempts to DDOS you? Hypothetically, of course.

I'm a non-native English speaker as well, though I might as well be due to immigrating at a very early age, and I second this and will go even stronger: it doesn't matter if there are impressionable children around, because they don't need to be protected from encountering the pain of seeing a specific set of characters in a specific order. Letters placed or syllables pronounced in some specific order are not magical spells, and it is bad for adults to behave as if they were in front of impressionable children.

The reason to avoid swearing around impressionable children isn't that they "need to be protected from encountering the pain of seeing a specific set of characters in a specific order", but that they are impressionable, liable to attempt to copy you and get the impression that things you do are a good idea to do in other contexts.

Edit: which is not to say that the entire Internet should be sanitized into child-friendliness.

Indeed, I have sat in that chair, I have had this conversation

Sure, but impressions can go in many directions. Using terms like "n-word" or "f-slur" when "nigger" or "faggot" would be more appropriate can give impressionable children the false impression that these words (and possibly, slurs in the general sense) actually have magical properties that make uttering them cause harm or whatever.

They do in fact have magical properties, though. They aren't just words, they are taboo in the most primitive sense possible, and there is no reason to believe this will change in the forseeable future. You might adhere strongly to the "words are just words" ideology, but the norms that ideology built lasted a bare handful of decades, and now they are gone. "they're just words" is, perhaps, minimally true, but "they will mess your life up if you use them" is maximally true and in a very immediate, concrete way.

If it is the case that such words really do have magical properties, then using them in front of impressionable children will demonstrate the magic - i.e. someone will mess your life up for using them - and children would notice that and learn of those magical properties. If using them doesn't result in such messing up happening, then it would demonstrate that, No, those words don't have magical properties, and there are contexts when they can be used without people messing you up. Impressionable children wouldn't necessarily pick up on those contexts, but I posit that (1) information about taboos around slurs is so plentiful anyway that watching/reading some adult use them has minimal impact and (2) children get much more leeway in breaking such taboos due to their natural lack of experience and maturity and learning the right contexts when to use such terms through experience and experimentation is part of growing up.

This is beginning to sound like the makings of a good South Park episode.

The problem is, some -- too many -- do treat them that way, and have banished the use/mention distinction. It's like the Jehovah scene in Monty Python. So rather than risk crazy people trying to ruin your life, people avoid the words.

I prefer to take it further, and talk about either Voldemort or "the letter-after-m word". Well, actually I generally prefer not to talk about it at all, since there are too many rabid, crazy people out there. (yet here I am, oops)

I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs? "Colonizer?" Maybe someone says that and right-wingers feel unwanted, or doxxing threats make them feel unsafe. It's also possible that the community enters a purity spiral and implodes. But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.

I'm... not sure this is a good model. This is from a little over a year ago, and it's not exactly slowed down.

Since, the RPGNet forum has a new header, proudly informing everyone that "With abortion and birth control rights threatened both around the world and particularly in the United States, RPGnet believes that reproductive rights are human rights. We're committed to that, and will sanction posts supporting anti-human-rights positions." A quick look through the rules forum shows examples like this. The person who ran a Minecraft server I contributed personalized code for wrote, casually, about how proud they were to have personally punched a Prop 8 funder. I've got a lot of sympathy for the Quilt side of that culture war, but it's not like it's hard to find loads of conversations in the Quilt Discord hunting for even a sniff of 'right-wing' alignment and shutting down conversations or people they see as doing so. There's been a 'fun' battle in a STEM outreach organization I volunteer for, less about the LGBT and pronouns pins (fine), and more about any team where the mentors show too much discomfort with them (understandable if not great), and what needs to be done to move students (little paranoid) and resources (problem!) around that.

Now, people have a right to not be perfectly accepting and making everyone feel safe, competing access needs, yada yada. But it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and self-identifies as a duck.

But at a deeper level, I think the inability to even think of anti-racist slurs is... kinda showing a big blind spot. Even for that specific example! Karens (and their distaff Kevins), MAGAtards, so on, are all 'about' racism. Do you think "Nazi" is a real specific term describing an ideology, or a boo-light? How about "reactionary", whether on twitter or coming from the President of the United States? And that's ignoring the complex ones, like 'alt-right' or 'white supremacist/nationalist' (which sometimes actually means that, rarely even by self-identification, but just as often means 'somewhere to the right of President Obama in 2014).

And it's not like those are special. Outside of race, "gun nut" was reclaimed, but want to know a place where you can call people groomers on Twitter? These aren't slurs in the sense that a lot of the progressive movement cares, and I've had long debates with TraceWoodgrains about the bounds of it... but that's kinda the point.

Since, the RPGNet forum has a new header, proudly informing everyone that "With abortion and birth control rights threatened both around the world and particularly in the United States, RPGnet believes that reproductive rights are human rights. We're committed to that, and will sanction posts supporting anti-human-rights positions." A quick look through the rules forum shows examples like this.

Jeezus. I stopped posting on RPGNet years ago, but since then they seem to have reached Atheism+ levels of wokeness. BGG seems to be heading in the same direction, unfortunately.

I think your broader point is somewhat true (there are lots of insulting things you can say about right-wingers that are obviously insults and obviously moderated less severely or not at all on most platforms), but I also have trouble thinking of leftist slurs that are slurs per se. The closest is probably the much-overused "Nazi," but beyond that, what is there? "Magtard" and various insulting variations on "Republican"?

In my time with college-educated 20somethings, they call a LOT of things "white."

Wingnut, Trumpkin, Domestic Terrorist, y'allQaeda, bigot, racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, white supremacist, fascist, klansman, abuser, rapist, anti-semite, fuckboy, pissbaby, incel, bible-thumper, inbred, hick, redneck, gun nut, ghoul, vampire, bloodsucker... The list is considerable.

Naively, one might imagine that "slur" means something along the lines of "name that humiliates, demeans, or shames those it's applied to". After a few minutes of thought, though, I don't think that's actually how it works.

Various terms for races that I'm sure we're all regretably familiar with frame ethnicity in a negative light. People are in fact those races, but these terms are slurs because they assume "...and that's a bad thing". One might argue that claiming people are bad for being a race is obviously objectionable, but of course Gammon, Mayo, Whitey, cracker etc are generally acceptable in what passes for polite company online, and terms like oreo or banana show up as well. "White male" often comes with a "fucking" attached. This is just sorta the way things are, no one here is under the impression that it can be changed.

What about terms relating to actions or choices? Maybe it's a slur if it's aimed at immutable identity, versus one's actual choices? Well, no, I don't think so. "bitch", "slut", "whore" are all slurs, and generally unacceptable to use in polite company, at least toward a woman, despite describing someone who engages in specific behaviors. On the other hand, "racist", "sexist", "bigot", "homophobe", are all entirely acceptable, while also describing someone who engages in specific behaviors, even when those terms are quite a stretch. If one refers to a woman who publicly sells their body as a "whore", that is unacceptable. But it is entirely permissible to refer to someone as a "racist" for any and every reason, or even no perceptable reason at all. And of course, one of these words comes freighted with serious consequences for those so labeled, and it isn't the one that refers to farming equipment in the vernacular.

It seems to me that most of the words we generally think of as slurs are things Reds frame as bad while blues think are neutral or good, whereas most of the names Blues call Reds are terms Blues think of as bad, with Reds' opinions not really being relevant to the judgement. I can't think of any exceptions that would disprove this model.

It's not even that certain words are okay and other words are not, based on Blues' collective judgement. It's that certain words are okay based on who they're applied to, based on Blues' collective judgement. It's not hard to find cases of even the hard-R being dropped by blues toward percieved Reds, even African-American ones, without the slur alarm getting triggered. [Upon reflection, @Amadan is correct and this claim is unsupportable.]

Given the above, of course Blue spaces don't have a slur problem. When Blues use words to demean, shame, or humiliate, it's not a slur as judged by definitions our society actually appears to use in practice. The same goes for "threat", "harassment", and the rest of the no-no word terms.

[EDIT] - To be clear, this is a factual claim. Counter-examples are welcome, and I'd be happy to hear even anecdotal evidence to the contrary.

The left-wing slurs you cite strike me as falling into three categories:

  • Generic slurs that happen to be applied to right-wing targets (e.g. MAGAtard), probably do have a decent chance of being banned.

  • Extremely weak, unlikely to seriously offend most people (e.g. cracker, vampire). Might get you banned under very strict mods.

  • Things that basically everyone agrees exist and are bad in some sense, the debate is over the boundaries. (E.g. racist, fascist, Nazi, abuser). Hard to ban, although you could perhaps ban applying them to other users via a Wikipedia-style "assume good faith" policy (I assume that's the case here, in fact.)

Things that basically everyone agrees exist and are bad in some sense, the debate is over the boundaries. (E.g. racist, fascist, Nazi, abuser). Hard to ban, although you could perhaps ban applying them to other users via a Wikipedia-style "assume good faith" policy (I assume that's the case here, in fact.)

Grooming being wrong is a widespread position, yet the word "groomer" got banned on reddit. So it appears to me that even such words aren't actually hard to ban.

the word "groomer" got banned on reddit.

I hadn't heard about this ... apparently it didn't, no.

I see your points, but I don't think you convinced me on this:

Naively, one might imagine that "slur" means something along the lines of "name that humiliates, demeans, or shames those it's applied to". After a few minutes of thought, though, I don't think that's actually how it works.

I do think that's more or less how it works. Most of your examples are not so much slurs as "generic insults that blues can get away with calling reds but reds can't get away with calling blues." I do not disagree that this illustrates that most platforms are unfair to reds, but other than a few, like "y'allQaeda"and maybe I'll give you "Bible-thumper," none of them look like "words implying that being Red is inherently bad."

"Bigot, racist, sexist, transphobe," etc. - sure, in some people's minds that's synonymous with "conservative," but there is no shortage of leftist circular firing squads where they accuse each other of these things too. (See: J.K. Rowling.) We discuss those a lot here.

You said:

It's not even that certain words are okay and other words are not, based on Blues' collective judgement. It's that certain words are okay based on who they're applied to, based on Blues' collective judgement. It's not hard to find cases of even the hard-R being dropped by blues toward percieved Reds, even African-American ones, without the slur alarm getting triggered.

And again, I don't disagree there are examples of this and you can make convincing "who whom" arguments, but this doesn't mean leftists don't really consider the hard-R a slur. Most leftists would castigate other leftists calling Herman Cain or Clarence Thomas the hard-R. Some isolated cases of liberals dropping racial slurs on black conservatives and not being cancelled are not compelling evidence to me that slurs are inherently not slurs if directed at the "right" people. You're pointing out examples of hypocrisy and "who whom," which are plentiful, but not examples of "leftist slurs" per se.

I appreciated your response, fwiw.

Evidence for this claim?

This strikes me as low-effort, obnoxious, and insincere, but I'll give it more of a response than it deserves. Absent a poll in which leftists are asked to respond to the question "Is it okay to use racial slurs against black conservatives?", I will rely on my experience with leftists and my prediction as to what would happen if you go on a leftist forum and start calling black conservatives niggers. If you would like to test this, I will pre-register my bet that it will result in you being banned.

My comment was indeed sincere, however it was rooted in a misunderstanding about what "hard-R" referred to, which your reply clears up. Thanks for that, and I expect you're correct.

I won't deign to answer your charges of "low-effort" and "obnoxious."

Well, if you misunderstood what I meant, perhaps you were justified in asking for evidence. (What did you think "hard-R" referred to?)

I read you initially as demanding I provide evidence that leftists actually think "nigger" is a bad word. Which did indeed seem like some sort of very dumb and low-effort attempt at a gotcha.

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was rooted in a misunderstanding about what "hard-R" referred to

Perhaps you were confusing it for the "R-word" or "R-slur," aka "retard/retarded?" I've noticed that there's a wide range in how taboo this slur is even in leftist circles. Where I grew up, the "R-word" would be only 1 level below the "hard-R" in terms of offensiveness, but I've noticed that in other environments with similar levels of leftism, it's used pretty freely without anyone noticing. E.g. I was shocked when I first noticed how much people used it on Twitch of all places, given how strict Twitch tends to be with authoritarian-left language policing.

Calling them niggers, specifically, probably a problem. Calling them Uncle Toms, which is conveying the exact same sort of viciousness...

Leftists are okay with slurs, they're not okay with nigger. Nigger is a magic spell in the US. It should be in D&D as a Power Word.

Calling them niggers, specifically, probably a problem. Calling them Uncle Toms, which is conveying the exact same sort of viciousness...

We are getting into the weeds with the taxonomy of slurs, but it seems to be relevant.

"Nigger" is an insult because the meaning is basically "Black person, which is inherently a bad thing." "Uncle Tom" means a black person who is a traitor to his own people by collaborating with his oppressors.

Leftists do not think being black is inherently a bad thing. They do think that betraying your own people and siding with your oppressors is a bad thing. So one is a slur, and most leftists would agree it's a slur no matter who uses it (because you're saying it's shameful/insulting to be black). The other is a charge of being a morally bad person.

I am not debating whether either term is ever used "viciously" and/or inappropriately. Certainly many insults are unfair and inaccurate, and calling any black conservative an Uncle Tom certainly falls into that category. But they aren't the same kind of insult.

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Upon further reflection, I can recall some isolated cases of leftists getting away with the hard-R, but those cases are in fact isolated and quite rare, even for extremely prominant targets. I think it was probably a bad example on my part.

Can you provide evidence of leftists employing such terms without consequences, especially online/in print?

I do not disagree that this illustrates that most platforms are unfair to reds, but other than a few, like "y'allQaeda"and maybe I'll give you "Bible-thumper," none of them look like "words implying that being Red is inherently bad."

Yeah, there's definately complexity here, and not just in the specifics but in the general. @MugaSofer below is gesturing at a sort of taxonomic breakdown, which I thought about attempting but didn't have the energy for; leaving aside the political angle, that's where I think the meat of the general question could be found.

"Bigot, racist, sexist, transphobe," etc. - sure, in some people's minds that's synonymous with "conservative," but there is no shortage of leftist circular firing squads where they accuse each other of these things too. (See: J.K. Rowling.) We discuss those a lot here.

I think these are the central example of actual blue slurs. And yeah, they get used on Blues as well, the same as "bundle-of-sticks" might get used on reds by other reds. It's all various forms of "bad person", "disgusting person", right? The thing is, social judgement and social enforcement are pretty clearly necessary if people are going to live together, so I'm pessimistic that the core form is ever going to go away. "bitch" got embargoed pretty thoroughly in its original context; "Karen" seems to cover like 90% of the same territory.

And again, I don't disagree there are examples of this and you can make convincing "who whom" arguments, but this doesn't mean leftists don't really consider the hard-R a slur.

In the cold light of morning, I think you're entirely correct here. This argument relied on "can a thing possibly happen", and presented it as evidence of a norm. Further, the cases I could think of involved it being spoken, and I can't think of a single case where it was used in print or online. The hard-R has so much taboo mojo that it's going to be used by someone somewhere sooner or later, and some percentage of those uses are not going to be immediately struck by lightning, but that's pretty much the opposite of a norm. I was wrong.

My list wasn't exhaustive; we can quibble over the "redness" of each individual insult. But mostly they seem no more politically aligned than calling someone a "retard."

I'm also puzzled by "ghoul, vampire, and bloodsucker." Is that really a thing conservatives notice liberals calling them? I'm not questioning whether anyone has ever done this, but just the idea that these are known to be blue insults for reds.

I noticed ghoul thrown around a lot on /r/stupidpol towards, well, pretty much any 'neoliberal' boogeyman they don't like, but especially targeted towards the old right wing flavors like Kissinger and Cheney. This is pure anecdote, but I have yet to notice vampire and bloodsucker.

There was a small thing about that's been around since at least the Affordable Care Act. Ghoul's the one that's persisted most, I think. Of course, that turns back into the "inherently bad" -- you could at least write a steelman that they were about criticizing conservative policies, rather than conservatives qua people.

I think there's a pretty sizable number of things along that realm, once you're attuned to noticing them. Their very nature as not politically-aligned makes it harder to notice when they're pointed a specific direction, but that doesn't make it less common.

That said, I think a lot of this distinction is more attuned to Blue Tribe preferences than to generalized ones. Not just in the sense that socons and even non-socons see many of the covered examples (controversially, being gay; less controversially, being queer) as something you do rather than something you are, or that both actual racists and not were often making that Chris Rock Skit as a serious argument, or that the Blue Tribe has put significant effort (for, tbf, reasons not entirely under their control) to define or frame their desired focuses as innate and immutable.

But there's a far more serious matter of it not being especially clear why anyone should find one to be acceptable, and the other an abomination. Why is abuse of parenthesis worse than prolonged mockery of 'magic underpants'? What part of the many bannable terms for correctly calling someone gay in offensive intents are worse than incorrectly calling someone a cousin-humper? Why, given how bad racism and sexism are, are false claims a person is or is motivated by them harmless, no matter how ill-founded or plain false? Why are one of these things a "name that humiliates, demeans, or shames those it's applied to", and the other not?

((I mean, the practical answer is probably that there's been enough organizations with enough power to make these things not mere social faux pas, but potentially a source of legal liability should an employee do it even off-hours and off-premises, or a business not react to it promptly when done by a customer, while the other direction there's... uh, people claiming TERF is a slur, and no one believing it.))

I feel the need to point out something in regards to RPG.net for those not in the know; RPG.net is a big deal. (Atleast, it used to be when I still browsed it). It's the forum where active professionals(writers, publishers, artists, ect, ect) go to post and discuss matters. It's some place where you could feasibly post and gain the notice of professionals in the publishing industry, a way to get your foot in the door.

So when you see a place like this being overwhelmingly blue tribe-aligned, it creates a severe gate-keeping effect as a byproduct.

I've seen some editors remark on the political alignment of their internal studio staff, with a surprisingly broad selection... from over twenty years ago. I doubt it's that way now.

I attended Albuquerque’s biggest and oldest SF convention, Bubonicon, in 2016, almost the platonic ideal of a grey tribe space. It was just before the election of Trump, and one of the writers on a panel said something violent toward Trump voters, and the room erupted in the most vicious roar I’ve ever heard in person.

I’ve never felt so in danger for my life.

I participate or participated in many online video game communities. What you are describing as niceness = left wing is probably as far from the truth as I can imagine. The only area where is could plausibly be true is commenting on weirdness or grossness. It seems that leftists typically embrace weirdness like over the top piercings and tattoos or fat-embracing etc more than those on the right, and so you do get left wing moderation by banning negative comments about people's appearance, delinquent drug use, cheating on partners, fathering/mothering multiple bastards, etc. Basically, if you ban criticism of weird or bad life choices, yes that results in a leftist shift. But that doesn't get you even 10% to where most of the forums end up drifting.

Where it inevitably ends up is with banning people for anodyne right of center opinions that leftists categorize as "attacks". Illustratively, I was once banned from a Warcraft III forum for "homophobia" aka saying orgies spread STDs. On city-related forum, there was a mass ban of "racists" which was people who had participated in a thread about getting their gaming systems and laptops stolen in home invasions. Not some targeted ban of slur-users, a ban for everyone who was not a mod that participated in the discussion. This is not "niceness" its hounding out dissent because open discussion refutes their worldview.

I don’t really disagree. 2rafa may have phrased it better below.

it’s because if you’re in a right-ish forum with libertarian moderation any thread, even one about video games or the latest fantasy show or whatever is liable to turn into a sea of unnecessary racial slurs, homophobic baiting or just petty interpersonal attacks in which people are called slurs for Jews or gays or whatever for not agreeing with their respondent.

In other words, it’s not that leftists have any particular claim to niceness, it’s that they’re more likely to avoid copping a ban for this specific low-hanging fruit. Repeat that for a few months and the only people left are the ones who wouldn’t use slurs to start.

Sure but that's not left coded or right coded, that's reflexive-contrarian-from-a-privileged-background coded

Wait, which part?

a sea of unnecessary racial slurs, homophobic baiting or just petty interpersonal attacks

just sounds like Xbox Live.

just sounds like Xbox Live.

That's kind of my point the use of slurs isn't left coded or right coded so much as it's spergy teenage edgelord coded.

Repeat that for a few months and the only people left are the ones who wouldn’t use slurs to start.

But they consistently will go much further than that. TheMotte may or may not ban slurs, but even if it did it would not drift drastically leftward. To make the Motte into /r/politics you start banning ideas, facts, and questions.

I actually think it would cause a drift!

A strict policy on certain words would hit right-wingers harder, both because of the direction of any euphemism treadmills and because, as @gattsuru put it, there's more plausible deniability on the left's equivalents.

It would also push out any principled free-speech absolutists, who are overwhelmingly right-wing. This group matters a lot more for the Motte than most communities.

The end result would be evaporative cooling, even if no specific idea was ever banned. I think that's more likely to happen in hobby spaces than hostile takeovers and explicit ideological censorship. The latter makes for a better narrative, which is why we can think of so many examples.

there's more plausible deniability on the left's equivalents.

Meh, there's just more special pleading accepted by NYT.

Something like that.

I’d say the kind of censorship which is useful for functioning online communities is more compatible with the left wing than the right. Ideologically, maybe, but mostly because citing free speech is almost exclusively right-coded.

TheMotte may or may not ban slurs explicitly, but the sort of person who would use a slur to insult another poster tends to catch a ban for other reasons pretty quickly. There is a minimum IQ threshold to understand why writing this sentence (complete with r-word) is less bad than calling out the retards who use spaces instead of tabs to their faces. The nice thing about this place is that 100% of the regulars meet it.

Disclaimer: I don't insist on tabs, but my employer does, and I am smart enough not to argue.

the retards who use spaces instead of tabs to their faces.

Hey, we're reading too, you know! I should totally report this. /s

Disclaimer: I prefer a usage-determined mix (basically the clang-format UseTab: ForIndentation behavior), but until everybody's auto-formatting is smart enough to understand "tabs are for program flow indentation, spaces after the same number of tabs are for alignment of statements wrapped onto subsequent lines", using spaces alone seems to be the safest way for a big project to not require constant formatting fixes or look scrambled when moved between different authors' editors with different tab sizes. Plus, even when everybody's on board with a mix, you can still end up with different line wrap locations from different tab size preferences.

Yeah, left leaning communities do not ban slurs. They only ban the slurs against their patron groups.

I think the saddest, for me personally at least, community that went hard and hatefully left has been the Penny Arcade forums. Officially, there is a rule. The only insult you are allowed to use is "silly goose". In practice? That only applies in one direction.

They have rules against hateful content. But people openly saying a lot of white people need to be murdered in a revolution don't get moderated. Suggesting that Kyle Rittenhouse, in their Rittenhouse trial thread, was correctly found innocent? You get banned for hateful content.

It was not always this way. I'm not sure when the moderation began moderating hard left. I think it might have started after the Dickwolves controversy, and as a sign of good faith they brought on some "friendlier" moderators to "educate" the community.

Many discords I'm on for hobbies have a "no politics" rule, to keep things friendly and inclusive. In practice this means no bringing up conservative politics. Everyone is free to root for Biden, and complain about Republican politicians, talk about how enthusiastic they are for liberal or progressive policies, etc. It only becomes "politics" when someone disagrees, and then they get banned.

Is there a summary of that anywhere? I seem to have missed it. Was it something in the SciFi community?

*Thanks y'all, that was a wild ride.

Loose summary:

In 2010 Penny-Arcade made an irreverent strip mentioning rape that offended some proto-SJW's who thought it was insensitive to 'rape survivors'.

According to one such offendee:

"Whether or not the strip was offensive isn't really relevant at this point: More than the comic itself, what made the most impact was how Penny Arcade responded to the readers -- including rape survivors -- who said it upset them. First, they mocked their critics with a series of posts and a flippant non-apology. In a subsequent "make a strip" demonstration at PAX Prime, Krahulik further needled the issue by drawing a dickwolf, and Penny Arcade even monetized the discomfort over the rape joke by making and selling "Team Dickwolves" shirts and pennants."

Then some notable members of gaming community spoke out against PA and received a lot of insults and alleged death threats. The drama continued with one of the early designers for the PA website publicly cutting ties.

Mike Krahulic apologised and removed dickwolves merch from their store. Then later recanted and said at a later PAX Q&A panel that he regretted backing down and removing the merch. The week after PAX he clarified his comments.. I think it roughly died down after this point.

tldr; Comic used rape as a joke, feminists got upset on behalf of rape survivors. Drama ensued.

Many discords I'm on for hobbies have a "no politics" rule, to keep things friendly and inclusive. In practice this means no bringing up conservative politics. Everyone is free to root for Biden, and complain about Republican politicians, talk about how enthusiastic they are for liberal or progressive policies, etc. It only becomes "politics" when someone disagrees, and then they get banned.

To bolster this point, I'd add that I've been on the receiving end of this in a Discord server I was a big part of. The topic of the server was not related to politics, in fact they had a no-politics rule and yet woke politics ran rampant in the server every day - I remember reading so many endorsements of woke talking points in the server, to the point where some of their members were basically endorsing sentiments like "I hate men" and calling it helpful and "consciousness-raising".

I was the only one who repeatedly called for all political discussion to be halted. Eventually I got tired of trying to enforce a rule that just got ignored and laid out my disagreements with their points during one of these discussions (very politely, I might add). What happened then is that after I had a user respond to me, a mod ended up halting the discussion and stated that it was getting too political despite their complete willingness to let every political discussion in line with their beliefs stand. Then later on I was banned because I'd supposedly expressed "harmful things", and after I was banned and couldn't defend myself someone else still on that server told me that many of the users decided to shit-talk me in there. Including somebody I had considered a friend.

The idea that leftist communities exude anything akin to "positivity" is in my opinion ridiculous.


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