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As a Literal-Minded Person, I am Once Again Asking for Connotation not to Completely Supplant Denotation
The other day, I saw a screenshot of this tweet on Instagram:
I commented that I found it very strange to assert that you're not scared of crime. Crime is bad. All things being equal, no one would choose to be a victim of crime. Of course some people are more scared of crime than they really should be, but that's a far cry from saying that any amount of fear of crime is wholly unjustified. I may have compared the tweeter to Bike Cuck.
People in the comments clowned me. "Admitting you're afraid of general crime and calling someone else a cuck is a bold stance for someone so pathetic." "If you live your life in constant fear that 'someone' is gonna suddenly commit a crime against you every time you go out in public, you have agoraphobia and should get therapy." "Do you want the powice offiew to tuck you in and wead you a night night story?"
Nowhere in the comment did I claim that I live in constant fear of being a victim of crime: I merely stated that it's silly to claim to not to be afraid of crime at all. It's a weird non sequitur: "you assert that it's not unreasonable to experience some degree of fear of crime - ergo you are a bootlicker who worships police officers." It's also strange to be accused of agoraphobia by someone who I can only presume was an enthusiastic supporter of lockdowns.
I found the tweet strange, in its conception that "being afraid of crime" is a trait unique to (American) conservatives. Many of the canonical beliefs associated with American liberalism also entail fear of particular types of crime (perhaps even fear vastly out of proportion to their likelihood of occurring). Rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment (including on college campuses) are all types of crime. School shootings are crimes. Hate crimes are crimes (the hint is in the name). Revenge porn and certain kinds of cyberbullying are crimes in many jurisdictions. If you're afraid of any or all of these happening to you, you are afraid of crime, by definition. This sort of reminded me of the finding Scott cited, that most American are opposed to Obamacare, but in favour of every individual component of Obamacare.
Moreover, it makes far more statistical sense to be afraid of crime in general than to be afraid of any particular subtype of crime. A woman's likelihood of being raped in a calendar year cannot be higher than her probability of being raped or mugged or having her car stolen etc. If you are X% scared of being a victim of a specific type of crime, you should be >X% scared of being a victim of any kind of crime, as there is no circumstance in which the former is more likely to befall you than the latter. This is just basic statistics. (Thank you to several commenters for reminding me of the conjunction fallacy, whose name was on the tip of my tongue while initially writing this.)
Back in the real world, I know why people react this way, in spite of how illogical it is on its face. Generations of Blue Tribers have internalised the idea that politicians who talk about being "tough on crime" are engaging in "dog-whistle politics", and that "crime" is being used as a code word for "the kinds of crimes that black people (or more recently, immigrants) engage in"; using the word "crime" in a vacuum is a signal of Red Tribe membership. Conversely, a person who expresses concern about being the victim of a hate crime, a school shooting, rape or sexual assault, cyberbullying or having their nudes leaked without their consent is signalling Blue Tribe membership.
This leads to a curious situation in which a black man who expresses concern about being the victim of a hate crime will result in all the white people around nodding deferentially, whereas if he expresses concern about being the victim of a crime (a category which includes all hate crimes), the same white people will roll their eyes and call him an Uncle Tom. In part, this state of affairs came about because many of the people who express these concerns believe (erroneously, in many cases) that these specific crimes are disproportionately likely to be committed by members of their out-group. The idea that white men are responsible for a disproportionate share of hate crimes or active shooter-style school shootings is a myth that stubbornly refuses to die.
But I hate the idea that ordinary common-sense words are being ceded as tribal shibboleths so readily. "Crime is bad" (a category which includes all Blue Tribe-coded crimes such as hate crimes, school shootings etc.) should not be a politically polarising statement, any more than "being sick is bad" or "dying prematurely is bad". It seems our culture has now reached the point at which one cannot say "crime is bad" without half of your hypothetical audience immediately responding "lmao, okay whatever you fascist MAGA bootlicker". And this is far from the only ordinary common-sense word which inspires such a bizarre polarised reaction. The most politically loaded question of the last five years was "what is a woman?", for fuck's sake. If this trend continues, I fear that in ten years' time, anyone who uses the word "the" in a tweet will have people in the replies mocking them as a Definite Article Enjoyer which, per this NPR column and Vox explainer, is a dog whistle for... something.
(This is still probably Freddie's best work.)
Its not worth thinking about any of this at the object level. The things you are interacting with on social media are not human beings, they are AIs programmed to hurt you with weaponised language. By engaging with them you're allowing them to set the terms and tempo of the debate, and their only goal is to prevent real debate from happening because it's their best strategic option right now.
The words are a cloud of ink. There is no "real" message it's possible to engage with, and the people responsible just need to be supressed and incapacitated .
Just having to wade through their posts spamming a board and wasting time thinking about them is an attack on you, just as much as when they ddos a wrongthinker's website. Flooding the zone with DARVO ragebait bullshit is just an effective counter to drag the discussion away from people being burned alive on the subway, which they can't defend on the merits.
If you want the purest demo of this possible, go to /pol/ and see if there's any threads worth responding to. It's all ragebait, disruption, shilling, trolling, etc.
This should be the new canonical reference for how to write a highbrow-sounding "boo outgroup" post.
The statutory 24 hours having passed, I'm saving it for my "things the mods are surprisingly okay with when they directionally flatter their biases" highlights reel.
There is no statutory 24 hours. We usually try to make a decision quickly rather than letting a post sit in the queue for days, but in this case (with the post standing at 11 reports), there is a reason I personally am not going to pull the trigger, and most of the mods are only erratically online because of the holidays.
But thanks for providing a direct contrast to @SteveKirk's accusations that we only ever mod him because he offends our biases.
Well, I figured that 24 hours was a reasonable amount of time to wait so I wouldn't just be complaining while mods are asleep or discussing. I concede that I jumped the gun here and was wrong in expecting that you would let him get away with it.
However, I do still think that you are making it too easy for yourself by reasoning that looks like a "people from both sides get mad about the moderation, so it must be that we are actually quite fair". There is scarcely a time or system in history that did not draw complaints from people who wanted to pull further in the direction in which it was already biased; I'm sure even the leftiest of Mastodons get people telling the admins they are being fascist, too. I can only hope you have some good internal metrics about the results of what you are doing, because by the main external ones (alignment of prolific posters, upvote patterns), you are really not doing well.
Yes, I do believe that both sides constantly telling us how much we suck is evidence that we're fair.
As for whether we are "doing well" or not, I'm not aware of any "metrics" being collected other than activity counts, but I weigh your judgment about as heavily as I weigh @SteveKirk's (who, unsurprisingly, has also been telling us forever that our moderation is so bad that we're destroying the site).
If your complaint is that the site skews rightward, yes, we're aware, it's been discussed since before we left reddit, and I (and the other mods) would like to see more of an ideological balance, but I have come to the conclusion that, realistically, the only way we could keep leftists around is to ban all the rightists, when the opposite isn't true. I leave any conclusions to the interested observer.
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If you think a post against propaganda is a banworthy offense, I don't know what to tell you.
I just told you the opposite of that. If you can't understand what I wrote, I don't know what to tell you.
Has one meaning, come on, are you serious? That sentence isn't interpretable as saying anything other than "I would pull the trigger, but I'm waiting for a triggerman instead"
God it's all so fake and manipulative. I'd rather deal with the actual bots.
The meaning is: we are discussing whether or not to ban you. It is my opinion that you've earned a permaban, but I am recusing myself due to our past interactions. If the other mods disagree with me that your post merits a permaban, I will accept their decision.
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IMHO at this point they should just remove the boo-outgroup rule rather than make a continued mockery of it.
Edit: jeez and +17
I don’t think it’s boo-outgroup to say that large sections of social media are awful people who want to hurt you and engaging with them honestly is a mistake. Right now those are all leftists because of other civilisation all dynamics but it would just as bad if they were rightists.
I referenced /pol/ to try and demonstrate that it was a general point about the risks of letting propaganda weapons into your brain without a filter. Although admittedly even there a lot of it is committed by leftists for trolling or demoralization, it's still a good example of a community poisoned by all sides.
But yeah, if some people want the boo outgroup rule to mean "you have to take 'Kamela is Brat, Vance fucked a couch!' propaganda at face value," rather than treating them as weapons to be analyzed and defended against at arms length, I think the community is fucked.
The boo outgroup rule means you should not refer to your political opponents as literal inhuman "things." If all you said was "don't trust propaganda and liberal social media," your post would not be under discussion.
The "weird" attack on Vance was literally invented by a propaganda consultancy firm and algorithmically boosted by bots. If that doesn't count as the product of an inhuman "thing" we're going to have to have some discussions about the nature of humanity.
If your mother gets called by an automated telemarketing scam pretending to be you needing bail money/gift cards, is that the action of a human, or a malicious thing directed by human intelligence? Is the correct response for her to argue with it, or slam the phone down and curse the thing that tried to hurt her?
If something that looks almost exactly like your wife except for the featureless empty black eyes comes to your bedroom window and asks you to let it in, what do you do? Ask it politely how it's floating outside the 2nd floor, or nod to your actual wife to get the fucking shotgun and a bible?
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What do you want my response to be to "American conservatism just doesn’t appeal to me because I’m not scared of everything"? Can you write us a sample response to that claim, if it's not a waste of time engaging with?
Do you want me to waste time pretending it's a real argument we have to disprove to avoid being epicly owned by SmearBot420@x dot com?
The sole purpose of a tweet like that is claiming territory by shitting all over it. It is not a real argument. It is not speech. It should not be listened to or responded to, only talked about in terms of the hostile political project it represents.
I'm not sure if it's more appropriate to describe "my interlocutors are not human" as a different stage in the lifecycle of the very memetic parasite you are bothered by, or just a related species - but I do not think it is in any sense better.
You have seen reddit meta sub threads where they talk about strategies for taking over communities and imposing censorship. You've seen literal government and NGO sponsored influencer campaigns complete with bot account boosting. In the last six months you've seen the most manufactured consensus enforcement machine ever created in the Harris campaign.
I'm asking you, do you honestly think that the correct way to respond to these is arguing over the definition of "brat" and whether Kamela fits it? Or is the only appropriate response to note and analyze the propaganda campaign for what it is?
At least when I signed up for it, this forum was not for developing and executing an efficient counterstrategy to the Kamala campaign, but for being able to discuss the culture war with people from all sides involved without having to deal with the sort of brainless dunking and bingo-board automatisms that define Twitter, Reddit and all the other political forums. Your post is not conducive to this: we already very nearly have a right-wing monoculture, and I doubt that any stray left-winger will be particularly encouraged to stay and contributed when they see a highly-upvoted post that describes their friends and allies on Twitter as inhuman automata. They would probably think of those Twitter users described as being the ones who are actually fighting off hordes of inhuman bots, and their canned responses as the only way those allies of theirs are managing to keep the upper hand over an onslaught of repetitive astroturfed narrative attacks.
If you really think the Twitter posters you are describing are literally bots, then you are frankly out of touch with reality. If you think they are not literally bots but it is strategically correct to treat them as such, then you are not noting and analyzing the propaganda campaign but fighting it.
I wouldn't call ourselves "a right-wing monoculture"; we have everything from colorblind gender-neutral 90s liberals, to centrists who just want to grill, to autistic libertarians, to God-'n-guns conservatives, to throne and altar reactionaries. The only thing we are really missing is the far left, either economic (communism) or social (wokeness).
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Do you not think that fighting against propaganda campaigns is helpful? One of the founding events of the SSC community was Scott countering the "men are more likely to be struck by a meteor than falsely accused of rape" propaganda campaign from our old friend Charles Clymer. (Who in his defense was never falsely accused of rape lol)
Fighting propaganda campaigns to keep their power outside your walled garden of discussion has always been a fundamental goal of the community.
I don't see any evidence that that propaganda campaign ever encroached in this particular walled garden. A much more salient founding event was when Scott talked about toxoplasma, and how "countering" a political meme actually makes you a vector for the very same meme - that's why to date, we have rules on paper about discussing the culture war and not waging it. If you prefer to take cues from the other side, Moldbug was on to a related thing when he talked about power leakage. The moment your forum/institution/whatever becomes a political fighting force of any import, it also becomes an asset worth capturing. Few factions would care to encroach on a forum that autistically discusses current events while prohibiting its members from openly taking sides or showing emotion, but once this forum actually starts producing innovations in fighting against one side or the other, this calculus surely changes.
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I mean, I could try. Something like:
While an American liberal or progressive might feel like an American conservative is coming from a place of fear, this is a misleading impression. First, it is worth pointing out that wanting things like lower immigration, more barriers to trans care for children and fewer government hand outs doesn't have to come from a place of 'fear.' Just as liberals/progressives believe that their policies come from a high-minded place of concern for their fellow man, so too a conservative can genuinely believe that the best thing for all peoples is to adopt those policies.
In the case of immigration, a conservative might believe that brain-draining poor countries is bad for the stability and well-being of those cultures, and that migration might serve as a release valve for pressure that would rightfully lead to successful rebellions that might actually make those countries better off in the long run.
In the case of trans care, it doesn't have to be fear of the "other" at all, but a genuine conviction that the evidence in favor was actually substantially weaker than often claimed, that it originated in a different country with different background information that doesn't seem to apply to the anglo-sphere. Add in the replication crisis (which also affects medicine), and the evidence that the WPATH is an activist organization that seems to go beyond the remit of evidence, and you have a recipe to truly believe that trans healthcare for minors is a net negative for most children, and society as a whole. This is not about "fear", but a genuine disagreement on the merits of the evidence and an approach to epistemology.
Even aside from all of this, it is worth pointing out that liberals and progressives seem to be afraid of their own side's bugbears, in a way that is out of proportion with the statistics. They fear hate crimes, rape, and discrimination to a far greater degree than the statistics would seem to justify. It is wrong-headed to think that what makes conservatism unique is "fear", as opposed to the positive values they do espouse.
Exactly, that's four paragraphs wasted responding to a mindless one sentence smear. And then Trollbot5000 responds with "lol ur weird for being so invested in justifying ur bigotry, bonus transphobia yikes, have a normal one weirdo," 40 other identical replies instantly appear to ratio you, and you are reported to bluesky for hate speech.
Your thoughtful reply didn't help because there wasn't any communication happening in the first place, just a DDoS attack on your brain to bully and deflect from people asking "huh, has anyone else noticed more people on fire in the subway than usual?"
If you don't think there's anything worth responding to here, you can just not respond. We're not on Twitter, or Bluesky so the kinds of responses you get there are irrelevant.
That's what I'm talking about
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For me the cool part was that I'm not on twitter much and it seemed eminently plausible that the discourse there has actually already been captured by toxoplasmic AIs. Can't be long now, anyway.
The nice thing about twitter is that you can have little siloed areas of good conversation, for now at least.
That's how Reddit used to work until moderation killed all the good places.
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Oh, there's lots on both reddit and Twitter (and 4chan, although most of that sewer is just regular troll posts). Some are so good they almost pass for human , but others still use all the instantly recognizable chatgpt tells: "However, it's important to consider factors like", etc.
Others seem like real language until you realize they're just sampling random phases from the conversation while throwing in slogans.
I think dead internet theory is going to be a reality by the end of next year, if it isn't already.
Scarier than a dead internet, I'm worried that the rise of AI assistants is going to lead to a dead humanity. Even logging off won't save you from that one.
I've already seen reddit arguments that descended into "chatgpt, lecture this bigot about The Science," and there's something absolutely horrifying about someone making an active decision to hit the "brain turn off, let machine move mouth" button.
I always got that sick feeling of watching an ideology speak through someone, but never expected it to become this literal.
No exaggeration, we're only a few advances in machine interface away from becoming wetware for mind parasites, like an even gayer John Barnes novel.
Do you, honestly, think ideology doesn't speak through you? Never?
I don't know if his threshold is at the same level as mine, but I don't think being ideologically captured is all that common. A normal person with an ideology will have their moments of cognitive dissonance and scrambling to come up with an excuse, but someone who is being spoken through by an ideology will say things like "imagine the backlash against Muslims, if ISIS set off a nuke in a major metropolis", or will refuse to publish a study because their political opponents might "weaponize the results". Or if you want an example from the other side, reportedly Ron Paul's reaction to 9/11 was "oh no, now we're gonna have big government!".
In any case the scary thing about the discussed scenario has nothing to do with any particular ideology, ideologies are just an example of how people already outsource their thinking. The point is that with AI this is going to reach a whole new dimension. It will go beyond "we've all read the same book(s)" or "we all attended the same church", it will be people literally refusing to engage their brain and outsourcing all their reasoning to AI. Be my guest if you want to focus on petty tribal squabbles, but the idea is just as terrifying to me no matter who this power is wielded by.
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