There comes a time in every discussion forum user's life that they espouse an unpopular opinion. Not something unpopular in a way that they have broken any rules. But unpopular in a way that many other users want to chime in with their disagreement.
Ratioed
On twitter it is called getting "ratioed" where the unpopular tweets have a higher than normal number of comments relative to likes and retweets. It is viewed as a negative thing to happen when you are on twitter, because saying unpopular things on twitter is seen as bad.
Here on themotte saying unpopular things is not bad. We are here to have discussions with people who have different points of view. If you say something unpopular but not against the rules then you are serving the purpose of themotte. Not only have you not done something bad, you have done something good. You have provided everyone else here with content. There might be some tribal instincts in the back of your head screaming warnings at you "oh no! you have said something unpopular. quick! defend yourself, moderate your position, attack your most aggressive detractors!" These instincts are wrong. Instead, by saying something unpopular you have become the bell of the ball. The star athlete that all the recruiters want. Etc etc. We all want to talk to you!
Death by a thousand cuts
Being the center of attention and wanted by everyone can be stressful, especially when it feels like a form of infamy. There is a common failure mode that we as the mods have to witness happen again and again. The person that is at the center of attention is getting minor attacks that don't rise to the level of moderation. Multiple people might say the equivalent of "I think you are wrong because you aren't smart", or other forms of implied insults. The person at the center of attention will eventually get worn down by all these small cuts and jabs, and they will lash out at someone making the jabs. The lash out often does rise to the level of moderation.
You are the solution
The mods have talked about this phenomenon and we have realized that there isn't a good way to solve this problem through moderation. But! That doesn't mean there is no good solution at all.
These are the strategies I have used when getting ratioed, they've kept me sane, kept me calm, and helped me enjoy my time far more:
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Attitude - You are the popular one. Everyone wants to talk with you. Keep these in mind to avoid the tribal anxiety of 'everyone hates me I have to defend myself!'
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Match Effort - There are lots of responses flying at you and these responses have varying levels of effort. If someone has a low effort comment I do not respond with a well researched and cited response, I will often try and avoid responding to low effort comments altogether. Remember, you are the bell of the ball, they need to come to you.
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Prioritize the Best - Try and respond to your best disagreers first. The ones that bring up the best points, address all the things you said, or are just very polite about how they say it. You should be rewarding their effort, and hopefully signalling to other potential commentors that this is the type of comment you will respond to. This also helps with the next piece of advice:
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Refer back to yourself - Don't get frustrated saying the same thing a bunch of times. If you find yourself having the same argument in two different places, then only have it in the place with the better disagreer, and then point the other people to those posts, or just extensively quote yourself. "I addressed your point while talking with [other user], see my comment here(link)".
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Limit the back and forth - I will usually only give one response to most users. I will try and match their effort and address their points. I will try and have an extended discussion only with the best disagreers. So many instances of me moderating people happen ten or fifteen comments deep into a conversation, when almost everyone else has stopped reading. Both sides have already said the same thing multiple times, and they just become frustrated at each other "How can you resist the amazing logic and beauty of my arguments! Only a cretin and scum could fail to be convinced!" My suggestion is to just say your point and get out. You should expect to not have the last word when you are getting ratioed, so just embrace that reality up front.
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Leave when you are done - Sometimes even with all these strategies you might reach the end of your patience. You just don't want to talk about it anymore. Try and be introspective and recognize when you have reached this point. Once it happens, thank your best disagreer for the good discussion, say you are done with this topic and leave the discussion. Do not feel obligated to respond to additional comments. Your further participation is only likely to get you in trouble. You will likely get more and more frustrated until you lash out.
I also have advice for when you see someone getting ratioed and you want to join in on the dogpile. But that advice is more of a charitable nature, like it would be helpful to the community as a whole, but probably not as much to you personally. If people are interested I'll add it.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I openly identify as a "pedofascist" here. I don't think I can relate at all to caring enough about this issue to write this long of a post about it.
Here's my short advice that I think is both more succinct and superior to yours (which again in my view is unnecessarily lengthy for such a minor issue): It's just text on a screen. It means nothing. It can't hurt you. (Somebody implied that they were going to throw me in a woodchipper on here like a day ago, to which I responded with German loli visual novel song lyrics. What's he gonna do about it? Nothing.)
Engage as much as is entertaining and/or intellectually stimulating for you. Then leave. (I guess that's similar to a suggestion you made too, but mine's quicker.)
PS: It's "belle of the ball", not "bell".
As a fellow “unpopular ideology haver” in this space (though I think you’ve got me handily beaten when it comes to the relative unpopularity) I think you might be understating the potential value of presenting a compelling - or, barring that, at least not actively off-putting - face for your positions. This means that it can be valuable to make a sincere and concerted effort to respond - responsibly, respectfully, and with appreciable effort - to interlocutors, even after you are personally no longer interested in the conversation or you feel like you’ve gotten the most that you’re personally going to get out of it. You never know when your response, however perfunctory and unnecessary it might feel internally, may be what leads an interlocutor to see your position in a new light, or even to just become slightly more positively-inclined to you, and by extension others who may (hopefully) express similar views in the future.
There's value in both, tbh.
Actually 'converting' someone to 'fascism / white nationalism' is best done by totally ignoring the race superiority and fascism parts for a while, because that's obviously wrong, and convincing people of the whole slate of reactionary aesthetics, various forms of last-man emptiness and degeneracy as bad and purposeless, the truth of nature and hierarchy, will and strength, war separating out strong from weak, as the father of all things in nature, etc, each in ways that play off of the individual's personal experiences and ideas - and then building the more directly taboo parts on top of that. (and the same goes for any other kind of significant set of ideas someone would dislike, easy to write a list for anarchism or stalinism or whatever). This isn't even manipulative, exactly - if that was something you agreed with, it just sounds correct and practical "if someone is christian and you want to convince them of atheism, don't just scream GOD IS FAKE HERES BIBLE CONTRADICTIONS, explain how physics and natural selection explain so much of the world and then bring in god-fake as a natural conclusion to that" and that's basically the same as "to explain particle physics, probably start with algebra first"
But having someone who presents extreme, even ironic / exploring taboo areas views is also good, because it leads you & observers to consider them directly! "pedofascist" is probably ironically overstated, although there are definitely unironic pedofascists out there, but having someone come directly in with "slavery and monarchy are good" or "war and culling of the weak are good" is valuable, even if those are deeply wrong, because one needs to consider the ideas and what they mean. Although the latter are arguably better done by old books/writing than anyone actually alive today.
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I've neglected responding to this (as I could respond more extensively but I'm not sure such a response wouldn't be unnecessarily based in my own personal dynamics) but I feel bad not acknowledging that you do have a good point (one which I've always acknowledged, though perhaps I've become too cynical to always fully implement it (hence my prior statement about personal dynamics)) so take this post as that. Racially I think we may agree on many matters as well. Thanks for replying with your insight.
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Well, yes, but with the caveat that this attitude will often lead directly to rules violations that will get you evicted from the space. They're not just words on a screen--they're words written by a person, and you should respond to those words accordingly. If you fail to treat people like people, eventually those people will stop giving you the opportunity for the entertainment and/or intellectual stimulation you hoped to extract in the first place.
I don't see much like an (edit: high) effort requirement in the rules (beyond avoiding "low-effort participation" which seems to me to be an easy bar to clear), mostly only civility, charity, etc. Besides, you can always apply this principle by just capping the number of posts you make at the number of posts you can make with a reasonable amount of effort. (I mean none of this applies to me anyway since I've written dozens of lengthier-than-average posts already.)
Indifference isn't necessarily laziness, (unwarranted) aggression, or anything else negative. An indifferent God can still crush the Earth in his palm.
Er...
And yet.
It's "negative" at minimum in the sense that it isn't what we're cultivating, here.
Well okay my statement was kind of contradictory/dumb (could've used some more proofreading before posting). Let me put it this way: I don't see much of a (high) effort requirement in the rules ("much" intended to be the operative word prior but "much of" probably would have communicated that better than "much like"), and I've rarely if ever seen someone get popped for "low effort". There's no requirement of a level of effort that would prevent people from disengaging freely as I describe is what I meant.
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Just curious -- what's your objective in engaging with people on TheMotte? Are you mainly here to raise awareness about and defend your own beliefs?
I have no "objective" really. I just like to spar and express myself, ideally with a board culture that doesn't end up resulting in the discussion degrading into the worst, not-actually-debate Reddit cliches ("Touch grass", "Get help", etc.). I decided to go full hog with my preferred, no-compromises political fantasy because I actually do think its basic tenets are quite readily defensible and I'm smart enough to handle it (admittedly some of this is because a decent amount of people don't want to engage with such an ideology at all), and so far I don't feel like it's taken a serious intellectual blow so I suppose I'm right.
I agree with you on the proposal that fucking or marrying consenting girls should be permissible regardless of age, but I wish you would mention arguments that appeal to property rights, freedom, and self ownership considerations, which would entice liberal minded people to agree. Your arguments are convincing to reactionary/traditionalist or fascist rightwingers but are repulsive or ineffective for people of other political ideologies.
I in fact actually have made such arguments (see the third and fifth paragraphs for expediency's sake).
The "libertAryan" in my flair is not simply for show. As a libertAryan pedofascist, I understand that widespread masculine cooperation and masculine individualism/autonomy both have perhaps equally been producers/drivers of masculine excellence historically. Therefore I (and all pedofascist comrades of my disposition) seek only the most ennobling, dignified, and vitality-enhancing balance between these two tendencies, with a more than reasonable allowance for individual preference (of the vigorous man who is provably not any sort of traitor to masculine power, who simply seeks the reasonable consummation of his natural masculine birthright and heritage).
The purpose of pedofascism is by no means to abrogate the masculine rights of anyone but rather to ensure their fulfillment through the confederate power of comrades and hopefully in some cases brothers united in a triumph of the will by the spirits of Lifthrasir, Mars, and Europa (among others, with no necessity of supernatural belief implied). For the man who simply mostly wants to be "left alone", there is certainly a place, so long as he is not a vector of rot and decay. Indeed, his masculine rights will be far better protected than under the current system.
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To actually criticize pedofascism - at least one that doesn't contest any "values", and is both unexpected and only morally objectionable in that it doesn't scream 'pedo nazi' - is physical - given the natural end of sex is childbirth, I can't see a fascist seeing value in sex outside childbirth in a large-scale sense - wouldn't even ephebophilia (by-definition pedophilia can't cause childbirth at all, although nobody really uses that definition exclusively) not maximize long-term fertility rates because small bodies would be injured by childbirth & not nourish the child well enough?
I'm not aware of anything in the fundamental nature of fascism which proscribes pleasure and enjoyment. Hitler obviously didn't think so. Certainly fascism often demands a significant measure of gravitas and ardent resolve from its citizens/adherents, but who said it was all no fun all the time?
Of course sexuality (which is often not even actual sex nowadays, just sexual hypnosis in the form of voyeurism/pornography (addictions)) must not be allowed to run wild, that is the state of libido dominandi that we are currently imprisoned by must be prevented, but what ideology based in the exaltation of bold and natural masculinity (among other things, but that's a big one) would ban men from sex for the pure pleasure and thrill of dominating (that is communing with, in the proper, just, and natural fashion by dominating) the feminine? If anything, within reason, this shall be encouraged. Perhaps there is a tendency in historical fascism that heavily contradicts this (in which case, as fascism is fundamentally a progressive (though right-wing progressive) ideology, I am still free to either accept this restriction or alter/abolish it), but I am not aware of it.
Well luckily we have the technology to separate sex and fertility to quite a reasonable degree. So I don't really see any great necessity behind so specifically making sexual policy contingent on fertility aims, as it seems to me that you can readily achieve those regardless with various breeding programs. (Of course the infrastructure to support this separation may take some time to construct/acquire. So perhaps the people may be required to deprive themselves of behaving as they could if the ideal resolution had already been achieved for a time, but as they will be a hardy, fascist people, this will not cause any great difficulties.)
Not at all, but it's understood that the forms of pleasure are the same as with purpose and strength - this is why well formed breasts and hips are innately attractive - and why the pleasurable act involves putting sperm into the fallopian tube - and that having sex without a purpose of childbirth is generally degenerate. So I don't see why you'd want to have sex with a prepubescent child! As to the link - 'bread and circuses for the people' aside, which is vaguely progressive, art, music, athletics, theatre, aren't merely 'entertainment' for nothing but itself, but directly communicate values, aesthetics, desires etc to people!
It's really funny how just making that argument is incredibly taboo and icky, because i'm not saying "what the fuck you pedophile GET OUT". It's the main correct factual basis for disliking pedophilia, though. If fertilizing 9yos was, historically, the most large-scale efficient method of reproduction for humans, we'd [probably] have no taboos on it whatsoever, and other animals have reproduction mechanisms as strange as that. All morality is like that though, contingent yet useful, cheating is contingently disliked not because it disrupts the fundamental spiritual union of awesome eternal souls but because it reduces an individual's number of offspring (which is important, because the peoples' genes determine much of most important things about them!)
The pleasure is the desire to reproduce, though, and getting off in the same way with someone who can't reproduce (in the case of literal pedophilia) is just confused. Fascism, iirc, didn't have rape as a general practice, instead having people marry and reproduce (although pushing that earlier). But that's besides the principle of it. And 'separating sex from fertility' is similarly mistaken - any time you have sex without reproducing, you've just wasted a correct desire to reproduce!
Club Tropical Rape, except the RWBB groyper's sperm genomes are swapped for short and ugly 150iq scientists? You could even keep most of the scientist genomes while swapping the attractiveness-related alleles, i guess. iirc GWASes generally found little negative correlations between traits like that, although idk how true that is at the tails.
We literally live in a society that has taboos on 20 year olds having children and is currently selecting its members out of the planetary gene pool. And let's not even get started on all the other ways that only non-reproductive sex is celebrated, from homosexuality to infanticide to ritual castration.
I don't think you can use the Efficient Taboo Hypothesis for this one.
Just making the point that all these moral claims are, or are attempts to be, about the practical results of the prescribed or proscribed actions. There are historical, correct reasons to dislike pedophilia in the literal sense! Evolutionary contingency could put us in places that, by 'local' moral standards, would be incredibly disgusting to us but natural to 'them' (as too happens between societies).
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this is not convincing to me because in my opinion the purpose of sex is pleasure, reproduction is a secondary effect which is not necessarily desirable. People who have sex while denying its reproductive potential do not feel like they are wasting their desire, instead they feel like they are fulfilling it. I think you are the one who is confused here.
Are you approaching this from the 'pedofascist' angle or a more common one? Assuming latter -
So, sex is a process of physical acts, right? A variety of physical relations that have evolved over millenia to coordinate reproduction. Now, it evolved because of reproduction - so the pleasure comes, in a sense, from reproduction. We can take this elsewhere - is eating primarily for pleasure? Is curiosity? What about duty - is a sense of duty to one's family or group 'primarily for the feeling of duty', or is it for those people?
Also, what about the profound cause of creating more people, who can have the same experiences and trials you had, but varied, with a chance at better? Isn't that valuable? Isn't that captured by the "pleasure" of sex? What is sex, or pleasure, without that? Why does satisfying 'desire to have sex' mean anything without sex?
Why not just jerk off? Or do heroin for that matter.
yeah, if sexual pleasure was not related to reproduction it would not have evolved to be a thing, so reproduction is its purpose in that sense. but i was referring to purpose as something that is determined by the user, so in that case sex would not have the same purpose for everyone.
in the case of eating, i would not say it is primarily for pleasure, but for an obese person it is, because they would not have to eat nearly as much if their primary purpose was sustenance.
in my opinion creating more people is not obviously valuable, so it may be a negative, idk.
satisfying the desire to have sex creates pleasure which is intrinsically valuable imo, just as you believe creating more people is valuable, i think pleasure is a good thing that is meaningful of itself.
jerking off is usually not as pleasurable. and heroin has side effects that can spiral out of control.
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This is directly contradictory to basic reality unfortunately. I can provably orgasm, and experience pleasure (which is not to say satisfaction, which is a wholly different matter), from putting my semen in a banana, my hand, a silicone doll, and so on (which is not to say that any of this is preferable). (And though masturbation is an ugly habit to be the slave of, if we are to recognize nature, we must recognize why nature has allowed us to arouse ourselves when we can't, for example, tickle ourselves.) No fallopian tubes are required. (Perhaps it is a fascist tendency (or a tendency of all politics) or not, but I am not in favor of the rhetorical denial of basic reality to emphasize a moral/spiritual point.)
I don't see how that's true. If anything, having sex with the purpose of childbirth can be degenerate if you are not appropriately managing your breeding impulses with a long-term outlook. (Otherwise Africans having 8 children they can't feed each and vastly overpopulating their continent would be the least degenerate people alive, which I don't think you mean to imply.)
For the same non-reproductive reasons you'd want to have sex with anyone else? Because they are sexually attractive and it will bring you pleasure? Unless you see humans as purely baby-making machines (which to me is the most limited kind of primitive, reactionary thinking that is hardly fascist at all (as fascism explicitly opposed mindless reaction (see: Nazi anthem "Die Fahne hoch" for example)), evident in the fact that as stated above it most closely praises African breeding patterns), these are perfectly valid reasons in appropriate contexts.
Well, you are ignoring a few things I believe:
A. For the vast majority of human history, there wasn't much of a taboo against fertilizing 9 year olds (which can happen in some cases as the youngest mother in human history was actually only 5, and she delivered successfully without dying) or attempting it. (For example, the explicit age of consent in colonial Delaware, inhabited by a reasonably reproductively-oriented people I think you'd agree, was set at 7.) It is very modern and thus cannot be reasonably claimed to be a moral intuition based in inherent human reproductive instinct (as in your cheating example).
(Actually this is not entirely true because I do think there is some reproductive instinct that explains it... the feminine reproductive instinct to establish taboos that allow them to avoid being outcompeted and quickly made reproductively obsolete in their life spans by more attractive and fertile younger females. (See now how so many of them are trying to stigmatize age gaps featuring an older man of almost any size larger than 2-3 years, how many of them shriek about a 27 year old dating a 19 year old for example. The underlying psychological instinct was always barely child "protection" at all and thus naturally never stopped at them.) This of course has likely only begun to influence men at all due to their modern feminization.)
B. We humans are of course a K-selected and not r-selected species (another reason why "sex for breeding only" is a flawed ideology as the human appetite for sex vastly outweighs its capacity for proper investment in offspring). Let me ask you, which is more K-selected behavior:
a. Becoming sexually attracted to other members of your species only at their exact, immediate moment of peak fertility?
b. Or becoming sexually attracted to other members of your species in anticipation of their peak fertility in order to facilitate the establishment of a stronger pair bond (which can take years) prior to that peak fertility which might benefit your offspring?
You now know the evolutionary argument for why men tend to begin to be attracted to females prior to their peak fertility (which is usually not the same as the onset of fertility at all), with escalating degrees of hebephilia/pedophilia simply being different, more highly tuned calibrations of this which naturally establish different reproductive niches. (It is worth noting that this implies that the more pedophilic an individual is, the more naturally K-selected their reproductive strategy is (which is not automatic praise, as basic economic analysis of the concept of "investment" of course reveals that it is possible to be too K-selected).)
I'm no fan of cheating but I think the claim that it "reduces an individual's number of offspring" is highly contextual and requires a greater degree of universal justification.
I've ejaculated in multiple women while using various means of birth control. It felt perfectly pleasurable to me. The satisfaction of reproduction is again provably, empirically perhaps related but easily separable. (You may claim that recognizing this separation is inherently immoral, improper, or inadvisable for various reasons but that's a different argument than claiming that they're equivalent.)
Dominating your own property is not rape (which originally meant theft for obvious reasons, that rape as a sex act was primarily and properly characterized as an aggression not against a woman's consent but a man's property). My quote was not a reference to rape in this fashion.
The Africans appreciate you. Perhaps we men shall simply travel to Mars on a mountain of babies, produced by a race fucking like they're on Ford's factory line to make more and more endless, indistinguishable offspring commensurate with a vigorous human appetite for sexuality because... I forgot why this was supposedly a good thing.
I can assure you that I have had a consummated desire for sex many times without an equivalent comprehensive desire for reproduction (because I non-degenerately recognized that reproduction at that moment was not behaviorally optimal long-term for either myself or my offspring).
Well yes, though the primary initial goal of the breeding programs will be to perfect women as subservient creatures (as I imagine this will be more readily achievable for a time than producing a perfect artificial equivalent) in order to save society from their subversive influences. It worked for dogs even without much in the way of modern science, so I don't take it as impossible.
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Can you define "bold and natural masculinity" clearly? I imagine there are plenty of reason men in this proposed society might be friends in a great fraternal way or bash each other's heads in at slight provocation and they hinge critically on the whole "raping each other's mates, mothers and daughters" thing. There would presumably be about one man per woman, who is sharing?
Unfortunately I cannot entirely, as it is a matter to which Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous "I know it when I see it." quote readily applies. I can clearly answer your specific question though:
My conception of "natural masculinity" includes the recognition of the concept of property, as even dogs recognize that taking a bone in the possession of another dog is grounds for conflict (so surely we can hold even the most primitive men to a same if not higher standard).
So no, men would not be allowed to fuck each other's feminine property without explicit permission. (And even with permission this would need to be controlled to avoid the reemergence of the eroticization of cuckoldry.)
Women would be property, generally personal property and generally owned each by one individual man. (Perhaps more complex ownership arrangements could be considered in some cases but this is tangential.)
So men own their daughters, how do men without daughters find mates? Is there a prostitution angle as well? I don't see how such a society could move from one generation to the next.
I wouldn't call it prostitution per se as that's a rental (though you can call it that if you want), but some men will inevitably prefer to sell/betroth (at least some of perhaps) their daughters to other men (according to economic incentive or more ideally personal affection) rather than keep all of them as their personal mates. (To be clear, no man is required to have sex with any female he doesn't want to, including his own daughters. It's just a nice available perk.)
Other than that, options include state or privately produced waifus without explicit parentage (obviously they would have one genetically but it wouldn't necessarily be recognized - all the better for them to be bonded only to their masculine owner), waifus "ex nihilo" that is (not really but kind of), state or privately provided breeding resources such as surrogates or artificial wombs (though I think it wouldn't be advised for men to have children without a mate to perform the naturally feminine aspects of child-rearing).
The key is that due to the fact that polygny would be allowed if not encouraged (within reason and the capacity of each man to properly support/justify his harem - to each according to his contribution), birth ratios would need to be tilted heavily in favor of females (with the exact ratio depending on how much allowance for masculine polygny is fulfilled by corresponding demand), which would be managed with embryonic selection, etc.
On the subject of monogamy, pedofascism recognizes that favoring monogamy over polyamory/polygny especially was a crucial social adaptation in the past to prevent females from being lopsidedly hoarded by particular men, leaving some others with none, causing general masculine discontent. But I believe that with modern technology we can now do better and grant each man the harem he deserves as his masculine birthright (again according to merit), allowing all men to live more as past kings and emperors did (which we basically already do, or often rather better, in the realm of the material/technological, so why not the romantic/sexual?).
Pedofascism also doesn't discount the possibly beneficial effects of future technologies like sexbots, VR/AI waifus, etc. in this area. If artificial feminine technologies surpass their natural equivalent (which they very well could) in utility (including breeding), then the natural variety of female could become as rare as masculine apathy permits. (I for one would welcome this, though it would never be entirely any one man's decision. Those who prefer the natural variety could keep them.)
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That comment was borderline, but you didn't directly threaten him, and while we're not keen on even implied threats, we let it pass... this time.
Mr. Pedo-Fascist has already been warned that he's pushing it, and so are the people reacting to his button-pushing.
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Note: Whatever "officialdom" of pedofascism that exists and is represented by me does not in any way endorse any illegal activity (as pedofascism needs its comrades free to act and uncaged), especially not any random attacks of terror, mass violence, etc. against the general populace or otherwise, as these accomplish absolutely nothing other than the discrediting of their claimed ideology. Any pedofascist of any violent or illegal stripe is preemptively disavowed by all pedofascist leadership, and anyone claiming to contact you on behalf of pedofascism to propose illegal activity is misrepresenting their affiliation.
Though I can't speak for German laws as you guys have some really tight handcuffs on over there. Sorry. I'm probably still going to say the Holohoax was majorly exaggerated at a minimum in my view. And if lolicon is illegal? I'll pour one out for you. (The creator of Unteralterbach is German though.) We pedofacsists support freedom of speech.
Glad to hear it. Your offer to come visit us in Unteralterbach is still open then. Just don't tell your government our secrets.
There's no child abuse (neither by the government's definition nor mine), implied or otherwise (except future/hypothetical, according to the flawed feminist definition of the present), in my posts. As far as ideals go, from the pedofacsist perspective current society is what's abusive to children and we are their saviors.
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If your addition is similar to things other people are saying, consider replying to one of them to reduce the flood of hostile notifications.
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You shouldn't care at all - but if you do just look at this for a while: https://i.imgur.com/d3krdGT.png
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I think this has as much to do with who is espousing the opinion, as the opinion itself .A highly reputable, well-liked member is likely to get less pushback and viewed as more credible , controlling for everything else.
It's more like being the role of a lowly student who is scolded about how he is wrong , not a star athlete, who has status and some position of leverage.
The problem with dogpiling is it has a self-reinforcing effect. The more people who respond, the more likely outsiders' opinions will be biased in agreement with whomever is doing the piling-on. Unless you are absolutely certain you are right, with supporting evidence, engaging can make things worse.
The problem with dogpilling is that it becomes really hard to keep an even tone. If you have a bunch of people throwing comments at you, some of which are bad faith or straight up insulting; it's hard to separate who is debating in good faith and who is just trying to shout you down. Also, the latter tends to be the constantly online type who will follow you around...
Traditionally, this would be on the moderators not as enforcers of the rules but to note the norms about good faith and so forth.
Alright, I apparently need to be louder about this one. I asked you to change your nickname and you haven't; I'm banning you for a day to get your attention. Once you've changed it to something not-confusing, feel free to message the admins to get unbanned (and link this post to them in case someone other than me sees it.)
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I thought "ratio" was about the comments in a tweet getting more likes than the original tweets likes. Not: a tweet having a high expected comment to like ratio.
Like, you post an unpopular opinion and get a small handful of likes but of course we can't downvote. So I reply: "ratio lol" and my reply gets tons of likes, and that functions as a de facto downvote.
Maybe youre describing the actual meaning and origin of the term, and my anecdote is just about a metagaming of it.
I checked on UD before posting, but you might be right. I don't actually use twitter, I'm just trying to use the cool kid lingo. I should have stuck to calling it dogpilling.
The black pill is so passé. It’s all about the dog pill.
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My understanding (as someone who does not use Twitter but read about this once) is that the literal ratio is Comments:likes. You are "ratioed" if your ratio is high, because it means lots of people saw the post, especially since only some percent of them comment, but few people liked it, which is less effort than a comment.
The comments getting more likes than the original is icing on the cake, and is highly likely to correlate with the ratio, but isn't the actual ratio.
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I sometimes decide not to post just because I don't want to get Gish galloped or have to litigate my entire argument from first principles. Usually it has something to do with a belief based on Catholic theology which most people here don't have a background in and (more importantly) seem to look down on as inferior to modern materialism/atheism/utilitarianism (maybe we just all have PTSD from the Great Internet Atheism Wars).
It's not that I don't like explaining or getting pushback, it's mostly just the shitty, condescending, or dismissive tone people sometimes use when responding. Interestingly, the worst offenders are often members fellow right-wingers (edgy Nietzscheans, mostly) or centrist liberals. The leftists who post here are often really charitable and succeed in making me sympathetic to their views (shout-outs to @Hoffmeister25, @gemmaem, and @chrisprattalpharaptr).
As much as I like TheMotte, I'm really busy and responding to rude or derisive people on the internet just doesn't seem worth my time. If you pride yourself on "telling it like it is" or "being blunt" you're probably one of these people. Letting go of your righteous outrage and using a little tact and empathy goes a long way towards sparking good conversation and making this place more interesting and productive.
While I appreciate the shout-out, I’m very perplexed to see myself grouped in with the lefties. I’m a white identitarian and I’d classify most of my object-level political beliefs as “extremely right-wing”, though I did used to be a leftist and I feel like I do a pretty good job of steelmanning leftist positions when I make an effort to do so here. Apparently I passed the Ideological Turing Test on the occasions you happened to catch me doing so!
This has happened to me at least four times on reddit, it's funny to be accused of leftism and have to dig into the comment history to prove i'm rightwing
I think it’s because you and I are both extremely easy to clock as Blue Tribe. I had this conversation on /r/CultureWarRoundup a while back, where regular users told me that I stuck out like a sore thumb, to the point where many openly accused or suspected me of being an infiltrator. Turns out that clues in my syntax, my approach to my arguments, and just all sorts of subtle clues gave me away as someone raised in a highly urban-coastal-liberal environment, which of course is entirely true. I always tell people that I’m “right-wing, but not conservative.” The same is clearly true of you as well, and is true of NrX and the extremely-online right more generally.
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I haven’t had trouble remembering Hoff’s stances (though he has done some good steelmanning/Turing test posts!), but you do catch me every now and then.
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Fair point! You seem to pass the ITT to me, but I'm probably not the best judge of that. I'm not sure why I thought you were a leftist but your steelmanning efforts probably played a role. IIRC you also push back on some blanket statements from right-wingers in order to add some nuance. In any case, I enjoy reading your posts since I often disagree with what you have to say. Keep writing!
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To be fair Catholic philosophy in particular seems particularly arcane to me. I've talked with Catholics before and while they're very intelligent it feels like we have to go back to first principles because lots of the words being used just have different meanings to me than they do to them.
That's a completely fair observation. I think there's a lot of philosophical "genetic distance" between mainstream beliefs and the Catholic Christian worldview.
I always imagine it like a tree of life diagram. Modern American liberals and conservatives are twigs at the end of one of the big branches. Socialists and ethnonationalists each exist on nearby, smaller branches jutting out from the same big branch. But Catholicism and its philosophy exist on a separate big branch entirely, one who separated from the first big branch way down on the trunk where the Enlightenment happened (oversimplifying a lot but you get the idea). And so we have to cover a lot of ground to have a fruitful discussion.
Another issue is simply exposure. I often think of linguistics fluency as a metaphor here. I grew up watching American TV, news, and movies in a mainstream conservative household while attending an unusual serious Catholic school. I gained some fluency in "American liberal" ideas from mass media, "American conservative" ideas from my dad shouting at the TV and from listening to Thanksgiving arguments, and in Catholic philosophy and social teaching from school. To be exposed to the first set of ideas is nearly guaranteed, exposure to the second is not too difficult to obtain, but exposure to the third requires some intentionality and self-sacrifice on the part of one's parents which is why almost nobody gets this exposure.
I think the best way to get around this issue is to simply grant things to your interlocutor for the sake of argument. I nearly always have to suspend my disbelief about stuff like the utilitarianism, philosophical materialism, teleology, the non-existence of natures/essences, etc. when reading posts on here because there are usually a ton of assumptions baked in to the "standard worldview" that most Mottizens seems to share. And because almost nobody wants to get dragged into discussing whether or not God or souls exist merely in order to discuss the lastest transgender bathroom outrage du jour.
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Thanks for the shout-out! The phenomenon you note is easily explained, of course. Most of the leftists on here who aren't deeply committed to charity have flamed out and left, already! Those of us who remain form a very specific subset.
I often feel an odd sense of fellow-sympathy with the honour-driven conservatives and religious traditionalists around here. It could be the shared virtue ethics, although Christian virtue ethics differs from the pseudo-Aristotelian kind in some pretty dramatic ways. But I think it's probably just that I, too, get tired of the edgy rightists and aloof centrists, and feel a certain solidarity with my ideologically-outnumbered fellows. You, too, are part of the ideological diversity of this place; every time you force the main flow of this place to deal with your more outsider-type views you're helping to establish that it's normal to encounter views on here that aren't perfectly aligned with local popular sentiment. And that means that when people encounter me they might be a little less likely to see me as an interloper to be resisted.
Perhaps some were sad to see that standard of charity dwindle to the point where further engagement couldn't be sustained.
A commitment to charity can't work when it isn't reciprocated.
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Forgive me for having a condescending attitude towards Catholic theology, which argues in favor of eternal punishment for finite sin, burning heretics at the stake, and claims that masturbation is worse than rape.
Not being a Catholic, I feel no need to forgive you, but being a mod, don't just post "Your religion is stupid" here.
Except my post was saying more than just that. I don't merely think that it is stupid because there is no reason or evidence which justifies its claims, but further that what it stands for is deeply immoral, incompatible with liberal morality, and dangerous for myself and most everyone outside of its grasp.
This is the Motte. You may have noticed that there are quite a few people around here with ideas that are deeply immoral, incompatible with liberal morality, and dangerous. Nevertheless, we have norms against being deliberately unpleasant to people on that basis.
This place has never been free of unpleasantness, just look at how often innocent people get labeled as degenerate by right wing posters and no one bats an eye.
The poster was wondering why people do not approach his religion respectfully, and I explained why, yeah it was a bit snarky but nothing extraordinary for this forum. If a post with a similar tone was made against wokism or some other leftist ideology, I don't think it would be downvoted like this one and I don't think it would have been called out by a mod.
But maybe I am just hopelessly biased to see things accurately.
The left does get a lot of unpleasant rhetoric aimed at it, you're not wrong about that. Frankly, if the norms applied to the woke left were applied across the board, this place would be a lot less pleasant for everyone (Including the woke leftists, whom I think would promptly become subject to a yet worse standard, because some inequities are unavoidable. I say this as a long-since-resigned
woke leftistfeminist with intersectional influences. Frankly, as someone near the bottom of the congeniality ladder I would prefer that the median not slip further down).If this was a discussion about "Why do people not approach Catholicism respectfully?" then I think your post would be acceptable, because it would be on topic. Unpleasantness as a side effect of honest explanation is unavoidable, sometimes, around here. But this was, instead, a discussion about how to survive when your views are unpopular. Moreover, it was a discussion specifically instigated to try to help those people feel more at home and deal with it better. "Have different views" is not a good suggestion, in that context, particularly since breadth of viewpoints is something this forum is supposed to encourage.
I don't think his views are unpopular around here, just the opposite, alot of people here have a lot of sympathy for orthodox religions even if they are not themselves believers, and this shows from looking at comment ratings. If you look at his posting history, you will find that posts where he defends or promotes his religion usually garner plenty of upvotes on net. Meanwhile posts on this forum that are critical of religious orthodoxy usually are unable to get off the ground in terms of rating.
Also one of the reasons why it can be productive to say things in a tone that is more provocative than is necessary is because it increases the chance of drawing engagement, which can overall makeup for the unpleasantness of the post that sparked it.
Hm, but why does "drawing engagement" make up for the unpleasantness of reading a post defending religious orthodoxy, for you? To be clear, I'm not implying that I know the answer to this question, but I think it's worth examining. If, for example, you feel a serious sense of grievance towards organised religion, and engagement on that grievance is a way to have your feelings acknowledged, then I can see why you would want that engagement, but this may not be the best way to manage feelings of threat and injury from someone else's ideology. Alternatively, if drawing engagement makes you feel less threatened because it means you know you've succeeded in retaliating for the unpleasantness you experienced by reading them in the first place, then I think you should not give in to that desire for retaliation; don't treat this place like a battleground.
Another thing worth examining is what kind of engagement you want. After all, you're replying to someone who says that condescension makes them less likely to engage. Personally, I have found that I often get more engagement from writing in a more measured tone and/or from developing relationships with posters who then learn that I am likely to actually listen to their replies.
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People do frequently post variations on "Wokes are degenerate groomers," and get modded for it, and the people who are modded for saying things like that use the same defense you are, that they were simply stating the obvious and defensible truth.
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Yes, but your post also said that, and the way you said it is against the rules here. You are not the first, second, or fiftieth person to argue "What I said should be allowed because I'm right," but that's not how things work here, and if you've been here for any length of time, you know that. So follow the rules or you will lose your posting privileges.
Would the following comment receive a warning?: "Forgive me for having a condescending attitude toward woke ideology, which argues in favor of disordered sexuality, double standards that unfairly treat my race, and the violation of my property rights and freedom of association."
I doubt it, and I have a feeling it would be highly upvoted rather than sitting at -7.
Possibly. Depends on context. This is not a one-to-one equivalence, though.
Probably. We would prefer that up and downvoting not be used as "I agree/I disagree" buttons, but the reality is that that's how most people use them. However, your specific statement was deliberately antagonistic and deserved downvotes even from people like me who also have no fondness for the Catholic Church.
first of all, please update your quote to match my edited comment. second of all, i dont understand why you think my comment was more antagonistic than the example i gave, would you mind elaborating?
No. My quote reflects why you were modded.
Yes, I mind. "Please elaborate so I can continue to argue round and round and into the ground why I wasn't in the wrong" is a game I've played too many times, and I'm not in the mood for it.
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Honestly, I'd rather be comment-dogpiled more! Getting feedback / disagreeing responses is half of why people post. The post has an assumption that being dogpiled is unpleasant somehow, and the list seems like a list of ... 'copes' for deeply disliking it. But there really isn't anything bad at all about getting negative replies, enjoy it!
Your recent comments don't seem to e down voted too heavily. Nothing below -1 that I saw in two pages.
I do agree that getting down voted on a post but having no one respond is a huge annoyance.
But the votes might be an actual useful signal of something about how you are engaging. Not just reflexive agreement or disagreement. I've always disliked when we hide votes behind a 24hour waiting period. I find them to be vague but useful signals that work best in real time.
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Honestly, this sounds like something a person who doesn't experience being piled on enough would say.
I'm a long-time rdrama poster and, in most online forums other than this one, intentionally make disturbing, strange, and offensive posts to make people seethe. So even in much more adversarial and unpleasant contexts than this one, I'm quite happy to be 'piled on'. Obviously on here I mean 'piled on' in the sense of interesting feedback as opposed to spamming the nword.
you're expecting it though by trolling. the worst is when you get piled even as you try to explain.
Sure - it's better, instead of a shitfest, when you make the argument perfectly, and everyone understand it and builds on it, or they agree but want more and you enlighten them with your divine understanding. Usually though, your argument isn't that well made, even when it's correct, and most of the responses are also not that well made. It's still more interesting to be dogpiled with low quality stuff with a few decent replies than to get nothing in response. It's not like the dogpilers start agreeing with you if they don't reply, they still hold the same potentially-wrong beliefs. I've participated in relatively-normal internet political debates a lot in the past too, so have had plenty of that.
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My entire writing style is designed towards getting some pushback.
I like to make statements about which I am very certain are true/accurate (90%+) and thus can handily support. Then I'll toss in one 'reaching' statement that is way more tenuous (~50-60% confidence) and see if anyone zeroes in on that one to attack it, at which point I try my best to support/defend it. Maybe my mind gets changed, maybe I slightly increase my confidence in it.
Ironically I mostly find myself getting in fights over the statements I have the most support for, but its fun either way.
If I were only making statements that I was nearly certain were true and not pushing the boundaries of my own beliefs, what would be the real point?
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Yeah. Honestly envious of people who drop in with a take that earns them a dogpile. Rarely, I get pushback I feel too exhausted to respond to; that's a mark of a day well spent (err, evening wasted on themotte). Sometimes, it's just normal disagreement, but that's good too.
Most of the time... nothing.
That's on me though, gotta do better. Thanks for disagreeing.
shorter and open-ended posts can elicit more feedback because there is more left to interpretation, I think
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Is there anything that happened that made you make this post? I haven't been reading the CW thread much.
I think its plenty evident to someone who scrolls the CW thread for 5 seconds, what they are getting themselves into. Rarely in other forums do I see so many walls of texts at such volume. And in my experience twitter style dogpiles are rare in the motte.
E - One tip I have to share is that its always better to err on the side of over-explaining than under-explaining. You might think your fellow egg heads might understand exactly what you think, but I have been burned a few times for doing that.
I'd meant to write it a few weeks ago, I had some free time yesterday so I wrote it up.
I guess some people overestimate their ability to withstand dog piling. Or they see the top 5 or 6 comments in the chain which are usually not too bad. But lots of mod action is buried in the sub threads.
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Twitter dog piles are more superficial or ignorable though. Criticism here, at least on the old sub, can be more acerbic. Someone being called a 'dick rider' for praising Elon Musk is not as harsh as the some of the criticism I got 2 months ago on my post a while back on the old sub, regarding TED talks. It's like tell someone they are a loser or a moron but without calling them a moron, and in 100-300 words instead a picture.
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Reasonable enough.
There’s a fine line between “the most compelling engagement of the thread” and “I swear to god if one more person mentions X...” If you think you feel the latter, you are probably at point 6, and it’s time to go take a walk. Cook dinner, clean a room, don’t play league of legends. You are not going to change any minds with a few extra minutes of simmering indignity.
The best you can hope for, on reaching point 6, is other people joining your “side.” And they’ll be there when you get back.
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Also, semi-related, but I can’t be the only one who browses the mod log on occasion. I’m not sure it’s actually healthy, but it’s kind of validating to see bans/warnings delivered, especially if you contributed to the reporting. God bless the janitorial staff.
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Also: Just stop posting!
This is not the only site on the internet where you can discuss things with people; there is nobody here that is actually worth sticking around for if the community in general seems toxic.
If you, eg, post about some political topic you consider obvious and everyone calls you insane, this community probably won't support the type of engagement you want.
There is such a thing as strikes.
This pattern would sand down the wacky edges that make this place interesting though.
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