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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28655 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Recently @RandomRanger accused me of strawmanning the Right:

Turok was being banned for being overtly aggressive and obnoxiously creating imaginary narratives like "The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."

That's not what the 'woke right' thinks and he surely knows it. He need only check the MAGA rhetoric from Trump about good factory jobs, or the rhetoric from the right about the need to mechanize dull fruitpicking jobs and raise productivity. Why, they say, should millions of people be brought into the country if AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs? Or the need to have American wealth kept in America rather than sent off in remittances. Or them hating H1Bs as cost-cutting that interferes with developing talent. Or them not seeing the country as purely an economic zone but having responsibility to native citizens. It's an insanely uncharitable and aggressive butchering of other people's ideology.

Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:

FOX: I think American citizens are willing to do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do.

LORI CHAVEZ-DeREMER: Americans are willing to do the job. What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.

DeRemer refers to "Americans," the online racialist Right is talks about whites, but in both cases the vision is the same, uplifting the ingroup means getting them the opportunity to do the jobs currently done by the guy standing in the Home Depot parking lot. Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party? Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor, which is why in the video DeRemer goes on to talk about how Americans will be given opportunity through being "skilled, upskilled, re-skilled" and how the Trump administration is increasing apprenticeships. Of course, few illegals do those high-skilled jobs, so upskilling Americans won't replace many illegals, but it's not like the Fox News host is going to point out the apparent contradiction.

Given that I've given an example from a cabinet-level Trump administration official, (not "nutpicked" from some rando on Twitter) I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim that I "obnoxiously created imaginary narratives" in the interests of truth and courtesy.

  • -37

Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:

This is exactly why we have the rule,

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.

Making top level posts "responding" to specific users without using the "reply" button instead is kind of obnoxious, but this is downright antagonistic:

I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim

Don't do that. Ideally, unless you think someone would like to get an alert from you, don't @ them.

If you want to talk about what Lori Chavez-DeRemer thinks and why it is stupid, or not stupid, or whatever, like... have at! And really, there are contexts where referencing "Left" and "Right" is fine, where it would be stilted or misleading to speak differently. But you have been moderated several times in a fairly short period, mostly for antagonism, and you seem to be making kind of a hobby horse of weak manning "the Right" or some portion of it you perceive as worthy of scorn. I don't know if you're subtly pursuing a kind of consensus, or if you're just trolling, but you don't seem to be here to move past shady thinking and test your ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.

Do better. Next time I see you pulling this, you get a ban.

This part:

This is exactly why we have the rule,

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.

Is ridiculously selectively applied, e.g. basically any time people use "the establishment" as a foil they're guilty of this, but they don't get modhatted. As it stands, the rule is merely another cudgel to use against people making left-leaning arguments, although in this case I don't think an unbiased application of this rule would be particularly good either. It just makes it clunky to talk about subsets of a group that believe in specific ideas that might not be shared among the whole group.

Though I do agree the "I expect that RandomRanger will withdraw his claim" is fairly presumptuous here.

What you're underappreciating is that @AlexanderTurok is basically getting modded for being annoying.

Which is the right thing to do. Turok knows what he's doing; he's obviously a smart guy and would otherwise be a valuable contributor were it not for the needless sardonicism.

You are right that there are users here, notably @WhiningCoil, who consistently adopt the most uncharitable framing of their opponents' arguments, but they do it in a less annoying way.

Any time anybody uses "the establishment" you are free to ask who they mean specifically. Most of the people using the word here actually have specific answers.

Is ridiculously selectively applied, e.g. basically any time people use "the establishment" as a foil they're guilty of this, but they don't get modhatted. As it stands, the rule is merely another cudgel to use against people making left-leaning arguments

The difference being that "the establishment" is meant to specify the criticism to the people with actual power, rather than generalize to everyone who might hold a particular view, and expecting them to defend it. For example, even though you call yourself "The Antipopulist" I would not lump you in with the establishment, and I would not demand that you, personally, defend the establishment's more controversial views and actions (unless there's something we don't know about you, and your position in mainstream institutions).

As for the claim that moderation has become asymmetrical in an anti-left direction, I'm trying to keep an open mind, but you're not helping. You listed several examples of "bad posts" the last time this was brought up, and while I can agree there was something bad about them in that they contained heat that could be taken out to leave more light, you went on to defend posts that were much, much worse, and you're continuing to do so here. One of your examples was "outgroup politicians are 'foreign agents'", but the actual post is much closer to "Ilhan Omar is a foreign agent".

Like I said, I don't even mind having Turok around, he's mostly an asset for people like me. The only downside of his presence would actually affect people on the left than people on the right - his tone is contagious. You said you want moderation applied equally to everyone, well if he gets to post the way he post, and the same standard gets applied to the median motteposter, the level of aggression on this forum is going to rise substantially, and the quality of discussion is going to drop, and you'll again be distraught about how much the right-wingers are getting away with.

I don't get your point about "the establishment" in this particular context. Why does it matter if they have power (real or perceived) in regards to whether it's a specific or general group. Most people, even politicians, don't see themselves as "establishment". For some people, Trump as POTUS is the epitome of "establishment". For others, calling him that word is utterly ludicrous. Note that I personally think it's fine for people to attack "the establishment" -- I'm opposed to this rule in general.

And I'm not defending his post wholesale -- I agree the last bit is presumptuous and I'm fine with him being given a warning for something like that. I don't think throwing the gauntlet to someone like this is really that bad, but maybe I'm in the minority on that. I think personal attacks are far worse for productive conversations, which happen regularly and don't get punished (or even become AAQCs!) as long as it's someone with a right-wing opinion attacking someone with a left-wing opinion.

I also have some reservations with how it seems like a final warning from stuff like his previous post which didn't deserve a mod action at all.

I don't get your point about "the establishment" in this particular context. Why does it matter if they have power (real or perceived) in regards to whether it's a specific or general group.

It doesn't, I was just saying what a defining characteristic of a group called "the establishment" is. Who identifies as, and who doesn't, who exactly that group includes, etc., doesn't really matter, the point is that anti-establishmentarians don't get to come here, pick the most ridiculous thing said or done by the powers that be, and demand that posters roughly identifying as centrists or "anti populists" defend it as though they have a personal stake in it.

And I'm not defending his post wholesale -- I agree the last bit is presumptuous

I also have some reservations with how it seems like a final warning from stuff like his previous post which didn't deserve a mod action at all.

If you think that's the main problem with that specific post is presumptuousness, or if you think the final warning is result of his previous post only, you're not approaching this in an objective manner. The issue is his constant antagonism.

Under the other post you claim you don't want moderation to aggregate transgressions by ideology, and adjust for that, but rather that you want the same enforcement no matter who the transgression is coming from. I believe this is mostly (adjusted for the mods being only human) what you're getting. You're not going to find another poster exhibiting the same pattern of constant antagonism, which I think you were aware of when you pushed back against my request for examples.

Also, if you think Turok is no worse than the average posters here, and is only getting modded because of rightwing bias, why do you think he got banned from ACX and DSL?

I think personal attacks are far worse for productive conversations, which happen regularly and don't get punished (or even become AAQCs!)

Specifically, which AAQC had a personal attack? Gattsuru's? Can you quote the part that contains the personal attack?

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