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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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So, it appears the latest (and seemingly last) set of Twitter Files has come out via Bari Weiss. Link.

This one is about what was going on inside Twitter after Jan 6th, 2021, but before the Trump ban.

It seems, as common sense entails, that employees who disliked Trump were growing more agitated over the refusal to ban him. Per Weiss, Twitter had always refused to ban him before, but the rising condemnation for Jan 6th from inside and outside was growing. People were aware that nothing he did violated the rules directly, hence one employee saying that he would "thread the needle of incitement."

In a bizarrely pro-Trump interpretation of his tweets, one staffer who was supposed to actually evaluate his tweets said that when Trump referred to "American Patriots" in a tweet, he wasn't referring to the rioters, but to people who voted for him. I have no idea why this person thought that the people who rioted weren't Trump supporters.

Edit: As pointed out in the responses, I think I've misinterpreted the above. I don't think this staffer intended to separate Trump's supporters from the rioters, but it could be read that way due to the informal nature of the slack chat.

Hell, the decision of the Trust and Safety team was that no, Trump's tweets about patriots or not going to the inauguration. An official named Anika Navaroli is cited as declaring the tweets acceptable for Twitter's policies, but Weiss tries casting bad faith on her testimony to the Jan 6th committee when she said that she had been trying for months to get people to realize that if Twitter did nothing, then "people were going to die". I don't know why Weiss thinks this is a contradiction, you can believe that someone skirts the line for incitement and that particular tweets don't cross the line.

There are some points made about how Twitter never banned other heads of state for things that were far more clearly in violation of Twitter's policies and which were allowed to stay up with the speaker not banned.

Anyways, the conversation at Twitter shifted once Gadde asked if his tweets could be seen as "coded incitement to further violence". This is the line that Twitter's "scaled moderation team" (no idea what that is) then began pushing as well, with the idea that if Trump was referring to the rioters when he said "American patriots", then it would be a violation.

There's also a point where some employees apparently started referring to the Banality of Evil, with Yoel Roth explaining that was an accusation that Twitter's policy enforcers were like Nazis obeying orders.

Anyways, Twitter banned Trump. Employees in favor of this celebrated and Weiss suggests they moved on to the topic of tackling medical misinformation.

I'm not really sure how to feel about this latest (last?) reveal. The annoying thing about this is nothing is being fully made public. There are no dumps of slack chats for people to gauge how the company's employees felt about all this, just the screenshots that are deemed appropriate to be shared. We ultimately have to trust that Weiss' depiction of these people as substantially demanding Trump be banned as reflecting the consensus, but there were clearly dissenters to this policy. You even have one person saying that they disagreed with the "Twitter doesn't arbitrate truth" policy but respected it nonetheless.

A point of interest to me: the TTS team's refusal to declare Trump's tweets to be in violation of policy, with agreement from some key staffers that no coded incitement was present. That's counter to the narrative being written about the TTS team with the other Twitter Files threads.

I don't particularly care about Trumps twitter ban, but these twitter files just add confirmation to what the last few years have led me to think.

That the problem isn't twitter, and it isn't twitters moderation or banning.

The problem is people. Specifically the two groups: who orchestrated and implimented censorship and bans, aka twitter employees, professionals, journalists, government employees (the people in Curtis Yarvins cathedral or Neema Parvinis octopus models); and the mass of semi normal people who accepted or supported this, as the joke goes insisting that it isn't happening and it happening is a good thing, insidting cancelling doesn't happen while cancelling or pouring hate on their colleagues or so called friends, etc.

The continued existence of either sets of people, not institutions, not moderation policies, not anything else but people, completely eliminates any trust in a liberal democratic system I might have.

Their continued existence itself sets that trust to zero, as it has been demonstrated to me that they can and will subvert and twist institutions, companies, governments, and even societies to favour their own dogmatic ideologies and in groups in ways are overbearingly totalitarian.

The expectation is that any new system, company, society, government etc will eventually be subverted again, unless it is rampantly intolerant of them in a way not compatible with liberal democracy at all.

As Karl Popper made clear, you can't have a tolerant society if you tolerate the intolerant, and I now think that he was right.

The problem is I don't think a tolerant non totalitarian society is possible anymore. Its internment camps for life for them, with North Korea style ancestry tracking or else we can't have a tolerant non-totalitarian society. Notice anything about that last sentence?

A flowery metaphor for it would be....

If you build a thousand bridges they'll call you the bridge builder, but fuck one goat.....

The PMC/liberals/tolerant empathetic individuals/communists/classical liberalsso tolerant they ignored it/whatever you want to call them have taken western civilisation and forced it to fuck goats non-stop for several years now.

The problem is people.

I agree. But either there is always a somewhat fixed percentage of authoritarian personality types in any given cohort, or we created the cadre of current year neojacobins somehow. If the former, where was this personality type in the 90s/00s? They couldn't all have been running home owner associations / leading parent groups against satanism in video games. If the latter, we can correct course. Slowly, over decades.

I don't know where they were hiding in the 90s/00s.

But ultimately the path tode nazifying Germany couldn't occur until approx 5 million german combatants had been killed ong with the mass destruction of german industry.

So to correct course over decades I would expect something like Germanies treatment post 1945 to be reuqired.

The anology for the english speaking west in the era of state and corporate collusion to supress dissent would be something like the following.

Scale for population (include women too, as no longer limited to physical combat by men). This gives 20-40 million from the USA, 4-8 million in the UK, 2-5 in each of Canada and Australia, and that one guy in New zealand. These people don't have to be killed but they can't continue to participate in government, politics, ecience, education, etc. No voting, no participation in markets if any kind, no bank accounts, no healthcare, no property ownership, no internet access allowed, etc. They would need to be outlawed.

The destruction of the industries that they previously captured, which would be something along the lines of handicap the wests industry, science, and government and give China thrle 21st century. Sillicon valley gets deleted. No more google, etc. Servers get the c4 treatment en masse.

Prohibition of their sacred symbols and policy positions moving forward, so that's no more of any of the various shibboleths that I won't name here but you'll know what they are or might be I expect.

Mass propoganda and education campaigns to prevent their ideology/religion from being thought of well ever again.

Finally, their leader get the Nuremburg treatment and get trials which result in hanging or other death penalties if found guilty.

Then the decade long process of fixing things can begin.

Of course none of this is remotely realistic or even truely desirable given the sheer scale of it and sexond, third, etc order effects, the consequences to such damage to external force capabilities regarding e.g., Chinese or even Russian threats. I am merely demonstrating that the process of restoring trust in a tolerant non totalitarian system requires the removal of the old as well as credible demonstration that it isn't going to be reasserted next Tuesday.

Thank you for reading my peculiar thought experiment haha.