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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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When's the last time anyone discussed HBD top level on the motte? I've honestly forgotten. At the risk of consensus-building, I thought we hammered most of that out on the old website.

The main thing I have to say is that the conversation on HN took on a pile-on dynamic where it was garbagetime vs two or three others. Pile-on threads are bad since the people getting piled on tend to mix up conversations they have with different people. It's very frustrating to have to make the same argument twice different places in the same thread.

Also someone mentions the 'quoted emails' from Scott? What are we talking about here? Some very innocuous emails that got leaked? I highly doubt he's written anything more aggressive than Untitled or the paranoid rant in recent years.

When's the last time anyone discussed HBD top level on the motte? I've honestly forgotten. At the risk of consensus-building, I thought we hammered most of that out on the old website.

I have argued that it has fallen out of favor since 2020 or so. The old sub used to be more pro-HBD than this one, especially around 2017-2020.

How much of that was natural "falling out of favor" vs a deliberate purge using any method and excuse possible, from topic bans to targeted mod harassment?

Beginning a few years ago it started to be actively suppressed by the mods and sneered at by the “cooler” users on TheMotte. I think it sort of coincided with Julius Branson. I noticed that every post mentioning HBD that wasn’t by a 5 year+ veteran was treated as “Probable sneerclub troll baiting to get the sub banned”, and at least downvoted if not banned by the mods.

Were the discussions repetitive and boring after a point? Sure, but so is everything we talk about. How many times have people discussed tech censorship of online communities? How often do we talk about overproduction of elites and wokeness as intra elite competition? It’s the same topics every week for years, barring a few new events. HBD was definitely excised from the community pretty deliberately, perhaps most here still believe it but have gotten the message that talking about it is deeply uncool and liable to get you banned.

Just look at how BorfRebus talks about “HBD autists” upthread, we don’t talk about “libertarian autists” or “classical liberal autists” or “anti censorship autists” with such casual mockery

and HlynkaCG's anti-hbd posts tend to do really well too

It's more of a "anyone that would be convinced by argument either way already is so there's no point discussing it" rather than heretics getting axed by my estimation.

I agree. The HBD discussions bored the socks off me, because after the first few go-rounds it was the same old stuff all the time with nothing new, but a tendency to slide fast into insults and sweeping claims. I was glad rather than otherwise that the mods slowed it down. The trouble is that it is very much associated with Culture War and to my recollection a lot of the pro-HBD comments degenerated into "and this is why [population J] are all a bunch of savage wild animals, science proves it!"

I may be wrong on that, but it's the impression I took away from it whenever the same old merry-go-round started up again.

agree. the issue has become tired, although i'm game for discussing it

Pretty much all the former, in my estimation.

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