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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5398 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How does substack moderate itself?

They seem able to walk the fine line where it's a mostly respected outlet yet allowing heterodox views, and while I've heard the occasional handwringer complain, I've not noticed any serious smear campaigns against it, or it having the 10000 witch issues.

Are any writers being cancelled or quietly deboosted?

There were plenty of smear campaigns against it, they just braved them.

The "7 zillion witches issue" was always mostly fiction, there aren't that many witches. If you can get a reasonable amount of normal people to hang out somewhere, they will be the ones eclipsing the witches, not the other way around. This was (and maybe still is being) done by sponsorship deals for authors with pretty big following (Greenwald, Taibi, deBoer, and lots of others that I don't follow).

Moderation is done on a per-author basis. It's like running your Youtube channel, or subreddit. The only thing I can think of that could have a moderating effect, is that there's something clunky about the website, that discourages high-frequency low-effort posting.

Isn't deBoer a pro-HBD leftist? Closer to witch than "normal people".

DeBoer elliptically acknowledges the HBD-IQ aspect of reality and then doubles down from a materialist-socialist (real Marxist, not trendy 'Marxist') perspective that he wants from each according to his abilities (HBD-IQ is here) to each according to his needs (not here).

He wrote a book called The Cult of Smart. This book has valuable insights about how charter schools can IQ poach out of normal public schools to make themselves look very impressive.

Does he also propose soon abolishing of capitalism (like classical Marxists do)?

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