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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29351 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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So I've done my best recently to avoid being subjected to personalized social media feed. So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead. It turns out it is classical Culture War stuff. Bluesky is apparently imploding because of "Waffles".

So this is not a "boo outgroup" post, my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though. It is as uninteresting because of the monoculture for me as getting an actual account mastodon instance or truth.social and gab due to the ideological alignment of majority of their users.

It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?

It occurs to me that I have no idea what you're even talking about.

Twitter I've seen occasionally, but Bluesky? Mastodon? truth.social? I suppose they're also social media of some sort, but I've never visited those sites. If they even are sites, rather than apps...if that distinction even matters. Could someone please spoonfeed me with a three-liner about what those actually are?

Bluesky is Twitter for people who hate Elon. I assume it’s a cesspool.

Mastodon is a bit more complicated. It was federated from the start, meaning it was always intended to let groups opt in/out of entire swathes of the broader sphere. This allows blacklisting without leaving the platform. It also supports numerous witch covens. I assume they’re all cesspools.

Truth social is Twitter for people who think Fox News is captured by anti-Trump wreckers. I don’t actually know how it differs in features, and I am okay with that. I assume it’s a cesspool.

"But where is a social network for the people who aren't sewage?"

"The what now?"

Regarding Bluesky, Kiwi Farms says:

🦋Bluesky is a decentralized, open source social media app that is similar to 𝕏 / Twitter. In fact, Bluesky was originally created in 2019 by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to be an initiative into researching the possibility of decentralizing Twitter. However, Jack Dorsey stepped down as Twitter CEO in 2021 and Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, which resulted in the Bluesky initiative being severed from Twitter and evolving into a separate standalone app instead. When Elon Musk took control of Twitter, rebranded it to 𝕏, and worked to overhaul the platform's censorship and biased moderation, many leftists, politicians, celebrities, influencers, trannies, lolcows and other Twitter users who believed Musk had "ruined" Twitter, decided to flock to Bluesky, hoping that it would grow and overtake Musk's 𝕏. Other unsavory groups such as pedophiles, zoophiles, zoosadists, lolicon and shotacon enjoyers would also migrate from Twitter to Bluesky. As Bluesky's userbase pretty much consists of all the leftists and smug trannies that left Twitter due to Musk's alteration of Twitter's moderation policies, the Bluesky app has ended up becoming an even bigger echo chamber and hugbox with even stricter moderation to crush dissent.

Mastodon is somewhat more complicated. joinmastodon.org is a free (libre) protocol that can be used by anybody and supports easy communication between members who call different instances their respective homes. However, the biggest instance of joinmastodon.org is mastodon.social, which is left-wing and blacklists other instances that its admins don't like. Commentators often fail to explain this distinction, leading to confusion among onlookers. (See also matrix.org vs. element.io.)

Mastodon itself supposedly has a large presence of lolicon enthusiasts who went there after getting purged from twitter during a rules change.

https://ethanzuckerman.com/2017/08/18/mastodon-is-big-in-japan-the-reason-why-is-uncomfortable/

Mastodon itself

You're perpetuating the confusion. Your article specifically applies to the joinmastodon.org instances pawoo.net and mstdn.jp—not to mastodon.social.

By 'mastodon' I mean the federated network, not 'mastodon.social' .

Pawoo and Gab are blocked by most of the network to the point they might as well be their own thing.

However, the biggest instance of joinmastodon.org is mastodon.social, which is left-wing and blacklists other instances that its admins don't like. Commentators often fail to explain this distinction, leading to confusion among onlookers.

Thanks for this, I’ve noticed my own confusion about this distinction occasionally when people were talking about Mastodon, but had never bothered looking into it. Makes much more sense now.

Bluesky is where all the Leftists whom were offended with Musk buying twitter ran off to.

Mastodon I don't know anything about, so I can't really say.

truth.social is the social website Donald Trump spun up after being banned off of Twitter for some reason.

They're typically just twitter/x clones. Presumably Mastodon, as well.

From the "waffles" link:

noted race scientist Scott Siskind

Wow, Meredith really knows how to win the hearts and minds of her readers.

Actually, that article is full of money quotes.

Data work doesn't really count either, of course: it's too close to science, and science as a concept is feminine and obviously not technical.

Especially computer science! Felt really awkward being the only guy in a lecture with 400 people. But it got better when I studied physics, there were typically a few other men in the room. </sarcasm>

this is why Linus Torvalds, despite having some serious issues, is not beyond redemption, whereas Raymond and Stallman have fallen into perdition: Torvalds was motivated first and foremost by wanting a working open-source kernel, whereas Stallman and Raymond started with the ideology, and this is why Hurd still doesn't work

Glad to know that Torvalds is not beyond redemption, hope does not get more than a few years of sensitivity classes.

Also, ESR and RMS had different ideologies, with ESR favoring 'open source' for practical reasons while RMS free software movement started from the dogma that closed source software.

Also, while what Torvalds accomplished is super impressive, to reduce Stallman's impact to "haha, Hurd" seems plain wrong to me. That guy build fucking GNU, after all. And you would think that given the gist of the article ("knowing arcane runes is overrated"), she would appreciate that RMS founded the organization which invented copyleft, which is very much an active ingredient in much of the GNU/Linux ecosystem.

Sure, ESR is less impressive than the other two, but he did sell F/OSS to the suits (wait is that term elitist?) and writes NTPsec, which seems a lot more useful than what Meredith is doing.

we have to fight through a massive pile of Venture Capitalist money and the likes of Curtis Yarvin to do this.

Oh no. Not only Musk and Thiel with their billions of dollars, but the final boss battle will be moldbug. How can they possibly hope to survive?

Sorry for being a bit emotional, but that text really pulled my strings.

Very charitably, she is not entirely wrong. Gatekeeping for the sake of gatekeeping is bad. Long ago, a decade or so after I started programming C, I gave Python a try. Today I use it when I find it appropriate. I no longer consider it absurd to have programming languages which are usable by people who do not understand how pointers work.

Still, I think a huge part of what outsiders consider elitist in computer nerd and hacker culture is mostly striving for excellence. Outsiders often are "I don't care how it looks or what it does, as long as it (superficially) works". This is anathema to any craftsperson who takes pride in their craft.

Nobody (I think) goes to a meeting of a Poetry society and reads their poem and then goes "well, it was grammatically correct, and it conveyed how I felt about my cat dying, so if you do not like it, you are just a bunch of elitist pricks."

Apart from some minor technical details, there is no difference between the skill of a brain surgeon and someone who once tried to butcher a rabbit, after all.

My final observation is that the insistence on stuff being as simple as humanly possible is exactly what placed the left-leaning ex-Twitter users in their present conflict with Bluesky.

During the exodus from Twitter, there were two different main destinations: Bluesky (theoretically an open protocol, de facto a single platform), and Mastodon (an actual decentralized system, where different servers can have different content policies while their users can still engage with each other). Naturally, the anti-tech left moved to Bluesky, because it was slightly more convenient. If they had listened to the hackers, they would have told them that placing the people who write the software in charge of the servers (and thus content moderation) is generally a bad idea, and that it is worth the increased complexity to avoid such a situation.

Now they find that they have merely moved from one golden cage to another one, and that the developers of that one are also not as much into censoring speech as they are.

Data work doesn't really count either, of course: it's too close to science, and science as a concept is feminine and obviously not technical.

Especially computer science! Felt really awkward being the only guy in a lecture with 400 people. But it got better when I studied physics, there were typically a few other men in the room.

Meredith is obviously a crazy person, but to give the devil his due, she's not seriously suggesting this; she's claiming this is the attitude of tech people.

Fair. That being said, I think she is mostly building a strawman. I have contact with plenty of technical people (though not from SV), and I never got much in the way of condescension for being a physicist. The only people I have heard making jokes along the lines of "oh, you have a PhD, should I help you to tie your shoes?" are my colleagues expressing self-irony.

Of course, it helps that I (mostly) know what I am talking about, and possibly also that I am a guy.

A lot of big tech companies were conceived in academia, Sun and Google come to mind. I really do not think that the tech sector looks down on academia, I am very doubtful that Google would hire anyone who expressed the opinion that graph theory and big-O calculus are just masturbation for academics in their ivory tower who have no idea how the real world works.

At one point I hoped that open source, decentralized social media would be more resistant to censorship. Apparently some of its pioneers had the same dream. It seems crazy naïve now.

It's kind of impressive how thoroughly captured 'decentralized' social media is.

If someone says they're on Mastodon or Bluesky, it reveals way more about their personality and ideology than FB, Twitter, Threads, Tikitok, etc.

So we're at "Neutral vs Progressive"?

Every now and then I start to regain hope that the worst of my outgroup probably aren't as bad as all the memes imply, and then I read something like that article, and my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined. "Fascism" was mentioned in every other sentence of the opening paragraphs in between denunciations of milquetoast liberals and other traitors to the progressive cause in the most extreme terms:

notorious transphobe, fascist and serial instigator of harassment campaigns Jesse Singal

Peter Thiel and a few of the other fascist luminaries

Eric Raymond, to give one example, is both a highly capable engineer and clearly has a strong attachment to hard-right politics, racism and homophobia.

My eyes nearly rolled back into my skull at

noted race scientist Scott Siskind

Please tell me these are meant to be epic dunks and sick burns rather than earnest descriptions of ideological opponents. I knew that our common ground has been shrinking for some time, but if this is unironic we are, without exaggeration, inhabiting completely separate realities. Disagreeing about "terrorism/freedom fighter" at least implies some sort of common understanding of facts -- the subject under discussion is understood to be a violent activist, the difference in opinion is on whether that violence is justified, and that can be debated. But I don't even know how to begin talking to someone who earnestly believes Scott is a "noted race scientist."

Every now and then I start to regain hope that the worst of my outgroup probably aren't as bad as all the memes imply, and then I read something like that article, and my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

I think you're mistaken on the process. The worst of the outgroup are never going to get any better -- in fact, if you're winning then they are likely getting worse by evaporative cooling.

We've had a decade straight of the absolute worst of the Blue Tribe not only being loud, but actually being in charge. We didn't win by evaporative cooling, the evaporative cooling started when we started winning.

Yes. That what it means to win -- to marginalize your opponents. They aren't gonna get any better, but they can be cordoned off.

I think the one with Scott is referring to the fact that in some of his leaked private correspondence he once said "HBD is probably partially correct or at least very non-provably not-correct". Her wording is stretched to the point of being false, though; "scientist" means "one who does science", not "one who believes science".

Perhaps Scott would be a race scientismist.

I remember that incident, but the guy has multiple blogs jam-packed with nuanced takes on a million different topics. It's like calling the Austrian mustache man a "noted vegetarian."

It's like calling the Austrian mustache man a "noted vegetarian."

Noted vegetarian and landscape painter (better known for other work).

For the uninitiated, this is a Unabomber joke:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/27643011

What parts of a whole one thinks relevant is a subjective question, though, not "completely separate realities". Someone who thinks toast colour is the most important thing in the world can still agree with you on whether the toaster's plugged in.

I'm not going to say there aren't true delusions on that side of the fence, though. I'd argue that the overuse of "fascist" is to some extent a differing definition of the term rather than a disagreement on ground truth... but only to an extent.

Bluesky is apparently imploding

Big nothingburger. I don't see it actually affecting the user numbers much.

I might be pulling a mathcel move (so somone correct me if I'm wrong) here but it looks like Bluesky's decline has slightly accelerated in the last week: https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth?t=7d

Compare the last 7 days to the last 4 weeks. I would expect the figures for the last 7 days to be roughly 1/4 of the figures for the last 4 weeks, but in most categories it appears to be almost half.

No idea if this has anything to do with the CEO waffles nonsense or if it's for completely unrelated reason. Bluesky was already in decline anyway

Bluesky is apparently imploding

One tangential thing this video made me realise again is how curiously the culture of the right and the left is drifting apart even in more subtle ways now. This is the nth time I notice that a seemingly quite popular right-wing youtuber talks in a way that is just viscerally offputting for me (socialised Blue even if reasonably heretical, as evidenced by my presence on here). There's something that registers as blank aggression in the manner of speech - it's the tone of voice that I expect to hear if I pass through a US small-town downtown on a Friday night and a drunk manual labourer stumbles backwards into me, thinks in his drunken stupor that I shoved him and scopes me out for a fight. I can't see myself relaxing and leaving this running in the background, the way I could with a mainstream generic TV announcer voice youtuber. The n-1st time, incidentally, was Lunduke, a right-wing open source youtuber beloved of the Algorithm. Clearly this is not about content, as especially with Lunduke he mostly says things I agree with on topics that are close to my heart.

As a right-wing listener of this sort of narration, how does it feel to you? Do you actually not get the same "this person is on the brink of engaging in physical violence" feeling from it, or is it agreeable because you figure that it is a topic where wanting to become violent is the right and natural reaction, or is it something closer to "the violent vibes are the marker of a particular culture, and that culture is good and precious" (how I figure soypilled left-wingers cope with gangsta rap)?

I have the same reaction, but I see it less as a left/right thing than as a "videogame turned politics streamer" thing. I just think that niche tends to run more right-wing in general. It's the product of a generation of commentators raised on 4chan shitposting rather than Walter Cronkite. Content aside, this guy gives me the same sense of revulsion I get from Hasan Piker.

The guy in the Bluesky video is Jeremy Hambly aka The Quartering. He started his Youtube career as a Magic: The Gathering nerd, got into some community drama, and pivoted into becoming an anti-SJW sloptuber. He's the dimestore Tim Pool. He once got attacked by a crossdresser for being a "nazi" and ran away. Right-leaning people who are aware of his existence neither find him agreeable nor scary -- they mostly see him as a fun punching bag. Popular lolcow streamers Kino Casino have mined Jeremy for content so much that they dominated Youtube searches for his name for a while. Last time I saw clips of him he was talking about how he shat his pants at Walmart.

Personally I don't think I would see him as aggressive even if I didn't know the backstory. At most he comes across as a bit erratic in that clip, but that's probably because he tries to keep the audience's attention while being a lazy slopmonger who just reads articles and tweets.

Not exactly right-wing but agree on what the video is communicating, and on "wanting to become violent is the right and natural reaction" jives with me, though I probably do not feel it as viscerally as you mention. I guess I could see myself 'relaxing' to this video in the background, in the "holy shit yes there's someone who agrees that this is clearly insane" viewpoint.

One tangential thing this video made me realise again is how curiously the culture of the right and the left is drifting apart even in more subtle ways now. This is the nth time I notice that a seemingly quite popular right-wing youtuber talks in a way that is just viscerally offputting for me

On one hand I kinda wanted to agree with you after seeing that Klein vs. Coates interview and some panel with Yglesias on it, back to back, on the other hand I don't know if we want to start judging political subcultures by incredibly popular influencers... or do you want to answer some questions about Hassan Piker?

As a right-wing listener of this sort of narration, how does it feel to you?

I can't stand the Quartering even on a good day, but I was somewhat surprised by Lunduke being thrown in the same basket. Sure he's an outragemonger, but most of the time I'd read him as jolly rather than angry.

His manner of speaking doesn't come across as right-wing principaliter to me, it comes across as uncoordinated and aggressive. I think that's where your feelings of "this is like a drunken man" come from. It feels like he's rocking around and can't sit still. It comes across as sketchy to me -- I'm don't know the man, I'm just expressing what my snap judgment of his presentation says.

Where the feelings of aggression come in is he has a very intense stare, and I really do feel a sense of "this is an angry person looking at me with aggression" when he looks into the camera. This is a startlingly aggressive gaze for a youtuber to be making into the inanimate object of a camera. And the shadow that his ballcap casts onto his face doesn't really help.

I come from red country; the conservative men I know don't give off "aggressive, uncoordinated," vibes, but rather "more coordinated and chill than average." The feature that distinguishes a lot of the young conservative men I've met is they just feel calmer and pursue traditional milestones (marriage, children, etc). While there are lots of tells that this specific video creator is a right-winger, if you took the hat away I could easily see him being a Democrat, or a Libertarian, or a radical Socialist. He just feels like "angry man with bone to pick", not so much "proud conservative."

Where the feelings of aggression come in is he has a very intense stare, and I really do feel a sense of "this is an angry person looking at me with aggression" when he looks into the camera. This is a startlingly aggressive gaze for a youtuber to be making into the inanimate object of a camera. And the shadow that his ballcap casts onto his face doesn't really help.

Interestingly, at least this particular freeze frame does not actually register as particularly aggressive to me - I just read it as something like "triumphant expectation", like he thinks he just made a winning point in an argument and is waiting for me to concede.

I come from red country; the conservative men I know don't give off "aggressive, uncoordinated," vibes, but rather "more coordinated and chill than average."

To be clear, I didn't posit it as a general trait of conservatives; rather, it seems to me to be something that conservatives now appreciate in their influencers/thought leaders/talking heads.

For an example that separates the traits I am talking about from "working class markers" (as @OliveTapenade suggested), I got the same sense of unexpected aggression from the handful of Jordan Peterson clips I have watched. My feeling there was that he perpetually talked with a tension that sounded like a professional middle class father who was five seconds away from slapping his son so hard that he would fly across the room.

Interestingly, at least this particular freeze frame does not actually register as particularly aggressive to me - I just read it as something like "triumphant expectation", like he thinks he just made a winning point in an argument and is waiting for me to concede.

Hm, interesting. I get an intense sense of aggression from that stare, far more than I've ever gotten from any other youtube personality I've ever watched.

I got the same sense of unexpected aggression from the handful of Jordan Peterson clips I have watched. My feeling there was that he perpetually talked with a tension that sounded like a professional middle class father who was five seconds away from slapping his son so hard that he would fly across the room.

Hm, I guess you could see that in some of his clips, but I've enjoyed his longform lectures quite a bit, where he just sounds like a confident professor than a scold. Politics are the worst thing that ever happened to Peterson, and he would have been much better off as a person just remaining quiet about Canadian law and being a quirky psychology professor a little bit too into Jungian archetypes. He was much better as an academic than a surrogate father.

I think there are leftists with the same sort of aggression that appeal to young leftist viewers; intensity appeals to politically-inclined people. And I know of a lot of right-wing influencers with a softer style. But just like Twitter rewards clapbacks, the algorithms reward intensity and anger.

Not a right-winger either, but I have noticed a number of subtle speech habits or audio cues between each wing?

You're right that the generic right-wing affect is a kind of aggression or rage. It's not that they're all shouting all the time, because they're not, but they often speak as if they're about to. They tend to have some visible signs of masculinity or working-class LARP (the baseball caps, the beards, etc.) and their visual style is deliberately un-classy (that guy's video is plastered with garish ads, which for some reason I see a lot among right-wing commentators, but lefties seem to avoid).

By contrast I find the generic left-wing affect to be... one of two, it's either an affected sense of superiority (the I-can't-believe-I-have-to-explain-this-to-you style), or it's a kind of fragility? I don't know how to describe it, but if the right-winger feels like they're about to start screaming, the left-winger feels like they're about to start crying. There's a kind of insecurity. In my experience the superior, smug style is more common among men, and the fragile, desperate style is more common among women.

In both cases this is a generalisation and you can find counter-examples on both the right and the left all day.

By contrast I find the generic left-wing affect to be... one of two, it's either an affected sense of superiority (the I-can't-believe-I-have-to-explain-this-to-you style), or it's a kind of fragility? I don't know how to describe it, but if the right-winger feels like they're about to start screaming, the left-winger feels like they're about to start crying. There's a kind of insecurity. In my experience the superior, smug style is more common among men, and the fragile, desperate style is more common among women.

Does this apply just to left-wing politics youtubers, or to any "generically left-wing" (~anyone who does not register as having the aggressive affect to me)? (What about, say, this prolific tech reviewer, or these two default left-wingers talking to each other about vaguely politics-adjacent things?) Do you have any examples that you would consider typical?

I'm thinking particularly of politics.

For an example... I remember being very struck by this listening to a podcast with Sophie Lewis, a family abolition advocate. Unfortunately the one I'm thinking of as since been taken down, but this kind of conversation. Other examples of the podcast I was originally thinking of have the same kind of high-strung, nervous energy that I was trying to describe. Another way of putting it might be just the way that Robin DiAngelo talks.

Perhaps a linguist would be able to explain this better than I can, but there's a feeling I get somewhere beneath the surface where, say, Steve Turley comes off as wanting to yell. He has the energy or vibe, I suppose, that I associate with having clenched teeth, or wanting to punch someone. I get the opposite feeling from people like Lewis or DiAngelo - not actually crying or having an anxiety attack, no more than Turley is actually laying about himself with a golf club, but a sort of... 10% or 15% concentration of the same ingredient that would, at 100%, lead to those more spectacular breakdowns.

I do think it's gendered - I don't get, for instance, any of the nervous energy I'm talking about from Ezra Klein. He comes off to me as professional and articulate, and I think in general men don't project anxiety as much as women (and when they do, they come off as effeminate and weak and that makes it very hard for them to build a brand). But I think it's fair to say that women are more prominent in the left-wing sphere, and right-wing culture warrior women do more to imitate the angry affect anyway.

Red triber, not going to watch a bunch of YouTube videos, but lots of blue tribe speech norms just come off as… some combination of effeminate, corpo-speak, and backstabbing. A ‘firm’ tone of voice is what an honest man who’s sûre of what he’s saying uses.

Blue tribers hedge so they can retreat and use tone defense. 'I was never aggressive and I never actually said that thing so your hostility is proof of your intellectual inferiority in being unable to muster a defense on the grounds of discussion'. That is why two liberal debate shows seem like people taking turns to smugly condescend to each other (or to others) rather than two people having an argument on the same topic. Just watch any Ezra Klein video to see that in action.

Yeah I have to agree with this, both of the examples seem fine and like men who were confident in what they were talking about. Blue tribe men often sound high pitched and fake.

The really honest one knows how much he still doesn't know and is humble

As a right-wing listener of this sort of narration, how does it feel to you?

I'm actually not a right-wing listener. I'm a victim of the youtube algorithm where in my past I used to get him recommended, when I saw the dewaffle article I went back through my memory and remembered that particular channel as someone on who comments CW things. Two things of note, I'm not English native speaker so I'm not as sensitive the mannerisms and tone in the same way and the second is that I'm a disappointed socialist who abhors what the left has become when post-modern identity politics took over. I dabble with libertarian and conservative ideas, but I'm not a true believer.

Wait, so it's literally about pancakes and waffles?

That makes this meme prescient. The only error is that it assumes this is restricted to Twitter. I'm not sure if I'm having a seizure, if the simulation is glitching, or if it's an intentional reference. It's probably the last one, in all honesty. Nick Land lands another blow.

I'm glad that Bluesky exists, albeit only because it's a containment hub for the most insufferable X users. Apparently they're also too insufferable for themselves. People planning to start new social platforms take note, founder effects rule everything around you.

I'm pretty sure it is in reference to that meme.

Related, from before this latest flareup in the Singal War: Nate Silver on "Blueskyism," (briefly: being horrid exclusionary scolds) which he considers to be the left's greatest weakness at present.

What I find fascinating is Nate Silvers total excommunication from the Left because he dared challenge the orthodoxy about polling favoring eternal progressivism, and his polling baby has been butchered into an ABC-owned politics focused The View with slightly less irritating panelists. David Shor nearly got excommunicated as well because he dared suggest that violent protests like the Floyd riots weren't helpful. Shor genuflected and abased himself by saying his findings were harmful, Silver stood his ground. It is unsurprising that Silver maintains a grudge against his moralizing peers.

notorious transphobe, fascist and serial instigator of harassment campaigns Jesse Singal

Beautiful way to describe a progressive Jewish New Yorker journalist who questions youth gender transition. He's 99% on their side, so he's basically the reincarnation of Hitler to them. The moral purity and rigid adherence to a narrow set of approved beliefs is amazing with this crowd.

Reading Iris's about us page, my impression is this is likely a transgender person, both from the pic and the picture-perfect set of male hobbies, any one of which I know women who are into them, but put together is pretty strong evidence of not being a natal woman... and of course, "most of my recent focus has been on transgender rights, especially in the workplace." (Read: I came out as transgender recently and now that's my pet cause.)

Either that or the most masculine woman I have ever heard of in my entire life. So, in that connection, "trans woman in tech is extremely progressive and doesn't like transphobes," isn't exactly a wild outlier. They believe this is an existential fight for them; I'd probably call my enemies fascists too if I believed as they do. As it is, I just find their intensity of feeling a little silly, and so it's easy for me to shrug it off.

But really I have a more specific pronoun problem with the website. I find it hard to take the website of a professional seriously when all of the pronouns are "we", and it's obviously just one person's consultancy. Just say "I," please. Don't pretend to be plural. (Wait.......)

(EDIT: Also, there's a publication "Published under my deadname.")

Reading Iris's about us page, my impression is this is likely a transgender person

Without even clicking the link, the name alone is enough of a tell.

You say 99% on their side, and yet his discussion of trans issues is way more than 1% of his output. IOW if you don't talk much about the other 99% of your issue positions how much do you really hold them?

IOW if you don't talk much about the other 99% of your issue positions how much do you really hold them?

99%, of course. People don't have a responsibility to talk about their opinions in order to hold them.

One can criticize the likes of Singal for being tactically incompetent in terms of how talking about the 1% difference aids the "other side" more than they ought to, or whatever, of course. But that's a separate question than whether or not he holds these opinions, with its own various dimensions, such as the fact that someone like Singal can reasonably (and very possibly correctly) believe that disproportionately focusing his speech on that 1% where he disagrees with his "side" is actually beneficial for his "side" and harmful to the "other side."

Imagine you are a dyed in the wool red triber. You agree with 99% of everything Trump is doing. Then one day, Trump decides we should all cut off our dicks. And suddenly you start seeing all your friends at church cutting their dicks off. They're cutting the dicks off their kids too! You might make it your singular purpose to try to lead your tribe, with whom you agree on 99% of all other issues, back to the land of sanity.

I don't envy Jesse Singal. He seems to honestly believe this is a mistake and not a conflict. He honestly thinks he can convince Democratic politicians and policy makers to reverse course, even 20%. If only those damned Republicans weren't also on his side of this issue, making his side all crazy, and doubling down on all the dick chopping.

Wait, I think I mixed up my metaphors there at the end...

Oh wait no, I'm good.

On the contrary, I believe that it is the fact that dicks don't actually need to be cut off that is the cause of the modern trans movements problems. Autogynephiliacs like Andrea Long Chu get to pretend they're one of the girls while openly discussing how much they want their dicks to be shoved into lesbians. The celebration of the dicked in the realm of the dickless is the precise shear point that drives many LGB and ACTUAL T people away from the Queer+ crowd.

As such I openly proclaim myself an obligate trans maximalist. Are you trans? Great! Heres some painkillers and a knife. Chop it off and live your life as the woman your dysphoria say you are! It is a costless exercise for dysphorics because the penis is a reminder of their eternal trauma for being in the wrong body, PER THEIR OWN STATEMENTS.

A man wants to be socialized and go into girls spaces? Then fucking BE a 'social girl'. Be the girliest fucking femboy, giggling at boys and wearing thigh highs and spreading bussy to get topped by Chad. But don't pretend singing Golden from memory and dreaming of eat pray loving through your dissatisfied thirties means you get the womens-reserved corner spot. Game devs in the west exploded in female representation, but only because men got to pretend to be women without needing any effort other than growing hair long.

It took me way too long to realize cutting your dicks off wasn't all that contrived.

For those of us who don't even recognize the name except as "Some Guy that the Motte talks about now and then", would you be willing to give some background on those accusations?

Background

Jesse Singal is a journalist and podcaster who often covers "youth gender medicine", reading the studies and interviewing many clinicians. While Jesse is critical of the evidence base for "affirmative care," he is hardly some TERF or even a true & honest transphobe. He still defends medical transition for minors, even puberty blockers, believes being trans is a valid identity, and uses preferred pronouns for anyone he writes about or discusses on his podcast. (His podcast was recently featured for covering a story about the Tranch, referencing the Farms as a source. He and his podcasting partner Katie Herzog also criticized the mainstream coverage of Keffals v KF.) His most genocidal posts were his Atlantic cover story about youth gender transition, an article about Kenneth Zucker, and an article about transracialism discourse.

Yet for the crime of covering this topic as a journalist instead of a stenographer for trans activists, he is one of the most frequent targets of their rage and derangement, including death threats, slander, sexual fantasies, and false accusations. They have repeatedly thrown their own reputations and careers under the bus in the process. (Jesse himself is unable to resist a Twitter fight, and very willing to request corrections and retractions if he finds their work to be full of errors or harmful to his reputation.)

I've been reading and posting on Threads recently. There seems to be an interesting division between Finnish Threads (essentially a hornier version of normie white-collar millennial Twitter, somewhat leftlib but mostly apolitical) and American Threads (dumber Bluesky). Threads is probably somewhat more popular in Finland than many other countries for reasons I haven't really understood, so that probably contributes.

Indeed there was an infograph recently of most popular social media worldwide and Finland stuck out as being the only one where Threads reigns supreme

I'd like to blame that on surstromming, but that's a Swedish thing. Maybe it's just lutfisk in general, that stuff can't be good for your mental health.

Heat induced brain damage from too much vihta bashing in Saunas.

Nah. It’s mämmi and we embrace it.

Hilariously seems like Bluesky has the inverse of the Witches Problem.

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

They witch-hunted all the witches off Twitter, pushed them to Gab, Twitter, Parler, Truth, etc., then a new monarch came to power and let (most of) the witches return.

So the witch-hunters all filed off to form a new community that was in theory was against witch-hunts but also promised to prevent the witches from doing their witchy stuff too much.

Witch-Hunters started making some really questionable accusations and some of the accused just shrugged and returned to twitter, and a few leaned into it and antagonized the witch-hunters enough to garner the current reaction.

Like its crazy, Bluesky might have managed to gain real traction as a Twitter alternative if the users were allowed to have fun and the primary userbase wasn't exactly as censorious and bigoted (using the proper broad definition, look it up!) as their stereotype. Now its arguably a more petulant echo chamber/breeding ground for radicalism than ANY of the RW twitter alternatives.

Now they can't even easily return to twitter because the witches are pretty well entrenched. Also they've declared the owner of the site to be a particularly dangerous witch.

I think its more like the witch hunter's community promised that they would not suffer any witch to live among them. Which kind of happened automatically because no witch wanted to live there (except maybe for an ultra-powerful immortal witch that wandered in for a laugh to show how silly and impotent the witch hunters were).

But pretty much the witch hunters got bored with no witches to kill and started hunting each other. The community slowly died off as a result.

I think a lot of witches would love to take up residence there for the laughs, but I'd readily admit they'd probably get up to such powerful dark witchcraft that it would be justifiable to ban or otherwise limit their reach.

But pretty much the witch hunters got bored with no witches to kill and started hunting each other.

There MUST be a term or idea for this (other than a "Purity Spiral") where a bunch of hardened witch hunters finally form their ideal social order where the greatest crime is mere suspicion of witchhood, then for want of actual witches they start slinging accusations at each other b/c they can't break the witch-hunt itch.

Social autoimmune disorder

Death by a holier than thousand cuts

Snitches need witches

Ouroboros to death

No, I’m pretty sure they just had a disjoint set of witches.

Lol, they can of course return to twatter. Twatter (as they loudly decry at every opportunity) has virtually no standards or "safety", it basically follows the bare minimum of US law (so no CP or active calls to violence) with a few extra advertiser-friendly bits thrown in (you need to click on "sensitive" videos instead of autplaying, porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff). There's literally a million people talking shit about Elon and Trump all day every day, the only difference is these comments are not being artificially boosted and have no official seal of approval, so they have to stand on their own merits (which they seldom do).

I am greatly enjoying watching BlueSky descend into a ratfuck, because it reveals the true nature of the people who populate it.

porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff)

Porn isn't banned. It's just hidden behind 'sensitive content' which, with the wrong setting, can be displayed automatically.

with a few extra advertiser-friendly bits thrown in (you need to click on "sensitive" videos instead of autplaying, porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff)

FYI there's no restriction on porn on Twitter (except required by law). There's tons of hardcore stuff easily available, though I believe the algorithms tend to limit their reach.

Ah, TIL.

Oh, I just mean that twitter will be completely intolerable for them now, as the witches are very much out of the closet, loud and proud, and will happily engage with the witch-hunter brigades, so I doubt any of the bluesky refugees will last very long if they come back into the fray. There's enough screenshots of what they said on BS (lol unfortunate acronym) to come back to haunt them.

It'd be like getting released from Juvenile Detention straight into the the rec yard of a Maximum Security Federal Penitentiary.

Hilariously seems like Bluesky has the inverse of the Witches Problem.

Like "reverse racism" is just racism, "inverse Witch Problem" just means the left did, in fact, have a Witch Problem. It's not a different thing.

The main distinction is that the right-wing witches were driven out by the left-wing witches, while the left-wing witches left because they were unable to continue to keep the right-wing witches out.

I feel like there is a useful distinction to be made between witches and witch hunters. The most commonly ascribed issue with witches is one of moral or spiritual corruption. Witches don't want to destroy witch hunters, they want to convert them into witches. Witch hunters on the other hand are all about accusing people of being witches and burning them at the stake to prevent their corruption from spreading.

I think that blueskies problem is with too many witch hunters and not enough witches.

Hard disagree. All that does is launder into the premises that there is a good version of being a lunatic fringe that is frothing at the mouth for violence. It once again centers this notion that even the crazy lefties have their heart in the right place.

I reject this fully.

I don't see how it launders in such a premise, especially if you know that all real world harms caused by witch hunts was caused by the hunters, not the witches.

Eeeeeeh, that's really not how the metaphor is used. At no point in any essay about "banning witches" has the premise been "but witches aren't real".

I mean, yes, in the real world there are no witches and witch hunters do more damage. But in the context of all the essays about "What happens when you ban witches, and by witches we mean right wing racist", witches are real and witch hunters are necessary.

I think that blueskies problem is with too many witch hunters and not enough witches.

Western societies in general suffer from a systems-level equivalent of an auto-immune disorder where the demand for witch activity far outstrips its supply.

Also, it is noteworthy that this case is literally "Burgers?". I guess life does imitate art.

Also, it is noteworthy that this case is literally "Burgers?". I guess life does imitate art.

Given how often Stone Toss gets parodied both by his fans and haters, I feel like someone must've already made an edit of that comic using "Waffles?" as a punchline, but I'm not clever enough to figure out what the joke would be.

Western societies in general suffer from a systems-level equivalent of an auto-immune disorder

I see what you did there.

Its witches all the way down.

Although in my mind the distinction is that most Right Wing Witches aren't trying to drive lefties out, they need 'em as a foil and might even enjoy the conflict. Its the lefties who are insistent they must burn the witches.

Driving away your opponent is not fun. The fun is keeping they/them alive and kicking while forcing them to watch you butcher their sacred cows

That seems more a right-wing thing than a left-wing thing, IMO (cf the owned by facts and logic genre, which is heavily right-wing).

The Left does need to have opponents, but the point of an opponent isn't for him to be humiliated over and over again. It's to offer a target to express power over, and particularly symbolic/verbal power, because that's where the Left dominates now. The Opponent's role is to say something and then be expelled, as a symbolic ritual. The Right cares about the psychological humiliation and hierarchy you can inflict on an individual, while the Left cares about using someone as an example pour encourager les autres.

But, if you keep on expelling people, eventually those people will be gone. So you have to find a new Opponent to maintain the ritual, and that's how Jesse Singal ends up the witch.

It does seem to me like you are on to something here. At least in the US context, "torture bad people until they become good" seems to be more of a right-wing solution, and "execute bad people in the town square and spit on their corpse" to be more of a left-wing one. Perhaps this is just of an outgrowth of individualism vs. collectivism - an (individualist) right-winger would feel that evil must be defeated within every individual, while a (collectivist) left-winger would be more concerned with the evil of groups and think that "reforming" individuals is a waste of time and effort when they are better used as a teaching piece.

(Seemingly relevant anecdata I can't slot into this theory: the concern of Puritan witch hunters with making their marks repent as they were tortured to death; Orwell's fantasy communists being obsessed with the same on a longer timescale, even as their real models didn't actually seem to be so concerned)

I don’t think that checks out.

The death penalty is extremely right-coded. Even back when opposition came from Christians it was considered progressive.

Instead, I would say conservatives are more comfortable with solutions that require any sort of violence. Domestically, that means “tough-on-crime” policy, low tolerance for riots, and at least lip service given to the Second Amendment. It might also apply to the neocon style of foreign interventionism.

The death penalty is extremely right-coded. Even back when opposition came from Christians it was considered progressive.

Yep. I recall the 1995 film Dead Man Walking featuring Susan Sarandon as a nun iirc, whose heart bled for convict Sean Penn

I think that what you are saying might be an orthogonal aspect of the modern left-right distinction, though? The Soviets, the Chinese and the revolutionary French all had no issues with "justice, prompt, severe, inflexible". In the scenarios we are talking about, the putative violence on either side is metaphorical, anyway - the Right "tortures" left-wingers with "facts and logic" or hanging-transsexual animated GIFs, while the Left "executes" right-wingers by summary bans and damnatio memoriae.

Even with the death penalty (for criminals, not heretics), I do also see some tendency towards being attached to the aspect where there is no quick timeline and the subject is kept in the dark whether they will be spending a day or a decade on death row. Admittedly the "free helicopter rides" meme does put more of a dent in my theory, though.

One possibility is that the Right implicitly accepts that there will always be disbelievers/bad people/whatever, and so the role of the inquisitor is to put them lower on the hierarchy. But the Left believes in the perfectability of society, and there's no room for bad people in a utopia.

my observation is that bluesky is resisting its best of becoming an "ideological monoculture", failing at that though.

I guess my question is, why are they resisting this? The hardest part of making a successful social media site is building the userbase. The current Bluesky userbase consists almost entirely of people who left Twitter because it wasn’t an ideological monoculture. Owning a site with an annoying userbase is better than owning a site with no userbase.

Well, it's like the problems of video games in recent years. They think theres a larger audience out there they can get but their current one is so toxic it's preventing them from getting it. Thus you have the choice of ditching your old users and hoping the new bigger userbase gets on board or slowly dying with your old users.

Bluesky is a profit driven company so of course they have to take the risk of more users and thus higher profits over guaranteed slow death.

It's mostly left-wingers who left Twitter after Musk enshittified it my ramming his preferred content down everyone's throats. They don't want a monoculture so much as they don't want to be forced to look at posts by Ted Cruz. The fact that they were getting a reputation as you described is probably a big part of the reason they are so flippant currently. If the woke scolds who are the face of the company but a small percentage of total users want to leave, let them leave. I went on Bluesky today without an account and I didn't see anything relating to politics, mostly sports and scenic photos. I can't say the same about my Twitter account, which shows me a bunch of right-wing political posts even though I'm almost exclusively following sports journalists.

They don't want a monoculture so much as they don't want to be forced to look at posts by Ted Cruz

Was Singal Cruz-posting? I don't get the connection.

"Waffles"

Is there something in this 5000 word essay you find interesting? I sped through it, but tech->fascism->tech->fascism doesn't provide much insight. The 30 additional mentions of fascism don't make up for it either.

The best time for Bluesky to put its foot down and set the tone was a few months after the platform received the influx last Summer. Enough time for the new users to create networks, get situated, but with enough anti-X relevancy that they can soften the reaction. Make a great big point of it, do the waffle bit, and get the 'we only moderate content on our site' policy riots over with.

Bluesky has been an ideological monoculture for as long as I've paid attention to it. Whenever I endeavor a visit, the main feed advertises this culture as the heart, blood, and soul of the site. There's a smaller, but significant slice of the main feed that is cool friggen' astronomy photos from reddit, but mostly it's Twitter resistance posting and its professional pundit version from anti-Elon diaspora. I believe the CEO when she says she doesn't like it, but the non-activist left-liberal tech networks -- which I assume she likes -- exist in quiet corners.

Does Bluesky ever plan to make money, or is it Jack Dorsey's pet project and it never needs to? There is close to zero demand for a truly decentralized social network, and this preference is no more apparent than in the stereotypical Bluesky user.

It seems that it is hard to make large scale "microblogging" platform that caters to heterodox political culture and I'm a little curious if there is any insight for why it is hard to make one?

I'd argue that the heterodox platform is called X. On the platform you can find unrepentant racists of all stripes, from the deranged ramblings of black nationalist Hoteps to teenage frogposters in Malaysia. You can find content from US representatives like AOC and Marjorie Taylor Greene, or you can hear from award winning economists, rocket scientists, CEOs, and lawyers.

The platform may not cater to heterodox political culture, but that's because few people demand or prefer one. The Motte encourages a heterodox political culture, but it can't conjure one.

"Waffles"

calls a huge percentage of programmers "fascist"

"noted race scientist Scott Siskind"

Who is this person? She'd certainly be at home on BlueSky. Reading through that essay turned my stomach.

Is there something in this 5000 word essay you find interesting? I sped through it, but tech->fascism->tech->fascism doesn't provide much insight. The 30 additional mentions of fascism don't make up for it either.

I just use it as a reference to the controversy that is in the beginning of it and from someone who is really angry about waffles. It is actually the lack of insight that is the main point of using it.

I think what's most fascinating about Blusky, is it's the only case I know of where the lefties were exiled (well, self exiled) from a supposedly "neutral" platform. Every other time it ever happened, it was because the TOS or the Trust & Safety teams came down like a brick of shit on their right wing political opposition. This caused two things. When the people who got banned went to voat.co or gab or where ever, it concentrated things and made them look even crazier than they seemed before, making the right as a whole look kind of unhinged. The second thing it did was further entrench leftism as the "default". It's just being a good persontm.

Twitter going the opposite direction has been seismic in pushing back against both. The overton window has expanded to include more rightwing thoughts, and now the left is over on Blusky acting completely unhinged.

There's an even stronger selection effect. If your club gets banned by the city you have no choice but to follow them out of city limits to stay in the club. This club wasn't ever banned, so why go through the trouble unless you care a lot?*

Does X qualify as "explicitly right-wing" or do we see an exception to Robert's Law of Conquest as applied to the internet?

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

I would consider myself a moderate X user. I check it 3-5 times a week. On the site, I follow some users who progressives consider unsavory characters, but the majority are normal interesting people, moderately annoying pundits, and domain experts. The max vitriol content is on the site, it's not hidden, but it's also not pushed in my face. Where I run into the uber based right content is usually because I signaled interested in a topic, like a big culture war murder story, and the algorithm asks just how based I really am for a time. (Not very.)

Conditions might now only require an organization be perceived as explicitly not left-wing to avoid conquest. "Any organization that cannot be made explicitly left-wing will see leftists leave for greener pastures."

So my lurking on mastodon without account saw that something happened over at Bluesky and people were leaving to go to the fediverse instead.

How does that make sense? Bluesky is refusing to ban this person from the platform, therefore I'm moving to a distributed platform where it's not even possible to ban someone?

These people are laboring under the misapprehension that their voice is so desired other people will follow them to wherever. In reality, no one cares, and it makes no sense.

It makes at least a bit of sense to stop supporting a commercial business if they do things you don't like.

The Waffles article is a reminder of how much I hate interacting with other parts of the internet.

Its a writing style that consists almost entirely of assigning the worst possible terms you can get away with to people you don't like. "Fascist", "race scientist", "shit-head", "racist", "white supremacist", etc. No regard for truth value, just pure culture warring and mud slinging.

I barely learned anything reading the article. There was about one paragraph of content explaining something that happened and then like 30 paragraphs of name-calling. That half paragraph that is most useful is here so no one else has to visit that link:

A little while back, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber approvingly tweeted a post by Jerry Chen about a person bursting into a Waffle House and shouting "oh, so you hate pancakes?". In the replies, someone asked her why she'd not yet banned notorious transphobe, fascist and serial instigator of harassment campaigns Jesse Singal from the platform, to which she replied with only "Waffles!".

Even in those two sentences she couldn't help but throw out some names.

I have to wonder if part of this writing style is a leftover problem of "micro" blogging platforms like twitter. In isolation you might believe those things about Jesse Singal, and it would be very useful to learn that thing. So a tweet saying that would get boosted up and retweeted.

But when its paragraph after paragraph of everyone being called a fascist, or some other thing that is the worst thing a progressive liberal can think about someone. You can't help but notice that this writer thinks everyone is a terrible awful no good human piece of garbage. And suddenly the information content collapses from "this person she is speaking about is really really bad" to just "she doesn't like this person, and everything she says about anyone is suspect".

It also highlights why some of Scott Alexander's takedowns of people are so damn effective and brutal. He will spend a lot of writing space saying many nice things about people that seem objectively bad. And then he will end by saying something slightly not nice about one person, and you come away thinking "damn that person must be the worst piece of shit ever".

If your default is to be nice, kind, and charitable to everyone, then if you ever need to stray from that default and say bad things about someone we know you really mean it. If your default is to insult everyone you just look like a misanthrope.

It also highlights why some of Scott Alexander's takedowns of people are so damn effective and brutal. He will spend a lot of writing space saying many nice things about people that seem objectively bad. And then he will end by saying something slightly not nice about one person, and you come away thinking "damn that person must be the worst piece of shit ever".

Honestly, this also describes most of Singal's work, which is I suspect part of why he's so hated for, as far as I can tell, things like questioning small-n studies that have been embraced broadly with shockingly few published followups now that drastically more data should be available.

I think it’s an artifact of social media and the attention economy. The only real way to stand out in the vast sea of ordinary people posting about your topic is to be as noisy and obnoxious and name-calling as you can get away with. If Trump is just wrong you get nothing— no likes, no shares, no comments, you are not going to be seen by many people. If Trump is an evil narcissistic authoritarian Christian nationalist, you get seen. Short form doesn’t help things, because it doesn’t allow for nuanced writing, but short content displayed chronologically wouldn’t push people to that degree because doing so would not make more people see the post. It’s like all the people posting are being manipulated into being shock jocks just to be noticed and so all of them eventually realize that being shocking and mean is the best way to win, and being deleted is actually a good thing because you are then the kind of poster not afraid to tell it like it is.

I barely learned anything reading the article.

Better article with copious screenshots

Jerry Chen: (bluesky user bursts into Waffle House) OH SO YOU HATE PANCAKES??

Jay Graber: Too real. We're going to try to fix this. Social media doesn't have to be this way.

Random person: have y'all banned Jesse Singal yet or

Jay Graber: WAFFLES

The post is interesting because they have titles like: 'We need to kill the "coding" concept' but are part of the blueksky zeitgeist that is anti-LLM. If you really hate these 'man-children' maybe you should be pushing the boundaries of LLMs in order to replace the need for people who type arcane runes into the machine.

This raises so many questions. Does Bluesky have a communications team (apparently not)? Why do so many of the Bluesky staff treat their (very queer, very trans, very liberal) userbase with open contempt? Why are they so attached to having bigots on their platform? And does this perhaps indicate that a fair part of the Bluesky staff have fascist sympathies (unclear, but we would do well to assume the worst)?

Gee, I wonder why they don't want their current userbase?

More broadly, I think that there was a time when a) the grey tribe thought that they had more in common with the liberals than they did, and b) thought that queer liberalism was the future and opposing it was just asking for damnatio memoriae. They were therefore inclined to allow/enforce progressive political orthodoxy.

As this arrangement broke down, tech leaders have become increasingly aware that a) they don't have much in common with this faction and b) having a solid bloc of very queer very trans very liberal users makes your userbase incredibly volatile, aggressive and hard to please. See for example:

Furthermore, while I don't believe that most of the tech industry or most "tech people" are outright fascists, reactionary centrism of the debate-bro flavour, or what noted race scientist Scott Siskind calls the "grey tribe", is distressingly common.

The fundamental problem with having a heterodox social media platform is that humans are very tribal and are not psychologically capable of being in genuinely heterodox environments. Even what we have here is, largely, a political monoculture with a strict set of rules and a culture that is (somewhat) orthogonal to red/blue but still very clear. You can talk to someone and think 'yeah, they would make a good Mottizen' and look at a 4channer or blueskydiver and think that they wouldn't. Observations to this effect have been made by many posters here right before they flame out.

EDIT:

I didn't know we had any channies here

Look, okay, some 4channers are all right

I didn't mean that literally no 4channers could be good Mottizens, only that AFAIK the speech norms are often pretty different and a lot of people who enjoy spending time on 4chan kind of enjoy being deliberately provocative, which is banned here.

…and some, I assume, are good posters.

I’ve been annoyed, on this site, by people complaining that the left calls everyone fascists. I figured it was hyperbole, maybe a bit of a persecution complex. After reading this blogpost, I recognize my mistake.

only that AFAIK the speech norms are often pretty different

Yes, 4chan is for my literal shitposting (on my employer's time of course), the motte is for when I am waiting on civilized company. One can have different voices tailored to different environments.

noted race scientist Scott Siskind

Steve Sailer heartbroken.

You can talk to someone and think 'yeah, they would make a good Mottizen' and look at a 4channer or blueskydiver and think that they wouldn't.

I am literally the guy writing the posts on 4chan that make you think “that guy wouldn’t make a good mottizen”.

See edit, I hadn't meant to express such a sweeping sentiment :)

I didn’t take it as an insult lol, just thought it might be a fun factoid for people who didn’t know how much overlap we had (I know of a couple high-profile mottizens who have confirmed they post there)

It's called code-switching, and it's actually very brat.

and look at a 4channer

There are a decent amount of anons here, actually. /pol/ is where I go for a fun roll in the mud (and to add to my edgy meme collection), this place is where I go when I want some actual substance and intellectual stimulation.

See edit, I hadn't meant to express such a sweeping sentiment :)

I'm no longer a 4channer, unfortunately, but 15+ years ago, I used to use it heavily. Spending time there and seeing how communities can develop when anonymity is enforced both through trivial inconveniences and norms, on top of not only tolerance for but celebration of the breaking of taboos and common decency is one of the main things that convinced me of the value of free speech. In my 30+ years of using the internet, 4chan remains the most loving, welcoming, dynamic, and fun community I've encountered. TheMotte comes a distant 2nd and is even better in some aspects, but falls far behind in others.

This is why the ideological capture of places like Reddit and old Twitter was such a problem, as long as it is viewed as the "neutral" option network effects make it hard to leave and make any alternative which is founded explicitly as a refuge from the bias fated to become the opposite bias but 10 times worse. The right failed to do this several times with truth social and parlor and gab, and its why the left hated Elon buying Twitter so much as this gave the right one of the neutral spaces and the left's attempt to make a new site has gone little better than the right's attempts.

I don’t think Reddit is really perceived as being “neutral” any more. It never had the mainstream traction Twitter did, and my general perception of Reddit is that it was always a fringe platform, probably less popular than, say Discord. In my real world social circle, only one person uses Reddit, and the general consensus is that our Reddit user is a bit of a loose cannon.

Reddit is so inaccurate, I would get more fair and balanced reporting at DailyKos (another far left progressive site), and I really don’t think anyone in the real world has the same respect for Reddit that they have had for Twitter. Wikipedia, of course, doesn’t consider Reddit reliable.

As an aside, I have a lot of respect for Jesse Singal because he defended Alcoholics Anonymous in an era when the left wing media was using questionable (and ultimately false) science to claim AA didn’t work. Waffles indeed.

Reddit is generally for various forms of failsons who want to seem smart but don’t want to do such things as read real books, get a real job, or leave the house. There are a few users, mostly on the tech subs that know a bit about technology, but most of them barely have help-desk level tech knowledge. The Reddit users I’ve known generally know nothing, but believe they are gifted, and are therefore super smug.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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