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Okay, let's start with something basic. Here's 3 day training that Lockheed Martin executives were sent to, where they were asked to connect the term "white men" with terms like "old, racist, privileged, anti-women, angry, Aryan Nation, KKK, Founding fathers, guns, guilty, can’t jump.". Or here's a chart by the Smithsonian that's so anti-white that it somehow managed to flip over into being racist against non-whites.
Sure, that’s a great example of bizarre double-standards racism, but…
Entities like Lockheed are not publishing racist screeds, progressive or otherwise. They are subscribing to them. The publishers are usually small, interchangeable consultants. In aggregate, they might count as an institution; individually, they’re effectively free to dance on the bleeding edge.
Lockheed and friends want that +1 to saves against cancellation, but they can’t commit as hard as the consultants, since they have lots of competing interests. So they pay whoever is currently atop the pile. It doesn’t matter if that consultant gets exposed and torn to shreds because they’re fungible.
That’s part of the reason the Smithsonian infographic was so insane. They’re not supposed to be fungible! They’re not supposed to be testing new and exciting frontiers for racism!
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Eh, fuck it.
After spending the better part of a day dumpster-diving through the worst MAGA shit I could find, I finally started wondering why I was doing any of this.
I mean, shit, it’s not like whatever I can throw at you is likely to convince you that actually, you’re wrong and I’m right; any more than than your (IMO unimpressive) examples actually convinced me that I’m wrong and you’re right. All I’ll succeed at is wasting both our time, probably irritating you with my unwillingness to cede any ground in the face of what you consider to be indisputable evidence, and further disgruntling me with continued exposure to anti-woke talking points.
So whatever; you win, I guess. Congratulations on your argumentative stamina. Feel free to get in the last words at your leisure.
If you haven't yet completely flounced, would you mind posting what you found anyways? I'm working on something of a steelman of your and magicalkittycat's positions and I'd like to see what you managed to dig up.
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Well that hardly seems fair, would you say the Smithsonian is a dumpster?
So just to clarify, if you saw the exact same workshops / infographics published under Trump by the exact same institutions, but with races reversed, someone got outraged over it, you'd say something like "I don't see where the problem is"?
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@Amadan, I’d appreciate it if you did the both of us a favor and permabanned me while this moment of clarity lasts.
Ought to make your lives easier having one less triggered leftist around accumulating reports, and maybe it’ll be the kick in the pants I need to finally get me off this site.
It’s clear to me now that the time for talking is over, and that there can be no further productive use for sticking around and trying to bridge the ever-widening divide in realities between “woke” America and “antiwoke” America.
Not here, anyways.
There are actually a lot of people in the middle here. I'd largely consider myself one; I'm often grudgingly willing to ally with the conservatives against the progressives (particularly since said conservatives are weaker here in Oz), but as an erotic fanfic writer I know I'm not exactly their favourite person either.
It would be nice to keep more diversity here - real diversity, that is, diversity of opinion. It has been noted to me that theMotte is not feeding me an especially-accurate view of "the left", and you could help with that.
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Sad, but not unforseen: https://www.themotte.org/post/2190/why-bother/335757?context=8#context
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If you really want me to.
I feel like I should say a few things, though. It's ironic you are at this point now. I just took you (manually) out of the new user filter since you've been around long enough that you're clearly a good faith contributor, but also clearly were never going to accumulate enough "karma" or however Zorba scores accounts to leave the filter on your own.
You do get reported a lot, but 100% of the reports have been people angry at you for being a leftist expressing leftist opinions. You have not a single warning on your record (so far). I can see how it's disheartening to get downvoted constantly. This place is no better than reddit, in that downvotes are supposed to be used only to express that a comment is "objectively" bad in the sense of contributing nothing to the conversation, but instead it is used as an agree/disagree button, just as half our members use reports as a "super angrily disagree" button.
Now, is "the time for talking over"?
I am kind of there myself. And this place frustrates the hell out of me. Proud and violent bigots and haters, accelerationists, and people who literally and explicitly wish me death.
Clearly I should go find greener pastures more aligned with me, right?
There are none.
SlateStarCodex and adjacent spaces come closest, and even there you'll pretty much be booted for talking about the wrong things or having the wrong opinions.
I could go on X/Twitter, which is pretty much the Wild West right now. Except while it's true you can say almost anything there, that just means you'll draw a small crowd of people who agree with you and a lot of fire from people who hate you, and since it's far more public the doxxing potential is greater. There's no real upside because you aren't actually having interesting and thoughtful conversations, you're just dunking and point-scoring. It suits a certain personality type, I guess, but not me with my milquetoast centrism and lack of desire to throw people out of helicopters.
Anything "mainstream/normie"? Fuck no. All my hobby and social spaces have converged on acceptable and settled positions on everything from trans people to HBD to whether or not Trump is Literally Hitler to ... well, everything. I mostly don't talk in those spaces anymore, because I, with my center-left "let's just be civil and polite" GenX 'tude retains just enough skepticism and contrarianism that I have narrowly escaped being tagged as a Literal Nazi more than once, and I know if I bother to get into it, I will be banned. These spaces provide other needs for me and I don't want to lose them, so I keep my mouth shut. No point in losing years of history and access to resources that are somewhat important to me because I cleared my throat about the wrong subject.
This is what your side does. (I say "your" side, but I still consider myself liberal enough that it's kind of my side as well, except not really- they want to fucking kill me too, and now I feel kind of like a sleeper agent seething and blackpilling in their midst.)
So tell me, bud, where are the other places I could go to share opinions and maybe express skepticism about whether or not trans women are really truly heckin' 100% biological women, even though I by no means hate them or want them killed or put in camps or forcibly detransitioned? Where are the places where I can admit I think HBD is probably true even though I think individuals should still be judged on their own merits? Where can I say that I really dislike Trump, but also I don't think he's Hitler (and also the Democrats brought all this shit on themselves)? Where can I say Charlie Kirk was a prick but murdering him in front of his wife and children was an atrocity and if you're celebrating it you need to fix your goddamn soul? And so on and so on. In all your spaces, I'll just be called a collaborator, a bootlicker, a useful fool, a Nazi, and then banned.
Here, you suffer downvotes and unpopularity for taking a contrarian position but you still get treated politely. We still politely talk to each other (not willingly, not happily, many people would like to take the gloves and masks off completely, but we mods won't let them). Sure, half the people here are salivating for the Day of the Rope, which means its inherently unstable, but it is what it is.
I would be disappointed to see you pack up and go because righties are mean to you, as has happened to so many leftists before you. But I also understand it's just not fun being constantly dogpiled and downvoted, so I can't tell you you should keep hanging around somewhere that makes you miserable. I just want to point out that the greener pastures you are heading to are only greener for your orthodox and approved opinions.
Some parts of the SpaceBattles diaspora used to be this (most notably Digital Wild West and Questionable Questing), but DWW's dead (its owner had a psychotic break) and QQ banned politics. I think The Sietch is roughly similar to here in outlook, although I haven't actually joined due to being satisfied with ACX/here.
Speaking of which, the ACX comments still do exist, although Substack's UI is hilariously inferior.
What about Data Secrets Lox? It uses an old school forum interface, allows political discussion, and doesn't ban people for politics. It's a rationalist forum, so the posters are smart, and if anything it seems to be a bit less extreme than The Motte.
Yeah, should have included it (I am a member, and all that), but it is a bit less active than here IIRC.
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The Sietch is a bit too spittle-flecked for the tastes of most Mottizens, I think; and too dominated by the same half-dozen or so regulars.
The SB diaspora is a good example of the wider tragedy of the fragmenting internet. What used to be a more close-knit community with a range of opinions has, as it has grown, also narrowed its window for acceptable speech and become something of a shadow of its current self. It's a good example of self-siloing and the seven zillion witches effect.
I mean, those effects were involved in the SB/Sietch breakup, although significant chunks of it were just SJ pulling the standard entryism+inevitability playbook that it was playing for the entire decade. QQ and DWW, though, died as politics venues for unrelated reasons, and SV/SB mostly retained a common userbase rather than siloing happening (of course, now SV's dying; never mind QQ eclipsing it, its post rate is outright going backwards at a significant rate).
Well, SV was a Blueskyisation, which is its own form of seven zillion witches. The most progressive posters, mainly those who were fans of a censorious power mod (who in my view did deserve to be fired, but the firing process was arbitrary and incompetent), schismed off to their own website. As SB has coalesced more around progressive norms, that site's comparative advantage has faded and it's now dying. The Sietch was a second schism, that time over another case of staff arbitrariness and incompetence but that time related to the right-wing fringe. SB hasn't become more open to hard-right views, so the Sietchers have not returned.
QQ and DWW are a different situation. QQ was just people angry they couldn't post porn, and DWW was a single charismatic jerk angry about getting into trouble, who went off to start his own forum
with blackjack and hookerswhere all speech would be allowed. DWW as far as I can tell never had much life in it at all. QQ survives just because, well, people like their NSFW quests.I would not recommend any of them for serious political discussion. The Sietch and SV are small, bitter echo chambers. QQ and DWW don't really have lasting politics discussions at all. And SB is a much larger but equally pointless echo chamber. Outside the occasional insightful poster, I'd say they're all around Reddit tier or lower.
QQ used to have politics discussion before, well, they banned politics back in 2017. It was not an echo chamber. It wasn't the most civil place, but there was actual discussion going on. But, as noted, it's over now. QQ still has people of most political persuasions (some SJWs, a lot of real liberals, a few alt-right; essentially-no true conservatives for the obvious reason); they just don't talk about politics. (Well, sort of. I keep getting away with it because I'm polite enough and moderate enough to frequently be a calming force, because I'm erudite enough to be able to avoid saying the magic "political" words while still getting my point across, and because I know when to take things to PMs; however, even I've gotten close to the fire on occasion and I don't recommend trying to pull that off.)
I did only say "used to be this". DWW's dead (as in, offline), QQ doesn't allow politics, and SB/SV/[whatever Jackie/Ritterin Sophia's board is currently called] don't allow moderates or rightists (NB: don't touch that last one with your real IP; Jackie's a doxxer). I suppose I forgot about Frozen in Carbonite, but I don't know much about it (there is similarly the slight issue that the admin, Horton, is known for black-hat hacking and acted like a man with a candy van when trying to get people to join up).
EDIT: Oh, and THASF/Train Dodger (the owner of DWW) wasn't a jerk. He was a little schizophrenic, and then a lot schizophrenic when COVID hit, but he was never an arsehole that I remember. Yeah, technically he's banned on the big three, but two of those were self-requested and the third was because of the aforementioned psychotic break (he refused to stop posting his Big Folder About COVID everywhere - this being the folder that popularised hydroxychloroquine, no I am not kidding - and so the QQ mods permabanned him).
EDIT2:
Most of them came back to SB and maintained dual accounts after The Observer resigned. Of course, that very capitulation did eventually lead to the PM scandal and third exodus, which is part of why I blamed SJ's tactics for that.
Incidentally: the first to flounce off SB during the Athene Affair was, um, me. SV would have happened without me, of course (Squishy and Ford had been cooking it up for months without my knowledge; they just went public early to capitalise), and I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't had massive existing issues with The Observer and some of the mods, but that was still not a great decision on my part; I'll cop to that.
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I get "Hmm...this page doesn’t exist. Try searching for something else." for this link.
Fixed, thanks!
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