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Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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As much as I have been assured by childless female democrats and their allies in academia assure me that "cultural appropriation" is a terrible thing that must be condemned I've been enjoying watching the Czechs and Poles embrace the joy of redneckism

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IZvpHwoQfqk

As much as I have been assured by childless female democrats and their allies in academia

Dude, what is with you lately? You did not used to dip into this base level of culture warring and sneering.

Tone it down, please.

I don't know what to tell you other than what I was recently telling @IGI-111.

I don't think my comment was all that sneering, insulting, or culture warry. At least no more so than what has already been established as the baseline for participation on TheMotte.org. The only difference is who's sacred cow is getting cooked.

Which actually brings me to something I've been meaning to ask. If a comment were reported as insulting but the community had marked it as "neutral" to "good" what are the odds that a moderator would even read it, much less assign the comment a warning or ban?

Sigh. You really gonna tell me I'm only (lightly) modding you because you insulted my sacred cow?

If a comment were reported as insulting but the community had marked it as "neutral" to "good" what are the odds that a moderator would even read it, much less assign the comment a warning or ban?

I don't know exactly how Zorba's system is going to work - it's still being tested and right now we still only mod based on what we see (in the mod queue or otherwise).

Sigh. You really gonna tell me I'm only (lightly) modding you because you insulted my sacred cow?

Yes and no. I'm not going to claim that what I did was not necessarily worthy of a warning. But I would suggest that reason that I'm getting this attention is that I'm sneering at different targets than most of the other users here and thus I am the nail that sticks out.

I don't know exactly how Zorba's system is going to work - it's still being tested and right now we still only mod based on what we see (in the mod queue or otherwise).

That's actually encouraging to hear, I know that Zorba has always hated moderating and was worried that the new feature would be used as an excuse to offload that burden.

The biggest group of passing sneers I see here is basically some variation of "woke bad" particularly feminists, anti-racists and trans activists. Childless female democrats who complain about cultural appropriation seems to fall in that sphere as well so I don't think you are as much of an outlier (in this respect at least) as you might think.

I'm not saying that there isn't any sneering at progressives to. I'm saying that sneering is already the norm and the reason my comments stick out is that I'm sneering at the wrong targets, IE people rationalists typically identify with.

the reason my comments stick out is that I'm sneering at the wrong targets, IE people rationalists typically identify with

Amazing. Every word of what you just said is wrong.

Your comments don't "stick out" particularly. You got reported because your sneer was -- a sneer. Other people sneering at other targets (including those that rationalists "identify with" and those they don't) have also been reported, and not infrequently, modded. You have not come to our special attention, and while you do have haters who spite-report most of what you post, you are not unique in that regard, and we haven't become stupid since moving off of reddit. You didn't get reported just because you sneered at the "wrong" target.

There are no "right" or "wrong" targets here. There are people who are obviously very tribal, so they think some targets are right and some are wrong, and will report accordingly, but again - we are not stupid. You didn't get modded just because you sneered at the "wrong" target (implying that if you had sneered at the "right" target, it would have been okay).

This place isn't particularly rationalist, and really, hasn't been for a very long time. There is still overlap - maybe we are still "rationalist-adjacent" - but if this place has a "tribe," it isn't rationalists. You didn't get reported or modded because you attacked the in-group.

"Childless female Democrats" is not a group that rationalists particularly identify with, to my knowledge (I am sure there are childless female Democrats in the rationalist community, but that's not the same thing), and they are definitely not a group that the Motte identifies with. (I wouldn't be confident that we have a single childless female Democrat poster.) So you weren't reported or modded because you attacked a group that anyone here identifies with.

You were reported, presumably, because you threw out a low effort sneer. You were modded because a mod (me) looked at it and say "Yup, that's a sneer and we don't want that kind of thing."

Get off your cross. You are not a brave iconoclast challenging the groupthink here - you're becoming just another culture warrior whose enemy tribe is very slightly different from the people who hate wokes, women, and Jews.

But rationalists don't appear to identify with child free female democrats who complain about cultural appropriation.

Thats the (generalizing here) "woke" demographic not the rationalist one. Who are mainly male and overwhelmingly tech oriented. And at least here 1) Rationalists are probably not the majority and 2) those who post here are even more unlikely to identify with the group you targeted, and indeed more likely to target them, themselves.

So I don't think that really passes muster as an explanation. If you were posting on "normie" reddit then you might have more of a point I think.