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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   26709 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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So on a lighter note the Trump ballroom is continually in the new. The two most interesting questions about it aren't addressed often enough.

Why isn't there a Presidential ball room already? Also why is there so much opposition?

What you need to understand about DC is that there are multiple power structures. Many of which aren't connected to directly to the President or WH.

The ballroom creates an issue because it will immediately become the most prestigious ballroom in the area, and arguably the US.

Right now rooms used for prestigious events are also commonly used for much less prestigious events. There's no cachet in just being at an event in any of them.

The WH ballroom changes things. There are a lot of powerful connected people who aren't going to get an invite to the WH ballroom anytime soon, even under a future Democratic presidency. So it's a blow to their egos, and they are very upset about it.

There are DC judges evaluating suits trying to find a justification to block it, and their motivation is primarily that their wives aren't going to be invited and they're going to hear about it for the next 10 years.

Of course the second reason is that by naming traditions of DC, it should be referred to as the "Trump Ballroom" for the next 100 years. And that is clearly no bueno.

Why isn't there a Presidential ball room already?

I suppose Presidents have largely not felt a need for it. I don't think it's a crazy position that the White House should have a larger permanent structure for holding events than the previous ~200 person seating in the East Wing.

Also why is there so much opposition?

How about because it will be ugly? My understanding is the proposed size for the new East Wing is somewhere between 50% and 200% larger than the White House depending on whether you count square footage or three dimensional area. Should the White House be dominated by one of its wings in height and size?

I suspect a lot of people are also disturbed by the process by which this was conducted. Previous significant renovations (construction of the East and West wings, Truman's renovation) were done in conjunction with Congress, paid for by the government. In this case a bunch of private individuals and businesses donated money to Trump (very specifically, not the US government) and the whole thing is being paid for privately. This is conceptually in opposition to the notion that the White House belongs to the government, to We The People, rather than being a possession of whomever happens to be President.

I think opposition being motivated by exclusivity is a weird take. The ballroom is much larger than the building it is replacing. Surely many more people will be invited, not fewer. That's the point of building a larger space to host events.

I suppose Presidents have largely not felt a need for it.

The thing is that's clearly not true. Right now it's common to set up tents on the lawn to host large events.

I think opposition being motivated by exclusivity is a weird take.

It's counterintuitive, but that's why I wanted to post it. Right now the East wing isn't suitable for a large event so it isn't an option. Once there is a larger venue people will have to face the reality that there is a more prestigious option, but they don't qualify.

It's crazy how little it comes up in the discussion, but a big, new presidential ballroom is just an objectively good idea that is long overdue and only hasn't been constructed before now because nobody wanted the optics of being the president who spent tax dollars building himself a fancy new ballroom.

Current white house capacity for fomal events is 200 people. 200. That's smaller than the guest list for my sister's wedding. It's pathetic. The president shouldn't be setting up fucking tents on the lawn to host foreign dignitaries. The leader of the free world needs a big fancy room to hold big fancy parties in, and it's insane that he doesn't already have one.

From what I can tell the DC insider consensus is FUCK TRUMP ...and also.....we need a ballroom....

I suspect a lot of people are also disturbed by the process by which this was conducted. Previous significant renovations (construction of the East and West wings, Truman's renovation) were done in conjunction with Congress, paid for by the government.

I have a hard time seeing the zone of Congressional authority here: it's an executive action on executive property for the direct use of the executive. Congress has the power of the purse, it doesn't and shouldn't have veto authority over every government activity.

Nobody's disturbed by the process and if you were to go and find previous cases where a similar process was used and present them to those disturbed by the process, they would claim that was different for some spurious reason, or change the subject. The argument is a soldier and nothing more.

...motivated by exclusivity is a weird take...Surely many more people will be invited, not fewer.

That's a large majority of "exclusive" things. Exclusivity usually comes from creating something new that doesn't include most people. Creating exclusivity by kicking the existing people out is possible, but it's rare.

My old company would do holiday parties in DC. We've been to a few different locations.

They have done it at the peace institute, the natural history museum (my personal favorite), the building museum, the art and technology institute (not sure if that is the right name, this was my least favorite venue), and the African American history museum.

It did feel like a lot of the places were ridiculously prestigious for a run of the mill SaaS tech company. But yeah basically all the venues have some level of prestige. I agree with your assessment that a white house ballroom will be a step ahead of all those other DC venues.

There are DC judges evaluating suits trying to find a justification to block it, and their motivation is primarily that their wives aren't going to be invited and they're going to hear about it for the next 10 years.

I'm sure you can come up with a better model of your opponents' thoughts that this.

The social status games in DC are actually incredibly important to understanding what happens and doesn't happen there.

I phrased that as a bit of a fun jab, but for a verifiable example some of the injunctions against the USAID defunding / merging with State Department were granted by judges with wives who were active in NGOs receiving USAID money. With all of the lawsuits its a jumble mess to sort through, but I believe they were eventually overturned. So that does give some evidence that the legal reasoning was motivated to begin with.

I mean, it's a verifiable truth that many people are on average more politically aligned with their spouse than a median American.

I don't support the injunctions, but I can see a fairly clear causal pathways where the judge and their spouse both believe in a set of axioms and vibes about the republic that lead them to where they were. And yes, they were all overturned (as they should be).

You really shouldn't underestimate how socially petty people in politics can be. Of course, one also shouldn't forget that goes for plenty of people on your side, whatever side that is.

I'm sure they are, but I'm also relatively sure they are entitled to their own view on separation of powers. As noted below by another poster, it's historical precedent that Congress & The President cooperate on it.

I have no opinion on the merits of the case (though I also have no faith whatsoever that any branch of government respects Congress these days...). Just making a general point.

it's historical precedent that Congress & The President cooperate on it.

Are you sure? Every time the PATRIOT Act comes up for renewal suddenly congress can find a way to agree on something all the while calling eachother every dirty name under the sun for other stuff.

I mean the biggest negative for most of the DC elite is that Trump thought of it and is building it with his own money. The arguments about the Rose Garden feel flat mostly because nobody really cared about the Rose Garden until the Ballroom came up. All of a sudden, the Rose Garden became significant and full of history and so on.

Some various thoughts about the whole thing with Iran. My apologies if much of this was already discussed before by others in previous Culture War threads.

  1. If this goes on longer, the environment lobby should be really happy. There should be quite a significant drop in fossil fuel use globally. Definitely better than the effort that goes into doing Earth Day. Reminds me of Genghis Khan and being the "greenest invader" in history.
  2. Many have already pointed out that the biggest beneficiary of the war so far is Russia where both oil prices are seeing higher prices AND that their sanctions are dropped. At first glance, this should be bad news for Ukraine.
  3. Iranian oil also got its sanctions lifted. This reminds me of how in a different war, the US government was fighting producers of products that US citizens enjoy. I am of the opinion this is another tally on the board for why the war preparation was incompetent.
  4. Talking about this being a war, it's actually a military operation. Not only does it reminds you of another military operation, this story once again underline the absolute weaksauce cowardliness of the US legislative branch in allowing this to happen. But maybe this is exactly what the American people want. Elections will certainly be spicy this midterm year.
  5. Will the American people forget about Epstein?
  6. Aside from the various prices of things going up, we must be reminded that this year the US (and its neighbors actually) is hosting the World Cup! How will this World Cup be remembered? Fans should have already gotten flight tickets, but would flight operators cancel flights due to raising fuel costs? Game tickets are expensive as heck, a trip to America is expensive as heck, now everything will be even more expensive as heck as well!
  7. Five weeks ago, a ground war with Iran is unthinkable by the American people. Since then, that opinion has clearly changed. Is this what Chomsky calls "Manufactured Consent"? I've never read the book, and being from a communist country, my consent wasn't really needed either so I am unfamiliar with the process of it all.
  8. I think America will try to take one or a few islands.
  9. The Venezuela op was a masterclass. What conditions would allow Trump to declare victory? Would a victory Trump can declare be a good thing for America long term?
  1. Yep
  2. Also yes
  3. Ditto
  4. Unfortunately yes as well
  5. No, not for those of us paying attention
  6. Who cares
  7. No, I don’t think opinions have changed much; still a stupid idea
  8. Which ones?
  9. Doesn’t matter. Trump has dissolved his own coalition, and there’s no getting it back at this point

Doesn’t matter. Trump has dissolved his own coalition, and there’s no getting it back at this point

Betting against Trump being lucky as fuck so far has bad track record. The guy can fuck up the surest thing ever and can win any doom situation.

"Ah well. Nevertheless."

In the case of #2, are the sanctions fully removed or is it just the restrictions/effective embargo on their energy and oil that’s been removed? American foreign policy is so schizophrenic and the administration changes its policy directives so much I’ve quit bothering to even follow it.

The US waiver, active for one month, will let countries buy up Russian oil which, under current sanctions, has been floating at sea, unable to be sold. ... Bessent has insisted that Russia will only see a limited financial boost from the sale of the oil, while the move addressed the "instability posed by the terrorist Iranian regime".

However, Benjamin Hilgenstock, head of macroeconomic research and strategy at the Kyiv School of Economics, argued the move was "a serious bailout" for Putin's regime.

He estimated monthly Russian oil exports could be boosted by around $10bn (£7.5bn), with half of this being paid in tax straight into the government's coffers.

source: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cm2871wyz9ko

just oil.

If this goes on longer, the environment lobby should be really happy. There should be quite a significant drop in fossil fuel use globally

Unless China uses a few percent more coal.

Many have already pointed out that the biggest beneficiary of the war so far is Russia where both oil prices are seeing higher prices AND that their sanctions are dropped. At first glance, this should be bad news for Ukraine.

Definitely good for Russia, but I don't think cash is that big a bottleneck for Russia, so only mildly bad news for Ukraine.

Iranian oil also got its sanctions lifted.

Yes. Iranian oil is a double-edged sword; exporting it helps Iran, but also keeps oil prices and supply worries within reason. Also if Iran's oil is cut off, they can retailiae by throwing whatever is remaining at Gulf oil.

But maybe this is exactly what the American people want. Elections will certainly be spicy this midterm year.

For Trump to have this improve GOP chances, he needs to win outright -- new regime in Iran, doesn't matter how much they such as long as they'll play ball with the US and "Death to America" is off the playlist. I give this maybe a 5% chance; there just doesn't seem to be anyone in Iran capable of creating such a regime.

Five weeks ago, a ground war with Iran is unthinkable by the American people. Since then, that opinion has clearly changed.

Has it? Many of the earlier polls excluded special operations troops.

I think America will try to take one or a few islands.

Or possibly all of them.

The Venezuela op was a masterclass. What conditions would allow Trump to declare victory? Would a victory Trump can declare be a good thing for America long term?

The big win would be regime change. No mullahs, no IRGC, no "Death to America". Doesn't matter to the US if it's a military dictatorship, a democracy (LOL) or a restoration of the monarchy (double LOL), as long as they play ball.

Lacking that, the existing regime playing ball. Stop attacking Hormuz, stop supplying the Houthis (Hezbollah and Hamas matter to Israel but not the US), hand over the enriched uranium and allow US inspections.

No mullahs, no IRGC, no "Death to America".

A minor aside, I often wonder to what extent we should idiomatically translate "Death to X" as "Fuck X" instead. In the same way that an American saying "Fuck Iran" should be translated to a Persian as "Death to Iran" and not "I would like to have intercourse with Iran."

I'm not going to buy the theory that we've been mistranslating a harmless idiom until someone shows me a stadium of Iranians chanting "death to [rival team]" during a friendly sporting event. If it is indeed a harmless expression, there should be plenty of examples of Iranians using it in other contexts, but I've never heard it directed at anything other than the US and Israel.

but I've never heard it directed at anything other than the US and Israel.

Have you ever interacted with a Persian?

From Grok:

the Persian phrase “marg bar” (مرگ بر, literally “death to”) is famously used in political chants like “marg bar Amrika” (Death to America) or “marg bar Isra’il” (Death to Israel), but it (and related death idioms) also pops up in more casual, everyday Iranian speech for frustration with mundane things.

It’s not always a literal call for death—it’s often idiomatic, like an exaggerated “damn [this thing]” or “down with [annoyance]” for stuff you can’t control or that irritates you in daily life. Travel writer Rick Steves captured this perfectly during a trip to Tehran: his taxi driver, stuck in horrible traffic, exclaimed “Death to traffic!” (in English) and explained that Iranians say this about uncontrollable frustrations, comparing it to casually saying “damn those teenagers.” Steves noted the driver wasn’t advocating violence against drivers—just venting about gridlock the same way people rant about everyday hassles.

Another clear non-political (or at least prosaic) example is “marg bar sibzamini” (“Death to potatoes!”). During the 2009 Iranian presidential election campaign, opponents of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad chanted this at rallies in places like Yasouj and Isfahan. It mocked his government’s potato distribution (seen as a gimmicky handout or vote-buying tactic amid economic issues). Protesters turned a staple food into a slogan of everyday dissatisfaction: “We don’t want potato government!” It was humorous and pointed at a mundane economic gripe rather than grand ideology.

Broader Persian “death”-related expressions are super common in quotidian contexts for exaggeration, annoyance, exhaustion, or minor irritations (not protests). These show how death metaphors are woven into casual talk:

Che margeshe? (“What’s his death?”) → Used for objects or people acting up, like “In mâshin che margeshe?” (“What’s wrong with this car?”) when it won’t start.63

Mordim tâ… (“We died until…”) → For everyday ordeals, e.g., “Mordim tâ residim!” (“We died until we arrived!”) in bad traffic or after a long, draining commute.63 Marg! (“Death!”) or Boro bemir! (“Go die!”) → Casual “Shut up!” or “Get lost!” among friends, depending on tone (joking vs. serious).63

Khabare margesh! (“The news of his/her death!”) → Muttered under your breath about something/someone annoying, like a frustrating politician or a bad driver.63 These aren’t rare or invented—they’re documented by Iranian-Americans, travelers, linguists, and Iranians themselves as normal ways to blow off steam about traffic, broken stuff, exhaustion, or petty annoyances. The political versions get all the media attention because they’re chanted at rallies, but the structure lends itself to everyday venting in Iran, much like how English speakers might say “screw this traffic” or “kill me now” hyperbolically. Context and tone make it clear it’s rarely literal.

Either way, I don't think it's about translating it as harmless, just making the Iranians seem less poetic and serious. It's a problem with Persian translations in general, hence the Twitter memes about how every middlebrow Iranian bureaucrat had a PhD thesis on Quranic Hegelian dialectics in assymetric deterrence compared to Trump's boomer caps lock and Hegseths group chat edginess. If we translated more idiomatically, we'd see them as losers, the way most Persians do.

Wow, so it turns out I was just confidently 100% completely wrong about this. Mea maxima culpa. Updating heavily on my Iran assumptions.

If this goes on longer, the environment lobby should be really happy. There should be quite a significant drop in fossil fuel use globally. Definitely better than the effort that goes into doing Earth Day. Reminds me of Genghis Khan and being the "greenest invader" in history.

Trump: warrior for climate justice

There is a half decent case that Rockefeller and Standard Oil were responsible for a huge drop in whale oil consumption, which was good (not perfect) for whales.

If this goes on longer, the environment lobby should be really happy. There should be quite a significant drop in fossil fuel use globally. Definitely better than the effort that goes into doing Earth Day. Reminds me of Genghis Khan and being the "greenest invader" in history.

This cuts both says. What would we all say if Biden unilaterally raised the price of oil to $100 in some (dubious?) climate crusade.

Maybe it's for a worthy cause, but then we're just negotiating on the price.

Maybe it's for a worthy cause, but then we're just negotiating on the price.

Pretty much. I've always been very convinced by number 5 in this NPR article on "Six Policies Economists Love (And Politicians Hate)"

Five: Tax carbon emissions. Yes, that means higher gasoline prices. It's a kind of consumption tax, and can be structured to make sure it doesn't disproportionately harm lower-income Americans. More, it's taxing something that's bad, which gives people an incentive to stop polluting.

If this goes on longer, the environment lobby should be really happy. There should be quite a significant drop in fossil fuel use globally. Definitely better than the effort that goes into doing Earth Day. Reminds me of Genghis Khan and being the "greenest invader" in history.

This is me! I've been making that joke every time I talk politics with someone I meet out on the trail or the park. (I let them bring it up first, I'm not that autistic.)

It's a real winner; the libs get to laugh at how stupid cons are and the cons get to laugh at the absurdist nature of reality. Brings us all together!

Many have already pointed out that the biggest beneficiary of the war so far is Russia where both oil prices are seeing higher prices AND that their sanctions are dropped. At first glance, this should be bad news for Ukraine.

What worries me about is to what extent Russia can prop up Iranian anti-ship capabilities cheaply. It would be very much in Russia's interests to keep the strait closed as long as possible, it harms their enemies and helps Russia. Every air defense capability sent to the gulf is one not sent to Ukraine. Buying Russian oil and propping up Russia becomes the lesser evil compared to surrendering to Iran. They don't need to give the Mullahs the bomb or supply their whole war effort, just keep a trickle of drones and missiles coming in to prevent a total degradation of Iranian launch capabilities. Keep Hormuz' legs crossed, and the more both sides destroy more oil infrastructure the more the price premium Russian oil will demand for months or years afterward.

What worries me about is to what extent Russia can prop up Iranian anti-ship capabilities cheaply.

Zero. Russian Naval Warfare have always been a joke. Shipping from Russia to Tehran is hard. And you need to actually train people. Which takes time. So they probably don't have much to give, will have hard time bringing it in and by the time iranians are ready to use it will be over one way or another.

It's not difficult to ship things to Tehran. Russians can and do regularly ship lots of things down the Volga River, across the Caspian Sea, and into Amiribad or Anzali. Recently, in the last few years Russia and Iran have drastically increased the facilities and volume of trade on the Caspian Sea.

And you don't need to train anyone. You can just have Russia soldiers manning the equipment, just like they did and have done in proxy wars for a long time using whatever schemes like "mercenaries" and whatever else to cover it up, e.g., the pilots flying Migs in Vietnam were regularly Russians and the people manning AD in Vietnam were regularly Russians and they were a big reason why B-52 were being shredded and why Operation Linebacker II was the last operation Linebacker.

Not that I think the Iranians would do that; agreeing to use Russian weapons means Russian conditions and Iran already watched Syria be destroyed because it relied on Russia and Russia allowed it to bleed until it was rotten from the inside out.

It's not difficult to ship things to Tehran

If you are willing to walk on the seabed probably. But the moment you raise your head above the water there will be a friendly tomahawk or something similar waiting for you. Iran has zero opsec.

No, not really. The US is not going to attack a Russian ship on the Caspian Sea.

The main way the US/Israel would do something clandestine would be using Azerbaijan, but everything said about the fragile nature of the Iranian government is actually true about the Azerbaijan government and it would be easy for Iran to obliterate their oil facilities which would topple that government, something which Russia likely wouldn't oppose, and something the Iranians have already threatened if the Azeris allow their territory to be used again.

And even if that wasn't true, it wouldn't meaningfully stop trade to Iran.

I think the two complications for Russia in helping Iran are as follows:

  1. The Russian government's actions over the course of the last decade show that it values having friendly relations with Israel and the Arab Gulf States even while having hostile relations with the United States. I don't know to what extent this policy is motivated by geopolitics and to what extent it is motivated by shady financial interests of the Russian elite. In the case of Israel, the friendly relations are also probably motivated in part by the fact that just like America, Russia has many Jewish elites, and that Israel has many Jews from a Russian background.

  2. Russia can ship things to Iran across the Caspian Sea without the ships being attacked. However, the US/Israel have very good surveillance and spying capacity, so they can probably accurately target that stuff as soon as gets into Iranian hands. This is similar to how things work in the Ukraine war, where the Russians don't bomb supplies while they are in NATO countries (with the possible exception of some alleged sabotage operations), but as soon as the supplies cross the border into Ukraine, Russia feels free to target them.

The Russian government's actions over the course of the last decade show that it values having friendly relations with Israel and the Arab Gulf States even while having hostile relations with the United States. I don't know to what extent this policy is motivated by geopolitics and to what extent it is motivated by shady financial interests of the Russian elite. In the case of Israel, the friendly relations are also probably motivated in part by the fact that just like America, Russia has many Jewish elites, and that Israel has many Jews from a Russian background.

One darkly humorous part of the whole China/Russia/Iran is how each of them very clearly wish they had different allies and aren't exactly shy about it. China always hedging between Russia/EU and Iran/Sunnis/Israelis, Iran originally preferring European companies over Chinese companies, and the above behavior from Russia. Rumors of Axis 2.0 are overstated.

This makes me want "Where's my Bush?" style sitcom where Putin, Xi, and whoever the Mullah currently is are roommates who all secretly hate each other and keep enaging in madcap schemes to get the other two to move out.

I absolutely agree, but again, Russia's hypothetical goal here isn't to get enough material into Iran to prop up Iran's conventional defenses, or to allow Iran to resist the whole US air force, or enough missiles to level Tel Aviv and Riyadh. Iran doesn't even need enough missiles to sink every ship coming through the Strait of Hormuz. They just need to continue firing enough that they can credibly threaten traffic, such that insurers and ship owners still won't risk it, which requires a fairly minimal quantity of munitions. Hell, even if they get down to the point where escort missions are practical, as long as there is still enough fire coming from shore that escorts are necessary, that will still massively throttle traffic compared to pre-war numbers, because it's impossible for destroyer escorts to escort the number of ships that transited on a typical day before the war.

The longer the oil shortage goes down, the greater the urge in the West to de-sanction Russian crude and accept Russia back into the community of nations in order to get access to that oil.

Fans should have already gotten flight tickets, but would flight operators cancel flights due to raising fuel costs?

Aren't futures made exactly for this purpose? Don't companies buy futures so they can price the tickets and not be bankrupt by the price of oil?

The Venezuela op was a masterclass.

Was it? It was very risky, as proved by the Iran op. Even in a game with a negative expectation, you can sometimes win once or twice. It does not mean it was a good idea in the first place.

Aren't futures made exactly for this purpose? Don't companies buy futures so they can price the tickets and not be bankrupt by the price of oil?

Things will still be shaking out but this is a black swan event (or at least an event few if any prepared for). A quick chat with gemini says:

However, many U.S. airlines—most notably American, Delta, and United—largely stopped hedging years ago for several reasons:

  • The "Loser" Risk: If an airline locks in fuel at $100/barrel and the market price drops to $70, they are stuck paying the higher price while their competitors enjoy cheaper fuel and can lower ticket prices.
  • High Costs: Hedging isn't free. It requires paying premiums (like insurance) or tying up massive amounts of cash.
  • The "Natural Hedge": Most major carriers now believe that when fuel prices go up, they can simply raise ticket prices because the entire industry is facing the same cost increase.

The Exception: Southwest Airlines is famous for continuing a robust hedging program. While others are reeling from the current price spike caused by the conflict in the Middle East, Southwest often has a significant portion of its fuel locked in at much lower, pre-war prices, giving them a massive competitive advantage right now.

I asked for sources and the best one is "U.S. Airline Fuel Hedging: The End of an Era" which actually pointed out Southwest has abandoned the program in 2024, but their positions will mature until 2027.

Was it? It was very risky, as proved by the Iran op. Even in a game with a negative expectation, you can sometimes win once or twice. It does not mean it was a good idea in the first place.

I think the Venezuela op is clearly different from the Iranian op and is not different rolls of the same game. One is a surgical kidnapping, one has just been continual bombing. I think there is something to be said how Israel is on the side edging America on, and very willing to dish some on their own. Imagine if the Ayatollah was kidnapped instead of being made a martyr.

Yes, at some level, everything is the same game. But macro/micro for me is a range. And at some point in that range, Iran and Venezuela are two different games. Venezuela was a great idea, executed excellently, and I do think it will pay long term benefits to US if handled well (Teddy Roosevelt would be proud). Iran is a different game, it was not a good idea, it wasn't executed well, and it's still being played so it's hard to know what the long term results are (as a casual observer though, I believe it's getting worse by the day. But then again, one ethics class in college is the extent of my social studies in this direction).

I think the Venezuela op is clearly different from the Iranian op and is not different rolls of the same game. One is a surgical kidnapping, one has just been continual bombing. I think there is something to be said how Israel is on the side edging America on, and very willing to dish some on their own. Imagine if the Ayatollah was kidnapped instead of being made a martyr.

I don't think he is seen as a martyr. The problem with the bombing is more that bombing schoolgirls is not the best way to be liked by the locals. I think the Trump administration expected Iran to go the same way as Venezuela: after a few days of bombing, the regime dies because there is a revolt, a coup or something. It's quite obvious they had no plan beyond bombing them for three days. And I think Venezuela could have gone badly in the exact same way as Iran.

Imagine the kidnapping does not go well, and kidnappers are taken or killed. Then the US military tries to get them back and is out of luck; a lot of americans get killed. It seems to me Venezuela/Iran are the same kind of bad ops, because it's high risk - low reward. The power the US can get over Venezuela through a simple kidnapping will only last until some coup or next elections. Was it worth risking a long and painful war with Venezuela?

Edit: and also, thx for your the information about hedging.

Aren't futures made exactly for this purpose

Are the oil futures guys making a killing in the market? I've not followed the stonks crowd for a while.

Talking about this being a war, it's actually a military operation. Not only does it reminds you of another military operation, this story once again underline the absolute weaksauce cowardliness of the US legislative branch in allowing this to happen. But maybe this is exactly what the American people want. Elections will certainly be spicy this midterm year.

It is actually stupider and more evil than just "weaksauce cowardliness". The democrats all want war with Iran because they're compromised by Israel and the military-industrial complex, and war with Iran serves both of those interests (or at least those interests seem to think that - who knows what will happen in the end). On the other hand, they know that their base absolutely despises the war with Iran and will refuse to vote for people who support it. That's why they're simply doing nothing and pretending that their hands are tied - because it allows them to get what they want (incredibly expensive bombs paid for by the US taxpayer blowing up schoolchildren who are in the way of Greater Israel) without having to damage their electoral support by actively supporting it.

It's more that they're worried that one of two things will happen:

-- The Special Military Operation will work, and they'll look like naysayers

-- Iran will do something so horrible that you don't want to look like you were defending them

I mean if the IRGC sets off a dirty bomb in Tel Aviv, that actually makes the war a worse idea than when it was started, but it makes anything that sounds like sympathy for Iran look bad.

I based my claim on an article which is now paywalled and hence unable to be used as a source which claimed these were the actual motivations in question. But that said...

The Special Military Operation will work, and they'll look like naysayers

I highly doubt this will happen.

Iran will do something so horrible that you don't want to look like you were defending them

Yea, just imagine how awful it would be if they did something terrible like blow up a school full of young girls or destroyed a major petroleum stockpile in a populated residential area, causing immense ecological damage and health consequences for people forced to breathe in black rain! Who could possibly defend monsters that would commit such atrocities?

I mean if the IRGC sets off a dirty bomb in Tel Aviv, that actually makes the war a worse idea than when it was started

Speak for yourself - Tel Aviv getting blown up is one of the few positives to emerge from this conflict in my view.

I highly doubt this will happen.

I mean me too but I do think it entered the head of the average Democratic senator that he didn't want to be on the wrong side of this, especially when people are holding up Venezuela as some kind of massive success story.

Who could possibly defend monsters that would commit such atrocities?

It's different when we do it. Hell, even just Iran causing mass military casualties will qualify. Say, by sinking an aircraft carrier, or destroying a landing craft full of marines on live video feed. Enough flag draped coffins will lead to calls for revenge and redoubling, "finish the job so my child didn't die in vain" as Pete Hegseth claims a parent told him but the parents that could be reached for comment deny.

Congresscritters are cowards with their fingers in the wind, not principled anti-war activists.

This war is too unpopular for a large casualty event to lead to doubling down and calls for revenge to work. It's far more likely that a large casualty event ends the political will to continue the war at all.

The warstate and other scumbags will definitely try to double down and call for revenge, but it's been a long time since foreign wars killing American solders were responded to by the average American with revenge. Instead they've been responded to with a question, "Why the hell are we still there?"

And I think the Trump Admin and the war state thinks this too which is why they've been so casualty averse so far. But the current thing isn't working, it's leading to catastrophe, and time is running out to avoid worldwide economic crisis, so they will probably take another step up the risk ladder.

I continue to be skeptical of the thesis that has no balls and will give up if harmed. The Ukraine war has made me permanently skeptical of the idea, which seemed like the perfect example of a population of a fake country with a corrupt government that nonetheless is willing to go to the mattresses.

Ukrainians think their war is existential

Americans do not think a war most of them cannot point to on a map on the other side of the world is existential

Do you disagree with the more general legislative branch framing to specifically call out the democrats as evil? I imagine the "compromised by Israel and the military-industrial complex" descriptor fits the political class in America in general, rather than just the Democrats. Hell, if we had to choose which side is more apt for the descriptor, I'd have chosen the Republicans. Furthermore, I thought the Republican base was supposed to be the ones who despise war with Iran more, as evidenced by the countless media campaigns and memes I've seen during the 2024 election season about Kamala wishing to start a war with Iran if elected, and the no-war president Donald Trump. So if any side is more duplicitous, I'd also say it's the Republicans. And let's not forget that they currently control the house, the senate, the supreme court and the presidency. Yet somehow the continuation of the Iran war is more evidence that the democrats are the dishonest evildoers.

Do you disagree with the more general legislative branch framing to specifically call out the democrats as evil? I imagine the "compromised by Israel and the military-industrial complex" descriptor fits the political class in America in general, rather than just the Democrats.

No, I don't disagree with this - the entire legislative branch IS corrupt and compromised (except maybe a few small outliers). The reason I called out the democrats specifically is that they are ostensibly the opposition party and are meant to put a stop to wars like this.

Furthermore, I thought the Republican base was supposed to be the ones who despise war with Iran more, as evidenced by the countless media campaigns and memes I've seen during the 2024 election season about Kamala wishing to start a war with Iran if elected, and the no-war president Donald Trump. So if any side is more duplicitous, I'd also say it's the Republicans.

The republicans have betrayed their base to an immense degree, and that base agrees - the MAGA coalition has just about disintegrated at this point. The magnitude of their betrayal is probably larger than that of the democrats, but I'm sure in the alternate reality where the DNC won they would be betraying their base just as hard.

Yet somehow the continuation of the Iran war is more evidence that the democrats are the dishonest evildoers.

I actually did have an article which made the claim that the democrats know that their base hates the war but they want to support it anyway, but as far as I can tell that article is now paywalled and I can't find it anymore. But yes, it is evidence that the democrats are dishonest evildoers - just not THE dishonest evildoers.

I actually thought a little deeper about my "weaksauce cowardliness" verbiage and I feel maybe my anger is unjustified. Honestly, this is what the American people want. Americans like it that the executive can make unilateral military action. If the American people cared, they would have elected people that cares. At this point the power to "declare war" is just writing on a piece of document. In China, they say "Rules are dead, people are alive", maybe what we need is just an update of the rules instead of this charade of calling it "military operation" instead of a "war".

With regards to Dem's behaviors as you described, I suppose that can be considered good politiks or as you say "stupider and more evil". I don't believe "democrats all want war", I think they both don't want war and know how good it is that the Republicans are pushing on anyway. Even now, I'm not sure what to expect from the Democrats to do, it's not like they can shut down the government even harder. Then again, I'm not a legislative aide or some kind of Washington insider who knows the levers of power.

Anyway, this is what American people voted for, isn't this the best way for a people to learn?

If the American people cared, they would have elected people that cares.

They quite literally elected a man who said "no new wars" all the time

They elected a man who said “no new wars,” yes. But they also elected a man with an obvious trail and history of lies that is much greater (relatively) than the normal politician. So Trump's election is not evidence that the public wanted war. It is evidence that a large part of the public was willing to trust, excuse, or ignore dishonesty when it came packaged with promises they liked. So my quibble is with what the American people cared about. They cared about the lies, they didn't care about the credibility of the liar.

PS: Liars with good credibility are what we call innovators and pioneers.

If this goes on longer, the environment lobby should be really happy. There should be quite a significant drop in fossil fuel use globally.

In short term, yes.

If the situation drags for longer, imported oil and LNG will be replaced by local coal. Coal resources are immense, coal mining and burning is proven 19th century technology, even the shithole parts of the world can handle it.

It already begins in Korea, the bellwether of the world.

The limit on coal-fired power plants will cease entirely, while that on nuclear power reactors will be loosened, as part of Seoul's response to the threat of an energy crisis due to conflict in the Middle East, the ruling Democratic Party of Korea said

Time to RETVRN to cozy 1970's East Germany.

edit: links

Conditions which the Iranians would agree to and stop firing weapons at all the people and countries attacking them or supporting attacks against them? I would guess something like:

  1. US Abandons all US bases in the Persian Gulf (relocated some to Israel)

  2. Removes all or most sanctions.

  3. Unfreezes Iranian Assets which the Iranians can label "reparations" and Trump can claim is buying the dopes off with their own money.

  4. Iran gets de facto control over Straight of Hormuz and they will collect tolls to use it (Oman will probably help) and will likely ban any traffic from US or Israeli affiliated ships.

Trump could just about face tomorrow, claim we've destroyed all their weapons and elementary schools, and that's what victory looks like, maybe the biggest victory ever, and just stop the war tomorrow. This will not stop the Iranians from attacking the Israelis and probably won't stop them from attacking any US assets still in the Persian Gulf, but the US could just leave.

Would a victory Trump can declare be a good thing for America long term?

No, every single thing will be strictly worse for the United States and Americans generally than it was on February 27th.

Nah, no one who cared about the Epstein files will forget about it because of Operation Epstein Fury for the Epstein class/Israel. It's these people who keep bringing it up and they still will and I would bet you will see messaging in the midterms about it.

Your suggestion is US surrender, and it won't happen until January 2027 at the earliest, when the Democratic Congress can force Trump to give up.

In the meantime, it is more likely that any one of the following occurs

  1. The US takes the islands in the strait and some of the Iranian coastline, and forces the strait open. This could start as early was Friday evening EST

  2. The US and Israel kill enough IRGC leaders that Second Lieutenant Amir Rezei, highest ranking surviving IRGC leader, is not so fanatic as to be willing to make a deal to survive

  3. The Iranians, if they are indeed winning as much as you say, manage to put a nuke together and fire it.

  4. The Paper Lion (Crown Prince) leads an army of diasporans in and takes the place. (OK, maybe this is only exactly as likely as an unforced Trump surrender. Neither one is happening)

If the US wants the war to end, and it should, those are the terms on which the Iranians will allow the war to end. All of the alternatives are worse.

As I've written before, the choice at this point is for the US are between defeat and catastrophic defeat or a vast escalation. The US doesn't have the will nor the political capital to accomplish a vast escalation at this point. The US doesn't have even 1/10th the soldiers which should be staged in order to take an island in the straight and it would take many months to attempt this, all the while they will be suffering casualties because the Iranians are not going to sit by and allow troops to be accumulated anywhere near the Persian Gulf. Opening the straight won't solve the crisis of the closed straight which was fully open on February 27th because if the US is able to open the Straight the Iranians will simply blow up all major oil infrastructure in the Persian Gulf. The existence of the straight to block it is far better than the alternative. It doesn't matter much if Hormuz is open if there is no oil being produced and refined to sail through it and this destruction will lock in global economic crisis which we will start to see a taste of in the next week.

The Trump administration is currently terrified of high casualties and rightly so because the moment the US suffers a large number of casualties will be the moment the political will to continue this idiotic farce completely evaporates. No, Americans are not going to respond to drone videos hunting down US soldiers and blowing them up with anger at the Iranians. This war is far too unpopular.

Killing IRGC leaders (and Iranian leadership generally) is a mistake because the younger the member the more likely they are to be radical, not to mention the IRGC is heavily decentralized. Killing one person or a dozen people will not stop all of the other IRGC groups from continuing the war. The reason why it's plainly stupid to kill the civilian leadership is because someone needs to be able to speak for the Iranians and have enough political capital to convince them to put their guns down and abide by any agreement. As leadership candidates dwindle, the remaining leadership will be harder and harder to kill so I seriously doubt the US/Israel will get to the point you're describing. But if IIRC, you also thought Hezbollah was destroyed so this is unsurprising.

It evidences just a total lack of understanding about this conflict or the Iranians to think the Iranians are winning and will also be the first to fire a nuclear weapon. It evidences just a total lack of understanding about this conflict. It is far more like Israel uses nuclear weapons first before the United States does and far more like Israel or the US uses nuclear weapons first before Iran does and not because the Iranians cannot field one.

It's hard to communicate just how stupid this war for Israel was and just how costly it is going to end up being for Americans generally. Declaring victory and pulling out of the Persian Gulf is where this is heading anyway absent vast escalation which risks totalizing conflict and war, it's far better to do that now than after when strategic defeat turns into catastrophic defeat.

So. Why can't the US just get bored of blowing stuff up, declare mission accomplished and then leave without resolving the SOH?

Is Iran going to impose a permanent toll on the SOH anyway? Are they actually able to do this long term? Why didn't they figure this out until this month? Presumably they should have done this all along?

Something doesn't quite add up.

Because doing so would trigger a war like this and get the entire leadership killed. Now that the war has happened and the entire leadership has been killed, there's no cost to doing it, that's already been paid.

So. Why can't the US just get bored of blowing stuff up, declare mission accomplished and then leave without resolving the SOH?

Cause oil prices are and would remain high and the political consequences are severe.

Is Iran going to impose a permanent toll on the SOH anyway?

From what I understand, that's what they are trying to do, they are trying to get "US recognition" that the SOH is theirs to control. Once there is US recognition, that's pretty much it. Though that would certainly piss off a bunch of countries.

Why didn't they figure this out until this month? Presumably they should have done this all along?

Iranians didn't want to fight. Now that it's existential for them, they're pulling out the cards of trying to control the strait de facto. Maybe some of them are also surprised at how effective it is and wonder maybe they should have done it earlier. But there is a difference I think being "the one that started it". For what its worth, I think a strong and persuasive narrative from the Iranian regime is that "yes things were tense, but we were at the negotiating table when the other side started blasting so we had no choice".

Are they actually able to do this long term?

Well, unlike Panama, they don't control both sides of this narrow passage. And I suppose that's the point of the thousands of American boots on the ground that is gearing up into the region.

Watching all this go down is strange. For the past three decades or so, this whole conflict basically has been in the realm of kayfabe. Lots of saber-rattling, angry rhetoric, not giving an inch obviously, threats etc. But everyone involved had enough sense not to actually start shooting. However, the venom has been accumulating. And now it’s going down. It’s real. It’s on. Ideas have consequences indeed.

Caveat: we won't know how this war turns out until a year or more in, so this is just a very low-confidence statement.

Militarily and politically, what is the US lacking? Willpower. If the US population decided tomorrow they wished to do anything up to and including conquer Iran, the US could do it. The issue is that the US government, as a result of the population not being sold on the war, is unwilling to escalate beyond a certain point or sustain casualties or discomfort for the US civilian population. If what Rubio said was right, and the US joined in since Israel was going to attack anyway, that may have been a huge blunder; the US joining in without an immediate Causus Belli really weakened the will of Americans, as well as allies, to actually prosecute the war. If Israel attacked then Iran retaliated and attacked US bases, the US would have an immediate Causus Belli and, while likely not an unlimited will for war, a strong will for war you have to respond if your troops/bases are attacked. The limiting factor of the US right now is willpower, and events don't seem to have strengthened it.

Militarily and politically, what is the US lacking?

industrial capacity and the resource extraction base to support it, cohesion, purpose, human capital, will

The US could blanket Iran in nuclear weapons repeatedly for a period of years to destroy it and kill everyone in Iran if we really wanted to. Sure, this would likely lead to Armageddon and world's ending, but it's possible.

The US couldn't conventionally conquer Iran even if it really wanted to. It would take 10 years at least to build up the necessary industrial capacity and fighting military which could field a large enough army of people actually able to fight in Iran and conquer it, move it across the world, and supply it for the years it would take. The US just does not have the industrial capacity any longer to make enough weapons and ammunition and warships to do this.

In 1941, the US had immense industrial power and the civilian structure and human capital necessary to make that immense industrial power work. This pre-existing power could be retooled and the human capital retrained quickly in order to pump out tanks and bombs and warships. The population was young and vibrant and cohesive. The US spent that very powerful force it built up from WW2 throughout the Cold War on the last couple preposterously stupid wars in the Middle East. That military is gone. The America which built it is gone.

The US military is built for quick, overwhelming firepower engagements but it does not have lasting power against any sort of real adversary. It's weapons are expensive, hard to produce, and produced in small numbers. It's ability to field real fighting infantry on the ground which is what wins wars and conquers has been drastically reduced. The people who fill the US military now are worse in every way than the men who filled it before. Without major changes, the US couldn't even have done what the Ukrainian military has endured over the last 4 years and would have buckled within the first couple of years. Printing money and manipulating digits and pieces of paper can only do so much. It would take 20 years for the current US to replace a single carrier group sinking.

Is it theoretically possible some Great Man comes about in response to existential crisis which spends the years necessary to rebuild America's industrial and economic might, which begins immediate universal conscription and fires all the calcified flag officers and severely punishes the rampant corruption and raises an Army of 15 million men, and has the capacity to equip them who marshals the newfound might to build a thousand ships to motor over to the middle east and withstand the fire and heavy casualties as it accumulates to launch an invasion of Iran, launches an invasion, defeats the IRGC on the ground, roots out their tunnels and complexes, and subjugates the population leaving a large military force to regularly slaughter Iranians who disagree? Yeah, but this scenario even strains "theoretically." The US would need a serious and sincere totalizing and totalitarian assimilation project which would require severe crackdown on any identity which isn't "American" (whatever that would be) and forced ethnogeneses to create a people cohesive enough who agree about basics to even make this possible. Otherwise, it will just lead to regional and factional conflict in the US.

And Iran will have a nuclear weapon long before that and Russia and China will act to stop this, including direct confrontation.

Good morning, my fellow patriarchs, my AIPAC fellows, my Thielite dudebros and gainsmaxxing vrilchads. We gather here in memory of the dearly departed: of the progressives no longer in our midst. Of those who unironically use low human capital as an insult. They who have flounced (and who may yet remain amogus with their alts) with long, boring wordcel essays on how we're all racists, or not participating in their personal armies against Trump, or what have you. Sometimes they even delete their posts, leaving only the scathing retorts to their shaming screeds.

But why do I bring the subject up, you ask?

The reason why I bring the unpleasant topic is because it's become a distinct genre of post on the Motte. Since I am a pattern-noticer of much skill, I thought it useful to put in the effort to make a F.E.C (Frequently Expressed Crashouts) as future reference, and to hopefully save time and effort in the future to what is otherwise a pretty repetitive subject. Feel free to add onto this list, if you feel I've missed anything. I admit that I am making rote argument and there may be gaps of which clever people can argue around it.

A) I'm not comfortable with witches/HBDers/misogynists/actual racists in the Motte. That's why I'm leaving!

First of all, so long, farewell!

Secondly, why are you even here? It's not like there's a shortage of places which moderate against such people. The whole point of the Motte is to talk to weirdos and freaks such as myself with as much politeness and decorum as can be managed. If the subject matter makes you uncomfortable, tough titties. You're an adult. You can decline to participate in conversations you have no interest in. Or you can make an argument that stands on its own merits. If you can remember how to make one!

B) The moderators are terrible at their jobs! They won't ban [X] or [Y]. Here's my evidence-

@Amadan is the embodiment of the Platonic philosopher-king, and their judgement is infallible, like the pope speaking ex cathedra.

The jannies of the Motte are of a different breed than the soft, nepotistic babies of Reddit. They are veterans of forum warfare. The Navy Seals of the mop force. If you take a look at Amadan's profile and sort by top rated, you will see a long list of people they've dunked. Their rage is truly a sight to behold. The only reason they haven't torn you apart yet with their immense verbal IQ is because the other moderators have to physically restrain them from the keyboard. The fact the moderators aren't handholding every little personal spat and argument is a sign of enlightened restraint, not weakness.

C) I'm just so exhausted by the witches/HBDers/misogynists/actual racists. It's emotionally draining. For my own mental health, I have to step away.

That was always allowed. Why are you telling us this? This isn't your blog.

One of the most insidious things in internet communities is passive-aggression. Oh, if only this space wasn't so toxic, I'd participate more! This is a favorite tactic of flouncers who want to use shame but aren't aggressive enough to argue with individuals or demand change from the mods. Using therapyspeak in any other context other than therapy itself is annoying and manipulative! If you want to leave, just leave. Don't make a melodramatic show about it. No one cares.

D) I'm being oppressed because I'm going against the consensus! You guys are hypocrites!

Is the consensus in the room with us right now?

I'm not going to disagree that there is an element of groupthink to all communities. But if you come to a community with the greatest concentration of witches, contrarians, and satirical trolls per capita and you're getting pushback - maybe you should rethink things. If you feel that your position is fundamentally correct, then the number of people disagreeing with you shouldn't matter to you. So as long as you present the best version of your argument for your position, all the downvotes in the world won't change the content of your post. But if you come into the conversation expecting special treatment for being an iconoclast or going against the grain - tough luck!

Perhaps your words aren't as convincing to others as you thought it was. Get gud. Skill issue.

Funny post, tell Grok thank you for us.

This doesn’t feel AI generated to me. I liked it.

I wasted the good part of an hour writing this up, so to have the authorship attributed to Grok makes me the big sad.

The Amadan part was the main section giving me strong AI vibes - if I'm wrong, mea culpa! My thanks was not sarcastic, I did enjoy it whatever the provenance.

Ahah, that's fine.

It's kind of sad that I ping people's AI suspicions, when I've always been longwinded and rambly.

That part, and only that part, did seem a bit LLMy.

I love run-on sentences with tons of parentheticals, asides, etc., and I've found that that makes my writing less likely to get pegged as AI slop. So join the bad grammar gang (or maybe start writing like Cormac McCarthy) and you won't have to worry about it.

My fat fingers and pathological overuse of gerunds are the only things protecting me from my love of em-dashes.

Ugh, I know the feeling.

The motte doesn’t have a ‘consensus’, we’re all witches and wrong thinkers of course, but different kinds of wrong thinkers, a wide variation and one which is instructive to watch, as while we do exhibit blind spots and patterns, we truly cover a variety of politically incorrect opinions.

I'm a socially libertarian, economically moderate, tough-on-street-crime, race realist, pro-choice but can understand where pro-life is coming from, moderate-on-immigration classical liberal.

I don't post here as much as I used to because it gets boring to argue with the same few conservatives about the same few topics over and over again.

Not only that, but many of my disagreements with conservatives boil down to matters of preference that can't really be argued about on rational grounds. For example, take the matter of whether drugs should be legal. This topic can often boil down to a question of whether individual liberty is or is not more important than the government taking steps to keep society physically and mentally healthy. But that is not an answerable question. It really is just a matter of taste, odd as that might seem.

I do still find interesting ideas here pretty regularly though.

I notice that my comments often get upvoted much more than the actual written replies to them would make it seem. Which indicates that either people here are actually pretty good at upvoting for reasons other than agreeing with the material and/or that the people who post the most on the site are not actually a representative sample of all the people who vote on the site.

But that's a perfectly valid reason though. It's not like the Motte is homework.

Agreed. I just saw your post as an opportunity to share some related thoughts.

This topic can often boil down to a question of whether individual liberty is or is not more important than the government taking steps to keep society physically and mentally healthy. But that is not an answerable question. It really is just a matter of taste, odd as that might seem.

While I do get and agree with this, there is some useful discourse around the implications of those vibe-driven policies.

For example, I'm relatively OK with laxity on drugs, but I wish those folks would either ge% behind efforts to exclude the indigent from libraries/parks or else admit that this laxity has a real consequence in the destruction of those places and the deprivation of those that would usually benefit from them.

One doesn't have to confront the unsolvable issues to have that conversation. And maybe it helps not to talk about it directly but to work on how to accommodate it and what tradeoffs are needed.

Oh, I agree with all that. I think that drugs should be legal but that society should strongly police things like antisocial use of public spaces. And I agree that it is good to have a conversation about the tradeoffs that both the lax or the strict approach to drugs have. I just think that the fundamental issue of individual liberty to consume substances vs. use of government force to limit individual consumption of substances is not rationally arguable.

If you can identify easily what kind of persona won't do well here and summarize it in your points 1 and 3, that in itself is a consensus. Do you not see the contradiction? Not to mention the other consensus of opinions here. And with every crashout, it only gets stronger. Why you're being smug about it is beyond me.

It's like showing up to a zoo, which advertises itself with animals, and then complaining to the zookeepers: "I think animal-keeping is unethical. Why don't you get rid of them?" A Motte without the chuds and the HBDers and the holocaust deniers already exists: it's called the SCC reddit/comment page.

Admittedly, 1 and 3 are quite similar, but one is more emotionally manipulative than the other which I found annoying enough to warrant its own entry.

I guess it depends which action you're criticizing. I don't ask for anybody to be banned for instance. It's quite easy to simply not respond to the people I find odious.

But it is easy to notice that bad comments that agree with the Motte consensus end up fairly highly upvoted even as they get a modhat response, and if you go against said consensus you will often end up in the negative regardless of the evidence you bring. I would be pleasantly surprised if I changed even one person's mind, but usually you either get downvotes and no response or some response that boils down to belief that a nebulous outgroup is evil and acting out of malice. Not exactly intellectually stimulating debate.

but usually you either get downvotes and no response

You gotta change your frame of mind. I get so happy now when I rip a large comment with some linked support and then don't get a response back.

I used to get a dopamine hit when I saw the little red bell was lit up, now I get one when I make a good comment and then check back and it's empty.

The subreddit is nice, albeit too quiet for my taste. The actual comment section on the ACX Substack? Pure sensory hell for me, in the sense that the terrible UI and UX makes me never quite feel like writing there. I could and should, in the sense that's a good way for me to get a boost in popularity in exchange for effort, but it's just that bad. And I'm the kind of person who begrudgingly uses the reddit mobile app, even if it's a hacked and modified version.

I wonder how soon LLMs will become cheap and fast enough that all websites can be rewritten on-the-fly to match whatever UI style and format the user wants. I feel like the tech is pretty much there in browsers, but no human has the time to write a bespoke algorithm for each site they use, which also could change at any time. A sufficiently fast AI could fill that role and do it realtime, adapting to any changes by the website devs.

Because I too dislike the substack comment UI and wish Reddit (and Twitter too, for that matter) hadn't killed all competitor apps and forced us to use theirs.

To be fair to the, uhm, contra-contrarians, there is a noticeable issue here of voting- for-agreement (as opposed to quality of argument) and dogpiling. Even if both are far better than reddit. It's human nature I suppose, I regularly catch myself wanting to downvote only to control myself since the poster is clearly arguing in good faith, I just disagree hard.

I've never understood this, updoots and downdoots have always been retarded to me, but maybe that's my 4chan background talking. If anything, downvotes are a sign I pissed off the right people, but w/e.

Eh, I sort of agree with you but 4chan has its own version (could be argued from the reddit influx) of (You)s and image replies. One's own thread receiving invective or positive shitposting is also a form of this.

Yeah I don't entirely understand why this website has up and down votes at all. I've never once changed my sort option from "new". Although I am probably on this website more than most. I'm sure the people with self control who skim it once a week enjoy sorting by "top".

I think they should be removed though, or at least hide the score. Although I dislike that downvoted comments get buried, it's lame. And given the mods actually mod here, we don't need downvotes to ensure good signal:noise ratio.

Something about my style of participation here spurs very few replies to my comments. For example, here is the previous comment I posted to this website right before this one. Often I would have no idea anyone is even reading what I'm writing if my comments didn't have the vote counts under them.

I'll be straight up, I often simply delete any of my comments that have zero replies and zero votes (up or down!) by the time the vote count is revealed 24 hours later. Those messages-in-bottles left floating in the internet seem pathetic and embarrassing to me somehow, so I delete.

I know I'm the only one on this website who uses the votes to gauge engagement, because no one else has echoed this sentiment or even voiced agreement with it.

FWIW the easiest two ways to get replies are:

  • end your post with a question
  • post something that is mildly controversial

I have definitely done the same.

That being said, your comment is +7 there and I remember seeing it and chuckling, so you're not screaming into the void

I've never once changed my sort option from "new".

I guess there are two types of people. I've never changed mine from "old". Although I remember some people browsing directly from the firehose which seems insane to me, but all power to them.

Is there a consensus somewhere that the up/downvote is not a proxy agree/disagree?

Ideally it's supposed to be related to the "objective" (lmao) quality of the comment, regardless of your personal valence towards it.

I think that was the original idea on Reddit when they added the system.

I think LessWrong splits it into two different forms of karma.

the OG redditards made the rules and they said upvoting is for useful info, downvotes for fake shit

also i wanna elaborate that i mean actual reddit, not here where the upvotes send you to valhalla

I've always felt that making upvotes and downvotes visible to anyone but the moderators (or perhaps at all) was a bad idea and that it would be better not to have them at all. If people want to agree or disagree at least make them put their name on it.

Yes, this is something that the drama website we forked our code from does well—all votes are public. (And downvotes are also counted as upvotes for algorithmic scoring purposes, which is hilarious and honestly not a terrible idea.)

As much as upboats can be farmed or warp the discussion to a popularity context, I think they serve a useful purpose. The ratio of lurkers to posters in all sites has always been lopsided in the favor of lurkers, and yet if we had no voting system these people's opinions would go unseen. The field would be dominated by those determined enough to wax lyrical at length. The upvotes serve a useful feedback system, if we are to have any discourse at all it would be meaningful to gauge the audience's reception to our arguments.

What could be done to make it a little bit more interesting is have a personal invisible tagging that the user picks. Could be a multi-axis affinity designation. The user's tags/afinity would be only visible to themselves and the backend. Then then "updoots" would also be collated so publically you would be able to see (received 10 updoots from conservatives, 5 downvotes from conservatives, 3 upvotes from progs, 7 downvotes from progs) etc. etc.

I'm not sure what the UI spec would be for this. But it would ameliorate the loss of information a raw number like 16 bears.

The bit about the ratio of lurkers to posters is something that I hadn't considered. I don't think it's enough to change my mind but it is a good point.

I don’t think HBD can be considered witches anymore. It’s crossed the Yglesias/Noah Smith rubicon if not explicitly than implicitly. What else can it mean when Yglesias says American Muslims (filtered historically) are not like European Muslims.

The top 3-5% tend to seem to agree on it. The PMC potentially do too but for career reasons would be afraid to say things explicitly. And the rest are too dumb to have ever bought into intellectually arguments that they shouldn’t just trust their eyes (and what they see watching football on Sundays). HBD is something I knew as a 5 year old.

That is a claim not incompatible with HBD-adherents still being witches. Just, at least in the US, the kind of witch that has the power to cast a few spells if you get too uppity with the pitchfork. Good change, we need more descendants of the witches-you-couldn't-burn.

Judging by the reports, this is not going over well. It does kind of read like a bit of trolling and dunking on your outgroup.

First of all, as much as I appreciate the (no doubt totally sincere and not at all tongue-in-cheek) flattery, I do not "rage" and I am not sure why you are they/theming me. My pronouns are "He" and "Go away."

More seriously, we have seen some of the rage-quitters and "I can't even" flouncers you mention, but really, not that many. And not all of them have been outraged leftists. For the most part, the leftists who can't stand to share space with HBDers and misogynists have already left. We do have a couple of very persistent mentally ill obsessives who keep screeching at us in filtered comments you never see, but again... not all of those are leftists.

Unfortunately, I do think evaporative cooling is leaving us with fewer and fewer posters who aren't one-note culture warriors, and very heavily skewed towards the right. I wish there was a way to recruit more people of diverse viewpoints, but even the SSC/LessWrong forums now think the Motte is a hive of scum and villainy because of who we don't ban. There really is a longer point to be made here, about how rightists have become the more ideologically "tolerant" faction. Not to say I don't get the sense that a lot of rightists are very eager to put leftists (and moderates) up against the wall - but they will at least talk to the other side while it's mostly liberals who now act like even engaging in dialog with a MAGA is starting down the dangerous path of seeing them as human beings.

The Motte regularly disheartens me and there still isn't any other place like it.

I don’t know what the ideological leanings of this place even here except that on occasion it’s a decent place for me to express an opinion and get feedback on it. People that are highly invested in any topic or community will typically overanalyze and read with much greater intensity every letter in the words someone writes. Some of my comments draw in consensus, others get blasted, but that’s part of any community.

I also agree with him somewhat about the way you ‘seem’ to moderate, Amadan. I’ve replied in kind to other posters in the past where logic has clearly left the building and ran out of gas on their part, obliged them and been every bit as much the condescending prick they come across. Strangely the finger wagging did seem to be somewhat one-sided in my case when the abuse of the rules were far more concentrated on the other side. On my last ban I didn’t even know I’d been banned at all, let alone for several months. I just voluntarily went on an extended hiatus and miraculously chose to visit the site on the exact same day the ban had been lifted.

Posters on the regular need to keep their emotions in check and ask themselves what they’re looking to get out of these conversations. And if you get little to no value out of them, then it’s better to leave the platform. Moderators on the other hand need to be somewhat charitable when someone comes along and sarcastically delivers a counter argument against someone else’s point. It’s difficult to interpret where someone is coming from through text when that’s all you have to go off of, but either be strict and apply it consistently across the board, of it there’s ambiguity, step in to clarify or otherwise let it slide.

I had the masculine pronouns in place, before I realized I actually didn't know your pronouns and asking you what they were for a bit of servile flattery would probably annoy you more.

The reason why there's a partisan tilt to my observation, and that's because righties do not go 'this forum is full of feminists/progressives/liberals, and I'm leaving' because A) no one says that and B) such a conservative would have already been preemptively banned a long time before they could get exasperated. I tried to be as nonpartisan as I could, but there really is a difference between righty and lefty crashouts: the former have personal animus against the mods and the latter are disgusted by the community itself.

Should we make a try at returning to Reddit in search of new blood?

The environment is different now over there.

I don't think it's the worst idea, but from a moderator perspective: Jesus Christ their tooling is awful. And as a mere user, the current reddit mobile experience is obnoxious.

I would reserve/endorse a return for very specific circumstances, such as if this community is truly dying (it's not). Or perhaps we could start posting things that aren't just the monthly AAQCs there, maybe smaller discussion threads that show evidence of life and are a springboard to the site.

We genuinely are doing pretty fine, even if we don't have the activity that the sub had at its peak. If I had the opportunity to meet Scott in person as planned, I'd have begged for him to give us even a small shout-out in a relevant Open Thread.

I don't think we are dying but I do think we are losing interesting people and shrinking in variety.

we must retake our homeland, yes

Please no.

Reddit is a publicly-traded company led by spez. They could add ID verification, kill old.reddit (and insert more ads), take over the subreddit and do whatever. They've already killed third-party apps. Enshittification is real and they're undergoing it.

Even a few days ago they banned r/theadamfriedlandshow (supposedly for a meme about Israelis dine-and-dashing, but I couldn't find confirmation).

I trust Zorba more.

It does kind of read like a bit of trolling and dunking on your outgroup.

It reads incredibly lame and like he's doing a victory lap. It amuses me people reported this, but it definitely brought down the average quality of this weekly culture war thread by a small amount.

I think there's also the issue that intra-maga disputes are illegible to anti-maga people, intra-right disputes are illegible to anti-right people, intra-non-left disputes are often illegible to progressives, etc. There's some equivalence for the right looking left, but mostly in bad faith on the part of right-wingers, because we get the left-wing stuff megaphoned into our brains by the prevailing culture whereas the right is, in Scott's words, "dark matter". So themotte looks to some like a place of spirited debate over important questions and to others like an echo chamber of right-wing circlejerk. I happen to be of the former view, but opinions naturally vary.

I wish there was a way to recruit more people of diverse viewpoints, but even the SSC/LessWrong forums now think the Motte is a hive of scum and villainy because of who we don't ban.

I guess jettisoning the ideology of rationalism would be a start? Just thinking out loud.

I would rather hang myself, or take some of you guys with me (this is a joke, and not just for legal reasons).

What I like/love about this place is that it hasn't divorced itself from its rationalist roots entirely. Sure, it's drifted to the point where I'd personally label the Motte as rat-adjacent; yet it retains the important things - like, the popularity of clear arguments and good epistemics makes it one of the few places I care to interact with the internet. Minus any pretense of Standard Rationalist Rules For Discourse, this place would become indistinguishable from 4chan or X in a week.

I am neither lefty nor progressive, but I too have flounced off in my time (and then got dragged back in again). Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

I am neither lefty nor progressive, but I too have flounced off in my time (and then got dragged back in again).

Hence the "HereAndGone" username I presume?

You and me both.

If you ever storm off declaring you're not coming back and then don't return within a few months: I'll have to check the obituaries. I say this with some degree of affection, even though we rarely see eye to eye.

That quote from the Godfather movie which I've never seen, but which everyone seems to know, applies here!

I make up my mind "Okay, all I'm doing is getting into stupid fights and collecting warnings from the mods like empty bottles, I am not learning anything, I am not doing anything, quit and stay gone".

And it lasts for a while.

And then I have something I want to discuss, but nowhere else to discuss it. Or someone makes a post or comment that is so misinformed on something I do know about - and off we go again 🤣

It’s given us some pretty good usernames, though :) I liked @FarNearEverywhere.

Reads like consensus building.

TheMotte is the TheMotte. Exiled weirdos call this place home, as do normies with high openness. Neither gets to define what this place is or isn't.

It's no secret that the median individual on this forum has been steadily shifting right. It's a valid concern. The place risks turning into an echo chamber. Scratch that. The risk was realized, and this place is nearing a complete transformation into an echo chamber. I don't mind a shift in the Overton window. I do mind the decreasing quality of discourse.

Sometimes it feels like TheMotte is stuck in 2020. Woke is over. Trump is president. MAGA won. Where is the America that was promised ? Consider this. What if the forum has gotten boring because people are too scared to express the true contrarian opinion?

"Maybe woke wasn't so bad after all." (kill me)

First of all, so long, farewell!

Thanks, but no thanks. I liked what this place was. In its current state, it still exceeds the bar (low as it may be) for discourse on the internet. I'll bitch and moan as much as I like. That's my right.

I was about to summon my heritage motteizan creds. I hear JD's worldview carries weight around these parts. Alas, you created an account 1 full day before me. I concede defeat.

Sometimes it feels like this forum is still stuck in 2020. Woke is over.

The anti-woke have discovered that half of them hated the process of wokeness, and the other half hated the way the process was targeted. On this forum this mostly takes the form of disputes around the Hebrews, elsewhere it revolves around Charlie Kirk or foreign wars.

Can you please expand on this? Are you arguing that there are two politically effective ways to combat the process? Maybe more?

The opposite, I'm saying the anti-woke coalition is a mixed-marriage between people who think that wokeness is wrong because the theory is bad, and people who think the theory is good it should just be applied to a different group. The former are horrified by the latter, the latter think the former are moral mutants and cowards.

Take as our basic woke concept "if you criticize the actions of BlackTM Folx, it's because you are racist and bad. Any bad outcome for BlackTM Folx is due to Systemic Racism, even if the people in power are not and would not be racist. Policies can explicitly help BlackTM Folx, but if they even implicitly hurt BlackTM Folx, then they are racist and bad."

There's a large portion of people who disagree with that concept! But they don't all disagree for the same reasons.

Some people disagree with the process. It's stupid and reductive to attribute everything to an -ism, any -ism. Identitarianism harms the group you're trying to help by stifling their drive for success, removing their internal locus of control, leading them to attribute all their failures to nebulous "haters." Every group, and every member of that group, can do bad things and be bad people, no matter how much Oppression the group may have faced before. Affirmative Action is bad because it undermines meritocracy, etc.

Other people disagree with the targets, but love the process and want to use the same process but for other groups. BlackTM Folx fail because of their bad genes or bad culture, but any criticism of Jews should be met with thought terminating screeches of ANTISEMITISM. Affirmative Action was bad when it was targeted at BlackTM Folx, but it should be targeted at white Christian Conservatives, who are the real oppressed. Etc.

Both very divergent ideologies are labeled as "anti-woke" and travel under the label, but they're diametrically opposed. One group wants free speech on campus even if the speech is offensive; the other thought it was bad for kids to be hounded for saying nigger in an instagram post but don't mind kids being hounded for saying "From the River to the Sea!" at a protest. One group thinks tracking down a twitter commenter at their job and reporting them to HR for making a joke about faggots is bad because it threatens free speech, the other group thinks that it's bad because sodomites are sinful, but are happy to track down cashiers who talk shit on Charlie Kirk. This realization is uncomfortable for the three principled libertarians, and maybe for the seven zilliion witches as well.

"No bad tactics only bad targets" etc.

It comes down a difference in views on virtue and sin.

One side thinks that you restrict tactics because they are bad for your enemy. The other thinks that you restrict tactics because those tactics are bad for you.

Like a jiu-jitsu coach that tells the white belts not to lean too hard on cheesy moves that will only work against other white belts, or caution big guys against moves that only work against smaller guys in workouts, because then as you progress or you want to compete you have to learn jiu jitsu twice.

A lot of people think sinning is winning, and that the only reason not to do bad things is out of some primitive feeling that Sky-Daddy is going to punish you when he goes through his giant ledger at the end of days. Others think that sin is bad because it destroys you, destroys a society.

Identitarianism is bad for blacks because victimhood politics holds people back. It is equally bad for whites. I'm sick and tired of hearing pissant "I coulda been a contenda" speeches from people.

So in other words, the anti-woke camp is divided on the issue of identity politics or alternatively on the issue of civic nationalism.

I would say it's divided by the question of virtue.

Woke is over.

Woke isn't over until there is a flier of FBI crime statistics (or the equivalent thereto depending on month) posted next to the HR-mandated "[allegedly oppressed group] history month" flier.

True. That said, wasn't the whole HR-mandated woke stuff kind of exaggerated to begin with? I've worked for over ten years in tech, an industry that is often considered to be a hotbed of progressive activism, and I have almost never seen it. Yes, I would get fired if I started saying ethnic slurs at the office. But I've seen almost no woke propaganda at my jobs. If I recall correctly, the closest has been some very minor but not coerced options to have custom pronouns and maybe one brief computerized inclusivity training that I think pretty much everybody just ignored and clicked through. And that's in over ten years.

That said, wasn't the whole HR-mandated woke stuff kind of exaggerated to begin with?

No, it's not. Thr claim was never particularly believable even at the start of the SocJus trend, and it's even less believable after years of every major company draping itself in rainbow flags every June.

Really depended on where you were. I was at a university and it was stifling. Militants took over my student union and made seats for every minority under the sun until they outnumbered representatives of actual students, and anyone who objected was unpersoned. There were the ‘how not to be a Taoist’ (really, Apple?) workshops. The endless complaints from female colleagues about all the white men they had to put up with, apparently oblivious to my gender and skin colour. The girl who went trans, putting me at serious risk of being thrown out if I ever forgot myself and used ‘she’ for the squeaky voiced 5ft ‘man’ sitting next to me. The manager at my first tech job who hinted that I hadn’t been promoted because of my failure to give sufficiently woke answers to an HR training quiz.

Above all there was just the fear. The knowledge that if you put a single foot wrong you were dead, a decade of university and research work just done in the blink of an eye.

It was bad. I’m glad it was better for you.

Got it. To be fair, I did see negative consequences of wokeness. Just not in my career. I saw it in changing attitudes to police work that, I imagine, probably explain why one of the pharmacies in my neighborhood closed and another has almost every item locked up.

That said, wasn't the whole HR-mandated woke stuff kind of exaggerated to begin with?

Wasn't it always just a few college kids on Twitter? /s

I worked at Google, and the answer is no.

That said, wasn't the whole HR-mandated woke stuff kind of exaggerated to begin with?

The Canadian NDP (fairly popular centre-left party) is literally handing out privilege cards to members of the oppression stack to determine the speaking order at their party convention -- the rankings on said stack being determined by a non-binary chairPERSON who scolds you if you call her MADAME chairperson. Nothing is over, it's just gone to ground. (in the US)

The motte is not an echo chamber. It is a forum with admirable diversity of right wing opinions, which doesn’t quite correspond to the typical diversity of IRL right wingers.

Revleft, back when it was a thing, wasn’t an echo chamber either- it was different kinds of communists screeching at each other for being secret reactionaries, and sûre that’s not the vibe thé motte is going for, but you don’t have to have the conventional representatives of the other side to not be an echo chamber, is my point.

Internal diversity. It's just us weirdos and freaks. But wouldn't it be a more interesting space where left leaning users participate while being held to the same moderation and quality standards so they engage without the usual social shaming dialogue (accusations of bigotry, bad faith, or moral failure)? Let the discussions move beyond status games and purity spirals toward actual arguments. I want the leftists in the conversation. Darwin was one of the few prolific leftist posters around here, though a ragebaiter admittedly. Been two years since he ditched this site and retreated to reddit.

I don’t mind claims of bigotry (sometimes it is true). But what I dislike is assuming bigotry is always wrong (or at least irrational) and the inability to recognize the lefts own bigotry.

But wouldn't it be a more interesting space where left leaning users participate while being held to the same moderation and quality standards so they engage without the usual social shaming dialogue (accusations of bigotry, bad faith, or moral failure)?

You know the story of the Scorpion and the Frog, do you not? Despite the format, it's not one of Aesop's but apparently originated in early 20th Century Russia.

I'm probably more of a classical liberal than a leftist but I grew up in a very leftist space so I can Steelman a lot of it. I do my best. It's fun bickering with people here.

The Motte is what you get when you get arguably decades of selection pressure.

I've noted this before, but let me re-elaborate what my experience has been in forums regarding left/right politics. Most forums that allow for political sub-forums to discuss such things tend to be heavily leftist. As a result, you end up with two things;

One, left-aligned individuals will find themselves in a massive echo-chamber supported by a horde of fellow leftists;

Two, right-aligned invidiuals will find themselves obscenely outnumbered and buried under mass-replies or gish-gallops, or both.

This results in a curious selection pressure; The right-aligned posters that stay and actively discuss politics despite the above conditions end up being a cut or two above normal posters. They are the White Whales, as I personally call them, hardened in debate by scars, able to smash others in one-on-one debate while still behaving well enough that the Admins can't overtly censure them, and they refuse to flame out. (Instead, things will often escalate to the point where such posters just get pushed out for other, made-up reasons, or forum rules forcing them out.)

Now, here's the other side of this; I've seen circumstances where, in another, smaller, seperate, more niche outside forum, still made up of contintuents of the larger forums for one reason or another, allowing for a political sub-forum.

Except, things are changed, now. The White Whale is still the White Whale, but the left-aligned are no longer in whaling ships. They no longer have the echo-chamber or gish-gallop to bring down the larger foe, or atleast drown them out.

Instead, they find themselves in a dinghy, up against a scarred monster, and, as a result, it's now the left-aligned posters having a severe flame out and reduced to bad behavior when, all of a sudden, thier arguements no longer work(from thier PoV) and they find themselves constantly on the backfoot.

...naturally, the sub-forum ends up closed, as the Admins just get sick and tired of having to deal with said left-aligned posters behaving so badly.

I bring up all of the above personal anecedants and observations to get to my points; Left-aligned posters have no reason to get in that dinghy, IE, the Motte. They're perfectly content in thier various echo chambers - indeed, as we've seen, when such places end up turning more neutral(such as Twitter), the left-aligned posters will end up fleeing for more safer waters(Bluesky).

Now, I'm sure there are a host of posters on the Motte thinkings 'But I'm left-aligned and don't think that way/do that'. And yes; You, instead, have made it through another selective pressure where you don't flame out, or behave badly, or expect echo-chamber backup when making your arguement.

The Motte will always have it's selection pressure, and there's never going to be a way to combat against that. Trying to find 'new blood' will always be a fools gambit, as you're never going to be able to lay down the nessecary bait to get the left-aligned posters you want. The only way to do so would be to allow special exceptions for left-aligned posters, and all that would result in would turn the Motte into yet another left-aligned echo chamber as what centric and right-aligned posters shrug and leave, as the unique charachteristics that make up the Motte would no longer exist.

If anything, your example of Darwin is very topical. People were pointing out his bad behavior and special treatment for years, and every time this was brought up, the only real defense that could be mustered was along the lines of 'Well, he had a bunch of quality posts, so...'

I agree with the overall schema of how forum cultures work but I think you have a blindspot. The motte is the equivalent to the left-wing dominated forum but for right wingers. Lefties here are absolutely dogpilled, mass-replied, gish-galloped, mass reported, or downvoted. Far more than the reverse happens here. So yes the lefties that stick around here do have a selection pressure, but lets not pretend that righties don't stoop to the same left-forum behavior when they are suddenly the majority.

EDIT: This is straight up just human tribal behavior. Attaching a political label to it is just further evidence.

Agreed. We could do better. Myself included.

Lefties here are absolutely dogpilled, mass-replied, gish-galloped, mass reported, or downvoted.

As a lefty (in multiple senses of the word) here, I disagree heavily. The rate at which this happens is orders of magnitude lower than the mirror image in a typical subreddit that has discussion about similar topics as here. By my observations, leftist posters who get treated this way are almost always treated this way in response to particularly careless or bad-faith posts*.

* Aside: these extremely low quality posts often have characteristics which appear to me as posts that would be popular on a typical subreddit; my conjecture is that these commenters are used to calibrating their arguments for the type of scrutiny in those environments and didn't properly re-calibrated for the standards of this forum before commenting.

To quote Scott:

How virtuous, how noble I must be! Never stooping to engage in petty tribal conflict like that silly Red Tribe, but always nobly criticizing my own tribe and striving to make it better.
Yeah. Once I’ve written a ten thousand word essay savagely attacking the Blue Tribe, either I’m a very special person or they’re my outgroup. And I’m not that special.

Your QCs are, like, almost entirely criticisms of progressives. That’s basically catnip for this site. It doesn’t mean you aren’t left-leaning, but it does suggest that you aren’t getting the typical experience.

I disagree heavily.

Then we disagree. As a centrist, I witness and have experienced it with my own eyes.

The rate at which this happens is orders of magnitude lower than the mirror image in a typical subreddit that has discussion about similar topics as here.

If this is your major point then you are making a point I am not arguing, its not about quantity it's that it happens at all. This place has orders lower magnitudes of people than the mirror image typical subreddit. This is like saying it's safer to be be next to a bear in the woods because bears kill less people then men do. It's bad stats because you interact with an astronomically large amount of men everyday, everywhere. I doubt the Motte has more than 50k-100k active users. Just went and looked at the comparative PurplePillDebate on reddit. It has 121k weekly visitors, and it is very degraded from its heyday.

I'm not really going to weigh into a discussion of "quality". That is highly subjective, to the point, that one could easily just say every post that gets dog-pilled and mass-reported was "low quality". It's a just-so-story.

If this is your major point then you are making a point I am not arguing, its not about quantity it's that it happens at all. This place has orders lower magnitudes of people than the mirror image typical subreddit. This is like saying it's safer to be be next to a bear in the woods because bears kill less people then men do.

If this is your interpretation of my point, then you are wrong. The "rate" is on a "per-[leftist/rightist] comment (implicit: that bucks the general popular trends of the forum)", not on a "per-day" or whatever. If the rate of physical injuries during a typical encounter with a bear in the woods was lower than the rate of such during a typical encounter with a man, then it absolutely would be safer to be next to a bear.

I'm not really going to weigh into a discussion of "quality". That is highly subjective, to the point, that one could easily just say every post that gets dog-pilled and mass-reported was "low quality". It's a just-so-story.

If you aren't going to weigh into "quality," then all you're really doing is commenting on the lack of equality of outcomes (as measured by things like responses that amount to dogpiling, Gish Galloping, etc.) based purely on left-right-partisanship. And that's just irrelevant here, because the point of this forum isn't to achieve such equity. Quality is highly subjective, but it's also not infinitely so, and there are certainly qualities which are agnostic to partisanship that this forum specifically demands of the comments both by rule and by norms, and it is a good thing that a comment's quality determines, in a large part, the pushback it gets from other commenters.

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I hate the centrists label because fundamentally it means you have no beliefs. If the left pushes the left Overton farther left then a centrists moves left, if the right is winning the pushing of the Overton window then you move right.

I feel confident say Trump political core is a ‘90s finance bro in NYC which would be mostly left then. Of course he has some eccentricities but he’s mostly that. A centrists political position over a life time would be like a pinball bouncing around as a npc.

It also strongly encourages Overton window pushing, if 30-40% of voters are just centrists then the best thing you can do as a political operative is push hard on boundaries. If you move the boundaries then a bunch of centrists slide in as your voters.

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Actual lefties (of the woke variety) would get absolutely eviscerated here. Darwin was the only person I can think of that was consistently left and who posted for a long time, and his posts were always lightningrods despite him being extremely polite relative to his interlocutors. And people were constantly accusing him of doing something "wrong", of violating the rules somehow, but I kept asking for examples and people could never give me any.

I recall multiple threads where evidence was provided that went nowhere, and I have no interest in going down that path again, so I'll just register that I disagree on your assessment of Darwin and how he was treated.

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Yes, our users are unusually polite, patient, and so on.

Yes, our users are also rather right-wing.

No, correlation is not causation. The underlying politeness is due to our rules. The political slant owes more to our other users.

The Motte and the CWR thread it birthed from, arose at a time when, on Reddit and other social platforms, expressing extreme LW opinions in most places was deemed acceptable or popular, and extreme RW views had a good chance of getting you banned.

The Motte offered a safe space, but one with a value proposition that was more attractive to the disenfranchised. This informed our starting pool, which skewed RW even if it had a large number of centrists or more heterogeneous thinkers.

I agree with netstack below that there are other strong selection effects in terms of openness to ideas, inclination to debate, and ability to be polite. I'll gloss over that.

We skew to the right of /r/SSC, our ancestor, and to the right of the typical subreddit, at least the ones that weren't founded for the purposes of gathering around RW views.

And this is... fine? At least for me. I am an Enlightened Centrist, but the based kind, where the dots on the political compass that represent my individual views form a circle with the center at the intersection point of all quadrants.

I'm the annoying type of person that usually looks at the two polarized sides of a debate and says they both make valid points. From my perspective, the average Mottizen is to my right. But I don't care, I know that the typical liberal or leftist is more eager to burn me at the stake for wrongthink or being some kind of right-wing fanatic. Adversity makes for strange but reasonable bedfellows, the kind you can trust to take out the trash. If I didn't like talking to the mix of people here almost all the time, I'd go find some other place to mentally-masturbate.

I don't think that's an issue related to quality of arguments so much as what happens in forums that are heavily slanted but don't actively ban heretics.

For instance, I came from /r/moderatepolitics . It has a similar nature to The Motte, but with a different moderation style. You can argue almost anything if you do it in a very specific way, but the mods are both hypersensitive to and arbitrarily define what is and isn't a personal attack. It leads to things like not being able to accuse someone of being disingenuous even when they do things like repeatedly attribute a belief to you that you've explained is wrong. Even though the sub was created for debate it still ends up with a consensus belief - IMO anti-Trump, somewhat left-leaning but right-leaning on guns and immigration.

That said, in my experience the people in the minority who stayed weren't necessarily better debaters, they were just people who were completely undeterred by downvotes and often just repeated the same argument and ignored reasons why their argument was bad.

Of course I'm sure The Motte would say that about the left-leaning people here. Like I remember in the not too-distant past where magicalkittycat was farming downvotes arguing something, and had to respond to an accusation of ignoring someone with "You know I get 20 responses to every comment right?"

As far as the heretic goes, the experience is "Why are you booing me? I'm right!" Your good arguments will just go ignored and be buried. The difference between a friendly forum and a hostile forum is you can say the same thing but in the latter it feels like you are talking to a wall.

For instance, I came from /r/moderatepolitics . It has a similar nature to The Motte, but with a different moderation style. You can argue almost anything if you do it in a very specific way, but the mods are both hypersensitive to and arbitrarily define what is and isn't a personal attack. It leads to things like not being able to accuse someone of being disingenuous

Limiting personal attacks and heat between posters is a good policy, one which I wish the Motte would follow more closely. It's almost never productive to accuse someone of being disingenuous if your goal is test ideas, rather than to "win debates" in some nebulously defined way.

As a first order effect this is true, it is probably not productive to the debate at hand. But at a second order effect it could be good if done appropriately. Because if someone actually is being disingenuous you want them to stop and/or leave. Discouraging and disincentivizing bad behavior increases the quality of contributions over time and prevents things from slipping down the slope of easy farmable engaging content. If done appropriately. If the accusation is false/unwarranted then it just become ad-hominem and that itself is bad behavior we want to discourage.

If it's actual clear trolling then that's something a moderator should deal with. I've rarely seen accusations of "bad faith" or being "disingenuous" from a user debating another user to ever end up going well. It's almost always little more than "I disagree with them strongly". A lot of times it happens from 2 users occupying different information bubbles, this causing them to not really understand each others' arguments, and thus putting words in each others mouths as was often the case when people debated Darwin2500.

prevents things from slipping down the slope of easy farmable engaging content

This seems like a different issue.

Directionally agree, but I have seen a lot of very low-quality right-wing takes heavily upvoted while those who try to respond have from -1 to +4 vote count. I can see how that could be frustrating for someone going against the tide. Not sure why voting feature was even preserved from reddit, it only serves to enforce consensus.

I will note that SJ, as a rule, is not very fond of the idea of talking to racists/sexists. This is one of the defining attributes that distinguished SJ from 90s liberalism. This creates two issues:

  1. SJers are systematically likely to not see theMotte's purpose as worthwhile,
  2. SJers who do find theMotte worthwhile still have to worry about the other side of the social shaming coin - i.e., other SJers punishing them for engaging with us.

“Woke isn’t bad.”

I question your motives given that you are Indian. Woke was generally rhetorically at least supportive of brown people who suffered from colonialism (eg Indians)

MAGA has been very skeptically of immigrants especially Indian immigrants.

Therefore, I’m skeptical that you objectively think woke wasn’t bad compared to the status quo post. Instead, I wonder if you think the status quo post is worse for Indians and therefore don’t like it (consciously or subconsciously).

Now of course it would be fair for you to say “you too” but in reverse. I guess the difference is this is still a white country so it seems like the majority ought to be able to say “we want to benefit the majority; not the minority.”

I think you missed the 'kill me' part of my comment. Gamergate happened right as I was becoming political. I was anti-woke from the very beginning.

India has the world's most popular right wing leader - Modi. Therefore, it is hated by the woke. Western Indians are wealthy, which also puts them at the bottom of the woke totem pole. There is reason that MAGA has so many Indians. Most aspiring Indians pray at the altar of merit. It puts them at odds with the woke. 2nd gen Californian Indian women and Indian muslims have specific reasons for being woke. They're edge cases that'll take their own post. But the median Indian stem guy disagrees with woke culture and hates socialism.

at least supportive of brown people who suffered from colonialism

The woke, in their wilful ignorance, view western Indian hindus as upper class Brahmins. It treats them as oppressors. Little sympathy is extended to this lot.

Now, back to where we were....

Maybe woke wasn't so bad after all

It is an uncomfortable question I am asking myself as much as I'm asking the community.

The question isn't if woke is bad. The question is whether it is the lesser of 2 inevitable evils. Let's assume the disillusioned populace wanted to express their populist discontent by associating with a stupid and shiny movement. In that scenario, was woke the worst of all options ? MAGA and the woke are cut from the same cloth. Both view the world as a zero-sum race conflict. Demographic and loyalty points take priority over merit. Both movements have their gray tribe intellectuals and policy wonks who're kept at an arms length from power while the identarians find themselves on the throne.

If these negatives are a foregone conclusion, which flavor of it would I be able to live with ?

Idk. I genuinely don't so. That's why it is an interesting question.

95% of western woke people probably don’t know who Modi even is. They also don’t think about much of the caste system.

In the U.S., Indians are brown immigrants and therefore virtuous.

Also, from my experience Indians like meritocracy when competing with non Indians but can be rather tribal when they are able to be so. Woke permits in some ways both.

I happen to live in a predominantly Indian community. They are very upset about immigration restrictions. Perhaps I am over indexing to my local neighbors.

In the end, MAGA seems Lindy in a way woke just isn’t.

You're projecting MAGA demographics onto to woke people.

Woke people are usually aware of both Modi and the caste system. It may a couple of sentence, but they know. "Isn't Modi the hindu fascist? Isn't the caste system like slavery but worse? Are there still untouchables in India? I hear Modi is genociding the muslims in India". They know.

Indians in the west are politically homeless. Neither the woke or MAGA want them. It's mostly gray tribe 'Indians looks good on statistics' crowd that defends them.

No. Most woke people are dumb and ignorant. After all, most people are dumb and ignorant.

"Islam is in diametric opposition to feminism. Therefore, it is hated by the woke"

This is news to me. If anything it would seem to me that "the Woke" and "Radical Islam" are nominally allied. Otherwise where would all the "Queers for Palestine" and mainstream media support for the Ayatollahs be coming from?

I think you meant to reply to @FlyOnTheWall but I think the OP was using that example to prove that even though wokes should hate island we know they support it thus saying wokes dislike Indians because Modi is right wing misunderstands woke.

I think you missed the 'kill me' part of my comment. Gamergate happened right as I was becoming political. I was anti-woke from the very beginning.

I don't think zeke is suggesting you were woke, or even that you prefer woke to the pre-woke state of affairs, but that you prefer woke to the current state of affairs (because of MAGA anti-Indian sentiment)

India has the world's most popular right wing leader - Modi. Therefore, it is hated by the woke

"Islam is in diametric opposition to feminism. Therefore, it is hated by the woke"

Or less glibly, the woke have a bunch of different priorities, and sometimes they come into conflict, and they might overlook one thing for another. In this case, they would be willing to overlook Modi being right wing for India being brown.

But the median Indian stem guy disagrees with woke culture and hates socialism

Like with the Modi thing, that doesn't prove that the woke weren't trying to run cover for the Indians. On a group level, most normie Blacks didn't like wokeness either (especially with the whole LGBT thing), but wokeness benefitted them.

The woke, in their wilful ignorance, view western Indian hindus as upper class Brahmins. It treats them as oppressors. Little sympathy is extended to this lot.

I think the woke extended less sympathy to Indians (and just brown people in general) than Black people. And I think AA in the US discriminated against Indians? (this was never made clear - everything just seemed to reference "anti-Asian" discrimination)

But at the very least, wokeness provided all non-White races an immunity from being criticised on the basis of their race. Specifically, criticisms about Indian workers being less competent but taking jobs by working for less money due to lower standards, Indians being racist, Indians being scammers, Indians being rude etc - this kind of rhetoric is just unacceptable to left wing people (much less actual wokes)

MAGA and the woke are cut from the same cloth. Both view the world as a zero-sum race conflict

I will register disagreement to this strong characterisation on both points. But I agree there is undeniably a racial angle for wokism (this is not even denied by the woke), and whilst there isn't the same hard proof for MAGA, I think there is a racial angle there too (but at least for MAGA, "world as a zero-sum race conflict" is way too far - the VP's wife is Indian, and ACB has 2 Haitian adopted children)

...identarians find themselves on the throne.

Also I'll nitpick "identarian" here. I think there is a difference between being racist and being identarian - the MAGA stuff seems more like wanting to have a nice country, and being willing to think about race in service of this goal. Again I'd point to Usha and the Haitian adoptees.

It is an uncomfortable question I am asking myself as much as I'm asking the community

...

If these negatives are a foregone conclusion, which flavor of it would I be able to live with ?

But this is exactly zeke's criticism - you are doing this musing without addressing the fact that you are Indian, and how that is going to play into your feelings about the matter.

In general, I appreciate the forum culture where we focus on ideas instead of poster identities, so even if you disclose identity markers at some point you don't have to carry it with you everywhere and just state your thoughts as thoughts instead of as a White/Black/man/woman/transsexual/etc

But in a case like this, when one's [demographic marker] is so obviously tied to the issue (and [demographic marker] is unusual amongst Mottizens), and it is a subjective moral question (I don't think a poster should have to bring their own personal race into, say, a HBD writeup) and you are going mainly on vibes and what you see with your own eyes (which I am not against!)... it comes across as sort of insincere to not address it at all.

EDIT: (shortened for brevity)

It’s not really though. I’m a traditionalist in most respects. There are a lot of places where I disagree with people here, especially the Groyper leaning atheists, some of HBD (at least where it’s assumed to be self evidently true without mentioning potential confounding factors like environment and nutrition and education), or tech bros who assume that turning everything over to a chatbot will naturally create utopia.

I don’t think that it’s possible for any collection of people who talk with each other for a long time to not reach a sort of consensus on main issues or at least reach the point where trying to argue about it is just no longer interesting.

Sometimes it feels like TheMotte is stuck in 2020. Woke is over. Trump is president. MAGA won. Where is the America that was promised ?

We're only one year in, and we're not even at a fraction of the measures put forward by the woke. Wake me up after a decade of progressives getting booted from their jobs for expressing their opinions off the clock.

Maybe woke wasn't so bad after all.

So contrarian. Much shock. How about you elaborate on what you find good about it, if you actually believe it?

I don't believe it yet. Let me sit on it.

It it'll take a few months for the acid reflux to go back down. May give it a shot then.

I know the core thesis I'll be going for:

If HBD is real, then a meritocratic world is an unfair world. If society offers no means for the 'idiot' to flourish, then one must resort to the oldest response : violence. The idiot is fooled by rhetoric and imagery. Give them representative faces and a rhetoric, to keep them docile. Elites get to be elites as long as they pay woke dues and the idiots find dignity in being part of the underclass. It's corporate harassment training implemented for society at large. No one enjoys the theater of it. But, it's a stable equilibrium and there is something to be said for stable equilibria.

You wouldn’t be able to get an actually woke person to agree with any of that prescription, though.

I don’t think it’s stable to build a society on top of true believers and then expect them to stay docile and go along with the kayfabe.

Same is true on the right. Attempting to appeal to right-wingers in the UK whilst clearly acting against their desires and their self-perceived interests has destroyed the 200 year old Tory party only five years after they got a genuine landslide.

Doesn't sound like something I could recognize as good. Even the stability argument is falling flat on it's face, given how much pushback it's generating.

Woke is over.

I have mandatory implicit bias training at work. I work for one of the largest companies on Earth by market cap. HR hasn't been informed of this happy news.

I also think there will be a backlash against Trump. Someday Democrats will be in charge and their voters will want payback. It will look something like vindictive wokeness and motivated partisan prosecutions.

Sometimes the contrarian opinion is just bad, as your suggestion is. What is interesting is the struggle to find what the actual contrarian opinion is in the post-2024 world (it's not "da joos", either).

Reads like consensus building.

...

It's no secret that the median individual on this forum has been steadily shifting right.

Ummm...

Sometimes it feels like TheMotte is stuck in 2020. Woke is over. Trump is president. MAGA won

Respectfully, this is much too short a time-horizon. Yes, Trump is president now. But he won't be in 2 years, and there has been no substantive action taken against the organizations which enabled aggressive progressive lawfare both against conservative ideas generally, and conservative activists in particular. There is precious little stopping a hypothetical Newsome or Ocasio-Cortez administration from simply reversing every single one of the anti-DEI measures Harmeet Dhillon has worked so hard on as DAG for Civil Rights, or dropping all of the ICE detainer agreements that Tom Homan has negotiated with thousands of US local police jurisdictions.

And even now, there are significant entrenched woke gains in life and society that really are quite nauseating, ranging from the symbolic (it's still mainstream journalistic style to capitalize "Black" as an enthnicity but not "white") to the really quite substantive (a continued progressive hammerlock on the education system including continued racial setasides and preferences for the melanated). The citadels of progressivism - my own beloved, beshitted California, Chicago, NYC - remain entirely undisturbed. The battle is very much still live.

Any forum is less interesting when the dominant ideological faction is in power, because it is easier to criticize and muckrake than it is to get into the nitty gritty of governing policy, which almost always underdelivers compared to rosy dreams and expectations. However let's not get carried away and assume that current trends are anything like inevitably going to continue.

Good morning, my fellow patriarchs, my AIPAC fellows, my Thielite dudebros and gainsmaxxing vrilchads. We gather here in memory of the dearly departed: of the progressives no longer in our midst. Of those who unironically use low human capital as an insult. They who have flounced (and who may yet remain amogus with their alts) with long, boring wordcel essays on how we're all racists,

Can you link to a couple of these "goodbye" posts so I know what you are talking about?

I'll try not to make this a "Amadan's Greatest Dunks" compilation, but here's something roughly representative.

GematriaUnlimited, alt of banned user, hater of MAGA but from a vaguely socon perspective, hysterical calls to action, namecalling.

Clementine, nonspecific objections to subject matter, not specifically naming names. Generally wishy-washy.

AlexanderTurok, "You're all retarded low-human capital."

KulakRevolt, "It's time for the reactionary revolution, talking is pointless"

You'll have to take my word for it that this is roughly representative. Flouncers who delete their posts are unfortunately permanently removed from the historical record, so I can only characterize them generally rather than specifically. Honorable mention to GuessWho the Darwin alt who got so throughly destroyed that they didn't even make a huffy flounce post, but instead slunk away in shame.

Wait... Kulak was progressive? That's, um, certainly a definition and category...

"Progressive" is not the term I would have chosen, I would have characterized them more as an "anarchist" or "revolutionary socialist"

It is actually kind of interesting how different peoples' categorization of different ideologies depends on their ideology itself. Often they lump in different ideologies based upon the fact that their objection to those ideologies are the same. The modern left objects to both conservatives and revolutionary rightists/fascists since both oppose the left's egalitarianism/universalist values. Conservatives oppose both leftists and revolutionary rightists for trying to rebuild society based on abstract theories.

Liberal fascism is a snarl, but it also encapsulates a real aspect of how traditional conservatives view the world and what they find wrong about both ideologies.

Honorable mention to GuessWho the Darwin alt who got so throughly destroyed that they didn't even make a huffy flounce post, but instead slunk away in shame.

Truly the legend of Amadan lives to this day, and shall never be forgotten.

There was(?) also @justawoman.

Still lurking, endlessly entertained from the void. Amadan continues to hemorrhage the site into an echo-chamber, self-made-human's addiction to the attention they get from here got so bad they started using A.I in an effort to make this place their Substack, faceh continues to scream, magicalkittycat puts up the good fight but since the moderation is fundamentally broken it's useless, but between the occasional Astral Codex Ten "are we the baddies?" comment, Data Secrets Lox literally rooting for the glassing of the Middle East and the Motte waiting for marching orders about birthright citizenship, I feel like a kid at a circus with too many attractions to choose from. I put my fist in the air for you though, @magicalkittycat. I know you've got good intentions.

I just can't help myself. Adrenaline is such the drug, but hope is on the horizon; I go to the gym now. I can now run 6.0mph for a sustained 7-8 minutes. I like to think if I can reach a ten minute mile, I can stop bad habits, and reading opinions I fundamentally don't respect from people who I also fundamentally don't respect in subconscious hopes of seeing their eureka moment to fuel my hope my estranged parents will have their eureka moment is one of the worst habits I own. Plus I've already seen the eureka moments from all three of my witch covens and they're never as satisfying as they are imagined in my head. Maybe when I hit my ten minute mile it'll all just slide into place and opening the Motte will never cross my mind seriously again.

I should ban you for the trolling and personal attacks, but you're kind of amusing. The trolling isn't that amusing, though, so that was your one freebie.

Remember, while you feast on the schadenfreude and disrespect, the schadenfreude and disrespect is also feasting on you.

Amadan continues to hemorrhage the site into an echo-chamber, self-made-human's addiction to the attention they get from here got so bad they started using A.I in an effort to make this place their Substack, faceh continues to scream, magicalkittycat puts up the good fight but since the moderation is fundamentally broken it's useless

I'm relieved to find that I think that all of the specific examples you've given are, as far as I'm concerned, bad ones or at least of questionable judgement. That genuinely makes the one that singles me out easier to ignore, so thanks?

(It is far more painful to be critiqued by people you like, and who like you, generally speaking. Especially the ones who do usually demonstrate good judgement about these things.)

For what it's worth, I do have a Substack that I use as a Substack, I also think most if not all of my posts are the type of thing that has a place here. There is plenty of stuff, including effort-posts, that I do not wish to post on the blog but do share here, and far fewer the other way around.

Did I miss some flameout that prompted this?

Of those who unironically use low human capital as an insult.

Those people aren't progressives, and they're still around. It's the ones who were nodding along with Hanania right up until he started saying Orange Man Bad. And the econ-pilled ones who were mad about tariffs.

@Amadan is the embodiment of the Platonic philosopher-king, and their judgement is infallible, like the pope speaking ex cathedra. The jannies of the Motte are of a different breed than the soft, nepotistic babies of Reddit. They are veterans of forum warfare. The Navy Seals of the mop force. If you take a look at Amadan's profile and sort by top rated, you will see a long list of people they've dunked.

My pet theory is that @Amadan is Freddie DeBoer. Hear me out.

He's obviously invested in TheMotte, but rarely makes a top-level post (has he ever?) on a new subject - and he can't, because it would inevitably be about basketball or education policy or half-asian babies and destroy his opsec. When he talks about his politics, it's always how he's a true leftist but the progressives put him up on the wall for wrongthink (Freddie saying HBD-adjacent things, being cancelled). He clearly has a job that allows him to piss away hours in the middle of the workday on the sisyphean task of internet jannying. 'Classical-liberal' politics. It all fits. Giants walk among us.

The whole point of the Motte is to talk to weirdos and freaks such as myself with as much politeness and decorum as can be managed.

I'm confident most progs manage to be at least as decorous as this post.

Perhaps your words aren't as convincing to others as you thought it was. Get gud. Skill issue.

The world is too complex for anyone to properly grasp. The purpose of echo chambers is to selectively filter/spin stories that flatter their ingroup, or make the outgroup look bad. I'm fairly confident that if you perfectly swapped someone's social environment to be full of partisans of the opposite valency, and fed them a curated media diet you could change their politics fairly easily over time.

In other words, a lone prog crusader isn't going to convince TheMotte any more than you're going to turn Reddit pro-Trump, regardless of how eloquent either of you are.

My pet theory is that @Amadan is Freddie DeBoer. Hear me out.

I'm sold, and I'm adding this to my list of Motte conspiracy theories that I believe (others include JD Vance lurking here).

I find this one more plausible than the Freddie deBoer one.

It's true that I've never seen Amadan act like a raging dick in the same way I've seen FdB do (and over rather small issues).

Yeah I actually like FdB, but I don’t think in a million years he’d have the patience to moderate a forum like this, lol.

Freddie is mentally ill, and with no malice intended, it can show in some of his writing. Amadan is the polar opposite, he's even and calm-tempered to a degree I find impressive, concerning or mildly-intimidating. It takes a lot to piss him off, or to even see him lower his standards. We could use him as a benchmark for "sanity".

Reminds me, I need to take my pills or @faceh is going to make me his tulpa.

Goddammit, Don, stop blowing our people’s cover!

Well, if he's around, I'm politely asking him to approve the next visa application I make to visit the States. I'll even stop liking the meme edits on Twitter.

I'm pretty sure Vance likes the memes considering he dressed up as one of them for Halloween. Maybe you should promise to make more of them.

Amadan is a self-proclaimed leftist? Are you sure? I kind of feel like I would have picked up on that after years of being here.

My pet theory is that @Amadan is Freddie DeBoer. Hear me out.

Cute theory, except I'm not a leftist, I'm exactly the kind of liberal centrist Freddie despises.

but rarely makes a top-level post (has he ever?) on a new subject

SF nerdery. Which Freddie also despises.

I'm exactly the kind of liberal centrist Freddie despises.

That's exactly the type of cover Freddie would use for opsec. @Goodguy

I don’t think I’ve ever heard Amadan talk about schooling, so that can’t be right…

The world is too complex for anyone to properly grasp. The purpose of echo chambers is to selectively filter/spin stories that flatter their ingroup, or make the outgroup look bad. I'm fairly confident that if you perfectly swapped someone's social environment to be full of partisans of the opposite valency, and fed them a curated media diet you could change their politics fairly easily over time.

I agree with this, but only to an extent. I think that there are personality based limits to this. If I'm being perfectly honest, I went from being a progressive raised in a liberal family to no longer being a progressive once the progressive social millieu I was in started saying too many things that hurt my ego/went against my personal interests. I think a lot of transitions of people politically/socially, in modern terms often people who grow up and live in one political/social group to the opposite one, come from the politics they inherit harming their ego or going against their self interest. There are tons of historical examples where people go against their social subgroup due to a harm their social subgroup dealt to them.

Not sure it’s that easy to change someone’s mind. I spent a lot of time on redddit. I never became a leftist. Political beliefs though due seem to align with my background and where you would expect someone of my background to end up.

How many male, rust belt town kids, who kept going to Church weekly well into 20’s vote Democrat? Might be able to shorten that today to - male and has had manual labor jobs for at least a summer.

I would guess with probably a 50% probability that without moderation Reddit would become the Third Reich in 6 months. Leftist places online seem to need to be protected to exists.

At this point non-leftists have so many discussion forums that it's possible there are no longer enough non-leftists lacking a home to cause a non-censored Reddit to be swamped by them.

Possible. I just also think right-wing ideas tend to spread online either because they hit natural tribal instincts or are simply correct.

But certainly there was a time when anywhere open to rightist was the only store open.

How many male, rust belt town kids, who kept going to Church weekly well into 20’s vote Democrat? Might be able to shorten that today to - male and has had manual labor jobs for at least a summer.

How about - how many male, rust belt town kids, who went to church throughout their childhood and then went to the northeast/west coast to a prestigious college end up voting democrat?

I would guess with probably a 50% probability that without moderation Reddit would become the Third Reich in 6 months. Leftist places online seem to need to be protected to exists.

The only reason I would pass on that bet is that there are hyper-motivated NEET-autists (see: 4chan) who would spam Hitler memes and scare off the normies. It wouldn't become the Third Reich because a bunch of middle-class redditors had a change of heart and started goose stepping down Park avenue.

Did I miss some flameout that prompted this?

Maybe I'm being narcissistic but I feel like I may be at least half responsible. I blame the other half on @KMC and @FiveHourMarathon. No disrespect intended but I share the latter's perception that if @KMC's comment had been aimed at "Negroes", "Venezuelans", or "Trump-Voters" it likely would have gone un-reported and thus un-moderated.

What that means for the forum as a whole is it's own conversation.

You said this in modmail, and repeating it doesn't make it true. @KMC has been modded for saying similar things about "Negroes." People absolutely report posts that tee off on Trump voters, blacks, and other groups.

I can't even fathom your theory of mind that says we give special protection to Indians.

At this point, you're a broken wrong record.

If anything, the most "anti-Indian" poster we ever had on here (though I haven't seen him here for a few months) was that actually Indian castist guy who seemed to think that most of modern India's problems could be fixed by getting rid of special treatment for the lower castes and making Brahmins truly the top dogs again. I think his name was something like MrVanillaSky? Was certainly an interesting perspective to see. But I saw him get modded a couple times, he definitely didn't seem to get special treatment.

And when everyone dogpiled on self_made_human for using AI to slopify his posts I didn't see any mods rushing to rescue him even though he's both Indian and a mod himself.

most of modern India's problems could be fixed by getting rid of special treatment for the lower castes and making Brahmins truly the top dogs again.

I've worked with many Indians in corporate America. I've even been sent to Hyderabad and Delhi a few times over the years. Its takes a while for Indian coworkers to open up to you about this stuff, if they ever do, but opinions in the same general neighborhood as this are incredibly common, though not necessarily the part about Brahmins being in control, the bits about special treatment of the scheduled castes seems universally unpopular amoung people who don't receive the treatment, and even some that did. Of note, Indians that work in corporate America in the US is a powerful filter on who you hear from.

I work with a ton of Indians at my day job (about 80% in Mumbai, 20% in the US) and I make a point of looking people's surnames up since it's a decent (if imperfect) indicator of caste. The more competent of my coworkers (though this is an obscenely low bar, they're almost all awful) definitely tend to have last names correlating with higher castes.

Of note, Indians that work in corporate America in the US is a powerful filter on who you hear from.

The ones in Silicon Valley are the most notorious for it online, at the very least. I don't work in SF or in tech, or even happen to live in America, so I have no idea if it's actually common, but most other Indians not in India don't care very much. The 2nd gen ones hardly care at all.

I've stopped thinking about it entirely since I've left the country, though as my reply above will show, I haven't changed my actual views on the topic. It's good to get away with not caring, instead of it being a constant handicap or shackle around my ankles like in India.

We don't really have many active Indians who have mentioned they are Indian here. From memory, it's just me and @DirtyWaterHotDog, after Vanilla left (apologies to anyone who I've forgotten, if they exist).

Vanilla was an interesting character, there are plenty of right-wing leaning Hindu-nationalist casteists in India, though I have the good fortune of knowing very few of them. As painful as it is to admit, I think it's probably true that there exist significant disparities in IQ between castes in India. I'm far from upper caste, and just above the threshold where I'd be lower-caste and entitled to affirmative action.

Speaking of said AA: I loathe it with every fiber of my being. It deprived me of the opportunity to enroll in a better med school despite decent grades and exam results. I was entirely caste-blind my entire life until that point, because I was Westernized enough to simply not care (and my family were socially liberal). The immense resentment that developed afterwards is mostly gone, because I managed to escape to a place where caste had no bearing, where everyone's performance was judged on the grounds of the performance itself.

I understand why the upper castes are mad about things, even if I'm lower-middle caste (I lack a better word for it). This AA is ruinous in India, and many have fled to the West to get away from it, even if that wasn't my primary motivation. From a purely Bayesian perspective, these mostly upper caste Indians are probably right to think that the lower castes who benefit from quotas are dumber than them on average. Should they import their casteism and rage to a Western context? Probably not. I don't. But someone who got into an IIT on the basis of caste is not of the same quality as another candidate who didn't. It might be an inscrutable and impenetrable quibble to a white recruiter in SF, but Indians from India would know better.

I consider myself fortunate not to have to worry or particularly care about it anymore, and note that I would never have if it wasn't wielded against me or used for demagoguery and identity politics.

And when everyone dogpiled on self_made_human for using AI to slopify his posts I didn't see any mods rushing to rescue him even though he's both Indian and a mod himself.

Neither did I. Amadan was one of the critics himself, and while I still advocate for my approach to LLM use, I took his dislike of it seriously. Far more than I would the average resident doing a drive-by. Negative feedback from someone I like and respect (despite his concerning takes on Reverend Insanity) means much more to me than anything thrown by the peanut gallery. I think his response, namely ignoring or skimming most of my posts, is a far more reasonable one than people calling for any LLM usage to be banned or slinging insults at me. I endorse the general principle, I agree that for many topics on this forum: if you don't like it, don't read it, instead of bitching about it.

(This has a limit. SS gets warned for joo-posting when he becomes one note. It is good for him that he tries to spice up his repertoire on occasion, though his true passion and calling still bleeds through.)

Hell, since the initial kerfuffle, I even ended up using LLMs less for editing purposes and stylistic purposes. My self-imposed standards include that if people are noticing and mentioning AI influence in my prose (regardless of their stance on it), then I've lost too much of my original voice and character. Or perhaps I took it even more seriously because people who appear intelligent and discriminate and who gave me positive feedback mentioned they noticed in passing. Even if they don't mind, I do. I like my voice, even if I think AI helps me in practical ways.

Not "Indians" the "Ingroup".

Which, as @FiveHourMarathon observed in that same thread, is perfectly understandable, "We're always going to have a bias towards our friends."

So, your theory of mind is that I go extra-hard on anti-Indian comments because I am (kinda sorta in a distant online way) friends with @self_made_human?

Why do you think I don't go hard on anti-MAGA posts since I'm about equally friendly with @FCfromSSC, then?

I don't know how to penetrate such obtuseness. I'm just going to keep pointing out that you're wrong, and if you want to advocate for changes in moderation, telling us we're doing things we aren't is a demonstrably unsuccessful strategy.

So, your theory of mind is that I go extra-hard on anti-Indian comments because I am (kinda sorta in a distant online way) friends with @self_made_human?

I wish. I'd settle for you going easier on me in particular, but I will note that every time we've had a disagreement (or the one time you temp banned me before I became a mod), I thought you had a good point.

On a more general note, there is little need to demonstrate favoritism towards the mods here. They were chosen because they were considered a good fit for the community and have a record of the kind of engagement we're looking for (and of course because they're willing to devote the time and energy). It is little surprise that we're not the ones usually needing to be slapped with warnings or bans, and even when we do mess up, it's usually a temporary lapse that is addressed through internal channels. The overwhelming majority of the time we end up in a fight, it was provoked by someone less sympathetic.

This is easy to mistake for favoritism towards us and harsher punishment for those we dislike, but I do not think it's true. We usually recuse ourselves from weighing in on moderation decisions when we believe that our judgement is clouded because of personal antipathy, or even because us taking action will convey the impression of a vendetta.

@JeSuisCharlie isn't just accusing us of being biased towards each other, though. He's accusing us of giving special protection to Indians because of you.

Presumably the only reason we haven't banned the Joo-posters is that none of the mods are Jewish (afaik).

That is a claim I find even more confusing. I can kinda sorta understand the reasoning behind claims that we are biased against left/right wingers if I squint, not that I think those accusations have much merit either.

(The RW claim we extend affirmative action to Leftists, the LW claims we go easy on the Right because that is the Forum Consensus)

But Indians? Really? I have no idea where that's coming from, and I think your handling of KMC's previous warning was perfect, and that you would have done the same thing for any other ethnic group. I wouldn't have touched it (not that I had the opportunity to before you did, as far as I remember) because of the potential of coming across as having a conflict of interest.

(As I've said before, Zorba's moderati must be above reproach)

People write negative comments about Indians all the time. I have done my fair share of criticism, even though I also come to our defense when I feel that the criticism is unfair/factually incorrect. Usually, that amounts to politely reminding people that India is not sub-Saharan Africa, and that assuming similar levels of dysfunction or dirt is unwarranted. Can't say I've ever modded anyone for insulting us either, though I do recall you warning Hlynka for being blatantly racist against me years ago (an opinion shared by others in writing). If I can't get away with claiming that I am extremely non-partisan about my place of birth when I have multiple comments discussing its dysfunction (or acknowledging that claims of an average IQ in the low 80s have evidence), who can?

I genuinely consider my ethnicity to be mostly incidental trivia about me, at least when it comes to my most important opinions and beliefs. I can't really help being Indian, can I, but I am nothing like the modal Indian in India, or even the other lucky bastards who made it to the West.

Eh. People will always have grievances. Some more factually warranted than others. I feel like this one can be safely ignored, while I make a cursory wave in the direction of potential personal bias while denying actual bias.

Sigh. The most annoying part of minor forum drama is when someone uses rare, inconsequential examples as an excuse to create even more drama. Often the meta-drama is worse than whatever the problem was. You'll see this, on occasion, on Reddit: there'll be a hundred people loudly complaining and farming upvotes about some form of thought crime that happened in the comments, and then you'll scroll down and see that what kicked things off was maybe 2 or 3 comments that were downvoted to oblivion.

I think that is precisely what you're doing now. It's been weeks or months since we've had the kind of flameout you describe, for the reasons you describe. No, Dase doesn't count. He didn't quit because he thinks we're right wing retards, he just happened to be particularly disgruntled and claimed that there were too many idiots here for him to handle. While I clearly don't agree with him, I can see where he's coming from.

There have been, to the best of my knowledge, no other high profile cases of people throwing a hissy fit before their departure in ages. Turok, maybe, but that's been a while. But I doubt anyone misses him too much. Darwin? God knows it's been long enough that we've probably evolved a few new species of finch.

While we have a rule about leaving the rest of the internet at the door, we also, implicitly but perhaps even more seriously, have norms that say that your current antics aren't acceptable either. If Amadan's not going to put on his mod hat, I'm not either. We have our differences, but most of the time I do recognize he has a point and that he does an excellent job. But I will say, mostly as a user but also as a mod, that this crap belongs on rdrama. Please take it there instead.

This is lame and while its not bad enough to report, I'm sad I spent time reading a digital version of you preening your feathers and crowing about your moral superiority by virtue of being part of the majority on an autistic (I include myself in that) debate forum.

As one of the leftists on here the only reason I'm posting less is that I'm retiring from my day job to work full time on my own creative projects. While I'm at work my employer owns the copyright to everything I create, which is why I can't work on my creative projects here. This frees up time for the motte, because I'm totally fine with my employer retaining copyright to my cancellable rants against Israel and nuclear power.

Then again I'm very atypical for leftists in that I think HBD is real and that social justice/woke culture is a counter-productive dead-end for left wing political strategy, which is probably why I have been posting here instead of whatever the real leftist forums are.

in that I think HBD is real and that social justice/woke culture is a counter-productive dead-end for left wing political strategy, which is probably why I have been posting here instead of whatever the real leftist forums are.

My man, nice to know there are two of us.

I've basically totally left reddit, and stopped browsing there a ~year or two ago, but if you don't know about it, you may find /r/stupidpol a good time

A tangentially related question: back when the Manosphere / Red Pill Sphere actually existed online, there were multiple attempts to have blogs where adult men and women can politely discuss Red Pill theories. You can imagine how it all ended up. Are you aware of these maybe?

Are the purple pill debaters still going at it?

No more, I imagine. The sites in question went through purges initiated by women, then became deserts and died.

I haven't been in a year or two, but they were still limping along in 2024. They definitely hit a sort of evaporating cooling effect where most of the intelligent discussion oriented folks left, leaving mostly people in the rage-phase of their various red/pink pill movements.

EDIT: This is /r/purplepilldebate specifically

They definitely hit a sort of evaporating cooling effect where most of the intelligent discussion oriented folks left

When was their "golden age" ?

They've been around for 12 years, it has always been a den of scum and villiany but the arguments/discussions were at least more interesting than shit-flinging. Probably 10-8 years ago was peak. so 2016-2018/2019 my memory is a bit weak on the exact period.


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