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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24419 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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Censoring journalists to prevent suicides is a fool's errand

In 2015, Scott published a post called "What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?" He described a variety of cognitive-behavioural milestones that might seem innate but in fact have to be consciously learned, examples including "theory of mind" (the understanding that everyone's minds are distinct, and that just because you have access to a piece of information doesn't mean that another person does) and foreign languages (many young children take their native language to be the default, and people speaking foreign languages "really" know the e.g. Japanese word for a thing, but insist on converting them into their own special code before talking about them). He then moves into more controversial and potentially elitist examples of potential milestones, describing his reaction to a piece by Nathan Robinson, in which Robinson acknowledged it's hypocritical to criticise conversatives trying to get Fun Home removed from a college syllabus while also defending students' boycotting a screening of the film American Sniper:

He proposes a bunch of potential counterarguments, then shoots each counterargument down by admitting that the other side would have a symmetrical counterargument of their own: for example, he believes that American Sniper is worse because it's racist and promoting racism is genuinely dangerous to a free society, but then he admits a conservative could say that Fun Home is worse because in their opinion it's homosexuality that's genuinely dangerous to a free society... I’m not sure what I think of this conclusion, but my main response to his article is oh my gosh he gets the thing, where "the thing" is a hard-to-describe ability to understand that other people are going to go down as many levels to defend their self-consistent values as you will to defend yours. It seems silly when I’m saying it like this, and you should probably just read the article, but I’ve seen so many people who lack this basic mental operation that this immediately endeared him to me.

I would like to propose another possible developmental milestone that some have reached and others haven't: the complete inability to generalise a proposed solution outside of the narrow specifics of the problem it's intended to solve.

Following Nathan Cofnas's exposé regarding Jason Arday's plagiarism and fabulism, and his subsequent suicide, many are pointing fingers at the media's handling of the case. The more charitable framing holds that Arday was "hounded" to his death by a racist, right-wing harassment campaign; the less charitable framing (furnished by none other than Ibram X. Kendi) claims that the way Arday's story was covered in the press amounts to a modern lynching. Even people who concede that the allegations against Arday were not baseless insist that the amount of coverage he received was massively disproportionate (an opinion I do not share). The good people over at Change.org have a legal solution in mind to prevent future Ardays:

Proposal for Arday’s Law: a limit to articles published on one person within a timeframe.

249 articles were published across 15 major British news outlets in the period between 24th July and the date of his death (14th August). Worryingly, 188 articles were written in the 9 day period between his resignation and his death (5th-14th August). These articles scrutinised every area of Professor Arday's life.

This petition calls for legislative action to impose limitations on the number of news articles published about a single individual within a defined time frame. By doing so, we can ensure that individuals are not subjected to undue public pressure and potential mental anguish caused by excessive media coverage. The government must hold media outlets accountable for their role in amplifying potentially damaging narratives.

3,642 people have signed the petition at the time of writing.

So, guys. Let's walk through this step by step.

How could such a law possibly be enforced? Imagine the UK government has a massive centralised database of every news article published in outlets domiciled within its borders, updated in real time, listing the primary subject of each one. As soon as the number of articles about a particular subject exceeds some threshold (e.g. 80 articles in 7 days), the UK government issues a presumptive gag order against all media outlets warning them not to publish any more articles on this subject until the articles-per-day metric has declined somewhat. Any article published after the threshold was exceeded will be issued a public order demanding the article be taken down. This petition is effectively demanding a nationwide digitised Stasi surveillance body employing dozens if not hundreds of Winston Smiths (not to mention an initial outlay of billions of pounds just to get the news article-crawling infrastructure up and running), all to prevent – I mean, how many people commit suicide in response to "excessive" media coverage every year? Aside from Arday, can you name a single British person meeting that description this year?

And needless to say, this legislation would be utterly pointless for any news story of international interest, as Arday's was. (Arday: "The New York Times and the Atlantic are calling me a plagiarist and a liar." His legal counsel: "True, but we made damn sure the readers of the Daily Record wouldn't hear about it!")

But even if there was some way to enforce such a laughable piece of legislation, it surely goes without saying that the primary beneficiary of it would be Donald Trump, who would see the number of UK articles criticising him drop precipitously. Hell, an even bigger beneficiary would be Boris Johnson, whose latest paternity scandal would be reduced to a footnote. It's even trivial to imagine how such a piece of legislation could be gamed. Nigel Farage gets wind that a scandal is going to break on Monday morning. He immediately springs into action, buying a regional newspaper with triple-digit circulation for pennies on the dollar, launching a website to go with it, and flooding that website with nothing but AI-generated articles about said scandal. Under Arday's Law, there's no way for the BBC, the Guardian or the Observer to cover the scandal: their hands are tied.

I know, I know: of the 3,000+ people who signed this petition, most surely have no expectation of any legislation being passed. Signing the petition is just an applause light, a way of saying "I feel sad that Jason Arday killed himself, and wish that he hadn't", with a fig leaf of having Called for Something to Be Done.

But I genuinely feel that some people (most likely including the person who created the petition) simply lack the imaginative capacity to generalise a hypothetical solution outside the narrow confines of the problem that prompted its proposal. During the 2010s, when conservatives were getting banned from social media left and right, a common smug refrain I heard from progressives was "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want". I continually pleaded with these people to understand: it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion. You really do not want to set a precedent that social media companies can ban anyone they disagree with and they have no recourse. Every company undergoes ideological drift, whether slowly or all at once: the fact that Facebook moderators share your worldview now is no guarantee that they will a year from now. "They're a private company, they can do what they want" will come back to bite you in the ass when some billionaire who doesn't share the progressive worldview buys a social media network and moulds it in his own image.

And then a billionaire who didn't share the progressive worldview bought a social media network and moulded it in his own image. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of hair. What could I say other than "I told you so"?

The situation makes me detest even more the practice of blaming other people for someone's suicide. It wasn't good when Kiwi Farms was blamed for Julie Terryberry, Chloe Sagal and Byuu, and it's not any better now. All that blame shifting encourages more suicides by providing a powerful incentive to kill yourself, since it effectively absolves the deceased of any responsibility. If suicide was correctly attributed to the one who actually did the killing, then everybody would know there would be nothing to be gained by committing suicide, and so it wouldn't happen. But in our society where we're so eager to blame everyone but the deceased, it's a tantalizing win for your political side to kill yourself. If you're not dead, they can't use your body to agitate for censorship and restrictions on free speech in a vain attempt to prevent more bodies piling up. You are literally more useful to them dead than alive.

it's hypocritical to criticise conversatives trying to get Fun Home removed from a college syllabus while also defending students' boycotting a screening of the film American Sniper

Isn't the major difference here that removing a book from a syllabus prevents others from reading it, while boycotting a film only prevents yourself from seeing it? People taking the course that covers the book are presumably doing so of their own accord.

My bad, according to Robinson the progressive students were actually trying to get screenings of American Sniper cancelled. So it's perfectly symmetrical.

But even if there was some way to enforce such a laughable piece of legislation, it surely goes without saying that the primary beneficiary of it would be Donald Trump, who would see the number of UK articles criticising him drop precipitously. Hell, an even bigger beneficiary would be Boris Johnson, whose latest paternity scandal would be reduced to a footnote. It's even trivial to imagine how such a piece of legislation could be gamed. Nigel Farage gets wind that a scandal is going to break on Monday morning. He immediately springs into action, buying a regional newspaper with triple-digit circulation for pennies on the dollar, launching a website to go with it, and flooding that website with nothing but AI-generated articles about said scandal. Under Arday's Law, there's no way for the BBC, the Guardian or the Observer to cover the scandal: their hands are tied.

Public figures such as elected officials would most likely, if not exempted from such protection entirely, at least have a much higher threshold.

Also, can we go back to when legislation had boring, neutral names that don't assume the world-view of their supporters? Too many proposed laws these days are either (a.) named after someone who died under tragic circumstances that the proponents claim would have been prevented by their agenda, leading to the argument "How can you oppose $NAME0's Law? Are you saying $NAME0 deserved to die?", or (b.) named after a notarikon of an applause light, leading to "How can you oppose the $GOODTHING1 Act? Are you against $GOODTHING1?". (This applies to my team as well. If I am ever in a position to introduce a bill to, e. g. require that trans individuals be able to use the toilet in public places without regard to their anatomical-sex-at-birth, I will title it the 'Restroom Act', or 'Lavatory Act', or 'Bathroom Policy Act', not 'Luo's Law' or the 'Equal Quotidian Use and Access to Lavatories In Total Yesterday' Act.)

Presumably you have no complaints about the BRRRRT Act? It's not boring, but it's as neutral as you can get.

Public figures such as elected officials would most likely, if not exempted from such protection entirely, at least have a much higher threshold.

Jason Arday had appeared on television numerous times.

Good God. It was bad enough to suggest that some sorts of outrage only come from people lying about their beliefs. Now you’ve found a group who must be developmentally disabled?

I’m unreasonably annoyed by this, because it looks like you considered the whole alternative answer I’d have given. Signing the petition is an applause light. These guys aren’t expending the mental effort to flesh out a viable plan. They’re showing up to beat their chests and holler at the other team.

But no, they must “lack the imaginative capacity”? Why? What’s wrong with the first answer? You’re watching people play soccer and insisting that their arms must have been crippled.

It’s not like I disagree on the object level! No shit, the petition is stupid, and I’m sure the free-speech norms which got us to this site are better. Ha ha, point and laugh at the Limeys.

I'm actually quite annoyed at your glib dismissal of my post and your insistence that these people cannot possibly mean what they say, especially when the literal Prime Minister of the UK has not ruled out the possibility of a public inquiry into the media's handling of the Arday case:

Calls are growing for an investigation into media reporting of the case. An open letter to Andy Burnham demanding a public inquiry “to ensure we never see a tragic death like Dr Arday’s again” has gathered more than 85,000 names.

The prime minister is said to be open to the idea and has not ruled out “Leveson 2” – the planned second part of the earlier inquiry into British press standards, which was cancelled in 2018.

Sorry, I’m not trying to be glib.

I think people like the PM recognize that something like this is unworkable, but expect that the benefit of posturing outweighs the costs/risks. Is that “not meaning what they say?” Only if we exclude the middle. There is a continuum between opposing and endorsing a policy, and signaling approval falls somewhere in between endorsement and neutrality.

I also think you captured that sentiment when you said it was an applause light. Talk is cheap, and talking about how one’s government is very sad, totally going to start another investigation, any day now? Business as usual.

But then you dismiss the perfectly good explanation. Why? What makes incompetence more likely than strategy?

What makes incompetence more likely than strategy?

Por que no los dos? Why is the null hypothesis that everyone throwing their support behind a cause is doing so for the exact same reason? Why is ideological and cognitive homogeneity more parsimonious than ideological and cognitive heterogeneity?

Not everyone is a Svengali playing 4-dimensional chess with public opinion. Some people really do just think This Is Bad and Something Must Be Done, and the proposed solution would in theory prevent the Bad Thing from recurring, but they're simply incapable of thinking through it to envision the second-order effects the proposed solution would wreak.

We have a dozen terms for situations like this (e.g. bootlegger-baptist coalition, "useful idiots"). I know lots of people who put their names to this petition know that nothing like it could ever be passed into law, but just want to voice their opinion that what happened to Arday was a Bad Thing. I also suspect that many people who put their names to it think that a piece of legislation like this is entirely feasible, and that if the government won't pass it, then that just means they don't care about black autists. And rather than just dismiss the latter group out of hand, I wanted to explain to them in exhaustive detail what legislation like this would entail were it to come into effect.

It was bad enough to suggest that some sorts of outrage only come from people lying about their beliefs.

Why was it "bad enough"? What was "bad enough"? Shame on me for daring to suggest that a person who refuses to give a straight answer to a simple factual question might not be being entirely honest. Yes, I do in fact think that some people just go on the internet in front of their constituents and tell lies.

Why? What’s wrong with the first answer?

As mentioned by someone downthread, multiple things can be true at once. It can simultaneously be true that some people signing this petition think it's a sensible no-brainer of a proposal, while others have no expectation of anything like it passing into law, and are simply using it as a means to vent their frustration or signal their in-group. I know this, I'm not an idiot.

I really don't get what the complaint is here. On the one hand, you criticised me for accusing politicians of lying. At the same time, you're saying "the people who signed this petition don't really mean it, they're just pounding their chests, don't take them so seriously". In other words, you're criticising me for – taking what they say at face value and not assuming they're lying about their intentions. Which one is it? Should I call people liars, or not?

"It's bad when you assume that people who give evasive non-answers to simple factual questions aren't being entirely honest about what they believe. It's also bad when you don't assume that people aren't being sincere in their motivations for signing a petition." What do you want from me, exactly?

Ha ha, point and laugh at the Limeys.

Believe me when I tell you that I treat Limeys with far more charity and forbearance than the average Irishman does.

I mean, are these people incapable of thinking through the consequences of their demands? No way to tell. But what about the people pushing NY's new '3D printer' law (that actually applies to all CNC machine tools)?

(See @gattsuru's excellent rundown here for context.)

It passed the legislature and got signed into law! Is it your position that none of that was serious either? Crippling manufacturing in an entire state just as a form of chest thumping? We've all heard the line about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, but I've never met someone who's actually done it! Presuming they're incapable of thinking through the consequences of their actions is the more charitable interpretation!

Realistically, I don't actually think the politicians* (or their staffs, at least) are incapable. I think they successfully reasoned out that their constituents will like this law and they just don't care about its other effects, which they can surely blame on billionaires/republicans as per normal. But that just kicks the problem up a stage. Why would their constituents like this law if they're capable of thinking through its effects? Which is not to say that none of them are, just that the smart money is apparently betting the ones who can will be drowned out by the ones who can't.

*There are industry voices pushing for it too, but they have different motives. For them, crippling manufacturing is the goal. They want a regulatory moat; they can't actually supply the demanded technology (because it's impossible), but with a little luck they can leverage their loyalty to convince the committee their solution works and hopefully freeze out their less enthusiastic competitors.

Ha ha, point and laugh at the Limeys

To be fair, they used to rule the world and are now some kind of obscene parody of the West, suitable only to scare the rest of us into avoiding their mistakes except inasmuch as we are apparently intent on recapitulating them.

I think the problem is women, but blame men, and really democracy, for getting us here in the first place.

I think the problem is women

@Sloot, you have competition.

I would like to propose another possible developmental milestone that some have reached and others haven't: the complete inability to generalize a proposed solution outside of the narrow specifics of the problem it's intended to solve.

I think this is a specific symptom of a broader and more fundamental developmental milestone which is something like the inability to perceive/consider/predict second order effects. Things like:

-People who want open borders (First order effect: helps poor immigrants. Second order: causes economic hardship, cultural clashes, crime, etc)

-People who want to be soft on crime (First order effect: helps poor people who turn to crime to survive. Second order: massively increases crime)

-People who want to raise the minimum wage (First order effect: poor people get more money. Second order: prices go up, unemployment goes up.)

-People who want to massively raise taxes on the rich (First order effect: you get more money. Second order: rich people leave and you get less money.)

And so on. It's kind of the same thing as what you said, but I think this framing is a better way of thinking about it. There's the Game Theory thing where one person does a thing and then someone else responds to that and then someone else responds to that, etc, and things only ever settle down if there is a stable equilibrium (or mixed strategy). And some people don't even consider this, that someone might respond directly to the change rather than their behavior being predetermined. It's not that they can't imagine something changing, it's that they don't consider change as part of a causal chain which can be induced by themselves in opposition to their desires. It's the failure to disentangle intention from real outcome. If the Goal of doing X is to cause Y, then any increase in Y is attributed to X, and any decrease in Y from second order effects is attributed to the most direct precursor to Y, and not to X which is further away causally.

To be fair, though, I think people opposed to the measure are often equally willfully ignoring ways that second-order effects could be dealt with/mitigated/redirected to induce beneficial third-order effects, or amount to simple coordination problems. The first country to tax the rich might have suffered capital flight, but nowadays if you are rich your options for escaping the tax-man are really rather slim (and might put your money so out of reach as to be inconvenient). Maybe there is some second-order effect of Europe's relative softness on crime encouraging crime, but there is also the third-order effect that the relatively lesser proportion of outright life-ending consequences from random lost trials means people are not willing to pay so much for lawyers, which lowers the water line of how much lawyers get paid and makes close to everything that touches upon liability cheaper (medicine first and foremost).

I would not call it "equally" ignoring. People who consider second order effects are generally capable of understanding the concept of third, fourth etc order effects, as it's essentially the same concept extrapolated forward. Now, quite a few people are biased and discount the effects opposing their favored position, and there's people like this on both sides. But a biased person can still comprehend the nature of arguments and weigh them and think about them. There's a large contingent of people who literally do not consider second order effects. They're vaguely aware that there might be such a thing, but they don't really understand it, or think about it, or consider them "legitimate" or worthy of consideration on the same level as first order effects. And again, there's people like this on both sides, but the left seems specially tailored towards catering to them (by emphasizing first-order niceness above all in their policy choices), and so there's a much higher prevalence there.

So I'd argue that policy proposals like that are just a rhetorical technique. They aren't serious attempts at a solution.

They want to keep the public debate away from topics that could actually hurt them -- in this case that the hiring practices of prestigious schools are laughable and indefensible.

But Arday is a topic of public discussion. So they need to railroad the conversation by taking it in new directions that can't harm them.

The obvious flaws in the proposed law are a feature. It's difficult for people to hear about it and not immediately start explaining the problems with it.

Basically it's the "Nerd Sniping" XKCD comic.

https://xkcd.com/356/

Oh shit. Did I fall for the trap?

It's not a big deal here.

Also it's probably less cerebral than I'm making it out to be. I'm reminded of how during Trump 1 he could suck the air out of the room by making things about him whenever he wasn't in the news.

But I genuinely feel that some people (most likely including the person who created the petition) simply lack the imaginative capacity to generalise a hypothetical solution outside the narrow confines of the problem that prompted its proposal. During the 2010s, when conservatives were getting banned from social media left and right, a common smug refrain I heard from progressives was "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want". I continually pleaded with these people to understand: it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion. You really do not want to set a precedent that social media companies can ban anyone they disagree with and they have no recourse. Every company undergoes ideological drift, whether slowly or all at once: the fact that Facebook moderators share your worldview now is no guarantee that they will a year from now. "They're a private company, they can do what they want" will come back to bite you in the ass when some billionaire who doesn't share the progressive worldview buys a social media network and moulds it in his own image.

And then a billionaire who didn't share the progressive worldview bought a social media network and moulded it in his own image. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of hair. What could I say other than "I told you so"?

As someone with high imaginative capacity, what's your vision for blocking 'private companies from doing what they want?' How do you thread the needle between not banning/algorithmically deprioritizing people for supporting Trump (sounds good), QAnon, holocaust denial (uh...), kiddie porn? I grant that it's probably feasible to separate out kiddie porn, actual terrorists and criminals from the rest, but you're left with a broad spectrum of shit that most normies just don't want to deal with.

Even themotte has to crack down on holocaust denial, HBD and other topics from time to time. And you're catering to a fairly niche and homogenous population that hasn't managed to muster significant disagreement on a culture war issue outside of the Russo-Ukraine/Iran wars in the last 5 years.

If you want to bring back the Fairness Doctrine on steroids for social media I'm on board, but I doubt most of the people complaining in the 2010s want to see their Fox News talk shows or facebook slop nuked by the FCC of a democratic admin.

Even themotte has to crack down on holocaust denial, HBD and other topics from time to time.

Sigh. You're baiting me, aren't you?

No, we've never "cracked down" on topics *. We've cracked down on obsessive single-issue posters and people turning their hobby horses into culture-warring and consensus-building. We've never forbidden Holocaust denial or HBD posting or even pedo-posting from the guys who want to abolish the age of consent.

  • (Once, many years ago on the old subreddit, before my time, the mods put a temporary moratorium on HBD posting because it was close to turning into open calls for race war.)

You're baiting me, aren't you?

No, you're both focusing too much on 'topics.' If @FtttG wants Facebook (and presumably themotte) to be treated like a utility, there's no justification for you cracking down on 'single-issue posters' any more than they can shut off my power for obnoxiously blasting music that bothers my neighbors. If themotte were run like a utility, the sidebar would basically say 'don't post illegal shit.' The fundamental point is that if you did treat social media like a utility, it would rapidly be unusable to the vast majority of society who don't enjoy 4chan.

Everyone wants to censor, everyone likes their echo chambers. It's just a matter of degree.

Once, many years ago on the old subreddit, before my time, the mods put a temporary moratorium on HBD posting because it was close to turning into open calls for race war.

I didn't realize that was the rationale, I thought people were just sick of the same old recycled talking points. But then, who are we to censor people just because it might spark a little race war?

No, we've never "cracked down" on topics *. We've cracked down on obsessive single-issue posters and people turning their hobby horses into culture-warring and consensus-building. We've never forbidden Holocaust denial or HBD posting or even pedo-posting from the guys who want to abolish the age of consent.

You give a leeway for it for sure but my last ban was for posting a harmless visual novel top post. You have banned me too much under the wildcard rule which really just means per your discretion you don't like my posts. Obviously a big chunk of that is going to be the ideological substance therein. I won't deny that you do give voice to the people you mention, but I also won't deny it's only for a limited time. I think it's impossible to become a true forum regular while also being one of the types of posters you mention, just because sooner or later you will give a huge ban for posting a top level post that isn't even about one of the no-no topics. And that huge ban would obviously not be given to a regular.

Your ban was not for the topic you wanted to talk about.

You have banned me too much under the wildcard rule which really just means per your discretion you don't like my posts.

You have no idea how many people I'd be banning if I banned people because I don't like their posts.

I think it's impossible to become a true forum regular while also being one of the types of posters you mention

We have many forum regulars who are those types of posters.

And that huge ban would obviously not be given to a regular

We have given permabans to people who've been here for years.

This is going to land badly coming from a stranger on the internet but as far as I can see it's because you combine very strongly-held opinions that you don't seem to be able to examine along with an immense self-regard and a persecution complex that becomes self-fulfilling. You have views (and so do I) that the mods don't like but you don't seem to be able to debate them, you just assert them harder.

When cross post discussion tends to converge into a debate, mods tend to crack down on them because of the inherent combative nature of beating up on the beliefs of the other side. You could argue there are ways to be tactful without being aggressive, but not really, and that involves a lot of personal taste. TM is more of a serious discussion forum in that regard but I’ve never thought of it as a debate forum. Debate is blood sports.

This is going to land badly coming from a stranger on the internet

Actually, it's fine. We're both anonymous, obviously I'm not trying to network on this account so I don't need to save face.

You have views (and so do I) that the mods don't like but you don't seem to be able to debate them, you just assert them harder.

Where at? Last time I got banned for posting about Doki Doki Literature Club, not for debating wrongly. I got banned in the middle of a «debate» with a guy who was wrong about marriage statistics, but he wasn't citing anything. I ended up not citing anything because I was lazy, but I didn't assert harder, I referred to the correct statistics. I almost came back with a top level write up on it but I figured amadan would ban me for that and it doesn't matter because it won't change the type of mind that got to this point anyway. I got banned for not citing sources in response to a guy that was being rude and also wasn't citing sources. If I recall correctly I think he may of lazily linked to the European marriage pattern article but not much more. I told him correctly that that started only in the last 400 years and even then was only in some classes of a small corner of Europe, not all of Europe. To me, asserting harder would be just repeating my previous claims.

I can't think of any other example close to this. And even there I was being held to a higher standard than the other poster because of the side I was arguing on, which is unfair and is what I'm talking about. If you want to claim Europeans never married teenagers, you can be snide and dismissive and link at most to a flawed wikipedia article. If you want to claim otherwise with the same level of sophistication and attitude you get banned and then told you're not a good debater. Not fair.

EDIT: I found the comment. I misremembered how many sources we exchanged. Neither of us cited any. Only I was banned for this behavior. I must have been remembering the PM I almost sent to amadan before deleting it upon realizing that it would be pointless.

I was not asserting my views harder, rather I was objecting to specific claims made in response to my views. I objected without evidence because of Hitchens's maxim.

You were banned for being antagonistic and obnoxious, not because of the side you were arguing or for lack of citations.

The claim that you have been banned for what you are arguing might be something you genuinely believe (lots of people come in with a hot take, call people who disagree with them names, and then insist they were banned for their hot take and not for their name-calling), but it is not true.

Your lack of self awareness is unfortunate.

Your lack of self awareness is unfortunate.

The sass and disrespect probably feels cool to you but delegitimizes your authority and makes the quality of the forum a little worse. I usually don't disagree with your modding or your points and I'm sure it's very stressful and irritating to get abuse all the time but you're not setting a great example of civility.

A lot of people seem to have the idea that mods are bots and we are not supposed to express personal opinions, or respond to bitching at all except with a customer service voice. While we strive for civility, most accusations of being uncivil boil down to "You told someone who's being a jerk to stop being a jerk." When someone who's already been extended more grace than he deserves several times over is told he lacks self awareness, that is not incivility.

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I looked over my bans and I see for some I call Trump names and stuff like that, so I can agree that that qualifies as obnoxious. But the ban during the marriage statistics exchange was bad as was the ban for my Doki Doki Literature Club post.

Person who gets banned a lot thinks his bans are bad. Many such cases.

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How do you thread the needle between not banning/algorithmically deprioritizing people for supporting Trump (sounds good), QAnon, holocaust denial (uh...), kiddie porn? I grant that it's probably feasible to separate out kiddie porn, actual terrorists and criminals from the rest, but you're left with a broad spectrum of shit that most normies just don't want to deal with.

There's long been an argument that social media companies cannot be held legally liable for the content that appears on their sites, as they're just a facilitator, not a publisher: it wouldn't be fair to hold Facebook legally responsible for Rohingya massacres, any more than it would be to hold a telephone company responsible for a bank robbery which was planned over the phone by two of their customers. Fair enough. But if that social media platform then starts banning people for legally protected speech, they ought to lose this protection: they are explicitly making judgement calls over which content they will and will not host, which is publication.

I don't know what the solution is, but I do know it's not fair that Facebook gets to act like a publisher, but only gets treated like a utility provider in the eyes of the law. Can't have it both ways.

Even themotte has to crack down on holocaust denial, HBD and other topics from time to time.

Does it? Certainly mods have handed down bans to posters who talk about these topics, but generally because they violated other rules in the process of doing so, not for the mere act of bringing the topics up in the first place. I'm not aware of someone being banned simply for bringing up Holocaust denial or HBD.

But if that social media then starts banning people for legally protected speech, they ought to lose this protection

I don't care about big social medias, but repealing Section 230 altogether would be a bad idea because it may affect smaller forums like this. Every half-decent forum has to ban some users: spammers and generally obnoxious.

I wish people were more tolerant to other opinions and more willing to join smaller or federated platforms. In the meantime, we can encourage the latter, even BlueSky. I honestly don't think being heard by everyone is necessary or even reasonable, there are too many people online and some want their echo chambers, but small forums you at least get heard by some, and the best can be amplified; whereas large social medias' ability to promote decent posts (by my standards) are questionable at best.

but repealing Section 230 altogether would be a bad idea because it may affect smaller forums like this

I don't think FtttG was saying it ought to be repealed, merely that it ought not to apply to any platforms that censor content on particular topics.

Doesn't every website / forum do that? If not they'd be flooded with spam.

I agree with the sentiment, but I'm coming around to believing that this would be a tricky law to write. I thought the easy fix would be to have the protections only apply to smaller fora, but then H.L. Mencken rose from the dead and slapped my around with the printed out text of the EU's Digital Services Act.

Doesn't every website / forum do that? If not they'd be flooded with spam.

Yes, but most old-school Forums - and, of course, subreddits - are modded by volunteer users, not by the domain holder. This would be the equivalent of specific Facebook groups policing themselves, as distinct from Facebook itself stepping in. (I suppose all it would take for even the Motte itself to comply with such a paradigm would be for Zorba to agree not to take any conventional mod actions, and I don't think he makes a habit of it anyway.)

I don't know what the solution is

Banning all social media, obviously!

There is no solution that would work. That is a big reason why the culture war is never ending.

You could argue for nationalization and turning these places into public spaces, but don’t even ask me what the plan for things would be going forward. In fact that’s a conversation currently taking place with OpenAI and Anthropic and if the market rejects them then these entities should become nationalized by the government.

Does it? Certainly mods have handed down bans to posters who talk about these topics, but generally because they violated other rules in the process of doing so, not for the mere act of bringing the topics up in the first place. I'm not aware of someone being banned simply for bringing up Holocaust denial or HBD.

They ban those people for doing the same «violations» as everyone else. For example someone will post a wrong topic, will get insulted, if he posts back with half the vigor he gets banned and the other one doesn't. They've been doing it to me, I got banned for being right about marriage statistics and posting about a visual novel. Obviously amadan and netstack don't like my views.

Does it? Certainly mods have handed down bans to posters who talk about these topics, but generally because they violated other rules in the process of doing so, not for the mere act of bringing the topics up in the first place. I'm not aware of someone being banned simply for bringing up Holocaust denial or HBD.

I'm old enough to remember the moratorium on all HBD posts on reddit, which I think never officially ended? It just sputtered out sometime in the last 6 or 7 years as virtually all the anti-HBD people left and the problem solved itself.

As for holocaust denial and Jew skepticism in general, you can ask @SecureSignals if he has more he could say on the topic or if he's been muzzled by the mods.

Ah, by themotte I assumed you were referring to the current iteration, not the subreddit. Obviously Reddit is its own thing.

But this is my point: SecureSignals is free to post here.

100% agree that if FB acts like a publisher then they should be liable like a publisher. And in the past I think they’ve crossed that line.

The extra CW dimensions this story has taken on that it didn't need to is pretty fascinating. The core CW issue, of course, is DEI and the logical consequence of which, being Professor Jason Arday of the University of Cambridge. That would have been easily big enough to justify the huge kerfuffle that has been happening the past few weeks. But also, the story was broken by Nathan Cofnas on his personal Substack, and the first thing anyone in the mainstream talks about is Cofnas's "racial realist" views - summarized as "racist" - due to publicly holding HBD views, most famously from affirming Harvard's conclusion that affirmative action is needed for Harvard to have anything more than vanishingly few black undergrads (and extending the conclusion to cognitively-demanding industries/fields in general). Furthermore, Arday added on a layer of either suicide or drug overdose (or both, if we consider the latter is often an instantiation of the former). Which then led to this whole free speech row, with Arday's supporters openly calling for censorship of journalists if their subjects are sufficiently mentally unwell.

The part with Cofnas and HBD is the part I find most interesting right now. Almost everyone mentioning Cofnas is careful to call him a racist and mention that his racism doesn't affect the veracity of his claims, but also that it justifies the skepticism that Cambridge and Good Law Project (dunno their exact connection to Arday, but they were probably the biggest non-Cambridge defenders of Arday when the story first broke) had towards Cofnas's claims of plagiarism. This has led to a bunch of people on Twitter looking deeper into Cofnas's views and claims, researching HBD, and some of them openly defending him as having been tarred unfairly.

I doubt that this will lead to anything really big, but it would be pretty amazing if this affair of Arday led to enough more people to look into Cofnas's claims such that basic scientific facts about HBD become common knowledge or at least unforbidden knowledge. If so, it could very well have been the case that Jason Arday was a net positive for humanity in a way that he never would have been had he not been unjustly elevated to his stature thanks to DEI.

Where things become especially funny is when we consider the arguments in favor of censoring journalists who cover "vulnerable" people in light of Cofnas, rather than Arday. Of course, by the judgment of the proponents of censorship, Cofnas is too white and nerdy for it to be possible for him to be sufficiently mentally unwell as to justify censorship of negative journalism about him, and so it would never apply to him. I doubt that this principle playing out publicly in real-time will have any meaningful effect in the culture, but it's still amusing to watch.

The only thing that makes less sense than this proposal is that people here are taking it seriously, or acting as though it's representative of a certain kind of person. This is a Change.org petition, not a legislative bill, so the bar is already pretty low. And 3,000 people is nothing. It wasn't that long ago that 45,000 people signed a Change.org petition calling for an investigation into Rachel Gunn for being bad at breakdancing. Some people are idiots.

3,000 people is nothing

180,000 people signed a change.org petition calling for London to secede from the UK over Brexit.

I endorse this proposal. Of course this will be Escape from New York and Escape from LA style in which anyone attempting to get in or out will be machine gunned including coastal defenses.

Years ago I read an article claiming that individual buildings in London have more revenue than the entire UK fishing fleet. I don't want to mangle a statistic, but supposedly for some narrow inclusion of what ships to count and by some economic measure this is true. I'd very much like to see these London buildings thrive with no imported out-of-town fish. I wonder if they make anything you can eat.

I much prefer the Warhammer version of this statistic - the UK exports more Space Marines than fish. (And the rump UK would become even more dependent on Warhammer for hard currency if London somehow did secede).

The UK fishing industry is tiny because there are so few fish left in the UK EEZ, and most of the rights to catch them well sold to Spanish commercial trawlers (who could pay more for the quota because they were more efficient catching the fish). It is traditional to blame the EU for this, but the cuts in quota due to overfishing would have happened whoever was in charge, and allowing retiring British fishermen to sell their quota to Spanish commercial operators rather than tying the quota to a specific port as most EU countries did was a Thatcher government decision.

I would have loved for this to happen.

London would, of course, have had to pay for a hard border and enforcement as part of its EU joining process. This would have then made the encirclement, blockading and sieging of London very easy. We could then charge London absolutely exorbitant rates for water, power, food and access, and thereby regain some of its hoarded wealth at least.

They could probably get food shipped over from abroad.

Over whose airspace? Through whose ports?

London itself has no port?

They are something like 20 miles off the coast. Counting from the edge of the city. The mouth of the Thames is a convenient choke point.

They are something like 20 miles off the coast, counting from the edge of the city.

It's actually more like 50 miles, counting from the edge of Greater London to the edge (baseline) of the UK's "internal waters", which are basically the same as the UK's territory.

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Sure, one you can get to through waters now controlled by your enemies (see the gulf states and the strait of Hormuz for a similar example, except you wouldn't even need missiles, just some artillery near the mouth of the Thames).

Not on international waters. It would have to either annex several districts of Essex or Kent, or negotiate free passage through UK internal waters.

I explicitly acknowledged all of that in the OP. And it's over 4,000 signatures now.

One such developmental milestone many miss out on is the comprehension that multiple claims can be true at once. It can be true that Arday was a plagarist and compulsive liar who represents the worst failures of academia and DEI policies and that the number of articles and focus on him was pretty excessive.

As one tweet pointed out, it's quite blackpilling to consider the difference in both amount and style that The Spectator covered with Arday vs Epstein and his associates. And as a reply to them pointed out "Or Quilette - Im still getting ads for their Arday story. Meanwhile their founder said the Epstein story is "boring""

An intentional predator ring run by a well connected elite and covered up by multiple powerful politicians gets less focus (and often in the case of The Spectator, active defense like in the case of Prince Andrew) in them than a professor getting caught in a plagarism scandal. Is this not crazy?

The solution being even more government suppression is hilariously stupid and you would think at some point the UK left would realize that their anti speech policies tend to just be abused against them (like the strong libel laws and anti terrorism support laws have been). But that doesn't negate the claims that the media reaction to him is that of carrion-eaters as Sam Kriss wonderfully puts it. After all again both can be true, free speech restrictions are dumb and the UK press hyper focused on this in a way they don't for far greater stories.

It’s also completely true that the press had every right to report on this. It’s news. Cambridge is a major institution, it takes government grants, it represents the country; of course we have a right to know if it’s giving out professorships to lovable rogues with a totally invented backstory. Arday was advising the government on the school curriculum; people in that kind of position need to be held to public scrutiny. But is that really all you were doing? Admit it: you were having fun. Everyone was enjoying it. Peer into the man’s house, infrared cameras, concrete-penetrating LIDAR, let’s see what’s in his sock drawer: socks. I knew it.

If a lot of people seem to have suddenly started making very different noises in the last few days, it’s not because any of the substance has changed. Everything they said is still true. The allegations against Arday are the same, and the evidence is still overwhelming. The only difference is that it’s not fun any more. The victim can’t run or hide, but if they’re desperate and vicious enough they can choose to ruin the fun. ... You’re not really sorry, just momentarily embarrassed. A few weeks later someone else is being paraded for your amusement, and you’re whooping like a gibbon as their skin starts to fissure in the light.

It can be true that Arday was a fraud who represented the worst of academia's failing and be true that the response to controversies is dominated by psychopathic vultures hungry for their next meal against an "acceptable" target.

I liken it to those guys who won't shut up about how they want to be home invaded. Self defense is morally okay and it's a weird thing to constantly wish to happen so a good bit of them are just sadists who are fantasizing about the legally acceptable way they can finally kill someone and part of why every once in a while you get "guy shoots at girl scout who knocked on door" stories because they saw a potential opportunity to finally shoot and their idiot brain took it without thinking. Normal people plan for self defense as a potential and necessary option, but they do not day dream about the shedding of blood.

The Sam Kriss article is very good, but you've missed part of it in a way that's understandable for American readers. To understand British tabloid culture, imagine if the most popular media outlets in the country, left right and center, were a mix of the New York Post and TMZ, except with even lower ethical standards for "human interest stories" (most famously, the News of the World was shut down after an inquiry learned their journos had hacked the phones of a murdered schoolgirl, terrorism victims, etc.). What happened to Jason Arday is not particularly exceptional - his race, and therefore politics, is inextricable from it, because his whole career was about his race, but this is just what the British media does when they see a juicy "human interest story".

An intentional predator ring run by a well connected elite and covered up by multiple powerful politicians gets less focus (and often in the case of The Spectator, active defense like in the case of Prince Andrew) in them than a professor getting caught in a plagarism scandal. Is this not crazy?

Man, we had this convo just yesterday. See here and here. The "intentional predator ring" doesn't appear in any legal document. Pointing to the absence of wall-to-wall coverage of the most elaborate version of the story as evidence of suppression assumes the elaborate version is true in the first place. Amazing job covering up something that the man wasn't even investigated yet became globally infamous for. And I assume this is the "active defense" you're referring to, the author directly addresses your concerns in the final paragraph:

I can hear the cries from the cellars of the Epsteinheads: ‘How can you defend Andrew?!’ Actually I’m trying to defend the presumption of innocence. And truth. And reason over hysteria.

Other than the Spectator, how many articles do we have doing something so radioactive (on both sides!) as "defending Prince Andrew, the Epstein associate"? The scarcity of such pieces is what you would expect when the social cost of defending process values in this particular case has become extreme.

Self defense is morally okay and it's a weird thing to constantly wish to happen so a good bit of them are just sadists who are fantasizing about the legally acceptable way they can finally kill someone and part of why every once in a while you get "guy shoots at girl scout who knocked on door" stories because they saw a potential opportunity to finally shoot and their idiot brain took it without thinking.

Exhibit A: the absurd oxygen the UK left poured into "Adolescence", a completely fictional story that flattered a particular set of priors about young males and online radicalisation. Exhibit B: every single pred catcher channel's frisson of righteous confrontation packaged as public service.

Anyway, coming to Arday, you're not wrong that a large portion of right wingers were feverishly licking their lips for a story just like this. A disgraced black academic elevated through DEI culture being outed as a fraud lines up neatly with certain HBD-adjacent priors. And yes, the discourse has unfortunately devolved into a decibel contest of validating narratives. Every inconvenient case is just a flag that must be defended. Even when the details are messy or the individual is indefensible, aura is necessarily spent defending it. The result is, both sides end up being tethered to weak or embarrassing exemplars because abandoning them feels like conceding the broader frame.

One such developmental milestone many miss out on is the comprehension that multiple claims can be true at once. It can be true that Arday was a plagarist and compulsive liar who represents the worst failures of academia and DEI policies and that the number of articles and focus on him was pretty excessive.

It seems like what you are missing is that disagreement is not lack of comprehension. It certainly can be the case that the amount of articles written on him was excessive, that doesn't mean that it was.

As one tweet pointed out, it's quite blackpilling to consider the difference in both amount and style that The Spectator covered with Arday vs Epstein and his associates.

Why is it blackpilling? We had a teenager smiling the wrong way become an international scandal. An actual fraud in one of the world's top universities being exposed having such coverage seems like a nothingburger.

consider the difference in both amount and style that The Spectator covered with Arday vs Epstein and his associates.

What was the Spectator's coverage of Epstein?

Your link only shows "the Spectator published 12 Arday stories over a 14-day period". I can't see any info about their Epstein coverage. It invites us to compare them, but doesn't actually present the latter thing to compare.

So: what are we supposed to be comparing? Epstein is a story that's been running for a decade or so. Is the complaint that Epstein should've been more prominent than Arday in that 2-week window? Or that, at the peak of the Epstein scandal (I guess around his suicide? idk) the Spectator published fewer articles than they did around Arday at his peak scandal? I expect that, on net, the Spectator published an order of magnitude more articles on Epstein than Arday. So is the issue the timing, the density, the frequency, the consistency, the tone, or what?

I have no opinion on the Spectator, and I'm certainly willing to be persuaded that they under-covered Epstein. But the tweet and your comment both take it for granted that we all know exactly what their coverage was, with no summary or evidence provided, and I'm reluctant to just accept that without even knowing exactly what I'm supposed to accept for the comparison.

And 12 stories over a 14-day period, by itself, seems completely reasonable to me, given how egregious the situation was. Arday wasn't excessively covered, regardless of whether Epstein was under- or over-covered.

Epstein seems an interesting comparison, because he also killed himself [citation needed], doubtlessly because of, at least in part, a bunch of negative press coverage. Surely if we need these sorts of protections for plagiarizing, fabulist sociology professors, we also need them for pedophile financier socialites: think of how much blood is on those journalist's hands, too!

that the number of articles and focus on him was pretty excessive.

Who defines "excessive"? Epstein is convenient but it would be more interesting to compare either a different "DEI suicide" like Mike Adams (much lower profile school, provocative but not a fraud) or a different kind of academic fraud like Dan Ariely or Francisca Gino. I'd imagine Ariely/Gino also generated hundreds of articles, but maybe not in quite such a concentrated period.

But off the top of my head no example captures a proper parallel, because a proper parallel doesn't exist, can't exist; there's too much intersectionality to the situation. Mike Adams is the Tony Timpa to Arday's Floyd moment. A huge swathe of modern Western culture is optimized to pay attention to that intersection; that focus remains for good and ill.

Normal people plan for self defense as a potential and necessary option, but they do not day dream about the shedding of blood.

Normal people don't become journalists.

But off the top of my head no example captures a proper parallel, because a proper parallel doesn't exist, can't exist; there's too much intersectionality to the situation.

Not even intersectionality. Most people didn't have an "autobiography" that's seeming to be chock full of more lies than Marco Polo's journal about to be published that they were gearing up to do a press tour for at the time the scandal reared up.

Arday wasn't the major story, it was Cambridge circling the wagons and essentially upgrading Arday to the walking avatar of 'Academia is a stupid circlejerk more concerned with DEI than actually doing anything productive' that really drew the media attention. If the immediate response hadn't been a week of Cambridge's best and brightest circling the wagons around a clearly naked Emperor, the whole thing plays out considerably differently. Epstein genuinely isn't that interesting a story beyond the maybe Intelligence links. If anything, the sheer confabulation of Epstein with braindead 'billionaires are sacrificing 4 year olds to Cthulhu'-posting or acting like he's any sort of a unique level of depravity provider are the bigger issues with how the story is portrayed.

I just realized this is basically Gamergate, but for respectable people.

That's a great comparison. The Emperor is so palpably naked and they just can't help themselves.

Spice leads to attention. I'm sure that if you did a full review of academia you could find quite a bit of misconduct, some of it similarly blatant. "Someone makes extremely outlandish claims, holds a prestigious job for years with seemingly no one checking, and multiple attempts to expose him lead to nothing or are actively quashed" is already a pretty spicy story, even in a world where Arday was white.

There's the whole meta left-vs-right debate about "Did Arday get away with it because of DEI?" vs "The right only cares because he's black and they can blame DEI/black people" but the right has the upper hand in this fight because as mentioned above this was a pretty unforced error by Cambridge and even if the left's argument is correct it doesn't change this takeaway. The left just looks like it's engaging in "Republicans pounce."

The sheer outlandishness of the claims is a factor as well. Bro makes Leo in Catch Me If You Can look like a punk. For God's sake, he was a time-traveling, long distance running cyborg Rainman with 3 kinds of gigacancer! This is amplified further by how breathtakingly gullible and stupid it makes all the credentialed people who believed him seem.

Basically, the story is a lot more fun than "Academic #3475 faked a data set".

all the credentialed people who believed him

they did not believe him. You are not nearly cynical enough.

I think you're not nearly cynical enough if you don't believe that the vast majority of them did believe him. Intentionally modifying one's own judgment faculties in order to honestly believe in things that are convenient for one's status within the ideology is basically ubiquitous among the more involved in the ideology, which is basically everyone in one of these departments. It's something Arthur Chu referenced a while ago on Slate Star Codex, that he "mindkills" himself regulary so that the tendencies in his brain that would be reluctant to SocJus claims can be appropriately suppressed

I know. Calling them breathtakingly gullible and stupid is one of those fun insult "conclusions" where any defense just makes it so much worse.

It's a gotcha question. Either:

a) they believed him (meaning they're stupid and gullible, hence unqualified to make hiring decisions), or

b) they didn't believe him, but hired him anyway (meaning they knowingly hired a con artist).

Third option: they plead ignorance to those claims, and argue that they only looked at his academic and interview credentials, and didn't know about anything else other than that a routine background check came up clean. Also damning, but less obviously so to the public eye (who is likely to be unfamiliar with how Arday's work compared to any other sociologist or academic), and therefore able to be clung to.

Bro makes Leo in Catch Me If You Can look like a punk.

If you're trying to point out that reality is stranger than fiction, then you might be interested to know that Frank Abagnale Jr. was a real person, so it's more like reality being stranger than another reality.

I think the consensus now is that Abagnale Jr. is a meta-fraud. Most of the exploits in the movie were made up. See his wikipedia.

Yeah, but I can't decide if that's more or less impressive

They should make a meta-comedy sequel about Frank Abegnale scamming Steven Spielberg and just hanging out on set stealing food/making up random lies to keep himself entertained.

That's what I meant by spiciness. "Guy makes completely believable lies and is eventually caught" doesn't have that factor that makes it memorable or that you want to talk more about it. This caught attention because of the layers of absurdity and incompetence to the extent that if it wasn't because he was black then you have to wonder how it happened. Either way you choose to spin it a bunch of people besides Arday come out looking really bad and that's why this story has legs.

For God's sake, he was a time-traveling, long distance running cyborg Rainman with 3 kinds of gigacancer!

Also a professional snooker player and semi-pro London footballer.

As an example, does anyone even remember that Stanford's (white) president was forced to resign in 2023 over research misconduct brought forward by the student newspaper? Fabricating (literal data manipulation!) Alzheimer's research in Nature you'd think would be a bigger deal. He's still a professor there, even.

Attention ≠ importance is a general problem. e.g. Far more articles on celebrities than the ongoing Sudan genocide, or the outsized attention on trans rights.

Fortunately, you can ignore the repetitive articles, and they do provide more general insights. e.g. In many arguments, trans can be substituted for other minorities.

In this case, I feel sympathetic towards Arday and that the system failed him, he was in a distorted world and suddenly forced to confront reality. But it was more important he got help than affect others' actions that he could've largely ignored (by not checking the news, or only checking a sympathetic outlet).

Isn’t this just a sign that what you think is important just isn’t important. 30m Argentinian Ants die per year in San Diego in a colony war. Sudan is a technologically unsophisticated country on land that no technologically sophisticated country wants. Nothing that happens in Sudan has any effect on first world nations or the broad arch of human civilization.

TransCulture has an effect on first world fertility and feeds into the replication of advanced western civilization.

I don't think so. News has incentive to be sensational and over-dramatic, and it is. More people are afraid of shark attacks than car crashes, because a run-of-the-mill shark attack will reach the news but a car crash won't, but the latter are more likely and dangerous.

Why would mass Sudanese genocide not be sensationalize? I’m sure there are piles of bodies to photograph? But no one cares about Sudanese because they have no influence on anything.

it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion

Not everybody's. What about 'I win and you lose' as a ruleset? That's what they actually want. When it's Farage or someone they don't like, the media is holding them to account. At no point are these rules intended to be applied fairly, it's like how Lockheed Martin doesn't give Iran missiles to shoot back.

See if you shoot missiles at them you get into a conflict! This is why you shouldn't shoot missiles! I told you so!

But I want to get into a conflict, that's why I'm shooting missiles. I want to win and secure control and reap spoils of war!

I think some don't understand the culture war, it's a kind of war after all. Wars have certain levels of escalation management and there can be negotiated peace deals but fundamentally they're about using force to achieve goals. Sometimes I saw people saying about war 'why not just do arbitration instead or go to the UN or do an elaborate computer simulation to see who would win' but the violence is the point, that's the proof of work that no judge or agreement can override and sometimes it just feels good to hurt people.

Not everybody's. What about 'I win and you lose' as a ruleset? That's what they actually want. When it's Farage or someone they don't like, the media is holding them to account. At no point are these rules intended to be applied fairly, it's like how Lockheed Martin doesn't give Iran missiles to shoot back.

That ruleset is fantastic only if it is truly the case that God or the moral arc of history is on your side, since you can guarantee that that ruleset will win out. Otherwise, that can invite alternate rulesets that are even harsher for oneself than it would have been towards others, and it can make that alternate ruleset both more likely and just in a way that the original ruleset wasn't. Thus one can genuinely believe that it's fantastic for oneself/one's party/one's ideology/etc. if one has unwavering faith that they are on the side of God right side of history, even if it is, in fact, not the case that it's fantastic for oneself. This, of course, is an obvious risk that immediately presents itself the moment you start dealing with faith, which is something that anyone who's had even a semester of higher education should find intuitive; that any college-educated people would fall for this is a tremendous condemnation of the higher education system as it exists today and certainly within the last few decades.

That ruleset is fantastic only if it is truly the case that God or the moral arc of history is on your side, since you can guarantee that that ruleset will win out.

It's also fantastic if you don't believe rulesets exist in any meaningful way. That is, "ruleset" implies and assumes that good outcomes can arrive by some mechanistic process outside one's own direct control, that one can meaningfully win not only through enforcing one's own will, but by "the rules" declaring one a winner, and that this will be respected by all parties involved.

"I win and you lose" is the default of the ingroup fighting the outgroup, always has been and always will be, because that's how human minds work. If you have sufficient cohesion that I (or we) covers a supermajority of the population, then you can prop a dinky NASCAR-commemorative-china ruleset on top and pretend it's running the show. Then the level of cohesion drops and the china set totters off and hits the concrete floor and shatters into a million irreparable pieces.

None of this is about rules. Rules are not going to solve any of these problems.

Or if you vest thé ruleset in partial institutions, of course.

I don't think you have to believe you're on the side of good, just that enough of your enemies are sufficiently unscrupulous that they would always evoke maximally harsh rulesets against you if they won (so don't let them win at any cost).

I don't think you have to believe you're on the side of good, just that enough of your enemies are sufficiently unscrupulous that they would always evoke maximally harsh rulesets against you if they won (so don't let them win at any cost).

"Good" isn't a perfectly easily-definable term, but I'd say that anyone who truly believes that their enemies are sufficiently unscrupulous in that way is someone who can accurately be said to believe that they are on the side that is "good" in some meaningful way that their enemies aren't.

But also, believing that the "I win and you lose" ruleset is a particularly good way to guarantee forever that "I win and you lose" happens (which is very important, because if I lose and you win, then you will be particularly unscrupulous towards me) seems naive to the point of (self-)malice. A ruleset like that is just going to encourage people to circumvent the ruleset and also eventually subvert it, in a way that a ruleset that isn't just purely and obviously who/whom doesn't. And the only way to believe that such attempts to circumvent/subvert will never succeed is if one believes in some supernatural force willing it so, whether that's God or a god or the moral arc of history or whatever.

Sometimes I saw people saying about war 'why not just do arbitration instead or go to the UN or do an elaborate computer simulation to see who would win' but the violence is the point, that's the proof of work that no judge or agreement can override and sometimes it just feels good to hurt people.

So what I'm hearing is that the objectively best solution is to replace warfare with giant robots in a civilized fighting tournament.

Almost. Lose the giant robots, use maids.

Nanomachines might be a point of failure.

Inventing nanomachines is still easier than making thousands of kg of steel move like ballerinas...

I have observed in the past that warfare has gotten, for lack of a better term, more abstract in the last century or two. Time was, you fight because the enemy would sack your cities, take your lands, put you and yours to the sword, or similar. But those things are unseemly by modern Western standards (not saying they don't happen, though). Modern states fight for principles or alliances or things like that, and we'd likely prefer to force surrender (or at least negotiations) rather than aim for maximum destruction. See the current Iran conflict: we certainly could strike bridges and power plants, but that's not abstract like we'd like it (not judging, merely observing).

It seems the logical conclusion is that we'll move to warfare between entirely-robotic forces, with any human casualties seen as "gross, icky, war-crime material". On the other hand, the abstraction only works when all parties accept the implication: the Taliban didn't have the good sense to give up in the face of overwhelming force that wasn't accompanied by wanton destruction. Neither does Iran, it seems.

Not quite. War goals have gotten more abstract, but this is a side effect of the underlying cost/benefit analysis.

When most humans were right on the edge of subsistence farming, you could pay for conquest by extracting tribute, taxes, or slaves. As technology got more complex, the value of a conquered peasant’s labor went down, but you still needed raw materials and food.

Now the first world has basically all the unskilled labor and cheap goods it could want. It produces unbelievable amounts of food. Its most successful businesses are three, four, five steps removed from actually manufacturing stuff out of normal, boring materials. So how are you supposed to monetize a conquest?

National security. When everything your country does has a better rate of return than fighting, you only fight to get back to the other stuff. Hence “making the world safe for democracy.” Hence the Cold War. Now it’s counterterrorism and FONOPs. We slogged through the War on Terror because we had a war goal of never letting anybody try that shit again. Wanton destruction didn’t actually bring that any closer to fruition.

So yeah, we’re setting stupid, impractical war goals. All the old-fashioned ones are economic non-starters. What’s left is power projection supporting our other, more valuable activities.

On the other hand, the abstraction only works when all parties accept the implication: the Taliban didn't have the good sense to give up in the face of overwhelming force that wasn't accompanied by wanton destruction. Neither does Iran, it seems.

Yes, unfortunately, it gives any defector in the system too much power, so long as public opinion will be on their side as poor victims. If public opinion of Iran's behavior was similar to that of General Sherman talking about the South, things would be far, far different, I feel.

A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many, many peoples with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence.

I meant "in everyone's best interest" in the Rawlsian veil of ignorance sense. In a realpolitik sense, obviously it's best if you can design the rules so that they always benefit your ingroup and hurt your outgroup. Most progressives at least pretend to believe that justice is (or should be) blind.

Oh I missed that... I think though we overcare about Rawls though. The veil of ignorance is something that cannot exist.

No one thinks the veil of ignorance can actually exist. It's a thought experiment meant to guide our intuitions, basically a more sophisticated version of the golden rule.

The golden rule has no impossible prerequisites.

Whereas Rawls thought experiment is impossible, it presupposes a kind of disembodied soul that could land in a body with abilities, wealth and social status at random. It presupposes that the disembodied souls can collectively decide how to distribute wealth and organize political systems in a binding way before they even get their bodies.

Anyone could write up some impossible principles and say 'oh everyone in this fantasy world would behave like this', that doesn't make it valid.

Better to conduct moral reasoning from conventional premises than from impossible premises.

The golden rule has no impossible prerequisites.

It does, though. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." But that requires me to imagine myself in circumstances that would never and can never befall me (it's impossible for me to have been born with one leg, or been born a woman, or been born a different ethnicity), just as the veil of ignorance does.

At least as regards speech restrictions, the historical evidence is that even rules that are intended to be used exclusively by ingroup against outgroup end up mostly being used to settle personal beefs within the ingroup.

Also groupthink. All ideologies are flawed, and if you can't point out flaws without greater risk to yourself, you get Stalin, woke, LinkedIn (iykyk), etc.

These proposals do not come from a place of genuine concern or worry. This is damage control and limitation for their ideology. They don't give a fuck about Arday beyond being able to leverage his final gift to them in order to prevent further ideological damage.

The left was caught diversity hiring to one of the most prestigious organisations in the land, deliberately and wilfully overlooking obvious lies and inability in order to do so. Their devotees blindly defended him without even looking at the claims, because he was a black man. All of this concern about Arday's decision to die rather than face scrutiny is simply an attempt to limit or prevent anyone exposing more of their diversity hires. And there will be more. There will be a lot more.

Exposing frauds is in the public interest and exposing Arday is one of the few good things the media has done in recent times. I would be in favour of a guideline that future Ardays be placed into protective custody until the landscape settles, if indeed anything must be done about such things.

During the 2010s, when conservatives were getting banned from social media left and right, a common smug refrain I heard from progressives was "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want". I continually pleaded with these people to understand: it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion. You really do not want to set a precedent that social media companies can ban anyone they disagree with and they have no recourse. Every company undergoes ideological drift, whether slowly or all at once: the fact that Facebook moderators share your worldview now is no guarantee that they will a year from now. "They're a private company, they can do what they want" will come back to bite you in the ass when some billionaire who doesn't share the progressive worldview buys a social media network and moulds it in his own image.

I'm not a progressive, but from a more libertarian leaning, I actually agree with the statement, "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want."

I'm happy if Blue Sky wants to make and enforce rules that favor their progressive/liberal base, and I'm happy if Elon Musk's Twitter/X wants to make and enforce rules that favor conservatives. Isn't that how it is supposed to work?

I can sort of understand the idea of wanting large social media sites to be common carriers, but I kind of fail to understand why it should be necessary. Did the Founding Fathers feel like every printing press in existence needed to be a common carrier that would print anything that wasn't illegal, or did they understand that if there were enough competing print shops, then Shop A might refuse to print something for Cause X, but Shop B would probably be happy to print it?

In the past, the way the mob denied you free speech was by destroying your printing press three times and then murdering you when you didn't get the message. I actually don't think any of the tactics that people use to shut down free speech these days come anywhere close to being that bad. By comparison to that, Americans have been living in a free speech utopia for decades, and barely have anything to complain about. I say this, even as I do think cancel culture and deplatforming are bad.

I'd be far more likely to support laws forcing credit card companies to be common carriers for anything that's not actually illegal, as I have witnessed Visa and Mastercard absolutely demolish free speech online over the last few years, because they're too prudish around niche fetish erotica. There is always cryptocurrency as a workaround, but I would just prefer one of the big governments (EU, US - I don't care) to pass a law that forces the credit card companies to knock it off, and stop worrying about fictional depictions of taboo things that can't possibly hurt anyone. Who elected the credit card companies as the arbiters of morality anyways? Unfortunately, very few people are willing to die on the hill of defending niche fetish porn, so the actions of Visa and Mastercard have continued unabated.

I actually don't think any of the tactics that people use to shut down free speech these days come anywhere close to being that bad.

Killing people who say things you don't like is a tactic that people use to shut down free speech these days.

...Come to think of it, there were significant efforts to "destroy the printing press" of people whose speech was disfavored as well. Deplatforming, IDing as a "hate group" and debanking... is there a meaningful distinction you're pointing to here?

Even if things like SWATing and more direct attempts to kill people over speech are occasionally practiced, I would say that the vast majority of cases of people talking about encroachments of free speech online is the confused masses crying wolf over and over again. As part of my work, I ended up meeting a man in his 70's who was hardcore MAGA, and he told me that he thought Elon Musk had done more for free speech than anyone alive today.

And don't get me wrong. I'm genuinely happy Elon Musk bought Twitter/X, because I do think it had a positive effect on the quality of societal debate, but I think it is silly to suggest that he did anything to free speech one way or the other.

Far too often, the signal of genuinely worrying encroachments on free speech like the Biden government sending messages to large social media sites asking them to take certain posts down during COVID, or Donald Trump asking universities for control of hiring and firing practices, are drowned out by nothingburgers like "Person X got banned from Platform Y", which almost definitionally cannot have an effect on free speech one way or another.

Like, does anyone believe that Elijah Lovejoy's abolitionist beliefs didn't effectively blacklist him from writing articles in mainstream newspapers? A particular print shop is absolutely allowed to say, "Sorry Mr. Lovejoy, we won't publish your extreme beliefs." So too, a particular website is allowed to say, "Sorry, we don't allow that kind of talk here."

The thing that is killing societal debate is the fact that people are unserious and uncurious. They don't seek out opposing viewpoints, and they double down on dogmatic thinking that leaves no room for debate. They don't care about what is true, they only care about wielding power against their political enemies. And sadly, I think this kind of uncurious thinking is taking root on both sides of the political aisle. I respect genuinely independent thinkers who come to unique positions by following the evidence come what may, but they are a vanishingly small portion of the population.

As part of my work, I ended up meeting a man in his 70's who was hardcore MAGA, and he told me that he thought Elon Musk had done more for free speech than anyone alive today.

And don't get me wrong. I'm genuinely happy Elon Musk bought Twitter/X, because I do think it had a positive effect on the quality of societal debate, but I think it is silly to suggest that he did anything to free speech one way or the other.

Far too often, the signal of genuinely worrying encroachments on free speech like the Biden government sending messages to large social media sites asking them to take certain posts down during COVID,

Biden retaliated against Elon Musk (via capricious investigations of his other companies, fraudulent revocations of subsidies, etc.) for allowing the deplorables back onto Twitter. Musk lost ~$50 billion in net worth from that. If the COVID issue implicated free speech, I think this (the threat, implicit or explicit, of which we have to assume was behind a lot of the deplatforming by other social media and by pre-Musk Twitter) clearly does too. Of course, I'll also note that given the massive vibe shift from uncensoring Twitter, SJ's consensus-astroturfing operation does seem to have been quite successful until then; even had the US government not been involved, that does really seem like an instance of the problem free speech attempts to fix.

Also, missed this when writing my other reply:

I'd be far more likely to support laws forcing credit card companies to be common carriers for anything that's not actually illegal, as I have witnessed Visa and Mastercard absolutely demolish free speech online over the last few years, because they're too prudish around niche fetish erotica.

Do note that some (though not all) of that niche fetish erotica is illegal in at least some non-US Western jurisdictions. Those laws are bad, I break them, and I want them repealed, but it does somewhat complicate the matter.

As part of my work, I ended up meeting a man in his 70's who was hardcore MAGA, and he told me that he thought Elon Musk had done more for free speech than anyone alive today.

And he's right. All the rest were willing to censor, and censor heavily, on behalf of the deep state.

drowned out by nothingburgers like "Person X got banned from Platform Y", which almost definitionally cannot have an effect on free speech one way or another.

Except it did, because this was a coordinated, partisan, ideologically biased, cross-platform censorship system which was encouraged and directed by parts of the government.

And he's right. All the rest were willing to censor, and censor heavily, on behalf of the deep state.

Even Grok doesn't believe that claptrap. Elon Musk is just as willing to censor for the government as all the other big tech CEO's, he just talks a better game about it.

I mean thé issue with ‘different social media sites for different folks’ is that unlike newspapers, social media sites become better with widespread adoption- they’re more like a telecom company than a newspaper. The dynamics will always point to a smaller number of social media sites rather than a larger one, and those social media sites will be good at different things.

I guess my stumbling block is that I don't think widespread adoption or reach is necessary for free speech to flourish.

Elijah Parish Lovejoy's abolitionist pamphlets almost certainly had less reach than big city, mainstream newspapers of the time. He probably had a short list of subscribers who shared around his pamphlets when they were done reading them.

How are people, Left or Right, who complain about not being allowed on a given platform, not doing the equivalent of Lovejoy hypothetically complaining, "The big city newspapers should be forced by law to have a column written by me about abolition, so I can have the maximum reach possible!"

Free speech does nothing to guarantee reach. You have free speech if you're allowed to run a dinky WordPress site off of a Raspberry Pi, or hand out your pamphlets on the street corner.

If the big city newspaper doesn't want to run an article you wrote advocating your political position, or a large social media site would ban you for saying certain things, this has no larger implications for free speech, as long as there are other venues where you can say those things.

I just feel like people are being lazy when they insist that the large social media sites must carry their opinion. Like, yes I too would prefer to say my piece on Facebook instead of actually doing the hard work of printing out pamphlets and distributing them at train stations like a Jehovah's Witness. But the fact that you're unwilling to do the latter thing in advancement of your political goals just shows you are a coward and a hypocrite on top of being lazy, not that you have actually had any free speech rights denied in any meaningful sense.

Elijah Lovejoy replaced his vandalized printing press two times, and died for his beliefs. What have you done recently?

Ok, but are big city newspaper held responsible for the content they publish?

Social media sites are not, they are considered, in the jurisdiction that matters (US), protected by Section 230 as utilities are. Someone can say something completely illegal on Facebook and Facebook does not get in trouble. The reason why social media sites are given this protection is because forcing them to moderate content would have been, when the decision was made technically difficult , and out of concern that it would have a chilling effect on lawful speech.

Now since then they have demonstrated that they are both able to moderate, and also moderate in a way that chills some lawful speech, why do they need or deserve this protection? Of course, stripping them of this protection will make them very vulnerable to lawsuits, which they will probably want to avoid. So it's likely they will change their moderation policies (reducing the amount or kind of speech that is moderated) to maintain the protections.

Now since then they have demonstrated that they are both able to moderate, and also moderate in a way that chills some lawful speech

I think this is a silly statement. Any platform worth being on will moderate some lawful speech, no matter how big or small.

I wouldn't join a Facebook parent's group if it was 90% spam ads for children's toys that I don't need. I wouldn't go to /r/DnD if it was 95% low effort AI slop. I wouldn't go to the Motte if they didn't moderate for tone.

All of the content in those three examples is perfectly legal, and I don't want to see any of it. Or if I do want to see it, I want it on a dedicated place.

I don't actually think there is a principled argument that could separate that necessary function of making any online space worth going to, and possibly restricting certain kinds of legal speech.

If you want to change the law and make the companies subject to suing and litigation, fine. But it is awfully silly to do it because they restrict lawful speech, because they all have to restrict lawful speech in some way.

Also, I think you're just not thinking about the second and third order effects of changing this. In your ideal world, do you think the Motte being subject to suing based on what its users post would make it a better or worse platform for discussion than it currently is?

I can see several ways around this. First would be technical moderation being considered different; it could either for messages that don't qualify as they are of a nature that inherently impede effective communication (ie: spam), or speech that is deemed off-topic. Then there's also distinctions that could be made between platforms that aim to service "specific communities" or are meant for "everyone". Facebook and Twitter at large, ignoring specific Facebook groups, are marketing themselves as social media for everyone. Then from there you could distiguish that hte platform is Facebook, or Reddit, not /r/DnD, and so while /r/DnD could enjoy the moderation they want, Reddit could not without risking their Section 230 protection ban someone from making /r/DnDAISlop.

Ultimately, beneficial moderation is likely to become irrelevant and unnecessary as AI will enable bespoke filtering of content. Whether it will be good or bad for humanity with regards to our already strong filter bubbles I'm not sure, but I think it's inevitable at this point.

Then there's also distinctions that could be made between platforms that aim to service "specific communities" or are meant for "everyone". Facebook and Twitter at large, ignoring specific Facebook groups, are marketing themselves as social media for everyone. Then from there you could distiguish that hte platform is Facebook, or Reddit, not /r/DnD, and so while /r/DnD could enjoy the moderation they want, Reddit could not without risking their Section 230 protection ban someone from making /r/DnDAISlop.

I'm not sure the sites actually want to be for everyone, though. Reddit admin eliminated /r/CreepShots, because they didn't want to deal with the bad publicity of their website encouraging people to take candid photos of women out in public. Even if we assume a world where they could limit /r/CreepShots to such jurisdictions where taking photos of strangers in public without their permission was legal, do you think that Reddit's section 230 protection should be contingent upon Reddit admin allowing /r/CreepShots to exist whether they want it to or not?

Should Reddit have been forced to keep up /r/jailbait, which was "just" provocative images of fully clothed teenage girls?

Should Tumblr have been forbidden from banning porn from their platform back in 2019? Or is your expectation that all of social media should basically be a porn free for all, if sites want to keep their section 230 protections?

I just think that platform owners will legitimately have visions for how they would like their platforms to be used. And there will obvious, easy to put into writing criteria, like, "We don't want spam on this site", and there will be more nebulous, vibes based things like, "We don't want anything that would make it hard for advertisers to advertise on our site", or "We don't want anything that will reduce shareholder price or affect our brand image", and I personally think those are legitimate concerns for platforms to consider. They need to make money to keep operating, and I'm not sure the government forcing them to become common carriers will actually be the best way to keep these large sites operating in the long term.

Don't get me wrong, I find it extremely frustrating when run of the mill monetary concerns diminish a site I enjoy. I remember when TV Tropes Wiki had to disallow certain kinds of adult tropes and content, because the advertisers the site needed to stay afloat wouldn't advertise if those pages existed. But should TV Tropes Wiki really have been forced to choose between A) having the advertising revenue they needed to stay afloat but opening themselves up to being sued due to losing section 230 protections, or B) having to shut down the site because they couldn't find advertisers willing to advertise on their platform?

Heck, even if you want to argue that in a social-media-as-common-carrier world, everything will work out, and advertisers will make deals to only be shown on certain subreddits and never on others, do you really think platforms will want to devote database space, server cost, etc. to subreddits or accounts they can never get advertising revenue off of? They'll ban them for some other pretense, because who wants to be forced to have 10 Pentabytes of creepshots and jailbait photos that you can't even make any advertising money off of taking up space on your platform?

I can sort of understand the idea of wanting large social media sites to be common carriers, but I kind of fail to understand why it should be necessary. Did the Founding Fathers feel like every printing press in existence needed to be a common carrier that would print anything that wasn't illegal, or did they understand that if there were enough competing print shops, then Shop A might refuse to print something for Cause X, but Shop B would probably be happy to print it?

The argument's based around network effects/natural monopolies and correlated incentives.

  1. Social media is a natural monopoly, or at least an oligopoly based around different products, because people want large reach which means they tend to prefer sites that are already large (a network effect). This means that Moloch doesn't bite at full force on failure to obey the market incentive of "serve everyone who wants to be served". Note how most of Web 2.0 - the enormous profusion of specialised fora that took off in the early oughties - withered on the vine when the major social media sites started sucking up all the people; I can think of one site I visit that's grown massively in the late tens and twenties (Questionable Questing), but it is worth noting that QQ's niche is primarily that for the most part no titan site wants to host QQ's type of content due to the immense reputational and legal issues (most of its content is fanfic, which is in a legal grey area; much of it is erotic stories and cartoons of characters under 18 which is legally CP in the non-US Anglosphere (and AIUI decent chunks of the EU) and sends even most US advertisers running away screaming).

  2. Relying on the various social media companies to pursue different non-commercial agendas doesn't always work, because the non-market incentives on them are not independent; they're highly correlated. All the major social media companies implemented the same SJ-based censorship from ~2014-22, because they were all being pressured (by cancellation, by jawboning, by being convinced, etc) by the same pressure group. Elon Musk broke that lockout, yes, but he did so in explicit defiance of his incentives (he lost about $50 billion from Joe Biden's retaliation over the next couple of years); true believers that committed and that rich are rare, and it's questionable whether someone else could/would have done it in his place (IIRC Zvi Mowshowitz had it as a pie-in-sky idea, but couldn't figure out where to get the money); certainly, if you look at theMotte back then, many of us weren't exactly hopeful.

It's not quite as strong as the argument for regulation of e.g. water/power companies, but it gets pretty close.

That’s great. Can my private company not hire people because I don’t like their skin color?

Sure, why not?

If we were going to keep anti-discrimination laws, I would prefer to limit them to "essential" domains, like hospitals, banking, and communication technology. I think that that is sufficient for keeping a functional free market where all can participate.

If we really wanted to keep anti-discrimination around employment, I would prefer for it to be limited to military and government jobs, and I would want to implement it in a way that doesn't lower standards in any dangerous domain. (So all the 115+ IQ black men get slurped up to places they are competent to carry out the work, and the remainder get government janitor jobs or something with great benefits.)

You can in fact set up some workarounds to that.

Isn't that adjacent to how the Arday situation manifested?

Companies began filtering on university degrees because they could, then everyone needed a degree.

No.

Companies began filtering for degrees because degrees filtered for more than just raw IQ, even if they were degrees in psychology or art history. IQ tests remain legal in hiring unless they can be shown to be used for the purpose of disparate impact(which on the case of Griggs was blatantly true). The private sector uses the Wunderlic test all the time. Most decent noncollege jobs, and not a few college jobs, require aptitude tests that are heavily G-loaded. Degrees (used to)show the ability to work in a white collar environment productively and without rocking the boat, and that is why they became required for white collar employment.

Companies that really want to discriminate have a very limited number of loopholes, but it’s technically doable- there’s a handful of companies which require new hires to join a particular private club, for instance(the largest of these is the knights of Columbus insurance corp, which is Fortune 500- obviously this means they hire only male practicing Catholics with conservativish political views- but these jobs are posted publicly to job boards in view of the public). And hooters declares all of its front of house staff actresses to get away with the crazy high levels of discrimination.

If the progressives arguing "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want" really meant it, I'd have no problem with this line of reasoning.

But after Musk bought out Twitter and started banning people he didn't like, these same people were rending their hair. They didn't actually believe the libertarian principle that privately owned social media companies can do what they please: they just mistakenly believed that these privately owned social media companies would always be owned by people sympathetic to their progressive worldview.

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