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Ordinarily I wouldn't post personal Reddit drama here, but the thread is slow and I'm mad.
Here is a post that I saw on /r/baseball:
Anthony Bass promoting anti-LGBTQ propaganda on his Instagram
You probably noticed that the thread is locked with a moderator message: "The trolls are flooding in, and the conversation has run its course at this point. Friendly reminder to love your neighbor, and that it's not intolerant to oppose bigotry. Everyone have a nice holiday Monday!"
This message was posted only a few minutes after I was permanantly banned from /r/baseball for comments in that very thread! In fact, I believe they are referring to me as one of the "trolls flooding in". Lets take a look under the hood to see what counts as perma-ban and threadlock-worthy comments.
First, the actual article in question. Anthony Bass is a pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays. He posted an Instagram story saying Christians should boycott Target and Bud Light. That's it. That's the "anti-LGBTQ propaganda". I posted a top-level comment in the thread sarcastically making this point.
Is this a high-effort comment? No, but if you are familiar with the sports subs at all then you know that this type of low-effort sarcasm is all over the place. That's the posting culture there. I also got involved in another comment thread.
This was the extent of my participation in the thread. I did not expect my comments to be particularly well-received by the Reddit population, but I felt that I pointed out enough legitimate issues that I would be safe from accusations of trolling. I was wrong.
Here is the modmail message I received informing me of my permanent ban, along with the brief conversation we had before they muted me with their absolute power.1 For reference, here are the /r/baseball rules. Would an honest reading of these rules give you any reason at all to think that anything I posted would not be allowed, much less permaban worthy? You would have to be steeped in internet leftist culture to understand that, "Trolling, threatening, harassing, or inciting violence towards individuals or groups will not be tolerated. Racist, sexist, or otherwise intolerant language in both comments and submissions will be removed." means that pointed questions against the progressive consensus will get you tossed out.
I understand why so many subreddits are complete circlejerks now. It's not about echo-chambers and voting dynamics. They literally just banned everyone who disagreed.
1. Here is the source they cited for their "62%" figure. I'll let you decide for yourself whether this poll is applicable
This just explains why I’ve radicalized. The conversation is over. It’s why I love Desantis attacking Disney though I think Disney falls within the spirit of free speech. The point of the game now is finding wedges of power and taking them when you got them. Use your power, use lawfare, break all norms. When you can take a win take a win. Any courtesies won’t be extended to you from the other side.
And by breaking thing I associate with civil society that’s where I think the right is winning. Texas lawsuit oriented abortion law pre-roe overturned was working. Lawfare works. Desantis Disney assault is working. Bud lights boycott led to the target change of corporate behavior. Busing migrants to blue cities worked. All of these are combinations of activision, lawfare, using government authority outside of the spirit of the constitution. Things the right wouldn’t do before. They need to keep doing these things and probably 10-50x the amount of them. And it’s why I’m a big Desantis backer because I think he’s the best the right has for working outside their comfort zone.
That’s fucking stupid.
What good is owning the libs if you have to dismantle civil society to do it?
Abandoning all courtesy doesn’t look like DeSantis. It looks like free helicopter rides. This isn’t some novel theory, but the oldest excuse in the book. Oddly enough, it doesn’t tend to work out in the long run.
DeSantis is most effective when he uses the rules in his favor. You’re getting way more actual value out of his educational reforms than from any grandstanding over Disney. The latter is intra-party maneuvering, not an external strategy.
The goal isn’t to “own the libs”. It’s to win and make society how you want it.
The Disney strategy is part of getting the PMC back in the fold. Right now they have to be woke because that’s the activist class that will hurt them. Punishing corporates for being woke and having a right activist class is part of a strategy to make corporates more neutral again.
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What good is overgrazing if it destroys the commons?
Well, if overgrazing secures you benefits, and the commons are going to be gone very soon regardless, then the choice is between securing some benefits by overgrazing, or securing little to no meaningful benefit as the commons disperse too many ways to be of value. This presumes the commons can't be meaningfully preserved, and that overgrazing is net-benefit at least for you personally, but neither seem unreasonable assumptions in a variety of real-world scenarios.
Getting back to the discussion over the weekend, your use of "civil society" is shorthand for a whole lot of points that can't, in fact, reasonably be assumed. The day before the Rwandan genocide, did Rwanda have "civil society"? The month before? The year before? Unless we're assuming spontaneous mass possession by demons, there has to be some sort of runup to the fabric of society abruptly failing, right? What does that runup look like?
The intra-party maneuvering is vital, in the same way a rudder is vital. It's the small things that determine where a much larger thing is going to go, and where the thing is going to go is the whole of the question. Without that, there's nothing of value in the exercise at all.
If you have a principled view that government enforcement of ideology against or through business interests is a bad idea, I invite you to climb into your time machine and deliver an impassioned plea to some point at least twenty years ago, probably more like fifty. It is far, far, far too late now.
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Civil society is already dismantled; instead we have a progressive orthodoxy wearing its skin. Case in point above, the conviction on felony charges of two tiki-torch carriers at the Unite the Right rally. If those in charge don't care to allow the right the benefit of "civil society" (including the right to protest), they should not be surprised when the right decides that what the left is calling "civil society" is of no value to them.
Civil society is partly dismantled but the current situation is nothing what it would be like if civil society were utterly dismantled. Our society is still vastly more similar to pre-wokism America than it is similar to anarchy or to a totalitarian dictatorship. Plus to me it seems that wokism reached a high-water mark sometime around two years ago and has actually been receding since then.
None of which to say that one should not be concerned, but to me it seems that saying civil society is dismantled and we have a progressive orthodoxy wearing its skin is almost as hyperbolic as saying that the Republicans are planning to put all transgender people in camps. It is, at best, directionally correct.
Yes, if it were utterly dismantled progressives might receive harm from the right.
No, what happened is Trump was defeated and as a result wokism is proceeding more efficiently and quietly because there's less opposition to it able to even be heard. At least until the Bud Light thing.
In the last few years, Musk bought Twitter and, encouraged by this, anti-wokists and race realists ran wild all over it. Substack became very popular and is now host to all kinds of respected independent journalism. Joe Rogan still has one of the world's most popular podcasts despite cancellation attempts. Conservatives managed to launch a successful wide-scale boycott. Non-wokes actually to large extent (not at the infrastructure level, but at almost every other level) managed to build their own Internet. Affirmative action policies were defeated in multiple California elections. Despite censorship, a bunch of city subreddits are full of people complaining about crime and saying that wokism has gone too far.
Musk is turning Twitter back over to mainstream media figure Linda Yaccarino. Substack is irrelevant. Meanwhile DEI initiatives continue to advance, prompted by Biden-administration regulations and by existing DEI supporters in industry, government, primary and secondary education, and universities. Left-wing cancelation continues unabated.
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Keep in mind, though, that Reddit does not represent the entire left. Especially when it comes to politics, and especially on the big subs, it highly over-represents constantly online, politically angry, mostly young wokes who are convinced that they are on the right side of history. It is like deciding that having a conversation with the right is pointless because 4chan exists.
Fair. It’s always a bit difficult to seperate online discourse from facts on the ground. Though it seems to me a lot of the online stuff bleeds into real stuff.
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Where the analogy fails is that the views of the modal 4chan right-winger are very far removed from those of any right-wing Anglophone who wields any power or influence (Holocaust denial is a meme on 4chan, but you'll never catch Trump, DeSantis, Johnson or Sunak saying anything which could be even uncharitably misconstrued as antisemitic).
By contrast, the typical opinions of Reddit mods may be unrepresentative of the left as a whole, but they are very representative of the views held by leftists and liberals who wield power and influence in Anglophone society. Pro-lockdown, pro-vaccination cert, pro-censorship, pro-hate speech legislation, pro-arming Ukraine, pro-trans, pro-BLM and so on. These stances may not be popular among the Anglophone left as a whole, but they are absolutely popular among our left-liberal ruling classes.
You make a good point. Maybe a bit exaggerated, because most leftists who wield power and influence in Anglophone society do not favor open borders, very high minimum wage and/or UBI, massively cutting the number of police, or other common Reddit causes. But still, a good point.
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Same here, in my case I go as far back as gamergate.
It was a harrowing experience to have all my lefty heroes seemingly turn into irrational monsters overnight who simply refused to listen and circled the wagons around a handful of clearly corrupt people.
That's when I got intimately familiar with the typical lefty 1-2 punch: first they silence you, and then they lie about what you said.
The couple years after gamergate was an experience of getting repeatedly caught off-guard and surprised by the sheer pettiness and malice of people I had respected and admired. We used to have a saying back in those days: you don't join GG, you get thrown in the pit with the rest of us; and, boy, was that the case for me.
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