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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   30468 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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The Cancel-Culture Troll with a Neo-Nazi Past. This is an exposé on the RationalWiki editor behind several cancellations of intelligence researchers including Bo Winegard and Noah Carl.

He used to be a white nationalist on Stormfront before flipping to the other extreme and attacking the reputations and destroying the careers of academics by writing defamatory articles under multiple pseudonyms.

He was later banned from RationalWiki for, among other things, writing articles about and doxxing other editors. Although he was easily able to ban evade and continued to use RationalWiki to attack academics.

This overall situation has created a climate of fear among intelligence researchers. Two prominent and tenured academics, who had not previously been attacked by Smith, initially offered to write this article; both later reneged out of concern over what Smith might do to their careers in retaliation. I ultimately agreed to write it because as someone outside academia, my career is less vulnerable than theirs to these types of attacks.

There are few places on the internet I've got more disdain for than RationalWiki. It's a cesspit, on the same tier as /r/Sneerclub. Even rdrama is at least funny and not nearly as malicious.

And it's also squatting on a perfectly good name for a wiki that could deal with actual rationality for one.

What sort of people actually use rationalwiki? It's also seemed pretty terrible to me.

Anyone who hears about Emil Kirkegaard, Steve Sailer et al, for the first time, googles them, and picks the result that shows up very near top.

This was true before they became (in)famous enough to have Wikipedia pages. Not that there’s a big ideological gulf between Rationalwiki and Wikipedia.

I have no clue, I've yet to see anyone use it for any purpose myself. To me, it seems like it only has a minor degree of relevance from simply being one of the places people searching for random rat-adjacent concepts might accidentally end up if they don't know better. They see wiki and think it has to have some legitimacy.

I remember seeing it in a search for Roco's Basilisk a long time back, and while the Basilisk is a dumb idea, it deserves better than RWiki.

He used to be a white nationalist on Stormfront before flipping to the other extreme and attacking the reputations and destroying the careers of academics by writing defamatory articles under multiple pseudonyms.

LOL, can't make this stuff up. Feel like there's good material for a low-budget indie comedy somewhere in this origin story. Although, weren't the Nazis against IQ? I recall reading it somewhere. So perhaps the jump isn't as extreme as we might think...

He was later banned from RationalWiki for, among other things, writing articles about and doxxing other editors. Although he was easily able to ban evade and continued to use RationalWiki to attack academics.

This overall situation has created a climate of fear among intelligence researchers. Two prominent and tenured academics, who had not previously been attacked by Smith, initially offered to write this article; both later reneged out of concern over what Smith might do to their careers in retaliation.

The sad part is that he seems quite intelligent too. Very determined and resourceful for just one guy. Imagine if he spent all that energy to something actually useful instead of being a menacing supertroll.

I think it's pretty common. Horseshoe theory is around for a reason. It's the inverse of the Bernie-bro to MAGA pipeline that I've also heard about (though not recently).

Racialism and anti-racism have pretty similar underlying logic. It's not totally implausible.

the Bernie-bro to MAGA pipeline ...

As someone who was called a 'Bernie-bro' (I did a small amount of volunteering for the 2016 campaign); There was no pipeline. There was a fair amount of punishment votes but I can't think of one person I worked with that went MAGA.

It's more of anyone critical of Hillary gets put in the same box.

There is a Berniebro to MAGA pipeline because a significant number of Berniebros were Berniebros for populist reasons. They got betrayed by Bernie, voted Trump in protest at first, and are now MAGA. I know about a dozen people who are full MAGA volunteers who were Bernie supporters; they had Bernie gear and they donated to Bernie.

Maybe it's overblown and maybe you feel falsely labeled, but there is some truth to a significant number of people people who swapped from Bernie to MAGA and it's identified in polling in the 20-40 male demo. It's IDd in former Obama voters who voted Trump as well.

I think this is somewhat true but in general not only do white men largely vote Republican and have done for quite some time, but those who vote Democrat are mostly college educated, more cosmopolitan, PMC types (plus some residual blue collar union types, who had mixed views on Bernie) and they tended not to go full MAGA. Obviously rightist ‘blue tribe’ men are very much overrepresented on this forum.

A fun trick when you get very annoyed with the customer service of some business. Say "I'm a Wikipedia Editor and I'm currently looking at your company's Wikipedia page and right now I intend to edit it to reflect your poor customer service." Weird how the Internet can empower a single person willing to make certain types of anonymous complaints.

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