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I've removed this post as it was just a copy-pasted article. Please remember:
In other words, this is a place for discussion. If you'd like to discuss this essay, you may link to it, even quote from it, but then you have to do the work of offering some evaluation or insight of your own. There is no minimum word count, but "low effort" is something that is often evidenced by a low word count.
On a somewhat meta point, this isn't the first case of a low-effort repost of some white nationalist rant on the Motte, is it? I'm starting to feel a little concerned that the Motte has been identified as a possible recruiting site by people in that sphere.
As Naraburns points out in another comment, if you want to stick to spaces where white nationalists are not allowed to attempt persuasive arguments in favor of our positions, you are welcome to try everywhere else on the entire internet. Can you let us have this one teeny-tiny space where we can actually have a respectful and open dialogue with people, allowing them to weigh our arguments without multiple layers of reinterpretation and misrepresentation by media gatekeepers? I do hope that’s not too much to ask.
It is too much to ask if those discussions crowd out everything else.
Just on a practical level if white nationalist talk floods the forum, it will cease to be an interesting forum to non-white nationalists.
There's a genuinely difficult problem here when it comes to creating an open discussion forum. If everything is allowed, at least some percentage of that everything will be vile. Many people don't want to be in a space where vile discussion occurs, and therefore will avoid it.
If there's a position that, by virtue of being included, will automatically lead to other positions self-excluding, then including that position may actually reduce the range of potential discussions. How to handle positions like that?
I can already hear the complaint - isn't this just giving a veto to the censorious and intolerant? And certainly it doesn't seem like a good thing to optimise for just having as many people as possible. The goal of the Motte isn't to get as many people as possible, so it definitely makes sense to just go ahead and let 'normies' feel uncomfortable if that's the price of attracting intelligent people with controversial ideas. However, even intelligent people with controversial ideas may not want to associate with certain ideas. So there should be a line, it seems to me?
The line shouldn't be placed at zero, where everything that offends anyone in the majority is banned. But neither should it be at one hundred, where literally everything is permitted including the guy who just likes to scream 'DIE N---ER DIE'. Where should the line be? If we want to curate a healthy, vibrant garden of ideas - where are the borders?
I know this will be interpreted as a call to censor. That's honestly not where I'm trying to go. My preference is to try to maximise the interchange of interesting ideas. It's just that how to do that isn't an easy question. It isn't resolved by just picking an an absolute principle like 'everyone is welcome full stop' and standing on that.
Anticipating an objection does not make it invalid.
You got there anyway. You appear to be trying to erase sharp distinctions (screaming "DIE N---ER DIE" versus discussing white identitarianism) in order to create a continuum where you can play the old game of "you have no hard and fast principles, we're just arguing over the price".
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On a purely individual level - should they do that? As a matter of fact, what's the harm from discussing disgusting ideas? I think, in an ideal sense, 'taboo ideas' wouldn't exist in the context of discussion. Whether that's 'is pedophilia good, actually', 'is slavery good, actually', 'is eugenics good, actually' - it raises very interesting philosophical questions that flesh out aspects of reality you would otherwise understand less. The writings of history's evil reactionaries deeply influenced the thought of history's foremost progressives, even though they were at odds morally.
It's also not a coincidence that the mainstream lines of thought on every taboo topic is hopelessly confused. That's what happens when you make intellectual inquiry taboo!
At the same time, you have to strictly enforce a quality floor, and be fine with that quality floor having a 'disparate impact' on the witches.
While I think, ideally, everyone should 'not defect' and tell all of the self-excluders to suck it, TheMotte is one of the very few spaces that does that and simultaneously maintains a quality bar (and also an implicit IQ/competence filter), which makes it especially important we allow such badthink.
It's all very well to claim to be above such tribal or social associations - but I very much doubt than anyone here is. I know that there are people interested in the Motte's ostensible purpose but who have quit the community because it contained too many witches, and was going down a groupthink-y hard right hole. The Schism is the most obvious example because it's a public community, but every individual who quits and doesn't advertise it adds to the count, but does not leave an obvious record to point to.
All humans are social animals. If you want to recruit exclusively from people who don't care about social associations, you're going to get only the tiny proportion of weirdos who don't care and the people who genuinely like the social associations here (i.e. the witches). It is not at all clear that the resulting community is going to be one that's maximally open to the discussion of interesting ideas.
I'm not claiming to be above tribal and social associations, that would be stupid - both in that it's untrue, and that it'd be dumb to do so, such tendencies exist because they're very useful!
I am claiming, however, to be interested in talking to people and considering ideas, no matter how disgusting or obviously wrong or taboo the topic is (and that does include far-left stuff, like weird kinks, anarchists, gender-abolitionists, authcoms, etc). And I think everyone should do that. Obviously this goes against natural tendencies and is generally a weird idea.
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You keep saying that, and keep refusing to back it up. If there are "intelligent" people with "controversial" opinions, who believe that merely being on the same forum as people with views they find vile creates some kind of "association" I very much doubt their intelligence, or the amount of controversy around their opinions. Maybe you can find me a unicorn that is both intelligent and controversial, and who doesn't want to post at The Motte because of the vileness of the views here (I'd love to meet them), but 99.9% of the time this will be the domain of the establishment-adjacent.
The line has been the same pretty much since the start of the community. All ideas are allowed, as long as you're civil. Given that the 'DIE N---ER DIE' dude was never allowed to post here, why are you acting like it's an open question?
Define 'intelligent and controversial'. As I just noted, there are certainly people I would describe as intelligent who cut down on their engagement with or quit the Motte as a result of the last year or two's decline.
It's possible to redefine 'intelligent' on the fly, such that everyone the Motte lost was a thinker not worth keeping. But I would say that's inherently a value judgement, and a very questionable one to boot. It's possible to define the Motte's Overton Window in a way that excludes, say, the Schism crowd but keeps the white nationalists and anti-semites. It's also possible to define it in a way that includes the Schismers but excludes the white nationalists and anti-semites. But it may not be possible to define it in a way that keeps both.
As I recall, the schism originally schism'd not over white nationalism, but over the moral approval of lethal self defense. That's a DAMNED slippery slope you're suggesting we set upon.
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Plenty of intelligent people wouldn't want to hang out here, it's the idea that they're both intelligent and controversial part that I don't buy, and the fact that you went for the Schismers as your example proves my point.
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Almost all people just don't want to be around ebil nazis, and this includes almost all very intelligent people, even those with controversial opinions. They're are incorrect/wrong to do so, but it's still true. Most very intelligent people are establishment-adjacent, too!
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I’m going to ask the same thing I asked Amadan during the discussion about JQ-posting: are white nationalist discussions crowding out everything else? A quick perusal of discussion topics in this week’s CWR suggests precisely the opposite. There are still tons of discussions about all sorts of topics on this forum. If people don’t like the race/identity threads they can hide them, the same way I hide discussions about LLMs or macroeconomics or other issues I feel unqualified to assess or weigh in on.
Amadan and I see additional topics because we are moderators. Plenty of things get filtered out and never removed from the filter. Lately, almost all of that filtered stuff is white nationalist type rants, and sometimes just fully copy pasted articles like above. Since the inception of this website our worst content violations have been ... white nationalist might not be the right word, since I doubt you'd want to associate with them. But users like die[n-words]die, with accompanying images in their profile.
As moderators, we really can't just completely ignore the white nationalist threads. We still have to enforce the rules here. So when fights flare up I have to go read the relevant threads. And the race threads are either consistently causing problems, or common enough that there is a constant influx of reports from those threads.
Basically the white nationalist types are bad neighbors. They move in and cause all kinds of fights and problems. As soon as you allow any of them in you have to create a strict dividing line to keep out their worst elements. And then when you point out these problems we are asked to pretend that they are not coming a single group. That group has claimed that they receive unfair discrimination from just about everyone. Does any of this sound familiar? How would you suggest handling such a troublesome group?
So, this is useful and sobering information for me to have, and I appreciate you sharing it. Obviously without seeing the specific threads you’re talking about, and without observing the behavior of the specific users responsible for them, it’s difficult for me to assess how likely it is that the vast majority of them are trolls or similarly bad-faith users. I would strongly suspect that this is true of the “die[Ns]die” guys, but I recognize my biases as far as that’s concerned. Certainly the more unseemly parts of the racialist right have never had a shortage of thuggish atavistic types and edge-lords like that.
I’ve been honest from the start in saying that my overriding concern here is to stringently oppose attempts to limit my own ability to responsibly present my views in this forum. I believe that my record, insofar as I have never been banned for any length of time by the moderators here, speaks to the fact that such views can be dealt with in ways that are well within the bounds of acceptable discourse here. I acknowledge that topics of race and identity are bound to evoke stronger and more negative emotions than other topics, and I acknowledge that this does create extra work for you guys relative to what’s created by more anodyne discussion topics, but from my non-moderator perspective, that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
All that being said, the analogy you imply in your final paragraph is both clever and incisive. I’m pretty much forced to take it seriously. I’d be a massive hypocrite not to! So, I guess I should probably ask: what, if anything, do you suggest that I personally should do in order to help ameliorate the issue. Is @fuckduck9000 correct that I should be more vociferously calling out apparent bad-faith posters who purport to share some funhouse-mirror version of my views? Would that even help at all? It sounds like the vast majority of these posts are being caught by the filter and never even make it to the sub, so I can’t really do anything about any of those.
So, here, I'm gonna post this in the main thread, but I'll show it to you first (and I guess anyone else who checks my comment page, hi there!) Here's the current prototype for the single-issue-poster rule:
We occasionally have trouble with people who turn into single-issue posters, posting and commenting only on a single subject. We'd like to discourage this. If you find yourself posting constantly on a single subject, please make an effort to post on other subjects as well.
This doesn't mean you need to write megaposts! This can be as simple as going to the Friday Fun Thread once in a while and posting a few paragraphs about whatever video game you last played. But this community is fundamentally for people, and if a poster is acting more like a propaganda-bot than a person, we're going to start looking at them suspiciously.
This rule is going to be applied with delicacy; if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're fine.
Does that work?
Honestly I'd like it if everyone did that more often :V
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Its often impossible for us to tell whether they are trolls or sincere users. I'm of the opinion that it doesn't really matter. If someone posts low effort crap because they are dumb, or because they are smart and running a 4d chess trolling, the end result is the same: there is low effort crap to be cleaned up.
There is very little you can do as a user. The volunteer system is still a thing, and that does help us a bit. Acting as community police can sometimes backfire, because it starts fights rather than ends them. Also I wouldn't be a huge fan of white nationalists policing each other's views and getting into a purity spiral on here.
If you want this forum to stay interesting and healthy I would suggest you cultivate other interests that are relevant here on the culture war threads. Then whenever you come to the culture war thread if you see that a race based topic has already been started you should post about your other interest instead. If you implement this advice and suddenly start to think "hey some idiot wasted my chance to have interesting discussion on the race topic by posting some low quality crap" then you will understand why we try to moderate low effort posts.
I've found that most people that have a single topic of interest have a real blind spot to other people's level of toleration for that topic. If you only like that one topic, you might be fine with 90% of the conversation being around that topic. If you hate that topic then you might feel that even 10% of the conversation spent on that topic is too much. And having interesting conversations with people is the limiting resource on this forum, so don't be surprised when even non-moderators complain about you stinking up the commons. Whatever your preferred amount of discussion about race is, everyone else who doesn't want to talk about it thinks that number is way too high.
I was a moderator over at slatestarcodex when we did the topic ban on race discussions. I recommended against it then, and I'd recommend against any topic bans right now. Based on my general sense from the other mods we are very very unlikely to ever to do a topic ban. The exception to that will probably be if encounter legal issues. But we also aren't going to ban people from saying 'jeez this topic is talked about way too much, we're really beating a dead horse here'. There is a certain amount of community policing that tends to arise on its own for over-done topics. And as I mentioned above, community policing often creates more fights than it ends. This is why I suggest having other interests. If the community heat level on the race topics starts getting too high, switch to your other interest. Without that ability to switch you just become part of a feedback loop.
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I think there's a difference between an open dialogue and low effort link spam.
I agree, but you did not express concern with low-effort link spam - your expressed concern was with white nationalists trying to “recruit” people. Given that this is your concern, shouldn’t you be more worried about white nationalists using sophisticated and high-effort argumentation in order to make our side look respectable and interesting, rather than posting shitty low-effort links, which makes us look lazy and bad-faith?
It's worth noting that attempting to build consensus is explicitly against the Motte's rules, and the top post of every Culture War thread says:
So when I object to 'recruiting' I am objecting to something that is already forbidden here.
I am not objecting to people being honestly persuaded of things.
I acknowledge that the line between trying to convince someone of something and trying to recruit someone into a movement can be pretty hazy. "Here's why I think Marxism is true" isn't that far away from "you should become a Marxist and join the class struggle" - indeed, if Marxism is true, then becoming a Marxist and joining the class struggle may logically follow from that. But I still think there's some value in trying to allow the former type of post but not the latter, even if the borders are unclear.
To take this specific example, I think cake's posts are very clearly on the recruiting side of the line. He's not coming in here with an idea to discuss, including the possibility of genuine give-and-take or being convinced by his interlocutors, but rather with a manifesto to share. He's since reposted the link here in a more acceptable format, and gone on to make posts that clearly read like political recruitment - I take comments like these as aiming at building a coalition.
So what's my ultimate position?
I don't want a screening test where we ban anyone who might fit a definition of 'white nationalist'. That's impractical and foolish. However, I do want it to be clear that cake-style white nationalist recruiting is unwelcome, and I'd like a more proactive approach to our rules against recruiting and consensus-building. I'd particularly note that rules in favour of kindness, against weakmanning, and in favour of writing like you want everyone to be included seem like they implicit rule out a number of white nationalist arguments anyway. I do see posts here that come off like "so, fellow white people, how do we deal with such-and-such problem?", and those definitely seem inappropriate to me.
"Recruiting for a cause" is "Hey join my organization" not "my team's ideas are great and you should adopt them because they're great".
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I personally think attempts to recruit by stating and a clear thesis and defending it by engaging with the central points of the counterarguments would be a significant improvement over the current trend, which seems to be "copy/paste kinda incoherent rants and hope it resonates with someone".
I’ve been here for years making effortful posts with clear theses in defense on my views, and I think I do as good a job as anyone else here of responding to counterarguments. There are a number of other equally effortful and sophisticated posters here with views similar to mine who have been active for some time here and who post regularly. You are pointing to the poor behavior of one specific guy, posting under various ban-evading alts, and acting as if it’s a representative example of a larger trend.
You are not the main problem here, no. Although I don't know who you're referring to as someone who both substantively agrees with you and also engages with difficult questions (rather than e.g. changing or dropping the topic when challenged and then coming back with the same points a week or two later).
Edit: or at least I don't consider you to be the main problem. I don't speak for everyone.
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It’s still the same one-JQ-copypaste-post per day guy, and he immediately posted another top-level after nara nuked this one. You appear uninterested in policing this behaviour from your side, you’re content to swim in the sewer he turns the sub into. You’re right, it does not reflect well on your ideology.
I often report low-effort link-spamming by right-wingers in this sub; I would have reported the post in question if it hadn’t already been nuked before I saw it. What I’m defending here is not link-spamming, which I agree is bad for the sub. If you recall, my comments in the kerfuffle about JQ-posting were exclusively in defense of SecureSignals, who is not guilty of low-effort link-spamming, whatever else you think of him. I have never defended link-spammers like Foreverlurker or his alts.
Like I told you last time also, my problem is not with you or SS, but with foreverlurker, cake, and all his alts, who is right now plying the sub with his garbage, while you are all cheerfully pretending the discussion developed organically. Do you genuinely not see it, or this some sort of balancing of the scales for your oppression by society? Do we have to tolerate your blatant, daily astroturfing to compensate for your censorship elsewhere?
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