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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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It's getting unavoidable - the quality of news and novel information obtained from time here is crashing. I used to hear things here first - now I usually don't hear them here at all.

Recently I brought up Rich Men North of Richmond - only because no one else did - and pretty well everyone shit on it for one reason or another. 'Should've sang about this instead,' 'this song is better,' 'why'd he bring this up' etc. But it's the biggest song on the planet. You were all wrong and I was right to bring it to your attention. How can we raise the quality of posts back to be worthy of attention, so readers are informed about developments in the culture war?

  • -22

It’s the bizarre (tacitly, selectively enforced) rule the mods have about post length. Effort posts are great, but a lot what is happening here is becoming the sort of illusion of effort by making things 10x longer than they need to be.

Certain mods don’t even make an effort to hide their desire to enforce ideological or social adherence and use the implied thread of banning as a way of quenching discussion about things then don’t like.

It’s very sad to me. SSC CW roundup threads were good, and I understood why they were eventually moved to TheMotte. I also understand why themotte moved offsite. At this point it seems like the experiment has failed, though. There just doesn’t seem to be the sort of rich discussions here that used to happen, and I really do think it’s the mods putting out the sparks of those conversations because they either disagree with them, or because the poster hasn’t written some pointless chatGPT style fluffed up 8th grade level essay on the topic.

My suggestions

  • Stop metaphorically resting your hand on your ban hammer because a post is “low effort”, when it is in fact just short.

  • Mods looking out for their pet topics of internet friends should be a bannable offense.

  • Bring back the BLR, or do a second weekly CWR thread that is for people who like more discussion; allow bare links there.

At this point it seems like the experiment has failed, though. There just doesn’t seem to be the sort of rich discussions here that used to happen

I think the root problem is the nature of the domain, not the nature of the place.

What is there left to discuss?

Bona fide right-wingers, to be honest, have been subsumed by Trumpism (or worse, Pitinism simping), and summarily discredited – in the eyes of most everyone else; their inveterate support of an abject, morally bankrupt failure is just no longer interesting to challenge (I wonder how @ymeskhout still bothers). Stuff like anti-HBD is likewise discredited in the eyes of anyone who could be interested to engage in good faith. (I suppose the inverse has never been credible to staunch opponents). Further inferences have been ruled out either by administrative fiat or just by disinterest in achieving more than proving to oneself that the other side sucks. The SSC-era culture war has died down somewhat. The ongoing culture wars, tracing the important tectonic shifts within the [American] Logos in its intellectual dimensions, calling to non-jaded vision of a change, are substantially different; but the extant population of posters is set in their ways and will mostly try to shoehorn them into the old topics. Should I war with Hlynka again about whether the recognition of LLM intelligence makes me akin to a wordcel Berkeley Marxist who's blind to the truth of Christian God? Pls no. I have things to write on the important stuff directly, without justifying it to a yet another opinionated committee, and I do so now elsewhere.

Where can I read your writing elsewhere?

and I do so now elsewhere.

Would it be possible to be given a clue as to where that might be? Some of us consider ourselves fans of your writing.

I don't really want to entangle those but might respond to a DM.

It’s the bizarre (tacitly, selectively enforced) rule the mods have about post length. Effort posts are great, but a lot what is happening here is becoming the sort of illusion of effort by making things 10x longer than they need to be.

Always the same complaints from the same people. No, we don't require people to arbitrarily use more words. But if you want to write a post about how much the people you hate are the Worst People Ever, yes, we will require you to put some effort into it to make it worth reading, whereas the people constantly accusing us of bias are the ones who just want to drop a link and sneer.

Certain mods don’t even make an effort to hide their desire to enforce ideological or social adherence and use the implied thread of banning as a way of quenching discussion about things then don’t like.

If this is true, then you should be able to point at an example of me doing this and not even hiding it.

Stop metaphorically resting your hand on your ban hammer because a post is “low effort”, when it is in fact just short.

Most short posts (even one-liners) are not modded because we do not have a rule against short posts. We have a rule against dropping one-line snarls.

Mods looking out for their pet topics of internet friends should be a bannable offense.

This sentence needs editing, but give me a concrete example of what you're talking about.

Bring back the BLR, or do a second weekly CWR thread that is for people who like more discussion; allow bare links there.

You know what place is dying? /u/CWR. You know why? Because even they get bored of linkspam about how much the people they hate are just the Worst People Ever.

I’m talking specifically about you getting all ass blasted and white knightey when I called a literal actual in real life whore who actually takes real money from real humans in exchange for her business of whoring a whore.

I’m not going to go dig up a link since it seems like you already do know what I’m talking about, and it seems there are other people who are critical of you for the same thing. Hey maybe we’re all experiencing some mass psychosis where we all hallucinate the exact same thing about the exact same person.

/r/cwr has been dying for like 3 years. You’re right links about the same people being not very cool is boring. Is that what you think people keep asking for over and over and over and over when they ask for a return of the BLR every couple of weeks for the last several years?

Here’s the thing: maybe YOU are so immersed in the culture war that this is all boring to you, but my suspicion is that for a large contingent of people, talking about this stuff is still interesting. Our society is at war with itself and yea the battles do keep happening. Sure you’re bored of it, but plenty of people aren’t and want to talk about it and are annoyed that you enforce poor writing skills in order to do so.

Sorry if this post is blunt, but it’s getting annoying having to retread these exaxt same things over and over where the community complains about poor modding and then you pretend you just have No IdEa what they could be talking about.

I’m talking specifically about you getting all ass blasted and white knightey when I called a literal actual in real life whore who actually takes real money from real humans in exchange for her business of whoring a whore.

Not remotely an accurate description of my motives or our modding policies.

/r/cwr has been dying for like 3 years. You’re right links about the same people being not very cool is boring. Is that what you think people keep asking for over and over and over and over when they ask for a return of the BLR every couple of weeks for the last several years?

Pretty much, yes. That and the lazy ability to drop Twitter-level hot takes.

Here’s the thing: maybe YOU are so immersed in the culture war that this is all boring to you, but my suspicion is that for a large contingent of people, talking about this stuff is still interesting.

On the contrary: I do still find it interesting, and sometimes even informative. That's why I resist those who would like to degrade the quality of discussion.

but plenty of people aren’t and are annoyed that you enforce poor writing skills in order to do so.

Plenty of people are annoyed that I won't just let them shit on their enemies.

As rhetorical practice: can you steelman the case people keep making to you? What are people asking for? What are their motivations?

They want to drop bare links to something they think is interesting enough to discuss but for which they lack the time or desire to contextualize or comment on. Their motive is a desire to create more discussion threads and get reactions from other posters, with less effort required on their part.

That's the steelman. And it probably is true for some BLR aficionados.

There’s plenty of lurkers and occasional posters that would be more likely to participate with a BLR. People are intimidated a lot of the time especially with top level posts.

Good! If people are intimidated then it filters for people who are serious and willing to grow in their opinions, take criticism, and continue posting. Those are the type of people we want.

If you are so emotionally fragile and/or lazy you can stomach writing a few paragraphs of your thoughts about a link, maybe you aren't the right person to make a top level post.

I don't mean to be a jerk here, but years ago I felt the same way before I started posting my writing online. I ended up just doing it, and realized that my fear was pointless and holding me back. Since then I've been in a much better place mentally, and I think many others would benefit from facing their fears and doing the same.

Agreed re BLR. Could be a separate thread. Sometimes would find interesting stories and sometimes interesting responses.

I get why they won’t. Then this thread would become manifestos. But there are a lot of things I’d like to discuss that I think have already well developed frameworks and posting them would just be repetitive. Not having a blr though makes me think on a topic for a day or two to see if I can develop it in a way that would make for interesting conversation. Twitter legitimately sucks for basically any convos. Since there’s no blr a topic I want to discuss I’m debating whether I can turn it into a npc discussion since I feel like my opponents successfully turned me into a npc. And maybe that’s an interesting discussion when the news itself is well understood here.

For the Richmond song I just don’t think there was an interesting angle to the story. About the only thing I saw was that republicans are now crying little babies.

That’s honestly the best way to do it, IMO. I don’t object to links, but I think it should be limited to one thread outside of CWR simply because I like the deeper discussion that CWR provides.

Could also have the redheaded stepchild of a /r/cwr weekly thread on the motte that allows low effort. On the bright side it would attract all the witches. On the downside it would drain effort from this thread.

The draining effort is the main problem. Once the main CW thread is regularly getting 3k+ comments a week again I'd be down for a BLR. Before that, it's a distraction.

The main thread isn't getting a lot of comments because making a good moderator-acceptable top-level thread is difficult and too many people who posted moderator-unacceptable ones have eaten bans.

I think they could be different things. This thread should be about developing new ideas and thinking in new ways. A blr could be about things that have been discussed and here’s another example of that.

Is the engagement here going up? Steadily? And what medium are we using to monitor that?

Strongly agree about there not being enough toplevels and post length not being an ideal filter, strongly disagree about 'ideological adherence' (they let the holocaust deniers and white nationalists keep posting.)

I think the reason post length is a filter is that it's a strong filter for post quality. Someone who's willing to write 500-1k words about their topic is less likely to write about 'wtf demoncrats in randomtown randomstate are transing the kids!!!!', and even if they do write about that they'll have to give sufficient context and detail that it might be interesting to discuss.

My suggestion (I don't think it'll be taken, as it's against the content-neutral ethos, also might be too much modlabor) is to allow a BLR and just aggressively delete 'bad posts'. If it's a median post in /r/CWR, just delete it it, don't bother justifying it or getting community input.

Strongly agree about there not being enough toplevels and post length not being an ideal filter, strongly disagree about 'ideological adherence' (they let the holocaust deniers and white nationalists keep posting.)

If you are a moderator and you want to wage the culture war while pretending not to, letting the holocaust deniers and white nationalists through is useful, because they have no chance of convincing anyone--but if you let through an ordinary conservative, they might actually convince people.

As a bonus, you get to associate normal non-leftist views with Holocaust deniers and white nationalists because those groups disproportionally are permitted to post such views.

If you are a moderator and you want to wage the culture war while pretending not to, letting the holocaust deniers and white nationalists through is useful, because they have no chance of convincing anyone--but if you let through an ordinary conservative, they might actually convince people.

That's awfully devious of us! We couldn't possibly be allowing the few right-wingers who actually gore your personal ox to speak because we genuinely believe in the principles of the Motte. No, it must be because we are secretly trying to filter out "ordinary conservatives" who might "actually convince people."

As a bonus, you get to associate normal non-leftist views with Holocaust deniers and white nationalists because those groups disproportionally are permitted to post such views.

You seem to be making a case that we should ban Holocaust deniers and white nationalists.

Is that what you are proposing?

We should treat everyone equally. Banning either everyone or nobody at a particular badness level is better than doing it selectively.

That is, more or less, what we try to do. If you would like to argue that we let Holocaust deniers get away with more than we let other soapboxers get away with, make that argument. But it is hard to treat such arguments as being made in good faith when accompanied by accusations that we do this on purpose as part of a hidden agenda to drive away "normal conservatives."

letting the holocaust deniers and white nationalists through is useful, because they have no chance of convincing anyone--but if you let through an ordinary conservative, they might actually convince people.

Why are you discounting the impact of holocaust deniers and white nationalists on convincing people? It doesn't even need to be total, one tactic that people on the mainstream Holocaust "side" is JAQing off. That is, asking questions that don't come from a place of desire to learn, but to simply sow doubt.

Moreover, how many people are even familiar with the Holocaust and the evidence behind it to the point that they could refute the deniers, even to themselves? Every time I see a post by SecureSignals about Jews and the Holocaust, I have to admit I have no way of refuting the points being made, because I don't know enough. I'm not swayed, ultimately, but I don't find it inconceivable that someone may come here and think that SS makes a good enough point to cast doubt on the entirety of the mainstream narrative.

What you say is literally true, that is an effective tactic.

I don't think the mods are doing that though. When do they moderate ordinary conservative posts? I see a lot of them.

Indeed. The labor theory of value is wrong. It is wrong in economics, it is wrong in commenting, and the ability to crank out drivel to soak up pages is not a virtue.

Certain mods don’t even make an effort to hide their desire to enforce ideological or social adherence and use the implied thread of banning as a way of quenching discussion about things then don’t like.

What are some examples here? People keep bringing this up but every time I see mod action, I generally agree with it. Even though I'm ideologically opposed to some of the more active ones.

It wasn't using a modhat, but how about this? (The part I was involved in)

What exactly are you accusing me of doing there, besides not banning SecureSignals?

You were hinting that I am a racist because I speak in favor of Jews too much.

Then you misunderstood me. I was hinting that your complaints are unprincipled because you think that shitting on your ingroup should be modded but shitting on your outgroup should not.

No mod hat, no bans? What's the problem?

Hell the mods are doing a public service they should get to argue all they want imo.

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