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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?
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.
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.
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.
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