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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27772 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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This is a troll post where you pretend to make an argument that 38% property ownership is not high enough to justify discrimination against Jews, while intending for the reader to ignore your argument and just react to the 38% figure as being too high.

They post and delete so many threads now, often you reply only for them to be deleted. They’re also a lot like a similar account that used to do this.

As a Slovak I have a suspicion it was more than 38%.

I know that in Hungary it was over 50% before WW2..

Not sure what's objectionable about this post. (His behavior aside).

Slovak state was antisemitic, they aryanised Jewish property, they didn't just hand over Jews of Slovakia but paid the Germans to take them.

2/3rds of the pre war Jewish population died, a lot of the remainder moved to Israel.

Still seems to be a lot of Jews around, but that's just my family - half of it are M.D.s and Jews are quite common in medicine.

I think interwar Hungary is widely acknowledged as the European society in which Jews were most disproportionately dominant in commerce (Scott even wrote about it on various occasions). I suspect it had something to do with political dynamics in the late Austro-Hungarian empire; even in Poland (which had a numerically and proportionally much larger Jewish population) you didn’t see the same level of involvement in leading businesses etc.

Weren't Poles more antisemitic / discriminatory?

The reason why OP's post is objectionable is because OP is doing a thing. He wants to post a quote about how Jews owned a large percentage of property in Slovakia. He considers the high percentage to be noteworthy and wants to share it with The Motte, and yet, he disguises his reason for sharing the quote by pretending to refute it. He pretends to make an argument that the large percentage is not noteworthy, while expecting the reader to reject his pretend argument and conclude that it is indeed noteworthy.

OP wants to make posts that speak truth to Jewish power but feigns to believe that the moderation team of The Motte will silence him if he does so in an open and forthright manner. He adopts the guise of an antisemitism skeptic who tries to refute hate facts and fails. I think as well that OP expects his disguise to be recognized. Which means his true intention is not even to deceive but simply to express resentment that his posts speaking truth to Jewish power are unwelcome on The Motte.

Let's consider forbidding this bad behavior. Whatever they're doing with this post and delete game, it isn't in good faith.

Yeah. It really puzzles me why NNs are allowed to post on this site. I understand that rationalists want to "discuss absolutely anything", but bad faith posting doesn't help anyone.

The point of this place is to practice the belief that we can discuss any subject rationally and honestly. So we strongly prefer to ban not any specific viewpoint, but poor argument tactics instead. If you want to say that Jews are bad, you can, but you have to actually say it and make a rational case for why, not make suspiciously weird and irrelevant posts whose real purpose seem to be to put a eyebrow-raising number into people's heads.

I think this is a good thing - the NN's most compelling argument is usually that they're so censored everywhere, they must have an actual point that the system doesn't want you to hear. We can refute that here - here's a wide open forum for you to post what you actually think, and if it's really dumb it will get shredded just like it deserves.

Why can people even delete threads? What purpose does it serve?

I've used it to delete dupes in the past, or comments I later saw were already made by somebody else in totality. You also should be able to delete posts you simply didn't intend to make.

Removing them after people have engaged I don't see the use of however, it just removes useful context.

Incidentally that's how it works in Slack: you can only remove posts nobody interacted with.

I think that would be a decent compromise. And you can message an admin to delete otherwise.

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