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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   29677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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There's so much interesting stuff going on right now - why is every post here such a snoozefest? Is anyone else checking here less and less often because equal quality commentary seems increasingly available elsewhere?

  • -13

I haven’t found anywhere with equal quality commentary. Twitter is terribly formatted and seemingly encourages by its very nature edgelording, rudeness and one-upmanship. Reddit is full of morons who tediously invade any serious discussion about anything, and any well-moderated communities are (as we found out) banned from having interesting discussions. So what’s left? A few other obscure forums (DSL is fine but worse than here, with worse writing, and I prefer the Reddit structure) and blog comments sections (where participation is structured around what the singular blog author posts).

When something interesting happens, this is usually the place that I want to discuss it. ‘Experts’ can be found on Twitter, but that’s not really the idea - after all, I’m hardly an expert. Instead, I want discussion about current events with smart, somewhat ideologically sympathetic people in an environment that respects long-form writing, politeness, manners and which is well moderated to ensure the above.

Where else has that?

twitter is alright. you just got to find the interesting accounts. Too bad Musk broke some of the functionality of the site though to save costs . for example, you can only see 30 of someone's followers. That makes it harder to find interesting people

I’ve been spending a lot more time on Twitter lately, particularly since I can mottepost there now. What I formerly read as fundamental constraints in the directions you point turn out to be mediated pretty heavily by the part of it a person spends time in and who they choose to interact with. There’s a self-selecting group in and around the ACX-adjacent parts of Twitter that is pleasant and full of smart, well-mannered, somewhat ideologically sympathetic people, with two clear advantages in my view:

  1. The decentralized nature means that incompatible personalities can self-select into slightly different subcommunities where people who get on with both can still interact with both in what feels like the same space, meaning in particular that the ideological range is much broader than here.

  2. The public nature means that when you chat with people in your quiet corner, your posts will occasionally leave the bubble and contact a much wider audience, sometimes including the public figures you talk about. In the recent OpenAI drama, for example, the interim CEO was a well-known regular in Twitter’s ACX-adjacent sphere.

I don't think 'fundamental constraints of a medium' are real, necessarily, every mottepost could be a TikTok video if there weren't any other options, just like 2000 years ago knowledge was mostly transmitted via spoken lecture or conversation. But as people figure out social media platforms, they'll tend to collect their serious, subtle posts in long-form text, and their idle chatter and jokes on places like Twitter. So even though Twitter has most of the same people people you see posting here, or in the ACX comments, it has a different 'culture', and it's one that's a lot less careful about accuracy, and more just people slinging vibes at each other.

Don't get me wrong, I spend a lot of time on twitter, and have for years. I think a lot of other people here do too. But there's a reason I still come here.

it used to be from 2009-2012 twitter had lots of celebrity gossip, as well as the celebrities themselves having a large presence . now just AI talk. AI discussion is half the site it seems; the rest is split between sports, porn, pro-Palestine propaganda, politics, and Musk.

The problem with twitter is posting anonymously. I could use an alt but for the most part there are too many spammy anonymous posts. And a lot of things here are close enough to the Overton window or past it that there tough to discuss in your real name if your not a trust fund kid.

not everything goes back to HBD example: https://www.themotte.org/post/772/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/164914?context=8#context

I'd agree with that, and I would like to see more leftists. The problem is that they either storm in with a blazing "J'Accuse!" post and expect us all to repent of our sins like the weeping Magdalen, or they stick around for a bit then leave with "this place is a nest of fascists" because they got pushback on their views.

Impassionata, God bless all who sail in her/him/it, is still going but hasn't dropped by in a long while, they prefer to post over on /r/drama about how they totes showed us Motte-fascists where to get off and are now moving on to sting other targets (they're still obsessed with Trump, if anyone wants a sitrep).

they prefer to post over on /r/drama about how they totes showed us Motte-fascists where to get off and are now moving on to sting other targets

This reads to me as alien as zoomer slang

I may be too online in some young person spaces and hence picking it up by osmosis.

But Impassionata is still going on about Trump, fascism, how The Motte is a haven of bad 'uns, and how they were and are completely right about everything. They do seem to have recovered some of their sanity since that grinning marshmallow thing, at least.

Why are there no liberals to be found here? Scott Alexander himself appears to be one, and I’m assuming much of his readership would be too

They have many better echo chambers to reside at.

A lot of us are liberals, for certain values of "liberal." But we have long since drifted away from being "Scott Alexander's readers." We're a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off, at this point, with all the filtering that implies.

The SSC diaspora has fractured into a number of different communities with different leans - the ACX discord leans left iirc, we lean right, etc

The "there is no such thing as antifa" "actually I support antifa and their goals" routine eventually got old, and once the sub moved to an independent site there was no value to be had in colonizing a mainstream discussion space. The only draw now is discussion with people who disagree with you, which members of the previous leftist user group have said does not motivate them (quotes available on request, I take a lot of screenshots).

I just looked at all the left wing accounts that used to post on the motte. If they were still here we would be arguing over whether or not Israel is carrying out false flag attacks to end hostage trades so that people don't find out how kindly Hamas treated the hostages. There would be fights to justify Ireland's new ban criminalizing possession of material that might incite racial hatred. There would be, uh, lots of posts about how "right wing people fuck toasters" and every member of Trump's family should be executed? That last one might be an outlier, but theschism is welcome to it regardless.
Are we interested in that? I'm sick and tired of it personally, because most of the engagement on reddit was bad faith arguments and outright trolling by people who enjoyed torturing their opponents with the backing of reddit admins.

What a fascinating history. Thanks for recounting.

quotes available on request, I take a lot of screenshots

I am indeed interested in seeing that for myself.

The only draw now is discussion with people who disagree with you, which members of the previous leftist user group have said does not motivate them

Also, I don’t know how to phrase this in a less derogatory way… but why are leftists like this?

Power.

Intellectual flexibility is only beneficial if your interest group is not currently running things.

This is why the actual Marxists still have debates even with nationalists, why modern day progressives lost the ability to think from the point of view of their adversary, and why the moral majority was completely blindsided despite their ostensible control over culture.

Goliath is a giant, clad in armor and wielding the bigger stick. But his strength loses him the humility necessary to even understand the nature of David.

There's a sort of sliding scale among the SSC diaspora; DSL is way more to the right of this place; this place is fairly right-tolerant; ACX is in the middle trending centre-left, SSC remnant is more liberal/lefty, and TheSchism is for the liberals/lefties as a safe space for those who felt harassed off here/constantly being dog-piled.

The above is by no means authoritative or dispositive, nor intended to be taken as such.

Is DSL really way more to the right of this place? That wasn't my impression

What is DSL in this context?

http://datasecretslox.com, a forum with various old ssc comments posters

On some things it's definitely more conservative (I think there are a lot of economic conservatives and political conservatives both there and on here, but that's not necessarily the same thing as socially conservative).

Perhaps they do not like interacting with people whose opinions get them banned on large Western websites.

This seems more like a sneer than a contribution. Themotte's opinions, other than the few white nationalists, don't get you banned on most large Western websites, e.g. even pre-Musk most of the HBD bloggers had unsuspended twitter accounts.

There's a wide spectrum of people banned on various websites.

There's Alex Jones who is not antisemitic and not really a WN as far as I know.

There are elections / democracy skeptics.

There are antivaxxers who are not necessarily WNs (Alex Berenson is a zionist judging from his substack).

There are anti-feminists like James Damore.

There are TERFs.

There are gamergaters.

There are people who mock the obese.

There are anti-homosexuality people.

There are people who follow the same trails of thought as a Chappelle and who are not necessarily WN (Kanye West excluded perhaps?).

There is overlap, but a lot of these people are not WNs and most of the time they do not get banned for WN-related discussions.

You get banned on most political subreddits for bog standard conservative thought. I was banned from /r/science for asking an AMA poster whether IQ could explain the differences in his group outcomes...

yeah i agree that's bad, but that's not the central example of conservative thought. there are plenty of places 100x larger than us where conservatives and liberals debate, so op's reason isn't correct

Where do you think that is?

More comments

I did a few of those political compass type quizzes recently and turns out I'm a filthy centrist with opinions in the mushy middle 😁

And yeah, that seems to now be a term of insult, so probably I would get banned on large Western websites for that.

Because it became clear Reddit admins would intervene eventually on a number of forbidden opinions.

Way before that -- discussion on the SSC subreddit itself was vibrant as heck, and Reddit was not being a problem at that time. The NYT on the other hand reached out to cancel Scott, so he got uncomfortable being associated with certain elements. (HBD mostly AIUI, which I think he probably still basically agrees with in the weak form)

Although we’ve largely reached a point of ideological homogeneity on the “classic” culture war issues, we still have very spirited disagreements about AI - which is a more interesting topic than the culture war anyway at this point.

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