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I've noticed an increasing amount of chatter from both sides about dropping out of society -- to build a homestead, or to buy a house in some foreign, isolated part of the planet. Of course, "I want to live rural!" guys have been around for years, and actually living rural in 2024 is a pretty raw deal for most. But it's telling so many have made the leap from, "I want to live small", to "I want to live completely alone (with spouse/kid/dog)". I'm sure much of this springs from a genuine love for sustainable living, the quiet life, the country and all of its joys. But the vibe I get is a subtle rising tide of misanthropy, of decreasing faith in the common man possibly regardless of one's leaning. As someone else put it,
My question is: Have you noticed this too? Maybe my circle's blowing this out of proportion, but maybe not.
If so, what's going on here?
I've got a personal theory for what's happening. See, I'm not much of a gamer, but I play two games regularly: Fortnite and PUBG. Really they're just for stimulation while I chill out and listen to music/podcasts, but something pretty damn annoying happens almost every time. I'll be relaxing in-game, looking for loot at a calm pace, when some absolute beast of a player flies in out of nowhere and shreds my health before I can blink. Every time it feels like bullshit because I'm not even trying to compete at that level. All multiplayer games have separate queues for "casual" and "ranked", but inescapably there's a handful of sweat lords who've memorized the meta, who know exactly where the best guns and vehicles are, who throw their weight around in casual games and ruin the experience for everyone else.
And when this happens, my natural reaction isn't "This game's matchmaking has failed", it's "I'm tired of these dickheads, I should play single player games instead". In other words, this is an organizational failure. Humans are naturally excellent at organizing themselves into the right groups -- you throw hundreds of kids into the same school, and very quickly the correct circles will form. There's bound to be a lot of kids with nothing in common, but this is obvious to both parties, so they simply avoid interaction. All groups are autonomous and self-organized, and it works really well.
Online groups in 2024 are algorithm-organized. The internet has taken on a kind of 1800s-Manchester-factory-worker housing feel where everyone's crammed into the same tiny spaces despite our differences. We are now constantly aware of how the other half lives, what they are saying. It's like your teacher forcing you to let the annoying kid play kickball with your group, to sit at your lunch table, etc. Going online feels abrasive in a way it really didn't back then. In 2009 you'd hop on some forum and it felt exactly like hanging out with friends, a 100% positive and chill experience. Going online now is like hanging out with everybody. Sometimes it's good, but a lot of the time it sucks. I don't want to know what the guys I hated in high school think of politics, or movies, or anything. But now I'm going to hear it, over and over and over.
Maybe I'm nostalgic, right? 2009 was a long time ago, I was basically a kid...
But probably not. Because I have a solid point of comparison: I understand Japanese, and spend a ton of time on the Japanese web. What inspired this post is actually a single website, which is 5channel. It's the largest anonymous bulletin board on earth, but more accurately it's a collection of around 1000 bulletin boards with virtually zero moderation. You can post wherever you want, say whatever you want, and... it works. Not because the Japanese are polite or something -- they can get wild -- but because if you just let humans organize themselves, things work out. This echoes my own time as an internet moderator, where I first believed that I could shape the board through my actions, but later realized the board's quality was beyond my control, it's an autonomous process that you have little say in.
I pay $4 a month to post on 5channel. I've made hundreds of posts there, and yet no one's realized I'm a white foreigner. Despite the language barrier, I post there because it's sorta like the English web was back in 2009. There's none of the bullshit, it's a site for nerds to make dumb jokes and chat about nerd stuff. When I browse reddit or twitter or 4chan, there's a lingering unpleasant feeling, but when I go to 5ch it's just dumb fun. It's exactly like the net I grew up with. You compare the two, and the English web just feels... sick.
I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why. What's funny is my narcissistic tendencies fade the more I use 5channel. When you're stuck around people that challenge your identity all the time, you get defensive and sorta retreat back into yourself. But when you're around people who aren't going to constantly irritate you or challenge who you are, you start to relax and open up. You may even turn into a bit of an optimist. Conversely, it's this constant feeling of "Someone's gonna try and screw with me" that sorta defines how English web feels now, why everyone's so antsy and defensive and unwilling to let their irony shield down.
Human groups are naturally pretty small. In nature, whenever any major divide happens, tribes just split off and go separate ways. Being forced into a semi-permanent state of clash really can't be good for us, despite how "normal" this has become.
Can't splinter in the English web? How so Do you feel technically unable to do it, psychologically, or you can't find others who want a smaller community?
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I guess the popularity of such trends will inevitably grow when home office work becomes normalized, for example.
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Filter bubbles are still a thing, but they mostly filter by ideology, not by obnoxiousness.
I think a large point of it is that many online interactions are one-off. In the non-iterated prisoner's dilemma, defection is a viable strategy.
If you had a constant group below Dunbar's number, then everyone would learn who the main assholes are and employ any number of strategies (server bans, teaming up vs them, dropping out of games when they join, teamkilling them) against them to effectively push them out of the group.
I predict that for most casual games, there should be an obvious solution: fill the game with bots. Most of the chat is nothing which LLMs could not manage, and training a neural net to play like a noob or mid-level player should not be very hard. Or you could try to use machine learning (or even plain old statistical analysis) to figure out which players are mostly causing others to drop out of the game and then put them into matches with similar players instead.
They're already filled with bots. The AI sucks though.
Games like Overwatch 2 are fairly punishing to "toxic" players, and they'll deliver a million slaps on the wrist + an eventual account ban, but this fails to solve the human organization problem here, which is: Assholes deserve to play games too. I don't want to play baseball with someone I hate, but he should still have the freedom to play baseball in his own way -- just with someone who's not me.
Overwatch, League of Legends, CS2, none of these games understand this. They're trying to enforce a universal standard of politeness onto online games, which is ridiculous, because for some people mic spamming and shouting slurs is why it's fun. Society should not be telling us, "If you can't have fun in the exact way I tell you to, you're not allowed to have fun."
CS2 has something called "Trust factor", which is an invisible metric that determines how likely you are to cheat. Matchmaking sorts players by trust factor, so if you have a low trust factor, you're getting a game full of cheaters. The question is -- why don't we do this with "toxic" players? Instead of banning them for using the gamer word, just lower their niceness score and match them into the in-game equivalent of 4chan. We created this problem with algorithms, so let's solve it with them too.
Dota 2 already does. There is what's colloquially called "hidden pools". If you get reported for flaming in chat or being obnoxious you start getting preferentially matchmaked with other such people until your hidden metric for obnoxiousness/abuse improves.
I know this because I pretty consistently play in a team with a hothead who just can't help himself but start flaming in all chat, usually the following few games we get matched next are also with people like that. When I que solo, it's fine. When we que together and he has been "a good boy [tm]" the matchmaking is fine also, until he starts talking shit again in all chat. Then it's back to the hidden pool.
I was under the impression that the low priority pool is not "hidden", but very explicit - when you go there, when you're on a premade team with someone who goes there and when your report sends someone there. Or do you mean to claim that there's a separate hidden pool on top of the explicit LP pool? Why'd they do that?
Oh there definitely is an explicit low priority pool, but before you get slapped with that one, you can be assigned a hidden pool where it just ques you with other people who are getting excessive reports be it for verbal abuse or griefing. To this day the hidden pools remain unacknowledged by valve publicly.
While they did say they have "hidden pools" for hackers and voice/text abuse in CSgo/CS2 they have not admitted to the same in Dota2. Both games are running on the same base engine and both games also are part of valve's Overwatch pseudo AI moderation system.
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A little bit, but not undertaken (or even intended, I think) very seriously. There are some families living on a couple of acres, with a goat and a little garden, and the mom staying and homeschooling the kids. But they are not serious about the garden or the goat, they're just kind of a nice hobby to have if you're going to be a housewife in an era full of appliances, and less expensive than other hobbies. They tend to be the same people who go to church a lot, and are part of a small (but sometimes physically distant) church with a reasonable tight community, who kind of want to belong to a more physically close village sort of unit, but not enough to actually make it happen.
I don't know if that kind of thing is more common than when I was a kid. I was homeschooled, and there were a lot of families who liked homesteading aesthetics, raising one livestock animal, once, and reading Little House on the Prairie, and a few families who took that unexpectedly far.
What you've described is unlike my experience of the internet in Current Year. I spend a lot of time here and on DSL, which are highly selected discussion spaces. My Instagram feed is the one clothing brand I chose, three people I know in real life, and art and craft videos for eternity, which I also chose. My Facebook feed is mostly local plants and day trip sort of places, and a little bit people I know. Occasionally a person I know says something political, and then if they do it a few times I unfollow them. My experience of the internet feels very narrow, like I would like to expand it a bit, but am not sure how.
This seems basically unrelated to whether or not I would rather live in a city vs rural area. In rural areas, I'm more likely to interact with people who are unlike me, because they're the only people I can find to interact with. It's interesting, to an extent, I like having an excuse to get to know people unlike myself. There'll be some old person talking about their (literal) dream or somebody's wedding or funeral to go to I don't know that well. In a city, I mostly find people at least as selected for similar interests as I do online, which can be comfortable, but also gets a bit cramped. Whenever I've had an opportunity to interact in a friendly and non-political way with people unlike myself, it has generally been interesting, and I've enjoyed it, at least in retrospect.
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I think we’ve lost the ability to self organize to a large degree. There’s a sort of (https://www.adbusters.org/articles-coded/what-is-hypernormalization) hyper normalization that I’m observing in almost every aspect of modern life. It’s like everyone knows that the system doesn’t work anymore that our leaders don’t have any desire to fix things, most of the pre-centralized system institutions are largely withered away, and no one has any inkling of a way to get back to functioning society. We know, they know, they know we know, and none of it gets better because nobody has a vision of the future that doesn’t seem hopelessly naive.
I watch old shows from the past and what strikes me most is the lack of modern nihilism. People seemed to put up leaders who legitimately wanted to solve whatever the problem was, and the writers tended to play that straight up. The person not only wanted to do good, but he was allowed to defeat evil and fix the problems and we actually had a happy ending. Jedi were not opportunistic nihilists in it for themselves. The rebellion wanted a democracy for everyone. There was the sense that people in charge of things were altruistic and not self serving and that problems were fixable. It’s mostly gone. People just sort of default to a grim dark idea of the world in which nothing works, nothing gets fixed, and everyone has an angle.
And I think the nihilist mindset is part of why we no longer make those communities. If everything is unfixable and everyone is on the take, there’s no point in trying. Just get yous,protect yourself and your family, and try to not rely on other people and systems any more than you actually need to.
I'm reminded here of a Tanner Greer piece at City Journal I read recently, on the popularity of dystopian YA novels (one of the many pieces drawn upon in an effortpost I'm currently mentally composing, involving Weberian rationalization, software “eating the world,” “computer says ‘no’,” Jonathan Nolan TV series, “Karens” wanting to talk to a manager, the TSA, Benjamin Boyce interviewing Aydin Paladin, and the Butlerian Jihad):
And yet, these stories also increasingly resonate with modern adults as well:
…
The key part that stood out to me was the final two paragraphs:
We seem to have become allergic to the idea of human leadership, of having a person — and not a faceless bureaucracy — actually make decisions, use common sense, exercise personal agency, with "the buck stops here" responsibility for them. And it's the latter that really stands out. It's not just that we seem to fear the idea of having someone else in charge of us — though we submit readily to Hannah Arendt's rule of Nobody, "a tyranny without a tyrant" — but that we're perhaps even more afraid of stepping up and taking charge ourselves, of bearing responsibility for that power and its consequences. We find it better to be a human cog in the machine, able to say "I don't make the rules, I just follow them," than to take ownership of the exercise of power.
(Can you imagine someone in the West writing a story of an orphaned child soldier achieving his lifelong ambition of becoming military dictator, and not having it be played as a tragedy?)
Dictator? Dictators are a really bad thing.
Leader? I can definitely imagine. I would also happily read it, as long as it is not played as tragedy or playing it as tragedy without realizing it (by whitewashing dictatorship).
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I work in a startup, and know my CTO and CEO on a personal basis. The problem with personal leadership, as with family-owned restaurants, is that the quality is so variable. We've run through 3 CEOs in the time I've been at the company, each notably flawed in different ways, and my current CTO is a competent but over-promoted nepotist who hoards control and seems to believe that only people who grew up in his particular part of France can be trusted. My current manager is literally his old friend from university. This in an Asian company with employees from all corners of the globe.
Personal venting aside, my point is that although it’s probably better on average to work for someone you know, don’t romanticise a world where your quality of life depends purely on your personal relationships. Especially since we’re all weirdoes ;)
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1), I’d read the shit out of that book, or watch the movie, whatever. 2), no, although there was a tv series loosely based on a fictionalized account of the life of Bashar Al-Assad which played him sympathetically(this was before the war), although I can’t remember the name of it.
But more to the point, modern literature is allergic to leadership and agency because the protagonists are figures to which things happen, and not figures who make things happen- you said as much- but it’s worth emphasizing that this is a relatively recent change. The Lord of the Rings has its fair share of protagonists going out and shaping the world in which they live. So does other older fantasy like the Belgariad. Compare to Harry Potter and Twilight, where protagonists don’t necessarily do nothing, but neither do they take a particularly active role in shaping the narrative. Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen are content to be manipulated by more powerful figures in a way that Roald Dahl protagonists and the kids of Chronicles of Narnia aren’t.
And this is in part because our society is allergic to leadership. Modern American society- or at least the literati class- don’t want people to stand up, take charge when something needs taking charge, and get stuff done. And that applies to themselves as much as everyone else; the cultural production class is utterly terrified of being in charge.
This is a observation (or complaint?) I've seen about modern literature and particularly comic books and comic book inspired film. There are proactive characters shaping the world according to their will. Those are villains. There are reactive status quo preservers. Those are the protagonists.
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I was, in fact, referring to a best-selling manga series with this description.
This is exactly my point. And I'd agree that while it's only recently that it's become so widespread, I think there's a case that, per Max Weber, the roots go back over a century, possibly to the "Enlightenment" itself.
Naruto is an extremely noncentral example of a child soldier.
Yeah, reading that, my mind went to the Gundam franchise, but I don't think any series from that IP comes close to that description.
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Cottagecore and associated cultural trends are 95% LARP. Obviously, there are a few people who really are into it, but my observation so far has been that this is far more likely to mean "I moved to an exurb and picked up a horticulture hobby" than anything remotely resembling actual rural or off-the-grid living. Actually, 95% LARP might be being overly generous; I'm going to guess the conversion rate on people taking the Stardew Valleypill is extremely low. Most people entertaining sanitized fantasies of tradrural lifestyle aren't even going to get as far as the exurban house and gardening hobby.
All of which is to say: I don't think this is a real trend. To the extent that it is a real trend, it is mostly the product of backflow from young professionals crowding into major cities, enabled by the rise of remote work. Social media may be having a corrosive effect on social cohesion, but it's not making people yearn for the pines.
We can. It's not particularly hard to set up your own forum, and if you're willing to put in a little effort and tolerate some jankiness you don't even need to reply on a 3rd party service to do it. This reminds of third place discourse, where people talk about third places disappearing as if someone came and tore them down, as opposed to that people stopped going to them. You can very easily leave the major social media platforms. We just don't. The problem is
a) these algorithmically driven services may be inferior to organic, homegrown human interaction, but, crucially, they are free and offer a path-of-least-resistance option. You could start your own forum or even go outside and meet people, but Facebook is a click away. Whatever your community of interest is, it probably already exists on reddit.
b) network effects mean there's a lot of value lost in leaving the big platforms for a smaller one. Being the first person to break away from twitter gets you little but
a massive improvement in mental healthisolation. And, especially for people who view themselves as incumbents, the suggestion that they should leave because of what someone else is doing is deeply irritating - "why should I change, he's the one who sucks". So everyone stays on the big platforms and complains about the moderation policy but never leaves.That's more a reflection of how a subset of hardcore American conservative low-key hate America and have despaired of reasserting control by force.
I think you're right that the overwhelming majority of people aren't going to seriously take up off-grid living, but I think we are seeing a slow shift in the zeitgeist around the margins. Sure, someone who fills Pinterest boards with cottagecore styles and buys a potted plant isn't personally making a huge shift, but I do think from talking to friends and co-workers that we're seeing a bit of a rebound into, for lack of a better term, touching grass: hobbies, IRL social groups, and such. It's less clear to me whether it's countering the broad, growing online-ness of the last two decades, or more specifically the stark digital isolation of 2020 (likely both), but the social status of "being online" has, to my eyes, peaked as of a year or two ago.
The Internet has completed a full cycle from being the exclusive domain of weird academic types, to primarily high-paying tech workers, to everyone's parents, and I wouldn't be surprised if the median (American) internet addict already has or will soon have a lower income than the average American. Admittedly, that's ill-defined: it's hard to escape the Internet completely, but it feels to me like constantly burying one's nose in a phone playing games or watching videos is becoming a low-status behavior. Less so for email, reading books, or texting friends, but I've seen people engaging in analog activities (writing, drawing, photography) get explicit positive reactions.
That I agree with and think is a more substantial point - pure anecdata, but a huge share of people in my social circle have leaned hard into physical hobbies (woodworking, blacksmithing, gardening, etc...). Notably, things which are kind of difficult and require (or at least benefit a lot from) specialized knowledge and equipment, and which produce some physical proof of effort.
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I lived in a rural area for 3 years, not because I was trying to LARP a lifestyle but because I was working in the outdoor industry at the time and that's where I needed to be. I guess I was semi "off the grid" but not in any meaningful sense. I had electricity, but well water and a septic system. No TV or internet and really bad cell service (I left the property if I really needed to make a call, but if I sent a text it would send eventually). My house had an oil stove but it also had a wood burner and I decided to use that thinking it would save money. Well, maybe, a little. First, I had to get a log splitter, and even buying a used one split with two of my buddies was enough money to pay for half a winter's worth of oil. Add in the chainsaw and it became a whole winter. Then, every time someone cuts down a tree you have to be ready to go to their house that Saturday to cut it up and load it, and spend Sunday splitting and stacking it. I also didn't have much to start with so I had to buy a cord to get through the first winter, which was a brutal one. Then, when you go to use it, you have to load the stove up to capacity before bed lest you wake up in the morning freezing, making the house so hot you have to open the windows. You freeze in the morning anyway, and you have to get a fire going again from coals. Trust me, the last thing you want to have to do in the winter at 6 am is build a fire. Repeat the process when you get home from work. In the spring and fall you have to use aux heating anyway because any fire is entirely too hot when you're only trying to warm up from 50 degrees. The amount of time I spent dealing with the thing, had I spent it working, would have more than paid for me to run oil full time, and that's not including the cost of the splitter, chainsaw, blade sharpening, gas to haul all that wood, etc. That being said, nothing beats the feel of a stove going in the dead of winter, and it added a rustic charm, but I could have gotten that with a lot less work if I would have just bought wood and burned occasionally rather than committing to it as a heat source. And this is just one, relatively minor inconvenience that comes with living "off grid". But, I still have access to a log splitter I may decide to use again someday.
Yeah, I've lived in villages that use wood only heating in the winter, and if you want to go to sleep warm, everyone has to move into the main room in the winter.
One of the things that wasn't mentioned much in the discussion about traditional housewife work but is huge in some climates is keeping the fire burning in the winter, and waking it up again from coals before dawn, as the father gets ready for work. In villages without was heat, that's very important, and a fair amount of work. One household I lived in had only daughters at home (I think there was a son, but he was working elsewhere and couldn't return to help), who spent several weeks splitting wood by hand.
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This description of heating with wood is giving me flashbacks to a winter I spent in a yurt near the California/Oregon border.
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I can point exactly where I was, online, in 2009: the writing was already on the wall, and it went exactly where I expected it would.
There were better places online, if you looked for them -- this was still before some of the weirder specialty forums got chased out, and I have some fond memories of early therianthropy spheres -- but it was already a long way from the highlights of the early Eternal September era, or especially usenet era. The Scylla and Charbydis of SomethingAwful and corporate monoculture were well and present then.
rpg.net. Sigh. I remember being a regular there once upon a time. Boardgamegeek is headed in the same direction. Writing forums and other places I frequent all doing the same thing. I am normie-presenting enough to usually stay out of trouble, but if there's anything that comes close to blackpilling me it's the sheer smugness of censorious would-be political officers in every hobby space I am part of.
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That post (?) is hidden behind registration, but I found their logo funny nonetheless.
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A Catholic news site I followed kind of posted about the same topic today. Nothign to do with Catholicism, the author is just an Anglophile:
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/a-perfect-week-ironic-invites-and
Why do you think that the right sort of women would not apply? Would they prefer to be among themselves for that kind of banter?
I didn’t author the opinion, but I think the author’s point is that women who try to integrate men’s only spaces are going to do it for the sake of making them integrated, not because they’re merely looking to socialize.
There’s no shortage of socialization opportunities for women, so to decide you must be socializing at this specific single sex club demonstrates that making it coed is your goal.
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I'm reminded of the Californian Bohemian Club (motto "weaving spiders come not here") and accompanying conspiratorial retreats. I find it pretty hard to believe that members of these clubs don't gain any professional benefits at all, but nevertheless I'd probably join a male club with at least a nominal ban on shop talk if there were any anymore for regular guys.
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Hello! I think you are talking about me. I mean, we didn't buy a whole ass farm. But we bought 4 acres, got some backyard chickens that give us all the eggs we need, and a nice garden. We still buy food. Even most of our food. We aren't completely off grid by a wide margin. Although we have stocked up on a growing supply of 25 year shelf life emergency food as well...
There were dozens of reasons we made the decision to do this. The increasing social dysfunction of the Democrat controlled semi-urban core we lived in, as well as the utter fecklessness of Democrats to even acknowledge it exists. All the institutions there-in insisting we mask our then two year old daughter, while turning a complete blind eye towards the "mostly peaceful" protest that caused all the businesses to board up their windows whenever they appeared. The rise in crime, like the guy who got shot in my condo parking lot, that nobody seemed to give a fuck about. The people were wound up so damned tight, taking our newborn daughter for a walk, on our best following all the covid guidelines behavior, people would literally dive into the bushes in a mad panic off the sidewalk to maintain that 6 foot distancing.
After we left, we looked back in horror as the school district double, then tripled down on secretly transitioning children against parents wishes, and keeping pornographic "diverse" books in middle school libraries. Or when we have business there, and we still see people masked, alone in their cars on the highway.
There were affirmative reasons we moved too, as opposed to just fleeing Democrats. I wanted my daughter to have a yard, and woods, and a creek to play in. I wanted to feel safe leaving her relatively unsupervised outside. It was way more affordable.
Sometimes I miss living somewhere walkable. But those thoughts are fleeting compared to all we gained in a deep red county.
Kind of a weird focus on democrats in this post. Plenty of those where I live in a very rural state. We have creeks and woods and safe legal abortion and the lowest crime rate in the country. Democrats are driving crime is a pretty tired narrative. Density + poverty drives most of the type of crime you seem to be concerned about, not who you vote for.
I share your frustrations of the covid overstep and mess. It really turned me off to a lot of institutions. I just don't know that if the republicans had become the covid law and order party and insisted on authoritarian lockdowns for the children, would you have rebelled against them the same way?
It isn't red vs blue, especially here on themotte. Try to see the grey.
My Republican governor was happy to impose onerous Covid restrictions on the state (while of course violating them himself). The rules imposed in my state weren’t as long-lasting as they were in many blue states, but they were still intolerable to me and to many Republicans throughout the state. In response, the Libertarian candidate for governor received a record high number of votes in the following gubernatorial race.
I think you’re seeing party politicization where none exists.
I agree, I was trying to point out that what WhiningCoil was commenting on wasn't necessarily a red vs blue issue like he stated it was.
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This was never going to happen because the ways in which lockdowns were less than evenhanded were always going to hit the Republican base harder than the democrats.
I am postulating a hypothetical situation here that almost happened. Fear of the wuhan flu was red coded for the first few months if you recall.
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I get your feeling, and I think the main culprit, the biggest reason the insular internet mostly collapsed is Reddit (and recently Discord). The technical superiority of Reddit when it came out, its ability to spin up new subreddits on any topic and its originally relaxed moderation turned it into a natural Schelling point for any community. Previously if I wanted to find an active community talking about topic_x, I'd google "topic_x forum" and look at some of the results and join a PHPbb (or similar) forum that seemed to have a vibe I liked. Now the first place I, or pretty much everyone, will think about is /r/topic_x. It will be bigger and more active than almost any other community about topic_x.
The only exceptions are going to be existing communities that don't want to be Schelling points that passively attract newcomers (like this place) or people who have an axe to grind against Reddit. And while I do myself have an axe to grind against Reddit, I have to admit I'm in the company of a lot of witches who really just want a place they can spam the n-word, and the communities created by that second group are likely going to suck.
We already know what such a community would look like, it's called 4chan. It's one of the most influential internet communities ever and has been an endless source of entertainment and fascination for me for the past 15 years.
Ah, but 4chan predates reddit, and its community uses the n-word as a way to try (futilely) to keep its community within the bounds of people who don't take words too seriously. If you want, say, a community about biking that isn't a subreddit, you're likelier to end up with a community of people who love saying the n-word and sometimes, rarely, discusses biking. Compare to the subreddit which is going to be mostly about biking, except when progressive politics talking points seep through and you're not allowed to say anything else you'll be either piled on or modded. Normies either agree with the progressive politics, or they don't even notice them as we don't notice the air we breathe, but at least they're probably there to talk on-topic. The alternatives are selecting for people who do notice the air, and they'll be more interested in discussing that than the main topic.
4chan has a few other features, besides just its age and uh, forbidden words:
All in all it's a weird, quirky little community. It would be interesting to try and create another community like that, without explicitly copying 4chan. Discord has some of that, but it's just too fast-moving for me or any other normal adult to keep up with.
No offense, but all the posts here seems like they're very touristy views of the site and completely ignore all the numerous downsides of the site.
You can search on 4chan's archives more easily than reddit's. Reddit's search function is worthless and requires you to use google to search site:reddit instead.
One of the worst parts about is that a few shitposters can ruin threads way more easily than anywhere else, like there are /vg/ threads that are unusable because a bot will find them and spam them, there's shitposters that can and will ruin entire boards. It is proof that no moderation, or more like light moderation will certainly not result in better places for discussion.
This is worsened still by the hivemind of 4chan where anything that goes against the common view of the site "Everything is shit" will generally be ignored and be shitposted about. Say you like a book and you wanna make a thread for it? I really doubt you'll find better discussion for it on 4chan vs other sites. Because most people will ignore thread, a few will shitpost, and maybe you'll get one or two replies that are actually relevant to what you want.
And that's not to say that there aren't good sides on it. 4chan/imageboards are really good for the small, niche communities for particular subjects. Like there's a tea thread that's very nice, but anything outside of those niches is generally worse than other sites.
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I think there's something to what you're saying. I'm not fluent enough in Japanese to use 5chan, but I do know a little. Everything in Japan seems old-fashioned, like they still pay with cash, still use old BBS boards, and their websites often seem like a mess of old PHP. A lot of services that we'd do with software, like bank transactions, are still done manually with paperwork there.
that might sound bad, but I think it genuinely helps makes sites feel a little more "human." the western web just seems like one giant ocean, connected by omniscient algorithms. the typical user barely creates anything, we just watch shit from "creators" with 10 million followers, then mindlessly repeat their memes. anything "off" gets harassed and downvoted, or just hidden into oblivion. the smaller, clunkier internet forces people to actually create something if they want to be part of it.
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One of the reasons I tend conservative is the different views towards exit rights.
For most conservatives, the reaction to liberals who want to go start a communist paradise elsewhere is "Good. Go do it!". This is a sincere wish. The presence of communism elsewhere is the surest bulwark against it happening here. The idea of communism so alluring that we need constant reminders about its failures, which are guaranteed.
But liberals have more of a "yous can't leave" attitude. The grand experiment can only work if everyone is forced to join. If the ants go somewhere else, the grasshoppers won't have any food to eat. Thus, states like California are considering exit taxes to trap the high-performing people in the state. And obviously the Soviets had to keep people inside with barbed wire and guns.
Did you just rewrite atlas shrugged in 2 paragraphs?
I would rebut, and say the issues is socialized losses and costs while privatizing the profits/tragedy of the commons/extraction without due compensation/collusion/fraud/monopoly/rivers on fire/cancer clusters/disgusting food/dangerous drugs/pinkertons/unsafe air travel. To pretend that there are not serious and almost endless downsides to unregulated commerce and exploitation is crazy.
Classically, libertarians always seem to want all the benefits of a stable state with a monopoly on powers, as long as it doesn't realllllllyyyyy apply to them, and they don't have to pay for it. Laws for thee and not for me etc....rich people already kind of live that life, so it is an attractive philosophy for many, I run into them every day.
True believers can always move to the libertarian paradise that is Somalia!
As far as keeping a tax base of people that have immensely benefited from the state apparatus to generate their wealth. It is perfectly fair to incentivise them to keep some of their wealth in the place that helped create it. Again, wanting all of the benefits while shirking the costs.
The rest of your post is okay, but this kind of tired, low-effort sneer is not a good faith argument. Stick to your actual disagreements with your opponents and not recycled tropes. (Pointing out that Somalia is, in your opinion, the end state of an actual libertarian society is fine, but using it as a dunk is not.)
Would changing it from "You" to "True believers" work better? jeroboam listed places like soviet russia and california as approaching or end states of communistic collectivist societies full of spendthrift takers or "grasshoppers". I don't think my inclusion of Somalia as a counterpoint is particularly offensive, even if it is cliche. The ant and the grasshopper parable is equally boo outgroup insulting and also a trope at this point. He also is blocking me, so no need to worry about offending him.
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Libertarians often want a state powerful enough to create and enforce property rights, and to raise a defensive military when needed, and not really anything else.
This would need taxes, of course, but much less.
Somalia doesn't do a good job with maintaining property rights.
Maybe so. That is a terrible idea. I think I pointed out the pitfalls of a minimalist state pretty well in my previous post.
You did, hence why I'm the other upvote here.
That said, I don't know that I agree that all of those would be serious problems. I'll run through what I think of each.
This is only really a problem when there are commons. With expansive enough property rights, there would not be many commons, and so not much tragedy. That said, some things are hard to keep separate (like air). In such cases, while, strictly speaking, it may be regulated as an infringement on property rights, really it should probably just be treated as a commons with no property rights, and subject to regulation accordingly.
Not really a problem with good property rights, except in cases of bad decision making/desparation (and the market should sort out the latter).
Yup, this is a problem. It shouldn't get worse than monopoly pricing, but this isn't great, and regulation is probably reasonable here.
Yeah, I'd want this regulated. But I would assume that many libertarian states (should such exist) would care about things like this? Breaking contracts like this should fall afoul? Maybe violate property rights?
Yes, bad, though not always worth getting rid of, if the alternative is worse.
That said, I'm not sure that we'd have more of these. Competition should try to keep these away, and the reduced regulation should lower barriers to entry for competitors.
See tragedy of the commons.
The market might sort this out to some extent (in that people won't want to be in harmful situations, and so would have to be compensated accordingly should they know), but yeah, this is a problem.
What? There are no laws requiring that our food, as it exists today, tastes good. It tastes good because they want us to buy it. This wouldn't change.
Yup. I'm not a fan. I suppose libertarians could try to regulate nonconsensual use of them as a crime; it would be infringing on the rights of others?
Not okay. The state has the monopoly on violence. That doesn't change.
Well, airlines have a pretty strong incentive to make air travel safe: they want people to fly. I don't think this would be too large of a problem.
Overall, I don't think it's nearly as hellish as you suggest to go with the minimalist option, though there are several things that I would prefer be regulated.
Regarding the food, I'm thinking more along the lines of gutter oil and listeria outbreaks. The consumer simply cannot judge if a certain restaurant is safe to eat from, they will never have perfect information. That is the problem with a ton of libertarian policy ideas. LTs have to assume an almost omniscient consumer/citizen for most of their ideas to have even a small chance of working. There isn't enough time,energy, information, or intelligence in anyone's life to make choices like that, we need regulatory bodies of experts with enforcement mechanisms and bureaucracies.
Re: Air travel. The 787 Max kinda disproves your point there. Before regulation basically everyone who flew regularly eventually died flying. We probably shouldn't have to let 100 more planes crash before consumers decide that getting to california for cheap isn't worth going on a certain type of plane. Not to mention the ongoing issues due to regulatory capture and just underregulating/poor oversight that have lead to deaths and serious problems, it is getting so bad that it is undercutting national security and economic progress in a vital industry.
Thanks, those are both good examples.
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That Somalia line is a tired cliché that straight up ignores the Hoppean elephant in the room.
Libertarians are fine with authority, actually. So long as it's consensual and not tyrannical. We want our masters to compete to be picked, not ditch them altogether. That's anarchists you're thinking of.
Hoppe is quite fine with feudalism. And in my travels I've found lots of libertarians that actually did go to places like Hong Kong, Prospéra and the UAE that are clearly and obviously ruled by some authority but provide the basic entrepreneurial freedom and reasonable tax rates that are sorely lacking in the West. Better to be ruled by a fair autocrat than tyrannized by the people.
I myself have moved my permanent residence to Galt's Gulch, and it's really just fine living among civilized people that aren't trying to squeeze you for every last cent to give nothing in return under the guise of a social responsibility they abdicate every day. I recommend it.
Ah yes UAE home of literally modern day slavery and modern day monarchy with free money and sinecures for all true citizens and free or subsidized healthcare, education, and housing. An economy based on resource extraction they lucked into. Truly a beacon for humanity.
Hong Kong, a successful trading port run on British principles/laws for 100 years that is now being slowly bogged down by chinese nonsense, but hey you can still score a dog crate apartment (literally) for a reasonable price.
Prospera, I read a few think pieces about it a while ago. Seems like a good place to set up crypto scam companies and stem cell clinics. Also seems like the locals don't like it.
None of these "countries" are driving humanity forward, anywhere is already pretty nice if you're rich, and large stable governments are responsible for almost all recent scientific progress and will continue to be so. These little projects are sideshows at best.
I don't understand your final paragraph. Is there a Galt's Gulch project out there or are you saying you've moved to the UAE? Don't worry, we'll let you back in once the robots do all the work, just nice like that.
Edit: Had to look up recent Prospera stuff, as expected it is basically just a money/drug/crypto laundering scheme. Pretty funny, seems like they are about to be beaten down by the unrelenting might of the honduran government. (words that have never been said before in history)
https://theintercept.com/2024/03/19/honduras-crypto-investors-world-bank-prospera/
Still waiting on your SLS Block 2 Mr. Big Government, at this point it costs so much they're going to have to turn it over to Boeing. This used to be true, it hasn't been for a while. At best they give some of it back through grants now. The days of long term fundamental research spawning large awe inspiring strategic projects are long gone.
Hell, even military innovation is done by VC backed startups now. Where's the government's Attention Is All You Need?
Deterritorialization has won, as expected.
There are lots of myths in the specific descriptions of these places you pithily give. These are memes, not knowledge. I'm certain you've never actually gone there and checked.
And they're not the real reason you're objecting anyway. If you see any amount of freedom as a laundering scheme and worthless in comparison to such fictions as "progress" we're not going to see eye to eye. I for one do not support tyranny.
Nice try, but I'm not telling you who John Galt is.
More to my point that you've misconstrued here. Governments have in the past, and continue to, fund and do immense amounts of fundamental research. But that wasn't my argument.
I was attempting to point out that no entity public or private can do the kind of complex research and invention required today without a stable, relatively safe, relatively predictable government in charge that provides basic infrastructure and services. We aren't getting our best (or any) innovations out of Syria or Iraq, or Palestine, or Myanmar, or the or Prospera etc...etc... (these are not examples of gulchs, just unstable regimes.)
I'll be impressed if/when we have an actual libertarian "country" as case study that is outperforming more traditional current governance types. It is also just so damn hard to pin any libertarian minded person down on what exactly they believe and how that would translate into a governing body or country. I don't think I've once gotten a straight answer.
I guess that's fair and we're actually going to see this with Argentina and to some degree El Salvador.
I thought Hoppe was pretty damn clear, open and consistent, actually.
Personally I ideally desire Patchwork, also known as Feudalism, and an efficient and minimal guardian of my natural rights. And I'll settle for a destruction of central orders and a return to smaller and more personal forms of government, inasmuch as is pragmatically possible. You know, like Machiavelli.
This obviously makes us enemies inasmuch as you seem to desire greater levels of centralization and support Administrative States as inherently legitimate sovereigns. But that's what this place is for, right? Talking to people you disagree with.
I've seen some chatter that El Salvador should try to model itself on Singapore. I would say Singapore goes against pretty much every libertarian ethos except for being pro-business. It has about as heavy a hand as you can have as a government controlling society and citizens. Although I wouldn't class the UAE or Hong Kong as particularly libertarian either. So maybe we should start there. Clearly you have an affinity for the ideology, how do you square the circle regarding these regimes and personal freedoms etc...
As I have stated, I've never really nailed down a "libertarian" on what they actually believe and what a real world based on those beliefs would look like, even when I was the treasurer for our college libertarian society wayyyy back in the day (threw some good fundraising poker games). Maybe this is my chance if you're willing to go to bat.
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I'm not a libertarian, personally, but I don't think libertarians have the goal of society of driving humanity forward or progressivism of any sort. Some of them do, but that is adjacent to libertarianism. They just want a government that can defend property rights from outsiders and arbitrate disputes between insiders. You can't make a critique of liberal morality to libertarianism because they consider it in the domain of the individual and not the government.
A libertarian will tell you if you want to change the world, become an angel investor, or if you lack the means, purchase stock in the most forward-thinking companies. Or even better, start your own. Not demand the government to do so. And this is entirely consistent within their world view. Just because you don't like it or clutch your pearls about the second order consequences doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to a libertarian.
That is fine. I just think is is a terrible way to go about governing (or not governing) a large population. No man is an island, we live in a society, there but for the grace of god go I, and the thousand practical benefits of helping and being helped by your fellow humans. yadda yadda yadda....
There also seems to be an expectation that anyone and everyone is perfectly healthy and intelligent and is capable of starting a business or being the locus of their own control, etc...etc... a huge section of humanity isn't cut out for that, and the rest certainly weren't when they were born and won't be when they are old.
Nobody is clutching any pearls, just pointing out some basic stuff.
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I have very few thoughts on the actual topic of your post, but as someone who spent more time than was healthy on 4chan a little before 2009, your description of 5channel now sounds similar. As I stopped using 4chan around 2009 and started using other social network sites, I found that the quality of conversation on places like Twitter or Reddit were substantially worse in comparison to 4chan, and it has only gotten worse in the 15 years since. My pet theory is the enforced anonymity and abrasive/offensive social norms helped to keep everyone from taking things too seriously, which in turn helped to keep conversations from getting enflamed. I've heard 4chan also got worse in the meanwhile, so maybe those golden years are forever gone. But if I could wave a magic wand and destroy every social network and replace them with something akin to the mid-late-00s 4chan, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
4chan felt that way once, but those times are long gone. 10+ years ago, each board had a community feel, and the centralizing factor is that everyone was just a nerd with an unusually deep interest in the topic of the board. On /v/, you had guys obsessed with Yume Nikki and E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy and Godhand. On /mu/, you had guys digging through labels to find obscure bands. /lit/ helped popularize eccentrics like Nick Land. At some point, the boards lost this exploratory, communal spirit, and modern 4chan just talks about whatever media product is the most advertised. Old 4chan had this sort of 90's mentality where they worshiped authenticity, weirdness, and indulged in old stuff, but on modern 4chan all those values are pretty much gone.
Waxing poetic about some old site is lame, but it really did have a positive influence on a lot of people. It was a sort of special place, nothing with that combination of optimism and passion is really around nowadays.
Yeah. The fact that one of the threads with the highest number of posts on /lit/, is basically /r9k/(at least it's slightly better than what that board is today, but still), says a lot about the site.
On most of 4chan today, sincerity is despised.
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I've noticed people saying that they're going to be, but it mostly seems like about as serious of a threat as the people that say if the election doesn't go their way, they're moving to Canada. The United States has continued urbanizing for my entire life and the number of urbanites that actually turn themselves into homesteaders is vanishingly small.
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We banned freedom of association in the 60s. It's a legal thing now, not really a cultural thing. If anything the fact that people made so many attempts to still create communities since then shows that westerners are still healthy in that regard. It's just illegal, so inevitably some expansion of inclusion lawfare will torpedo any community you build. If you want to have some semblance of sanity focusing on very small local/extended family social interactions is the socially healthiest choice available.
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This doesn’t address a large part of your post, but I think a lot of why people are attempting to live rural now is because they anticipate some kind of collapse of society. Either due to nuclear war, climate change or civil war.
I know this is not your stated belief, but how would climate change lead to the collapse of society in the lifetime of anyone currently living?
Are there any people who believe in climate change so strongly they are willing to move to a rural area?
I know there are many people who say they believe climate change is a serious threat and yet buy expensive oceanfront property.
Agriculture. If we can't grow wheat and maize efficient enough we are fucked.
But this isn’t happening. Every year the caloric surplus generated by humanity is greater. The temperature increasing by 2 degrees in one century won’t change that. In fact higher temperatures and more co2 will likely lead to even greater agricultural production. It certainly hasn’t hurt so far. While some regions will suffer it will be made up for (and then some) by gains in other regions.
Despite this, I think climate change is an important problem. To me, the environment matters for its own sake, independent of humans.
I believe climate change will ultimately be solved in the 21st century by carbon removal technology that will cost less than 0.1% of global GDP per year.
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The world can ride out one or two bad harvests(although some Africans will be fucked), and wheat and corn both grow well enough under hot conditions. Shifting rain patterns might require some fields to relocate but catastrophism is entirely unfounded; climate change’s impact on agriculture will be more from retarded carbon restrictions than from actual climactic conditions.
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There are various potential scenarios for how fast climate change will progress. Some of them involve various tipping points being passed, like AMOC circulation collapse, that could cause rapid changes in climate within 10-40 years. In any case, if it does happen, climate change could cause massive refugee outflows and knock-on political effects that could collapse multiple world governments in short order. Add on to that mega storms and heatwaves battering the less affected regions. Additionally, many people who follow climate change also are concerned about decreased energy return on investment causing at least a partial collapse of industrialized society.
In 1970, the Bhola Cyclone killed at least 300,000 people in Bangladesh. Fortunately, weather-related disasters are getting much less deadly, not more. There's very little reason to think this won't continue.
That said, as global incomes increase, refugee flows will continue to worsen regardless of the weather. Once people escape extreme poverty, they gain the means to emigrate.
This is a concern. In terms of EROI, renewables suck. My guess is that a lot of the solar being installed in California right now is actually negative EROI. Once you max out on solar, more solar just creates an unusable surplus.
But will this cause governments to collapse? I really doubt it. California can afford to be stupid about energy because they are so incredibly rich. It's true that renewables will make us poorer and more miserable. But governments can and do pivot when things get out of hand. In 2022, Germany started mining lignite again rather than shut down their economy.
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The only total collapse climate change scenario I’m familiar with is the ‘methane bomb’ / clathrate gun hypothesis that a huge amount of trapped methane could be released from the ocean which could rapidly kill off sea life (plankton, kelp etc) and spiral into a huge temperature rise in only a few years. I think that’s considered quite unlikely though, the IPCC officially declared it so.
The more obvious point is that if we really end up facing such a disaster, we'll just geoengineer a solution. The only reason we don't pursue it now is piety, but it's hard to imagine billions of people just letting themselves die because the IPCC says it would be wrong to stop climate change.
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