banned
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
Eh, I’ve gotten banned for ranting about Haitians.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4mo ago
Indeed, it's quite disappointing what this place has become. Good posters like TracingWoodgrains have been banned or moved on. Shitposters from CultureWarRoundup have moved back in, telling us constantly how we have to hate the outgroup with every fiber of our being, and any notion that we should try understanding them is akin to betrayal. The mods are apparently asleep at the wheel. Zorba, the original creator of the site, hasn't posted in 3 months, and hasn't really participated that much in nearly a year.
gattsuru
4mo ago
I don't think we know, or can know, what people would do in a vacuum. Your question was how people would react without the Times writing those two articles, not about a world where the Times didn't and hadn't existed as the paper of record for literal lifetimes and spent much of that time both papering over this sort of behavior, and stigmatizing any organization that would report on it.
The Times isn't the only part of that, or even the biggest part, fair. But that just kicks the problem up one level. Whether you call the ecosystem that the Times swims in and creates a conspiracy or prospiracy or The Free Market Modulo All The Law And Gov Funding Involved, it's still a giant machine of giant machines, often heavily coordinated, of which many or most of its components have explicit or not-exactly-vino-veritas recognition of what they're doing and how they're coordinating with other components. The degree to which that might be coordinated or naturally evolved is an interesting question, though one that I think has far more evidence against your position than you'd expect, but it's still besides the point. A machine that evolved fully organically is still a machine that would be fully compatible with :
Because while they'll only read a hackernews thread about TW's article once, they'll have heard the counter-narrative a million times, and will be sick of mustering the mental resources to reply critically with half-remembered anecdotes in the face of emotional blackmail. Eventually they'll forget they ever questioned the need for DEI programs, because only maga Nazis think that. The majority of people will never even see it once because reddit moderators deleted every mention of the article from the default subs, and banned the people who linked it.
So don't count on the familiar manipulation tactics failing forever just because it doesn't seem to be working right now. There is still an enormous propaganda engine manufacturing public opinion, and if I was in charge I'd make fighting it a high priority. But the current counter-elite supporting Trump dismiss that arm of the cathedral as opportunistic mercenaries, and fail to recognize the threat.
A fully headless organization could still produce a million articles about the counter-narrative that had the exact same notes, they could still aim massive amounts of emotional blackmail through every available institution, they could call everyone that disagreed with them maga nazis, they could still ban a ton of people who try to link things.
And that makes it pretty clear that whether or not Jesweez was acting in good faith -- perhaps they haven't seen any mainstream media coverage on this topic, or haven't read any of the actual coverage, or prosaically don't realize the ramifications of the words they're using -- they either don't or shouldn't actually believe their claim that this literally just "a few people you disagree with in a comment section."
German elections
The German parliament snap election is coming up, and for the first time I actually managed to get my postal voting documents on time and am in a realistic position to send them in before the deadline. That being said, I am really at a loss regarding who to vote for, as I find the Wahl-o-Mat style matching to each party's stated views to be useless due to the gap between what they say and what they wind up doing. I would therefore like to take the opportunity to give a short account of the German party landscape as seen through my distant eyes, and solicit both corrections (especially from our German posters) to these perceptions and advice (from everyone) on how you think I should vote given my own values and weights. (It would probably be a waste of time to try to convince me to change those values and weights so that I vote for the party you would prefer in this setting.)
@mods, let me know if I should just hold it and repost it in the next Transnational Thursday instead.
In descending order of latest polling,
CDU (the Christian Democratic Union), around 30%. The right-wing side of the old "two-plus" party system. Famously the party of Merkel. Now running Friedrich Merz, an old fox who has been hovering around the candidacy since prehistoric times but was never allowed near it because of his negative levels of charisma. Their primary terminal value is the preservation of the post-war societal order of Germany, with the US representing the Lord God in his heaven, a CDU chancellor as the Pope, a college of cardinals consisting of assorted old-school industrial magnates, publishing house elites and wealthy widows, and the middle and lower classes staying quiet and attending catechism (TV and tabloids). They are pretty agnostic as to how to achieve this, but the chaos of the '00s (Pirate Parties, protests against transatlanticists ventures (Iraq, trade pacts...) that actually worked, people gluing themselves to tracks to sabotage nuclear waste transports...) scared them and so they are firmly convinced that they need to (1) control the lawless element that is internet culture and (2) break the back of grassroots leftist~anarchist civil society orgs.
(I think that half of the reason for Merkel's opening of the refugee tap is in this list: it was openly a hail-mary to improve the increasingly bad bargaining position of their industrial magnate base relative to their workers, and Merkel's political instincts told her that it would drive a wedge right into the contradictions of the civil-society orgs. The other half was EU political checkers downstream from the 2009 debt crisis.)
AfD (the Alternative for Germany), around 21%. Everyone's favourite alt-right populist boogeyman. Formed as a somewhat Frankensteinian merger of various groups, including a "dark enlightment"ish dissident intellectual wing that sublimated out of the old block parties, the rubble of various predominantly East German neonazi parties that had close brushes with being banned and grassroots identitarian anti-Islam movements like PEGIDA. Their terminal values are obtaining respect for a broad coalition of "deplorables" (blue-collar workers, the East German poor, low-openness rural dwellers), reducing the number of visible foreigners, and defending masculine-coded aspects of German culture (cars, engineering, firework, beer). Other parties, with the encouragement of the media, have agreed upon a "firewall" which says that the political system should produce outcomes as if they did not exist. Defecting e.g. by proposing laws that would not pass but for their votes is punished harshly.
SPD (the Social-Democratic Party of Germany), around 16%. The left-wing side of the old "two-plus" party system. Lost their status as a possible solo governing party irretrievably, after entering a coalition with Merkel's party in 2005. (Just imagine if, in Trump's first term, Bernie ran on an independent ticket, no single party wound up getting a majority, and the Democrats agreed to give their EC votes to Jeb in return for some cabinet positions.) The current chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is running again (he was carried by a coalition with the Greens and the FDP which fell apart), but barring some complete upheaval he is understood to stand no chance. Traditionally, they were the party of blue-collar workers and socialists, but by the early 2000s had become culturally alienated from their base and earned resentment for a severely pursestring-tightening reform of social programmes. It's hard to discern what their terminal values really are now - my sense is that they just pine for the old political arrangement, and think that if socialism must be wound down, it should be them doing it, since they will do with gentle sadness rather than hatred (think the Goebbels family poisoning its children).
Bündnis 90/die Grünen (the Greens), around 14%. A counterculture party that gradually worked itself into being the culture party as its members grew up and got white-collar jobs through the '90s. They are sort of like the medieval church, in that everyone within the mainstream must profess that they are the arbiters of morality, and just disagrees about the piety-practicality tradeoff. Accordingly, every major party can form a coalition with them, though their relationship with the FDP is strained. They had an interesting character development arc that started when the foreign minister who led Germany to join the American crusade in Afghanistan in 2002 was from their party, and resulted in them gradually turning from a virulently anti-American hippie party into the most pro-American party in the German landscape. They are the party of the young, well-educated, and urban women of all ages. Their terminal values are to destroy the masculine-coded aspects of German culture, US-style SJ, environmentalism, and to instantiate a decisive struggle of good against evil, with themselves as the vanguard of Good. The "grown-up" wing of the party believes that the principal battleground of this struggle will be the USA, and the proper role of the Greens and Europe more generally is to be the angelic mentor figure that guides the protagonist (US progressives) on his quest and orients his moral compass to save him from his human flaws (attachment to idiosyncrasies like free speech, unregulated business and self-sufficiency), but this sometimes creates tension with an unruly youth wing that takes America's performative self-loathing too literally (which results in clashes over Israel, Facebook etc.), as well as remnant elements from before they fell to American memes (e.g. anti-vaxxers, anti-globalists, pacifists).
Die Linke (The Left), >5%. A party that came to be as a merger of West German hard left, some SPD evaporates and the remnants of East Germany's communist uniparty. Actual communism is thoroughly discredited in Germany, which left them in an ideological vacuum that was filled by an incompatible combination of Greens-but-anti-bourgeois and East German cultural identity (\setminus the neonazis) plus more socialism. This resulted in the party finally fracturing into two a few years ago, with most of the sitting parliamentarians joining the BSW listed just below. This party got the "anti-bourgeois Green" component, and for a while it looked like they would just sink into irrelevance, but they are experiencing an eleventh-hour comeback. I can't get a good read of their terminal values, but I guess it is some patchwork of "more socialism" and instantiating the same decisive struggle of good against evil as above, but with the USA and Israel shoved into "Evil" coalition. It is conceivable that they could get into power as part of a coalition with SPD and Greens under certain circumstances.
BSW (the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance), <5%. The "East German identity" splinter of the above, and the newest party on the map. Uncharacteristically for Germany, they are completely centered around the eponymous founder, a rhetorical firebrand East German communist cadre with a microeconomics PhD. Their terminal values amount to "Sahra Wagenknecht should have a say in German politics", more socialism, and a "respect for masculine East German culture" package that is quite similar to that of the AfD; flowing from that, they advocate for keeping out refugees, reindustrialisation and rapprochement with Russia, but those details seem to be negotiable. They seem to vote and speak against the CDU's police state agenda, but this might just be because they expect to find themselves at the business end of it. They inherited many parliamentary seats from the Linke and initially looked to be pushing 10% as they absorbed anti-system sentiment from people that for one reason or another could not palate the AfD, but teething problems/drama (such as a whole state chapter going rogue against the federal party) and a deeply unsympathetic press has now driven them below their other half and the 5% threshold that generally needs to be cleared to enter parliament.
FDP (the Liberal Democratic Party), 4%. The third member of the shattered governing coalition. A party that has been part of the post-war German fabric from the very start and has been through some extreme highs and lows, being the "kingmaker" quite similar to the British Lib Dems for a while. They are ostensibly a civil rights/libertarian party, but in practice their national incarnation has been a "business bro" party for as long as I can remember. (The Europarl offshoot is a different story.) Their only terminal value is to lower taxes and hurdles for their upper-middle-class freelancer and independent white-collar business owner clientele, though they think that if this clientele could also have lower obstacles to do whatever pastimes they enjoy (sex, drugs, rock and roll, cars) this would be a nice plus. Because of this, for the longest time, their preferred partner was the authoritarian-leaning CDU, as they found that the CDU is not particularly opposed to business bros as long as they don't threaten the true elites (Bertelsmanns and Albrechts) and can be effectively nudged by the threat of remembering the civil rights component of the party platform. The media has been dragging them through the mud continuously since they were seen to have backstabbed the coalition (in a way that is particularly damaging to the cause of the Greens, who are unsurprisingly overwhelmingly supported by the newsrooms), with the result that they will almost certainly not make it past the 5% threshold. There is also a element of most everyone being fed up with their shit, since the 4% represent approximately all the people that actually care for tax breaks for freelancers/independents and they have time and time again proven to be a terrible political ally (as they don't care about anything else, but are willing to theatrically pretend to have other pieces of agenda just to have bargaining mass to trade for them).
Now, I am really unsure who I should vote for here. My own preferences are, in loosely descending order of weight,
- civil rights (I'm opposed to the CDU's onslaught of mass surveillance, encryption breaking, copyright enforcement, policing of dissidents, abortion restrictions; everyone-but-the-FDP's occupational licensing; the Greens' plastic bans, gender-inclusive language mandates, and the planned speed limits and firework bans that also seem to be pushed by the SPD)
- education (I'm opposed to the Greens' lowering of school standards, levelling of distinctions etc. in the name of diversity, also partially supported by the SPD; and to the AfD's likely Trump-like broad-spectrum reprisals against universities, as well as the Greens' ideological ban on certain areas of science and tech - nuclear, GMOs (especially!), some human genetics, partially shared by SPD and CDU for different reasons)
- opposing safetyism (related to "civil rights", but also including the whole aesthetics and philosophy that resulted in people over the last 10 years having started to wear helmets while skiing, raising mandatory child seat minimum ages, etc.)
- foreign-internal policy (I'm opposed to the USA bootlicking by everyone except for the Left, BSW and AfD, and the damage to the economy that results from it as instantiated in the Ukraine context. I'm also opposed to the Greens deindustrialising tendencies)
- internationalism (I'm opposed to the AfD's apparent goal of actually cancelling all foreigners rather than merely the refugees) and
- economic freedom (I have concluded it is unrealistic to operate as an independent software developer or tech entrepreneur in Germany, and I would even loathe to touch my stocks while resident in it).
As I see it,
-
Voting FDP would weakly signal a theoretical vote for civil rights, but in reality it would only be a vote for economic freedom (far down on my list) and I'd have to watch my actual top preference being made a mockery of. They will also almost certainly not get in.
-
Voting AfD might seem natural considering the dot product, but apart from a personal distaste for the neonazi component that lives on in them, I don't think it would actually be tactically correct. They also lean pro-surveillance/police state, being authoritarians. They are well outnumbered by people who categorically consider them to be the devil, and empowering them further has a pretty strong effect of also strengthening Green ideology by toxoplasmosis. It's needless to say that every subvariant of the Greens is my political nemesis, but the limit of letting the AfD-Green toxoplasma spread in Germany in my expectation looks like maybe 65% Green to 35% AfD, which would be much worse than the current situation. Alternatively the system could just ban them if they get too close to power, which would demoralise and create precedent for banning any out-of-window opposition.
-
Voting BSW is my current teeth-gritting top choice, insofar as they are a neat non-toxoplasmic "against the system" option that actually has a chance to get in and I agree with them on a lot of points (Russia, industry, anti-Green, anti-refugees, anti-surveillance). However, they are now more likely to not get in, I find their focus on the person at the helm silly and politically a doomed meme in the German landscape, and I'm not actually on board with a lot of their tankie DNA.
-
Voting the Linke might be an interesting "preemptive compromise" signal like "if it has to be something Green, this is the most palatable form of Green politics to me", and also signals opposition to the system as the CDU-SPD block tried and only recently failed to uphold an AfD-like "firewall" against them. However, my volume of object-level agreement with them is fairly low.
-
The SPD, to the extent they have an identity of their own, are being something like a party of moderation (note e.g. Scholz's resistance to maximalist support for Ukraine). However, they are now weakened even further, which almost guarantees that if they get into power they will just be a canvas for whatever other parties are in the coalition to paint on. If they do not make it into government, a vote for them is at most a weak signal that Scholz's politics of moderation was not so bad, because they really don't stand for much.
I have taken to shocking my normie friends by saying that if they actually go through with the fireworks ban I will snap and vote AfD (since that is just going too far with the sadistic culture defacement, and I'm a card-carrying pyromaniac), but so far this is just meant as bluster.
I'm not considering the other two parties because for both of them negating every single vote they cast in parliament would have gotten closer to my preferences than what they did. Minor party voting in Germany is a non-starter at the moment (and the Pirate Party got converted into a Green Party Youth Wing without the lame adults watching). What should I do?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
The usual rules about specific groups, outgroup-booing, and heat vs. light still apply. Even when you really don’t like the people involved.
Given the number of times you’ve been warned or banned for more or less the same thing, this shouldn’t be news to you. On the other hand, you keep doing interesting stuff when you can keep the vitriol in check.
One month ban, then.
(let's face it, this place is very, very red tribe-bent)
Is it? It's very, very right-wing, but that's not the same thing. From "I Can Tolerate Anything except the Outgroup" by Scott Alexander:
The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.
The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.
(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)
From what I can tell, most of us are Grey Tribers who refused to go along with the blatant falsehoods of wokeness and got thrown into the pit with the rest for it. The surveys support this. From the same essay:
On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.
But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?
When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre local sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.
How many "God-'n-guns-but-not-George-III" conservatives do we actually have here? I think the most prominent ones were @HlynkaCG, who got himself permabanned, and @FarNearEverywhere, who left. We got a couple of other military vets and Christians who fit the bill, but the bulk of us would be as completely out of place in a USMC boot camp as we would be at Sunday church service or a Super Bowl watch party.
Agreed, the regime even in totalitarian system doesn't care about the free speech of the raving guy on the street corner. But where does that leave us with respect to "the rule of law" for any group which participates in the political system at all?
The US currently, right now, engages in vast violation of the 1st Amendment rights and "free speech" rights of its citizens. The Biden Administration saw a vast complex of both government and government financed NGOs which worked diligently through carrots and sticks to coerce social media companies to engage in vast censorship of American citizens, including financing overseas NGOs to lobby governments to ban and threaten those social media companies. There are dozens of lawsuits showing this to be the case. There were group chats within these companies of "former" intelligence officials who were coordinating with their government colleagues to direct and enforce this censorship.
Sure, you can show how pretty much all actions and statements by the government during the covid response were bullshit, but then you'll lose your bank account, you will be banned from government grants (thus making you unemployable in academia), you'll be banned from social media companies, and you'll be banned from payment processors, and any licensing boards you're apart of, e.g., lawyers and doctors, will attack your ability to practice your profession. So as long as you don't care to have any job with any power or influence, you had "free speech" off the internet but also you couldn't go to public places because no one was there and businesses and social gatherings were banned. We don't have to go back to the 1960s to see what the US Government does to attack dissidents and violate free speech; we have rampant examples in the last few years.
"Checks and balances" is an illusion. The separation of power between various factions of government requires them to have actual power and also requires them to not be the same people, but in the modern era they are the same people and a part of the same faction. The "rule of law" is an illusion, it only looks that way because victims of the violations have power. When they don't have power, the law is no hurdle. One faction punishing the other faction for its wanton violation and weaponization is necessary if you want to get back to a détente which can be inaccurately described as "rule of law."
You say "social pressure" is enough, but that social pressure is currently manufactured through this vast web of government money and overreach. Its power is just as serious as the beatings on the street, except it's more deniable. Spread out, faceless total state is worse than a system with an actual knowable and identifiable sovereign. "Social pressure" is used, just like during the Covid Hysteria, to create a minority small enough and powerless enough so that more explicit use of power can be brought to bare to force the dissidents to conform and then that will be attempted.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4mo ago
Banned for punning.
(Just kidding. This was reported for "Quality Contribution" and "Crime against humanity.")
Has anyone been checking out the reddit and hacker news reaction to TW's FAA scandal follow-up?
He's downvoted to -44 on /r/atc, which applauded his essay last year. Highlights from the comments:
Trace, the truth of the matter is you think you deserve a ton of credit for bringing this story to light. But this story has already been brought to light, been analyzed, and it’s nowhere close to the actual scandal of FAA hiring.
The choice you’ve made, is to cast your lot with the fascists currently ransacking our government. To pretend as though the Trump EO on DEI is in any way a reasonable response to a genuine policy concern, rather than the pure expression of bigotry that it actually is, is inexcusable.
There are only two sides right now. There are the neoconfederate fascists intent on dragging us back to the antebellum era, of which Trump, Vance, and Sailer are definitely a part. And there’s the rest of us.
You don’t have to be on their side if you don’t want to be. But if you choose to be, at least be honest with yourself about what you’re doing.
The top-voted comment on hackernews is accusing it of being a rehashed non-scandal laundered by authoritarian fascists. But the actual comments are mostly in favor, or pointing out that there's suddenly a lot of brand new accounts defending the FAA & claiming "this wasn't real DEI."
Grendel-khan describes the reaction:
The left outside the institution at fault swears up and down that something like this would never happen, and it's just right-wing disinformation, and you're probably a closet right-winger if you believe it.
The left inside the institution at fault swears up and down that this is a good thing and it's obvious that it's happening and why are you making such a big deal of it?
Taking it for granted for a moment that a lot of this stuff is totally astroturfed by blueanon orgs with AI-assisted spamming, it looks like doubling-down and tripling-down on full spectrum information manipulation is still the only strategy on the menu, even as it's increasingly failing and backfiring outside of totally controlled environments like reddit and bluesky.
So, what are the next four years going to look like? Is there going to be any evolution in strategy? Are they correct that just repeating a party line hard enough will bring people back into the fold?
I think that right now it's easy to point at this sort of frantic concern-trolling and laugh, but in a few years the average voter won't remember anything about some FAA hiring scandal except that "Trump used a tragedy for a culture war attack on minorities." Because while they'll only read a hackernews thread about TW's article once, they'll have heard the counter-narrative a million times, and will be sick of mustering the mental resources to reply critically with half-remembered anecdotes in the face of emotional blackmail. Eventually they'll forget they ever questioned the need for DEI programs, because only maga Nazis think that. The majority of people will never even see it once because reddit moderators deleted every mention of the article from the default subs, and banned the people who linked it.
So don't count on the familiar manipulation tactics failing forever just because it doesn't seem to be working right now. There is still an enormous propaganda engine manufacturing public opinion, and if I was in charge I'd make fighting it a high priority. But the current counter-elite supporting Trump dismiss that arm of the cathedral as opportunistic mercenaries, and fail to recognize the threat.
Moldbug and especially Thiel may absolutely despise the press, but they see the manipulation of public opinion as a quirk of "demotic" regimes, and have no time for it themselves. Moldbug in particular dismisses color revolutions with the over-simplistic "why does the dictator not simply shoot the revolutionaries with crypto-controlled weapons?" Thiel is quieter but clearly sees controlling the murder drones and spying rings as more important than propaganda. Musk is the only one of Trump's big backers who thinks control of social media is important, and I'm convinced that's because of his showman's instincts and desire for attention rather than some strategic policy.
People here have been talking as if the left will shift to violence and hard power in response to their usual methods failing last year (more assassinations of Musk & Trump, etc.). I'm a lot more worried about them doing the same thing they always do and getting away with it, because people don't have lasting immunity to propaganda.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4mo ago
So, were you trying to get me to ban you? Look, "you're lying to yourself" is a little uncharitable and if I really wanted to I probably could have banned you for being a jerk, but contrary to what some persistent pests insist, we don't go looking for reasons to ban people. If you really want to be a bitter cynic, it doesn't hurt my feelings.
However sincerely I believe that only suckers don't seek to dominate other people, and you're clearly not a sucker.
Well, I doubt anyone can convince you otherwise, but no, I really don't have any particular desire to "dominate other people" except to the extent that I participate in a society that has to negotiate conflicts of interest and competing priorities, and therefore some people will be winners and some people will be losers, and obviously I'd prefer not to be the latter. But the kind of "dominating" that the brutalists espouse, where I wish to drive them before me and hear the lamentations of their women? No, I don't need that.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
4mo ago
A holistic approach is better. does the person have a history of only ai-assisted posts or a mix of both? A lot of people use AI to assist with writing when stuck. An account that only posts ai-like content should be banned though.
At one point we were reduced to talking about "muggle realism" and "Horrible Banned Discourse" in the Slate Star Codex comment section when Scott banned the strings "HBD" and "Human Biodiversity" (the former was a play on an earlier euphemism of "Death Eaters" for Neoreactionaries, because Scott, hypocrite that he is, also banned that word after he wrote his posts on Neoreaction).
jeroboam
4mo ago
Are you new here? In the past, he specifically banned HBD, to give one example.
hydroacetylene
4mo ago
My views are a bit spicier than yours and I've never been banned except for referring to 'the chink virus' and 'devil worshipping jigaboos'. I 100% believe that the rules are about tone and not content.
I don't necessarily want AI banned, but I'd like to see heavy moderation against a few common failure modes.
The first is that it's often used as an argument to authority. "I'm right because the God machine agrees with me" is a bad argument, but it seems to be a common one in the LLMposting on this site.
The second is that it seems to be used to pad the word count of a post. Word count as a proxy for quality is already a problem on this site, and AI posts make it worse.
If someone is using it as an augmented search engine that's fine, and should probably treated as such. Bare links to Google would trigger a ban, so why wouldn't dumping pages upon pages of AI output?
blooblyblobl
Battery-powered!
4mo ago
My $0.02: non-critical appendix-style references to AI output are probably okay. Usage for generating discussion or argument should be banned. We do need a rule to match expectations between users and mods, to avoid encouraging excessive attempts at AI ghostwriting, and to reduce paranoid accusations of AI slop in place of deserved criticism.
- The cost of generating AI content is so low that it threatens to trivially out-compete human content. The volume of output and the speed of processing by AI makes for an extremely powerful gish-gallop generator.
- Unlike our resident human gish-gallop generators, nothing I say to the AI will meaningfully change its mind. AI can simulate a changed mind, but with substantial limitations and ephemeral results. Personally, the draw of the Motte is the symmetric potential to have my own mind changed and to change others' minds by sharing our own unique experiences and perspectives. (I am open to future AI advances that make debating the AI similarly engaging, but we're not there yet.)
- Quoting books, blog posts, etc is an acknowledgement of the perspective and effort applied by the human being cited, regardless of topic-level value alignment. AI does not develop perspectives or apply efforts in ways that warrant social considerations (at least, not presently).
- Quoting a source also serves as a natural bridge to further learning and discovery of the source for anyone interested. There can be valuable context, history, or interpersonal relationships surrounding the quote. In this sense, AI mostly generates shallow engagement opportunities. Where it could be more engaging (e.g. reference discovery or Google search replacement), I'd prefer to take recommendations from someone with skin in the social game.
- Importantly, quotation is typically brief, poignant, and insightful. I'll grant that brief, poignant, and insightful are possible properties of AI output, but I've yet to see anything worth quoting by those criteria.
- Pastebinning or spoiler-tagging AI output is an invitation for me to skip it. I'm okay with this for mentions or references, where there is already an implicit understanding that I may skip or summarize the content. I am not okay with "see my response [here](www.aislop.com )" replies.
- I strongly agree with @SubstantialFrivolity that responding to a human with a wall of AI text creates an impression of "I can't be bothered, talk to my assistant instead." It's very rude. Critically, no amount of initial prevaricating about the effort you spent prompting, tweaking, and blessing the output makes this any less rude. On the other hand, if I can't tell if you used AI, you're likely using it well enough that I don't mind. It is in principle possible that I am already interacting with several longstanding AI characters and I just don't realize. The quality of AI output to date is not compelling evidence for this possibility. I also suspect that for each person successfully using AI to ghostwrite their posts, there would be ten other clumsy attempts that obviously fail. I feel that anything other than a blanket ban on AI ghostwriting is an invitation for people to push their luck, and will lead to more AI slop, more paranoid accusations of AI slop when mere slop is sufficient, and more moderation headaches as a result.
- The growing pool of modhat "we didn't order you not to do this, but don't do this" posts on AI slop is a strong indication of an impedance mismatch between the expectations of mods and users, and of a need for unambiguous rules about how AI should or should not be used here.
- I'm open to reviewing any rules made about AI posting in the coming years as AI gains increasing agency.
Aside: is $0.02 competitive for this amount of inference?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4mo ago
Except a big reason we don't have them in the first place is that we have the longpoast filter. It's the number one complaint of dramanauts, and le average redittors (at least the ones that don't run away screaming about Nazis).
If we came across one that managed to string together a longer sentence by himself, but still didn't make the cut of what we expect here, I don't think it would be proper to ban them on sight. They're obviously trying, and the effort should be commended. With AI there is no effort, so it should be banned on sight.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
4mo ago
In debates over whether it's ok to use AI for X, it's helpful to ask "instead of asking an AI to do it, what if I asked another human to do it? Would that be ok?"
So the equivalent here would be, instead of dumping AI output as a top level post, what if you just copy and pasted an article from someone else's substack and offered that as a top level post? And that's already not ok. It would be considered low effort and essentially no different from a bare link. We're here to read your writing, not some other entity's writing (whether that entity is human or not).
Failing to attribute the source doesn't make it any better, and if anything it just makes it worse. IIRC people have gotten banned in the past for copying other people's articles and posting them here without attribution.
Of course the use/mention distinction applies and I don't think anyone has a problem with quoting AI text when it's relevant in a discussion about AI.
Kind of? On a technical level, the median AI essay is both easier to create and lower quality than the median motte post. I want to strongly discourage people from spamming bad content because it’s bad content, especially at first while norms are being established.
But lots of other posters are arguing that posting AI-generated words is inherently wrong or goes against the purpose of the site. That if the words were not crafted in the brain of a human then discussing them is worthless and they should be banned regardless of their content. I think some people would be more offended by a good AI post than a bad one, because they’d been lured into paying attention to non-human writing. THAT is what I mean by ‘moderating for provenance’.
I should note that I’m mostly thinking of top-level and effort-posts here. If you’re involved in a downthread debate with a specific person then I can see that drafting in a more eloquent AI to continue the battle when you lose interest is poor form, at least unless you both agree to it.
(The labelling is partly practical and partly a moral conviction that you shouldn’t take credit for ideas you didn’t have).
4nji2
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
4mo ago
There basis of state is self-preservation, treason is the first crime. Yet themotte.org has no rules against activity aimed at destroying themotte.org itself. One is allowed to argue that reddit was right to [remove] innocuous comments on /r/themotte. One is allowed to argue that reddit would be in the right even if banned /r/themotte, that the hosting of themotte.org is allowed to end with no justification, or that patreon is allowed seize the donations to themotte.org.
As thus one is allowed to gnaw at the very foundation if themotte.org, any rule whose alleged aim is allowing the continued existence of themotte.org, is arbitrary. And I consider its true goal to be something else. In this case, it is insecurity: if a merely large enough matrix can be shown to produce greater insights than many flesh and blood men, ideologies would have to take this fact into account. And perhaps some would cope more easily than others.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4mo ago
Sharing your opinion on a group is fine. Generalizing to what “almost nobody” thinks, or drawing conclusions about “many of these people,” is not.
You’ve been banned for this exact behavior before. On the other hand, you’ve been relatively good for the better part of a year. I’m going to go with a 1 day ban as a reminder to be more precise and charitable, even about people who are trying to be edgy.
Corvos
4mo ago
This is the same reason people got angry about Black Lives Matter (before the riots). Waving a placard saying "Black lives matter!" is implicitly an accusation. It's saying, "I have to scream 'black lives matter' at you because you secretly don't think they do.'"
All Lives Matter was the same accusation in reverse, which is why it was banned so quickly.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
This was one of the reasons that I insist that policy decisions were the major drivers of Covid-era inflation. Not only were massive supplies of money printed and distributed, but governments banned or severely restricted major sectors of the economy for a long period of time. That money is going to go somewhere.
veqq
4mo ago
Southern Italy and Sicily have been backwards since literally the Roman times.
They were quite wealthy during the Middle Ages, e.g. Sicily under the Norman Roger II. However the south's cash crops stagnated the economy as great wealth flowed in without much need for diversification and increasing complexity (...and later the Kingdom of the 2 Sicilies banned agricultural exports!) Prosperity started breaking down in the 14th century, then in the 15th century when large earthquakes and plagues decimated the population and slave raids shifted settlements inland; the Spanish art of governance (rent seeking) also halted development (cf. Spanish literacy into the late 19th century).
Nevertheless, up to unification, Naples remained one of Europe's largest and wealthiest cities. Sicily had 3 of the most industrialized provinces in 1871 - but they hadn't changed production methods for centuries, doing seasonal labor in workshops (compared to the area around Milan which used power looms etc. from the 1820s).
This is a false equivalence.
First of all, "Radical leftists want to undermine America" is itself a bit more Fox News than I think we normally go. I would probably say something more like "The left wants to weaken America's military, so of course they support closing overseas bases." I think a lot of leftists would actually agree with my framing, and would disagree that closing bases counts as 'undermining' America. They would probably say that America should spend its money on welfare rather than overseas bases, and that closing bases actually strengthens America in all the ways that count. Thus, they don't want to undermine America, they just want to close bases.
The Jewish conspiracy angle leaves a lot of unanswered questions. I do not actually accept the reasoning that Jewish people want to undermine the UK any more than I accept the reasoning that the American left wants to undermine America. I think that the thing you most need to justify when making that argument is the premise. Any time anyone posits a Jewish conspiracy, they never explain the alleged motivation of the alleged Jewish conspiracy. I believe that the American left wants to close military bases, because it makes sense according to their goals (spend less on military and more on welfare). I do not believe that British Jews want to 'undermine the UK’s geopolitical power when the nation is weak and vulnerable' out of sheer evil Jewishness, because that is not a real motivation.
I think if someone went around suggesting that the Vegans were the masterminds behind every Islamic terrorist plot, they would be banned in short order. The problem with the Jewposting isn't the form, it's the sheer nonsense of it. You can't post crazy gibberish and expect to be taken seriously.
More options
Context Copy link