banned
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
"My ingroup tells the truth. My outgroup are all liars, and you should definitely hate the people I hate."
Making inflammatory generalizations about groups you hate is about all you do and you have an impressively long track record of doing this (and posting little else).
Banned for three days, and it's only this short because it's been a while since your last driveby, but at this point you're on the "escalate consequences steeply" slope that looks a lot like the FAFO graph.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
2rafa
5mo ago
Nothing in his comment suggests that TikTok was banned because of Jewish lobbying, it suggests that some people complained about antisemitism on TikTok (often the same people complaining about it on all other social media, where they appeared and appear similarly powerless). If they can’t get Zuck to block it on Instagram, it doesn’t make sense that they could ban TikTok without something else, which in this case was the impetus for the ban (the China thing).
jkf
5mo ago
I agree, being evil isn't a crime. Neither is funding dangerous research.
When Congress explicitly banned the dangerous research it kind of is?
aqouta
5mo ago
As he's not been banned can we consider that other question answered or will it be implied again?
Fauci worked with a major geo-political rival (China) to funnel US tax-payer money into performing bio-weapon gain of function research. Research that Congress had explicitly banned.
RenOS
something is wrong
5mo ago
Substack is alive and well, and there are a whole number of good posters in adjacent topics, some of which used to be prolific posters on themotte (hwfo,kulak) but most, as expected, are from other places. The problem is that themotte is starting to outlive its usefulness - twitter is better for low effort posts and a pretty open platform nowadays, substack is similarly open but better suited for quality content, and the overton window has shifted so much that Scott is now effectively writing about the things he more-or-less banned us for. Though I'm still a bit salty he isn't apologizing or at least referencing to themotte about it in retrospect, overall I'm much more happy about it.
Themotte, in contrast, has always been more a medium-effort discussion platform that discussed high-effort content as opposed to generate it. Which is just a bit of awkward spot to be in.
Also, since nobody has mentioned it, you should definitely take a look at thelastpsychiatrist/Alone/Edward Teach. He was a significant influence on Scott, and roughly stopped posting (2014) at the time when Scott blew up (incidentally, this was also shortly after I became familiar with Scott). He's definitely more on the esoteric side than the rationalist side, though.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
"Russian and Chinese military spending does the opposite" says the hippy "and all we get are these retarded wars and megadeaths that grind on for years where almost nobody gets what they want and everyone pays a shockingly high price. Why can't we all just get along?"
There are a bunch of complex reasons why we can't get along probably rooted in the human condition and likewise there are complex reasons why people want to speculate or do things that aren't strictly rational or productive. I feel no desire towards Bulgari handbags but I don't think 'these should be banned because they're socially useless moneysinks that unworthy organizations use to make money they shouldn't really have because they make these things high-status'. Let people enjoy things.
Gooofuckyourself
5mo ago
If you get banned for extensive citations answering a direct question, I think it would just answer another question.
I covered this months ago when the Ban was gaining support.
You have ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt in panic proclaiming "We have a major Tiktok problem" and saying that they have to work together to solve the problem... which they have now done... Then later you get lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups to ban TikTok:
Jewish Federations of North America, representing hundreds of organized Jewish communities, said its support for the bill is rooted in concerns about antisemitism on the platform.
One of the most prominent Jewish groups in the country has thrown its support behind a fast-advancing bill that could lead to the massively popular video app TikTok being banned in the United States...
Jewish Federations of North America, representing hundreds of organized Jewish communities, said its support for the bill is rooted in concerns about antisemitism on the platform. The Jewish Federations and the Anti-Defamation League have accused TikTok of allowing antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment to run rampant.
“The single most important issue to our Jewish communities today is the dramatic rise in antisemitism,” JFNA wrote in an official letter to Congress. “Our community understands that social media is a major driver of the drive in antisemitism and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.”
Before the ban acquired enough support, the Times posted an article called Why TikTok Needs to be Sold or Banned Before the 2024 Election which hardly mentions anything about some national security threat from CCP, and instead under the heading "Why it Matters" complains about the portion of pro-Palestinian hashtags on the platform and the spread of antisemitism:
TikTok says users decide whether to post and engage with content on #FreePalestine rather than #StandWithIsrael. But, content moderation decides what posts stay up, what gets taken down, and what accounts get banned from the platform. And it’s TikTok’s algorithm that decides what circulates and what doesn’t.
For anyone who doubts the causal link between TikTok and the rise in antisemitic incidents we’ve seen on U.S. campuses: a November 2023 study conducted by Generation Lab, which I helped to organize, showed that people who spend 30 minutes per day on TikTok are 17% more likely to agree with anti-semitic statements like "Jewish people chase money more than other people do."
And on top of that you have WSJ and Economist admitting that the momentum from the support came from the Jewish lobby.
This is completely typical of @2rafa, and frankly a typical audaciousness of many Jewish people. We have leaked recordings of Greenblatt proclaiming that something must be done about TikTok because they have a GenZ problem. Then you have Jewish journalists posting "why TikTok must be banned" which includes alarmism over anti-semitism as the chief concern. Then you get organized lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups to ban TikTok because of Israel, not CCP. After the political support for the issue starts to change due to that pressure, you STILL get people like @2rafa who just are unable or unwilling to see an obvious political play even when the means, motive, and opportunity are all crystal clear as day and directly admitted to by the people involved. You get Greenblatt saying on a secret call that "something must be done about TikTok" then you get organized lobbying by hundreds of Jewish groups, but @2rafa enforces the norm that nothing nefarious can be attributed to Jewish people.
And there's a 20% chance I'll be banned for posting this comment, but at this point people like 2rafa are just admiring the Emperor's clothes when denying that the TikTok ban happened because of Jewish lobbying. Even when the people involved directly admit what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Edit: Also why not throw a quite from Mitt Romney into the mix:
Driving the news: In a forum Friday at the McCain Institute in Sedona, Arizona Romney asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken why Israel and the U.S. have "been so ineffective at communicating" justifications for the war in Gaza, adding, "Typically the Israelis are good at PR."
"You have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion — the impact of images — dominates," Blinken said.
Romney replied, "Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts."
Shrike
5mo ago
I don't think "looking down on guys who can't get a mate" is a new thing, or something we've developed recently in the West.
Prostitution has been varying degrees of frowned on/illegal in the West since Christianity took hold (and even absent Christianity, I think it's fairly rare that prostitution is considered an esteemed career, historically). It's not like everything was fine up until George W. Bush banned prostitution, or whatever. Historically there have always been cycles where it was tolerated and then cracked down on.
It's true that literal "mail order brides" are looked down on, but people still go overseas (or online) and find someone who meets their fancy and marry them, and that's not illegal and I don't think is generally looked down on at all, as long as it isn't framed as a transactional relationship.
Setting all the moral quibblings aside, the nuclear family is a very beneficial societal force, and prostitution a negative one, so it doesn't seem strange that people would promote the one thing and look down on the other.
I think it is more likely that people becoming fed up with wokeness lead to both the Trump victory and Scott feeling more free to speak his mind.
This is going to be hard to debate, as it largely concerns the inner state of mind of people I either never met, or met only online, but I have a lot of trouble buying into that theory. As far as I could tell wokeness was always ranging from an embarrassment to a source of terror. The true believers were always a minority (something in the range of 10% if memory serves, there were some studies / surveys done on that but I'm not sure I can find them), and it doesn't really look like they suddenly changed their mind either. If you look at the sentiment on Twitter, it didn't change because suddenly people got fed up, it only changed because people were no longer being banned, or were even getting unbanned.
To me it looked like Kamala vs. Trump was "Wokeness on trial", if it delivered a victory, we'd still be stuck in the 2016-2024 vibes. The Blue Tribe went all in with the Coconut-Couchfucker-Joy offensive and there was no sign anyone was getting fed up. In fact, I distinctly remember people making the same old "if you want wokeness to subside, vote for Harris" argument that they were making during Biden's campaign, on the same assumption that it's the trumpness of Trump that made everybody go crazy, and if he wins again, we're just going to have a rerun of 2016-2020... except that didn't happen, he won, and now everybody is talking about the "vibe shift". I really honestly doubt this would be happening if Harris was president.
I think that modelling Scott as someone whose most important political goal was to tell the world about HBD is likely wrong.
I agree, because I think the way you're describing it is going way too far, but to me it's clear the issue is quite important to him. I mean, it's literally the first thing he chose to talk about when the environment became more permissive. It's not like he's short on controversial takes he could revisit after the fear of cancellation went away,
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
In defense of Russia, there are a lot of non-conspiracy reasons that Russian conservatives might sound like American conservatives.
First of all, Russia is, for Europe, a pretty conservative country, and therefore its views are going to match up. They have similar concerns, and similar beliefs and similar hopes for the future. Therefore when a Russian says something conservative, it’s going to sound like American conservatives because— they agree, more often than not.
Second, unlike China, Russia is a European, Christian country. Yes they’re orthodox Christian but they are Christians and therefore when they talk about their values it matches up with conservative Christian values. Both groups want Christianity to be more prominent in society and things like gay, trans, and abortion to be if not banned, at least harder to get. When they explain their reasoning, they’re appealing to Christianity and to the Bible and traditional family values derived from Christianity.
Given just how much the two groups share, it’s not really all that odd to find them sounding similar to each other. Heck we can probably find conservatives sounding like AfD, not because German trolls, but because they share a concern about immigration.
Speaking as a former reddit powerjanny, not that insider knowledge is necessary as the admins posted this publicly, the Reddit "Russian bot" story was a total fabrication.
Outside of the post by [see link], none of these accounts or posts received much attention on the platform, and many of the posts were removed either by moderators or as part of normal content manipulation operations. The accounts posted in different regional subreddits, and in several different languages.
Karma distribution:
0 or less: 42
1 - 9: 13
10 or greater: 6
Max Karma: 48
Admins banned 61 accounts. It wasn't unusual for me to ban more spam accounts than that on multiple single days in any given month, and very often those accounts had already accumulated thousands of upvotes.
The American intelligence apparatus had highly politicized reasoning for depicting Russia as an adversary. They're also part of the true power in this country, so personally I just can't find credibility in their words. After all, I saw for myself the proliferation of the bot hoax on Reddit. I can't say with certainty China was or is shilling on the site, but I can say how I was on /pol/ more than anything else just after Wuhan was quarantined, and those coronavirus general threads had videos from China of things that never happened. If Chinese cyberwarfare finds value in sliding and psyopping /pol/ and fielding an army of "wolf warrior" bots on Twitter, it's fair to suspect them of doing the same on Reddit.
I'll also say, having been introduced to just a taste, Chinese meme culture is incredibly complex, brilliant, and funny, all this even passing through translation. Heavy state censorship in the information age is cleverness' perfect crucible and surely some number of those people take their talents to contribute them to the state. If they haven't been doing any of this and it's just all a series of unfortunate coincidences, I don't think it's because they're lacking citizens who know how to talk like Americans, argue like Americans, and truly so importantly, meme like Americans.
satanistgoblin
5mo ago
TikTok, as it exists today, is getting banned. You can call it an attempted expropriation if you want.
jake
5mo ago
I wish a little that it was about spying on users. I wish more that it was about how TikTok is the worst thing humans have ever created. Hypershortform content is gigafrying the developing brains of young people, and then there are the peculiarities of its content. TikTok text-to-speech, obnoxious subtitles on every video, five hundred thousand shitty clips to the same fucking 20 seconds of a song over and over and over, TikTok dances, splitscreen videos of Family Guy clips and Minecraft because attention spans have apparently become that bad. Adolescents are mainlining psychic polonium just from all of these, and that's before we consider the psychic demon core that is social media.
Spying on users would be a good enough reason. I don't know how people respond with "My government is spying on me." Yeah but it's our government. It's a different and in many ways a far grosser abuse of power but at least you can say there are legitimate reasons for the American government to keep data on American citizens. There is no conceivable above-board justification for the Chinese government creating-via-numerous-cyberattacks a general database of American citizens and its existence alone is grounds to ban them from all American telecommunications.
It was probably expedited to congress because of AIPAC but that was long after Trump tried to ban it and well after the Biden admin had it investigated and banned from government devices. It also must be said that however much congress and their AIPAC handlers get their hackles raised about Israel and JQ shit, the actual power in this country, the unelected bureaucracy, is clearly highly invested in righties wasting all their time posting about jews. Look no further than that preeminent JQ voice of Nick Fuentes being a fed.
Regardless of the actual motive, absolute justification for the ban is and has been the CCP having a tool to introduce political narratives in a social media platform used by a massive number of Americans. It's not Reddit or X where they have to work with shills and botting, it's not /pol/ where they spam slide threads and run psyops like they did at the onset of the coronavirus. It's a platform they control where they can push the figurative button and suddenly millions of people are seeing the exact content the CCP wants them to see. Google does that too, but I know their reasoning, why is 'based China' doing it? It's not because they're ideologically lockstep. It's because for the last decade they've been waging a next-generation war on the American people by destabilizing our politics. I still don't get how this has been missed, after a year of seeing commentators on the right making incredible snipes of nefarious deeds being snuck by the masses, only Sam Hyde has voiced a fraction of the animosity we need to exhibit toward China, which begins with expelling every single Chinese national in this country, and even he softened that with using it to frame a joke about honeydicking.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5mo ago
China has long banned foreign social media companies from operating in its borders, and in 2021 passed severe restrictions on companies taking data on Chinese citizens outside its jurisdiction. If TikTok were willing to keep its US data in a US subsidiary that operated entirely domestically by employees under US jurisdiction, we'd be having a different conversation, I think. IIRC Facebook et al already have to keep EU data within the EU too under GDPR.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
If the intent was to ban TikTok, they would have just banned TikTok. The intent was to stop having one of the most used social media applications in the United States owned by the chief adversary of the American government.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
5mo ago
An app store or internet hosting service that continues to enable distribution, maintenance, or updates for a banned application could be subject to civil penalties of up to $5,000 multiplied by the number of U.S. users who accessed, maintained, or updated the application. A foreign adversary controlled application that fails to provide user data as required could be subject to civil penalties of up to $500 multiplied by the number of affected users.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
In fact, it's not even being "banned" at all.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5mo ago
I think there are a few lenses with which to view the "TikTok ban": you can call it protectionism for American social networks, but I think in practice it makes more sense as a tit-for-tat response to a tightening global market for social networks. Many other countries have, at this point, adopted measures attempting to limit the exfiltration of their social information. Europe has GDPR, which attempts to apply extraterritorial jurisdiction to its citizens against (largely-American) multinational corporations. China simply banned American companies like Facebook and Twitter, requires its allowed networks to be subject to state surveillance, and has tried to place limits on foreign companies collecting data on its' citizens.
Until TikTok, the United States has never found itself needing these things: all the other major networks are domestically-controlled, and probably aren't shipping user data to potentially-hostile nations for cloud processing even if it wasn't explicitly banned previously. For all the concerns about "surveillance capitalism" here, I think simple "trade war retaliation" is a much easier angle, and Trump's positions on those elsewhere suggest that either he'll try to leverage the ban for something in return (unlikely: I can't see China unblocking Facebook) or let it go into effect. I don't think this is a sympathetic battlefield for even absolutist libertarian-minded free-tradeniks to take a stand.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
5mo ago
I think the average /r/SSC mod seems to have thrown up their hands at this point. They can't censor the topic very well if even Scott is talking about it, and he was the one who had the old CWR thread forced off (if memory serves, I only frequented the subreddit and The Motte's sub when it had been a year or so since the declaration).
I know that they'd have banned you for that, and even banned people for saying it can't be discussed and that they should go elsewhere (that happened to me, though they were nice enough to reverse it when I brought it up in the mod mail).
TowardsPanna
5mo ago
Right. If you put weirdo idiots in charge of deciding what to ban people for ... well that explains people getting banned for dumber reasons than before. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's something that bothers me -- it's pretty much apolitical to submit this framing that he's a Nazi/fascist/whatever and ask if X links can be banned, but to actually discuss the framing is political, so the framing wins by default. It's something we've seen quite a few times by now, but I don't know what the answer is.
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