banned
erwgv3g34
5mo ago
The theory I have heard is that a lot of Goons gambled their account on the presidential election. When Obama won the conservatives got banned and most of them never bothered paying 10 bucks to make another account, so that started the leftward spiral.
TowardsPanna
5mo ago
I don't know how that happened. SA was started as a place to make fun of all sorts of people, in irreverent ways unfit for any polite company. Now you would get banned for saying retard or bitch there.
Poultice
5mo ago
According to wiki:
"In 1978 the United States banned the use of CFCs such as Freon in aerosol cans, the beginning of a long series of regulatory actions against their use. The critical DuPont manufacturing patent for Freon ("Process for Fluorinating Halohydrocarbons", U.S. Patent #3258500) was set to expire in 1979"
citing DeSombre, Elizabeth R. (2000). Domestic Sources of International Environmental Policy: Industry, Environmentalists, and U.S. Power. MIT Press. p. 93
Magusoflight
5mo ago
Tiktok being banned won't solve much, there are 50 other apps ready to jump in and replace it, but maybe, just maybe someone will produce reliable research to measure the impact of these apps and finally get towards some policy proposals aimed at cutting out the most harmful elements while retaining the benefits. I can dream, right?
Jonathan Haidt is trying. But he’s getting the entire academy screaming at him for it. There’s certain forces deeply invested in ensuring teens stay addicted to their phones, and to my eyes it appears to be leftists primarily who desire to keep the status quo, who will try to argue you that it’s “alarmist” to be concerned at all about the massive societal rot and atomization occurring all around you. Phone addiction is politics addiction and a massive opportunity for political brainwashing of young impressionable kids. It’s done wonders for their movement. The moment people stop being addicted to their phones is the moment the trans movement and other adjacent movements wither and die. So it’s not just capital set against you - it’s woke capital.
aqouta
5mo ago
I find the framing of capital vs people to be misleading. There's only really one vector for commerce to care about or impact your focus, advertising, which we can certainly attack in a number of ways. Its demise would result in the death of a lot of things like most massive free websites but that could be seen as a benefit. I don't think banning it outright is really possible, there needs to be some mechanism for matching products to people who would like to have them but surely many forms could be banned and with them the goes the doom scrolling media sources that rely on hooking you into watching ads to exist.
The other end of the coin for rootedness is family. having kids gives you a ready made community with a shared prosocial interest in the kids. The decline in family formation is really probably partially the upstream cause of most of the ills of modernity. As someone who also moved across the country away from family I think this probably isn't a good thing in hindsight. My immediate family has since split into several different cities and only now has there started to be some interest in coordinating moving back closer together, maybe not surprisingly as my generation has started to work on families of our own. Much ink has been spilt on suggestions for increasing family formation, I won't put another attempt at a solution here.
Its funny, I'm an elder millennial, so I can remember a childhood without phones (and, barely, one without computers or internet), so I actually balk from blaming 'the phones' in the abstract. I was able to adapt from the old nokias to the slick flipphones to several different form factors for 'smartphones' and I think this gave me a practical view of the phone as a tool for organizing IRL activities and keeping in touch with distant friends. That's what we used it for originally.
BUT, I work with 20-21 year old Zoomers, and holy COW they treat their phones like an inseparable appendage, and you can catch them doomscrolling constantly. I can SEE that growing up with this influence leads to a qualitatively different relationship to/dependence on the gadget, which could be source of the other observable problems. Oh, and now they're used to having a semi-reliable AI assistant in their pocket at all times, so now they can use this machine to do a lot of their literal thinking.
And now there's been a couple decades of engineering and testing to optimize the apps for taking your money and sucking up your attention and otherwise making you dependent on various digital services that we previously lived without.
Tiktok being banned won't solve much, there are 50 other apps ready to jump in and replace it, but maybe, just maybe someone will produce reliable research to measure the impact of these apps and finally get towards some policy proposals aimed at cutting out the most harmful elements while retaining the benefits. I can dream, right?
There are similar vibes in many of the other hobbies I take part in: gardening, swing dancing, reading: a trend towards pick-and-choose attendence of events, rather than attendence out of any sense of obligation to a particular community.
Seen this issue a lot. You can't build a community without a core of dedicated people constantly showing up and doing the work to put together events, and that core of people will get frustrated and burn out or give up if there's too much turnover in membership or members are extremely flaky and unreliable. So hard to even get one off the ground.
My martial arts gym, which HAS an extremely dedicated core tries to hold social events every so often, with plenty of advance notice, and it still a crapshoot as to who will show up outside of that core group.
I've spent the past two years holding regular social gatherings at my house, which is cheap, low-pressure, and I can control the environment to 'guarantee' a pleasant experience. Wrangling adults to hang out together is HARD. Some can't find a babysitter, this one's busy with work or school, that one's just tired and wants to go to bed at 9. So you invite people on the assumption that there'll be a number of last minute dropouts.
Everyone has like 15 different commitments going on at any one time, so getting them to TRULY prioritize a commitment to one group over the other is nigh-impossible. And this also seems to have shifted how humans value individual relationships. There's billions of humans you can potential interact with, and if you aren't satisfied with the ones in your circle of friends, discarding them for new ones is easy. Even if you can't find local friends, your phone offers the potential to make 'infinite' friends! Parasocial relationships! You can spend all day chatting with an AI version of Hitler or Tony the Tiger if it strikes your fancy! Why value real-life relationships at all?
This becomes especially stark on the dating apps. Human connection is immensely devalued.
As somebody whose preferred method of making friends is to identify good people and then forge a deep, long-lasting bond with them (my best friend, whom I still talk to regularly, has been in my life since Kindergarden, literally 30 years), this world of ephemeral connections where people flit in and out of your life on a whim is a bit of a waking nightmare.
but people my age aren't interested in the other ministries that the church offers: working with soup kitchen, church garden, and food pantry to help feed the homeless, book clubs, or even social events, many of which take place right after mass
I can say for myself, I used to attend the soup kitchens, food pantries, and service to shut-in elderly folks to mow their lawns and such. It was fulfilling in its way.
But what I concluded is that this was basically burning up the manhours of competent people to provide modest benefits to people who simply aren't able to produce value on their own. It is literally more efficient to donate money to some professional org that will pay to provide these services than for me to go out and spend hours on a weekend mowing a lawn myself, and I could do something more enjoyable, to boot. I guess I was engaging in prototype effective altruist logic.
But I do think that engaging in activities that constantly expose you to the 'dregs' of humanity, and seeing that no matter how much money and effort is poured into these folks, at best you're basically just raising their standard of living by 2-3% temporarily, not dragging them permanently out of destitution and fixing the problems that put them there. If you're not a certain type of person, the futility of it probably burns you out. I even tried volunteering at a dog shelter, but that burned me out EVEN QUICKER because holy cow the problem of stray and abandoned dogs is intractable, and there will never be enough funds to shelter all those poor animals, just the few that we can locate, rehabilitate, and get adopted. Volunteering your time for such a sisysphean endeavor seems irrational unless you honestly do have a deep and abiding love for animals. Which some do.
Now, I'm not denying that engaging in acts of service is enriching, and exposing yourself to that side of humanity probably makes you a better-informed person. But its also easy to do it just for the virtue-signal points.
That might be another part of the equation. Sympathy for strangers seems to be on the wane, and this has pushed us ever deeper into our chosen ingroups, and built up a wall of suspicion against all outsiders who might want to forge a connection with us.
hydroacetylene
5mo ago
Paid public toilets were banned under anti-discrimination law- urinals were free(there is, after all, no practical way to charge for them) and so it was thought to be discrimination against women.
I’m sure that checking American building codes and construction permitting regimes will give you plenty of examples.
how do you define "social justice"
Every philosophy department knew how do do it succinctly before the label was banned for being effective: Cultural Marxism. Race/Sex/Gender/etc communism.
The application of moralistic ideas of collective justice and redistribution to the cultural sphere, through the definition of multiple intersecting binaries of oppressors and oppressed classes.
yofuckreddit
5mo ago
I'm actually largely with you that the minute optimizations that these guys build in "The Market" are generally pretty worthless, and probably outstripped by the other perverse incentives and distortions they create.
I view them as an inevitable side effect of capitalism, and I don't think anyone's smart enough to carve out what should be banned and enforce it. I think China would more effectively compete with us overall if Xi didn't treat their economy the way he does.
It is always satisfying, though, to read about what China does occasionally to stomp on corruption or other frivolously antisocial bullshit like this. No pussyfooting around with fines: people go to prison, get tortured, or executed. The second order effects suck I think but my paternalistic/animalistic monkey brain loves it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
5mo ago
There's modest consensus around here that Vivek & Elon firing half of the government would be a good thing, and that most of those workers are largely vestigial parasites/culture warriors who don't productively contribute to society.
What would the practical effects be of Trump pulling a Xi and dropping the hammer of god on wall street and hedge funds, HFT outfits, etc.? Say you can keep venture capital and bank loans to businesses and all the other stuff, but the 'quants' who make a living with options, trading commodities and the like? I'll leave it to someone better versed in that world to carve out precisely what should or shouldn't be banned, or try to convince me that this is a mistake.
The friends I have in that space freely admit that they don't believe that they contribute meaningfully to society. They have advanced degrees in physics, math and CS; wouldn't society be better off pushing them towards engineering, manufacturing, company creation? And redistributing capital from the non-STEM people at these places who contribute nothing of value to society?
It depends. For example, when affirmative action was banned in the UC system, both Asian and white numbers went up at UCB and UCLA, and black and latino numbers down, although I forget if it was acceptances, enrollments, or both.
2rafa
5mo ago
Trump will decide whether or not to enforce the TikTok ban (yes, it may happen the day before he takes office, but presumably if his justice department says ‘we won’t take any enforcement action’ then in effect the ban won’t happen, the same way that they aren’t sending the FBI to arrest every legal weed dealer in Colorado).
TikTok being banned and that ban being enforced (meaning no US advertisers can buy TikTok ads directed at Americans) likely leads to billions of dollars in bonus ad spend for Meta given they control all competing platforms except Snapchat. Ad budgets are mostly fixed, cut out one platform with hundreds of millions of American users and existing platforms with the same reach all profit.
hydroacetylene
5mo ago
Boycotts require lots and lots of buy in from the rank and file, as both gun control and pro-life movements have discovered, so you can’t just deploy them Willy-nilly. You can use them effectively against companies that take major stands on current thing, you can use them against companies with easily available alternatives, and in both cases you need a big true believer base.
Calling the boycott bluff is economically rational and Zuckerberg is smart enough to know it. There just isn’t a good alternative to meta- TikTok is about to be banned, Twitter has an even stronger reputation for far-right, and it’s no longer the current thing. Advertisers have learned this- especially after the bud light boycott(which is a great example of the conditions for a successful boycott- there’s a big true believer base which thinks transgenders are mentally ill perverts, they drank bud light and there were lots of easy alternatives, and trans was a big current thing). Contrast with the boycotts of Starbucks or home depot.
kriss___vector
5mo ago
Could I bother you for the results of your research into VPNs? The free proxy I use to look at furry porn is banned from all respectable places like YouTube, and the more reputable VPN I used to have seems to be blocked on the country level.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
So I banned his alt after about a day, while the self-professed right-wing troll got to hang around for a year, and your conclusion is still that we show favoritism to leftists.
I seem to be wasting time trying to talk to you like a person who can be reasoned with. Obviously nothing will change your viewpoint, nothing will adjust your priors, and you will continue saying and doing the same things. So be it. I've engaged with you mostly for the benefit of the audience so they can see how mod reasoning operates (and that I have bent over backwards to hear you out fairly).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Oh, him. We didn't actually remove his posts, he was shadowbanned (which I realize does look the same to you). Usually we ban people when they finally wear out our patience, but when someone explicitly tells us he created an alt just to troll us, sometimes we shadowban instead. The "discussion" you are missing is him exhorting other users to also create alts and cycle them to troll us. And he'd been doing this for a while - his bad faith engagement goes back over a year and nine warnings and/or bans with that alt.
So in fact, antifa got banned much faster and with more prejudice than your right-winger.
I await your admission of error and apology.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Justawoman and a few others showed up after not posting for a year, right as impassionata made a trolling alt, and instantly jumped into the "discussion" to call for stricter moderation against evil fascist right wingers? That's obviously not a coincidence.
It is not obviously not a coincidence either. You really don't have the birds-eye view we do. Impassionata returns periodically (and sometimes we catch him and ban him before you even notice), and there are quite a few posters who only drop in every year or so, or who apparently spend 99% of their time lurking and every once in a while will post. It is possible that @justawoman is hanging out with Impassionata on some other forum and Impassionata said "Hey guys, let's go brigade the Motte!" But it does not fit the pattern we have seen in the past. Additionally, if you notice, I directly accused @justawoman myself of wanting "stricter moderation" and she explained what she does want (which I think is equally unfeasible, but it's not "stricter moderation for evil fascists").
Slow down, take a breath, actually read the words people type (all of them, not just the ones that trigger you) and while I know asking you to consider the possibility of a good faith interpretation is a bridge too far for you, at least try to steelman the argument as something other than "The worst possible motives @SteveKirk can attribute to this person @SteveKirk assumes is pure evil." Because really, you're acting the fool right now and you are on a streak.
Also I actually had to look through your post history to find the right wing guy you banned, because if it's the one I found you instantly deleted his posts and banned him to prevent discussion, so I didn't ever get to find out about him. I only found it because you left a typical snarky comment ban message! That's how different your reaction is, and if you'd done the same to "antifa" everything would be great!
Which right wing guy are you talking about? If you post a link, I will address it, but we very rarely delete messages except when it's a very obvious troll, so right now I am going to assume you are either making this up or taking an action that I'd have been happy to explain to you and spinning the most uncharitable and bad faith interpretation you can out of it, as you have an unfortunate habit of doing.
Justawoman and a few others showed up after not posting for a year, right as impassionata made a trolling alt, and instantly jumped into the "discussion" to call for stricter moderation against evil fascist right wingers? That's obviously not a coincidence.
Also I actually had to look through your post history to find the right wing guy you banned, because if it's the one I found you instantly deleted his posts and banned him to prevent discussion, so I didn't ever get to find out about him. I only found it because you left a typical snarky comment ban message! That's how different your reaction is, and if you'd done the same to "antifa" everything would be great!
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
If you interpret what I’m suggesting as “pretty close to demanding that we be like everywhere else, where you won't have to read people being mean to your opinions”, then I don’t know what to tell you. I feel I have said repeatedly the problem is not that right-wingers are saying mean things about left-wingers, it’s that bad debate etiquette is so pervasive here that it’s impossible to have a discussion.
Yeah, but you still haven't told me what concretely you think we should do, other than be stricter. Maybe "@justawoman doesn't want to read mean things about her political beliefs" is not fair, but all your examples are basically people making bad arguments - and many of them are bad arguments! - which you want us to mod. We don't mod people for making bad arguments here! We mod people for making rude/uncharitable arguments or being insulting.
But if I can’t debate the bad opinions because my opponent won’t respond to what I am saying
If your opponent won't respond to what you're saying, what do you want us to do about it? And again, I disagree with you, because from what I have seen, some of your opponents might go off on tangents about how much leftists suck, but most of your opponents are responding to what you're saying. Here, @07mk responded to your complaint about posts claiming leftists don't care about child rape. Here and downthread people steelman the "Prep is for gay orgies" argument. Are they good arguments, or arguments you agree with? Maybe not. And your response to @7mk was basically "I think your argument is bad, ergo the Motte sucks." What do you want us, as mods, to do about this?
You are not the first person to write about how you think the Motte has gone downhill (or was always bad) and that the problem is the users and we don't enforce quality standards enough. Some people have a long list of rules they think should be enforced that would prevent people from bad-posting. They all tend to be some combination of (a) a lot more work for the mods, who would basically be delegated as editors and proofreaders for all posts, and (b) banning more posters who fail to meet the complainant's quality standards. Which effectively does boil down to "bad people who make arguments I don't like."
I can certainly envision ways we could implement this. Back on reddit, when the discourse had been turning particularly sour and low-quality for a while, we would institute periodic "reigns of terror" wherein we would become far more trigger-happy about banning people for low-effort and disparaging comments. It's not clear to me if these were particularly effective long-term; short-term, people mostly buttoned up a bit and toned down their vitriol, but of course we got all the usual whining about how we banned Suzy but we didn't ban Jane. We probably could decide we're going to start getting much harsher about modding dunks and cheap shots and low effort comments, and the result would be to force people to write longer posts with more effort, but it would also suppress a lot of discourse. Would it be for the better, or would it drive more people off-site? We already get a lot of complaining that moderation is driven by word-count, or that too much moderation makes everyone afraid to post and thus kills conversations.
So what concretely do you want us to do that isn't demanding a shitload more work from us and also isn't heavily biased towards making the Motte exactly the place you would like it to be, but not necessarily what everyone else wants it to be?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5mo ago
I feel like this just begs the questions; How high does someone have to be on the food chain before pointing out thier crazyness stops being "nut-picking"? and how many extremists does Putin get to endorse and support before it becomes "reasonable" to say that he supports and endorses extremism?
I haven't seen much in the way of endorsement and support presented. In terms of talking heads that can be in some sense argued to be in good standing with the Russian state, approximately an infinite amount - what matters is policy, not talk.
So what you're saying is that two years after Russia invaded Ukraine under the guise of "liberating Russian speakers" the Ukrainian government stopped teaching Russian in its schools, and a year after Russia invaded them for a second time under similar pretenses they banned publishing in Russian as well. Ok.
So what you're saying is that eliminating a language to dissuade any future notions of independence can be acceptable, and we are just haggling over the price?
Putin (in his interview with Tucker Carlson), as well as several of the "weaponised nuts" he keeps around, IE Alexander Dugin, Timothy Sergetsev, and Moscow's Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church have all made claims to this effect.
Dugin
Comparable to holding Trump accountable for things that Alex Jones says, maybe. As far as I can tell Putin-Dugin connections are on the level of "someone claimed..." and supposed dogwhistles.
Sergeytsev
Literally who? I had to google him (your misspelling of the name didn't help), and it sounds like... he is someone who wrote an inflammatory thinkpiece that was published on RIAN? I'm sure you can find some crazy editorials in Western flagship media (like the WaPo's cheerleading for invading Iraq), and for actual government media on Ukraine, here's VoA echoing Ukrainian conspiracy theories that the Russians are bombing themselves. I doubt every opinion piece they publish is ordered from the top.
Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church
Can I one-up this with Rumsfeld's creepy Bible quotes for invading Iraq? That one's even from an actual official member of government.
All in all, I think you could make a similar and stronger case that the American elites of the time endorsed and supported the actual idea of launching an honest-to-god religious crusade into Iraq. As much as I like smearing neocons, I don't think this would be accurate either.
I think this is a mixture of nutpicking (which is your fault) and weaponised nuts, as in the practice of keeping around extremists to send a message along the lines of "if you get rid of me you could get much worse" (which is Putin's fault).
I feel like this just begs the questions; How high does someone have to be on the food chain before pointing out thier crazyness stops being "nut-picking"? and how many extremists does Putin get to endorse and support before it becomes "reasonable" to say that he supports and endorses extremism?
while Ukraine started restricting books in Russian back in 2016 and has since 2023 also banned publishing in it.
So what you're saying is that two years after Russia invaded Ukraine under the guise of "liberating Russian speakers" the Ukrainian government stopped teaching Russian in its schools, and a year after Russia invaded them for a second time under similar pretenses they banned publishing in Russian as well. Oh Dear, Anyway.
I don't think there is much evidence of claimed dominion over all Russian-speaking peoples
Putin (in his interview with Tucker Carlson), as well as several of the "weaponised nuts" he keeps around, IE Alexander Dugin, Timothy Sergetsev, and Moscow's Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church have all made claims to this effect.
Again, how far up the food chain does somone have to be before citing them changes from "nut-picking" to "evidence"
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5mo ago
Durring the lead up to and early stages of Russian pundits were talking openly about eliminating Ukrainian as a spoken language to dissuade any future notions of independence.
I think this is a mixture of nutpicking (which is your fault) and weaponised nuts, as in the practice of keeping around extremists to send a message along the lines of "if you get rid of me you could get much worse" (which is Putin's fault). The reality seems to be that in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine Ukrainian is still offered as a first language at school at least as of last year (Russian MoE claims 43% chose it in Zaporizhia), while Ukraine started restricting books in Russian back in 2016 and has since 2023 also banned publishing in it. I would assume this entails no education in it, either (and if you speak it a friendly language inspector might just ask you if you got a loicense for that). This is not a matter of "well, it's Ukraine, so the correct percentage is 100% Ukrainian", either; many parts of modern Ukrainian territory historically never spoke the Ukrainian language. (Should India be allowed to stamp out non-Hindi speakers because the name of the language is related to the name of the country?)
I don't think there is much evidence of claimed dominion over all Russian-speaking peoples - there are large minorities in almost every country neighbouring Russia that they have not made any particular moves to claim dominion over, and conversely the Russian interest in Ukrainian alignment exists without the language/ethnicity component. Do Australian threats against the Solomon Islands to prevent a Chinese base in their backyard suggest a desire for dominion over all English-speaking peoples, because the Solomonese happen to speak English?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
Thank you. And you're banned. Good-bye, Impassionata. And I deleted your long post which was the last straw and removed all doubt.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5mo ago
Just a quick tip. The mods very literally and explicitly police on tone here. It’s an intentional, foundational part of the rules.
You can argue for virtually any viewpoint that you want, as long as you’re polite and charitable about it.
I’d really like you to stay because we have a shortage of leftists here, but if you don’t moderate your tone, you’re likely to get banned in short order. So please try to be a bit more level-headed in your posts. (Accusing someone of “being afraid they missed the fascism”, being seen as a generally impolite and uncharitable thing to accuse someone of, must be supported with substantial argumentation, rather than simply offered as a one-liner).
10-ish years ago Reddit collectively bullied Ellen Pao out of being the CEO. Today anything mildly non-progressive gets dowvoted, removed, and the user gets banned. Twitter from a decade ago was also uncomparably more friendly towards right-wing thought than it is even now, after Elon bought it.
It is also very disputable whether the algorithms move people to the right (or to the left for that matter), rather than towards an establishment-friendly worldview within one's political wing
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