banned
functor
5mo ago
More so than tax incentives they don't benefit from going to war against a large portion of their base. Facebook's users in the US coincide fairly well with boomer conservatives. Alienating millions of users for purity isn't going to be profitable. Driving millions of users away by being woke or even banning them is bad for business. Besides, politics creates user engagement.
At peak banning even Trump supporters were getting banned. That is a huge demographic for facebook adds, partially because of their numbers and partially because trump does well among reasonably well of people that can be target through digital advertising. Democrats have a lot of underclass voters which aren't great for advertising and their more elite voters are less likely to want to use facebook.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
5mo ago
Zuck was pressured to ban Holocaust denial on the platform like it had already been on Amazon, Youtube, etc. but he held strong until they brought out the big guns with the huge 2020 ad boycotts. He at least put up some resistance rather than immediately going to the "of course we can't have that content, it's unconscionable" route. So that earned him some credit even though he eventually folded. It will be interesting to see if Holocaust revisionism gets unbanned on that platform like it's tacitly been unbanned on X.
He did mention growing censorship laws, and Holocaust denial censorship is growing rapidly in Europe with new laws in new countries continuing apace. Makes me wonder if he is going to reverse course on banning that as well. I, for the record, do not think the Fact Checker reform is just about saving costs I think Zuckerberg is being sincere in the video.
jkf
5mo ago
Even moreso, since it was done (mostly, the handgun stuff was actually legislated and will take longer to roll back; we can still legally use those though, just not buy/sell) in such an easily reversible way and it is now obvious that (barring anything super-weird) there will be a right-wing landslide federally at some point this year.
I shouldn't understate it -- most ranges are pretty fuddly and would probably tell you to cut it out if one were seen taking banned guns there. The cops are quite disinterested in enforcement (particularly anything looking like doorknocking) but you never can tell when you will draw some sort of keener -- so given the short projected lifespan of the semi ban most people are playing it pretty cool.
Quantumfreakonomics
5mo ago
An uncomfortably large amount of human behavior, even at the very top, is just blindly following the herd. YouTube and Twitter banned Fuentes? Guess Facebook will too. They banned the president of the United States? Right behind you. Zuck’s heart was never in it. I don’t think he sees himself as a particularly ethics-driven person to begin with. Onlyfans-shilling thots are considered spam on the other platforms; on Instagram, they’re the content.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
You just got warned to stop doing this, and you immediately go dig up a month old post to revisit an argument?
You're clearly not new here and everything you post so far is a sneer. You can argue and disagree with people without slighting their intelligence or waving your IAmVerySmart flag. Stop doing this or you will be banned.
New ban on basically all semi rifles, owners can store them until confiscation is arranged due to the unprecedented scale of the ban; they tried to rely on "voluntary" turn-ins like with previous smaller bans, but it didn't work.
Handgun sales were banned already, I'm not sure if they moved on confiscation there yet.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5mo ago
There are several things going on here:
- Explicitly left-wing posters do get reported, constantly, for being trolls. There are a number of regulars in particular who report any left-leaning opinion with the same mindfulness as a knee jerking when the femoral nerve is tapped. We see these reports, we see who is making them, and we ignore them.
(In fairness, a couple of our remaining leftist posters do the same thing, to the same effect.)
- Left-wing posters also get dogpiled a lot. This is understandably hard for a lot of people to deal with constantly. Worse is the antagonism and hostility that comes out, which we do moderate when it crosses the line, but below a certain threshold, you're just constantly weathering accusations of bad faith and trolling and ignorance. We do our best to keep anyone from being dogpiled or abused, but as the culture of the forum has definitely shifted rightward, it's certainly true that it's a more comfortable place for rightists and a less comfortable place for leftists. Probably the majority of posters consider this a good thing, which means the cycle is unlikely to break. Even if we managed to get an influx of new posters, including a lot of new leftists, we'd probably shed most of the leftists over time, as has happened in the past.
But this brings me to my last point:
\3. I've commented on this before, and many others have made the same point: this forum, by virtue of the fact that it even allows right-wing opinions, naturally attracts a lot of right-wingers, and not just the civic Republican types, but the Holocaust deniers, the Repeal the 19th types, white nationalists, "pedophile fascists," armageddon-cosplayers like Kulak, etc. We don't attract a lot of leftists, especially not hardcore, ideologically committed leftists, because they have everywhere else on the Internet where their views are the norm and anyone arguing with them will get banned. We occasionally get a new leftist here who is shocked and appalled that we aren't banning Holocaust deniers or people who post about low black IQs. They usually either flame out or leave. Online leftists nowadays mostly just aren't used to dealing with rightists in an environment where they don't "win" by default because the mods are on their side.
So it's not really that left-wing posters who don't quite are eventually deemed trolls; we mods really do try to be fair to everyone, and we're not all rightists. The problem is that the leftists who (a) don't quit because badthink is allowed here; (b) have the persistence to stick around; (c) don't lose their cool and start responding belligerently, is a very small set.
(And again, in fairness, there are rightists who lose their shit that leftists are allowed to post, and they get banned a lot, contributing to the evaporative cooling and claims that we have our thumbs on the scale for leftists.)
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5mo ago
That was the joke he was making.
in my observation most explicitly left-wing posters who don't quit are eventually deemed trolls.
Who specifically do you think was unfairly called a troll? And given your objection above, who do you think was banned for being a left winger?
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
5mo ago
Damaging people's social trust in Reddit would be doing them a huge favor.
It would, but @Incanto's point is not that it's social trust in Reddit that's being damaged, but social trust in people in general. People read a fake story about a cruel or unjust landlord on reddit and slowly grow to believe that landlords are more likely than not to do them wrong, that all landlords are bad, that landlording is evil, that private property should be banned, that the means of production should be redistributed...
The point has also been made about those radio shows (i.e. "Ryan's Roses") where people are caught cheating on their partners, who call in -- they're fake but did damage to the public's trust in relationship fidelity and therefore in relationships in general. The same is true for /r/relationshipadvice and /r/aita.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5mo ago
What he's saying is that you haven't currently engendered the goodwill necessary to tolerate jokes at others expense. With this post for example, while you may have meant it to stake out your position with the added fun of a lightly barbed jab at your ideological opposites, it looks the same as trolling. And deleting all your posts increases the probability you are a troll pretty severely I would think. So the Tldr would be you have to start posting some stuff with a bit more substance, and ideally stuff that shows you want to be a part of this community or you are going to get banned.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
5mo ago
IIRC (I probably don't): A while ago, a user on this site kept posting about how he was going to be dropped off by helicopter with nothing but a knife in an isolated location as a way to forge himself into a real man or die trying. The isolated location was Hock Mountain, so he called this escapade "the Hock". The moderators eventually banned him for being a single-issue poster, since he kept talking about it but never actually did it.
Felagund
5mo ago
This is totally on point however, figuring this out is how I stopped getting banned all the time.
I'm curious about this—what sorts of truth do you think themotte can't handle, in favor of continued discussion? Feel free to circumlocute as much as you feel is needed, given the statement.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Oh come on. I post 10x milder takes from the other side and get banned for 90 days instead.
Indeed. And should Kulak post such hot takes as frequently and fervently as you, the bans will escalate in similar fashion. However, given his history and the content of this post, I do not expect him to come right back with another.
We'll see!
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
5mo ago
Banned for 3 days.
Oh come on. I post 10x milder takes from the other side and get banned for 90 days instead.
This is what the west is now, old men and women telling raped children to shut up and not be racist.
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. Banned for 3 days. The rest is details.
Yes, this is explicitly a token banning. For all your complaining, you do mostly stick to our discussion norms, minus some name calling and weak manning. At least one moderator prefers to not moderate people when they are clearly asking for it. At least one moderator is sympathetic to the point and points out that we do allow the argument to be made that argument is useless. I've had this conversation with other users in the past: sometimes it seems like conflict theory is actually right, and that's something we have to consider if we claim to be open to considering all arguments.
I have a different approach: moderation is driven by user sentiment, you've accumulated many reports, and I try to give people (including you) what they want. As this is a mod message, I set aside the substance of your post without comment, except those portions in which you directly criticize this space:
Rotherham is in large part the reason I don't comment on this forum anymore.
This raises a question: why are you commenting on this forum now? You have a history of doing it well, and then doing it poorly, and then mostly stopping. Why are you back? Welcome back! Would you be willing to post some good stuff again?
If any critical mass of people here or in other rationalist spaces actually valued the truth above politeness we would rationally immediately ditch all the speech norms of rationalist spaces and adopt those of 4Chan.
Where everyday you could have seen exactly this discussed, predicted, and parallels drawn to comparable things happening across the west.
But the Motte won't, because the Motte doesn't value the truth that highly, but rather values endless self justifying discussion for its own sake.
You're mistaken, though it is an easy mistake to make. Let me ask you something silly--do you dance? Specifically, are you a classically trained ballerina, or do you know any? If you spend much time around ballet studios, you will see an interesting phenomenon where little girls (and, occasionally, boys) show up with a dream. They love to dance, because they saw a ballerina do something amazing and beautiful. But real, recognizable ballet is pretty tough, on par with very high level gymnastics, and most people aren't really cut out for it. From ten classes of fifty toddlers in tutus a school might hope to produce one girl capable of dancing corps in a national production. And so along the way each aspiring ballerina reaches a point where she realizes that no matter how much she might enjoy dancing, this is not the dancing for her. This is hard on the ego, so a very common way of stopping ballet is to join a different dance club--pop dance, modern dance, stuff people will say they "prefer" when really what they prefer is not needing 40+ hours per week of effort to excel in their particular sphere.
Suppose one of these girls switches to a "contemporary dance" studio. She generates an argument--"ballet is so hidebound and pedigree-obsessed! It's stupid. In contemporary dance I can express myself without all these hurdles, all these rules and traditions and obstacles."
"Okay," replies the ballet world. "That was always allowed."
But then the girl shows up at a production of the Nutcracker and demands equal time on stage with the ballerinas. She will not be dancing ballet, but she is tired of all the attention ballerinas get for this stupid annual tradition of dancing to a nonsensical Christmas plot.
What should the ballet company say to her?
Kulak, the point of the Motte is not to change the world, or to change politics, or even to change anyone's mind. It's performance art: we're here to dance ballet. If you do not wish to dance ballet, then you may dance other dances in other places. The dance of this space is not, and has never been, truth; it is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Truth is an interesting and important part of that, but so are norms of politeness and, yes, inclusion. Our most vocal critics insist that we are already where you want us to be--that we are a hive of scum and wrongthink, several zillion witches in sheep's clothing. You seem to think the opposite, that we are are a hive of... priss and wrongthink, I guess?
But we deserve neither such praise nor such censure (as Jane Austen once put it).
It is my hope that the world be more like the Motte: more open to the truth, and more able to discuss ideas openly, however so much people may disagree. I cannot force people to be better, smarter, or less evil. I usually cannot even persuade them to be so. Barely am I able to even change the minds of my own children, now that they are adults.
But I know the rules to this particular dance, and I can still dance it.
Any light produced without heat is an illusion, a trick cast on the wall, a fire in a film that illuminates only what the director chooses and warms nothing. Real productive though, real productive discussion builds heat to intolerable levels and then combusts, burning away the lies in it's warming light, and injuring or killing the liars who crawled amongst their tools of darkness.
People once thought that all light was fire--that all light consumed. But my house today is brighter than any pharaoh's court, and it burns not. What we do here is performative art, but art is an act of hope, and hope can, sometimes, change the world. Slowly, as they say--then all at once. The Motte is not supposed to change the world, except to the extent that it serves as a model for what the world could be.
I am sympathetic to your conflict-theory takes. I worry that what we do here will not--maybe cannot--be enough. But it is all I can actually do. I am neither soldier nor politician nor billionaire nor celebrity. The people who come here to do what we do, come here because it is what we want to do. It is the dance we wish to dance, however so hidebound it may be. We who maintain this space--this studio--this garden--are doing what we can do.
Go thou and do likewise.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
I think honestly we’ve made real convictions dirty words, often hiding behind rhetoric about nuance and tolerance and so on. A healthy culture has absolute convictions about itself and its place in the world. It doesn’t mince words in an attempt to curry favor with other people. It forthrightly declares that its ways are good, true, and right lives up to them and enforces them on others. Healthy Britain remade much( of the globe in a more western image — banning evil practices and forcing good practices, spreading her language and religion and folkways. They banned child prostitution in much of the globe and ending burning women on funeral pyres in India.
And this is exactly the rot, head down. We can’t talk about the reality of things happening in the world, or causes that we all intuitively understand but that are too impolite to say aloud. And therefore, no action can actually be taken. We can’t say that thug culture needs to be ended, or that Islam enjoins jihad and subjugation of infidels. We can’t say that maybe we shouldn’t be taking in millions with values inimical to our own values and pretending that they’ll assimilate.
cjet79
5mo ago
This is totally on point however, figuring this out is how I stopped getting banned all the time.
Which user were you when you got banned? Cuz it wasn't this one.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
5mo ago
I no longer believe in cross-ideological discussion. I no longer believe in good faith, or shared values in disagreement, or the merits of discourse.
That's a dumb thing to say bud, especially if you are going to follow through with it. Always be willing to engage, always be willing for dialogue. If someone starts talking about something you don't want to talk about, you be as nice as you can as you stumble over basic definitions or gish gallop by condescendingly explaining some pedantic mistake that has zero bearing on the issue at hand. Do it well enough and you can tie your enemies up in useless conversations for ages.
But the Motte won't, because the Motte doesn't value the truth that highly, but rather values endless self justifying discussion for its own sake.
This is totally on point however, figuring this out is how I stopped getting banned all the time.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5mo ago
That's way too aggressive.
We are at least able to talk about the problem. Try talking to some upper middle class normies in the respectable milieu. EVERYTHING wrong with the UK is apparently because of Brexit. Even things that clearly happened before Brexit are somehow the fault of Boris Johnson lying about NHS spending or Dominic Cummings 'dividing the country'. The real tragedy is young people not being able to go to the EU as simply as before. I was speaking with some Canadians and Australians about this, I expect that's how shakers and movers in Britain feel. They have some wrongthink crimestop reflex where they feel embarassment even thinking about this and semi-gracefully move the conversation on to something else if you even bring this up. They are the real problem, not us.
If you posted this on a normal website you'd get immediately banned whereas here the mods will probably give you some more-considered warning.
anon_
5mo ago
there was a major opportunity to actually do some real feminism, to actually reshape Afghan culture to make it more liberal, and it just didn't happen. I'm not sure how much it was even attempted.
The Soviet-installed government had originally tried this back in the 1970s. From Wikipedia
Once in power, the PDPA implemented a socialist agenda. It moved to promote state atheism.[5] Men were obliged to cut beards, women were banned from wearing the burqa, and mosques were placed off limits. The government of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan moved to prohibit traditional practices which were deemed feudal in nature, including banning bride price and forced marriage. The minimum age for marriage was also raised. Education was stressed for both men and women and widespread literacy programmes were set up.
...
Between April 1978 and the Soviet invasion of December 1979, Afghan Communists executed an estimated 27,000 political prisoners at Pul-i-Charki prison six miles east of Kabul. Many of the victims were village mullahs and headmen who were obstructing the modernization and secularization of the intensely religious Afghan countryside.
...
The Soviet Union, which had initially supported the PDPA government, became increasingly concerned about the scale of violence and the destabilizing effects of these repressive measures. Soviet leaders were particularly alarmed by the PDPA’s brutal tactics, which they feared would alienate the Afghan populace and strengthen the insurgency.
To be clear, the attempts to repress the reactionary violence against modernization was brutal enough that even the freaking Soviets thought it was too much.
Rotherham, H1B's and the news cycle on X
On X (formerly Twitter), Elon likes to say "You are the media now". I think, he's... kinda right.
One thing that always amazed me about the mainstream media was their ability to control the news cycle. You'd wake up one Monday, and all of a sudden the entire media would be talking about one story like it's the most important thing in the world. Everyone is using the exact same language, repeating the same facts, etc... You'd be forgiven for thinking that a government propaganda bureau is directing it all from a central office. But the media wasn't actively conspiring, it was just group think and herd-following.
What's more, it mattered. Stories that got major media exposure led to real action from political and corporate leaders. The summer of George Floyd may have been the platonic ideal of this.
Well, X seems to have its own news cycle now.
Last week, X was aflame with a intra-right culture war between those who support and those who oppose high-skill immigration, especially from India. Feelings were hurt, accounts were banned, and it didn't die down until Trump made a statement.
This week, the big story is the Rotherham grooming gangs. I'm not exactly sure why it's being revisited now, but every other story in my feed is about the horrific crimes and the massive coverup which extends in England to this day. Perhaps people smell blood in the water. Kier Starmer, the incredibly unpopular PM of the UK, was head of CPS during the critical years. It seems he chose not to aggressively prosecute many of the monsters who gang-raped 13 year olds.
In my opinion, X provides a better platform for ideas to percolate into the public's consciousness. In the past, unless a story was "too big to ignore" like the Trump assassination, corporate newsrooms could and did bury stories that reflected their political team in a negative light. This can't happen on X. Moreover, a lot of the coverage of news events is less retarded on X (depending on who you follow of course). I'm sure there were lots of bad takes during the H1B kurfluffle, but I didn't see many. I saw a lot of nuanced but fearless conversation that went a lot deeper than anything you'd be likely to see on ABC or in Time Magazine.
I think that there is some special sauce in the technology.
Traditional journalism is top down. We (the authority figures) tell you what to think. On the other extreme, discussion sites like Reddit allow anonymous accounts to speak with the same authority as established ones. As a result, they are gamed by bots, and flooded with low value opinions. X seems to be a hybrid. Authority figures can post to their audience, but they cannot do so without getting pushback from others. When using it, I somehow feel connected to the people and ideas that matter.
I'll probably have to delete the app again in a few weeks.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
5mo ago
I’ve always said this about the approach: we never wanted to act like we were in control or had any right to be in control. This is in contrast to the occupation of Japan in the aftermath of WWII. In Japan, we took control of everything: the media, schools, government, banned weapons, etc. we even banned aspects of culture that we decided were too militaristic. We almost banned Shogi which is a Japanese form of chess, but the arguments that it was pro democracy was convincing so it wasn’t banned. After a generation, Japan went from a militaristic dictatorship and empire to a parliamentary democracy in which the emperor hides in his palace and gives a couple of speeches a year. It went from being the land of Samurai and death before dishonor that didn’t believe in human rights to a country that is only recently considering rebuilding a serious military in response to China. It went from military to kawaii, from swords to anime.
Why? We had the will to do so. We decided to be in charge, we decided we had the right to dictate what parts of their culture they could keep and what had to change. We decided to take over the schools and decide what they learned. We decided how things would change. And after a generation, they did. In Afghanistan, we did no such thing. We didn’t ban child brides, we didn’t mandate a modern secular education system, we didn’t ban head coverings for women. We allowed girls to attend the same schools as the boys. That seems to be about it. Everything else stayed the same. And so it’s not really that surprising that a country that was never forced to accept the ideas of liberal democracy, secular education, human rights, or a de-Islam-ified culture went right back to the Taliban. They had no ideals to fight for, no model of justice and democracy that they thought worth the effort.
In short, we were too liberal and culturally sensitive to win the occupation. Too multicultural to believe that our own ideas were superior to those of medieval Muslims who saw women as property to be covered head to toe and not allowed any agency in their own lives. Too multicultural to believe in modern secular democracy as superior to rule by theocracy. As such imposing on them, even when their ideas are primitive and frankly horrifying was not allowed. They went for the Takiban because the Taliban was willing to create order by imposing its ideals.
Sloot
5mo ago
“Ban cars” or the like is indeed a common in-joke among crimethink corners of interweb whenever some Truck of Peace makes incidental contact with pedestrians.
For much of today, the top thread (other than stickied ones) on the New Orleans subreddit was calling for cars to be banned from the French Quarter.
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).
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