banned
self_made_human
C'est la vie
7mo ago
When you get a chance I would love to hear how things are going for you!
I've been rather miserable since I've gotten here, for a multitude of reasons, which had notably dampened my appetite for chatting up my day job online. I'm slightly less miserable right now, which is why I'm back at it! I can elaborate in DMs if you'd like.
Please update my understanding of that particular suicide if it's incorrect, but what I'd heard is that the person was substituting human contact with the chatbot and his parents didn't catch the worsening social withdrawal because he was telling them he was talking to someone. My fear is not that chatbots will encourage people to do things, but that they won't catch and report warning signs, and serve as an inferior substitute for actual social contact. Not sure what the media presentation is since I'm relying on professional translation.
I raised objections against claims made exceedingly uncritically in the Guardian post you linked to (having assumed you endorsed it). For example-
“A dangerous AI chatbot app marketed to children abused and preyed on my son, manipulating him into taking his own life,” Garcia said in a press release.
I can cut a grieving mother some slack, but the facts don't bear out her beliefs, and the Guardian doesn't really do much journalism here, since it would otherwise suggest her suit is unfounded.
Your personal claims seem more subtle, but even then, I find it very hard to blame the chatbot for social withdrawal here. I'd point out you can make the same argument for anything from reading books to watching anime (a bullet that some may bite, of course). In other words, a potential refuge for the maladjusted, but also something that the majority of people would be loathe to ask others to consume less of or ban altogether, on the grounds that it's a net negative.
(I think the case for social media being far worse for teenage mental health is significantly more robust, and I still wouldn't advocate for it to be banned. In the case of chatbots, I haven't been nudged out of the null hypothesis.)
Imagine the chatbot was replaced by, idk, a Runescape girlfriend (do kids these days have those? Potentially substitute for someone grooming them on Discord), would you expect said person to be significantly more helpful, or at least worthy of blame? I wouldn't.
Also, good psychodynamics is not Freudian nonsense, it's mostly CBT with different language and some extra underlying terminology that is very helpful for managing less severe pathology. Again I tell you to read Nancy McWilliams haha.
I'll have to see if it's relevant to the MRCPsych syllabus, God knows that having an unpleasant time with the subject makes most reading on it feel unpleasant :(
At its absolute worse therapy is stuff like forcing social interaction, forcing introspection and so on. Some people can function well off of a manual, and some people can study medicine on their own. But nearly everyone does better with a tutor, and that's what therapy is.
A fair point. But I contend that an AI therapist is capable of doing those things, in a limited but steadily improving fashion. You can have a natural language spoken conversation with ChatGPT, and it's very capable of picking up minor linguistic nuance and audio cues. Soon enough, there'll be plug and play digital avatars for it. But I think that therapy through the medium of text works better than doing nothing, and that's the standard I'm judging chatbots by. Not to mention that they're ~free for the end user
God knows what the standards for AGI are these days, with the goalpost having moved to being somewhere near a Lagrange point, but I would sincerely advocate the hot take that an LLM like Claude 3.5 Sonnet is smarter, more emotionally intelligent and a better conversationalist than the average human, and maybe the average licensed therapist.
It is, of course, hobbled by severe retrograde amnesia, and being stuck to text behind a screen, but those are solvable problems.
To run with your analogy, an AI therapist/teacher is far closer to a human therapist/teacher than they are to a manual or textbook! You can actually talk to them, and with Hlynka not being around, the accusations of stochastic parrotry in these parts has dropped precipitously.
What I'm really advocating for is not letting the perfect become the enemy of the good, though I'd certainly deny that human therapists are perfect. I still think that access to AI therapists is better than not, and I'm ambivalent when putting them up against the average human one.
Though I'd also caveat that Character AI probably cheaps out, using significantly dumber models than SOTA. But it's not the only option.
Celestial-body-NOS
Why should Man not rebel against Nature, when Nature herself is in rebellion against Justice?
7mo ago
The only case I can see is a relative one - people opposed to liberal views aren't banned as much anymore, and that's a disadvantage compared to what they have.
"When one is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression."
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
7mo ago
This leads me to wonder, as someone who does not have a Twitter account, what is the steelman of the liberal claim that Twitter has now become actually biased against them?
The only case I can see is a relative one - people opposed to liberal views aren't banned as much anymore, and that's a disadvantage compared to what they have. Also, since Musk sided with the Red Tribe, he regularly makes politically inconvenient news / memes go viral, which didn't use to happen when he was more neutral. I have seen no claim that blues are getting banned or throttled more than reds. The only possible exception would be stuff that targets Elon directly - there was some guy tracking the movement of his private jet that got banned, but I think it got resolved due to the controversy it caused.
ControlsFreak
7mo ago
Wouldn't it be awesome if we had a category for things other than "mandatory" and "banned"?
benmmurphy
7mo ago
More evidence for the dead internet theory. I saw this tweet which has a picture of two users discussing bluesky (https://x.com/crystalandqueue/status/1857526125401878582).
Blondie6312: Are you on Bluesky yet?
Michell33650674: Nobody seems to be seeing my posts stating Bluesky PERMANENTLY BANNED ME for stating that the election was rigged
Based on the account names I would suspect those accounts are bots, but maybe boomers when picking account names try and pick what they want and then either the site auto-fills these number for them or they just mash the keyboard. But with the advent of LLMs presumably there are a lot of people just running bots even just for the lolz.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
7mo ago
I just... don't have high hopes for this. Maybe some people on Bluesky would be shifted by it. But I think it's far more likely you'll just end up banned, or ostracized, or ignored.
To be clear, I don’t have particularly high hopes either! I’m nowhere near as bullish on this supposed “vibe shift” as many people are, and I obviously have no hope of reaching people like my unfortunate-looking interlocutor in that thread. I highly doubt I’m going to be banned, though; I’ve managed to avoid ever catching a ban of any sort here, where the expectations for conduct are substantially higher than those on Bluesky from what I can tell. Bluesky does have a very robust blocking mechanic, though, including large blocklists, so I won’t be surprised to be comprehensively shut out by a large number of accounts. I’m starting small and keeping my ambitions limited.
I'd come away from such a discussion feeling terrible, like I'd poked some bear or strange man woman. Not because I think these people have any concrete way to harm me, but simply because I find debating things with mean-spirited people to be upsetting, a net-negative for me
If these were people I actually knew in real life, I would feel the same way. During those heady years between 2016 and 2020 when the progs were fully activated and on the ascendancy, the sorts of arguments I had on Facebook - and this is long before my views became as extreme as they are now - and the subsequent hemorrhaging of real-life friendships that were important to me, were extremely hurtful and dispiriting.
When it’s just some dumb bull-dyke with a shitty hat and a parody-level bio, though, I come out of it feeling smug and victorious. I’m not on Bluesky to “trigger the libs” or “guzzle liberal tears” or anything like that - I’m hoping to try and cultivate at least a few positive relationships - but I also have zero concern about having weird losers like that woman say powerlessly aggressive things to me.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
7mo ago
My hope is that the vibe shift can be helped along by people like me showing up in such spaces, proving we don’t have horns, and making a common-sense case against the more radically stupid positions that the “smart center” might be ready to jettison. Having such an easy and clearly-delusional foil in this scenario was helpful for me!
I just... don't have high hopes for this. Maybe some people on Bluesky would be shifted by it. But I think it's far more likely you'll just end up banned, or ostracized, or ignored.
I'd come away from such a discussion feeling terrible, like I'd poked some bear or strange man woman. Not because I think these people have any concrete way to harm me, but simply because I find debating things with mean-spirited people to be upsetting, a net-negative for me even if I were to be anointed by God as angels sing and get a call from the President of the United States congratulating me on my great debating skills while everybody claps. If it strengthens you, that's great. I guess it's just a personality difference.
jkf
7mo ago
Truckers (very memorably) were (newly!) banned from crossing the Canada-US border in early 2022 without proof of vaccination -- whether this was hysterical or not is I suppose something we could discuss, but I don't see how it could be because of a thing that was not 'a going concern'?
I mean my radicalization has already taken place, and my goal is to try and wrench myself a bit back in the direction of being able to intellectually interface with the normal, left-of-center people in my immediate social scene.
Although many of my specific beliefs and policy positions are very right-wing (for at least some value of what that term means) I’m still dispositionally an effete urban lib-brained aesthete. My natural coalition is other city-dwelling academic types, who want to live in clean and orderly and fairly sterile large cities; I’m not going to reinvent myself as a salt-of-the-earth red-blooded American who Works With His Hands™️.
My current strategy of just keeping my mouth shut about politics and letting people assume I’m a standard-issue lib is only tenable as long as I commit to a sort of detached insincerity; I’d prefer to return to a time when I could just be honest and intimate with close friends, even about controversial subjects. Part of that might be aided by a general “vibe shift” in the culture which will pull those people away from some of their more extreme stances, but I’m not holding my breath for that. In the meantime I want to try and find ways to present my own ideas to people in a way that doesn’t just immediately trigger their enemy detection alarms. Maybe posting on Bluesky, which has an old-school Twitter-style character limit, will help me succinctly defend my views in a way that doesn’t require massive amounts of careful elaboration.
By the way, that person clearly had nothing of value to offer you. She's some brand of mentally unwell (I'd say stupid, but she seems lucid and I don't notice any typos). There may be people worth interacting with on that site, but I think it's a bit cruel to yourself to interact with somebody that you know will waste your time and treat you badly, and giving them the benefit of doubt.
So, yes, it’s very obvious that I have nothing to gain from this person, and that I can run circles around her intellectually. However, that interaction did provide me with an opportunity to occupy the role of “reasonable person reacting with bemused concern at the extreme rhetoric of my interlocutor” - a position which I’m normally on the reverse end of in lib-majority spaces. My hope is that the vibe shift can be helped along by people like me showing up in such spaces, proving we don’t have horns, and making a common-sense case against the more radically stupid positions that the “smart center” might be ready to jettison. Having such an easy and clearly-delusional foil in this scenario was helpful for me!
I'd recommend you don't get too attached to the site (in other words, mentally tag your account as throwaway so that leaving or getting banned won't affect you too badly in the future)
Believe me, anything I post under the “Hoffmeister25” brand is inherently disposable; I’m prepared to have my social media accounts nuked from on high at any time, and Bluesky is certainly no exception.
TwiceHuman
7mo ago
If you wish to avoid radicalization, wouldn't it be best to stay away from social media entirely? Or you can think for yourself like I do (this will likely put you out of sync with most people, but you will have a sane view on things)
By the way, that person clearly had nothing of value to offer you. She's some brand of mentally unwell (I'd say stupid, but she seems lucid and I don't notice any typos). There may be people worth interacting with on that site, but I think it's a bit cruel to yourself to interact with somebody that you know will waste your time and treat you badly, and giving them the benefit of doubt.
I've only seen Bluesky on Japanese Twitter so far, so I thought it was Japanese, in which case it would be somewhat safe from a political takeover. But now that I Google it, it seems like it's American. I'd recommend you don't get too attached to the site (in other words, mentally tag your account as throwaway so that leaving or getting banned won't affect you too badly in the future)
TokenTransGirl
7mo ago
I already banned WhiningCoil
Okay, fair enough. My complaint was entirely that if "child mutilation" was considered acceptably charitable, I think I was more than matching that level of charity. If we're in agreement that "child mutilation" is an insulting and deeply uncharitable description, then my objection is pretty well resolved.
you oscillate between "this isn't happening" and "it's good, actually"
I do think I've been consistent in my stance: SRS is a surgery like any other, and calling it "mutilation" is ridiculous hyperbole. Calling it "child mutilation" is doubly ridiculous, since as far as I know, kids under 18 genuinely are not having surgery. I'm not saying kids don't transition, I'm saying they don't get surgery under 18, and that it's not mutilation.
If someone really has a source for SRS being common in kids, I'd love to see it. I've tried to find numbers, and basically every source has said "low enough to basically round off to zero."
I am responding to what was literally said.
Your response was insufficiently charitable.
Would you really allow this sort of insulting language to fly in the other direction?
First, other people's bad behavior is irrelevant to your own. Second, I already banned WhiningCoil for comments in this thread. If that wasn't enough to stifle your whataboutism, then I don't know what else I could possibly do to assuage your persecution complex.
Can I talk about how conservatives are routinely voting to kill women? Is it fair to say conservatives have once again elected a fascist rapist?
There are ways to make substantive assertions along these lines, and people often do. But they have to do so within a context of following the rules, which you have failed to do here.
cartman
7mo ago
Okay fair enough. I will say for the record that I am a new poster (jumped in for the discussion after election day as you noted) but have lurked reading every so often for at least a few months so I'm not unfamiliar with the forum as a whole.
I somewhat disagree with the characterization of my behaviour as 'just asking questions', but I understand how it appears that way. I do have a habit of questioning people to poke at underlying disagreements, and I can acknowledge that sometimes I do this too much or with somewhat inflammatory rhetoric, but it is usually with a goal relevant to the discussion in mind.
In this particular case, the questions regarding moderation were genuine. If there's something in the forum's history thats relevant to my moderation I wanted to know it. I did receive a message from another poster yesterday, that in hindsight, makes me think they also suspected me of being a specific different user evading a ban.
I want to stress again at the end here that my picking apart of this moderation may come across as being in bad faith, but I am genuinely attempting to understand the rules of engagement and how I would have to change my rhetoric in order to consistently participate. If I engaged less now, I might misunderstand something else down the road. The impression I get is that my familiarity with the forum is suspicious and also my asking questions is suspicious, but I felt that not asking questions would make it more likely that I was banned in the future for a reason I did not fully understand.
In any case, I will endeavour to make future posts acceptable.
cartman
7mo ago
Hello, thanks for the welcome.
I won't deny I have a habit of responding to the posts that seem egregious to me with rhetoric in kind. This is true. I can work on my charitability.
I don't want to come across as if I'm complaining about the moderation (I think it's fine) but I am a bit confused about the rules of engagement here and would like some clarification before posting further so that I don't get unceremoniously permabanned. If this comment is unacceptable on the forum please feel free to delete and continue the convo in messages, but I am actually asking for clarification in good faith.
First of all, am I being moderated for the tone/content of my posts or for ban evasion as a suspected alt? I'm assuming from your comment that there was a previous user on this forum who used to engage similarly to me and was banned for it. If that's the case and you think this person is me, then what can I actually do to make you believe otherwise? I recognize as a moderator the need to restrict ban evasion from problem users, but from my perspective I am unaware of previous users having similar rhetoric (and it seems onerous to expect me to write deliberately in a different tone or avoid certain topics) so what is my recourse to avoid a permanent ban for this reason?
Secondly, my understanding was that as a new user all my comments have to be approved by moderators before becoming public. Until this comment I had not received any mod feedback. If it is not just ban evasion I'm being modded for, is it only this most recent comment that goes over the line into being problematic? If not, does this comment act as a warning that all of my previous posts were unacceptable?
I'm not trying to be deliberately difficult here, I actually don't understand or know the answers to these questions. I'd like to retain the ability to post here, and in order to do that I need to know where the line is.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
Hello, and welcome to the Motte!
This response is not sufficiently charitable. You may note that I have banned the user to whom you were responding; one big problem with rule-breaking comments is that they tend to proliferate by encouraging further rule-breaking responses. But responding to a rule-breaking comment in a rule-breaking way does not excuse you!
...actually, looking through your rather fresh comment history, you seem to have a remarkable knack for sussing out problematic posts and making the discussion even worse by responding, not to the substance of the post, but to its rhetoric. Somehow that is, actually, most of your posts! The odds of this are so low as to not be worth contemplating.
Still, in the interest of charity, I will hold off perma-banning you as a suspected alt until the next time I notice this peculiar pattern. Once, after all, may be happenstance.
Silverdawn
I wake up 🔄 There's another psyop
7mo ago
You really just have to put your foot down and tell these people (the men, in this case) that they're not welcome. And when they inevitably respond with accusations that you're being sexist, transphobic, and exclusionary, you say: "yes I am sexist, yes I am transphobic, yes I am exclusionary, yes yes yes, it's all true; now please, the door is that way, if you don't mind."
On social media, you get banned at this point. If the moderators controlling the forum in question don't bend the knee, they get removed.
IRL, these conversations don't really happen. Presumably there are a lot of legal things happening behind the curtains but you only find out when you're already being sued.
And frankly, 'trans' advocates were never interested in having a real conversation in the first place. They only act like they want to talk because they think that will get them the most influence. They don't actually believe there's anything to discuss, they already know they're right.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
7mo ago
Playing that anecdote as an Uno Reverse card won’t work, as a sufficiently motivated counterparty will just respond with “He wasn’t fired, he was still in the academy and drawing a salary, therefore he wasn’t suffering discrimination”.
As a practicing academic myself I wish I’d be able to spend more time on my research by getting banned from my teaching workload, teaching fucking sucks.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7mo ago
Assuming you mean “civil suit,” yeah. It would have been a criminal case rather than a tort, and he would most likely have ended up with multiple life sentences, since Connecticut banned the death penalty that same year.
SteveKirk
7mo ago
we had a professor banned from teaching first-year mandatory courses because he donated to the Republican party in 2012,
Do you have a link for this? I want to use it next time the "there's no discrimination, conservatives are just too stupid for academia" card gets played.
Here
7mo ago
After the election, the president of the Student Advisory Committee of Harvard’s Institute of Politics insinuated that the IOP’s longstanding commitment to non-partisan civic engagement would be put aside to stand against the “threat” of Trump.
The Director of the IOP quickly rebuked the student, as did alumni. The original op-ed was modified to clarify that this was a student proposal, and not an official act of the IOP that could potentially endanger its tax status as a nonprofit in association with the school.
I was more shocked by the quick response than by the student’s comments; it’s taken for granted that the academy is the stronghold of Democrats. As friends and I contemplate government service, we’ve talked often about what doors we’d be closing off entirely by entering the administration now, and how that would impact our trajectory. Mentors have suggested waiting until certain milestones to provide easier routes back into the private sector, but we all agree that academia is DOA outside of like Hillsdale.
Part of these discussions included off-handed references to China’s “loyalty pledges” for students attending plum universities or receiving scholarships to study abroad. Given the academy’s existence as another wing of the Democratic Party, is there a possibility of colleges or universities ensuring students meet certain political beliefs in order to attend their institution? Would it impact their tax status to do so, and if yes, is that the only thing stopping them?
Private non-profit Christian institutions make their students sign statements of faith in order to attend. BYU is an example, although their agreement is slightly more complicated than faith, per se (as TracingWoodgrains has spoken about before). Patrick Henry College includes a bit about the number of books in the Bible to keep out Catholics. It’s not a stretch to thing secular colleges could have students sign statements about their culture war/social beliefs in order to attend. Will the privileges of Ivy League degrees be gatekept for the “woke?”
Is that, in a way, what diversity statements have been doing for years? Maybe diversity statements weren’t about meeting racial categories, but instead to ensure a certain level of “buy-in” to DEI ideology. As an aside, in the post-SFFA world, the number of students interested in the Federalist Society doubled at my law school. It could just be an “election year” thing (the last data point we are able to access easily is 2020, which doesn’t count due to the remote education) or it could be a “freeing” of conservatives entering the upper echelons of professional education. More data is needed here to support this anecdata.
Purity testing at schools is, of course, nothing new. For instance, we had a professor banned from teaching first-year mandatory courses because he donated to the Republican party in 2012, a thing that still doesn’t sit quite right to me. Why are people looking through their professor’s donation records? As people uninvite family members to Thanksgiving due to who they voted for, can universities deny students on the same grounds? Would some universities feel inclined to?
I’m not entirely sure. The demographic cliff means that universities have to start making themselves more enticing somehow. Degrees are too expensive for their value, nowadays, and many are choosing to forego higher education in favor of the trades or other endeavors. Schools like America University saw their acceptance rate almost double and yet still didn’t hit their enrollment targets. Can schools (even elite schools) afford to have an ideological purity test for entry?
NunoSempere
7mo ago
Elon Musk shared a perspective from Jeffrey Sachs, outlined in more detail here or here, about how Russia was provoked by NATO expansion into invading Ukraine, in the same way that the US was provoked by Soviet cooperation with Cuba. This matters because Musk has become an important Trump advisor.
African countries face cybersecurity vulnerabilities due to foreign control over critical technological infrastructure, with notable cases of Chinese cyber espionage in African Union headquarters and Kenyan government ministries. Chinese and U.S. companies dominate the application and operating system layers.
Theravada Budhist rebel militias control most of a state (province) in Myanmar. Seems like it could tickle some people here.
Otherwise, I'm thinking about how states just seem like a bad abstraction. Alliance blocks, ideologies, religions, dynasties seem like somewhat better building blocks. In particular, states seem like an easy abstraction, but recently they have mislead me when... a) thinking about the Iran/Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthis: it seems much easier to think about them in terms of religion than in terms of their geographic boundaries; b) there are a few governments that are pretty weak, and they are so just because the west recognizes and supports them. Yemen, the former government of Afghanistan come to mind, c) borders are important, but not that important. There is free travel between Paraguay/Argentina/Brazil, between the European Union, between the US and Canada, between Russia and Belarus, etc., d) at the lower level, a few governments are just a few families in a trench coat (Saudi Arabia, El Salvador, etc.).
Longer list of items below. Some may be wrong.
Protest in Hyderabad against Punjab's construction of more canals on the Indus river.
Canada forces are training for deployment in Latvia—an a potential
Potential prophylactic against Ricin, in case somebody is wanting to recreate a Pricess Bride scene irl.
A paper in nature warns about the danger of a repeat of the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption
Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi warned of the potential spillover effects of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, where Iran-backed groups are battling Israel. Araghchi stated that if the conflict expands, it could result in insecurity and instability spreading to other regions beyond the Middle East. I'm particularly worried about that scenario.
Biden administration "under pressure" to respond to Iran's plot to kill Trump, reports Fox News.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for imposing a weapons embargo on Israel and severing trade relations with the country
Far-right Israeli minister calls for annexation of West Bank
IDF says it destroyed most of Hezbollah's manufacturing, storage sites
Iran is building 'defensive tunnels' in Tehran metro network to save people from Israeli air strikes
Iran might have developed chemical weapons. These would have been tactical, rather than wide-area.. British tabloid claims that Liz Truss thought that there was a 50% that Putin would use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine in the eve of her administration
The Famine Early Warning System warns that if food supplies remain blocked, then Famine (IPC Phase 5) will most likely occur in North Gaza
An Iranian MP says Iran should move forward with a nuclear test
China is building nuclear reactor to power new aircraft carrier
France sent a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to Japan
North Korea ratifies mutual defence treaty with Russia. The treaty commits both countries to providing immediate military assistance to each other using “all means” necessary if either faces “aggression”.
NATO military chief says troops would be on ground if not for Russian nukes
US flights to Haiti banned after 3 airplanes shot. government information campaign in Norway is urging citizens to prepare for emergencies, with a checklist of supplies including water, food, candles, iodine, a radio, and cash.
Doctors Without Borders ambulance in Haiti ambushed, patients executed by police officers and vigilantes.
Colombia has declared a state of disaster following days of torrential flooding impacting tens of thousands of families.
European Forum for Disaster Risk Reduction
Canada records its first human bird flu case
Global talks to reach an agreement on better fighting pandemics will continue into next year
The largest-yet multilingual open pretraining dataset was released.
China arms itself for potential trade war with Donald Trump. "You think you’ve priced-in geopolitical risk and US-China trade warfare, but you haven’t, because China hasn’t seriously retaliated yet"
Ukraine could build a crude nuclear bomb within months, similar to the Fat Man bomb dropped in Nagasaki, from spent plutonium
An elephant seal colony lost 95%+ of its pups because of H5N1
An Australian site makes the point that misinformation laws prevent converging to the truth when the official version is wrong, as it was in the early days of covid when the mechanism for transmission was thought to be droplets, rather than the virus being more generally airborne.
ChinaTalk reports on the state of model testing in China
Tanista
7mo ago
Yes, a lot of it is structural but reddit policy made it infinitely worse. They banned basically most conservative subs that could have created a less progressive set of mods. Beyond that, they seem to have aided mod takeovers by exactly the sorts of obsessed supermods who never should have been given power (I recall at least one story of a mod being told to get new mods ASAP by admins and this acting as a way for these people to get in)
Mods of heterodox subs have to stress over some random stuff nuking the entire sub while supermods don't have it so hard. Of course one side loses in this environment.
The dirtbag and socialist left on places like /r/stupidpol and /r/redscarepod is still being tolerated but again, I do not know for how much longer given that they criticize mainstream Democrats almost as much as Republicans do.
Even those subs have inherently skewed discussion because of the threat of the Eye of Sauron. You could see it in terms like 'regard', how gingerly certain progressive sacred cows like trans are dealt with. Sister subs have already been banned. They're inherently unstable and fearful.
Reddit has a huge problem with a set of activist supermods. I was going to say that was the main problem and could be mitigated by some method to force mods to only mod a few subs but even if that worked (and it won't; these are the sorts of people who can get around that) there's still the admins who not only have had their own scandals but actively destroyed some of the most popular subs like thedonald.
It just rots from the head down. Which is why Twitter isn't a left wing bubble. Elon is not only not banning entire communities he's actively signal boosting the other side.
sohois
7mo ago
I think negative sentiment towards Indians can be narrowed down to one dominant factor: the English language.
Indians are, what, 1 in 6 people on the planet? In the past this number didn't mean much as the vast majority rarely leave their home country, but the internet and outsourcing means you have a much greater chance to encounter Indians. The thing is, India's cultural issues and level of social niceties are no worse than any other developing nation. China has many of the same problems, with a vast underclass of people that have awful hygiene and manners, a massive scam industry, nepotism and dishonesty, and even the "incel" characteristics that are ascribed to indians can be found in many Chinese men.
But people will very rarely encounter Chinese people because they don't speak English. There are no Chinese call centres, and while there are plenty of English language Chinese scammers you are still much more likely to get a call from an Indian. And on the internet, the Chinese are essentially banned from many of the most popular Western sites, while Indians will likely soon become the majority on places like facebook, reddit, youtube, and tiktok. The majority of the time an average Westerner is encountering someone from China will be Chinese tourists, and they have a godawful reputation.
Between cheap gas, cheap solar, and limited grid interconnects, Texas is a weird place to be boosting nuclear because it can't possibly compete.
It's the north that needs it desperately, with $.60/kwh prices, banned pipelines, solar not working in winter, and the Jones act literally prohibiting coastal shipment of (relatively) cheap LNG.
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