Search for "banned" - The Motte"

naraburns nihil supernum 11mo ago · Edited 11mo ago

Thanks for the response.

Discussions of the meta are not banned, of course--and I would re-emphasize that my analysis of your comment was not intended in any punitive way. Several users have raised concerns about a slide in the quality of discourse. Two mods have left the site, citing this as a reason. "The discourse is degrading" is not a new accusation; analogous complaints are arguably why the CW thread got kicked off the SSC subreddit in the first place. I've been moderating for something like five years and "the discourse is degrading" has been a steady drumbeat all along. And yet some of the most highly informative and uniquely insightful posts ever contributed to the CW thread were written long ago by users with names like "yodatsracist" and "trannyporno."

So I'm (yes, probably as an exercise in futility) trying to understand the shape of what's really going on. The Sneer Club subreddit (now defunct) was created eight years ago. Most of Scott Alexander's best culture war posts were written in 2014. The underlying mechanism of being "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" has contributed to the development of numerous semi-famous and arguably even influential substack writers and podcasters and the like. And yes--it has also resulted in a metric shit-ton of weird stuff, conspiracy-theory level madness, flat-earther tier denials of reality, etc. It has always been that bad, and it has always been that great. And as specific individuals have found its usefulness to them personally to expire, they have on many occasions departed with the declaration that now the Motte is just too much a hive of scum and villainy. But... maybe this time it's different? That's kind of what I'm trying to understand.

I myself no longer find the CW thread as useful as it has been to me in the past! But that's very much about me. The idea of freewheeling discourse being totally cool was well within the Overton window before 2016 introduced the idea of a "Misinformation Age" (whether things actually happened that way or not), and today, well... today people are much more concerned about epistemic hygiene, I guess would be the charitable way to say it. "Wrongthink bad" is not a new idea, but I daresay it is much more fashionable now than it was ten years ago.

I don't know where that leaves us. I've never been the solutions person. I know @ZorbaTHut has expressed some desire to implement solutions in the form of code, but the demands of day jobs are a curse upon us all. (Isn't there something in the Bible about that?) Anyway, thanks for answering my questions, I appreciate the effort and reflection.

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confuciuscorndog 11mo ago · Edited 11mo ago

The idea that there is some state of pure discourse free of even the hint of antagonism where humans merely discuss, unmolested by concepts like personal interest or context, the culture war without waging it to any degree is a fantasy, unless they're Spock (in which case they aren't human) or some secret time traveler posting from 3050 who finds the whole thing irrelevant. Maybe it's an important or necessary fantasy to prevent a discussion forum from entirely turning into /pol/, so maybe me getting banned for stretching kayfabe a little too much with my prior post was necessary (not that I really think so, but I have no idea where the Culture War Roundup community went or how I can participate in it), but it's still a fantasy.

But no, I wasn't optimizing for heat instead of light in that post. (That's more like a genre of post not uncommonly made on /pol/ that says something like "All women like to be dominated, therefore all Israeli women secretly want BHC (Big Hamas Cock). Only JIDF shills disagree. Prove me wrong, if you work for Mossad. Also, God doesn't exist, and Nick Fuentes is confirmed gay. But don't post in this thread if you have an American flag, because I don't want to talk to mutts who can't stop getting themselves shot." (Pls don't ban me mods for accurately imitating a /pol/ poster like you previously banned me for accurately imitating a black person. It's genuinely just an example to illustrate the difference between what I posted and what actually optimizing for heat is.)) I simply acknowledge that there's no light that doesn't also produce heat, and sometimes the best way to get the kind of light you need effectively is to turn up the heat a bit (whereas with my current post I instead tried a more logic-based rhetorical approach). Again, only in a fantasy world is this never the case.

The only thing strict adherence to the absolute most literal letter most rules here gets you is the culture war still being clearly waged, just in an infuriatingly indirect, passive aggressive fashion, like when Andrew Yang fans would pretend they were entirely non-partisan even though they obviously leaned heavily to the left. (And this is why the strictest literal letter of the rules here is rarely/only selectively enforced, though who gets the privilege of bending them the most can differ based on mod fiat.) I prefer my direct approach, though it's of course necessarily limited by the venue.

And I am traffic as opposed to merely in it? Good. I appreciate the compliment. The only thing that gives me pause about the current state of this world is that I'm not getting in its way enough, not that I'm getting in its way too much. You know who also acted as really infuriating traffic for the drivers on the road once? This guy. Traffic can be a noble thing.

So am I just waging the culture war? No more than basically anybody else here, even if I acknowledge it a bit more than some. Maybe I'll get popped extra/again for rejecting the polite fiction that this is a venue inherently opposed to that, but again if that happens given the pretty anodyne tone of my current posts then that's just a matter of selective enforcement, not reality.

In any case, if you think my prior post was wrong, then you should be happy with the mods here, who banned me and incentivized me to use a different rhetorical strategy this time. Your Motte lives, or at least its naked emperor has not yet ended his alleged fashion show.

The fact you got "upvotes" merely proves that other people on this site are also angry

That's good for me. They should be in my view.

that you are in an echo chamber. What an achievement.

Yes, I'm happy to confirm that some reasonably intelligent people agree with me. (Though according to the OP's count, almost a quarter of voters still disagreed with me, so hardly an echo chamber. Perhaps I just made a good point, even if it wasn't dressed up all fancy in pretending that I have no dog in the fight?)

I remember when expressing anger and hatred wasn't considered a virtue

I remember those days too. They were called the '90s when I lived them. Alas, they've changed some things since then that have affected people's propensity for anger and hatred.

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hanikrummihundursvin 11mo ago · Edited 11mo ago

I am comparing relevant metrics. 'Immigration' is a meaningless category since it only tells us what is recently going on, not what has been ongoing. A short look at US demographics tells a very clear story: Used to be majority white. Soon to be minority white.

There is a far greater difference in firearm availability.

If you are Canadian you can reliably attain an 'assault rifle' so long as you don't live in specific cities and jump through a few hoops. Not as smooth but very similar to the US. Yes, you can't get a million and one different variation of an AR 15 or an AK platform rifle, as many of those are banned, but you can get relevant stand ins. At the end of the day you have reliable platforms that fire rifle caliber rounds.

It is popular to be excessively critical of the US. I think pretending the US is as bad as Canada is an example of that.

It's popular to point at others and say: See! We're not that bad!

There are plenty of measures where the US is an embarrassment. Violent crime and prison rape to name two very relevant ones.

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cjet79 11mo ago

What short memories people have. This event has made me think I am doomed to live in a world of never-ending reprisals. How silly of me to once think that only the middle east was locked in the hell hole that is endlessly escalating conflict and revenge.

The language used by the right is very much exactly the same damn language the left was using a decade ago.

Scott wrote some impassioned pleas back then for the left to not go down this path. I give him lots of kudos for being consistent. I give everyone here who has called for lots of revenge zero kudos.

The right already had its fun being the purgers. Was no one else alive and remembering what the 2000-2010 decade was like? The slightest lack of extreme patriotism was enough for "cancellation". It was not hard to find stories of small towns and chruches treating gay people terribly. And about a decade of that treatment led the left to feeling quite a bit of bloodlust. So when power dynamics had shifted enough by the early 2010s there were a bunch of bloodthirsty leftists that were happy to live by the sword.

I made my position clear last week:

https://www.themotte.org/post/1077/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/230501?context=8#context

I suppose when it comes down to it I just want a maximum punishment for the spoken word. And cancellations often go way beyond my nebulous line for what a maximum punishment should be. People should suffer social embarrassment for a day, maybe a week for really bad things. And then it should be let go. The written word can maybe receive twice as harsh of punishments. If they are some form of sociopath that isn't really punished by social embarrassment then we can work something else out as a punishment that is about equally as harsh.

Humans aren't perfect, and sometimes they slip up and say dumb things without realizing they have crossed a line. I don't know if you think you've lived a perfect life and never said anything wrong before, but I know I've certainly said things I shouldn't have. I would like to not lose my livelihood over saying those things. I specifically remember one of the earliest instances of me saying a wrong thing, I was bullied by a kid in Elementary school, in middle school that kid committed suicide, in Highschool I made an edgy joke to a friend about being glad he wasn't around to torment me anymore, the friend winced and didn't laugh. I felt mild social embarrassment, and learned not to joke about that. That is an easy one to describe that I feel safe sharing because I can say I was an idiot in highschool, but I've made dumber and worse speech decisions in my adult life that I'd absolutely not feel safe sharing.

Humans also sometimes hold views that are not socially acceptable or within the Overton window. We are specifically on a forum that has been chased out of a larger social media site, because we want to allow people to say things outside of the Overton window. I am very uncomfortable with social rules that make it impossible to state anything outside of the Overton window. My own Dad often says things that are not acceptable on wider social media. He has been temp-banned on Facebook a few times for things he has said. He isn't really willing to not say some of his thoughts. Banning him from social media doesn't really remove him as a person, he is still out there thinking those forbidden thoughts. "Jokes" are one way to tease out the limits of the Overton window. The attempt to use humor, even if the attempt fails, shows that the person in question cares about social conventions. This is a sign that you don't need to punish them as harshly.

To all those about to say something like "its not fair that they got to be mean! I want to be mean back to them!" Don't worry. In a decade when the right has once again gone too far and the power dynamics switch back I will once again say that we shouldn't be "cancelling" people. But it will be the Left that is not listening. All will become fair over time, and meanwhile I won't be pouring gasoline on the house fire.

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confuciuscorndog 11mo ago

So again, per my post, do you apply this logic universally? Do you recoil at Little Timmy punching Brad, because you imagine that in all of his resentful little fury he'd probably be just as bad of a schoolyard bully or worse if he had Brad's status?

If "I believe you would behave badly if you were in a position of strength, therefore I can't support your retaliation from a position of weakness in the present moment." is a solid argument against retaliation, then retaliation is basically off the table entirely, because, as the old saying goes, power corrupts. If anybody who might take inappropriate advantage of a position of strength is banned from defending themselves from a position of a weakness, then almost everybody would be banned from defending themselves from a position of weakness.

Among the victims of mass shooters, for example, haven't there almost certainly been some who themselves fantasized about going Columbine occasionally? The types of young men who perpetrate these massacres have also not infrequently been their victims. So if one of these potential victims who likes to indulge in a little GTA and might even do so IRL if they had the power to do it without consequences (as unlike an actual mass shooter they're not willing to give up their life over it) manages to wrest control of a gun from an actual current mass shooter and end him, we should object?

The anti-retaliation side assumes that there are more groups than the two monoliths, of which one is actively doing the titting upon all tatters and the other has only now gained a reprieve to briefly tat upon all titters.

I think this is just a bad assumption. Yes, left vs. right is somewhat reductive, but in regards to the issue of Donald Trump's assassination, splitting people into those two camps is hardly inaccurate.

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confuciuscorndog 11mo ago · Edited 11mo ago

Ban or not, I stand by everything I said. (As the great rhetorician Adolf Hitler proves (regardless of what you think about his politics), sometimes you must breathe fire and brimstone to communicate the righteous fury necessary to get your point across, and I'll take the upvotes as a sign that I made that point in a rhetorically effective way that induced the intended response in most readers. With that said and my prior point made, I will take a different approach in this post.)

Now I think it's also clearly worth pointing out that, even if you advocate for (as I'm seeing all over this subthread) the "This weaponization of someone's expressions/speech/beliefs to deprive him of employment/civil status of basic respect/social media accounts/etc. is a terrible thing and should be off the table for all sides." position (which I actually happen to agree in large part would be the rule of an ideal society, at least in regards to working as a cashier at Home Depot and not as a teacher or in a high-profile government position, which is also why I take the practical position on the necessity of retaliating now that I do, as I'll explain), then you are still simply being rather naive if you think the present right-wing retaliation is a bad outcome/choice in regards to achieving your long-term goal.

Do you know what the best way is to get a child to stop pinching you, thus ensuring no pinching for everybody? Pinch him back just as hard (if not slightly harder), so he understands how it feels (and the precarious dynamics of getting into a pinching fight). No pinchy child has ever thought, "Well I've been pinching this adult all day and he's kindly not retaliated every time even when he could have, so I guess I should just stop pinching him forever. Peace has been achieved for our time."

That is, even if what you really want is the end of both tits and tats forever and entirely, you can rest assured that you are not going to get that through insisting that tits ("tit" being the part of the phrase "tit for tat" that I am interpreting as the retaliatory action, based on the phrase "eye for an eye") be banned. All you're going to get from that is even more confident tats all the time, increasing in frequency (which is exactly what we've experienced with politically-motivated firings/retaliation/"cancellations"/"deplatformings" etc. for the past 10 years proportional to the right's inability (and it's mostly been unable) to respond in kind), which is the absolute worst outcome. Going based off of the old formulation about "rules applied fairly" etc.:

No tits or tats (peace) > Tits and tats applied evenly (war, affecting both sides in an even/fair fashion, so not a massacre) > Only tats (massacre for one side only without any possibility of retribution for them)

Point is, magnanimous inaction is rarely if ever a winning strategy. Your serial killer may appreciate you generously not resisting, but that's neither going to do anything for you nor make society any safer from murder.

So if you think (or pretend) you're trying to achieve the end of both tits and tats evenly, but your practical suggestion to achieve that is just to let the tatters run wild without response because goodness deary it would be so undignified and hypocritical for the titters to tit after complaining so much about the tatters and their tats, then I can only see you as either a disingenuous undercover tatter trying to sabotage the titters for your own personal ends, someone who smugly (and wrongly) believes himself to be above all conflict in all cases (until it comes to their doorstep, as it often does), or again simply very naive and suffering from sloppy, short-term thinking (as opposed to being "principled").

Going based on the above, I absolutely resent and reject the notion of @FiveHourMarathon below that those advocating for retaliation in this case are therefore not "principled libertarians". If "principled libertarians" had managed to overthrow the Soviet Union, that would not mean that they would have immediately had to apply the NAP to Joseph Stalin the moment they had him on the ropes for a bit or supposedly suddenly lose their principles. It does not mean that after you get punched in the face you must out of principle strictly avoid punching back because "After all, my right to swing my fist stops where their nose begins."

Principled libertarianism is not (or at least doesn't have to be) absolute "Turn the other cheek." Tibetan-monks-praying-for-the-souls-of-their-killers-while-CCP-soldiers-gun-them-down absolute non-violence. (Though I personally am not super attached dogmatically to libertarian(ism) as a philosophy/identifier, even if I do identify with it somewhat, the notion that reasonable retaliation is incompatible with it is at a minimum essentially a de facto rejection of the existence of contracts with penalties (as any contract must have, explicitly or implicitly, if its performance is to be enforced and its violation sanctioned) for one, which is basically the whole foundation of the ideology. So that's why I chose to highlight specifically that attacking people over supporting retaliation here on alleged libertarian grounds is utterly absurd.)

I'll echo the post below of @FarmReadyElephants (which I suggest everybody also read) too and quote the most important line from it:

So it's just wrong to model this as tit-for-tat violence. It's 10,000 tits for one tat. And the one tat is a nonpartisan tat that absolutely must hold.

[Note that he writes, contrarily to me, interpreting the initial action as the "tit" and the retaliatory action as the "tat", whereas again, after considering the phrase "eye for an eye", I decided that the initial action should actually be the "tat" and the retaliatory action the "tit". I tried asking an AI about this, and it could not tell me whether there was a consensus about whether or not the tit or the tat is universally intended to come first, nor could I find anything about the query on basically useless modern search engines. But I prefer to ally with the tits (which is not to say women necessarily), so that's how I wrote it.]

And he's entirely correct. Even going based on what I said above, you must remember as he points out that this is still mostly a massacre of tats (or tits in his formulation) with only the briefest respite of tits (or tats in his formulation) thus far.

So I just don't get the anti-retaliation side at all. I just don't. Do you apply this logic to other aspects of your lives?

If you see Little Timmy, who is near his lowest because he has cancer (that he is recovering from... maybe), get his ass beat by Brad on the playground every day, and then one day some unique circumstance happens, say Brad breaks his arm playing football and it's in a sling, and Little Timmy briefly gets the upper hand and gives the bully a small taste of his own medicine, you'd really start indignantly lecturing him about how hypocritical and unprincipled it is that he went after Brad in his time of weakness after all of the complaining he's done about his own present weakness being exploited? That it proves that Little Timmy was always just as in favor of violent confrontation as Brad is? Even when there's a very good chance that the moment Brad recovers the (attempted, likely successful) ass-beatings for Little Timmy are only going to intensify, that it's not any sort of a permanent victory?

He doesn't deserve to celebrate or luxuriate in his one respite/triumph in a long time at all? He should have just ran out the clock on his brief moment of strength by peacefully meditating on how evil and inconsistent with his prior expressed non-violent principles it would be to take advantage of the circumstances by having poor ol' Brad be the injured party this time instead? (I'm not just slinging around rhetorical questions, but genuinely asking what the general principles on retaliation should be here.)

"But he didn't just go after Brad directly! He also attacked Sarah, who never directly touched him to my knowledge. As far as we know, all she ever did was subscribe to the mutual ideologies of Bradism and anti-Timmyism, cheer on Brad beating up Timmy every day in the background, and post on social media about how disappointed she was that Timmy's mom [who is seen by Little Timmy as his primary defender, as she's been advocating for the obviously unfairly biased teachers/administration to stop being so clearly prejudiced against him and punish Brad for his own bad behavior] didn't die in the car accident she had the day before. She's totally irrelevant, a minuscule fish in the larger pond of the overall affair. Even if you think retaliating against Brad or some more prominent members of his bully posse like Brock is understandable, going after innocent little Sarah is nothing more than pure sadism!" This meanwhile, IMO, is basically the equivalent of defending that cashier at Home Depot and others like her specifically. (No I'm not saying that any of the people defending her formulated their arguments exactly as I did or trying to put words directly into their mouths; the quote is just how I characterize their position myself, simply rephrased.)

Even Scotty engages in what I can only see as absolutely facile logic here. Observe this (what I would characterize as) nonsense:

The right-wingers admit that they have suffered terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs. Okay, check. They admit it’s made them so mad that they want a bloodbath of cancelling liberals harder than anyone has ever been cancelled before. Okay, check.

And now they say . . . that lefties must suffer terribly at the hands of cancellation mobs, because it will teach them that cancellation is wrong?

If being on the receiving end could teach people cancellation was bad, it would have taught you that. It obviously hasn’t, so try a different strategy.

"You admit that being pinched by this annoying child has made you think it might be a good idea to pinch him back; so you admit that being pinched hasn't even taught you as an adult that pinching a child is wrong; so what makes you think that a child being on the receiving end of a pinch is going to teach him anything!?"

Zero acknowledgment of the difference between unprovoked aggression and responding to unprovoked aggression already in progress. This is supposed to be one of our top rationalist game theory gurus? Give me a break. (I'm not even going to bother dissecting the rest of the article, because it is similarly flawed from top to bottom, as most modern barely-worthy-of-engagement Scotty (ever since he let himself be fully chastity caged by Ozy and co., with Alexandros Marinos showing him to be a fraud being the final nail in the coffin) writings are.

If there is a world where tatters (absolutely convinced of the righteousness of their tats in this case as we must be reminded) generally choose to put their tats away without the effective exhibition of tits creating a credible threat of more tits in return, then I'd like to see it, but I haven't yet. And it is precisely those like the Home Depot cashier who cheer on the tatters and their tats that gave them their perception of absolute imprimatur in the first place. How can you address a behavior without addressing such a deeply-rooted cause of it? If you deal in tats, whether by dishing them out or cheering them on, then you must expect an imminent tit to the face (or to the job in these cases). That's the only way to incentivize fair behavior.

tl;dr: By my reckoning, whether you simply like tits or even if you seek an eventual future without them (and tats), the only productive path for either side at the moment that I can see is to free the tits. Get your tits out boys. Otherwise you're committing a mistake much like someone with a cockroach infestation focusing their energy instead on killing the house centipedes chowing down on them.

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naraburns nihil supernum 11mo ago

This is not a warning, in the sense that I'm not putting a note on your account, but I have two moderator-level questions about your post that I'd be interested in an honest response to, if possible.

The first is your rhetoric concerning the Motte. You wrote:

...while there were some voices calling for restraint...

Which can actually literally mean anywhere from one voice, to all voices; from a small majority to a large one, and anywhere in between. Then you wrote:

...many commenters demanded blood from the left...

Which literally means the same thing as the first part of that sentence, in reverse. However you chose "many" instead of "some," which paints a certain picture of this space. You then dropped four quotes. But weirdly, the first and fourth quotes are from the same post, and it is a post for which that user got banned, which you don't mention. So my first question is: why did you decide to portray the discussion here with such uncharitable rhetoric?

The Motte exists as text. One of the things that sometimes happens to places like this is, what sets them apart from other spaces gets amplified as it gets noticed. So for example people notice that reddit is a teeming hive of fedora-wearing atheists, which attracts more fedora-wearing atheists (and repels non-fedora-wearing-atheists) until the admin slashes-and-burns their way through the algorithm (or whatever), converting the site to a teeming hive of reflexively woke young adults. In a way I suspect this is analogous to Flanderization, but with a community rather than a fictional character. Maybe sociologists have a name for this process?

Anyway, this is a space 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. But our "open debate, no positions banned" policy meant that people with Overton-suppressed political views found this space unusually welcoming. One way we try to tamp down the "seven zillion witches" problem that this eventually Flanderizes to is by emphasizing individual arguments over discussion of "groups" wherever possible. I have often repeated the line "you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic" to people who make sweeping claims about the Motte. It applies to your post, here: the reason I don't want people making claims about the Motte is that I think it tends to Flanderize the space. People read your claim, and it shifts, however slightly, their priors on whether this space is "for them." But of course it's for them! As long as they follow the rules, this space is for everyone, no matter what they believe. That's the foundation; that's the bedrock.

My second question is: why did you include the ChatGPT summary? Did you feel the need to provide a summary but didn't feel up to writing one yourself? Were you just padding your word count in hopes of avoiding a "low effort" moderation action? I'm not accusing you of anything, mind--I'm just curious. You have a pretty good posting history so I was caught off guard by it. Not only does generative AI minimize engagement with your audience, it minimizes your own engagement with the text you're citing. No one benefits from it. It seems to me that ChatGPT quotes are quinessential low-effort participation, unless maybe you're showing your work on a post specifically about generative AI or something. I don't think we've explicitly made it against the rules but I do think it's incompatible with the rules we've got--but maybe I'm overlooking something.

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SteveKirk 11mo ago

Trudeau literally banned handguns by executive order last year

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ThisIsSin Cainanites and Abelists 11mo ago

"Federation" as far as the client sees it is just managing multiple accounts

The point of federation is that you use the same one. So, for instance, if Reddit was my homeserver and I wanted to post to TheMotte's Matrix instance, I'd be [redacted]@reddit.com.

The problem, then, is that if you don't like that homeserver I can't use my main identity to talk here, and it's a single point of failure to only have a single account on an instance that doesn't belong to me (in which case it's "banned for coming from an instance that doesn't answer to you").

Messaging about trying to appeal to users that were on the run from overly-censorious website operators that their selling feature boiled down to "more hassle and still just as much censorship" was the opposite of a good plan. This would have been fine in the early '00s where culture war hadn't yet come to the Internet for cultural reasons, but it's not the early '00s any more.

but can’t you just create your own insulated private swarm of Matrix servers like IRC networks?

Of course you can- Pawoo and Gab are the largest such isolated instances, though as I understand it, that's more "most of the network has them blocked".

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jeroboam 11mo ago · Edited 11mo ago

How so? If the idea is that Christians don't lie because of their Christian belief, wouldn't they start lying again once they become atheists? But that doesn't seem to have happened in, for example, the Nordic countries.

More convincing is that big changes happened once the Catholic Church banned cousin marriage in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215.

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Amadan Enjoying my short-lived victory 11mo ago

Replying to your top-level, though I did read the follow-ons.

So, BLUF, you're banned. Good-bye.

Now, working from the bottom up: Yes, your posts have (had) to be manually approved, because you are an infrequent poster who posts angry rants that get heavily downvoted, hence you were stuck in the new user filter like everyone else. Had you made any effort to be a reasonable participant, that wouldn't have happened, but instead, your posts sat in the new user filter while we mods discussed "Should we just remove this angry drunken rant, or approve it and then ban him, or what?" (Spoiler: we decided the latter.)

You should have reread that mod note of mine you quoted above, because I was trying to steer you in the direction of actual productive engagement.

"Trump bad" is a perfectly valid opinion (and contrary to what you seem to think, it is not unique or even that rare here on the Motte).

"Trump bad and everyone who thinks differently is bad fuck you" is not.

You're a classic law and order conservative who loves America and the Constitution? Good for you. Wish you'd been able to express yourself without over-the-top rage and contempt, because it would have been good to have a little more of that, some more diversity of thought.

So why did I ban you, if we wanted more diversity of thought? Because someone who only seems to be able to participate by raging at his enemies isn't actually contributing anything. We've had your type before (usually, though, they are Impassionatas or Marxbros or other leftists), who are so implacably convinced of their objective and provable correctness and righteousness that they are literally incapable of good faith engagement because everything to them is a scissor statement.

Any forum in which I'm not free to use my speech like this isn't a free speech forum.

There is almost no forum that is a "free speech forum" in the sense that you get to say literally anything you want. Such forums rapidly turn into shitshows and there is a reason people generally prefer moderated forums, no matter how much they disagree over how the moderation should work (usually, "ban more of my enemies and let me say anything I want," but so it goes). This is a free speech forum in the sense that we don't ban any views. No one gets banned for having the wrong opinion or having unthinkable thoughts or unpalatable beliefs. Instead, they get banned because instead of wanting to talk and actually hear what other people think, they just want to dump shits on the floor, or pour gasoline and light a match, or shit on the floor and then pour gasoline over it and light a match.

And that's what your post is doing. What exactly do you think anyone who supports Trump (or even, not necessarily supports him, but thinks he's maybe not the most damaging person in US history) is supposed to say to your rant? Do you think they would have any expectation that calmly explaining why they support Trump would get anything more than another round of angry "fuck you"s and "repent sinner"s?

So you got your shot off, and now you're banned, because you're an angry ranter who got warned four times and banned twice for doing the same thing.

TheMotte became a performative space where people were allowed to tell themselves the story that they were 'grey tribe' neutral at the same time they bitterly denied and resistance any news which made their actual side look bad.

Only some people here call themselves "gray tribe." There are leftists and rightists and moderates here and people who don't neatly fit into any particular label. No matter how much critics try to insist this place is all a bunch of Trump-apologist red tribers (when they aren't screaming at us for being too accommodating to Blue Tribe sensibilities or being converged by Da Joos or whatever), it's not, and your anti-Trump arguments would have been welcome here, except what you tried to do was enforce consensus. Like, literally your entire post was an argument that we should all get on the same page about how bad Trump is. You can go somewhere else looking to force everyone into agreement with your position or browbeating those who won't, but if you actually want to participate here, you have to do so accepting that people are not going to agree with you and you need to deal with them, civilly.

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Rov_Scam 11mo ago · Edited 11mo ago

The AFI 100

Given the tendency of people to post lists this week, it seems like quite the coincidence that after 20 years of making a half-assed attempt at seeing all of the movies on the AFI 100, my journey is finally complete. I’m sharing my thoughts on every film on the list in the hopes that nobody else here will subject themselves to such a pointless exercise. Without further ado:

Citizen Kane (1941)The Great Gatsby has famously never been made into a good film, and this one is no exception. Yes, it’s the same story, trying to figure out who some rich guy really is. Skip this one.
Casablanca (1942) It may be the ultimate date movie of all time, but that’s not saying much. Everyone knows all the famous lines from this movie, including the ones that weren’t actually in it. No one remembers what the plot is actually about, and it wasn’t marketed as a romance until everyone who saw it realized that the international intrigue elements fall flat. Skip this one.
The Godfather (1972) The American Dream given a cynical twist with the realization that the crime business is a business like any other. But never mind that the two “heroes” of the tale—Vito and Michael—are mass murderous gangsters, the rendering of the story on screen is ponderous. The amber lighting, the shadows, the pace, the score, and the entire tone are so serious and pretentious that they verge on parody. This film would be just as good as a comedy if you added a laugh track. They say there is a fine line between comedy and tragedy, but it’s not quite this fine. Skip this one.
Gone with the Wind (1939) A sentimental epic that whitewashes history. It’s not as offensive as Birth of a Nation, but the insensitivity to the real suffering caused by slavery is there and has to be dealt with. I’m not trying to be a politically correct nitpicker; slavery isn’t nitpicking. And anyone who has the slightest bit of false nostalgia for the Old South should remind themselves that the landed, slave-owning aristocracy represented by Rhett and Scarlet was only between 1% and 2% of the population. Everyone else, black and white, endured miserable poverty working in the fields. At least that’s the normal criticism, which is fair enough, but that only describes minor plot points in the first half. The rest of it is just another old tearjerker where a spoiled bitch manages to alienate three(!) husbands because she’s still hung up on a teenage crush. Skip this one.
Lawrence of Arabia (1962) A four hour epic that only exists to impart the sensation of how vast and endless the desert is. This would have been better as a 20 minute IMAX documentary. Skip this one.
The Wizard of Oz (1939) One for the kiddies. But if you’re all grown up you can skip this one.
The Graduate (1967) The back cover of the DVD described this as “love and idealism triumphing over the forces of corruption and conformity”. Nope. Benjamin Braddock is a whiny asshole with no ideals and is himself a force for corruption. If he does indeed represent a rebellion against the conformity of middle-class life—as he breaks up two marriages and a business partnership—he only serves to make us appreciate squareness. Skip this one.
On the Waterfront (1954) This movie does more to reinforce the negative stereotype of unions than any Republican ever could. Skip this one.
Schindler’s List (1993) Speaking of Republicans, Tom Coburn raised a huge stink when NBC aired this film unedited and uninterrupted in prime time in 1999. If you were among the 65 million people watching then you don’t need to see it again. If you weren’t then you’re probably a hopeless Zoomer without the attention span to sit through this. Skip this one.
Singin’ in the Rain (1952) Tapdancing is as much an “art” as throwing a basketball through a hoop, and this crap is very dated. No one born after 1945 has any reason to watch this movie today, unless you’re one of those schlocky lounge/cocktail/swinger ‘40s revivalists who are into this type of thing so you can wear cool clothes. Skip this one.
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) Frank Capra was an overly sentimental cornball, but beyond that, this movie raises significant concerns about the criminal justice system, making one think it should be routine for a policeman to use deadly force to prevent the escape of someone wanted for disorderly conduct. Skip this one.
Sunset Boulevard (1950) Jack Webb is Joe Friday and Joe Friday only, not “one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet”. Skip this one.
Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) This movie sends too many mixed messages with regard to its historical inaccuracies. On the one hand, the Japanese are portrayed as incompetent at engineering and construction, which they most certainly were not in real life, giving this somewhat racist undertones. One the other hand, prison camps building the Burma-Siam Railway were much more brutal than this film suggests, given that the real bridge was built using forced labor in conditions that are too appalling for me to describe here. Without either of these inaccuracies, however, there would be no movie. Skip this one.
Some Like It Hot (1959) Neither Tony Curtis not Jack Lemmon pass as women. Skip this one.
Star Wars (1977) This was the first of the big-budget special effects movies in which plot and characterization take a back seat, ushering in the reign of big-budget special effects movies in which plot and characterization take a back seat, to the point that these days every movie is a big-budget special effects movie in which plot and characterization take a back seat. Skip this one.
All About Eve (1950) There’s a good line in this movie about a piano thinking it had composed a concerto—actors ought to keep their egos in check and realize they wouldn’t even have lines to mouth if it wasn’t for writer. Hell, Shakespeare is still read, but does anyone remember the famous thespians of the 16th century? Unfortunately, that one line is the only good thing the writers came up with in this otherwise dull movie. Skip this one.
African Queen (1951) This is a fine romance if you’re one of those crotchety old-timers who think it’s actually sexier when couples don’t take their clothes off and let innuendo and tension do the job for you. The rest of us can skip this one.
Psycho (1960) This isn’t very scary, and there isn’t much suspense. This is better than your average horror film, but that isn’t saying much. Skip this one.
Chinatown (1974) The plot of this is so convoluted it makes Raymond Chandler look like Anton Chekov by comparison. Skip this one.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) Jack Nicholson is at his craziest and hammiest, along with a bunch of other actors who wound up on Taxi. The beginning of his self-parody period (which has yet to end). Skip this one.
The Grapes of Wrath (1940) If you’re a tankie who needs to go back to the Depression so you can find a fictional example to showcase the horrors of capitalism, this is required viewing. Otherwise, skip this one.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) This movie looked like it would be good after watching the first few scenes with the apes, which mistakenly give the impression of a masterful epic. Instead we’re given 20 minute sequences of spaceships docking and no plot. When the most interesting character is a computer, you know you’re in trouble. Skip this one.
The Maltese Falcon (1941) Dashiell Hammett was a trash writer whom critics adore because he absorbed all of Hemingway and furthered along the development of a distinct American style. Unfortunately, that distinct American toughness is really just nothing more than a high body count. And the book is better than the movie. Skip this one.
Raging Bull (1980) Jake LaMotta just isn’t an interesting character, and two hours with him is pretty wearying. Skip this one. If you really want to watch a Scorsese movie, even Boxcar Bertha is better.
E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) Chalk another one up for the kids. Skip this one.
Dr. Strangelove (1964) “Black Humor” is nothing more than excuse film buffs give themselves to justify watching comedies that aren’t funny. Skip this one.
Bonnie & Clyde (1967) The real Bonnie & Clyde were considerably less sexy than Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Skip this one.
Apocalypse Now (1979) A very loose adaptation of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness that bears about the same relation to the reality of Vietnam as Star Wars did to the Roman Empire. Skip this one.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) With our awareness of the rampant corruption and venality within the Beltway in the post-Watergate era, this film seems hopelessly naïve. Skip this one.
Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) Ah yes, it is not gold that makes men act like animals; filthy lucre is merely one more thing to fight over. This is the kind of dime-store philosophy that practically defines “middlebrow”. Skip this one.
Annie Hall (1977) There are two kinds of Woody Allen movies: The funny ones, and the serious ones. This movie is a transitional work that attempts to fuse the two sides. Unfortunately, it’s hard to tell what’s a joke and what isn’t. His paranoia about anti-Semitism? That lobster scene—he’s not that much of a wimp, is he? Skip this one.
The Godfather Part II (1974) Was responsible for The Godfather Part III. Skip this one.
High Noon (1952) The only notable part is the structure. The action begins at 10:40 a.m. and unfolds in real time until noon, paralleling the length of the film. Other than that, it’s a rather standard Western. Skip this one.
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) Hollywood changed the plot of the book too much to make it more palatable to moviegoers. Skip this one.
It Happened One Night (1934) Film buffs toss around “pre-Code” like the era was full of racy and disgusting content. It’s really no more shocking than anything in a modern Pixar film. Skip this one.
Midnight Cowboy (1969) Film buffs like to point out that this is the only X-Rated movie to ever win an academy award. They don’t point out that this is only R-Rated by today’s standards and was given an X due to the subject matter more than anything actually pornographic. Skip this one.
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) This isn’t a movie, it’s a piece of propaganda designed to make returning WWII veterans adjust to home life. It’s alright for a public awareness video, but after serving its admirable purpose, it became obsolete. Heck, nobody’s going to nominate all those “Just Say No” anti-drug movies, are they? So why this? Skip this one.
Double Indemnity (1944) There’s nothing here you won’t find done better on old Perry Mason reruns not to mention your average post-Hill Street Blues cop show. Skip this one.
Doctor Zhivago (1965) Length doesn’t equal quality. Skip this one.
North by Northwest (1959) This movie has all the sophistication of a Timothy Dalton-era James Bond movie. Skip this one.
West Side Story (1961) Theoretically, the marriage of music and narrative ought to take both to new heights, but in practice the narrative suffers because it has to find corny ways to incorporate the songs and the music suffers because individually inspired songs are outnumbered by makeshift hack pieces designed to move the plot along. The world would be a much better place if no one ever penned an opera or musical ever again. Skip this one.
Rear Window (1954) Jimmy Stewart as a Peeping Tom? Skip this one.
King Kong (1933) There’s no need to delve into pre-Civil Rights America’s warped racial/sexual fantasies. Skip this one.
The Birth of a Nation (1915) Ignoring the fact that it completely distorts history and glorifies the KKK, this is just boring. Skip this one.
Streetcar Named Desire (1951) What I said earlier about musicals notwithstanding, Streetcar! was better. Skip this one.
A Clockwork Orange (1971) A great book would have been better if anyone other than Kubrick, the most boring great director of our time, directed this movie. Skip this one.
Taxi Driver (1976) John Hinckley Jr. watched this film over and over. Skip this one.
Jaws (1975) With Sammy Fableman being an overt self-portrait it’s now understandable why all of Spielberg’s characters range from annoying to evil. Suffice it to say, I was rooting for the shark. Skip this one.
Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs (1937) Too bad Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner never made a feature film, or I’d want it here instead. Skip this one.
Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (1969) A buddy film without homosexual undertones seems a bit quaint in the 21st century. Skip this one.
Philadelphia Story (1940) Katherine Hepburn’s annoying fake British accent (oh, sorry “Mid Atlantic”) just plain grates. Skip this one.
From Here to Eternity (1953) This snoozefest was created entirely so that Frank Sinatra could revive his failing career. Inadvertently, the producers seem to have pioneered the irritating “Oscar bait” genre that clogs up our theaters every winter. Skip this one.
Amadeus (1984) First, it rewrites history. Second, it doesn’t try to give you any insight into one of music’s greatest geniuses and just portrays Mozart as a party animal. Finally, the soundtrack inexplicably left off “Rock Me Amadeus”. Skip this one.
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) Certain nations gearing up for war have banned this film, which should tell you something about how powerful an anti-war piece this is even today. Unfortunately, some wars are necessary, so see this if you’d like, but don’t go showing it in high schools or anything lest we have a repeat of Vietnam.
The Sound of Music (1965) Speaking of schools, completely against my will my helpless fellow classmates and I were forced to watch this in elementary school. The only time I’ve ever cheered for the Nazis. Skip this one.
MAS*H (1970) Possibly the only time in recorded history that the TV show was actually better than the movie it spun off from. Skip this one.
The Third Man (1949) There are only two good things about this film: The first shot we see of Orson Welles, and the fact that the main character keeps calling Calloway Callahan just to piss him off. Other than that it’s a movie that tries to convince you that the cobblestones and zither of postwar Vienna are enough to make a film about counterfeit penicillin interesting. Skip this one.
Fantasia (1940) A revolutionary film that let Disney animators stretch the boundaries of what could be done with animation. Unfortunately, no one actually watches this, unless they like shadows of people playing musical instruments. Skip this one.
Rebel Without a Cause (1955) James Dean’s legend overshadows his achievement, which actually wasn’t much: Three films, all of which display some talent, but not enough to warrant his current status. If he hadn’t died young, he’d be remembered as a decent but unremarkable ‘50s actor/teen idol. The movie itself is dated and you’d have to be a retro ‘50s obsessed revivalist to get worked up over it. Skip this one.
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) Okay, maybe that wasn't the only time I rooted for the Nazis. Skip this one.
Vertigo (1958) Lonely, unattractive Alfred Hitchcock had a lifelong crush on Grace Kelly, and his psychosexual obsessions are nowhere as obvious as in this twisted film about a man who just can’t get an icy blonde out of his head. Skip this one.
Tootsie (1982) If conservatives want to make a film about how DEI has made it hard for white men to get jobs, then they probably shouldn’t load it up with an obvious trans angle. Unless, of course, they’re trying to tell us something they’re afraid to admit… Skip this one.
Stagecoach (1939) I guess this was good for 1939, but it made a star of John Wayne, who became an American icon by playing an insufferable asshole in every movie he was ever in and acting like even more of an asshole in his public life. Skip this one.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) If they want to include sci-fi, and they want to include kitschy noir like Double Indemnity, then why not include kitschy sci-fi, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, or The Fly? Skip this one.
Silence of the Lambs (1991) If you need to pick out scary trash with lots of sex and murder from the ‘90s, then you get a pretty big playing field. Why not Basic Instinct, or, better yet, Scream? Skip this one.
Network (1976) It’s supposed to tell painful truths about how media manipulates society. Instead, it convinces you that the Tea Part Republican turned MAGA Republican rambling on in a bar is on to something. Skip this one.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) This movie dates horribly considering what we now know about brainwashing, and if any Republican sees it in the next 6 months it’s going to lead to endless 4Chan conspiracy theories about how Thomas Crooks was compromised in a Democrat-controlled nursing home to give the libs plausible deniability. Skip this one.
An American In Paris (1951) One Gene Kelly tap dancing special was more than enough. Replace with The Decline of Western Civilization II: The Metal Years and give the old fogies who voted for this tinnitus. Skip this one.
Shane (1953) The charming tale of a family who thinks it’s a good idea to take in a drifter with a mysterious past and no last name (or first?) and let him babysit their son. I just realized that for all the movies about men who like other men a whole bunch there aren’t any cute animal movies on this list! Where’s Homeward Bound? Or Milo and Otis? Skip this one.
The French Connection (1971) When Eddie Egan and Sonny Grosso made the French Connection bust in 1962, it was the largest narcotics seizure in the country’s history. Strange, then, why they’d participate in this hack job that completely tarnishes their legacy. The real Eddie Egan must have been given a lot of money to berate the fake Eddie Egan relentlessly for being a bad cop. And the image of the detective as a slovenly womanizer doesn’t do his image any favors either. Skip this one.
Forrest Gump (1994) The moral of this apparently is that if you’re living through an era of monumental societal change, it’s best to be the smiling idiot on the sidelines. Skip this one.
Ben-Hur (1959) I understand the desire to include the type of over-the-top production that Hollywood was making in the 1950s to counter the popularity of television, but this is nothing more than a Charlton Heston movie without guns or apes. Skip this one.
Wuthering Heights (1939) This is a movie for housewives who read trashy romance novels, which, in fact, the book it’s based on was (it's only considered a "classic" because it was written in the 19th century, not the vulgar 20th). Emily Bronte was the Danielle Steele of her time. Sure, Laurence Olivier can act, but will Americans please get over their misguided prejudice that English accents somehow automatically denote sophistication and intelligence? Skip this one.
The Gold Rush (1925) The silent era ended for a reason. I don’t want to read a movie. Skip this one.
Dances with Wolves (1990) Kevin Costner takes himself far, far too seriously, and turns every film he stars in into a boring, turgid dirge. He winds up making a far greater fool of himself than Jim Carrey and Pee Wee Herman combined with his grim-faced schtick. Hollywood’s portrayal of Indians as great noble savages is one of those deep-seated traditions that is long overdue to go. How about a movie that takes place in an Indian casino? Skip this one.
City Lights (1931) We definitely don’t need silent films made 4 years into the sound era. Skip this one.
American Graffiti (1973) This movie did for 50s nostalgia what “The Big Chill” did for 60s nostalgia and “Dazed and Confused” did for 70s nostalgia — make films better known for their soundtracks. Skip this one.
Rocky (1978) "My old man told me that I'd have to use my body 'cuz I didn't have much of a brain." Thus, Sylvester Stallone neatly sums up his entire movie career in one line. Skip this one.
The Deer Hunter (1978) As a Pittsburgh native, I feel deeply offended that the only actual deer hunting in this movie was shot in the Cascades and not Tionesta or some other place where people actually have camps. And there’s no reason why they had to shoot the mill town scenes in Steubenville rather than Clairton. This kind of inaccuracy is easy to overlook if you’re more focused on the completely unrelatable plot, but to someone like me it’s like portraying New Yorkers as having southern accents to fit foreign stereotypes of Americans. Skip this one.
The Wild Bunch (1969) When the amount of violence in a movie is the only thing it has going for it, it’s not a good sign. Skip this one.
Modern Times (1934) And we certainly don’t need silent films that were made 7 years into the sound era and a year after the Hayes Code. Skip this one.
Giant (1956) Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean. If they wanted to include a teen movie how about Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon in Beach Blanket bingo, or better yet, Ski Party?
Platoon (1986) All Oliver Stone films are just his incoherent political ramblings translated to the screen. Unless you plan on voting for RFK Jr., skip this one.
Fargo (1996) I get it, people in the Upper Midwest have funny accents. And it doesn’t even take place in Fargo. And it inspired an absolutely dreadful television series that featured a scenery-chewing Kirsten Dunst and an unexplained flying saucer. Skip this one.
Duck Soup (1933) Snappy one-liners are not dialogue. Skip this one.
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) “Battleship Potemkin” was better, but it was made by Soviet commies, so it’s ineligible for this list. A half-assed substitute doesn’t cut it, even at 86. Skip this one.
Frankenstein (1931) See above about lamentably substituting an American snore because the better foreign films are ineligible — the monster movie was always one thing the Japs did better. If you need a stand-in then at least use “Young Frankenstein”, which scared the hell out of me. Skip this one.
Easy Rider (1968) I know they were different times, but the hippie rhetoric is laughable today. Not to mention that there isn’t much of a plot and the ending is hard to believe (sure, the roads are filled with rednecks going around shooting unarmed strangers). Skip this one.
Patton (1970) The movie starts with an incredibly boring monologue where Patton marched in front of an American flag and starts delivering a harangue about warfare. There are better things to do with three hours than spend them stuck with a warmongering lunatic. Skip this one.
The Jazz Singer (1927) The fact that Al Jolson sings for about two minutes doesn’t make up for the fact that you have to read this film. They could have at least included the Neil Diamond version with what should be America’s national anthem. Skip this one.
My Fair Lady (1964) Yeah, whatever. Shouldn't they disqualify this since it was written by Brits, has a British subject, and British actors? George Bernard Shaw is that rare playwright who is great on the page but talky and long-winded on stage or screen. Skip this one.
A Place in the Sun (1951) Theodore Dreiser was one of the clumsiest writers to ever hold a pen, and when he starts expounding on turn-of-the-century ideas about chemicals and glands, he's laughably dated. I guess it’s good that this film is better than spending 800 pages with him, but unless you’re trying to get out of a school assignment, you can skip this one.
The Apartment (1960) A philandering executive bribes an employee with a promotion so he can use his apartment to sexually harass a member of the Psychic Friends Network. Skip this one.
Goodfellas (1990) Martin Scorsese tries to whitewash the fact that Henry Hill was a total fucking moron who hung around with women who were even dumber than he was. And he was a snitch, too. Skip this one.
Pulp Fiction (1994) About ten years ago I was at a casino with a friend of mine who lost his wallet. When he had to tell the kindly old woman at customer service that it said “Bad Ass Motherfucker” on it, well, let’s just say he was no Samuel L. Jackson. Having a slightly out of order plot is not impressive. And, as with “Duck Soup”, zingers aren’t a substitute for dialogue. Skip this one.
The Searchers (1956) John Wayne in full-blown asshole mode, to the point that he wants to murder the girl they’ve spent years looking for. Skip this one.
Bringing Up Baby (1938) For some reason critics love to fellate 30’s screwball comedies (if you're not familiar with that term, it means a movie in which the hero and heroine start off hating each other and wind up falling in love), but don’t take their modern equivalents seriously. If they were going to include this on the 1998 list then they should have added “American Pie” when they updated it ten years later. Skip this one.
Unforgiven (1992) Another western featuring an asshole extraordinaire, but at least the John Wayne movies on this list didn’t subject the audience to the star’s right-wing political views. Skip this one.
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) If the “Oscars So White” people wanted to pick a more worthy target, this list would be as good of one as any. The exclusion of blacks somewhat understandable since they weren’t really able to make films until the 70s, but making this piece of dated claptrap their sole representative (and No. 99, at that) is simply inexcusable. No Spike Lee Joints? No Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song? Skip this one.
Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) If you feel the need to see a James Cagney movie, at least make it a James Cagney gangster movie. Skip this one.

21

Context

ulyssessword 11mo ago

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confuciuscorndog 11mo ago · Edited 11mo ago

I would like to absolutely echo and affirm in the strongest terms the "I don't give one flying fuck that these people are now getting served their own dog food." camp.

These people gaslit, threatened, and manipulated the entire country's (corporate and otherwise) power structure and much of its (stupid) citizenry into processing anodyne statements like "All lives matter." and "It's okay to be White." as "hate speech" and have gotten plenty of average people fired for uttering them over the past years (even and especially when they didn't really understand the broader implications of them, as the cruelty was the point), and we're supposed to shed tears over them experiencing the same thing for wishing death on the people's choice (per polls) to be the next actually democratically-elected leader of the country (something that is actually objectively "hate speech", that is, speech driven by and clearly, unambiguously expressing hateful desires towards somebody else)? They even got people fired just for using the "OK" hand sign, again even and especially random people who were obviously not even close to hardcore online right-wingers but clearly just clueless grillpillers who probably couldn't tell you the latest online memes from five years ago (also again because the cruelty was the point).

And that's even only the surface level of the most obviously unfairly prosecuted "offenses" by even a totally politically neutral standard. Say kids shouldn't be "temporarily" chemically castrated? Say your entire culture, heritage, and often direct living environment shouldn't be razed to the ground by millions of imported third-worlders to capture the electoral system and give rich Jews cheap labor? Say the entire world shouldn't have paused in breathless, hysterical mourning over a felonious drug addict and porn star who threatened pregnant women without a care causing himself an overdose in the presence of a cop? Say that thousands of mostly blacks burning, looting, and murdering isn't actually "mostly peaceful" and that it's hypocritical in any case when everyone else is being advised to stringently avoid so much as going to church or getting a haircut because of a slightly worse version of the cold running around (but don't you dare call it a Chinese cold, even though it came from China)? These people who pointed out the Emperor's nudity directly got it way worse, social execution being generally the lightest penalty at best.

So my village gets constantly raided by violent, sociopathic marauders for basically at least a decade, and now I'm supposed to cry for them because a few of my neighbors finally put some arrows inside of some of them instead? Fuck that. "Oh, but she's not really some high-level marauder or anything! In fact, she has no real control over them or anything much at all. She just supported them and cheered them on as they slaughtered your people! Show her mercy!" I don't give a shit. We didn't start this war (Remember how desperately right-wingers and wokeism critics pleaded during for example the early part of Gamergate to keep matters like hiring and firing apolitical?), but given that it was forcibly brought to our doorstep, I see not one good damn reason why we shouldn't fight it just as vigorously as them.

"But how do you know she supported any of that cancellation stuff anyway?" I know there's a 95%+ chance she's a left-winger if she was cheering for Trump's death. (Even most of the "Zion Don" type right-wingers that I've seen who have criticized him heavily in the past for not being hardcore enough (like me) have had to admit that he handled being shot like a true G and express some hope that literally almost getting assassinated in cold blood by his opponents makes him clean up his act a bit and actually try to do a bit more of... well, anything during his second term.) And if she's a left-winger, then there's a 95%+ chance that the notion of "cancel culture" or people being fired/punished for their political views/statements has been a not infrequent target of her sneering mockery since at least the Trump era. "Oh noes, poor widdle wight-wing baby went /r/byebyejob for literally calling for the genocide of trans children [Translation: Again, not supporting their chemical castration]! So sad! :(" We've all read thousands of these types of posts online (which doesn't even account for the assuredly much greater utterances of similar sentiments out loud/in person), plenty of them almost certainly made by bitter probably sexless fat old almost-certainly-feminist-aligned/identified crones just like her. Welp, not so funny now, is it bitch?

(Note: Humorously enough, searching /r/byebyejob on Reddit for "Home Depot" only gets you "Motel 6 and Home Depot drop ad agency after its founder calls ad ‘too Black’", nothing about this cashier. How furiously do you wanna bet the basement jannies there deleted those posts and banned their posters? "It's not /r/byebyejob when it happens to us! Then it's fascism!" Womp womp.)

So this lady losing her job, if she goes into despair, if she becomes homeless, if she kills herself... So what? Thousands of "average" lefties like her every day upvote content on sites like Reddit wishing for the same exact things and worse to happen to people like me. So no, her fate is not my problem. In fact, I actively wish whatever the worst fate was that any average right-wing person has ever suffered over being economically/socially/etc. attacked/"canceled" for their views on her and every other person like her. Karma's a bitch too, but for at least this one brief shining moment in time, she's our bitch now. And she's a bad bitch. So therefore I will do exactly what left-wingers have proclaimed to do for years with the resultant tears: collect them in a novelty slogan mug and drink them while telling their producers to cry harder. Boo hoo. :(

And while any of you can wring your hands in response to this over how "uncivil", "antagonistic", "uncharitable", or whatever alleged bullshit I'm being (and maybe I am to some degree, not that I care one bit, because again the targets richly deserve it), what you can't do if you're being honest is pretend that I'm not simply mirroring the exact same energy that's been projected about this issue from the left for again basically at least a decade now. (But no, that doesn't mean I'm going to fall for any "Well then aren't you just like them!? Horseshoe theory!" concern trolling either. In war (keeping in mind we're posting in the Culture War Roundup thread), bullets flying towards my side are bad, but the same bullets flying towards my opponents are good. That's how it's always worked. That doesn't mean that everybody who has ever used a bullet is the same.)

So /r/byebyejob! Hope it was worth it sweetie. :)

PS: Here's Sam Hyde making a similar argument in response to John Carmack complaining about the same thing if you prefer to hear it from an e-celeb. And he's right too.

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sliders1234 11mo ago

“ I adopt a posture that is skeptical of passion in politics, or people who are deeply invested in an organised political vision.”

This just feels like how I described centrism. Apolitical. Lack of vision. Just taking center of Overton window.

I know Trump is described as a radical rightist. His political views though are largely to the left of Bill Clinton. He favors less mass incarceration. He’s pro-choice (though aligned with Pro-Life judges), he’s pro gay marriage. He’s largely anti-market - trade protectionism. The current right largely backs ‘90s style race relations.

Politics is a real thing. It effects people’s lives. It’s very important to national and personal success. I just played basketball with a few Venezuelans. It matters. They are living in a foreign land because politics were bad at home.

The thing about centrists is they actually encourage Overton window pushing. If 60% of voters are just going to vote for the middle of the Overton window then the correct strategy is to push the Overton window wide. And then the median view comes closer to where you want it.

Take abortion as an issue. Right now the Overton window has one it’s right ban abortion. On its left abortion till 9 months. The centrist position is basically 16 weeks and then banned. If my goal is to ban abortion I need to get discussing the negatives of birth control into the public conscience as a respectable position. Then the centrist position becomes ban abortion.

The left did this with gay marriage. They made pronouns and gender surgery for kids into the Overton window. Now nobody questions gay marriage when in 2005 it was not passable as legislation.

If you had a hard view of abortion after 16 months is bad then if my side pushed to ban birth control then the right would lose elections. Instead centrism makes polarization beneficial because moving the Overton window moves the centrist position.

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gattsuru 11mo ago · Edited 11mo ago

I do have a lot of sympathy!

Jokes and 'jokes' about violence aimed at specific politicians have always been sporadically enforced, and as much as it's unfair that there's been less notice aimed at the left for the last few decades, it means quite a lot of people genuinely don't have fair notice when the closest thing to ramifications was Kathy Griffin (and even she didn't get booted from Twitter) for almost two decades. Some people do genuinely just have a morbid sense of humor, not just when people they don't like are involved. And it's not unusual for a lot of the enforcement to really be 'about' some more tedious local drama leading whoever starts the cancel campaigns to bubble things up, or because some especially-neurotic town asshole decided to Make An Example of someone.

I just don't have arguments, or at least any not-laughable ones. I've been trying to write up some of the recent libertarian Barnett-Sandefur discourse on related topics, and it's just empty.

That conservative formal opposition to social media censorship might result in even-handed de-escalation is kaput, an ex-argument, no more, ceased to be. I point to VioletBlue because she was one of the first examples I've offered in MotteSpace, literally no one but the strict free speech advocates noticed, and literally a week after her cancellation she using it as justification for broad censorship.. But it's not like that's nutpicking: Ozy's literal example of the Good Feminist argued that all that open-minded tolerance from Excluded only applied to "perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups", ie her side (and Ozy's significant other joined with the NYTimes cancel campaign against Scott). MorlockP's tolerance for sex worker twitter might have been crude, but it says something that it also came after said sex worker twitter wanted him banned from the platform and kept wanting it afterward. I have a hard time coming up with any examples of progressive targets of cancel culture who, after getting any support from conservatives, haven't turned around and bit back.
That conservative uses of cancel culture will give ideas to progressive ones is runs face-first into the extent that there are almost-exactly overlapping examples, often longstanding ones. I bring up Corcoran above because it's an almost exact copy of this and, even if Correia doesn't mention him, he absolutely remembers him, and it's the room temperature. People have been thrown off projects they've run for over a decade for liking a tweet critical of a trans school shooter with the threat that if they did not leave other people on the project would have to pick between continued collaboration and their jobs. There's a guy who got fired for legal donations to a someone who was later found innocent and were only revealed because of hackers. A kid got his college invitation rescinded because he said bad words in Google Docs. Teacher's unions called in the FBI over people being a little rude at school board meetings; Canada declared not!martial law over truck horns. There's nothing new happening in any of the conservative-lead campaigns, and I'm pretty skeptical that people like LoTT could even come up with something inventive.
That conservative uses of cancel culture will provide additional justification for progressive ones doesn't have any traction, either. Here, in this thread, we have people pointing to social conservative bans on homosexuality that are reaching back decades; in the past, we've had people explicitly drop back to 1950. And those aren't philosophies specific to here and now. Even if stopping today would reset the shot clock (not a given!), it would literally exceed my lifespan before we'd clear those existing time spans -- and as I've highlighted that conversation with SlightlyLessHairyApe, it's not like people have to or have stopped at 1950.
((The other common example is McCarthyism, and it kinda merges all of the above problems. In addition to its age, anti-McCarthyism was and is explicitly sold and taught as a universal principle about the importance of free speech from both government and corporate interference, vital to protect everyone, until it turned out to protect anyone outside of the Left, and then became Freeze Peach..))
Does it hit the innocent or those on my side? Ignoring for now the difficult question of whether I have a side, there's no evidence here that anyone who's been hit is. Working at Home Depot doesn't make or require you be a Trump fan, conservative, or even Red Tribe, and this particular person was sickened by Trump's first month in 2017 in the local Press-Republican (no link, because it does actually spell out her name rather than mumble it, and I don't like this); while we don't have as strong evidence for Gass's political leanings as Jack Blacks, he's been calling a Trump victory dangerous since 2016.
Should we only hit cancel culture advocates or participants? It'd be nice to have a good clean fight, but it's increasingly unclear such divisions exist. Forget indirect stuff like the extent it's gotten baked into HR at work; participating in progressive cancel culture is exceptionally common and these people are all pretty heavily online. I can't show that all those that LoTT is targeting today participated in 2020 cancellation efforts (and I know she doesn't care!), but I was able to find a couple with just a few minutes search.

What's left?

Principles? Clearly these aren't shared values to the left, but worse than that it's far from clear they're even held by any opponent of cancel culture. Even among self-identified Big-L Libertarians, there's no shortage of big-name people who flirt back and forth from XKCD 1357. It's not that SlightlyLessHairyApe was coming up with increasingly threadbare excuses for why This Didn't Count; it's that the people who write entire legal treatises about the First Amendment and cancel culture struggle to handle whether turning the shop radio to the wrong should be a (required-to-be) fireable offense.
Appeal to the center? @TracingWoodgrains might believe that the "the center... has been the only group consistently mobilizing against the phenomenon writ large", but a sizable part of my frustration is that, having spent well over a decade, I'm pretty far from convinced. For all the center might be shocked by the excesses of aggressive cancel culture, the resulting policies demonstrably changed minds far in excess of any backlash. In no small number of cases, the center absolutely loves it. We both, specifically, are beneficiaries of the illiberal stridency and cancel culture against homophobia, and today that means gay marriage is a 80%+ thing! Nobody cares about the 'f-word' getting people fired. And as much as I'm personally a fan of "don't beat up gay people" even if I'm far more mixed on jokes about gay people, "don't try to assassinate politicians" is pretty good as a goal if I'm far more mixed on joking about it.
Hegemonic Swarms and the involved drama are Bad? That's a great argument for not doing it in Matt Parlmer's shop, and I've been lucky enough to find some places that try something at least along the same lines, but they're far outliers. Everywhere else has been quite happy to not merely tolerate but invite Progressive Hegemonic Swarms; whether the right does it or not has no impact on whether it shows up there.

I'd love to see reasons why. I've been looking! I'm not willing to join in, both for my principles and for the what did you think tolerance meant vibes posters reasons. But the best arguments I can find for anyone else to behave differently don't look very good.

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cjet79 11mo ago

I suppose when it comes down to it I just want a maximum punishment for the spoken word. And cancellations often go way beyond my nebulous line for what a maximum punishment should be. People should suffer social embarrassment for a day, maybe a week for really bad things. And then it should be let go. The written word can maybe receive twice as harsh of punishments. If they are some form of sociopath that isn't really punished by social embarrassment then we can work something else out as a punishment that is about equally as harsh.

Humans aren't perfect, and sometimes they slip up and say dumb things without realizing they have crossed a line. I don't know if you think you've lived a perfect life and never said anything wrong before, but I know I've certainly said things I shouldn't have. I would like to not lose my livelihood over saying those things. I specifically remember one of the earliest instances of me saying a wrong thing, I was bullied by a kid in Elementary school, in middle school that kid committed suicide, in Highschool I made an edgy joke to a friend about being glad he wasn't around to torment me anymore, the friend winced and didn't laugh. I felt mild social embarrassment, and learned not to joke about that. That is an easy one to describe that I feel safe sharing because I can say I was an idiot in highschool, but I've made dumber and worse speech decisions in my adult life that I'd absolutely not feel safe sharing.

Humans also sometimes hold views that are not socially acceptable or within the Overton window. We are specifically on a forum that has been chased out of a larger social media site, because we want to allow people to say things outside of the Overton window. I am very uncomfortable with social rules that make it impossible to state anything outside of the Overton window. My own Dad often says things that are not acceptable on wider social media. He has been temp-banned on Facebook a few times for things he has said. He isn't really willing to not say some of his thoughts. Banning him from social media doesn't really remove him as a person, he is still out there thinking those forbidden thoughts. "Jokes" are one way to tease out the limits of the Overton window. The attempt to use humor, even if the attempt fails, shows that the person in question cares about social conventions. This is a sign that you don't need to punish them as harshly.

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sliders1234 11mo ago

In general I don’t think the Geneva Convention ever bans things that win wars. An example would be chemical weapons. They don’t win wars but kill a lot of civilians therefore they are banned. Cluster munitions US did not sign up for banning. We find that useful.

AI would be a war winning tech. He who wins the wars makes the rules. AI won’t be banned.

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dovetailing 11mo ago

I have not read most of the books on that list, but from the ones I have it does not bode well. The Great Gatsby is fine, but massively overrated. The same goes for Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Others are mediocre at best with a lot of flaws (Lord of the Flies) or simply execrable (On The Road, a book whose only redeeming quality is that it did an excellent job of making me detest the narrator). And the authors of the list seem to take pleasure in selecting books which had, at one point or another, been banned for obscenity, which certainly sheds some light on their criteria for greatness.

On the other hand, the books they chose not to include are also telling. How can you make a list of the best 100 twentieth-century novels and not include The Lord of the Rings (a contender for #1, and it's not in their list of 100!)? They also seem to think that anything that could be construed as "children's literature" is beneath them, though for my money this includes some of the best literature. Notably omitted is Anne of Green Gables as well as, as far as I can tell, every single Newbery winner (I'd single out A Wrinkle in Time, as well as it's more-mature sequel A Swiftly Tilting Planet (not a Newbery winner), as being particularly good).

All of which is to say, this list surely embodies somebody's idea of a good book, but it's somebody to whose recommendations I'd give negative weight.

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gattsuru 11mo ago

The book tries to draw up something more complex -- his grandmother being his primary caregiver and if she had been a hellion in her youth she'd at least tempered with age; his biological father got enough religion to take enough responsibility to provide some anchoring force not long after; having moved or been moved from some of the more hillbilly areas -- but I think for the most part he didn't get out clean, so much as the space between clean and dirty is a gradient with a steep slope :

I didn’t know it, but I was close to the precipice. I had nearly failed out of my freshmen year of high school, earning a 2.1 GPA. I didn’t do my homework, I didn’t study, and my attendance was abysmal. Some days I’d fake an illness, and others I’d just refuse to go. When I did go, I did so only to avoid a repeat of the letters the school had sent home a few years earlier—the ones that said if I didn’t go to school, the administration would be forced to refer my case to county social services.

Along with my abysmal school record came drug experimentation — nothing hard, just what alcohol I could get my hands on and a stash of weed that Ken’s son and I found. Final proof, I suppose, that I did know the difference between a tomato plant and marijuana.

((This is also part of why I'd caution against operating solely from reviews. One person's take on a story won't be the same as the story. For another example, "Bob" in Vance's example ends up having a different set of problems than listed in the review, likely as a result of going offhand: he misses fewer days a week on average but spends much longer in restroom breaks, and dormin1111's "nearly physically assaulting the boss" is just "he lashed out" verbally in the original. Maybe they mean the same things, but they're not the same statements.))

There's a view where these aren't the Real Sins.

Vance had to lie to keep his biological mother out of jail (allegedly threatening him with vehicular murder-suicide at 12), but he always had a different house to fall back to. He had a crappy GPA, but never flunked out of a grade. He had to forge a parent's signature to keep from being found truant in a legally-fraught way, but he was never kicked out of a school. He fought, viciously, with not!family who didn't buy into the borderer culture and could have gotten arrested over, but he never was so violent that someone tried to have him charged over it. He drank and smoke pot, but he didn't get addicted to narcotics. His mother saw him as useful for little more than piss (literally, to pass a drug test), but his grandmother pressed him to keep a passing grade.

The view Vance is pushing -- whether or not he believes it -- is that there's a very narrow step from one side of that gradient to the other, and that while he never recognized the slope in his youth, he sees it now. It's pretty explicit:

Thinking about it now, about how close I was to the abyss, gives me chills. I am one lucky son of a bitch.

((Though I think to an extent, Vance did benefit by having distractions. Hillbilly Eligy only mentions the TI 89 calculator and trading cards and television, but the man entered high school in 1998, and turned 18 several months after 9/11. It's quite possible that his version of 'acting out' was watching banned television shows, plinking with a BB gun, or passing around bootleg cassettes and nudie mags and beer and pot, because he had too many better things to do with his time: much of his worst behaviors were opportunistic. Similarly, modern-day borderers can kill someone three-dozen times for making fun of their mom, and then do it all again with laser swords-only: if it's in Halo the cops don't care. But sometimes that just puts off some of the issues.))

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FCfromSSC Nuclear levels of sour 11mo ago

My post about my family's immigration situation didn't go down well. In retrospect, that makes sense given how scatterbrained it was. But one of the responses got me thinking about national identity in a way I never had before. In turn, it got me reading a lot of posts on this website and I came across a back and forth about white nationalism, which then led to the cited

No. You've been doing this schtick for years. Roll an alt, adopt a naïve persona, oh hey, check out all these white nationalist articles I've just happened to stumble across in a crazy random happenstance!

No one is fooled, you are immediately and obviously recognizable the instant the link spam starts.

Banned for egregious obnoxiousness.

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Amadan Enjoying my short-lived victory 11mo ago

Crappy, low effort comments dripping with sarcasm and failing to speak plainly are not welcome here.

You were warned the last time you went on a shitty low effort posting spree to stop doing this.

Banned for 5 days.

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atokenliberal6D_4 Defender of Western Culture 11mo ago

And yet I'm posting this from a country where the literal first founding words are "All men are created equal" and whose founders hated hereditary privileges so much that titles of nobility are constitutionally banned.

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magic9mushroom If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me 11mo ago

I've seen at least one forum get eaten by a Discord channel, and have suspicions it may have happened to a couple more. As someone who has a "no accounts on large platforms" rule (and would likely get banned from Discord for heresy anyway), it's really fucking annoying.

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The_Nybbler In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball. 11mo ago

Yes, that’s how every social group works, and there are consequences for every “not.”

The consequences for not engaging in a "maoist style self-criticism session" here are certainly less bad than the consequences of engaging in one, and that's likely true in any situation where there aren't real-world consequences for refusal. You're getting needled by people you don't respect anyway, but no self-criticism session would solve that.

As for me being some sort of mirror-image Darwin, no. There's obviously some similarity in style; we're both short-form posters. But it ends there. Since I think Darwin's currently not here to defend himself (and his main account is banned, I think), I won't go further.

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