banned
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
3mo ago
If Kolomoyskyi has an outsized influence in Ukraine, why did this happen?
In 2020, he was indicted in the United States on charges related to large-scale bank fraud. In 2021, the U.S. banned Kolomoyskyi and his family from entering the country, accusing him of corruption and being a threat to the Ukrainian public's faith in democratic institutions. Zelenskyy reportedly stripped Kolomoyskyi of his Ukrainian citizenship in 2022. Later that same year, those of Kolomoyskyi's assets deemed to be of strategic value to the state in light of the Russian invasion were nationalised. These included Ukraine's largest gasoline companies. In 2023, Kolomoyskyi was arrested by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) on charges of money laundering and fraud, and placed under pre-trial arrest.
This is literally the third paragraph of the Wikipedia Kolomoyskyi page where your other quotes are from - don't you think it's more than a bit mendacious to not include this detail when discussing Kolomoyskyi's supposed influence?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
This breaks several rules, but mostly it's just a low effort snarl without evidence. You have a long string of these and have been skirting a permaban for a while now.
This comment itself is just middling bad and devoid of value, but your history recommends a timeout of anywhere from 3 days to forever. Your last few bans were 1-2 weeks, and you have multiple comments in the log saying "Permaban next time." The fact that we haven't done this yet is because we don't actually like to permaban people, especially when it's someone like you who, when exercising a modicum of self control, is capable of being a decent poster. On the other hand, we can only say "Knock this off or you're going to get permabanned" so many times before it becomes an empty threat.
I'm going to make this one 1 week. If I were in a less forgiving mood, it would have been 2 weeks, and if I had decided to make it permanent, no one would blink. So if you come back to spew more, you'd better be on point and make it worth it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
Why do you think I would ban you? If you want to vaguely hint that we've banned a topic, I want to know what you think we've banned, and whether I agree with you or not, I'm not going to ban you for answering the question.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
Can you tell me what views you think have been banned?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
Trump is a traitor to the USA, and we need to start seriously discussing imprisonment or a bullet to the brain. I'm serious.
No, we really don't.
If there is one view we are going to ban here, it's "serious" discussions of assassinations.
Despite your username, you've managed to hang around for years without being banned, but I'm giving you a week off, and if you ever fedpost like this again, I will just go straight to permaban.
DecaDeciHuman
3mo ago
Attempting to ban a view preferentially results in banning actual discussion of that view.
If a view is common you'll still get one-offs of people who either do not realize the view is banned, or don't care, and who drop an unbacked opinion.
This has the obvious feedback effect.
distic
3mo ago
The US and Europe banned Huawei because it was used to spy on them by China. Europe uses a lot of american technology like facebook, and it is also used to spy on us, but you can notice it was never banned. Do you think this will last for long without NATO?
Maybe you think that the US technology is just better and we can't just avoid using it, but then you have to learn that FAIR is in Paris, that's where LLaMa models are trained. Europe might not be as useless to you as you think.
phailyoor
3mo ago
this kind of incident is very bad for right-wing parties in Europe
Why should Americans care what happens to right wing parties in Europe. They aren't even allowed to win. Even if they got the votes, they would just be retroactively banned as nazis and thrown in prison, assuming they're even allowed to get on the ballot in the first place. They'd probably be banned and suppressed well before then if their poll numbers got remotely close to winning.
And don't call uniparty parties like the Tories "right-wing." Name a single right-wing thing the Tories have ever done.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3mo ago
In response to your edit, you weren’t banned for claiming there’s no difference. You were banned for railing about degeneracy.
Probably the single most common complaint about our moderation comes from people thinking “surely those rules about civility and tact don’t apply here, for my outgroup!”
whenhaveiever
3mo ago
Our rules-obsessed culture seems to have little space between "totally banned" and "fully commercialized and celebrated". But there are lots of things that belong in a third category: "grudgingly tolerated".
There's another "third" category: fully commercialized but not celebrated. Nobody cares what kind of shampoo I use or what snacks I eat at home, and I can buy what I want when I want, for the most part. I'm also not pushing my choices in your face.
I don't know how much weed culture is inherent to the product vs cultivated through the isolation of decades of being illegal. If we have decades of it being legal, will weed culture disappear? If you live in a small apartment, smoking weed in your home is necessarily making everyone else in your building smell it, unlike most of my shampoo and snacks, so maybe there is always stigma that then attracts "the worst people" who don't mind the stigma.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3mo ago
It's not "grudgingly tolerated" if it's illegal; it's banned. If you have to commit some sort of fraud to do it, it's banned. If you have to rely on the cops not busting you because they don't feel like it, it's banned.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
3mo ago
My man, you've convinced me to switch to the default Motte theme in my profile so I can both flashbang my eyes and also see what kind of record of past rule-breaking you've been up to.
My eyes are burnt, and so is your standing with us mods. I see a long list of past warnings and temp bans, and not a single good thing to counteract that. You've been warned for low effort commentary as well as booing the outgroup more times than I want to count.
Banned for a month, and I leave it open to the others if they want to extend this.
jeroboam
3mo ago
@Lomez had a good take on this, saying "Legal gray areas are good, actually".
Our rules-obsessed culture seems to have little space between "totally banned" and "fully commercialized and celebrated". But there are lots of things that belong in a third category: "grudgingly tolerated".
Vices belong in that third category.
Marijuana legalization has been a disaster. We have ugly dispensaries and billboards everywhere and consumption of marijuana has skyrocketed. I don't even think it's reduced violent crime. Near me, in Seattle, the areas around dispensaries attract the worst people and there have been murders nearby.
We were better off when you had to get some bullshit certificate from a fake doctor and then grow your own weed. Or just get it illegally with the understanding that the cops probably wouldn't bust you unless you were doing something else annoying.
Yeah, it seems like a shallow argument. I stand by the comment I left below it -
I think your argument about vaccines disregards the way in which the culture war eats everything. Being pro/anti-vaccines is not necessarily about vaccines - if the pro-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the Red Tribe being demoralised and feeling that it is not worth fighting for anything because they will expend effort and lose anyway, and if the anti-vaccine position wins, that's a step towards the mirrored situation.
The common commentary all the way back in 2016 that said Trump's election will "embolden racists" had figured out this dynamic on an intuitive level. If you believe that we are tumbling towards an equilibrium where there is no fine-grained object-level policy debate but only an "emboldened" side that gets everything and a "demoralised" side that submits and saves whatever remaining energy it has to plot an overthrow, then anything that "emboldens" the side whose dictate is a bit more in your interest is itself in your interest, to a first approximation.
Generally, I am saddened by the way in which Scott's blogging has degraded since the move to Substack. A big part of his appeal used to be that he was a fairly thorough or at least balanced thinker, and generally anticipated and addressed the best counterarguments to his theses even when the counterarguments were banned from polite discourse (the "$minority is getting worse SAT scores... why could this be? By elimination it must be racism! Or does anyone want to come forward with other ideas? ;)" pattern). He seems to have largely given this up in favour of the standard American pundit playbook where you produce a steady stream of slick essays arguing for one or another aspect of your agenda by setting up show matches against strawmen of competing proposals, seemingly optimised for a usage pattern like "RT: Here's the always brilliant @ScottAlexander thoroughly debunking #ConflictTheory. Can we finally move on yet".
ulyssessword
3mo ago
We have gotten to an odd place where people can nonchalantly talk about fighting police weekly and utilizing millions of dollars of public resources as "rights".
Get on our level. British Columbia got into a bit of a kerfuffle when it tried to ban people from injecting drugs in playgrounds. Apparently it would cause "irreparable harm" if they had to shoot up elsewhere, so the BC Supreme Court filed an injunction against that amendment.
(They eventually got it banned, eight months after their first attempt. Having Health Canada do it instead of the BC government was the secret sauce to make it stick, because it matters which government is violating the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, or something.)
Throwaway05
3mo ago
1
So you probably didn't see all the people who died, maybe because they weren't in your social group, maybe you lived away from inner city squalor for instance. It was bad, it really was.
2
COVID vaccine into culture war. I don't know a single republican, anti-woke, fuck the establishment doctor who has anything negative to say about non-COVID vaccines at all. These people do exist and one of the biggest eventually recanted but nobody takes them seriously.
It's like trying to get Toyota's banned because a BMW ran over your dog. Nothing about them is similar.
3
Medical research certainly has its problems but their is an immense world of difference in consideration between things like "get your fucking MMR shot" "here's a complicated discussion about the value of the Rotavirus vaccine" and "here's a retrospective study of complication rates using an N of 600,000.
As a sidebar their weren't a lot of lies during the pandemic, their was a lot of bad messaging. Things like "the fatality rate will go down overtime as the virus burns through the available tinder and mutates to be less deadly" were stated loudly and often but people didn't listen.
Stuff like the initial mask messaging was a lie and I was annoyed by it but it was well meaning.
Unforced errors sure but most of it wasn't lies and a lot of things are still true (yes it is dangerous), were found to be true (no Ivermectin didn't actually work the research that said it did had big flaws), or involve ongoing complicated debates (lab leak).
WhiningCoil
3mo ago
So, I had a fun time reading Gibbon a while back. I don't feel like combing back over them to dig out the specific emperors, dates, etc. But the narrative he paints of the crisis of the Roman Empire in the 3rd century is basically the praetorian guard run amok. Every emperor was basically appointed if not directly by them, but by their assent to his rule. They expected generous bribes that increasingly bankrupted the empire, and at a certain point Senators were begging not to be made emperor because they couldn't afford it, and the praetorian kept murdering emperors that displeased them. Eventually Diocletian comes into power and "solves" the problem by subdividing the administration of the empire into such a labyrinthine bureaucracy that it's profoundly rare that anyone has enough consolidated power to rebel or murder an emperor.
Along the way, emperor's tried to "fire" the praetorians, or get the rogue and rebellious legions to come to heel. It generally ended in murder, a new emperor and a new round of "donations" to the legions. They could not be shamed out of enriching themselves. Pompey's cold logic from another age to "stop quoting laws to men with swords" always won out.
I think about this a lot with the current Trump administration. I think about it with all the profoundly powerful intelligence chiefs he's revoked the clearances of and banned from federal buildings. I think about it with the appointments he's sent in to reform the FBI, already breaking up the DC office and transferring thousands of FBI agents all across the country. I think about it with Trump firing so many top generals. There are a lot of powerful interest right now having the law quoted to them, and many of them have guns.
I don't know exactly where we are so far as the breakdown of our society. The call going out is that what Trump is doing shouldn't be allowed, is a "fascist coup", and stopping these powerful interest from being dispossessed from the levers of power is "saving our republic". I'm sure the men with guns having the law quoted at them might feel rather emboldened that even if the law isn't on their side, they'll still be on "the right side of history".
The last thing I think about a lot is how violent successions are in Roman history. Entire factions get crucified and their wives and daughters sold into slavery, all their property confiscated by the victor in the name of "the state". One way of reading about it is to be thankful we have peaceful transfers of power in our modern system. Another way is to wonder how much power ever really gets transferred if it's so peaceful. One rarely quotes law at men with swords and lives to tell the tale.
Anything works as long as the general public voted it in place. I don't particularly care about whether it would be managed at the state or federal level. They'd probably negotiate treaties and recognize equivalent tests if the need arose.
As for their content:
A combination of IQ test and general knowledge for core franchises.
If you want to just be eligible to vote? Name the 3 largest political parties and their public policies. Score above the threshold IQ where you'd have been deemed Special Needs or outright lacking capacity. In other words, don't be an imbecile.
You want to drive? Take the same driving test we do today.
Want to drink? Show you understand how many drinks it takes to take your BAC to the legal limit. Take a simulated driving test while drunk, so you get a visceral understanding of its effects.
Do strongly addictive drugs without a medical prescription? Display a clear understanding of the dangers involved, the signs of toxicity and overdose, the longterm side-effects. Clearly state you understand the risks, you're releasing the state of liability for any expenses you incurr that you can't personally cover, buy insurance, or optionally post a bond that will be returned if you don't fall afoul in a fixed period of time. Optionally a cool-down period of a month, so anyone not strongly motivated doesn't bother. Perhaps have seminars by ex-addicts warning of the dangers.
Want to sell that shit? Don't want to go through med school? All of the above, with the same level of detail and knowledge you'd see in a geeky member of /r/Psychonauts. A clear understanding of customer protection laws, truthful advertising, quality control. Liability if not strictly vetting that your customers are licensed to buy too. It would probably look like a version of a pharmacy exam but much harder.
Want to gamble? I'd prefer no licensing at all, but if necessary, demonstrate basic understanding of probability and that the House always wins in the end.
Are you saying that bureaucrats and/or elected politicians will be granted authority to prepare an exam that deems be sufficiently "rational"?
Yes, with strict checks and balances, and mandatory consultation with domain experts. If you trust the systems in place that license doctors, lawyers and accountants, envision more of the same, but open to anyone who can pass the tests.
Alternatively, for people who have passed the hardest core tests, extend them the ability to buy any service, from anyone regardless of qualifications. If you trust some rando on the internet to be your doctor, then you can take his medical advice while discharging him of the liability normally involved.
Edit:
The simplest solution I can endorse is Robin Hanson's idea of a Store That Sells Banned Things.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-debates-should-not-appear-one-sided#fn1x15
Robin Hanson proposed stores where banned products could be sold.1 There are a number of excellent arguments for such a policy—an inherent right of individual liberty, the career incentive of bureaucrats to prohibit everything, legislators being just as biased as individuals. But even so (I replied), some poor, honest, not overwhelmingly educated mother of five children is going to go into these stores and buy a “Dr. Snakeoil’s Sulfuric Acid Drink” for her arthritis and die, leaving her orphans to weep on national television.
I was just making a factual observation. Why did some people think it was an argument in favor of regulation?
Add in an exam to be able to access said store, and then I accept this factual consideration, and consider it to be positive on balance.
shamgar
3mo ago
This got me thinking a bit about surrogacy laws and how this plays out in the culture war. In my own country, the Netherlands, specifically commercial surrogacy is banned, but if you can find someone who wants to do it out of altruism, it is legal. This runs into some complications where people go to countries with laxer laws (usually poor third world countries) and get a commercial surrogate there. My impressions is that while this touches on a lot of culture war issues, it somehow is a rare issue that does not always follow established culture war lines. What I mean is that while conservatives are generally opposed to it, I have seen progressives both ardently in favour from a perspective of support for LGBT people but other leftists ardently opposed because they view it as something which in practice often amounts to rich white men exploiting poor brown women in third world countries. I suppose there is also probably a libertarian line where you don't care about it as long as everybody involved consents.
This leads to the strange result that when I look at a map on wikipedia concerning surrogacy laws, it appears at least commercial surrogacy is banned throughout most of the world, but it is legal in for instance California, Vermont, Texas, Florida and Russia. California and Vermont being on the same side as Texas, Florida and Russia on a controversial medical-ethical practice which touches on LGBT culture war stuff, with places e.g. Norway, Germany, Michigan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on the other extreme, is pretty remarkable to me.
I'm afraid I won't be able to provide your steelman for you though, because as far as I'm concerned, at least if Sam Altman and his husband paid for the surrogacy they ought to be jailed for human trafficking.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
Can you show me evidence that previous Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal did those things
Wait, you were talking about what a given CEO did on the platform, rather than it's hat was happening under their reign? Why?
And what do you mean, exactly, by "progressives got so used to total control of speech"?
That speech that would go against their preferred narrative would be reliably removed or throttled.
Who are the progressives
What are you asking here? The ideological of what qualifies and disqualifies one as progressive?
what are the parameters of total control
Mostly what I stated previously - that stating an alternative viewpoint would get one reliably banned, their content taken down, and/or their reach throttled
and by speech are you including verbal?
Until Spaces, Twitter wasn't much of a verbal communications platform, so no.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4mo ago
Everyday I choose not be a resentful person.
My list of contrarian non-emotional twitter anons have scissored. Elon and AGI being the core drivers ofc. Now, they're split between despairing, spewing vitriol or expressing wierdo-optimism towards an AGI world. For the first time since 2016, my social media diet is reinforcing negative emotions rather than becoming a source of information & relaxation. Over Jan & Feb, I've turned resentful, yoyoing between anger and despair.
Thankfully, I have caught myself early. But damn, it takes so much effort to be a positive & well-adjusted individual when your entire echo-chamber is in the midst of mania. I must keep myself off twitter. Hopefully in a year or so, it'll be normal again. Until that point, I must abandon twitter like I abandoned reddit during 2016's Trump hysteria. Thankfully, I have enough going on in life to keep me busy.
This can be a manifesto of sorts. No dead kids or apocalyptic proclamations. Just a promise that, everyday, I'll wake up and choose optimism.
P.S: This is a butterfly effect from tiktok being banned. My instagram reels algorithm was tuned to perfection. Only the funniest low-iq brain-rot. Perfect relaxation. Once a tiktok ban was threatened, reels received all the tiktok kids. Pair that with christmas & mariah carey generally ruining all insta reels, and my reels never recovered. I started using more of Twitter as a result, and it's all south from there.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
4mo ago
I’ve always understood that the bad thing the Nazis did was load 6 million people or so onto train cars and drive them to industrialized killing factories. The bad part was hunting down people they didn’t like and killing them. It was all the torture and death and so forth.
The narrative in the US really focusses on that to the exclusion of everything else. I'd say the bad thing they did was to take a peaceful and democratic if troubled country, force a totalitarian (in the textbook sense of the state meddling in every aspect of life to align it to its purpose) reorganisation at breakneck speed, oppress and kill all internal opposition, promulgate an ideology that is fundamentally anti-humanist (in that it assigns most humans zero to negative value based on innate attributes), and finally start a massively destructive war of conquest and annihilation against almost all of its neighbours.
The comparison of anyone in Trump's orbit to that is of course massive, ridiculous exaggeration, but I don't think the assertion that Trump's second term has echoes of it is so far-fetched. The two main goals the administration is currently pursuing are firstly the "anti-woke" thrust, which they understand as a mandate for sweeping top-down action to purge parts of society of enemy elements that until then were more organically entrenched than directly installed from above, and secondly "America first", which surely is nothing other than a call to assign lower value to non-Americans than whatever value they are currently assigned.
From what I understand, Bannon is still bannished from the inner circles of the administration, and critical of it in a way that could be glossed as "Fifty Trumps". I think 50 Trumps, in the sense of cranking the above thrusts up fiftyfold, could in fact start looking somewhat like one Hitler.
campfire
4mo ago
Oh that's easy. 1) Discord mods are huge outliers in the population, they're disproportionately very progressive, chronically unemployed, and get off on petty displays of authoritarianism 2) Unlike the YouTubers who only made short statements, they had spent a full week dragging Greene's name through the mud and banning anyone who says "let's wait for his side of the story". Having to apologize after that and draw the ire of the people being unbanned is much more humiliating for them.
rokmonster
Lives under a rok.
4mo ago
So the Trump administration has made an effort to limit "indirect" research costs, those research funds which institutions charge on top of a research grant to pay for expenses which cannot be attributed to an individual research project, for items like building maintenance, grant writing staff, and administrative staff. The new policy, effective February 10, 2025, caps the indirect cost rate at 15% for all NIH grants, both new and existing. People in my social circle are watching the court battle over this with baited breath. One of their institutions charges 55%, and another one charges 70% (which appears to be the legal maximum). From this perspective, 15% seems very very low, but it appears the average is around 27%.
I recently talked to some of my Korean researcher friends, and in Korea indirect costs are capped at 17% (and come out of the allocated grant money, so they are considered during grant proposal submission). Of that 17%, the institution even sets a few percent aside to give "miscellaneous funds" to Professors. My friend (a former Resident) said that these miscellaneous funds (which are completely unregulated) were critical to keeping medical professors on the job after an anti-corruption law banned them from taking "gifts" from patients: they were frequently spent on personal items, team dinners, and alcohol. In my experience they were used to purchase high-end computers for data analysis. But the point is that 17% leaves the institution with a surplus.
I'm left wondering if indirect costs in the US (now two to four times higher than those of Korea) are a result of perverse incentives. The NIH negotiates these after grants have been granted. If the US had counted these expenses against the grant value prior to grants being granted (as Korea does), would professors have been incentivized to lobby their institutions against administrative bloat?
I tried to find how these costs have changed over time, and it looks like they have risen by a few percent in the past decade, but every grantmaking agency has different numbers and it is a mess, with more variance between agencies than change over time.
You should watch some of the videos I’ve seen of guys getting dragged away screaming to go die at the front, their mothers often wailing in the background. Changed my perspective
Elections in Ukraine are banned right now btw
Putin is obviously the chief villain here. But this halfway alliance is the worst of both worlds - no peace but no chance of victory. Let’s just declare war on Russia if you care that much (but they never actually do care that much, it’s just virtue signalling)
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