TracingWoodgrains
I'm not "perturbed" by anything: it's simply that your assertion that everyone on the Motte works in Silicon Valley is extremely obviously erroneous.
I don't know if we've ever done a user survey here, but Scott does one of his readers every year, and only 58% of his readers live in the US, and less than 50% work in computer science-related fields. If you assume that there's a lot of overlap between the kinds of people who read Scott and the kinds of people who post here, I'd hazard a guess that at most forty per cent of Motte users work in Silicon Valley - quite a long ways from "all" or "a very strong correlation". I wouldn't be remotely surprised if the real figure was as low as twenty per cent, or ten.
TracingWoodgrains did a user survey back in the Reddit days and only two-thirds of posters lived in the US (I don't know how much the demographics have changed since the migration from Reddit).
I will admit that there are few types of fallacious argument I find more obnoxious than sneering Bulverism, especially when it's based on an untrue assertion.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
16d ago
By this logic America is guilty of countless Holocausts and isn't in a position to lecture Hitler, a man who ultimately didn't even succeed in wiping out his targets.
Hey, how was the guest speaker from BLM last night at Oberlin?
So if some tiny isolated but culturally/ethnically distinct village catches smallpox before being wiped out in a raid by another tribe is that worse than the Holocaust?
Presumably there's some way to weight the degree of cultural importance and the size of the group against another group's size and cultural value? Idk. I'm not sure I entirely agree with it with regards to human nations as opposed to animal species so I might be losing my steelman abilities. On balance I would guess it would be more tragic to lose a big group with a large cultural footprint than a small group with a small cultural footprint; it's how you weight a small group with a large cultural footprint against a large group with a small cultural footprint. Would losing Mormons or Jews be more tragic, per TracingWoodgrains twitter?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
23d ago
This reply is very PUA or maybe more classically 'RedPill' adjacent. Which I found surprising considering the crowd one might expect to find following a pastor. But reading more of Pastor Fosters work, it looks to fit right in.
Devon Eriksen is an indie sci-fi author. He's a polyamorous libertarian with multiple wives. He's "redpill adjacent" in the same sense that folks like Eric S. Raymond are - anti-woke and evpsych aficionados (when it fits their priors) but not really part of the manosphere.
Ironically, Eriksen came to my attention through TracingWoodgrains, who positively reviewed his book. (I thought it was good enough that I'll read the sequel, though it's got some rough edges.) Eriksen also hides his power level a bit, probably because he wants to sell books.
This isn't the first time I've seen a somewhat improbable coalition of vaguely right-aligned people online, conservative Christians rubbing shoulders with libertarian atheist SF authors, united mostly by their hatred of woke. Often these affiliations fracture on their fault lines - KulakRevolt probably lost a fair bit of his audience once he started going hard on "Christianity is a pussy simp Jew religion," and the only time Eriksen gets pushback from his mostly rightie followers is when he reminds them he's a polyamorous atheist. (He probably gets a bit of a pass on the first because his situationship seems to be closer to "harem" than "polycule").
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Is community drama Friday Fun?
Rationalist-adjacent blogger Dinomight is accusing rationalist-adjacent Twitter poaster Cremieux of plaigerizing his post on aspertame into a popular Twitter thread. This has now escalated to wall-of-text denounciations, involving characters such as LessWrong admins and our old friend TracingWoodgrains.
greyenlightenment
investments: META/FBL, TSLA, TQQQ, TECL, MSFT ...
1mo ago
I'm glad someone finally posted it, but I would not say that it's flown under the radar. TracingWoodgrains also saw it yesterday pretty quickly.
It all over the news as well. This is the most scrutinized president in history, and there is so much attention on social media and elsewhere. Almost nothing goes unnoticed.
oats_son
1mo ago
I'm glad someone finally posted it, but I would not say that it's flown under the radar. TracingWoodgrains also saw it yesterday pretty quickly.
If disparate impact was a part of the Civil Rights act, and if it's been upheld by the Supreme Court previously (I thought it had), how can it be eliminated with an executive order? Is the hope that it gets adjudicated by the courts and eventually stricken down?
ZorbaTHut and TracingWoodgrains were(are?) both long time dramanauts and I am reasonably confident that there are at least two others. That's a minimum of two, possibly as many as four or more, out of a population of ten admins. Greater than 20% is a "significant percentage" if you ask me.
CCing @SteveAgain
My understanding is that the mod team has a lot of overlap with folks from rDrama. The Motte's underlying code is a fork of rDrama's.
Which "side" the mod team is on is whatever side that rDrama is on, which is less about left or right and more about a cultural aesthetic. Gay/Trans/Furry PC-Gamer Master-Race rise up. A metastasization of whatever was going on with Hot Topic in the late 00s.
A key feature of this culture is antipathy towards "normies" and anyone else who isn’t in on the joke. Both the extant left and right have factions within them that are at war with the "default" culturally christian, 2.5 kids and a dog view of middle America and it is with those factions that the culture of rDrama (and by extension theMotte) sides. The side that thinks that TracingWoodgrains trolling LibsOfTikTok was just chef's kiss is the side that the moderators of theMotte are on.
KennethAlmquist
1mo ago
The TracingWoodgrains essay offers PinkNews as an example of a news outlet given the status of a Reliable Source, suggesting it should not have been because:
-
It published a false story about Joanna Cherry, “retracting only after Cherry pursued legal options against them.” The wording suggests that Cherry asked them for a correction and they refused, but the supplied link doesn’t support that.
-
They attributed a quote to the wrong individual, and issued a correction when the error was pointed out to them.
-
A tweet promoting an article about Bill O’Reilly allegedly misrepresented the contents of the article. This doesn’t indicate there was anything wrong with the article itself.
-
“The site has a history of tabloid-esque sensationalism, clickbait, and photoshops about celebrities.” The supporting link says that one celebrity accused PinkNews of doing this. It doesn’t say whether the accusation is true.
Wikipedia editor Gerard said that PinkNews should be considered a reliable source because, “claims of journalistic malfeasance on their part didn't check out at all when we looked into them and discovered they'd actually handled them in an exemplary fashion.” As improbable as it may sound, if the worst that can be substantiated about PinkNews is that it got two stories wrong and issued corrections in both cases, it seems like it is indeed a reliable source.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
They decided on it because they noticed color-blind meritocracy wasn't getting the job done.
What job? To ensure that there are no racial or gender imbalances in the outcome?
This seems a silly ask.
Imbalances in outcomes can have two reasons:
(1) Cultural: this includes upbringing, parents financial situation, straightforward discrimination and so on. I think that I speak for the overwhelming majority (but feel free to correct me) when I say that these are bad, and that we should get rid of these barriers.
To a large extend, these barriers are bad because they lead to worse societal outcomes: if cultural factors such as plain old racism prevent Blacks from becoming doctors, then we end up with fewer or worse doctors than if it was otherwise.
(2) Inherent average ability (or -- in the case of genders -- interest): These differences exist, most obviously in gender and physical capability. They are the reason why most sport competitions are gender segregated. There are also physical capability differences between ethnicities, a few African peoples dominate long distance running, for example. The genetics of intelligence are complicated, and we get large variances, but there is a genetic component to intelligence. Should we just assume that while average height, skin color, long distance running aptitude, et cetera are all unevenly distributed over different ethnicities, intelligence is perfectly evenly distributed?
One has to be very careful attributing imbalances to (2), and has to notice the skulls of the people who came before. When the French Academy of Science did not admit women, they were certainly pleading something like (2), that women are intrinsically not suited to be scientists, not something like (1), that they were sexist pricks, while in retrospect it is clear that the latter was the case.
I am an utilitarian. In my utility function, women and men, Blacks and Caucasians, Danes and Madagascans all count the same. Being a doctor is good for the individual in question (student debts and insane work hours aside): it is a high status job which is paid fairly well. It is also good to society in proportion of how qualified the doctor is. The best solution overall is therefore for the people who will be the best doctors to become doctors. Predicting how good someone will be as a doctor is non-trivial, but certainly being good in science classes helps. Thus, I want the most qualified people to become doctors, regardless of any gender or ethnic balances.
(I would all have been for lightly putting our hands on the scales to make sure that we are not perpetuating effects caused by cultural effects, and thus permanently staying below the optimum. However, given how affirmative action is looking these days, I would argue that we are at the point where we are jumping on the scale as hard as we can, meritocracy be damned.)
If the meritocratic solution is that some ethnicities are mostly working low-paying jobs and some are well over-represented in high-paying jobs, then my utility sum tells me that I should not care (beyond making reasonably sure that (1) is not the cause). If you want to argue that the gap between low-paying jobs and high paying jobs is too high, because poor people could get out a lot more utility out of the marginal dollar than rich ones, then I am very sympathetic to that argument and open to ideas of how we can improve their lot without drawing the wrath of the Elder God called economy.
If the last part is not clear, imagine a feudal kingdom made out of nobles and serfs. Calculate its utility sum. Now imagine one of two scenarios: in the first, every noble magically takes on the physical appearance of an elf, pointy ears and all. In the other, the same total number of elves are created, but evenly distributed over both classes. How does the utility sum in either case change? Secondary considerations (perhaps elf ears are really bad at holding crowns, or perhaps most people have an elf kink and get a lot of utility from their partners being turned into elves) aside, it does not. It can not, because the utility sum does not weight your utility by the shape of your ears. (There is an argument to be made that the former scenario will lead to less meritocracy, because it limits the upwards mobility of the serfs, but I think "random people are in charge" is a closer model than "the best and brightest are in charge" for feudalism, i.e. that there is not much meritocracy going on in the first place.)
If you're interested you should register an account. The only real barrier to entry is dealing with dedicated volunteers who have mastered the blade of bureaucracy. A battle of will.
I’m curious if any of you have noticed similar patterns on other Wikipedia pages for controversial figures. Is this a systemic issue?
Yes. Did you read one of The Motte's forsaken progeny write on an English Wiki's power admin last year?
Wikipedia seems to make generally correct decisions as edit wars escalate in areas with controversy. That's around a 70% generally, not a 90% generally. It is an ideologically slanted correct decision similar to the ideological slanted factual reporting of [news agency]. If you list 10 areas of controversy undergoing various versions of edit wars I can generally guess which side of it is the status quo. That one is a 90%+ generally that approaches almost always.
Do we need a new Wikipedia built by uncompassionate LLMs?
The ones today learn quite a bit from Wikipedia I imagine.
Not sure why changes like this don't fall afoul of the NOTNEWS rule. This isn't an ongoing conflict that is important enough to keep up-to-date. This is a not particularly accomplished reporter. She is mostly a controversial reporter famous for her controversy. They could make policy that has a 60 day embargo on changes to living people who aren't heads of state or some such. Tying edits to the American news cycle is fundamentally flawed. Which loops back around to the problems with the reputable sources system.
Wikipedia, like this place in some ways, is an impossible project. It's pretty cool it is as good at it is.
FtttG
1mo ago
Tracing Woodgrains's writeup on a specific Wikipedia editor is a must-read if you haven't done so already.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
You may be interested in TracingWoodgrains, lately of this parish, 's essay on a similar case. The problem is certainly not unique, though I wouldn't say it's universal either.
I do also want to say that, while this Lorenz person seems like a pretty tiresome outrage-bait-manufacturer, one has to laugh at "as reported by the Daily Mail", which it is perfectly sensible of Wikipedia to ignore as a source. It's tantamount to a tabloid.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
1mo ago
They seem to be coming around though!
https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1906727995307381025
Summary: TracingWoodgrains ran a poll for both left and right respondents, asking if they'd rather have their opposite running the world vs. China.
For left respondents, China won handily, opposite for right-responders. Obvious selection bias and all, but troubling. The days of substantial fifth-columnism may be returning.
gattsuru
1mo ago
Trace highlighted the New College of Florida as a potential example. There's ways that's had an impact, but in turn it's increasingly obvious that this will only last just so long as DeSantis is willing to burn a lot of political capital on it. Not Republicans in general, given the recent immigration enforcement mess, but DeSantis specifically.
Dean
Flairless
1mo ago
My response to the 'missing the old system' is 'the grass on the other side is always greener.' That substack has its own authorial restraints doesn't mean it doesn't successfully establish independence from traditional media constraints. It just means that it's a change of constraints, rather than an absence of constraints.
Which, frankly, is not going to change. In the same way that the abolishment of private markets under communism didn't mean that people didn't have to work for a living, there is always going to be a tension between 'what the writer wants to do' and 'what the paymaster is willing to pay for.' And as long as there is a need to justify receiving limited resources- and there will always be limited resources- there will always be a paymaster in some form.
That doesn't mean that it isn't a net gain. The fact that Tracingwoodgrains and Kulak are equally eligible to make a living giving their opinions is still better than a world where only one or even none of them could because established opinion-generators ran the system like a cartel.
KingOfTheBailey
1mo ago
TracingWoodgrains once likened him to Nikocado Avocado, a man (or catgirl?) made ever more grotesque by the vehicle that brought money and fame. I cannot unsee it, despite enjoying some of Kulak's earlier writing (like the Alex Jones/WWF piece).
Trace doesn't mean to, but I see an invitation for conservatives to organize their own Long March. If he means to it is because he has no fear that conservatives have a chance to do this. If conservatives do capture the institutions, produce equivalent cultural output, then I am confident Trace would partly ask for cooperation rather than bark for an imaginary assault. Just based on what I have read from the guy.
If more conservatives became sociologists they would, at worst, complain less about it. At best, they may help to right the ship. There is no cost or effort on behalf of these institutions-- which are responsible for their standing, public facing reputation, and credibility. That's what good stewards inside an institution are meant to facilitate. They are a curator who considers and advocates for the institution. They protect it and enrich it. The institution forever remains larger than themselves and lasts longer than their lives. The mission was changed, the principles were subverted, and our institutions sought different kinds of stewards.
We can bicker over who to blame and why conservatives fell out, were pushed out, or lost interest in the humanities over the past 50 years. We might also consider whether the same conservative professors in 1960 can even be created anymore. This doesn't move us any closer to fixing them. Neither does standing high up in the fort to yell down "bring more men and a longer ladder!" Not when an apparent cannon is nearby and a fuse lit.
I like museums. I like libraries, too. Free children's books are amazing. We're keeping those, though. Personally, I don't care about a hypothetical target of 20-80 or 40-60 ideological split among librarians, anthropologists, or in psychology departments. We are so far beyond parity and so far off the ground that destruction feels better to many. This includes educated people here. I'd like the institutions be slanted in direction that I can easily (dis)miss. My tolerance for the slant is higher than Jim from North Carolina who, while uninterested 30 years ago, now has learned a stronger distaste for concepts like higher education. The value of a university education in these fields is objectively lower than the past. Beyond that, it is going to require change and effort for his son to return to his father's previously uninterested position.
I'm not sure it matters if Trace means to tease conservatives to start their own Long March because he does not consider this possible, or if he really does want to egg more conservatives to bootstrap back into sociology departments. It is defensive rhetoric about preserving stuff he values, aimed at people who also value it, but not at people he believes should value them. If one were to genuinely try, then how does one convince someone who no longer is uninterested, but actively places negative value on your institution, that you are worth preserving?
To do so, we're looking at a project of a generation if we were to tear stuff down and start over. The destruction method, besides being an overstatement of what's occurring, would be quick and painful. Reform, on the other hand, might never happen. There needs to be outreach, invitations, scholarships, hard work, propaganda, genuine accounting, and a renewed interest in stewardship. Those could all be indicators of reform. It is a lot more than anyone offers. If people want change to occur as reform, then begin the reform! Start a new department. Aim it at undergrads from Missouri. Cut the Exceptional Black Lesbian Celebration exhibit from the Smithsonian. That one is easy.
A long view is good, but few are prepared to wait 40 years for enough conservatives to apply, enter, and manage to fix anthropology. Not when we can't be certain what higher education will look like in 20. Not when the cannon is right there, fuse lit.
The institutions should function in a way that they can manage their own reputation and credibility. If Trace wants anthropology saved rather than smashed, then anthropology's movers must move to facilitate this. If the nascent conservative friendly institutions mature and reproduce they may threaten the old regime and spur reform. Trump is doing some stuff, but Trump is gone in a few years. If he sticks to his guns, then 4 years is a good amount of time to change policy and stewardship. I doubt sociology will be saved in that time frame. I doubt it will even try to be saved ever. Museums might redirect. That's plenty of time to find better stewards, realign the mission, create some outreach, and start fixing the brand. 4 years isn't that long though. Easy to wait it out.
I wrote about the trans half, too. I have some questions about trans medicine and research. I'll save it for another time.
Tracingwoodgrains also has a history of deliberate efforts to undercut the credibility or ability of political opponents to signal-boosting attestations of progressive political excesses, which includes things like the tesla stuff.
Tracing pushes back on a matter of success of tactics towards their preferred outcomes, not kind. Namely, when things are viewed as counter-productive to Tracing's preferences.
shakenvac
2mo ago
this perfectly describes a large majority of politics for as long as I've been paying attention, which is decades, plural at this point. I strongly dispute the claim that any of this is a novel creation of Trump or his supporters
Trump represents a difference in kind. Whether he is a fascist is the sort of question that generates more heat than light and so is not a terribly interesting question, but certainly his actions and rhetoric toward a US ally and fellow Liberal democracy are totally illogical, nonsensical, amoral, and speak to a man who has an extremely inaccurate model of the world and/or thought processes that are not coherent. This is not an alike thing to e.g. Having a snappy propaganda-esque poster of yourself made as per your counterexamples. Previous presidents/administrations have been anchored in reality (and morality) in a way that Trump et al are not. Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared, and everything his proponents denied. At this point I think everyone who was ever accused of TDS is owed an apology.
I know that you see Trump as your last, best hope against woke and progressivism, and so you use your intellectual horsepower and debate techniques honed here in themotte to carry water for him. But there is no intellectual basis for trumpism, and your attempts to create one is nothing more than sanewashing. Tracingwoodgrains had the right of this: as true as it is that Harris was a soulless avatar of The Machine, Trump was unworthy of defeating that machine.
I know that you will never agree that Trump is a piece of shit, if for no other reason than you see it as bad tactics. But I would hope that, at least, when you are alone with your thoughts, you might idly wish that your philosophy had a better spokesman.
anti_dan
3mo ago
Why is it so unlikely? It seems that a large amount, perhaps even a majority, of the Democrats advocacy apparatus is at least partially funded by the US government. That plus donors still feeling the sting of dumping record breaking amounts of money into the Harris campaign debacle probably means the number of paid protestors is fairly low right now.
One thing I have been disappointment by is the lack of the "center left" pundits like MattY and @TracingWoodgrains writing long thinkpieces expressing outright embarrassment about how this whole apparatus of grifting off the feds is to them and their general movement.
gattsuru
3mo ago
This sorta concept floats around in furry, therian, and (to a lesser extent) otherkin spaces pretty often, so it's not too odd to see if pop up in Zizian thought since they seemed to pull in whatever slipped through tumblr at a given time. There's been some attempts at extrapolating how much humans map around the concept of having a tail, and it is pretty fun for furries and therians when they can add prosthetic ones (and/or more expressive ears, hackles, so on). There are other behaviors like quadrobics that seem to spontaneously develop without significant public discussion or formal artwork, for better or worse.
But a lot of it's probably just trained or learned: too much falls outside of the space of things that non-furs do.
And, more critically, too much of it's non-falsifiable. A big criticism of 90s-style spiritual therianthropy was how much even the Weird Species therians only wanted to pick up the interesting and fun habits from their totem animal/fursona/whatever, over gross or lesser-known ones. And while that was somewhat overblown (insert a dogs sniffing butts, which was a common highlight, and rimming joke here), it applies as broadly or more broadly here. There's no shortage of Weird Behaviors specific to various lemur species or to most proposed common ancestors; there's not even a shortage of weird anatomy things. ((eg, is that weird 'jump wrong and fly' dream normal people get something something leaping lemurs ancestral memory)). You can pick and choose what you think might show up in a big enough populace, but even if you had a magic wand that distinguished 'this drive is shared and has a historical grounding' from 'this is just something you picked up from watching Zootopia', you could easily pick and choose until you had some summary that matched the real world but had absolutely no predictive power.
The moral argument is... less clear; Zizians aren't (weren't?) as attached to what they perceived as True as you'd expect from the capitalization, even beyond what you'd expect from a group like this. See the mess around dual souls (or Undertale), or even the bit at the end of that piece about a dragonkin. These people aren't making a REVURN argument, and the sheer variety in beliefs or expressions of this take makes it incoherent to attempt it. There just aren't that many lemur therians, and they don't want to start online drama with the LotR elf otherkin.
There's people who do or did, back in the height of online therianthropy, though they didn't often find much commonality with out trans folk of the era, or even into the late '00s. It might return, despite its incoherence, as the least-bad-agreement point for an often wildly-incoherent alliance of varied positions, only because the alternative explanations feel worse. TW's freedom of form as the logical endpoint of freedom of expression, but it's pretty unpalatable for a political sphere that's happy to draw territorial exceptions to those principles, nevermind its contradiction to the likely usable points.
The extent any specific position can switch be switched out for today's goals is... not encouraging, and the Zizians show exactly why, but it's also not a failure mode specific to them, or their political allegiance, or to their specific political fight.
crushedoranges
3mo ago
I feel called out at the moment, so, first, my mea culpas.
@Amadan I am aware that being a rightist partisan is not very conducive to the kind of space that the moderates wish to nurture. I, myself, personally moderate spaces where I have to manage people being political. Knowing this makes my behaviour even more unacceptable, and for that I apologize. I don't really have an excuse for my rhetoric, for liking the heat instead of the light. But I am not a passing internet troll, or fishing for responses from outraged liberals. I have been here in one form or another, and I actually like being here.
Moving forward, I will try to not clog up your moderation queue with my hot takes. I'll try.
@4bpp I disagree with the notion of reports as an enforcement mechanism because it is trivially easy to game, if one is a motivated bad actor. If an individual post is bad, one can downvote it. If it annoys one sufficiently, one can rebut it (although I concede the effort may not be worth the squeeze in nearly all cases.) Reporting is the tool of last resort, when something is noisome and of no value whatsoever.
But you report so much that the lack of response feels like a waste of effort?
I can't recall the last time I reported anyone. That's how little I use the feature. Do you want to be a moderator? You have a thousand posts... a lot more than me. Obviously you have opinions on what the Motte should be. But the demos has an opinion, too. Expressed through upvotes. Metathoughts about the pernicious nature of such social media systems nonwithstanding, is that not the fairest way of determining the merit of what someone is saying?
(I admit that the proposition of 'being maximally evil in posture to EA people' is horrifying, but no more so than the people who constantly talk about 'race realism'.)
I am also aware that the Motte has problems with ideological diversity. But that isn't my fault, that those on the left evaporatively leave. It's not like I'm running around conspiratorially reporting the TracingWoodgrains of the world. They left. Cannot I talk to those of a similar ideological bent? It's not like I'm pretending to be objective or anything. Am I being asked to keep it down to make sure the last leftists don't just pull up stakes and leave, leaving the Motte a witch-chamber?
I've been on a hot streak of hot takes recently, so I'll probably take a step back for a while. But if you have a problem with my posts or you believe that I don't belong here, you can say so. You don't have to write me up in a post complaining about moderation. That's all I have to say.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3mo ago
Indeed, it's quite disappointing what this place has become. Good posters like TracingWoodgrains have been banned or moved on. Shitposters from CultureWarRoundup have moved back in, telling us constantly how we have to hate the outgroup with every fiber of our being, and any notion that we should try understanding them is akin to betrayal. The mods are apparently asleep at the wheel. Zorba, the original creator of the site, hasn't posted in 3 months, and hasn't really participated that much in nearly a year.
Yep. I'd have linked two or more of I didn't have a class of students starting in ten minutes. The difference between didn't happen and don't remember it happening is kinda the point.
Yes, I'm rather titchy about the people who dressed themselves as paragons of Respect, Truth, and Peace, then instead grew up to throw around words like "moronic", are quite proud of 'pranking' into the epistemic waters or promoting Matt Yglesias, and not only can't find any reason to comment on attempted political assassinations or a guy getting beaten to death for political protest, but didn't wrangle up anyone who'd have a burning need to do so.
Do you have some better example? Going to explain why it shouldn't matter? Or are we just supposed to pretend history started yesterday?
Two years ago I told ChrisPratt that it's a problem that "Yet there's no TracingWoodgrains the news network; I don't think there's even a TracingWoodgrains the famous news caster." If it turns out that there's not actually a TracingWoodgrains the Redditor, on this topic, what am I supposed to be pointing at instead?
Blues in general. If it were just you doing it, I'd throw another reference to a recent post of yours. If it were just some people doing it, this wouldn't be a problem. Even if it were just the people here doing it, it wouldn't be a problem.
In the narrow sense, not try to hide a falsifiable and meaningful claim (did anyone here do X) behind a unfalsifiable and meaningless one (do you personally remember anyone here doing X). In the shallow one, it'd have been embarrassing for me if I'd had opened that link to the Butler shooting thread, and there was a big Amadan post talking about how this contextualized and heightened their concerns about political radicalization on the left, and I'd have liked to be embarrassed. I guess ChrisPratt tried? In the I'm-going-to-be-repetitive-and-obnoxious sense because dodging this matters here like every other time before, I'd have liked you to not moved the goalposts from FCFromSSC's "sure things happened in the past" to your own "no one thought it was no big deal or worse, something to be encouraged."
I'm sorry that you had that sort of encounter, and I give my sympathies and empathy if you lost friends over it.
I do, yes, think it would be stronger if you had something you could actually show, or a reference here contemporaneous to it happening instead of suddenly revealing under challenge, or if you didn't duck from 'it doesn't happen in real life' to 'a small number' where 'most' of your friends didn't agree, but again if it were just you I'd just be throwing a reference to a recent old argument.
More critically, I think it would have been stronger to start with that, than to start with "TikTok screamers" like this was only a problem in one website that doesn't really count.
No, I think that one tribe makes very very loud noises about how they are opposed on principle to political violence and suppressing other people's rights, all the time. They just don't act on that principle.
On the extreme side, the SLPC isn't shutting up about subtle threats motivating violence; they're just spending time focused on "male supremacy". (bonus points: did you know their podcast Apathy Isn't An Option? Betcha it doesn't have anything on this topic in a week!). Nina Jankowicz didn't crawl under a rock to surface in seven years time; she's quite happily promoting her brand and will never, ever, ever mention Tom Fletcher.
But if those are the nutjobs, where are the sane, reasonable ones? ChrisPratt tried after the Butler County attempt, but he's an army of one: most of the time people had literally nothing to say. What person terrified by the ultimatium thrown at Harvard yesterday ever spoke against Harvard-affiliated orgs doxxing Red Tribers? I'm not demanding that we find one individual that has such an opinion on all broad topics, or even that we find anyone willing to answer every single offense ever, but I'm feeling a lot closer to Diogenes than Lot, right now.
... I am going to be very, very polite here, because my first reaction to this bit involved profanity. I am not a KulakRevolt fan. I have never been a KulakRevolt fan. I have specifically highlighted him -- well before he went completely off the deep end and got braincored by Twitter! -- as an example of the sort of problem that actually contains what you and yours falsely accuse FCfromSSC or I of.
No. I think both the guy promoting rando violence, and the guy who says he hates rando violence enough to split apart communities for (banned!) comments, but only really can write about it when it's against his side are both bad, and I think it's actually a pretty serious indictment of society in general that they are getting anywhere near the coverage that they are, while anyone that really cares at best gets shoved into some third-rate Red Tribe rag.
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