banned
FiveHourMarathon
You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
How do you know a hero when you see one? Can we predict heroism or cowardice?
Typically I’m more in the “Great Forces of History” camp than the “Great Men of History” camp, more Hobsbawm than Carlysle. Current events might be changing my mind.
The conventional wisdom from Kofman to Ilforte to my Polish cousins seems to be that Putin made a tremendous blunder in invading Ukraine and attempting to implement regime change. That the balance of forces was always against Russia, and that invading only made that apparent. But I’m not sure that follows the available evidence available before the invasion. Putin’s strategy meetings might have amounted to “Lads, it’s Tottenham”; but they were wearing Tottenham jerseys after all.
It seems to me more likely that Putin took a gamble, a good gamble, which had positive expected value, and came up absolutely snake eyes on the heroism of a relative handful of Ukrainians. It’s wildly unfair to blame Putin for not expecting this guy would start acting like a Slavic Churchhill, when one could have expected a performance more akin to Ghani or at best like Tsikhanouskaya. If you really drew an org chart with leadership roles and dates of events, there were maybe 100 Ukrainians, from TDF and police commanders who chose to fight in Kyiv at key moments to key governmental figures without whom the whole Ukrainian resistance project would have collapsed, to a handful of nationalist psychopaths who chose what seemed like certain death over letting down the side.
But let’s focus on the guy at the top: Zelensky. His early life contains few signs of heroism, or even of particular nationalism or patriotism, very little of obvious self-sacrifice and duty. He’s been in the media industry for his entire adult life. Nor in media was he some Mishima-esque hyper-patriot, he voiced Paddington Bear in the dubs and some of his movies were banned in Ukraine under nationalist laws he opposed, not a bloodthirsty nationalist. Obviously I lack the language skills to really delve into his oeuvre or personality, but there’s little there that would predict that when the chips were down he would stay in Kyiv..
I’m having trouble tracking down citations, but I recall pre-war and in the early war the theory that NATO would immediately evacuate Zelensky and enough of his government to form a reasonable government-in-exile for Ukraine, while funding/arming terrorist groups inside Ukraine, gleefully described as “making Ukraine into Russia’s Afghanistan.” Had Zelensky chosen to go along with that plan, I think Kyiv falls by the end of March, even with a higher assessment of Ukrainian skill today than I had then. [It’s in the nature of asymmetric wars
that demonstrative symbolic victories
are critical to maintaining popular support. Fleeing was a choice he very much could have made, that many leaders have made, that some would call not the cowardly choice but the humanitarian choice to spare his people the suffering of war. But he didn’t.
And I’m left asking, can we predict that? How can we predict how leaders will react under pressure? How can we predict how wars and matters of state will conclude if they hinge on these personal decisions of individual, fallible, men?
Maybe we can blame that on systems. Maybe hyper nationalist Ukrainian networks were ready to kill him if he jumped, and the guy was stuck between picking how to die. But that strikes me as a little too pat an explanation, eliminating the individual by inventing a system that we can put our faith in.
Or maybe there’s some psychological profile? Surely the armies of the world have looked into this, studied this? What conclusions have been reached, and how can we apply them?
Gender Identity and Sports - Once More Around The Track
There has been ample discussion regarding whether trans women should be able to compete in women’s sports, ranging situations as unpopular as Fallon Fox celebrating the bliss of fracturing women’s skulls in cage fights to the silliness of the Boston Marathon extending women’s qualifying times to anyone that says they’re non-binary. For better or worse, some of this is starting to wash out to actual policies at the highest levels of sports, with World Athletics banning trans women from competing as women in the Olympics. Personally, I would regard this as an obvious and easy decision, with no reasonable debate to be had. For the other side, here’s trans sprinter Halba Diouf’s feelings on not being allowed to compete as a woman and here is Science insisting arguing that the null hypothesis should that be trans women don’t necessarily have an advantage.
This is sufficiently well-worn territory that I don’t really expect anything fresh to be said at this point. Instead, I want to focus on something that I’ve always personally thought was quite a lot more difficult to judge correctly, which is athletes that were assigned female at birth, but have conditions that cause them to have abnormally high testosterone, such as XY chromosomes. In recent years, this seems to be coming up more often, possibly because of awareness of it being a thing that happens, possibly because the increased money and visibility of women’s sports has begun to select for increasing levels of biologically unusual people, or possibly because of something that’s not occurring to me. The first one I was aware of was Castor Semenya, who I’ve always had a soft spot for because it seems like a really tough break to have been born labeled as a girl, lived your life as a woman, competed and won at the highest levels, then get told, “nope, sorry, your chromosomes don’t match, so you’re banned in the future”. I hope that regardless of my positions on these issues to always extend that basic level of empathy to someone who truly was not at fault in the creation of a difficult situation.
I recently bumped into an article tying the plight of Diouf to a Senagalese sprinter who turned out to have XY chromosomes and high T, resulting in a ban from the Olympics and this is what gets to the heart of the matter:
LGBTQI advocacy groups say excluding trans athletes amounts to discrimination but WA President Sebastian Coe has said: "Decisions are always difficult when they involve conflicting needs and rights between different groups, but we continue to take the view that we must maintain fairness for female athletes above all other considerations.
First, I’d like to note that this objectively is discrimination and that takes us right to the heart of the point - having a women’s category in sports is inherently discriminatory. That’s the whole point, to discriminate men from women and create a category that is feasible for the best women to win, hence we must determine what a woman is for the purposes of that competition. That a policy is discriminatory simply cannot suffice as an argument against it, particularly when the whole point of the category is to implement a form of discrimination!
Second, I think Coe’s answer is correct and neatly covers all of these scenarios. I used to have a tough time with them, precisely because of the desire to be fair to women like Semenya, but the reality is that Caster Semenya simply isn’t a female and the whole point of women’s sports is to allow women to compete on equal footing against other women. That this will feel unfair and exclusionary to some tiny percentage of the population that has either a gender identity disorder or chromosomal abnormality is barely an argument at all - elite athletics isn’t actually an inclusive activity, it is exclusive and filters for the absolute best in the world for a given ruleset. Within track, use of performance-enhancing drugs is strictly monitored, with spikes in biological passports used to ban athletes even if what they used cannot be identified. With such tight constraints and rules on what physical specifications athletes are allowed to have, I no longer favor something so inclusive as to allow XY or other gender-abnormal athletes to compete - the women have to be actual women competing against other actual women. If nothing else, Lia Thomas has helped provide me some clarity on the absurdity of muscle-bound, testosterone-fueled males in women’s sports.
Apologetics for America
I'm a big fan of the United States. It's a big country. It's a safe country. The people are wealthy, kind, industrious, and have done more than their fair share of upholding the Pax Americana under which the majority of the world prospers, including those who would tear it down.
I would go so far as to say that I'd be significantly happier if I had been so lucky as to have been born in a counterfactual universe where my parents had emigrated there, even keeping all my myriad flaws like ADHD and depression.
It's a country that holds multitudes, and has had such a good track record of making good on its promise of embodying:
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these the homeless tempest-tost to me…
And then achieving the minor miracle of making the vast majority of them upstanding proud Americans regardless of caste and creed.
(To such an extent that it has lost the memetic immune system needed to assimilate some of the people who meet that criteria but are resilient to anything but force)
It is gorgeous. Even after the visiting the UK, a nation that even in its sclerosed and ailing state is significantly better than India, I found myself grossly disappointed at how small and dull the place was, compared to what I've seen of the States.
I count myself lucky to still have the memories of when I visited as a toddler, some of my earliest, a period I enjoyed so much that I came back home speaking English with an American accent when I hadn't even been conversant in the language when I left.
I stare at the reels and pictures posted on Insta by my friends studying there with ill-concealed envy. It looks so huge, so clean, so vibrant, so picturesque and unspoiled. Still a land where someone with innate talent, having landed with but a penny to his name, can ennoble himself through hard work, or at the very least his descendants.
If it were not for the fact that I'm currently ineligible to give the USMLE today, for no fault of my own, I'd bid adieu to my current aspirations for practising and settling in the UK. The latter is still better than India, but do you really need me to tell you how low a bar that is to beat?
I'm about as pro-American as it gets without driving a pickup truck with the stars-and-stripes hanging off it!
The people eat great food. They live in huge houses that appear outright intimidating to the rest of us. They can afford to waste gigaliters of water on a modestly appealing perennial grass and mostly not begrudge the expense.
They can travel visa free to most of the world, and act the fool there (can, not necessarily do, the worst I can say about most American tourists I've met is that they were rather underinformed about where they'd ended up), content in the knowledge that none but utter pariah states would dare raise a hand at them out of fear of Uncle Sam.
They earn salaries that make us all look like paupers. The median wage for a doctor in the US is $250k, fresh out of residency, whereas a senior consultant in the UK might be content to make half that. Indian doctors can only weep, especially lowly ones like me. Even my father, so talented in his surgical field that he'd be nationally famous if he was more fluent in English (instead just being regionally famous), makes only $50k PA at the very peak of his career, after a life of suffering and hustling so his sons would have to suffer and hustle just a bit less.
Even that seemingly colossal sum of money does not achieve the QOL a naive purchasing power calculation would suggest. Even billionaires here must be content to have their money only buy quick trips with their windows rolled up from only upper class enclave to the next.
The world, somewhat more multipolar than it once was, still wobbles unsteadily if you try and make it rotate around an axis not centered on America.
I'd give a lot to be there. I really would.
That is why it so severely vexes me that my girlfriend, a smart, intelligent and hard working woman who makes for an enviable partner to have at my side, holds a view of it so jaundiced you don't know whether to cry or laugh.
Like many Americans, she has had her perception of the States clouded by sheer propaganda that is more interested in cherrypicking out all of America's real problems, and when even all the real ones no longer suffice, concoct ones out of half-truths and whole-cloth to terrorize a broken primate brain that only notices the bad and becomes inured to the good, such that it no longer bears a resemblance to how fucking good they have it.
She stares at me like I'm mad when I tell her I've always wanted to live there, and the few warts on the face of the nation can't hide its timeless beauty.
She believes that abortion has been banned. When I protest otherwise and say that it's only a few states putting restrictions on it, and even then, just a few, she shakes in existential terror at the idea that there's a seething crowd coming for the rights of women, eager to snatch them all away. She thinks racism is a serious concern for hardworking and talented immigrants who speak fluent English, whereas you could put me in a room with a Confederate flag and I'd find a way to end up drinking beers and shooting AR-15s before dawn.
Did I mention she's terrified of gun violence, even if she could live a dozen lives in parallel and not get shot?
She categorically refuses to follow me if I wistfully make plans to find some route to make it there, be it fighting tooth and nail with my med school and the ECFMG to give me the right to at least try my luck, so that I can show them I meet even their high standards.
I'm at the point that I am seriously debating abandoning clinical medicine as a career, to upskill myself in medical ML, so that I have an easier route to the States that isn't gated behind a professional licensing exam I'm not allowed to give. I am still young. I am allowed to dream.
She's rather be middle class in the UK, unable to afford air-conditioning, living in a tiny house, watching our salaries erode into nothingness, and then, if Sunak successfully makes doctors into a thin wrapper for GPT-5, potentially resign ourselves to a life of mediocrity, or worse, come back to India with our tails between our legs where we'd have to settle for working shit jobs with longer hours and worse pay.
She's scared of paying the medical bills, when the kind of comprehensive coverage that two professionals making 500k together buys care beyond the dreams of the NHS. Perhaps not value for money, but value.
I criticize America all the time, but only because I love it. I want to gorge myself on cheeseburgers with ridiculous portion sizes, because even if I die fat, I die happy.
I cherish what the Founding Fathers built, a shining city built on a hill of negentropy and abundance, rising out of a swamp wherein dwell the majority of us, only a generation or two removed from near-Malthusian conditions. I would die to keep the barbarians away from the gates, if only because I want to cross them myself, as an esteemed guest if nothing else, hopefully to be one of their own.
I set out to write a post somewhat glorifying (fairly) America, and to invite others to submit arguments that would let my girlfriend see reason. It would seem I've inadvertently done all the heavy lifting, if not for the fact that I've marshaled all these arguments before her and still found them wanting.
I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the two of us are moral mutants who can never reconcile our preferences. I prefer to think that she's wrong about her fears, or weighs the wrong facts too heavily and the right ones not at all.
Help me convince her. I will find it hard to live with myself if I fail.
Oh, and Happy Fourth of July to you all, ye sons and daughters living several decades in the future, hailing from the nation from whose physical and mental toil most of the good things in the world come.
Wait, is it a bit late for that? Um, I blame timezones, pernicious and insidious things that they are.
Don't think I don't see the cracks in the pristine facade, the erosion of the meritocracy that made your country glorious. I simply think that if America wakes up and patches a few holes, it can earn the right to slumber again in peace for centuries hence.
Take 2.
I posted and deleted this because I don't want to get banned, but if I can't talk about the things I want to talk about then I don't see much point in caring about the account, anyway. Still, I'll try to be subdued.
The Robert E Lee statue from Charlottesville has been destroyed. Liquidated, actually, and slated to be replaced with some statue for black people, which is striking symbolism of how Americans are being liquidated to be replaced by foreigners.
I'm posting the reactions on twitter, because there are dozens of two-sentence sentiments that I share. I'll quote a couple, for posterity, and you can get the gist of the other side from the WP article.
Disgusting. Why not give the Lee statue to a museum? Because people might enjoy visiting it, or one day decide to restore it. This is a reminder that the Left wont stop after displacing historic American heroes. They want to deface, destroy and replace them with their own ridiculous idols.
Columbus is next. Followed by Teddy. Then Jefferson. Then George Washington
Glenn Youngkin let them do this. His AG too
Never forget it. These squishes aren't built for this fight
people with no heroes and no accomplishments doing the only thing they know: crying to the courts to allow them to turn beautiful things that other people made into garbage
"We'll put them in museums", it was always a lie. The destruction of historical artifacts has begun. Shame on anyone who supports this.
God Bless Robert E. Lee
“How delightful it was to smash to pieces those arrogant faces, to raise our swords against them, to cut them ferociously with our axes, as if blood and pain would follow our blows”
Pliny on the destruction of Domitian's statues. The relish and vindictiveness in this process isn't an accident: it's a symbol and an effigy, an expression of violent hatred.
That last one is really quite striking, given this line from the WP article:
It was a grim act of justice and a celebration all in one.
Really, you should read the article, too. In it, I saw the genocide of my race, and it scares the hell out of me. I suppose this must be how the Jews feel.
So, is it justice? Is it vengeance? Should it be celebrated? Should it be destroyed?
And does the symbolism of liquidating the statue of a white man apply to the declining white population in America? Is the deliberate melting down of this statue a parallel to the deliberate replacement of the American race?
ETA: One more tweet from this morning, just a few hours ago:
Literally my ancestor. We carry the Lee name as a first/middle in my family
While I didn't need a directly insulting gesture to tell me that my kind is hated and many seek our extinction (the implicit cues were strong enough) I appreciate this image making it absolutely clear.
They absolutely want your extinction
Musk, as a white man born in South Africa, should know what it looks like when your native country changes and now wants you and yours dead and gone.
When Progressives Defend Pedophiles: The Curious Case of Sarah Nyberg
In my previous thread about Gamergate where I challenged a speech Ian Danskin made on the topic for UC Merced, I said it would probably be the last thing I would write about the incident for a long while, and this is certainly flouting that.
But this writeup is not about the core issues of Gamergate. Rather, it's to highlight an egregious instance of misconduct from the progressive camp that is far too damning not to write about. It's definitely old news now, but sometimes this stuff needs to be dusted off so it won't languish in some archived page in the asshole of the internet where progressives would undoubtedly rather have it stay.
So who is Sarah Nyberg?
Sarah Nyberg (srhbutts on Twitter) is a trans woman who became a prominent anti-Gamergate figure through constant attacks on Gamergaters on various forums and articles. Included among the things she's participated in is repeatedly dragging 8chan through the dirt over accusations of child porn and for being an "active pedophile network".
However, just 6-10 years before her involvement in anti-GG, Nyberg herself was an open pedophile who actively defended pedophilia, posted borderline CP on the forums of FFShrine (a site she ran), and also actively lusted after her 8 year old cousin, whom she called her little girlfriend (often abbreviated to "lgf"). This hugely came out in the mainstream when a series of videos was made about her by TheLeoPirate, and culminated in an article being made on Breitbart about her... leanings.
The original "slam dunk" evidence against Nyberg came from a series of WebCite archive pages, which came directly from FFShrine. Unfortunately, they can no longer be accessed - there is a reason for this, but I'll address that later. For now, just keep in mind that the primary trove of evidence that was initially used to indict Nyberg is currently missing, but they are online in various forms, in screenshots, videos and so on. Regardless, one can start building an extremely strong case for her pedophilia - and can do so even without the benefit of these sources.
The first part involves proving that the "Sarah" on FFShrine was in fact Sarah Nyberg, and that's a trivial task, since FFShrine was outright registered under her name. In addition, here she is on her main Twitter account, openly admitting to it being her site.
GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over.
Oops.
In addition, Sarah has had more accounts under different names. The email her site was registered under was called retrogradesnowcone.gmail. com, and you can see a user called retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums admitting they run FFShrine. And just to properly cement that retrogradesnowcone is Sarah, here is Sarah on Twitter approvingly posting a Ravishly article with her face in it with the caption "my face is out in the open", and here is a Hotornot profile called retrogradesnowcone with the very same photo of Sarah's face in it. Sarah also shares her pictures under her handle retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums here.
In short, srhbutts on Twitter, Sarah on FFShrine, and retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums are all the same person: Sarah Nyberg.
To begin, let's look at the logs on FFShrine. While the WebCite pages directly archiving the chat logs from FFShrine are not directly accessible anymore, there are images on the internet, taken from there, which are still up. One can also confirm that these WebCite archives contained in that pastebin page were directly archived from 2005 FFShrine logs when combing archive.is for archives of the WebCite pages.
Among the images of the WebCite logs floating around, there are a few which are quite incriminating. Like this one, where Nyberg openly admits to being a pedophile, admits to being attracted to her younger cousin, Dana, calls her her little girlfriend, and states that "let me see Dana and I will get you all the silverware you can eat". Here, Nyberg says again "Dana is my cousin that I miss very much <3" and notes she doesn't know what to tell her cousin's parents to make it not seem weird. Then states she wants to kiss her, although don't worry, she wouldn't unless her cousin wants to learn how to kiss or something. Here, Nyberg confirms that Dana is 8 years old and here, Nyberg admits Dana gives her erections.
In addition to this, a former user of FFShrine, Roph, also uploaded further leaks of FFShrine IRC chats to his own website, slyph. org. Although slyph. org is no longer working, you can download the zip files of these IRC logs once uploaded there at archive links such as this one (warning, the logs will auto-download). Things get even worse here, and here are some of the more incriminating sections of the logs:
In file 2006-12-29.035011.html, Sarah posts a bunch of links to photos on 12chan and asks "how old are they", along with one she calls "cute ^T^". The response from a user called thetruetidus is "below 10 - Sarah ???"
In file 2006-12-30.101829.html, she posts links to online organisations for "girllovers and boylovers", then again posts a bunch of links to photos. Then subsequently says this:
(18:55:54) Sarah: yea i no
(18:55:56) Sarah: there' sa nipple
(18:55:59) Sarah: alert alpott
In file 2006-12-31.015010.html, she posts yet another set of links to photos on 12chan (which, by the way, makes her denunciation of 8chan incredibly hypocritical), then says when linking one of them:
(11:18:27) Sarah: [LINK CENSORED] she looks drugged :(
The response from other users is as such:
(11:19:43) LiquidCruelty: The one where she looks drugged
(11:19:44) Sarah: LiquidCruelty
(11:19:45) LiquidCruelty: that's CP
(11:19:51) LiquidCruelty: I can see underage twat
(11:19:52) ivorynight: ya
(11:19:54) ivorynight: i see some vagin
Sarah's response is to say that "nudity isn't CP, also I can't see anything", and in response LiquidCruelty and ivorynight state "Oh bullcrap" and "well take some vitamins and try harder, I know you went over this with a magnifying glass". In another section from the same file, Sarah states she's 6 on the inside but admits "I just turned 21".
To further confirm the veracity of the logs, there was a period of time where the latest IRC chat lines from FFShrine were embedded on her video game music download site Galbadia Hotel, archive pages of which Roph posted on KotakuInAction. Let's see some of these chat logs (which are direct archives of the page, by the way):
On 2006-01-29, Sarah states "thank heaven for little girls" and expresses concern over the fact she "only sees her lgf a few times a year". When asked when she's seeing her again, she responds "at the very latest I will in summer sometime. my dad wants to go visit her place because he wants to go fishing there and I'd tag along and hopefully convince him to go fairly regularly !" On 2006-03-05, Roph asks her "so who is dana? =o". She responds: "dana's my lgf ^________^ - little girl friend !" It's notable how well the content of the logs embedded here match up with the ones previously mentioned, and the fact that she continuously tries to get close to Dana just to get herself off in secret without informing anyone of what's happening is frankly quite unsettling (and that's not even addressing the posted pictures of children). And just to confirm that the Roph who owned slyph. org and posted the IRC chat logs is indeed the same Roph in the FFShrine IRC chat, here's him linking to slyph. org in the Galbadia Hotel IRC chat lines.
In addition to the evidence from FFShrine and all the related sites, there's also her postings on the Venus Envy Comic forums under the handle retrogradesnowcone. In this thread in the Venus Envy Comic forums on 2006-01-14, Nyberg openly admits "for the record: yes, I am a pedophile. no, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. no, I don't-- I wouldn't ever-- have sex with children. no, I don't look at child porn." Just remember, this is someone who later in the year went on to say "nudity isn't cp" on FFShrine and decided it was perfectly acceptable to post photos of a potentially drugged kid on internet forums - photos which users went on to identify as having "underage twat".
A user named DJ Izumi, in that thread, goes on to post chat logs from elsewhere where Nyberg, again under her retrogradesnowcone handle, talks about her "lgf" and says an array of other questionable things. Such as:
Quote:
[01:20] [LINK CENSORED] > nambla ;-;;
Quote:
[01:27] that site I tried to show you? it's a site for lesbian pedophiles. jftr
Quote:
[01:57] ;-;; this is making me miss my lgf
[01:57] lgf?
[01:57] little girl friend.
Quote:
[03:08] I don't think it's right to do sexual things with a child, not because a child can't consent, but because in the context of society it can really @#%$ them up. in a more sex-positive society I don't think it'd be a problem
Quote:
[03:11] I'm attracted to (usually) about 6 to 12. been attracted to as low as 4 but that's atypical
If further evidence is still required, I'd also note that Nyberg was known as a pedophile as early as 2007, long before Gamergate was a thing. As user ItsGotSugar writes about FFShrine in October of 2007: "Another character [on FFShrine] was Sarah, an administrator who was allegedly a pedophile. (Don't ask me whether "she" was really a girll; it was hard to tell.) I think Sarah had been expressing an unhealthy fixation on children from the very beginning, and I could only hope it was all some disgusting in-joke that had gone on for too long." Similarly, in 2010, 4 years before Gamergate existed, user BasilFSM notes that "You know what the worst thing about this Sarah is? She/He's a known pedophile. That's deplorable in itself."
Furthermore, in this interview with Milo there's this accusation by an anon called "M" accusing Sarah of initiating inappropriate roleplay with her, despite knowing that she was underage, and she would say things like "mommy tickle me where it's wet". And later on in the interview M states that her claims were ignored on Twitter. Keep in mind, this is an unsubstantiated allegation, but it is an unsubstantiated allegation that aligns with what we do know about Sarah. While this alone is not something that the argument of Sarah's inappropriate behaviour can rest on, the contents of all these disparate pieces of evidence align so well with each other that it's honestly quite implausible that all of this has somehow been faked by Gamergate (a common accusation by anti-GGs looking to defend her).
Nyberg herself on Twitter and elsewhere has also made statements that often basically are tantamount to an admission that these logs are hers. Apart from the open admission by srhbutts that "GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over", there's this Twitter thread wherein she tries to defend herself with this response: "View the unedited logs. Everyone behaved in similar ways".
Eventually, Nyberg writes a medium article responding to the whole thing where she never concretely refutes the claims against her, never even claims the evidence against her has been faked, but defends herself by stating that she was "just being an edgelord". She states "Chat logs from an IRC room I was in nearly a decade ago were leaked to gamergate. To say the contents of those logs were not flattering would be putting it lightly. They are, in some ways, much what you’d expect from an early-2000’s chatroom of 4chan expats trying too hard to outdo each other for shock value. Even with that context, much of what I said was gross and disturbing, and I have no interest in defending it. Since then, I’ve learned that intent isn’t magic, and a playground of the taboo isn’t particularly conducive to moral growth. That I’ve grown past the person I was back then is something I am deeply and forever thankful for." She tries to paint it as regrettable teenage edgelord behaviour (she was 21) that she's grown out of, paints the people accusing her of being a pedophile as acting in bad faith, and casts herself as a victim of Gamergate harassment.
So even Nyberg cops to these logs being hers. And it's noticeable how her response to this is the anti-GG version of The Toxic Gossip Train. Even a good portion of the comments on her medium article are incredibly disgusted with how she treats the whole thing, with one stating "I’m sorry but I don’t think you get to just wash your hands of it and claim edgelord status. From the looks of it you were pretty deep into the role. Vieweing, discussing, and distributing child porn. That’s not edgelord that’s criminal." Another states "Pedophilia is a serious accusation. The evidence against you is disturbingly accurate. Your sob story won’t help you." In the same fashion as Miss Ukelele, the point of this post is not to issue an apology, she's essentially trying to trivialise her acts, claim victimhood and scold people into shutting up about her behaviour. It is true that "teenage edgelords" claim extreme views all the time, and sometimes objectionable ones. But what Nyberg did clearly falls far beyond that.
Yet in the light of Nyberg's medium article, the progressive crowd immediately comes out celebrating her and calling her stunning and brave. Here's Leigh Alexander's reaction (yes, that Leigh Alexander) as an example:
Definitely read it.
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643799292067610625
It's amazing how over and over again the women targeted by these nobodies have the grace to make their experience useful to others
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643800965943005184
anyway remember to please respect and support women in your field always, and do not define them by these experiences others created
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643803653082644480
Writer for Houston Press and Cracked Jeff Rouner had a particularly flabbergasting reaction, which was to send Nyberg a photo of his kid wearing her new hoodie to cheer her up. He would later go on to delete this post.
In contrast, other people who knew her from way back when start picking apart her article. Roph notes "Sarah is right in that ffshrine had “edgelords”. I was one, too. I visited 4chan almost daily, used the current hot memes and phrases, joked about stuff. Shared the funny, hot or shocking meme images. Many people there did. Then why does nobody give a damn about any other user in all those logs (which are absolutely genuine, don’t get me started)? Because none of us were paedophiles. An open, proud, adamant, often very defensive paedophile. Defensive of paedophilia. Often justifying it through various arguments. Attempting to normalise it."
Plasmatorture, a former mod on FFShrine, notes "The amount she talked about it and the great lengths she went to convince everyone that she was a suffering martyr for having these feelings she knew she could never act on (supposedly) made it pretty damn clear she wasn't just trolling. That's like 5+ years of playing the long con. No troll has ever had the patience for that." CoryMartin similarly notes "The members of FFShrine and other communities you and your members mixed with (crankeye, kefkastower) didn’t interpret your ongoing demonstrations and admissions of pedophilia as you being an edgelord: they took it as you being an actual pedophile. It was taken as fact, and you had no issues with people knowing it at the time. I believe I was around 14 then, and it certainly creeped me out. Either you’re incredibly inept at comedy to the point where even people who interacted with you casually on a daily basis thought you were serious, or you’re deliberately lying to cover up something about you that most people would find deeply troubling. I think the latter is far more likely."
Now, all of this would just be hearsay if we didn't have the chat logs, as well as Nyberg's own admissions that she did in fact author these logs. However, with these corroborating pieces of information, they become part of an ever-strengthening case against her. Yet despite this evidence, news articles often gave her the Zoe Quinn treatment, painting her as an Oppressed Victim which Nobody Had Any Reason To Be Angry With, such as this article by The Verge that links to Nyberg's genuinely terrible medium article as the only source on the topic and states that she was "subject to one of the biggest and nastiest organized harassment campaigns of Gamergate".
After the initial video and after Nyberg's sordid internet history came to light, anti-Gamergaters started attempting to damage control to an almost incredible degree. One instance of this was when Randi Harper posted lists of Gamergate supporters on public facebook groups. To be charitable, these people publicly associated with Gamergate, so this doesn't constitute doxxing. To be less charitable, part of her stated reasoning for engaging in this behaviour was to "take the attention away" from her pedophile friend Sarah Nyberg. Other anti-GGs, including currently prominent YouTube voices such as Dan Olson of Folding Ideas, were there and openly encouraged this behaviour, with some calling it "noble" of Harper to divert attention away from Nyberg's pedophilic behaviour. All this can be found in Crash Override, the anti-GG chat group Zoe Quinn and others were using to coordinate plans.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:22 AM] Randi Harper: i'm talking to amib in DM.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:29 AM] Randi Harper: all of this is going to take the attention away from sarah.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:32 AM] Dan Olson: and the second biggest #GamerGate Ultras, is fully public.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:37 AM] Randi Harper: i'm going to become GG enemy #1, i'm hoping.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:41 AM] Charloppe: ty for that randi
[04/01/2015, 9:43:48 AM] SF: That's really noble of you.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:48 AM] Charloppe: she needs some peace right now
And:
[04/01/2015, 9:48:38 AM] Athena Hollow: <3
[04/01/2015, 9:48:57 AM] Athena Hollow: They had to fucking SCOUR FOR MONTHS to find the shit on sarah.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:03 AM] Athena Hollow: and got fucking LUCKY on that.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:13 AM] Athena Hollow: fuck them.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:26 AM] Athena Hollow: they joined a goddamn public facebook group. fucking morons.
Notice what Athena Hollow in particular says about this. There's not even a denial of what they found. She only cares that GG got "lucky" by discovering Sarah's pedophilic behaviour and she's angry they could use it as a cudgel against anti-GG in general. This is what an unprincipled tribalist looks like. Imagine being so utterly unscrupulous that you would provide ballast and cover for a pedophile to win internet points against Gamergate.
It gets worse. You know why you can no longer access any of the original WebCite caches that were used to implicate Nyberg? The reason is because of an upstanding citizen called Izzy Galvez, who was another anti-GGer who was also part of Crash Override. In a Twitter thread, he gleefully posted images of him actively working to conceal evidence of Nyberg's pedophilia from the public (archive link here). The images in question demonstrate that he sent emails to WebCite claiming the material was being used for harassment, which resulted in WebCite making the snapshots of her domain unavailable to the public.
Not only did Galvez actively try to conceal information, he also attempted to manufacture misinformation to try and paint the logs as faked. He makes a post on GamerGhazi supposedly providing screenshots that supposedly show that the logs were last edited in 2015, therefore they were were "tampered with by GG" to add pedo material. The screenshots actively redact any identifying information about the site to make it appear that these are from FFShrine, but as this source notes in reality these screenshots came from Roph's backup of the logs in slyph. org, and not actually from the FFshrine website. In other words it "only proves that Roph uploaded files in 2015, NOT that the files were edited in 2015, or that they were created in 2015".
There's plenty of other instances of progressives trying to provide cover and ballast for Nyberg, such as an article by Margaret Pless entitled "5 Reasons Why I Stand with Sarah Nyberg" (which was then fully rebutted by this medium article called "5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Stand with Sarah Nyberg"). But of course, any discussion about Gamergate isn't complete without a discussion of how RationalWiki has covered it.
RationalWiki, as you can imagine, fervently defends Nyberg, courtesy of an obsessive anti-GGer called Ryulong who frequently vandalised the Wikipedia and RationalWiki articles on anything even slightly related to Gamergate, and who was even funded by GamerGhazi after he posted his GoFundMe on there and it was stickied by an admin. Because of Ryulong, RationalWiki is hosting two contradictory (and false) defences of Sarah Nyberg: "Timeline of Gamergate" claims that Nyberg was simply "expressing disgust at pedophilic roleplay" (this is completely unsupported by the link they use to back it up). "List of Gamergate claims", on the other hand, tries to state that, okay, "she made claims of being a pedophile, but she has since said was her and her friends making 4chan-style trolling jokes at each others’ expenses" - a claim that, as you can see by the evidence provided so far, is based on an attempt by Nyberg to misconstrue her own behaviour. A recent (2021) attempt to correct these false claims on RationalWiki by a person called Doris V. Sutherland resulted in the edits being completely reversed by a user called TechPriest, and the argument eventually reached the talk page. Without warning, Doris was then completely banned by the RationalWiki moderators, with the only rationale being "gator sock" - despite the fact that if you read Doris's article she is clearly not in favour of Gamergate.
Doing research on this post made me want to scrub myself with sandpaper, and the fact that this behaviour has been engaged in by a group of people who make claims of having the moral and intellectual high ground is frankly incredible. Unfortunately, most of the incriminating information now resides in heterodox news sources at best, now-defunct blogs and sites that have to be reached through archive links at worst, and as a result this information has pretty much disappeared from the eyes of the public. Most "authoritative" sources and large scale collections of information are strictly policed to make sure that reporting is sufficiently congenial to the progressive viewpoint, and the only thing the public ever hears is a skewed view of the entire affair.
This is, in real time, how history gets written. Once all the dissenters disappear for good, all this stuff will be forgotten, and the only thing left will be a bunch of seemingly authoritative articles that will cause people to harbour a distorted view of how the culture war actually played out.
So, how's that whole Elon free speech Twitter thing going? Turns out, not great. An article from Mike Masnick over at TechDirt has the details. Basically, back in November, shortly after Elon finished buying Twitter, he noted his belief in free speech was so strong it extended even to leaving up the Twitter account @elonjet. For those who don't know the @elonjet Twitter account used publicly available data to Tweet whenever Elon's private plane flew somewhere. Elon tweeted:
My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk
The man behind the account, Jack Sweeney, also operated a bunch of other plane tracker accounts for other billionaires (including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and various Russian oligarchs). As of today it seems the @elonjet Twitter account, along with all the other plane trackers and even Sweeney's personal account, have been suspended. Apparently this suspension is pursuant to a new Twitter rule about sharing personal information:
Under this policy, you can’t share the following types of private information, without the permission of the person who it belongs to:
...
live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes, actual physical location, or other identifying information that would reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available;
It took a whole month for Elon to craft a policy to ban the account he specifically said he wouldn't ban due to his commitment to free speech. So much for the idea that the limits of Twitter moderation would be anything like "only illegal speech." It also seems (according to the TechDirt article, and I tried this myself) that you can't even tweet links to @elonjet accounts on other platforms (like Facebook or Instagram). Amusingly Elon's original tweet from November now has a Community Note on it noting what the account that was being mentioned in the tweet was and the fact that it's banned.
Twitter files dump about the internal deliberations on how this policy change and these bans came about when?
ETA:
Seems @elonjet was unsuspended. Apparently the new policy requires "slight" (no word on how long that is) delay before posting info. Although, at the time of this edit the account appears to be suspended again. Link.
ETA2:
Elon now claiming that legal action is being taken against Sweeney. Would love to hear what legal action he's alledgedly taking.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1yr ago
Following up on a discussion with @drmanhattan16 downthread:
I keep hearing about fascist infiltration or alt-right infiltration into spaces, including themotte, but no one seems to actually be showing examples...
But now I find myself wondering if this has happened in more progressive spaces that were open to debate.
I think the answer is usually going to be "yes."
A couple months ago, during some meta-discussion of disappearing threads, I wrote up my thoughts on conspiracy theories as countersignaling. As long as there's incentive to appear cool, independent, unique, there is incentive to push the boundaries of acceptability. It's called "edgy" for a reason.
One of the common cultural touchstones for edge is forbidden knowledge. As a result, anywhere you find edgy status games, you'll find someone claiming to know whatever it is They don't want you to know. Except...if one can just say it out loud, how cool and secret can it really be? The theorist is incentivized to play up their edge, a rebel who won't be cowed rather than an attention-seeker. As an aside, antisemitism is past its heyday because it's not very good for this. Enough people pattern-match it to "attention-seeker" that it loses its edge. This is the result of decades of memetic immune response to those status games. Of course, given that one very definitely can get banned for it, it retains edgy credentials...sometimes.
(Note that I'm not claiming the antisemites here are just edgy. I understand you're pretty serious about the subject. The motte is a weird place and has other status games; personally, I think that COVID skepticism has a grip on more of the edgelords.)
In the end, some people will find themselves drawn to signal their edge. Those who do so overtly will usually end up banned, unless they signal something really milquetoast, in which case they're probably "cringe." Those with a little more tact, though...they are incentivized to find something under the radar. To maintain that sweet, sweet plausible deniability while still getting a rise out of the opposition. They need something that will prove their status as an independent free-thinker who doesn't fall for the party line.
And they take the black pill.
MelodicBerries
virtus junxit mors non separabit
10mo ago
Remember "creeping Sharia Law" that far-right hysterics were warning about 10-15 years ago? Of course it was always ridiculous, but now something pretty amusing has happened.
‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags
What stood out to me was the support of right-wing activists from nearby towns. So this isn't just a moslem issue, even white Republicans are joined up. Here in Europe, populists like Geert Wilders were often warning about how too many moslem immigrants would threaten liberal values but they've been supplanted by a newer generation of populists that appear to increasingly take a page out of America's right-wing playbook by uniting with moslems against the LGBT crowd.
For liberals it also creates a bizarre spectacle. They've been obsessed with white Christian "fascists" and often turned a blind eye towards immigrants. Many of these immigrants rarely had much in common with them on social issues. They just voted left because of economic interests and the fact that the white left is more likely to let their entire family back home settle in the West.
Another ironic twist is that the supposed "Great Replacement myth" is largely what facilitated this change. Moslems are now a clear supermajority in the city and the change happened relatively quickly. Liberals were demographically replaced by the people they brought in and now feel like they've been hosed. Can't feel much sympathy for those who use immigration as a political weapon against their domestic political enemies.
I wanted to write about the WPATH leaks: the cancers and the shrinks debating over how many of a 12 year old's "multiple personalities" need to be transsexual before they should give them hormones and surgery.
I wanted to write about a woman I know who just got a $90,000 government grant for her instagram hobby farm, alongside hundreds of other fake businesses like "the Black farmers collective." Taxpayers gave her more money than her business will ever have in revenue to play upper-middle-class status games while the few remaining real farmers around her are going out of business.
I wanted to write about watching my friend once again change all the grocery store tags because prices keep skyrocketing as talking heads insist we're imagining it all and everyone's actually getting super rich.
I wanted to write about my state banning non-"cage free" eggs and claiming it won't increase prices... because they negotiated a kickback deal with the remaining suppliers to eat the cost until after the '24 election, after which they can harvest their monopoly rents and some lobby group can release an official report claiming the price increases were unrelated.
I wanted to write about how my state house just banned natural gas hookups and enabled pressuring companies to drop service to existing customers.
I wanted to write about the people chanting "glory to the martyrs by any means necessary" while insisting nobody could possibly suspect them of supporting Hamas, with every leftist somehow getting an identical memo about how to provide cover for them.
But what's the point? Seriously, why even talk about this just to get gaslit by the people who are celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?
You could spend your entire life writing tens of thousands of words explaining and analyzing this insanity, and all it does it give the perpetrators the satisfaction of gloating about getting away with it.
What are we even doing here? Are we just going to keep doing it forever as the country goes completely insane?
Why? What possible good will it do? Is this whole place just a safety release valve to stop any pressure building up against the overton window slamming left faster than the eye can see?
Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good? Can anyone point to an example of it doing any good in the past? Has culture war discussion on the motte ever actually led to anyone solving culture war problems? The closest thing I can come up with are TracingWoodgrain's exposés, which while incredible have hardly moved the needle on public awareness.
Virtually all the energy expended here seems to be vented straight into the void, almost like it's deliberately set up to do so, keeping people arguing in circles until it's too late to do anything about it. And it's been going on for over a decade! When will it stop?
Edit:
I hope this example might get across what I mean. A few weeks ago I wasted time finding out about "multiplicity" (the new social contagion of kids who spend too much time on discord deciding they're all "plural systems" of different personalities). Did a bunch of research, got on a bunch of discords that use the "pluralkit" plugin, found examples of psychologists taking it seriously, started writing a post.
It turned out Gattsuru was already talking about it last year like it was just a normal thing that normies will learn to accept soon.
Yesterday we found out a bunch of WPATH associates all treat it like a legitimate and uncontroversial diagnosis that lots of their "trans kids" mysteriously have. It hardly made a splash in the news. Pretty soon people will be mocking anyone who cares about it.
I realized that any discussion I started on the motte would be pointless. It would just run the same circle of "noticing, denial, minimization, celebration, resigned acceptance" that literally all culture war events go through here.
What good would bringing it to anyone's attention do? Even the most bizarre event that would have been considered unimaginably stupid until the second it happens will just be rationalized away like it's no big deal.
TheBookOfAllan
1yr ago
TERF WARS
Hogwarts legacy, a high budget Harry Potter video game releases in a few weeks, and discussion around it has quickly evolved into another highly charged political issue for many within the gaming sphere.
As background, Harry Potter was created by J.K. Rowling, who in the last number of years has gotten a vitriolic amount of criticism by hard coded members of the blue tribe. Rowling is what is referred to in leftist spheres as a “TERF,” a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In other words, she is a traditional third wave feminist, but does not acknowledge trans women as being equally legitimate as biological females. Criticism of Rowling began in 2020 when she exposed criticism of certain linguistic tendencies that she had progressively seen engross within her social circles. An article was posted on Devex with the headline…
Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate
Rowling took to twitter to attempt to point out some of the inconsistencies in reasoning that she believed these social beliefs couldn’t reconcile with established feminist/progressive worldviews. She began by explaining that ‘people who menstruate,’ used to simply just be called women. And after receiving a bit of criticism herself she extrapolated on the details of her argument.
“If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hated to speak the truth,”
“The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades, feeling kinship because they’re vulnerable in the same way as women—i.e., to male violence—‘hate’ trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences—is a nonsense.”
After the obvious storm of vile that came as a response to this, she then went further in extrapolating her views in an entire blogpost that went into fairly meticulous detail around the entire trans issue as well as major problems that she sees may come as a result of it. I highly encourage you to read it, if not for the argumentative qualities than simply because of the sheer balls of the entire debacle, It wouldn’t be out of place if it was placed on this very culture thread.
Instead of being silenced or somehow intimidated by threats from these cultural forces, she points out that this is primarily one of the motivators of her immediate dislike of the community in general, including their constant use of hyperbole and slurs. The bitter criticism she received did not in any way overwhelm her, but instead made her far more resolute and ingrained to her worldview. She had become more fervently anti-trans since then, to points which are often hilarious. One may lose sight of the grievances often expressed by the left towards public figures, simply due to the sheer amount of it that is consistently thrown into public discourse. But it is important to point out that J.K. Rowling is a legitimate opponent of transgender ideology. Her most recent books have delved into themes that are consistently similar to the themes she has espoused. One book is literally about a detective trying to solve the case of a male serial killer who dresses up as a women in order to fool and kill biological women. Rowling gives extremely large donations to many charities who are their ideological enemies, as well as essentially banning transgender people from using any of her own charities that help victims of female abuse.
Before delving into the responses to this and the subsequent reactions, it is important to give context to what J.K. Rowling encapsulated during the prime years of her Harry Potter authorship. While harry potter is just popular in general, Blue Tribers LOVE Harry Potter, and at one time they >LOVED J.K. Rowling. Rowling’s influence in the early to mid naughts and 2010s cannot be overstated. In fact in many circumstances and social circles people began to read her novels because of her political affiliations, to support those who seemed to have blue coded interests in mind. Harry Potter had become synonymous with feminism and leftism in general, and as a result also became trumpeted by many in the early transgender movement. It isn’t simply because of her opposition to these ideas that she receives the amount of backlash that she does, but because of who she is. She at one point was one of the most influential feminists in the world and was a huge contributor to the cultural power that allowed it to influence so much of society, even in places like academia.
The responses to this given that context is frankly hilarious. It has been quite a long time since the progressive cultural zeitgeist has had such institutional opponent, particularly one that had for so long been such an icon of their movement. It is like if Luke Skywalker had joined the empire at the end of ESB.
This debate is continually devolving as it nears its release, and discussion about the game has been banned on multiple websites for its divisiveness.
It had led to an incredible amount of confusion towards that side of political isle, as regular attacks they are so used to employing, that are usually widely successful, seemingly have no effect on Rowling in the slightest. All they can resort to leading up to the release has been reputation destruction and hostility to those who plan on buying it. The most popular tactic used is guilt by association, who claim that if one buys Hogwarts Legacy, they are therefore inherently transphobic. Another important distinction you may notice is the difficulty many are having with disassociating themselves from what was probably their favorite intellectual property. There seems to be a desire to remove Rowling, but still somehow retain possession of the franchise itself, something that is frankly impossible. Take this for example, where fans removed Rowling’s name from her books before reselling them.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/13/reseller-removes-j-k-rowlings-name-from-harry-potter-books/]
Of course, everyone knows this is impossible. Rowling was wise enough to retain full possession of her intellectual work, and anything, and I mean anything relating to Harry Potter must be directly approved by her and she receives a good sum of the profits as well. Amusement parks, toys, video games, streaming sales, everything. Rowling is Harry Potter. Many now are used to franchises they once enjoyed being influenced in one way or another by these cultural elements in their favor, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the rings, etc. It is highly ironic that a property is receiving so much backlash not for expressing any pro-red views, but simply because the creator does not agree with one of the fundamental viewpoints that have become synonymous with the left.
On the right, this has had an equally hilarious reaction. While certainly not as fervent or significant of a response, many have taken to supporting Rowling and expressing a desire to purchase Hogwarts Legacy as a form of protest. This includes everyone from Neo-cons to White nationalists.
It seems as if hardcoded Blue Tribe members are learning certain facts about modern cultural society that red tribe members have slowly learned throughout the decade or so. Cancel culture does not work on legitimate financial elites. It does not matter to what ends you try to smear Rowling with, she is and will always remain extravagantly wealthy and beyond any real financial or cultural danger. It is my guess that Hogwarts Legacy will sell extraordinarily well, for it looks to be a genuinely good video game, to the point where even those who are not familiar with Harry Potter may be attracted simply due to its quality. It is already the most pre-ordered game on Steam at the moment has no sign of slowing down. I suppose now that I am not making any particular argument in any way, but It is interesting to see a political force that is usually so successful seemingly work overtime for years on one particular target and see nothing but a proverbial scream into the wind.
Jesweez
1yr ago
I read something today which I have long thought deep down, but hadn’t really seen spelled out elsewhere.
Namely, the censoring done by the liberal left, while there, is rather mild in the scheme of things and is probably much less than the same left would be censored by the people it currently censors if that group was in power.
The quote that brought it to my mind was from here, on Richard Hannania’s substack. After a post discussing being banned by Twitter, he drops this at the end of the article.
The right-wing whining in particular gets to me, and another motivation here is I don’t want to end up like my friends… I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.
https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/saying-goodbye-to-twitter
The attitude of censoring opponents seemed to have crystallized for the left around 2016, where I distinctly remember the conversation centering around the limits of tolerating intolerant ideologies. (Which seems to have become fully settled by now, interesting to observe an ideological movement update in real time in that way).
Does Hannania have a point here? Is the issue that the right takes offense with censorship itself, or would the right if it actually gained back power censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way?
Previously I've written about how Musk can Make Twitter Great Again with Celebs&Sports.
But now let me discuss how Musk can use twitter to subvert the regime without even trying: just allow people to have a clear and unfiltered look at the world.
As an example of this, consider the most recent viral content on twitter - more popular than an NBA game happening simultaneously - #wafflehousefight.
As the mainstream media might describe it, "some drunken revelers at a Waffle House in Austin, TX engaged in an altercation with Waffle House employees." At least that's what they might write if they covered it, but only yahoo and foxnews have bothered to actually cover it. And of course the reason is clear: the story is a group of morbidly obese angry black women assaulting a pretty-ish blonde (and clearly red tribe working class) waffle house employee after demanding the "white girl" make them waffles while they sat in a closed off area. The blonde white woman is clearly the hero of the engagement. It's a clear glimpse of what the mainstream media + tech companies normally try to hide: a disproportionate amount of crime is just black people getting angry and doing dumb stuff.
Quite a lot of tech and media tries to cover things like this up. Reddit has banned factual subreddits like /r/hatecrimehoaxes, /r/greatapes (black people doing crimes) and similar. The mainstream media similarly downplays stories such as black nationalist terrorists shooting up subways, as well as using tactics like not including the attackers photo.
Numbers, for anyone curious. Newspaper have also stopped publishing mugshot galleries to prevent people from noticing.
When the entire network works together to suppress facts, they generally succeed. But twitter can change that.
Twitter is popular because of celebrities and sports, and the content most people consume there will continue to be 90%+ celebrities and sports. But with stories like #wafflehousefight, Musk has an opportunity to give people a glimpse of what is being hidden from them. People may begin to realize that their eyes aren't lying, it's merely a set of elites who are gaslighting them.
Sam_I_am
1mo ago
Gamergate 2
A week or 2 ago, someone made a Steam group called Sweet Baby Inc Detected. This group exists to let people know which games have involved the consultant company Sweet Baby Inc.
Sweet Baby inc is a company that seems to be dedicated to adding more diversity to video games, and many people believe their involvement makes games worse.
This heated up when an employee of Sweet Baby Inc tried to get people to report the group and it's founder in hopes that they get banned
This has been in my youtube and twitter feed quite a bit in the past couple weeks. Mostly it's accounts of employees behaving in similar ways as the above tweet.
I don't really play AAA games very much, so the actual effect of Sweet Baby on those games is not very salient to me, but when reading and hearing about it, I can't help but notice that they usually aren't giving many examples of of aspects of these games that people really think are bad because of Sweet Baby. In fact, before this controversy, the main thing gamers were complaining about was in-game transactions.
What people are mostly talking about is how their employees conduct themselves on social media. And even though the way they often conduct themselves is unprofessional and dumb, It's also understandable when there's a hundred thousand people telling you how bad your work is and trying to stop people from doing business with you.
What are your thoughts?
Some here may know of Keith Woods, who is a well-known figure on the Dissident Right. He had his Twitter account unbanned a month ago. Keith is Irish, and he made a tweet about an upcoming hate speech law being considered in Ireland:
Ireland is about to pass one of the most radical hate speech bills yet. Merely possessing "hateful" material on your devices is enough to face prison time.
Not only that, but the burden of proof is shifted to the accused, who is expected to prove they didn't intend to use the material to "spread hate". This clause is so radical that even the Trotskyist People Before Profit opposed it as a flagrant violation of civil liberties. Dark times.
Keith was retweeted by Elon Musk who replied "This is a massive attack against freedom of speech". He was subsequently retweeted by Trump Jr. and retweeted by Jordan Peterson.
So overall Keith's brief analysis of the hate speech law reached 11 million people, and sparked debate among opposition politicians and gave the law more public visilbity than it had before.
There's a very slim chance that any of those three know who Keith is or his politics. But it's still a good demonstration of why Twitter is important, and being banned from the public square really does shift the discourse. Of course that is the entire point.
New Florida hate speech law coming out of Jerusalem
After Trump Jr. retweeted Keith, Keith made a reply that was quite strategically intended to goad Trump Jr. into attacking Ron DeSantis for his recent trip to Israel:
Thank you for standing for free speech!
What's happening in the West is tragic. And now Meatball Ron is signing hate-speech legislation for Florida in a foreign country. I hope you take your country back!
You see, Ron DeSantis made a secret trip to Jerusalem (!) last week where he signed a new Florida hate-speech law which "aims to crack down on antisemitic and other heritage based threats." The press release, Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Legislation in Israel Further Combatting Antisemitism provides a summary, and one of the more significant parts of the legislation is:
Creating a new trespass offense if a person who is not authorized, licensed, or invited willfully enters the campus of a state college or university for the purpose of threatening or intimidating another person, and is warned by the institution to depart and refuses to do so
In tandem with Florida, a couple of weeks ago it was reported that several people from the 2017 torch-light march in Charlottesville on the UVA campus are being charged with felonies on the basis of burning an object with an intent to intimidate. So there seems to be a broader strategy of expanding the definition of "intimidation" to mean "politically incorrect protest" and ban those displays from public universities.
Another significant fact of this Florida Law which was signed in Jerusalem is that it mandates that all manner of offenses, including minor litter (i.e. flyering) are to all be reclassified as hate crimes for statistical reporting. The ADL and various Jewish organizations were recently up in arms that hate crime data did not show enough of a rise an antisemitism, so there's a significant effort to expand the reporting of "hate crime" to include all manner of things.
I am unfortunately not surprised by this affair- an American hate speech law being signed in Jersualem. It goes to show that just because a conservative plays tough on some culture war issues does not at all mean they are an ally. The conservative establishment is not an ally, it's entirely compromised. Supporting conservatism is not an option for people who oppose this sort of influence. I would support Biden over Ron DeSantis at this point- I would be genuinely afraid of what Ron would do at the behest of Israel.
In support of mistake theorists and against outgroup reification
There's even more drama in the AI art sphere than before. Actually multiple dramas, all around Stable Diffusion, as is customary now. Artists on Twitter are threatening class action, half-seriously rallying around Greg "by greg rutkowsky, trending on artstation, 8K" Rutkowsky, Palmers and others; Danbooru is being slowly purged of content on takedown requests, in the wake of NovelAI SD-based image generator release (drastically superior to earlier stuff, and allegedly tracing over whole pictures); StabilityAI Discord has banned Automatic111, a hero and pillar of the community, the developer of the leading UI, due to him being an asocial Russian asshole implementing means to handle the recently leaked (by a third party) NovelAI models and allegedly stealing like 20 lines from their proprietary code, apparently to placate NAI and send a message to future pirates and business partners about Emad's priorities; Voldy denies the theft and counter-accuses NAI of copying his prompt-weights code without license; Stability staff/mods, it is claimed, have taken over a community subreddit by guile, to no comment from higher-ups (update: Emad magnanimously agreed to concessions); Emad keeps postponing the release of an improved 1.5 citing great responsibility and «tweaks to handle extreme cases» which is taken to mean «castration on dataset level». It looks like another Open-for-profit company has been revealed as an embrace-extend-extinguish scheme, and we will have to learn, after all, to pool resources on our own. Or maybe it's all catastrophizing by excitable FOSS fanatics. The situation develops rapidly.
…But I'd rather leave the drama discussion to @Porean, seeing as he's posted it first, and talk about something less spicy. After interactions with Hlynka here, I want to share an observation about conflict theoretic lens and unhelpful labeling of the outgroup – such as artists on 4chan /ic board calling AI users «pajeet».
This has to do with Emad's origins and the racism-tinged contempt for «soulless tech bro nerds» pervasive among the 4chan creative intelligentsia, of course (the Twitterati attack soulless tech bro nerds as such, without racial qualifiers). No equivalent prejudice against South Asians exists in Russia. So, there AI users and people arguing in favor of this tech are labeled «neuroschizo». I wonder about other sectors of the Internet.
Yes, singular «pajeet», singular «schizo». It's not just a meme. They (well, many of them) report it to mods as such, they whine about a sleep-deprived obsessive fanatic who keeps pestering them in their strongholds (a not-so-implausible scenario, but clearly wrong in this case). And I posit that this is Indicative Of A General Failure-Prone Tendency Of Conflict Theorists, who have a powerful presence here. I have ridiculed Scott's Conflict-Mistake framing myself. But the core objection – namely that the Conflict model is evidently true, as well as people's willingness to lie in service of their terminal goals – may be a cognitive poison pill.
Anonymous imageboards have been a mighty forge of internet culture. What is often underappreciated is how strong they are pound for pound, in terms of active user or post count – even the biggest 4chan boards are like a middling subreddit or Discord/Telegram chat. Why is that? Freedom of expression, lack of reputation and all that jazz, you know it. But I think that they're a bit similar to latent diffusion models: they are more efficient, due to compressing the trappings of a social network into a lower-dimensionality space. By stripping identification and the complexity it can carry, they allow – nay, force – individual voices to be associated instead with archetypes of groups, in every individual interaction. You cannot be a token, like on Facebook or what have you: everyone is a type, but which type, depends on the mood and the topic. This inflates the effective population size to parity with a big society where full connectedness is impossible and knowledge about others must spread by rumors and vague stereotypes. It makes boards a self-running, accelerated social experiment. (admittedly this theory needs more polish)
Anons know, of course, that they are few in number (although a Legion). And they can see that people are pretty stable in their quirks. And they are aware that people can lie when it serves them. So they overcorrect into reifying recognizable opinions as marks of an individual or at most a small coherent group. Someone sneering at «Chuds» comes, in /pol/ mythology, from some specific discord – and needs to be reminded that he «will never be a woman». On /ic/, someone explaining how latent diffusion works is… «cool story pajeet».
It's an experiment that represents, at small scale, the superstitious nature of network age paranoia. In larger communities, the same assumptions are applied on group level. Everyone who disagrees with me is a Russian bot! Except if I'm a Putin loyalist, then it's gotta be ЦІПСО, Ukrainian propaganda division (that's what I am these days, according to many of my compatriots). If you're an American Right-Winger, it's some sort of GloboHomo WEF talking head. If you're a good progressive, it's probably a Fascist representing a unified anti-Lib front.
This is psychologically comforting for a few simple reasons.
First, such a problem is very legible and simple. There's no structural reason for the thing that oppresses you to exist and be the way it is, no grandiose system of incentives, just malign will of a finite set of human actors, fallible flesh and blood with a self-serving narrative.
Second, it's surmountable. Calling the enemy out is half the battle; getting him banned is another one fourth, after that you just gather up the boys and attack his turf. The hostile group is not representing the majority of the population (usually is puny), is easily identifiable and kinda ridiculous. Maybe just one weirdo, a «pajeet» or «chud» at that.
Third, and most importantly, it excuses ignorance. You can plug bananas in your ears because conflict theory predicts that the enemy will lie, or try to deceive you while not technically lying, to demoralize you. And why would he keep investing effort into that, coming up with arguments tailor-made for you? Of course because his onslaught isn't really going according to plan, in part, precisely because people are not falling for it! That's what those artists think too. AI proponents are lying collectively to break their spirit; they just need to wait it out while the pajeet runs out of steam; they don't need to adapt.
They're wrong.
It's unhelpful to have a dead wrong model of the conflict they really are in. One big and obvious reason: because it precludes communication with people who are different but not the enemy and are trying to help – or at least negotiate. In trying to not be a 0HPLovecraft-style quokka, such a conflict theorist ends up being simply a myopic rat, destined for being made marginal and obsolete. The great discovery that counteragents might lie is a point of a wholly unreasonable pride of a certain brand of reactionaries. It's also a source of a delusion as damaging as the inability to conceive of bad faith.
Tl;DR: Conflict theories have a failure mode or reifying the opposition, that can lead to cognitive closure and lack of response to arguments. The very assumption of bad faith, without extra precaution, bootstraps the development of theories on how bad faith propaganda is being delivered to you, for what reason and by whom. From then on, truth is ever harder to find. People should remember that, when assuming they can see through the opponent and dismissing opponents out of hand.
WhiningCoil
7mo ago
I want to talk about game mods.
I cut my teeth on Doom WADs back in the day. WADs that committed flagrant copyright infringment like Alien or Star Wars TC WADs. WADs that replaced all the pinkies with Barney the purple dinosaur so you could shoot him with your shotgun. I played wacky maps like border1 for Team Fortress. And lets not forget the nude hack for Drakan: Order of the Flame. Or the plethora of offensive or innapropriate character models modded into every Quake.
Back then, I don't remember there being any sort of centralized modding sites. The Doom wads I actually found at local computer shows, probably sold "illegally" on a handful of floppies. Many of the maps or models would just download automatically when you joined a private server in Quake 1/2/3. At least I think they did? Maybe not Quake 1. And it's utterly inconceivable to me that id Software would have issued any sort of statement about the offensive material being made for their game, counter cultural as they were. I sincerely doubt they would have put any thought to it what so ever. It was simply somebody else's business.
Perusing Based Mods, a collection of mods generally banned from everywhere else, paints a grim picture of the political landscape of modding. I hate that I even have to use the phrase "political landscape of modding". Doing whatever the fuck you want with something you own should not be a political act. Alas, here we are.
Many of the mods follow a theme. Removing LGBT flags or pronoun selection from games. A few go further and remove homosexuality as content from games. Some remove anachronistic or nonsensicle diversity from games. Some just make all the people white because fuck it why not? A few are more accurate localizations versus whatever Americanized nonsense activist put out stateside. Like restoring the submissive personality to characters which localizers decided had to be more girl bossy.
The latest one I've seen which hasn't been banned everywhere, but which none the less appears to be walking a thin line, is the Better Aesthetics mod for Baldur's Gate 3. I'll let it speak for itself.
Baldur's Better Aesthetics is an attempt to make Baldur's Gate 3 look more like Faerûn as we know it. More Dwarves will have beards, more Duergar will be bald (including the women!), and fewer Githyanki will be sporting big ol' whiskers. You will also notice fewer people from Chult, but more from Calimshan, and there will no longer be ANY Half-Orcs with pink hair. Please note, these changes aren't universal. A couple of Dwarves have assimilated and gone clean-shaven, and a few lore-accurate descendants of Chultan foreigners remain (like the legendary Duke Ulder Ravengard). But you will certainly notice a difference!
I actually found this thread discussing the changes it made, and the lore reasons for them, interesting. In fact, it turned Baldur's Gate 3 into the Sword Coast I more or less recognize from Baldur's Gate 1 and 2! None the less, at an object level it makes Baldur's Gate 3 less "diverse", and thus it's problematic. I can't say for certain, but I find it suspicious there is zero mention of it on the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit. The single mention of it on the Steam forums is locked. Zero mention on the GOG forum for the game. I can't say for certain the existence of this mod is being broadly censored from the usual captured spaces. But I can't rule it out either.
It's just all so tiring. I go back and play old games, and I'm reminded just how different and natural they are. They don't have weird diversity polemics oozing out of every nook and cranny. Or the crypto-racism of having every evil or stupid character look like me, and every cool, heroic and most importantly moral character look like a Gen Z Nonbinary Zirboss. You aren't constantly confronted with the equivilent of a pride parade every time you meet a new cast of characters. And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.
My wife and I have a lot of discussions about what we'll expose our daughter to, and we've more or less decided the cut off is the 90's just to be safe. There were still normal shows, books or games that generally depicted normal cis hetero white families like ours positively. To subject her to modern media feels like child abuse. To the 90's it is. Everything after that is just too damned gay for children.
Trump ordered to pay $355 million in penalties in New York Fraud case. He's also banned from operating any business in New York for three years, the Trump Organization is banned from borrowing money from any financial institution registered in New York for three years, and Eric and Don Jr each get their own $4 million dollar fines, and the former CFO Alan Wiesselberg owes a million. However the court also reverses its earlier ruling to cancel defendant's business certificates (aka the "corporate death penalty"). Instead an Independent Monitor will continue at the Trump Organisation for three years to ensure that it meets its financial reporting obligations.
All the penalties come with interest, so the defendants collectively owe around $450 million, not counting the $80+ million owed to E Jean Carroll. Even for Trump, that's serious money. Trump has of course said he will appeal, but to do so he will need to put up the full amount in bond first, and it's not clear he has the liquidity to do that - and as mentioned above he's now limited in his ability to borrow. And even if he manages to get the cash together, it doesn't seem to me that his prospects on appeal are at all good. Higher courts typically defer to the trial court's fact-finding, and Judge Engoron is not kind in his assessment of the credibility of Trump and his witnesses.
Lizzardspawn
1yr ago
Kanye West is banned from Twitter. So obviously any definition of free speech absolutism doesn't include him.
Snark aside - and the anti Elon crowd is quite snarky - the whole free speech for people in meltdown or not quite mentally stable is interesting question. My approach to human rights have often been - approve of them as long as I get to define who the humans are. So it turns out that my approach to free speech is that while I will go to extremes to protect the free, I don't consider the incoherent ramblings of a drunken hobo as speech.
On the other hand while it is easy to say "Cut his access to the social networks until he has cool down, so he stop hurting himself" and probably it is the best thing to do - I can see how a policy of for your own good can be used to cull all the edgy content.
Porean
1yr ago
To which tribe shall the gift of AI fall?
In a not particularly surprising move, FurAffinity has banned AI content from their website. Ostensible justification is the presence of copied artist signatures in AI artpieces, indicating a lack of authenticity. Ilforte has skinned the «soul-of-the-artist» argument enough and I do not wish to dwell on it.
What's more important, in my view, is what this rejection means for the political future of AI. Previous discussions on TheMotte have demonstrated the polarizing effects of AI generated content — some are deathly afraid of it, others are practically AI-supremacists. Extrapolating outwards from this admittedly-selective community, I expect the use of AI-tools to become a hotly debated culture war topic within the next 5 years.
If you agree on this much, then I have one question: which party ends up as the Party of AI?
My kneejerk answer to this was, "The Left, of course." Left-wingers dominate the technological sector. AI development is getting pushed forward by a mix of grey/blue tribers, and the null hypothesis is that things keep going this way. But the artists and the musicians and the writers and so on are all vaguely left-aligned as well, and they are currently the main reactionary force against AI.
Patriot Front's Conspiracy to Riot in Coeur d'Alene Idaho
This is another post in what has become a series covering widespread lawfare against dissident-right activists, previously I have covered:
- The Civil Lawsuit against Richard Spencer and other organizers of the Charlottesville protest on charges of "Conspiracy to violate the civil rights" of the defendants, which they were found guilty of at trial by a jury.
- Some Charlottesville Tiki Torch marchers were charged with a felony of "burning an object with an intent to intimidate", to which a couple have already pled guilty.
- Florida State Representatives made a secret trip to Jerusalem, where Ron DeSantis publicly signed a hate speech law which also expanded on verbiage surrounding "intent to intimidate."
- Last year, 31 members of Patriot Front were arrested on their way to protest in Coeur D'Alene Idaho during a Pride event. They were charged with "Conspiracy to Riot" and this post provides an update on that.
The arrest of the Patriot Front men on their way to protest in Idaho (seen here from their perspective) became a big news story, with the dox and mugshots widely published and applauded, even as anti-hate NGOs admitted that rioting was not the M.O of the group. At the time, even I didn't think the charges stood a chance of going anywhere, even if police wanted to argue for probable cause there was no way a prosecutor would dig a little into the group, see quite clearly they intended to protest in the exact way that have been documented to protest over a dozen times, and then claim that these men came to riot. But I was wrong, and charges were pursued on a single count of "conspiracy to riot."
30 out of 31 members pled Not Guilty and opted for jury trials, 1 member pled guilty to a lesser charge of disturbing the peace and was sentenced to 180 days in jail with 179 days suspended. The first jury trial of 5 members who pled not-guilty to conspiracy charges was concluded last week, where a jury of 6 unanimously found them guilty of conspiracy to riot. They were sentenced to 5 days in jail with 2 days served and banned from downtown for a year.
Having followed the trial in various news stories, the evidence provided by the prosecution seemed to solely entail potentiality, as in "these shields could be used to bash people, and the flagpoles could have been used to hit people from behind the shields." It was noted that the shields the men were carrying had scratches on them and the flagpoles were longer than normal as suspicious, even while the testifying officers admitted that other protestors were open carrying, and it is not illegal to have a shield.
It's notable here that the members were arrested on their way to protest, they did not even have the opportunity to leave the vehicle. All indications are that they planned to march in the exact manner they have done many times before. My confusion, even after following the coverage, is whether or not the prosecution is alleging that this behavior would have constituted a riot, or if they solely relied on speculation for how the shield and flag poles and such could have been used to riot. If the Patriot Front had made it to the park and marched, would they have been arrested for rioting? I don't think so, somehow stopping them before they even had the opportunity gave the prosecution more leeway to plant in the minds of the jury all the things they could have done when they got to the park. It's not clear how this conviction will impact the other trials.
Needless to say, civil rights organizations are not lining up to defend these men (in contrast, the "civil rights conspiracy" Charlottesville lawsuit was concocted in a Manhattan office with a multimillion, NGO-funded war chest, with a lead attorney who compared the lawsuit to the Warsaw ghetto resistance). The PF men have relied on public defenders and faith in the jury process.
FBI Whistleblower Reveals Malfeasance In Patriot Front Trial (?)
The one form of institutional opposition to this prosecution has come from an article published last week by the Idaho Tribune. This trial is only the tip of the iceberg. Not only were PF men arrested, doxed, and charged with conspiracy to riot, but their phones were handed over to the FBI by the State for data extraction. The prosecution claims it cannot present the phones to the defendants in their conspiracy cases, as the State no longer as possession of the evidence. It turns out, nobody from the State ever saw a warrant for those phones before, or since, handing them over to the FBI. Not only that, but according to a whistleblower an FBI SSRA in Idaho was removed from his position because he refused to a sign a warrant for the phones due to lack of probable cause:
“I have friends who are in Couer D'alene who refused to write a Search Warrant for PF [Patriot Front] phones because the PC [probable cause] didn't exist. FBI HQ removed the supervisor from his position.” ...
A second source that will remain anonymous confirmed to the Tribune that Shoffstall was asked to write a warrant to procure data in the phones of the detained Patriot Front members.
After Shoffstall refused, he was punished. Sources tell the Tribune that he was sent on a “special assignment” to work at the FBI’s National Threat Operation Center, which is essentially a call center, where Schoffstall would ride a desk, instead of continuing his work in the field.
The Idaho Tribune was able to speak with Special Agent Schoffstall, who confirmed that he is no longer assigned to the Coeur d’Alene office because he is on a “temporary assignment,” and that he cannot disclose any further information...
In a court proceeding held on Tuesday July 18th, Thomas Rousseau’s public defender Kinzo Mihara vigorously argued that his client should be able to get data from his phone that depicts “the dress rehearsal from the day before” the events of June 11th.
However, the prosecution in all of these cases has not made these phones, nor the warrant that allowed the FBI to perform data extractions on the phones, available to the defense.
Mihara argued saying:
"We want media files from that phone… We have no evidence from the state of what was done, who did it when they did it, why they did it…
“Where is this search warrant? What search warrant? Which judge signed the search warrant? What was the material to be seized, the information to be looked for? Why don't we have it back? In a recent case I have search warrant from here signed by your Honor. It's to seize a black box out of a truck. They seized the black box, they left the copy of the warrant. If you're gonna grab physical items, our constitution demands it being pursuant to a warrant. And the criminal rules, both federal and state, cited to the court demand as copy of the warrant be turned over. We had no warrant from the state and we have no, we have no communications from law enforcement, which another judge in this court, judge Randalls expressly ruled to that. That's fair game. We asked for it. We want it, your Honor. We asked for it way back in February and it hasn’t been turned over.”
IANAL, so I cannot tell how serious this issue is, but reading through this brief it seems Rousseau's attorney is claiming the phones contain potentially-exculpatory evidence and that the State has "parked" the evidence with an FBI based on a warrant that nobody has ever seen and has not been provided to the defense.
The State's argument in this case is dangerous. Any time it wishes to shield exculpatory evidence from a criminal defendant, the State merely needs to have a law enforcement officer "park" the evidence with a federal law enforcement colleague and claim that it cannot produce such evidence ... taking it out of reach of a criminally-accused defendant. This is antithetical to due process and embodies the very tyranny our forefathers saw in their British masters.
In these cases, from what I can tell the public defenders have done a good job and they are receiving a good defense, though maybe not the best money could buy. But I'm not sure what exculpatory evidence could be on the phone: it seems the prosecution wasn't even denying that they planned to march in the way they've done every other time, they were just arguing that their actual plans constituted a plan to riot.
Lessons Learned
So you're right wing, but anonymously shit-posting online isn't enough for you, you want to organize IRL. Maybe you want to march with your friends against a Pride event. Well you better be prepared to be arrested, doxed with your face plastered in national news, charged with a conspiracy, and have your phone be handed to the FBI. Some people on the DR argue that it's an "overly online" movement, but this case shows that IRL activism is at the moment not worth the risk.
Patriot Front has some cringe optics, Rousseau's speeches are really cringe, but if their activism is accomplishing anything, it's exploring the boundaries of legal right-wing expression, which is not where you would expect it to be based on 1A protections.
Devonshire
1yr ago
I am not sure how big the contingent of "wants to use slurs" is. Certainly I do not encounter people in my right-leaning spaces wanting to use the n-word. I guess I can think of a few if I try really hard, but I mostly think of examples of them being told to control themselves. Even the f-slur gets exasperated sighs.
Or maybe you are being expansive in your use of slurs. You can get quite a bit of power by declaring other people's arguments off-limits and you can do that by calling them slurs. Twitter banned the "NPC" meme because it was dehumanizing, and reddit banned the word "groomer."
RPG.net is very good at making people uncomfortable, because say the wrong thing and you are dead, and "lol just do not say wrong things" is hard when today's wrong thing was a normal thing five years ago. Was ResetEra running "smoothly" on their old server?
Something Like A Sketch of A Rationalist-Adjacent Political Program
The subculture associated with the LessWrong diaspora and forums in its sphere has a distinct political approach worth interrogating. At least since The Californian Ideology was published people have noticed "silicon valley types" tend to engage with governance in a way that puts them in a unique and honestly awkward position relative to the US status quo. A decade ago Scott said the cultural signifiers of this group were:
"libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football 'sportsball', getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk."
They might have been less reform-minded at the time, but today there is a loose set of internally coherent policies we can identify with the heirs of that scene. 'Grey Tribe' (I really wish there was a better catch-all term) tends to have three broadly identifiable commitments unified by a vision of politics as an attempt to achieve administrative efficiency, in a way they tend to imagine as post-political. Many of the policies under each category naturally overlap with one another. I have tried to keep the list to things I have seen or heard discussed in these circles. The first is a broad institutionalist critique ("Meta-Politics"), the second is an intolerance for the rent-seeking behavior commonly used as a dealmaking instrument ("Rent-Aversion") and the third includes both a select few object-level concerns - I'm particularly interested in any more of these you could identify - and an inclination to shift status quo functions off the state and on to trusted markets and experts ("Optimizability").
Meta-Politics
Rats tend to be, relative to other smart people, interested in comprehensive reform of, or imagining alternatives within, Constitutional Political Economy. Hacking at the root instead of the branches of inefficiency. Here is what I imagine they are likely to suggest on that front.
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Electoral Reform: Widely popular given the perceived inefficiency of FPTP. Often comes as support for Instant-Runoff ("Ranked Choice") Voting, or the Single-Transferable Vote in the case of Proportional Representation advocates, who are ironically overrepresented. The more distinctly Rat position tends to be support for STAR over IRV/RCV, and something like Allocated Score over STV. Occasionally: Quadratic voting, Independently drawn districts, Unitary Primaries, Fusion voting.
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Legislative Reform: Relatively more proportionally representative legislatures. Increased House Apportionment, e.g. the Cube Root Law. Occasionally more unique proposals like introducing secret ballots to congressional voting procedures. Paying legislators competitively with top talent, as well as doing the same for their (substantially increased) staff. Codify law on a GitHub clone, and fold the Federal Register/CFR in to the same site.
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Pseudo-Futarchy: Utilizing prediction markets to generate more reliable information for agency regulators and legislative deliberation. Low hanging fruit.
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Meritocracy: Re-legalize and center the use of g-loaded tests for cognitively demanding public and private employment.
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State Capacity: Move towards a legible society through national identification systems, unified federal databases, and modernized technology infrastructure. Nationwide ERIC to replace Crosscheck. Hire, fire, and compensate administrative talent commensurate with their skill.
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Private Governance: Of particular interest to Bay Area writers. Why try for voice when you can exit? Charter Cities Institute, Prospera, Seasteading, etc. Replace poorly aligned democratic incentives with the productive clarity of polities competing for workers and firms in a market of policy regimes. Long libertarian history of related visions - Puydt's Panarchy, Nozick's Meta-Utopia, Yarvin's Patchwork, Scott's Atomic Communitarianism all grasp at similar intuitions. Looks more like SEZs in a domestic political context.
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Libertarian Paternalism: Well aligned with Grey Tribe instincts even if some specific claims fell to the replication Crisis. Use of choice architecture to encourage but not coerce prosocial action.
Adjacent: e-governance, vTaiwan, sortition assemblies
Rent-Aversion
Deliberative lawmaking between representatives of particular communities with their own interests will on some level always be about managing the distribution of gains and losses of some new condition or proposed change. Rationalist see this and, with a quasi-libertarian read of the situation, see a mess of rent-seeking carve-outs left in the wake of policymaking that is not meaningfully distinct from corruption. A lot of their policy approach concerns the abolition of (non-schumpeterian) artificial rents and the redistribution of natural rents away from private capture.
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Occupational Licensing: Lift artificial caps on doctors and residency in the US. Institute licensing reciprocity with peer states like Canada. Broad abandonment of loosening of licensing regimes, especially ones simply serving as a tertiary education filter.
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FDA Reform: Reciprocity with peer states for recognition of drugs. Generalize Operation Warp Speed for all applications. Prime target for comprehensive restructuring.
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NEPA Abolition: Environmental protection suits have been co-opted and abused to extract rents by incumbent landowners. The more interesting question is how to structure law that can achieve some of the environmentalist goals of the original legislation.
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Zoning Reform: Municipal control of land use may be the single most costly norm in US law. Ideally abolish all land use restrictions excepting designated zones for heavy industry, and simply rely on a (clear and independently drafted) building code. Pairs well with privatized governance as a single beneficiary of land policy internalizes all externalities.
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Carbon Taxes: Production and consumption that releases carbon in to the atmosphere is a simple underpriced negative externality.
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Land Value Taxation: Tax the full annualized market value of land, exempting all improvements and constructions on top of it. As supply is unaffected, this tax incurs no deadweight loss, improving economic efficiency when it substitutes other taxes, and arguably improving allocative efficiency of land.
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Destination-based Cash Flow Taxation: Replace Corporate Income Taxation with a tax on firm profits after full expensing of new capital investment via the transfer of an equivalent tradeable tax credit, with border adjustment to simplify compliance and nullify tax haven incentives. Resulting tax falls solely on consumption owed to supernormal profit/capital rents. Lacks deadweight loss. Some capital incomes are earned, some are luck. This targets the latter.
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Jones Act/1905 Dredging Act: Domestic shipping requires American ships, which acts as a distortionary subsidy to American industry. Similarly, American ports are under-dredged because a 1905 law required American ships to do the dredging, and ours are now internationally subpar at that task. These policies are something of synecdoche for relic rent-seeking behavior that we all grew up a little poorer for.
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Subsidy Abolition: Oil, agriculture, sports - substantial subsidies flow arbitrarily to wielders of political attention. Subsidies have a place in industries of national security importance or industrial policy planning, like semiconductor manufacturing, but not stadiums.
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Outlaw Non-competes: Non-compete agreements distort labor markets and should be banned at the federal level.
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Open Access Journals: Academic journals only serve to poorly gate-keep scholarship. Make a public sci-hub alternative. Likewise, revive the original Google Books vision of full, readily accessible digitization.
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IP Reform: Tax patents proportional to a self-assessed value under an option for public purchase (Harberger taxation), buy them to put them in the public domain at a price determined at public auction (Kremer Buyouts), or some other variation
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School Choice: Introduce market competition and consumer preference into schools through education vouchers. Dovetails well with LVT and zoning reform as it decouples municipal property taxation from school quality.
Adjacent: Strategic litigation reform, Civil Asset Forfeiture, Real Estate/Car Dealership mandates
Optimizability
Arguably where the neoliberalism of rat politics shines through. This is a change in state outputs, as opposed to Meta-Politics' focus on inputs to functionality. The Grey Tribe prefers policy-informed approaches to achieve goals it broadly shares with liberals, as well as speculative approaches to achieve goals it often does not. Many suggestions are just particular instantiations of the guiding anti-regulatory principle of market liberalization.
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Market Monetarism: Replace the inflation and unemployment mandate of central banks with NGDP Targeting (sometimes Gross Labor Income Targeting) with innovative instruments of monetary policy when at the ZLB. This has been popular on LW since the recession, and macro has slowly moved closer to that direction.
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Permitting Reform: The legal ability to perform large or atypical tasks is significantly harder than it once was. The continual updating of Nuclear Plant regulatory requirements during the construction process made them de facto illegal. Likewise constrains advancements in rail, geothermal, hydrogen airships, autonomous cars, autonomous drones.
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Grant Reform: Lead researchers by their own reckoning burn time and money writing individual federal grant applications. Move towards a system of cooperative, directed, institutional research funded by large block grants. Similarly, employ Romer's Self-Organizing Industry Boards for private innovation.
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Direct Transfer Benefits: UBI, NIT, whatever you want to call it. Replace the myriad difficult to navigate system of state programs with an income floor ensured through direct cash transfers. Progressive income tax structures (or some substitute) recoup the transfer so it maximally targets those with no alternative income.
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Organ Markets: Regulated, compensated sale of spare kidneys as we currently do for blood plasma.
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Open Borders: Provided some minimal health/criminality screening, uncap immigration. American institutions and localized production act as a multiplier on labor productivity. Simply increasing available labor grows general production more than linearly with the number of added workers. Some culture transplant and golden goose concerns, but this is very popular.
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Free IVF: Polygenic screening during IVF allows health, including likely cognitive performance, to be estimated in fertilized embryos before implantation. The multiplier on this intervention is likely well above costs even at this early stage, and should be free and subsidized.
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Pragmatic Criminal Justice Reform: Anti-social violence is concentrated in young men with high risk tolerance, low intelligence, and high time preference. The intentionally slow, abstracted process of criminal prosecution fails to disincentivize this cohort. Consequences can be lower so long as they are swift and expectable.
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Factory Farm Ban: Current law forbids the recording of industrial livestock processing. These laws should be lifted and their contents infoblasted to the public until reform is inevitable. Likewise, ban octopus farming and shrimp eyestalk ablation
Adjacent: Free GLP-1 agonists, Drug decriminalization, Geoengineering
Sometimes people say this scene's politics are identifiable in the Progress Studies publications, or in the Neoliberal orgs, or esoterically in Bostrom papers about singletons. I think, while conversant with all of those, it has its own MO. It is now mature and active enough that its originating, 'post-political' self-conception is in tension with its desire to effect change. I kept this in mind particularly with how slow the relevant orgs were to get any serious lobbying presence on the Hill for AI.
Regardless, this seems like a fitting technocratic vision for a group that sees itself as cosmopolitan, longtermist, and high-decoupling. Improve the function of the state as if agnostic to its ends, socialize rent-claims when they must exist and abolish them everywhere else, lean into the innately productive forces of well structured, well priced markets. If anything what stands out in this sketch is what is missing.
I think this broadly captures the political proposals I've seen discussed in those circles, and how they relate. Interested if there's any substantial disagreement, missing pieces or elements of rationalist political thought that should be explained, or policy proposals you think also fit. Also interested in blind spots, or how you imagining something like this list changing in 10, 20 years if the people in question continue to become more organized or active.
Ordinarily I wouldn't post personal Reddit drama here, but the thread is slow and I'm mad.
Here is a post that I saw on /r/baseball:
Anthony Bass promoting anti-LGBTQ propaganda on his Instagram
You probably noticed that the thread is locked with a moderator message: "The trolls are flooding in, and the conversation has run its course at this point. Friendly reminder to love your neighbor, and that it's not intolerant to oppose bigotry. Everyone have a nice holiday Monday!"
This message was posted only a few minutes after I was permanantly banned from /r/baseball for comments in that very thread! In fact, I believe they are referring to me as one of the "trolls flooding in". Lets take a look under the hood to see what counts as perma-ban and threadlock-worthy comments.
First, the actual article in question. Anthony Bass is a pitcher for the Toronto Blue Jays. He posted an Instagram story saying Christians should boycott Target and Bud Light. That's it. That's the "anti-LGBTQ propaganda". I posted a top-level comment in the thread sarcastically making this point.
Is this a high-effort comment? No, but if you are familiar with the sports subs at all then you know that this type of low-effort sarcasm is all over the place. That's the posting culture there. I also got involved in another comment thread.
JaysRaineman73 -18 points 2 hours ago: "Who the fuck cares. So tired of this shit. I only care about how he plays on the field. If he’s not abusing or hurting anyone, it’s irrelevant."
realparkingbrake 11 points 2 hours ago: "On what planet does denying people the same rights as everyone else not qualify as abusing or hurting them?"
QuantumFreakonomics -4 points 2 hours ago: "What rights do they not have? Name them? How is he hurting anyone? How does asking people to not purchase products from a specific mega-corp hurt anyone? Am I hurting people every time I go to Walmart and not Target? Please, I’m begging you. Actually think about the things you are saying. Don’t just parrot the same irrelevant lines you’ve seen other people use."
PuppyPunter21 4 points an hour ago: "Well, if any players live in Florida, they have recently passed quite a few laws targeted against them. The continued promotion of these types of boycotts encites more hate. Covid caused more hate towards Asians, Kayne West promoted more antisemitism. Ignoring it isn't a solution."
QuantumFreakonomics 3 points an hour ago: " 'Well, if any players live in Florida, they have recently passed quite a few laws targeted against them.' What rights did these laws take away? The right to have teachers come out in front of their students? I had never heard of that "right" before a few years ago. 'The continued promotion of these types of boycotts encites more hate. Covid caused more hate towards Asians' Is your position that someone shouldn't be allowed to talk about an issue if it could possibly cause someone else to hate another group? I don't see how that is a workable position at all. Should we not have instituted Covid restrictions or even complained about covid in order to prevent Asian hate? 'Ignoring it isn't a solution.' Why not? People speaking their mind on public issues is the bedrock of Democracy. Some of those people are going to say things you don't like. A democracy where certain issues are not free to be discussed is not much of a democracy at all.
This was the extent of my participation in the thread. I did not expect my comments to be particularly well-received by the Reddit population, but I felt that I pointed out enough legitimate issues that I would be safe from accusations of trolling. I was wrong.
Here is the modmail message I received informing me of my permanent ban, along with the brief conversation we had before they muted me with their absolute power.1 For reference, here are the /r/baseball rules. Would an honest reading of these rules give you any reason at all to think that anything I posted would not be allowed, much less permaban worthy? You would have to be steeped in internet leftist culture to understand that, "Trolling, threatening, harassing, or inciting violence towards individuals or groups will not be tolerated. Racist, sexist, or otherwise intolerant language in both comments and submissions will be removed." means that pointed questions against the progressive consensus will get you tossed out.
I understand why so many subreddits are complete circlejerks now. It's not about echo-chambers and voting dynamics. They literally just banned everyone who disagreed.
1. Here is the source they cited for their "62%" figure. I'll let you decide for yourself whether this poll is applicable
Fresh Moms For Liberty Scandal Just Dropped
Clarice Schillinger, a former Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, is facing charges of assault, harassment and furnishing minors with alcohol, including vodka and rum, in connection to a September party she hosted in her Bucks County home, according to a police complaint obtained by Newsweek.
From what I can gather from reading the newspaper on the topic, she appeared to be running the local Party House. Police reports state that they had been called to her house for underage drinking multiple times in prior weeks. She threw a birthday party for her daughter, perhaps larger than usual?, and things got a little out of hand. Schillinger and her boyfriend provided both liquor and beer. Schillinger drank with the teens, including playing beer pong and pouring shots. Schillinger and her boyfriend, separately, punched different teens while trying to restrain them from leaving the party. Schillinger supposedly yelled "THE ONLY THING I ASK IS THAT YOU DON'T LEAVE."
While underage drinking, and providing minors with alcohol as an adult, is of course illegal in the United States, Schillinger appears to have been attempting to do so responsibly. She wanted her kids to drink at her house, under supervision, and to keep them there until the morning when they had sobered up to avoid drunk driving. Kids drinking under parental supervision are obviously safer than kids drinking in the woods or in an empty house. Kids who drink and don't drive home are safer than kids who drive. The altercations alleged seem more like (politically motivated?) throw ins than serious assaults, no allegations of serious injuries, more like horseplay than violence.
This comes after an earlier scandal involving an OG founder of the group and her husband, the president of the Florida GOP:
...it was reported that an unnamed woman claiming to be a friend of the Zieglers filed a report with the Sarasota Police in early October claiming that Christian Ziegler had come to her apartment and raped her, after a planned threesome between the victim and the couple fell through after Bridget Ziegler became busy at the last minute.
The Ziegler's confirmed in interviews that the pair had a prior history of group sex with the woman involved, but Mr. Ziegler (obviously) denied any wrongdoing. Ziegler was, however, at the woman's apartment at the time alleged. The prior history reduces, though obviously does not eliminate, the odds that this is a politically motivated hit-job. More likely to be a case of sex being a full contact sport, with some degree of hazy consent violation in there. The bigger story than the alleged sexual assault in the papers has been the confirmed threesomes.
Thoughts? Some of mine, disorganized:
-- Everyone, regardless of their politics and their opinions of alcohol or group sex, needs to recognize that this is why laws and social customs that pry into people's personal lives are bad. If Ziegler committed assault, prosecute him, but various New York headlines about the sex lives of a middle aged Floridian couple are gauche at best. When we pass laws that allow people to be prosecuted for actions in their personal lives, we open political dissidents (of all stripes) to these kinds of criminal prosecution attacks. I don't really know any details of this particular case, but rape laws that make proving innocence essentially impossible open political avenues of criminal attack that are indefensibly broad. We've already seen this happen to Assange, where it is physically impossible for him to prove that he used a condom and it remained on throughout the sexual act, and that was leveraged to force him into hiding. Irrational underage drinking laws make criminals of normal, normatively moral American teenagers, and criminalizing "furnishing minors" makes felons out of parents who are trying to engage in harm reduction. Ordinary Americans should not have an adversarial relationship with the cops, where we find that ordinary Americans have an adversarial relationship with the cops it is the law that is wrong.
-- This does bring to mind my general joke about the Moms For Liberty and adjacent content police in public schools: if anybody wants to remove or ban a piece of media from the public school library, their own child first needs to come in for an interview. If it is found that their child knows what "bussy lmao" means or the lyrics to WAP, the book can't be banned. Physician, heal thyself! If you aren't protecting your child in your home from all these "dangerous" things, why should anyone else care about it?
-- On the other hand, it strikes me that both women were engaging in libertine behavior in what is "generally" a responsible and rational way. Schillinger tried to protect the teens, who were probably going to drink anyway, by supervising them and making sure they didn't drive. Ziegler was engaging in non-monogamy, but in the context of a committed marriage. Maybe the MFL types really do believe that these things are a-ok for consenting adults, but not for minors. Maybe they really do want to teach kids about fraught topics in their own way, rather than by rote in school? Just this possibilty makes me infinitely more sympathetic and amenable to MFL.
-- Does the median Moms For Liberty donor care about this? Is this behavior seen as hypocritical by the people who support MFL, or merely by liberals who are confused about their actual values? Is MFL low-key a Vulgar Wave organization, advocating for tits-and-beer 90s liberalism once kids are of age? Or is this a hypocritical look behind the curtain? Does the personal behavior of the organizers matter if they are doing good work?
-- The fact that the conservatives seem to be publicly having more fun than liberals seems meaningful doesn't it? I'm not sure how, but it does.
-- On an apolitical note, prominence in literally any field is once again proven to get you fresh trim. Someone commented to me after seeing the movie that it was weird to them that Oppenheimer, a probably-autistic physics professor, was able to have a wife and a mistress. I replied that he was brilliant and recognized as brilliant and prominent by those around him. That made him sexy. We see that over and over with people like Kissinger, Oppy, Falwell Jr. Even being prominent for advocating a return to moral conservatism will get women to engage in wild sex with you, despite the obvious factors.
As of this time @HlynkaCG has been permabanned. I'm posting this message at the top of the thread, because its not really for Hlynka, its for the community to know. There were a few different posts I could have chosen in the modqueue, and many of them were too buried to be visible. The mod team has given him repeated warnings and bans. And I personally reached out to him last ban to warn him that a permaban was likely coming if this behavior continued.
I mostly do not feel this is a good thing, but it is a necessary thing. Hlynka had quite a few quality contributions, and I don't think I was alone in appreciating his often unique (for themotte) perspective. But he repeatedly did it in a way that just wasn't acceptable for the rules around here.
I would like people to have a few takeaways:
Please keep any discussion civil.
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