JulianRota
10mo ago
I don't suppose anyone noticed that we got our first link from the orange site?
I think the moderation is just fine. The Kulak example you gave is actually one of the most wholesome things I've ever seen while debating on the internet. Seriously, I've been writing and debating on various internet forums for decades now. I don't think I've ever before seen a heated argument get started, the mods say "knock it off you two", followed by both posters apologizing for overreacting and restating reasonable points in a calm and civilized manner. Fucking magic!
I actually still remember to this day, one time like 10 or 15 years ago, I got in an argument/discussion with somebody on some forum, I think it was Slashdot. They were very hostile and insulting and I remained calm and reasonable. After 2 or 3 exchanges, I asked him why he was being so hostile and insulting when I hadn't insulted him once and he actually calmed down some and apologized. Not mentioning that to make myself sound awesome or anything, but to say that it's really remarkable and rare to actually move conversations from hostility back to calm and reasonable discussion.
Burdensomcount is the only one on your list who got a harsh-ish punishment. But the explanation from FCfromSSC seems quite reasonable. I don't have access to mod notes and I don't follow everything that goes on here in enough detail to know stuff like that, but I have no reason to disbelieve the explanation.
In every listed case, the mods have calmly and patiently explained their position, even restating it multiple times in multiple places for the benefit of people who could plausibly be claimed to be behaving disingenuously. 99% of the internet that's moderated gets "Fuck off, troll! ::clicks permaban button::" to that behavior.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I'd agree that it's political. The political situation is either A) You know the Feds will stop you, so you be a good boy and do nothing. Your meek compliance gets you zero enthusiasm from the right, and whispers start that you're an open-borders sympathizer, or B) You do something like this, stick to it as long as possible, make the Feds physically stop you. It'll help for a little while with the actual situation, and being seen to try to do something is good for his political support. Forcing the Feds to actually physically stop it and showing video of them doing that will help his political situation, making the case that he's on their side and is a fighter, and it's the Feds' fault that it isn't working.
JulianRota
10mo ago
There appear to be two paths to US citizenship. A legal route, which is nearly impossible for most people, and an illegal route which gets easier and easier.
I am given to understand the situation is more an abuse of the asylum system. Somebody comes in, gets caught, and requests asylum, with a halfway-plausible story. It gets provisionally accepted, but the backlog for formal evaluation is like a decade long, so they get to stay in the US until that happens. Even if the formal hearing results in them getting booted out immediately, they still had a decade in the country, and can do it all again the next day.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Whether "mostly military-age men" it is or isn't true, it would be astronomically unlikely there wouldn't be at least one adorable family among the body count. All one has to do then is find them, take a bunch of pictures of the bodies, and distribute them widely, while completely ignoring the rest, and your work is done.
Even if there are literally zero adorable families naturally coming over, the cartels running the operation on the other side aren't stupid. Surely they would be willing to ensure there are a few like that and make sure they get covered.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I'm sympathetic, but "The judiciary is captured" is a little too broad for me. There's a lot of Federal judges out there, do we mean all of them? I'm perfectly willing to believe a substantial number of Federal judges are extremely biased against the right and will bend over backwards to ensure harsh outcomes for anyone deemed too right-wing, but I don't think we can reliably say all of them.
Of course, if as least some of them are and you know who they are, it's quite powerful to be able to ensure all appropriate cases get heard by one of them. As far as I know, most of the most frivolous cases against Trump have been filed New York, which probably holds some of the most biased judges and jury pool.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Perhaps that was a bit over-stated. I think it has a little truth, but more qualified, like that something that vaguely resembles that may happen to like a single-digit number of people, not anywhere near even a whole number percentage of everyone who's ever possessed such content. And "coming to the attention" would look more like far-left activists being majorly annoyed at you for some reason and digging up things you've wrote or sold somewhere to make a case about how bad you are. It may not be super common, but such things occasionally do end up becoming prosecutions, often including an extra step passing through a "mainstream" activist group.
If you're looking for an actual case, the best example that comes to my mind is Paul Miller. His prosecution was on weapons charges, for laws that are pretty commonly flouted and rarely prosecuted on their own, reportedly at least partly thanks to the prompting of the ADL (though he wasn't exactly doing himself any favors either). None of the documentation mentions any particular radical literature, though it would be a little surprising if he didn't actually possess any.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Oh yes, that reminds me - if I tab away from a Substack page, when I go back, the page hangs on a blank display for a second or so before appearing again. Including if I'm nowhere near the comments, which I mostly don't read anyways. No idea what they're doing there, but it can't be good.
JulianRota
10mo ago
The thing is, they don't have any ads though. So I guess all of the engagement-hacking is aimed at trying to get readers to purchase paid subscriptions to more creators? I guess that's a strategy, seems pretty weird and annoying to me though.
Maybe it is true that they're financially underwater from paying and promising too much to their initial set of authors. Which could make them desperate enough to try any number of things.
I don't expect they're listening to me or anything, but it'd be great IMO if they worked more like Nebula - you don't directly pay for individual publishers, you instead pay Substack itself $5 or $10 a month or whatever. Most of that minus a cut gets paid out to authors based on how much time you spend reading them. Then Substack doesn't care how much you engage because they get paid either way. But it's now further in every author's interest to keep putting out content that keeps people reading, since the friction for the money slipping away if they let up is much smoother. But they don't have the ability to do much except put out more high-quality content.
Maybe that could even apply to anybody who writes on the platform. I don't expect I'd ever make enough to live on from people paying to read what I write, but it would probably feel cool if I earned a few bucks a month from such an arrangement. That's about the price I'm suggesting though, so maybe it's also an incentive that your paid subscription is essentially free if you manage to publish stuff on there that gets at least a little bit of engagement. Maybe it would be just a simplification - say my account is -$10/month for a subscription. If I get $2/month from people reading me, then they just bill me a little less that month. If I get $15/month from that, then my account goes positive, and maybe they only actually cut me a check if I'm over $50 positive. So there'd be a big cloud of unpaid readers (or maybe they're paywalled off?), a smaller cloud of paid readers, a smaller one yet of people who mostly read but also write some stuff that only gets read a little, and the smallest one yet of the people who write things that gets millions of reads and make significant money from it.
JulianRota
10mo ago
These books aren't samizdat you obtain from a guy who stapled it together in his garage after photocopying it over at work(or I guess which come in a word document on a flash drive today). They're freely available if you want to spend the purchase price(which is often high). Some of them are banned in parts of Europe, but I don't think it's enforced particularly strictly and they're definitely not banned in the US.
It's true that the majority of these books aren't really all that banned, at least in the US. It's hard to consider something to be banned when you can mail-order a copy off of Amazon. The Turner Diaries is a pretty good case for about as banned as you can effectively get though.
In the way of modern cancel culture, it's not technically banned in the sense that the Government will explicitly send you to jail specifically for possessing it. But Amazon and GoodReads removed the page for it entirely. I don't see it on any other online book sellers. I actually found a few paper copies on eBay, running around $100, apparently published by a Barricade Books, which according to Wikipedia went bankrupt in 1997. I would expect dire consequences if any publisher dared to do a new run now - in the form of every other author refusing to do business with them, credit card processors, shippers, and banks dropping them, etc. If you wanted a paper copy, something like printing it at home would in fact be pretty reasonable. PDFs over the internet are easier though - a DuckDuckGo search for it finds a downloadable PDF on the first page, so you don't have to work too super hard to find a free copy if you really want it.
While it's not explicitly illegal to have it, if it ever comes to the attention of the wrong people that you do, I would expect you risk getting busted for something made up or trivial that everyone else normally wouldn't be prosecuted for and some kind of sentencing enhancement citing the fact that you possessed it to document how dangerous you are.
The hell of it is, I don't see it being that great or dangerous. The ideology is pretty racist and anti-Semitic, but no part of the book actually advocates for it, it's just taken as a given that it's correct. The terrorism tactics seems to me like grade-school level stuff, the kind of thing where if you couldn't figure that out already, you really have no business conducting any sort of insurgent activity. It's kind of fun as an adventure story, and a circle-jerk if you actually believe in that ideology, but otherwise pretty meaningless.
This is more of a blindspot from the regime/cathedral/progressive-industrial complex, which takes for granted, sometimes with truly fallacious explicit justifications, that prejudice/oppression/authoritarianism only runs in one direction. Like the term "authoritarianism" literally is not used in the social sciences; instead it's "right-wing authoritarianism", and of course this is only measured in ways which make right wingers look more authoritarian.
I pretty much agree. I don't really follow social sciences much though, it seems pretty remarkable if they actually pay no attention to left-wing authoritarianism.
JulianRota
10mo ago
It seems like just about everything does that now. At least the prompts to enable notifications seem to have gone away, but for a while, basically every website would nag you to subscribe by email, turn on notifications, and watch a related video before you could even start reading the actual article that you clicked on.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Is it just me, or is Substack's UI incredibly annoying?
Apparently Substack desperately wants me to read every post in my email inbox. I do not want to read posts in my email inbox. I want to read them on the website. Nevertheless, every time I open a post in Substack, it does the thing where it starts dimming the page as soon as I scroll down to try and read something, which I find distracting, so I have to scroll down further to get to the box where they try to get my email, then click to dismiss it. Doesn't seem to matter if I've logged in or do give the email address, it still prompts me every time. Naturally, every search result about this on every search engine I've tried is about blocking the emails or users.
What I'd like it to do is, let me log in to an account on their site, then see an RSS-reader-like list of recent posts by every writer I follow in time order. Then, if I'm logged in, let me read a post with no popups or distractions, and if I open a post from somewhere else from a writer I don't follow, give me a button or something to click to follow them too. It actually appears that it's supposed to work like that, but it doesn't.
Instead, when I log in by email, as it seems to want you to do, and follow several writers, there doesn't seem to be a way to see things they've recently written. There's a page for that, called "inbox" for some reason, but it only shows content from one writer. "Home" mostly shows recent short posts by people I don't follow and don't care about, and I have no idea by what criteria it selects them. There's also a "reads" section in "profile" but it claims I'm not subscribed to anything. I can't find anything that even lists what I've subscribed to, but there's like 3 places where it tries to get me to read random content by people I haven't subscribed to. How is it this terrible? Has Substack also been taken over by the enshittification trend before it even really got going? I just want to read interesting effortposts in peace.
JulianRota
10mo ago
If I'm watching at home by myself, I'll usually watch a movie in 2 or 3 sittings. I don't have a problem watching a whole movie at once in a theater though. I suppose that's more likely to be planned out or going with other people though.
I suppose I'm more likely to watch in 1 sitting or make the breaks short if the movie is actually really good, which not that many are. Or, another way to look at things could be that I watch more movies than otherwise because it's acceptable to watch in multiple sittings rather than having to wait until I am ready to devote a solid 2h+ block to it. Which also means that I'm more willing to take a chance on something that I don't know much about and might not be that good, rather than only watching things I have high confidence that I'll enjoy. If it's really awesome and would actually benefit from watching the whole way through in one sitting, I can always watch it again when I am prepared to do that.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Interesting post! I have several of those on my shelves and in my Kindle already. I actually just finished reading Turner Diaries - quick summary, it's fun as an action-adventure story, but the politics are pretty unsophisticated and not discussed in much detail. I've been trying to find more books on Irish Loyalism as well, maybe I'll try and find a copy of Paisley's book next (though I have read from some Loyalist militiamen post-Troubles that they were rather annoyed at his tendency to swoop in to a volatile situation, stir everyone up with a firebrand speech, then be whisked away before any actual violence happens).
The meta questions are what this really gets into though. All regimes in history have banned books that they considered threatening to the Powers That Be. What's curious is how the current regime is obsessed with promoting the reading of "banned" books while simultaneously actually banning other books. It seems critical to the identify of the current power structure that they were formerly out of power and had their core ideologies banned, so it's both a dunk on the former Powers That Be which they overcame and a sop to the idea of Free Speech to promote them, but they're at least as totalitarian as those former powers, so of course they continue to ban things that threaten their new ideology, while of course paying no attention to the contradiction.
It's also interesting how we all seem to seek the authenticity of these types of books. Whatever they think, at least they actually meant it! Even the wildest-eyed radicals tend to become dull if they ever do manage to become the Powers That Be, only sometimes returning to authenticity once they're out of power but still alive and not in some terrible prison, and inclined to write more about what they really did and why.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Some of those writers dodge the issue (others embrace it), but the central issue under dispute was slavery, full stop. Yes, there were absolutely other political disputes between the South, broadly, and the North or the West, but none of them held a candle to the central dispute over slavery. Take away slavery, and there would not have been a secessionary movement. It was both a necessary and sufficient cause of the Civil War.
Yes, the American colonists succeeded at seceeding, and the Confederacy did not; that's a fact of history. However, when we're evaluating other secessionary movements in different times and contexts, I think it's much more useful to realize that the American colonists were fighting for free expression, the right to self-defense, the sanctity of the home against intrusion, the rights of the accused and convicted, etc., while the Confederacy was fighting for the right to own slaves. If your modern movement bears more similarities to the first, then I will probably agree that it's justified; more like the second, and no.
I think I would at least partly disagree with this. In my view, the best description of the role of slavery in the Confederacy's secession is that it was the lynchpin that made the secession and war possible and dictated the way it would be fought. I don't think most of the people actually fighting would describe their cause as fighting for the right to own slaves, and I don't think it's the true cause of the war. I think the real cause is the cultural split that goes back before the founding of the country, as described by Abilon's Seed and Scott's piece on it. I've been meaning to write a longer piece on this idea, but consider - why were the borders of the Confederacy what they were? Why did these people decide to embrace a plantation slavery economy while those other people rejected it in favor of industrialization?
JulianRota
10mo ago
Why can't both be true? It's both an objectively pretty reasonable set of conditions for secession and also a piece of propaganda for a particular side of a war that could plausibly be argued to be stretching the truth a bit. In fact, it's decently effective propaganda specifically because many people would consider it reasonable.
It's probably also worth considering that, at the time, basically every country in the world was a monarchy. So if you ever want any allies for a cause like theirs, it's very much in your interest to paint yourselves as having very reasonable objections to your specific king and definitely not any kind of general objection to the concept of monarchy. This is very much in contrast to the Marxist cause later on, which paints themselves as a danger to any regime that doesn't follow their ideology.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Looks like a good post that would lead to interesting discussion to me. I'd welcome it being reposted as a top-level in a current main thread.
I'm inclined to be reluctant to self-promote as well. But it's usually really obvious when the situation is somebody writes low-quality posts that were properly exposed and got low engagement because they were low quality, then aggressively self-promotes them to try and compensate, versus a high-quality post that just went up at the wrong time.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I finished Termination Shock, a few weeks ago actually.
The part about the Queen of Denmark's sex life was a little weird, but I didn't find it too off-putting. It feels like a case of, all such action/adventure novels are obligated to stuff some sex and love into them somewhere, regardless of whether it really makes sense. The whole concept of livestreamed hand-to-hand combat by volunteers at the China-India Line Of Actual Control is pretty bizarre too.
It also felt like there's some obligatory wokeness jammed in. This character is gay, this other one is native american, or black/african, or something else, even though it doesn't really add anything to the plot. But it's more of a mention than a focus. Almost like somebody convinced him to add some of that stuff into his next novel and he did it kind of half-heartedly.
I did find interesting the concept that some random rich guy and/or small nation could just start doing some geoengineering on their own that technically doesn't violate any laws. What would anyone do about it? Surely some nation would feel, justifiably or not, that some bad weather issue was caused by it.
The eagles fighting drones concept was pretty cool too.
Also, I'm fairly sure that EMPs cannot actually do what they were portrayed as doing. From what I've read, EMPs are hardest on very long conductors, like power transmission lines and copper communication cables, and anything connected to them without the right protection. They most likely won't have any effect on handheld electronics or vehicles, including drones. But hey, plot device I guess?
JulianRota
10mo ago
I've enjoyed Extra History. They're mostly good, though to be taken with a grain of salt on anything too close to the culture way.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I've experienced kind of a similar thing on a completely different subject.
One of my other interests is firearms and self-defense. On every controversial shooting incident where somebody gets killed, somebody always chimes in with something to the effect of, they should have shot them in the leg instead. I've used to respond with the conventional gun culture version of the argument against that, which is that it's wrong to think of a firearm as a non-lethal weapon, if you're ever justified at shooting at somebody you should be shooting center mass to stop the threat, and also that virtually nobody is accurate enough in an actual life-threatening situation to reliably hit somebody's leg. These arguments mostly don't seem to have much effect on people though. I started trying another argument, which is that leg shots are not at all less lethal - the thigh has some of the biggest arteries in the body, feeding the biggest muscles in the body and attached to the thickest bones in the body, and sending bullets into that is likely to cause severe enough bleeding to lead to death in minutes, if not life-changing injuries that they will never fully recover from. That argument seems to be much more effective at convincing people that attempting to shoot people who are a deadly danger in the leg or other extremity is not a good idea.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I live in NYC now, and mostly lived along the gulf coast before I moved here. One thing I have discovered is that there is a big difference between 30F and 10F. I've been told and am willing to believe there is an equally big difference between that and -10F. At 30F, you're okay with regular decent shoes, a set of long johns, a good basic jacket and a light hat. At 10F, you need (well, at least I need) insulated boots, heavy or double long johns, a heavy parka, hat, scarf unless your parka has a good hood, and mittens, and any skin exposed to the air for even a few seconds is actively painful. It's that cold here for maybe a couple of days to a week total over the course of a winter, and it's reasonable to avoid going outside during those times. At -10F I'm told you need petroleum jelly covering your face to avoid frostnip. I'm told in many places in the center of large continental areas, including the US, it's that cold or worse for multiple continuous weeks every winter. So I can totally see how many people, especially those who aren't in prime physical shape for any number of reasons, aren't eager to embrace needing to physically carry every crumb of food they eat home by hand.
I've lived in fairly hot places too, but never Phoenix. I've been told that in Phoenix, it's routinely hot enough that you are at serious risk of heat stroke if you walk outside in the sun for 20 minutes without carrying water. That's probably also worse if you need to carry moderate loads or aren't in great physical shape.
JulianRota
10mo ago
I did learn, or at least learn to pay more attention to, one interesting fact on the last Motte pro/anti car argument I was involved in - substantial parts of the world routinely experience weather for extended periods that precludes all but the most hardy people around from doing extended outdoors work, like walking for 20 minutes while carrying a few days worth of groceries.
JulianRota
10mo ago
democracies don't put election losers in jail, because that disincentivises all politicians from respecting the results of future elections.
The trouble we've realized with this ideal is that it also presumes that politicians refrain from doing obviously blatantly illegal things.
In my opinion, this was first realized with respect to Hillary, who faced effectively no consequences from breaking a bunch of laws (besides whatever effect it had on her losing the election). In her case, it was terrible for democracy for her to face any serious legal consequences.
I'm not about to claim Trump has perfectly abided by the law either. It's rather academic though exactly which laws he may or may not have broken and whether anything he did is or is not worse than what Hillary and other prominent Democrats have done. But it sure smells bad that he gets aggressively prosecuted all over the nation, taken off of ballots, etc, and nothing at all happens to any Democrats.
JulianRota
11mo ago
Thanks for doing this and posting about it, very interesting. The results are roughly what I presumed - these LLM-based "AI"s are pretty good at regurgitating and mixing and matching things it's already seen, but have no real ability to reason and fall flat fast when asked to do anything unusual or unexpected.
No doubt. I've had an account there since 2013. Under a different username though.
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