idio3
1mo ago
Could you elaborate on how old elite hold power in France.
Maybe I phrased it incorrectly, but I just meant the traditional party system. Since the end of occupation, France has been ran by either Gaullists or Socialists. The exact name of the party changes and sometimes there are breakups and mergers or whatever, but the French electoral system just kind of implies two major parties - one on centre-left and one on centre-right. Since it's not pure FPTP, other parties are not quite as screwed as they are in Britain or USA, but they're nonetheless strongly underrepresented.
Over the past two decades France has kind of gone through and electorally murdered every single imaginable combination of these traditional governing elites. UMP/LR (centre-right) were wiped out after Sarkozy, then PS (centre-left) got wiped out even worse under Hollande, with power falling to a defector from PS, Macron, making a centrist (really kind of just basic liberal) party, whose popularity was initially huge, but has progressivey lost ground.
My point is that there really aren't any tricks left up the sleeve of the traditional political forces. They all have a popularity akin to Hitler at a synagogue or something. Macron appointed a premier out of LR despite having no prospect whatsoever of it having parliamentary support. How all of this will keep workin until the next election is going to be fascinating. My guess is that not much will get done in general.
Or am I looking at it through rose-tinted glasses ?
Vous semblez utiliser le clavier français, lol.
Les espaces avant le point d'interrogation vous ont trahi 😁
idio3
1mo ago
Where are you seeing this? I'm seeing Hashim Safi Al Din (his cousin) but nothing about Nasrallah himself beyond him being targetted. Saudi and Iranian sources both claim he's fine and in a safe place.
idio3
1mo ago
If your belief is simply that no commenter, no matter how long-standing and high-quality-on-average, should ever be able to get away with posting anything low-effort, that’s fine, but it is not my position, nor does it appear to be the mods’ position.
It very explicitly is not my belief, you misunderstood me. My point was that upvote/downvote system is bad at weeding out low-effort postings in general, because vast majority of people will not downvote a low-effort inflammatory statement that they agree with. I am with you as far as the idea that low-effort posting only becomes a serious concern when it dominates over higher-effort posting, and that is usually caused by people who pretty much exclusively post low-effort, ideologically-motivated comments.
If you genuinely do hold that belief, why not make an effortful post about it?
I've done the very thing you suggested once 🫠. That's why I'm never going to be able to climbe out of a premoderation hole, lol
idio3
1mo ago
No, most people don't even remember a post from months ago. I don't even remember you.
Fair enough, my apologies. I'm originally from /r/drama, just came here in passing a while back due to being friendly with a number of motte regulars. My example is not that interesting, what's valuable in it is how it illustrates the drawbacks of the system.
After a certain number of upvotes (I don't know what the algorithm is, only Zorba does) you come out of the "new user" filter.
Pretty sure that it is not the case. Can't conclusively disprove it, but I am almost certain that it is, in fact, upvotes minus downvotes threshold, not just a number of upvotes. If it only counted upvotes, my original post would have been enough to clear it (while horribly received, it did accumulate some positive reaction).
You just haven't posted enough.
But this is the very effect I am complaining about. The disincentive towards posting while knowing that it will take up to 12 hours for the comment to appear in a thread that is having an active discussion is huge. If that wasn't the case, I'd absolutely post more, and I assure you that I am not alone in that regard.
The question is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. If discouraging people like me from posting is the system working as designed - then that's fine, I just think that it goes against the stated goals of the platform.
idio3
1mo ago
I reject the characterization of my comment as a low-effort hot take.
That's fine. If you believe that "Anyone affiliated with the Innocence Project deserves prison time" is a sophisticated, nuanced argument in favour of a certain position - it is your right to do so. I disagree and not simply with the position itself, but also with the prospects of such a comment leading to a reasoned discussion that could arrive at some interesting conclusion.
Here's a counter-example: "Executing all landlords in the world would be a good way to solve the housing crisis". It's a position that's a little juvenile and rather facile, but I am absolutely capable of writing a number of high-effort, good(ish) faith arguments for it by using utilitarian principles.
Do you think that the discussion writing something like this would lead to is going to be high level?
idio3
1mo ago
Yes, would love some other examples.
Sure. PVV (Geert Wilders) in the Netherlands, VOX in Spain, Chega in Portugal, Reform in the UK etc. All of them are a response to the traditional parties essentially fusing on issues that are the subject of genuine controversy within the society, while the social and economic problems directly attributable to the policies by the traditional elites are growing.
Also, how much of a fad is BSW?
I'm not German and am not really extremely plugged into their society, but I doubt it's much of a fad. SPD moving away from any sort of traditional social-democratic policies in favour of becoming milquetoast eco-liberals created an empty space on the left. Die Linke occupied that space for a while, but suffered from internal conflicts based on oppression hierarchies and other essentially social issues - BSW doesn't have that issue. You can agree or disagree with their stances, but it's undeniable that there is a space within a political system for them.
idio3
1mo ago
The only people I can recall recently who posted regularly yet stayed in the new user filter persistently for months were AahTheFrench and Darwin/guesswho
Well, here's another example for you. Me 😊. I have zero chance of ever climbing out of the karma hole here. I'm not super worried about it, but, for the record, the reason for it is one (intentionally provocative) thread that did lead to a discussion challenging the standard beliefs. Was it super-valuable? Of course not, and your comment on that thread summed it up pretty well. Was it bad enough to warrant a permanent modfilter? I'd argue that it wasn't and there is plenty of examples of far worse things adding nothing but vitriol towards the outgroup.
While being upvoted.
Without a new user filter, we mods would wake up to a ton of "Kill All Niggers! Death to Kikes and Faggots!" posts spamming the board which we would then have to clean up.
New user filter as it exists certainly helps with that to an extent, but its primary effect is completely different. It was trivial for me to find an example perfectly illustrating my point from just scrolling through the modlog. Here you go, the comment is essentially saying "people vote for communists because they just want to kill niggers." Votes on it are +3/-1, the -1 probably coming from the moderator who ended up handing out a tempban (no complaint here, it was a right choice). Voters had no problem with it. Is that how the system is supposed to work?
If you have an alternate suggestions, propose it.
If the goal is to avoid the things you mentioned, adjusting the filter to deal with that would be trivial. Simply adjust the filter to be 7 days + 50 comments (or some similar number) which will still filter random incoming trolls, without enforcing the echo-chamber and punishing going against the circlejerk. From my experience of working with coders on the same codebase motte is written on, something like that can be written and implemented in minutes. The question is only about what you want your system to accomplish...
idio3
1mo ago
While I've had my fair share of sometimes heated arguments with Frenchie and agree that the comment you're responding to is a low-effort contentless flame which at best will lead to nothing at all, the next part of your argumentation is just bad.
So much so that after being here for months, we still have to manually approve your posts because you can't get out of the new user filter. This isn't because you have some brave iconoclastic point of view that's too much for the Motte (...)
This is simply wrong. The new user filter feature is fundamentally chilling effect on views that go against the local mainstream and has a very predictable endpoint, already visible here. Fundamentally, low-effort "hot takes" like this (to name something you have encountered most recently) are not going away, but alternative viewpoints that go against that sort of content - most likely are.
The problem you're not seeing is that it's not the absence of a "variety of hot takes", it's that relying on the upvote/downvote mechanism for user absorption is guaranteed to fossilize a consensus based on some side of the very culture war this thread is about. I've had that argument with your colleagues on the site's telegram a number of times, and, as far as I can tell, there really isn't a counter-argument to present. Even if you're okay with having that particular kind of opinion dominate, you are still going to face a fall in quality of content, as is always the case in all echo-chambers that face no pushback.
Since I'm never going to be able to climb out of the new user filter you seem to laud, I doubt this comment will actually appear in the thread. But hopefully you'll at least see it...
idio3
1mo ago
France is probably the clearest example of the old elites holding on to power via technicalities, but Germany is about two electoral cycles away from that being no longer tenable.
Since the whole traditional establishment essentially refuses to compete based on the largest political issues in Europe, the "alternative" or "populist" parties (not just AfD and RN, but BSW and LFI as well, with other examples elsewhere I could list if requested) are gaining steam on the edges. The way liberal democracy works, where traditional parties have a very highly integrated hold on media and social organizations, means that the electorate will likely choose all options in sequence before finally abandoning them all. We've already seen the last stage of this process play out in France, where remnants of old elites only got any reasonable percentage (though nowhere near majority) due to the deal with Mélenchon. While Germany is unlikely to have the same issue the very next election, where CDU is going to win based on voters nostalgia for Merkel years, there's no chance they can actually repair the problems it's facing.
Five years from now, the traditional parties, tracing their descent to West German political system, are going to be in the minority in Bundestag. Since the others will be both to the left and to the right of them, it will probably lead to some sort of a political crisis. And since Germany doesn't have the sort of strong presidency that France does, this crisis cannot be resolved in the same way.
Obviously something could happen in the meantime that will change the equation, but I just don't see it. The entirety of EU is enthusiastically running towards the edge of a cliff and I can't currently picture a way out...
idio3
6mo ago
If you have telegram I could link a bunch, but it's annoying to have to download/reupload to hosting sites otherwise. It was always in this sort of style - over-the-top hysteria with ketchup and yelling.
idio3
6mo ago
Traditionally Russians have this thing, where they (in contrast to rather lukewarm interest in Western Europe) send their ambassadors, cultural orgs, and anyone else who is in any way official - to go and put flowers on wherever local WW2 monument is. The propaganda point there is fairly obvious - hey, we still remember the war that we won, while the rest of you don't, and are probably cryptonazis or at least sympathizers anyway.
In the past few years the actions of local governments have really, really nicely played into that message, since EU members have acted unbelievably and consistently dumb in pretty much everything they did as far as foreign policy is concerned. There are extremes, like near-baltic microstates, where governments themselves are arresting people for flowers or flags, but in the actual EU, this was mostly done via the sort of organized performances by shady activists like the ones on the video above, just on a larger scale. It worked fine, with journos being able to get a headline of glorious victory of activists or whatever, but this year they've been relegated to just part of the background.
idio3
6mo ago
Since it's 9th of May today, of course Victory Day events are taking place. This has historically been mostly ignored in Western/Central Europe, aside from minor things like ambassadors laying flowers on whatever monument is available locally. Over the past few years, these things have been successfully prevented through organized performance art style protests drawing gigantic crowds of journalists. Of course, something similar happened again this year:
https://streamable.com/e/fnrnke
None of this is news, of course. What is interesting is that they haven't updated them at all in about two and a half years now, with these performance art events now kind of falling into irrelevance. This year they actually didn't even prevent the thing they were trying to prevent and the only attention they garnered was derision from their opponents. Whether it means that the media and the general public are now less interested in this kind of pseudoshock content, or is this subject in particular now being retired?
idio3
1yr ago
As I said, many a kid is likely incubating there and maybe spending some baby years there before their parents relocate to where the schools are better but I've lived nearby and despite the density you really don't run into local kids very much.
That area is at the price level where accessibility of private schools is of a larger concern - and the best ones are unsurprisingly all clustered around there (and north to Lincoln Park, yes).
There definitely are kids there.
The knowledge that you're locked into proximity with a financial obligation that has a duration measured in decades encourages investment in the relationships.
That's kind of sad. While it's perfectly valid way for children to form bonds (they aren't extremely particular) it becomes somewhat less appropriate for adults, who typically look for something other than just any random person who happens to be nearby. In any case - nothing at all is stopping you from doing that in a huge block house. The problem you're describing lies in transient nature of housing which is overwhelmingly rental in American urban areas. But that's a consequence of American middle class idiosyncrasies, not a cause.
I do not want my relationships to be a competition and that might mean that the people I spend my time with won't be the most perfect match possible, but the fine details of the match are so much less important than the depth of the roots.
Intersex relationships are going to be somewhat of a competition due to simple biology, we can't really do much about that as a species or society, outside of weird stuff like arranged marriages, which carry a huge amount of their own burdens.
But you misunderstand my point about regular connections. These aren't meant to be competitive, they simply select for compatibility. Surely you've had friendships that faded away over time, right? Not necessarily because you lack physical access to someone, but simply because either you or him (or both) have, over time, found someone else they choose to spend time with. It's not about someone winning or losing here. And trapping you both in a close proximity without any alternatives would hardly be a better outcome...
I think you probably have very little idea of what motivates them really. The number one motivation is school district. I don't think it's controversial for me to say that, at least in Chicago, the urban public schools are simply unfit and it's not a matter of funding (...)
Okay, well here we go to the crux of the matter. Just as before - this isn't the cause of American middle class behaviour, it's the effect of it. There is nothing inherently bad about schools located in dense urban environments. Ability to quickly and easily walk to your school could hardly be considered a detriment by any sane person.
But yes, when a large proportion of people with the means to do so - do, in fact, flee to a lawn - the ones that don't - are quite strongly pushed to do the same. Overwhelming majority of above-average schools in, say, continental Europe are in major cities. Some Parisian schools have great reputation, while their suburban ones are widely considered to be dogshit. This follows the exact same indicators as it does in America, by the way.
So yes, you have discovered yet another extremely negative externality of lawn worship. It fucks up the urban livability in yet another way...
idio3
1yr ago
Are you suggesting the middle or upper middle class would stop working if homeless people were less visible?
No. I'm suggesting that homelessness and extreme poverty could in most cases be easily be fixed by any modern society. The cost of such a collection of measures would be tiny in comparison to the externalities associated with actually having homelessness and associated social ills. But it's not being fixed, since it provides the working precariat something unbelievably scary to prevent them from quitting. Existence of homelessness is kind of a virtual whip for the modern proletarian.
idio3
1yr ago
And you're never going to " 20% of Cook County lawns together and combine all the land, money, and effort that goes into their maintenance into something actually useful - you'll have a fucking Disneyland with a Champs-Élysées annex" because the patches of lawn are all in separate strips of housing and separated out by the various towns.
That part is literally the simplest fix imaginable. A stroke of a pen changes that. Imaginary lines on a map are hardly the biggest obstacle here.
You can't magically clump them all together to get "same surface area as Disneyland plus Champs Elysees", so it's not really a coherent argument.
I'm not "magically" clumping anything together, I'm merely making a point that the same area housing the same number of people in units of the same size could easily be accomplished in a tiny fraction of that area, with additional space left over being enough to have a [insert large landmark].
It's a thought experiment.
If you want to argue "the money and time spent on maintaining lawns would come to X amount and could be spent elsewhere" sure, but given my cultural background, very much I go "fuck you, this patch of land is MINE not the possession of the landlord or the Crown and if I want to grow a lawn I damn well can and will do so because it is MINE and belongs to ME"
Exactly, lol. This is precisely the attitude I have described in this post.
"Public" does mean the HOA or other pinched-face clipboard-holder coming round to tell you what you can and can't do with that piece of land.
Sure, the city won't let you have a toxic waste dump or a bottomless pit, but their decisions are based on public good and real, objective realities of an urban environment. Not conceptual unity with some grotesque local aesthetic chosen by a class of office plankton as a ludicrous way to signal their status.
idio3
1yr ago
That's great. But is your conception of a proper life at fifty limited to sitting on a couch, watching Netflix, and occasionally (as a treat!) visiting the local Red Lobster? Because there are indeed more things to life than fun party substances, but equally there is far more to it than what a endless field of cardboard boxes on grass could provide.
idio3
1yr ago
Pretty much all semi-successful cultures have developed some conception of a dense city as soon as they could. First cities, in fact, have (rather counter-intuitively) sprung up even before agriculture. If we're going to Paleolithic - you'd be right. But that wasn't due to social preference or something as much as it was about the fact that hunter-gatherers in general have a limit to the amount of people their lifestyle can support. As soon as that natural limit was lifted, tribes (or by that time - villages) started growing exponentially and combining into even larger polities. In many places and entirely independently.
The idea that homo sapiens is a solitary creature like a tiger is a very weird pseudoromanticism. We are in fact hard-wired to loathe loneliness above nearly all else.
idio3
1yr ago
I wouldn't necessarily go that far. Their aesthetics are atrocious and their behavioural patterns have a horrific effect on urban areas, but they aren't actively killing people. I am able to be critical of a group without instantly assuming they're literally hitlers.
idio3
1yr ago
"My office plankton job makes me inherently superior to those dirty poors, who just lack my good, old-fashioned work ethic" is considered to be boo outgroup, just a content-free insult, here.
While your criticism is fine in general, this particular sentence you quoted was incredibly obviously satirical. Both in tone and in context.
idio3
1yr ago
But high density housing already exists in Cook county, residents have the choices to move there if they would like. Destroying existing housing is not efficient. Wouldn't it make more sense to amend zoning laws and allow developers to build high density housing where demand allows?
Well of course it does, the "nuke the suburbs" is an intentionally inflammatory conversation starter, hardly practical (or even desirable) in reality. Yes, housing needs to get a lot denser, but it's a lot better to do that through gradual growth of existing high-density areas outwards than through trying to fill the entire metro with flat blocks.
The reason that isn't possible is due to the oversized influence lawn enthusiasts yield over the cities. So the high-density, actual, urban core suddenly stops in quite a few places.
idio3
1yr ago
You’ve jumped through the hoops, tried your best, earned the status symbols and are trying to wrest some meaning from your life.
...and that meaning comes from a lawn? Christ... What a miserable conception of a meaning...
idio3
1yr ago
It's oppressive and not the way humans were meant to live. You need to have some distance from other people.
That is just patently false. Human is a social ape that for most of its history had not even the slightest inkling of personal space or privacy. The idea of a personal house separated by some space barrier from the next one is a very modern one.
idio3
1yr ago
Clearly you haven’t tried hard enough to understand other people. Ever heard of social signaling? It’s pervasive, and it’s important. Lawns and large plots are a premier American status symbol.
Best, most honest explanation yet!
Before you mock this out of hand
I wouldn't dream!..
I’d encourage you to look at your own life and how you try to signal your status. We all do it, there’s nothing wrong inherently in status signaling.
Inherently? No. When it takes the form of a watch you wear or the pants you put on - it's fairly harmless, if potentially gaudy as fuck if done by nouveau riche. When it's something that overtakes a highly significant part of your life and affects the entire way a city functions - it becomes inherently wrong.
Think of it in terms of an analogy - chasing some wine with a cracker in a ritual of faux (semi)cannibalism might be somewhat odd to a completely naive observer, but it's not really causing any serious issues. Throwing homosexuals off a high tower, on the other hand, is a bit more controversial and damaging in a very real sense.
idio3
1yr ago
I don't think the near north side is producing very many kids at all.
Not going to look up the exact numbers, but with ~100k inhabitants, I'm pretty sure it's not going to be behind most suburbs.
It's this wide access that is the very problem! Why put down deep roots with some person when you're constantly exposed to new potential
This point I genuinely don't understand. Why is that a problem? Do you really need to have the desperation of inability to get away from someone on your side to make an actual friend? If they find someone else they're exposed to more to their liking - great! It wasn't meant to be.
and more importantly those people you'd never be able to find in the suburb also see you as one in thousands or millions.
Sure. But the great thing about being in the big city is that they have designated areas where they find each other intentionally. And it works just fine, because one in thousands still yields a few hundred easily.
I think there are merits to different housing configurations and if you can't see what could cause some huge proportion of the population to choose one over the other then you lack either perspective or imagination.
I can see what would cause that, intellectually, but it's not particularly flattering and most certainly not what they believe is causing them to do so.
From my understanding you hail from a Russian style of block housing. I hail from the suburbs and we've both lived in or near the Chicago urban core. We should be able to hash this out.
The block housing part I feel would lead us into an entirely different conversation which I have found to be incredibly unproductive in the past. They aren't great architecturally, granted, but simply looking at them in isolation is silly. Their advantages lie in absolutely incredible access to vast networks of public infrastructure, which is, unfortunately, entirely lacking in American cities. Primarily because the actual city part is squeezed into a really tiny area by the immovable bulk of the proverbial lawn.
I wouldn't go as far as calling them "socially right" - it's not like they want to ban abortions or integrate religion into classrooms and the like. On standard social issues BSW essentially just has a standard 90s era social-democratic rhetoric - they're subordinate to economic issues, but people are meant to be free to do what they want without influence from reactionary organizations. The only reason this can possibly seem right-wing is because SPD and their ilk elsewhere in Western Europe / North America have gone way past that in the past decade and change. But BSW is still nowhere near US republicans or other genuinely conservative forces...
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