naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
You are part of the identitarian left since you support identity politics for Jews
Uh, no. I don't, and I'd appreciate you not putting words in my mouth. Who do you think you're talking to? What "identity politics" do I support for Jews? What do you think "identity politics" means in this context?
For the sake of clarity, when I say "identity politics" I mean "advocating for and allotting special benefits to individuals purely based on their membership in a particular category." So for example, I favor the state of Israel against Islamic terrorism because (1) terrorism is bad and (2) Israel is a reasonably successful pluralistic state in a region of the world that desperately needs more such things. And you might say "aha! This is still advocating for special benefits based on nationality!" But I would disagree, because there are no benefits I would extend to the Israeli people that I would not cheerfully extend to anyone whose behavior is reasonably comparable. Since I do not give any special consideration to the Jewish people or Israeli nationals (many of whom are not Jewish), it is nonsense to say that I "support identity politics for Jews."
In fact if the world were arranged according to my principles, there would be little to no government at all, anywhere, but the world is not arranged according to my principles. This is not a "commie immoral ideology," it's much closer to libertarian anarchism... but I'm not really a libertarian, so much as a classical liberal. I'm conservative enough to think we probably need some regulation, and some government. But mostly I think people need to be left alone, and not have their social existence engineered by the Leviathan. If people want to form interest groups, they should be free to do so. And government actors should be forbidden from giving any of those groups special treatment based on group membership.
Objective differences between individuals is a different story, and sometimes these will be expressed in the language of groups. But for example treating "men" and "women" differently (in situations where the realities of sex matter) is fine, but strictly speaking that's not allotting special benefits based on membership in a category, it's arranging behavior in response to real individual differences.
Why shouldn't the majority ethnic group have their collective interests be taken seriously by its rulers?
Because there's no such thing as collective interests. Or, perhaps it would be better to say that collective interests are an abstraction which erode proper attention to individual circumstance. My rejection of interest aggregation in moral reasoning (I am a Scanlonian contractualist) extends to a rejection of interest aggregation in political action.
Of course, in practical terms, it's very difficult to carry out sweeping government intervention without engaging in interest aggregation. To me, this seems like an excellent reason to not have sweeping government interventions. Government should focus on coordinating behaviors for the good of everyone. Thus for example, having a standard for traffic flow is good. It doesn't matter who you are, you stop on red and go on green; this is not a deep moral principle, it's just the otherwise-arbitrary standard we all follow so we can all accrue benefit from the common use of roads. That's a totally appropriate use of government power, on my view, and there is not so much as a whiff of "identity politics" in it. Many things are good for everyone, and many things can be appropriately targeted toward objective individual differences rather than group membership.
Maybe you have a different definition of "identity politics?" But as far as I can tell, you're simply wrong. Certainly you're wrong about me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I assume you meant to reply to @urquan, since that is who you're quoting. But you're right:
Notre Dame and BYU are far from the only well-respected religious university in the U.S. Notre Dame is far from the only well-respected Catholic university in the U.S. Georgetown is technically Catholic, Marquette and Gonzaga and Loyola as well. They don't seem to care much about homosexual conduct though, as far as I can tell.
Southern Methodist... it's in the name. Pepperdine is affiliated with the Church of Christ. Pepperdine as well as Baylor (Baptist) have codes of conduct that exclude homosexual sex, though they otherwise seem happy to use progressive-approved language in discussing sexual identitarianism. I have no idea how serious they are about enforcement, though.
But most of the schools I just named are "top 100 national universities" in the US News rankings.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
More realistically, it's just an attack on the existence of religious colleges at all. Which is shameful.
Specifically, religious colleges can (and do) use faith statements to effectively exclude homosexuals from professorships. Their position is essentially "There's nothing wrong with being homosexual, it's just that you have to sign a statement saying that you won't do sinful things, like have homosexual sex." This is why organizations like the American Philosophical Association changed their anti-discrimination language to something like:
This includes both discrimination on the basis of status and discrimination on the basis of conduct integrally connected to that status, where "integrally connected” means (a) the conduct is a normal and predictable expression of the status (e.g., sexual conduct expressive of a sexual orientation, conduct expressive of a disability status), or (b) the conduct is something that only a person with that status could engage in (e.g., pregnancy), or (c) the proscription of that conduct is historically and routinely connected with invidious discrimination against the status (e.g., interracial marriage).
In other words, it's not enough to say "we accept everyone as long as they live up to our religious standards"--you have to accept everyone, and their "integrally connected" behaviors, too, even though the failure modes of such a requirement are probably easy to imagine. Anyway, as a consequence, some religious colleges lost the ability to advertise jobs in APA publications.
Progressives dominate academia, by a wide margin. It's pretty important to them to keep the door slammed very firmly in the face of possible competitors to that monopoly on propagandizing America's young adults (and is probably also why they tend to be in favor of pushing "college for everyone" even when the economics of such a thing make no sense).
It would be... interesting... to see how all this might interact with a Muslim-sponsored university, but there aren't many of those in the US. (Yet?)
Steelmanning the Strawman: Trump Has A Point About Kamala
Trump stepped into a fairly obvious trap. Remember: political progressives are the people who do things like call Bill Clinton the "first black president," say that Clarence Thomas is white, or flatly declare that black Americans who vote for Donald Trump "ain't black."
Scott Alexander explained this a long time ago but Americans in general still don't get it. Even the Leftists tried to explain this, by capitalizing "Black" and explaining why:
At the Columbia Journalism Review, we capitalize Black, and not white, when referring to groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.
Being Black is important, because Black people share a sense of identity and community. Sometimes it is asserted that this has to do with being descendants of American slavery (DOAS), but if that were really true then Kamala would not be Black. No, the reality of Blackness is that Black is a voting bloc. People who deviate from that bloc, are not Black, even if they're black. White people are not a voting bloc; ergo they must not have a sufficiently shared sense of identity and community to be of value as a political unit. Kamala Harris is Black even if she ain't black; she could be Black if her parents were, say, Bill and Hillary Clinton. Sure, DOAS might find it tasteless or even offensive, but what are they going to do about it--vote Republican? Not a chance.
Audre Lorde once wrote,
For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.
This is the fundamental problem with the Identitarian Right. Yes, embracing the politics of grievance and oppression can allow one to beat the Left at their own game sometimes (often in hilarious ways), but then one is fundamentally playing the Left's game. Arguing about whether Rachel Dolezal is "really Black" means focusing your attention on categories over which you have no actual control. It means turning away from the real individuals around you to obsess over cultural judgments governed by a never-ending churn of bureaucrats and theorists and busybodies seeking to endlessly manipulate humanity for their own venal ends. "Fine, let's endlessly obsess over race (etc.)" is not the victory the Identitarian Right seems to think it is.
So yeah: Trump isn't really wrong. Harris is a grifter and a buffoon whose sex and ancestry are, as far as I can tell, the only reasons she was invited to join the Biden ticket in the first place. But even so, Trump's comment was a mistake, if his goal was to win the election; it wasn't the kind of comment that persuades the unsophisticated undecideds. Whether it ultimately costs him the election, well, I doubt that this particular comment matters, in the grand scheme of things. But while it would be nice if society at large could have a reasonable discussion about the interesting things happening in the intellectual background of his commentary... I think most people would be completely baffled by the attempt.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
...isn't it saying that he deliberately made this hand gesture while on duty as an olympic official, having manoeuvred himself carefully so that it would be visible on TV?
It's saying that's how the Brazilian reporter described things. Maybe it's true?
I don't know what he thought he was doing if not clandestinely referring to this meme.
I mean... did you read my post? Assuming everything was as described by the Brazilian, the "circle game" is probably the most obvious explanation to anyone who is not Extremely Online. It was popularized (as noted in my links) by the sitcom Malcolm in the Middle, which still streams and airs in several languages around the world.
If he was just trying to subtly make the 'cool' hand gesture with hand by side while on TV, then that is behaviour that at least needs looking into on the grounds of it being baffling!
...really, though? "Someone is engaged in baffling behavior, I'd better report them to the authorities" is usually something progressive reporters get conspicuously concerned about and ask the general public to stop doing. Remember: this guy wasn't saying anything to anyone. He wasn't hurting anyone. He wasn't doing anything overtly aggressive or even, probably, actually against any rules. He was, at worst, making a hand gesture that some people sometimes associate with ideas they don't like. If you think that's the sort of thing that "needs looking into," like... hard disagree, I guess.
More Olympic culture warring: Olympic Games official has accreditation revoked for...
Honestly, I can't even complete the headline, it feels too much like giving credence to the delusion. Can you guess? Here's a hint: think 2017.
Yes, that's right. The rest of the headline is "‘white supremacy’ hand gesture."
Dictionary.com has a whole entry on the "circle game" which is mostly not about the circle game, but is about the "OK hand gesture" that in almost no context has ever been a genuine signal of white supremacist beliefs. The Telegraph article asserts without evidence that "its use as a far-Right symbol is apparently on the rise." And from Dictionary.com:
Beginning in 2017, the “OK” hand gesture began to be interpreted as a white supremacist hand signal due to a hoax spread by alt-right communities and users of the web site 4chan that the symbol was actually a secret white supremacist gesture.
Even the ADL's own expert had this to say about the "OK hand gesture" in 2017:
If someone presents you with a symbol and says it is the big new white supremacist symbol, you should be appropriately skeptical.
Of course, the ADL has since changed its tune, because, well, if you're not a part of the solution, there's money to be made prolonging the problem, I guess. I honestly kinda thought this particular meme had run its course when it got misapplied during the Kavanaugh hearings. It got new life when the Christchurch shooter flashed it in 2019, but that was more than 5 years ago, now--an eternity on 4chan. I don't know--did it actually catch on in Europe? Apparently it caught on in Brazil, kinda--
The Brazilian journalist who reported the matter to Olympic organisers said the issue was “nothing new” in his country, citing a trial last year in which the judge overturned the acquittal of Filipe Martins, Special Advisor for International Affairs to the government of Jair Bolsonaro, of the crime of racism, after he used the hand gesture in the Senate in 2021.
I hadn't heard the Brazil story before now. "The crime of racism" sounds pretty damn Orwellian to me, but I live in the land of the First Amendment... people do things differently in foreign countries. I'm also a little taken aback by the actions of the Brazilian journalist, who did not report a man saying racist things, or a man harassing people, but a man who might have been positioning himself on camera while making a hand signal that has sometimes been associated with having beliefs outside the Overton window. I already hold journalists in pretty low regard, generally, but this Brazilian displayed all the dignity of a classroom snitch, minus any compelling evidence that there was anything to snitch about.
For whatever it's worth, offensive hand gestures are nothing new for the Olympics--not even for these Olympics. But flipping the bird in each case appears to be pretty context-informed. As far as I can tell from the story, the dude maybe playing the circle game and maybe not doing anything especially deliberate at all was booted without hesitation:
The person in question has been identified and confirmed not to be a member of the OBS team. They are associated with one of its contractors. The contractor has been informed, consequently, the individual’s accreditation has been cancelled effective immediately.
I have never been much of a sports fan, but the Olympics in particular really get me conflicted. I've seen some remarkable displays of athleticism; Olympic gymnastics and figure skating are events I have on several occasions watched on purpose and with some interest. But I simply have no good feelings at all for the IOC. They are intellectual property trolls; they have for example attempted to use their trademark to prevent criticism (fortunately they lost that case, but the First Amendment doesn't reach everywhere). Other, specific cases of corruption are pretty well known. I, personally, would never spend any money in direct support of the Olympics, despite my occasional interest over the years.
Though I've little reason to care too much about one subcontractor getting an unceremonious boot for what, to my eyes, looks like playing a silly game he probably didn't even know had been at the center of a culture war flare-up five years ago--I do have reason to care about a slow, global slouch toward Orwellian big brother/little brother behavior. When people talk about "threats to democracy" and "the rise of fascism" I don't see Nazis goose-stepping down main street; I see progressives enforcing ideological conformity through everyday acts of institutional bullshit. This is "cancel culture," writ small.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
This is low effort and unnecessarily antagonistic, please don't post like this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I looked over the rules just now. Was it my use of the word "tranny?" If so, I'll avoid using it. Not sure what else it could have been.
We don't really ban specific words per se, but we do ban things like weakmanning in order to show how bad a group is. In this particular case, you might respond "oh but I was just explaining a way to play the game under discussion" but... I guess what I want to say is that I might accept that excuse from a good poster with a long history in the sub, but I certainly wouldn't accept that excuse from a user with your posting history.
Frankly, if I were you and I wanted to continue posting on the Motte in good faith, the first thing I'd do is roll a new account without an openly antagonistic username. We are, I think, mostly tolerant of quirky usernames but, yours is a pretty bold declaration against, uh, the whole ethos of this site.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I don't know! That's definitely a question for @ZorbaTHut.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Welcome back! Let's see, you were last temp-banned for low-effort boo-outgroup posting a year ago... but instead of taking three days off, you disappeared for a year. It took you less than a week of posting to get my attention this time.
You're banned for a week, but you can expect that to escalate sharply if you continue posting like this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Did you possibly post this in the wrong thread? This seems like a perfectly acceptable post for the CW thread, and while CW topics are not forbidden in the Smallscale Question Sunday thread... this doesn't appear to be a smallscale question.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
But yes, it turns out people who own businesses want to make more money, and they'll drop their appeal to males 18-34, if it'll help them also win over older males and women.
I disagree with most of your assessment because it simply does not track my own experiences--but this particular sentence did catch my attention. I was recently reading this Atlantic article about how Boeing became such a terrible company. The complete picture is of course complicated, but a quick-and-dirty version goes like this: once upon a time, Boeing made money by making airplanes. Over time, they did less and less actual making of airplanes and more and more putting their stamp on airplanes that were mostly made by other companies. By outsourcing this work, Boeing was able to increase its profits! But over time, this resulted in an "airplane company" that could not rightly be said to understand airplane-making in the way it once had.
I see this sort of thing all over the place. Amazon was a fantastic bookstore. Then, it became a remarkable everything-catalog. Now, it is a kind of shitty logistics company with a lumbering stranglehold on a couple of important channels of commerce. Each step down the path was a step toward greater profitability, but also a step toward enshittification.
The enshittification of geek culture is probably not entirely attributable to the Great Awokening--personally, I suspect that bad copyright law plays a bigger role than is ordinarily appreciated, as "control" over "key properties" comes to trump creativity and risk and so forth. But as I noted in another comment--"It used to be okay for something to not be for you." That is not something today's marketers seem to understand, or agree with. Everything has to be for everyone (except, maybe, straight white men). But even from a capitalistic perspective this is probably an actual mistake; short term, you might think "I want everyone to like this and buy it, because that will maximize profits" but long term you just end up with shitty planes literally falling apart in the sky--and whatever the cultural equivalent of that is.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Basically, it feels like society kicked nerds out in the 80s, we went "ok whatever we're going to do our own thing", and now 40 years later the bullies are back to kick us out of the communities we built as a refuge from them in the first place. It really grates.
This is a startlingly accurate summary of the last 25 years of my life.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
always been
...
doesn't involve screens
I'm thinking about a timeline that reaches back quite a bit earlier than widespread parental concern over screen time (other than television). Many figures do not rate "PG-13," though of course in the late 1980s the UK had "Page 3" and the U.S. was often portrayed by its internal critics as quaint and backward in its insistence on stuff like sexualizing breasts, so maybe things really were/are just different across the pond.
Of course, "get 'em hooked young" has been part of their marketing approach for a long time, too; as with the Japanese pulling cross imagery out of video games in that era, "just don't mention Slaanesh" is a pretty low bar. But woke capital seems to have accomplished what church ladies couldn't, as these days it seems like the true Emperor of Mankind is the diversity consultant heading up HR.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I am willing to extend someone enough charity to accept that "Pro-Palestine" does not necessarily mean "Anti-Israel"
I agree, in principle. In practice, in my experience, anyone with strong views on the matter tends to seek ideological purity. I have a number of problems with Israel, which are often difficult to express without either being accused of antisemitism, or being praised by outright antisemites. I have many more problems with "Palestine" (in any of its many incarnations), which are all but impossible to express without being accused of Islamophobia, being pro-genocide, being racist, and so forth.
Boardgamers are the fucking worst. (I can say this, I'm a boardgamer. Although I'm a dirty hex-and-counter wargamer, and only old white supremacist men play those.)
I agree, as a boardgamer, that boardgamers are terrible, and online boardgame forums are excellent demonstrations of Conquest's Laws. What amazes me is how the same can today be said of pretty much every hobby that was ever demographically "geeky white male." RPGs, video games, anime, comic books--but also science, engineering, philosophy, and information technology. These spaces have been absolutely overrun with people insisting "it's not just for you!" and for maybe the first decade of the new millennium, the response I usually saw was... this, basically. But post-Awokening (and with the help of "Woke Capital") a lot of old school nerds and geeks have been hounded to the edges of the space. It's weird to watch properties that weathered and survived the "moral majority" censorship of the late 20th century cave with zero resistance to the new millennium's church ladies sensitivity readers. You could kill children in the original Fallout. Warhammer 40k was not PG-13. It used to be okay for something to not be for you.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I would say that the meaning is pretty comprehensible to both his allies and enemies
Yes, certainly--but it comes with plausible deniability for those who are not allies or enemies, but merely useful idiots who parrot nice sounding slogans. In the now-locked boardgame subreddit thread, one user says:
Don't tell me it was just something like "to the river to the sea, Palestine will be free". The idea that that's understood as any sort of call to violence is pure fearmongering / gaslighting.
Which is gaslighting! The chant (and graffiti) in Arabic has for decades been "From the river to the sea, Palestine is Islamic/Arab." But people who don't know or appreciate history can say "oh, freedom from the river to the sea, how nice, I'm definitely in favor of that!"
Winning game designer banned from future Spiel des Jahres events for anti-Israel symbol.
Board gaming is a much bigger hobby than it used to be. The Spiel des Jahres award was created in 1978 to highlight family-friendly games, and I played some of the early winners (Rummikub (1980) and Scotland Yard (1983))--but it was 1995's winner, The Settlers of Catan, that really changed the face of board gaming in the United States. As an established presence in the European market, the Spiel des Jahres evolved from a simple trade award to the gold standard for "must have" games. Like most at-home hobbies, board gaming also got a bump from the COVID pandemic--but more broadly, the nerdification of American culture has fed board gaming in much the way it has fed video gaming, comic books, and other IP-adjacent hobbies.
These days there are three "Spiel des Jahres" awards--the children's award, the regular award, and the "complex game" award. This year's "complex" winner was Daybreak, "a cooperative game about stopping climate change." The creator, Matteo Menapace, presumably wrote his own bio, though I don't know that for certain:
...a game designer and educator, former artist in residence at the V&A Museum in London. He designs cooperative board games inspired by social issues, such as food politics, memory loss and the climate crisis. He also teaches people how to make games that encourage collaboration and help people navigate complex conversations.
Anyway, Matteo reportedly wore a pin or sticker or something looking approximately like this onto the award ceremony stage. The announcement describes this as
a symbol ... that Jews will perceive as anti-Semitic ... by pointing out the outlines of a 'Greater Palestine' that denies the existence of the State of Israel.
Predictably, a reddit post in the most popular board game sub refers to it as a "pro-Palestine" sticker rather than an "anti-Israel" sticker. These days the line between those things can seem pretty thin, or so it seems to me. The commentary is predictable enough... I suppose in this case I would say that it seems like the political symbol in question "deliberately skirts the border of comprehensibility." Matteo is clearly an activist, who was doing activist things. The Spiel des Jahres people are clearly on board with the DEI rhetoric, and employ it in this announcement, so this may be one of those "leopards at my face" moments, too. But I don't know what Matteo's nationality is (Google suggests maybe he's an Italian living in the UK?), and Germany has some fairly strict anti-semitism laws for, you know, historical reasons, so there may be a culture gap issue here as well.
Thanks for the response.
Discussions of the meta are not banned, of course--and I would re-emphasize that my analysis of your comment was not intended in any punitive way. Several users have raised concerns about a slide in the quality of discourse. Two mods have left the site, citing this as a reason. "The discourse is degrading" is not a new accusation; analogous complaints are arguably why the CW thread got kicked off the SSC subreddit in the first place. I've been moderating for something like five years and "the discourse is degrading" has been a steady drumbeat all along. And yet some of the most highly informative and uniquely insightful posts ever contributed to the CW thread were written long ago by users with names like "yodatsracist" and "trannyporno."
So I'm (yes, probably as an exercise in futility) trying to understand the shape of what's really going on. The Sneer Club subreddit (now defunct) was created eight years ago. Most of Scott Alexander's best culture war posts were written in 2014. The underlying mechanism of being "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases" has contributed to the development of numerous semi-famous and arguably even influential substack writers and podcasters and the like. And yes--it has also resulted in a metric shit-ton of weird stuff, conspiracy-theory level madness, flat-earther tier denials of reality, etc. It has always been that bad, and it has always been that great. And as specific individuals have found its usefulness to them personally to expire, they have on many occasions departed with the declaration that now the Motte is just too much a hive of scum and villainy. But... maybe this time it's different? That's kind of what I'm trying to understand.
I myself no longer find the CW thread as useful as it has been to me in the past! But that's very much about me. The idea of freewheeling discourse being totally cool was well within the Overton window before 2016 introduced the idea of a "Misinformation Age" (whether things actually happened that way or not), and today, well... today people are much more concerned about epistemic hygiene, I guess would be the charitable way to say it. "Wrongthink bad" is not a new idea, but I daresay it is much more fashionable now than it was ten years ago.
I don't know where that leaves us. I've never been the solutions person. I know @ZorbaTHut has expressed some desire to implement solutions in the form of code, but the demands of day jobs are a curse upon us all. (Isn't there something in the Bible about that?) Anyway, thanks for answering my questions, I appreciate the effort and reflection.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
This is not a warning, in the sense that I'm not putting a note on your account, but I have two moderator-level questions about your post that I'd be interested in an honest response to, if possible.
The first is your rhetoric concerning the Motte. You wrote:
...while there were some voices calling for restraint...
Which can actually literally mean anywhere from one voice, to all voices; from a small majority to a large one, and anywhere in between. Then you wrote:
...many commenters demanded blood from the left...
Which literally means the same thing as the first part of that sentence, in reverse. However you chose "many" instead of "some," which paints a certain picture of this space. You then dropped four quotes. But weirdly, the first and fourth quotes are from the same post, and it is a post for which that user got banned, which you don't mention. So my first question is: why did you decide to portray the discussion here with such uncharitable rhetoric?
The Motte exists as text. One of the things that sometimes happens to places like this is, what sets them apart from other spaces gets amplified as it gets noticed. So for example people notice that reddit is a teeming hive of fedora-wearing atheists, which attracts more fedora-wearing atheists (and repels non-fedora-wearing-atheists) until the admin slashes-and-burns their way through the algorithm (or whatever), converting the site to a teeming hive of reflexively woke young adults. In a way I suspect this is analogous to Flanderization, but with a community rather than a fictional character. Maybe sociologists have a name for this process?
Anyway, this is a space for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. But our "open debate, no positions banned" policy meant that people with Overton-suppressed political views found this space unusually welcoming. One way we try to tamp down the "seven zillion witches" problem that this eventually Flanderizes to is by emphasizing individual arguments over discussion of "groups" wherever possible. I have often repeated the line "you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic" to people who make sweeping claims about the Motte. It applies to your post, here: the reason I don't want people making claims about the Motte is that I think it tends to Flanderize the space. People read your claim, and it shifts, however slightly, their priors on whether this space is "for them." But of course it's for them! As long as they follow the rules, this space is for everyone, no matter what they believe. That's the foundation; that's the bedrock.
My second question is: why did you include the ChatGPT summary? Did you feel the need to provide a summary but didn't feel up to writing one yourself? Were you just padding your word count in hopes of avoiding a "low effort" moderation action? I'm not accusing you of anything, mind--I'm just curious. You have a pretty good posting history so I was caught off guard by it. Not only does generative AI minimize engagement with your audience, it minimizes your own engagement with the text you're citing. No one benefits from it. It seems to me that ChatGPT quotes are quinessential low-effort participation, unless maybe you're showing your work on a post specifically about generative AI or something. I don't think we've explicitly made it against the rules but I do think it's incompatible with the rules we've got--but maybe I'm overlooking something.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
That's what their defense attorneys say. Which is of course what they'd say.
And that defense was broadly successful, for several of the accused. Others took plea deals, and the convictions that stuck were, in the end, comparatively bland.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
It obviously doesn’t follow.
But the same presently available evidence that supports the proposition "unfit to run" also supports the proposition "unfit for office." We don't actually know what Biden's mental state will be 6 months or 4 years from now. But the same evidence (from his speeches, debates, public appearances, etc.) that he won't be fit for office in six months, or four years, is also evidence that he isn't fit for office now.
If the same evidence supports both A and B, then discussions of A will naturally invoke discussions of B. Your ability to frame what is being argued in a way that does not logically follow is irrelevant to the arguments that do follow, and so your focus on this one particular framing looks like cherry-picking.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Would either American party preemptively defenestrate a President because of mental competence concerns? The Reagan experience in his second term suggests not, though I suppose one could argue Republicans have shifted to caring more about mental competence since then.
No, I expect the "Reagan experience" is baseline; even the White House webpage has an entry praising Edith Wilson's handling of her husband's incapacity.
But the kayfabe is important; it may be the most important thing about the office of the President. When it falls apart, it is unlikely to fall apart selectively, in the way that is most politically advantageous for the people involved. That's what I'm pointing out here, I think, about "Schrodinger's excuse." Maybe it would be better put as "Schrodinger's dementia." The same evidence that supports Biden's withdrawal, supports his immediate resignation (or removal, or etc.).
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
Has anyone told him yet that he's not running for re-election anymore?
They didn't even tell his staffers, why would they tell him?
More seriously--if this were an elderly man trying to make changes to his will, I'd have some hard questions about undue influence. That's been true throughout his presidency. He might very well be going along with this as the result of rational persuasion, but I don't believe for one instant that it was his idea.
You were wrong then, you're still wrong, and now you've brought a third moderator into this conversation.
Your complaint, every time we have these conversations, boils down to "other people did bad stuff and got away with it." That is certainly true! We do not moderate every bad post. We do not moderate all of your bad posts. Why? Well, as I've explained to you before, we have to weigh the costs and benefits of every second we spend moderating. The rules ultimately function only in service of the foundation. Sometimes a not-great post just isn't worth the hassle, and isn't doing sufficient harm. Sometimes a not-that-bad post is worth the hassle, or is doing sufficient harm. Sometimes we just miss it because no one reports it. Sometimes we're busy with other things. "Consistency" is not the goal; the goal is to serve the foundation to the best of our abilities.
But since you seem to at least want more consistency, here you go: I've consistently told you that the bad behavior of others is irrelevant to your own. Arguing with us about what other people have or have not "gotten away with" is meaningless. We've banned leftists, we've banned rightists, we've banned more flavors of political perspective than most people know even exist. But always in service of the foundation. We've never yet banned someone "based on rounding discussions off to preconceived notions from your previous experience on the internet." As long as you believe otherwise, you will continue to believe something that is false.
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