site banner
PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

New from me: Reliable Sources, investigating how longtime malicious critic of this community, RationalWiki sysadmin, and Wikipedia administrator David Gerard launders his grudges into the public record. The article is a bit of a labor of love: I'd been loosely familiar with him from his time in spaces critical of this forum, but I had no clue just how deep the rabbit hole went. For the past five years, he's been on a mission to slash-and-burn "unreliable sources" from Wikipedia, advocating for sites like PinkNews and HuffPost as reliable while pushing to make heterodox and right-wing sources impossible to cite.

Back in the day, Gerard was a surprisingly big fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky and a reasonably good-faith contributor on LessWrong who was alternately friendly and critical. At some point, though, coinciding with the 2012-2014 cultural schism that destroyed old internet culture, he turned more and more against it. After his longtime friend [Elizabeth] Sandifer got banned from Wikipedia for doxxing someone in the wake of Gerard's abusing mod tools to lock Chelsea Manning's article under her new name back in 2013, Gerard seems to have elected to abandon all pretense of good faith on Wikipedia, instead spending years shaping the LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, and other rationalist-adjacent pages to reflect any negative information he could.

In particular, he was directly responsible for more-or-less fabricating ties between LessWrong and neoreaction, going so far as to have his friend self-publish a book (Neoreaction: A Basilisk) that used him as a source for all claimed ties, finding a review of the book from another friend of hers, and sliding that review in as a citation to claim a tie between the two communities. He also fed as much negative info about Scott to the NYT's Cade Metz (an old rival of his) during that whole affair a few years back while repeatedly trying to doxx Scott on his Wikipedia page and editing the page to put the focus on the NYT affair and remove articles critical of the NYT. That behavior, in the end, got him banned from directly editing things related to Scott Alexander, but to this day he remains the primary contributor to e.g. the LessWrong Wikipedia article.

There's much more in the article. The man has thirty years of online history, from running an anti-scientology page on Julian Assange's server back in the day to hosting LemonParty to a whole lot more, and I was caught up by a mad impulse to document All Of It. It's almost impossible to explain this sort of context to uninvolved parties without, well, sitting down, trawling through hundreds of obscure pages, interviewing a bunch of people close to the events, and pulling three decades of online Lore into legible form, so that's what I did.

All the best.

  • 114

I just realized he decided to leave the site after posting the top post of all time.

This is really, really, extremely good. One of the best pieces of journalism I've read in... at least the last year, I think. I just got done listening to it, and I'm going to listen to it again. More comments later, because it deserves them. Leave aside any aspect of tribal vailence, it's just a really good story about corruption, and how systems fail to deal with it. It's a worthy successor to MsScribe.

Several thoughts:

(1) I'm not in a position to double-check your research, but from within my Gell-Mann amnesia your piece seems to be a triumph of meticulous digging, well in the spirit of your ATC qualifications scandal piece. Mega-kudos on that.

(2) As usual, the prose is engaging and lively. To be honest, I have little use for the minutiae of wikipedia, but you made me give a shit while I read your piece. Further kudos for that.

(3) As an exemplar of a certain kind of, for lack of a better word, deep-state operative, the Gerard story is quite instructive. However, given that the output of Gerard's crankery is mostly (without casting too many aspersions) ideologically-slanted internet articles, there's still a part of me that looks at all this as a bit of an exercise in navel gazing.

(4) There's a dark, sad part of my soul that looks at this story and sees the death of our lovely walled garden of discussion. Yes, Scott created an amazing community that has spun off in many different directions and brought a lot of talented people together. That's kinda what happens when you take someone with a silver pen and throw human capital at them. But then there's Gerard - just a guy, not nearly as talented a writer as Scott, not nearly as brilliant or high-power-level as many of the posters here; but he has an iron-clad grip on his beliefs, and the sitzsfleisch to just grind away, arguments-as-soldiers-ing his way forward in the ideological trenches day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. There's gotta be an order of magnitude more Gerards, scattered throughout just about every institution, than there are of us, and it really seems like even the most beautiful walled garden (and you really make it seem like pre-ant farm Wiki was just such a garden) will crumble before a Gerardian siege.

More reminder to me of why KiwiFarms remains one of the most important repositories of information on the net. This would make a great OP for a post over there, assuming a lolcow like Gerard doesn't already have a thread. You should post it in the RationalWiki thread at the very least so it can be saved for posterity in case you catch too much heat. Good work.

I just checked, there's a rationalwiki thread that catches all the Gerard discussion. Someone posted TW's article already, but the thread is kinda dead.

I'm surprised no one has tried to oust him over his contributions to Uncyclopedia.

This article took me on a journey. When I began I couldn't remember who David Gerard is. When I reached the end, I remembered why I hate David Gerard so much.

As someone that only started interacting with the rat-sphere and adjacent parts somewhat recently, I appreciate this window into history. Great work.

Great writeup. Reminded me of The MsScribe story.

Every time I read the phrase "reliable sources" I heard it in Max Payne's voice.

I hear it in Richard Poe's voice (sorry, can't find a video).

Often times after reading one of Scott's greatest hits I would just sit staring at a comment box. How do I tell them that this is amazing? Everything I write just tastes like ash compared to what I just read.

I'll be plain and up front about it. This was an amazing piece. Super well researched. On a topic I greatly cared about. And a great ending that had me whoop out loud.

I've tried writing about David before, but it often just ended in frustration. I knew about him before the Scott thing blew up because he had posted descriptions of my modding decisions that seemed completely wrong. He would write up the descriptions on rational wiki (I'm still quoted on there). I quickly learned that was basically his own personal fiefdom. I've ended up taking the approach suggested by your parting words. David seems to be living in a personal hell of his own making. I will let him continue to live there, and I will try not to let him drag me down into it with him.

The fact that he was not stripped of admin powers after the Scott incident has eroded all of my trust in wikipedia. It is just another battleground in the culture war. A battleground that was mostly won because one side didn't even realize a battle was taking place.

Thanks--it means a lot. Reactions like this, and knowing how many of us had The Gerard Experience, are why I wrote the article. He needs to be seen to be understood.

I'll second cjet, this is a stupendous article. Your review of "from third world to first" was one of the first things I ever read on themotte (and I read the book myself because of it), and I'm glad you're still writing.

I do miss that old internet culture.

It sounds like this guy was, weirdly, ahead of the game in a lot of ways. He realized that the internet was important as a source of serious information, when most other people were just using it to goof around. He was willing to stand up and be a public figure, writing everything under his real name. Pretty common now on substack and celebrity twitter, but very rare back then. And he was willing to fight for all the causes that have became left-wing staples, completely avoiding the libertarian flavor of the earlier internet days.

If he hadn't wasted so much time and effort on that stupid RationalWiki site (I had no idea it was mostly all just one guy writing it), he'd probably be a famous influencer or political pundit now.

To clarify, it definitely wasn't mostly just him writing it! RationalWiki has a lot of prolific editors; he's just the Twitter frontman, the sysadmin, and in many ways the one who sets the cultural tone.

As someone who saw his descent happen in real time and even helped push him along by trolling Rationalwiki a few times, I really appreciated this article. It was nice to read a confirmation of all the things I'd recognised about him years ago backed up by real evidence and investigation - though at the end it just made me want to give him a smirk and a "We're not so different, you and I" speech for our seemingly shared efforts at disinformation.

Does any normal person consider rationalwiki a reliable source? I always thought of it as a 'by lolcows, for lolcows' kind of site. Elon Musk's article for instance: four paragraphs on Teslas, one paragraph on SpaceX, at least 50 paragraphs on Twitter and probably another fifty on his tweets.

It has a roughly similar tone to the incel wiki page on women. Everything from the derisive nicknames to the snarky pictures is identical. Only difference is that the incels are succinct.

I mean, if you’re trying to learn about a suspected total crackpot, rational wiki will get the point that he’s a total crackpot across faster and more entertainingly than Wikipedia.

If you're trying to learn about a suspected crackpot, a piece of paper saying "yes" will get the point across even faster than that. But the piece of paper and Rationalwiki will both be bad at eliminating false positives.

I doubt that normal people know that RationalWiki exists or consider it at all.

My experience with non-Motte-related somewhat-left-y people on the internet is that RationalWiki is seen as basically left-wing Conservapedia, and completely untrustworthy, but I admit that's probably selection bias.

My understanding is that RationalWiki was originally founded as a left-wing foil to Conservapedia and the only reason why it is marginally more accurate and significantly funnier is the higher average IQ on the Very Online left compared to the fundie right.

Well, maybe I should try a test case.

Let's take, say, the Conservapedia page on Joe Biden and the RationalWiki page on Donald Trump.

(On a side note, I put 'conservapedia joe biden' and 'rationalwiki donald trump' into DuckDuckGo, and neither search returned me the page I needed. The latter did at least return RationalWiki pages, though for some reason it started with 'Policies of Donald Trump', 'Trumpism', 'Foreign Policy of Donald Trump', 'Donald Trump Jr.', and 'Trump-Ukraine Scandal', and never actually had the bare page on Trump. The former, however, was more suspicious - DDG refused to find Conservapedia at all. Instead, the first five results were Politico, NPR, the New York Times, Time, and Bloomberg, with further stories from NPR, CNN, Vox, and eventually joebiden.com, his campaign website. If I DDG for 'conservapedia' by itself it does correctly return Conservapedia as the first result. This makes me wary that there's some kind of disinformation filter here.)

Anyway, RationalWiki on Trump:

Donald John "Huge Hands Hans" Trump, Sr. (1946–), is an American businessman, rapist, reality TV host, four times indicted criminal, convicted felon,[6] and conspiracy theorist who was the forty-fifth President of the United States from 2017 to 2021. He is an adjudicated liar[7] and an adjudicated rapist:[8] yes, he's a sadistic "sick fuck".[9] Due to his involvement in an attempted self-coup after losing reelection, he has the infamous dishonor of being the first president in American history impeached and acquitted twice by the House of Representatives,[10] with the most bipartisan impeachment standing in US history.[11][note 1] As of 2024, he was courting the cannibalistic serial killer vote by praising the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter.[12] More proof of his self-described "very stable genius"[13] comes from being the first one-term president since George H. W. Bush in 1992.

His public life and career read like a Greatest Hits album of everything wrong with American society. Once tweeting a quote by radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who called Trump the "Chosen One and the King of Israel",[14] he is infamous for being a bizarrely unsuccessful businessman,[15][16] brash television personality,[17] fascist and neo-Nazi sympathizer,[18][19][20] con artist,[21] honorary Russian Cossack,[22] heelWikipedia wrestling personality,[note 2] sexual-assault enthusiast,[8][23][note 3] demagogue,Wikipedia[24] personality-cult leader,[25][26][27] and an aspiring strongman,Wikipedia[28] Nobel Peace Prize nominee,[note 4][30] and subject of extensive false equivalency.[31][32] Thanks to the confluence of his legendary narcissism and propensity for self-promotion, minimal attempts by his Republican supporters to moderate his malignant impulsivity, and four years at the tiller of perhaps the world's most influential public platform with an itchy Twitter finger, he holds the distinction of having likely told more public (and demonstrable) lies than any other person in human history.[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]

Elected against all odds,[note 5] Trump's presidency was an unmitigated disaster. Responsible for numerous human rights violations and outright crimes against humanity, he was condemned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,[43] for taking migrant children from their parents at the Mexican border and putting them in literal cages.[44][45] His inflammatory rhetoric, defense of his antagonistic or outright homicidal supporters,[46] endorsement of police killings on leftists,[47] bragging that his government assassinated leftists and antifascists (and heavily implying under his direct orders),[48][49][50][51][52][53][54] and vicious scapegoating of minorities directly inspired multiple acts of violence,[55][56] including against political rivals[57] and their relatives,[58] and even actual politically-motivated murders by his supporters,[59][60] even against people unconnected to Trump.[61]

Conservapedia on Biden:

Joseph Robinette “Joe” Biden, Jr., aka Pops, Pedo Pete,[14] The Big Guy, Robert L. Peters, Robin Ware,[15] J. R. B. Ware[16][17][18] and My Chairman[19][20] (born November 20, 1942) is the authoritarian kleptocrat and dictator of the United States.[21][22] Biden has been described by a close confidant as an "egomaniacal autocrat"[23] and by his own Justice Department as incompetent and unfit.[24]

79% of Americans believe that the 2020 presidential election was unjustly manipulated by dishonest whitewashing of the Biden family's criminal activities.[25] The official position of the Biden regime as articulated by its chief press spokesperson is that political opposition is "a threat to democracy."[26] A poll conducted by the Daily Mail of Iowa Republicans in August 2023 after Biden's 3rd indictment of 2024 presidential frontrunner President Donald J. Trump found 57% believed America was becoming like Nazi Germany under Biden.[27] Biden's ongoing bid to retain the presidency in 2024 is backed by Russia.[28][29] According to the "left-leaning"[30] newspaper The Economist, the USA's Democracy Index ranking decreased from 7.96 in 2019 under Trump to 7.85 in 2023 under Biden. Biden is known for his use of the term "bloodbath".[31]

A prominent Holocaust trivializer, Biden has compared migrants who illegally crossed the U.S.–Mexican border to Jews who perished in the Shoah.[32] In the space of 25 months after seizing power, Biden single-handedly rehabilitated the reputations of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, turning Nazis into freedom fighters for Western liberal democracy.

You can keep reading both articles if you'd like, but you no doubt get the idea.

I think reading them both, my judgement is that Conservapedia is worse, but they are both basically unhinged rants, far more interested in just insulting their subject in the most over-the-top and childish ways possible than they are in understanding anything. Both are basically political entertainment, written only to amuse or entertain an audience of dedicated partisans.

They are both worthless.

They are both worthless.

I would say both are hilarious, though not for the reasons their authors intended.

I've known a few people who knew little about the specific internet subcultures, who at one time or another have cited RationalWiki to me as evidence that Scott Alexander is an unhinged neoreactionary rightist, or some other such nonsense. These people trusted RationalWiki mostly by virtue of its name alone (i.e. "well, it's a wiki that's trying to be rational, isn't it?").

RationalWiki is (or was?) a legitimately good source on a lot of cranks, especially from way back in the days when things were simpler and the chief debate on the internet was creationism vs evolution. But at the same time if you look at their article on Trump or anything remotely connected to the culture wars you're just looking at the same kind of junk they're so great at calling out when the political valence is flipped.

RationalWiki is (or was?) a legitimately good source on a lot of cranks

I don't know about now, but I always thought it's one of the worst. Being raised on James Randi style skepticism, seeing RationalWiki's takes on various cranks that seemed to boil down to a deluge of BooOutgroup, was like nails on a chalkboard.

IDK, rationalwiki seems like it makes it pretty apparent who's genuinely crazy and who believes probably false things for ideological reasons. I don't know that they're intending to do that but the difference between Ken Ham and David Icke on there is night and day.

I agree one could have seen the signs from the start, but it was easy to tolerate or even join in the sneering since many of the early targets were simultaneously ridiculous and unsympathetic, like scientology.

Does any normal person consider rationalwiki a reliable source?

Yes. Rationalwiki is high up (or used to) on the google search index. Most people that visit rationalwiki are directed from Google. Same deal with wikipedia. The average user doesn't know or care about any online drama.

fabricating

Not having read your article, and in isolation of whether or not this is actually a "problem", per se, this seems like a bad-faith article. If you go back and read old lesswrong articles and their comments, you will find now-known neoreactionaries like hanson posting on lesswrong, including roko.

Additionally, breitbart in 2016: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/an-establishment-conservatives-guide-to-the-alt-right/

In your defense, even lesswrong somewhat disagreed

  • -45

If you had read the article, you would have noticed that he addresses the very Breitbart article you linked.

He added a citation to a Breitbart article by Milo Yiannopolous and Allum Bokhari after they claimed neoreaction grew out of comments on LessWrong, and another citation to an article in German-language newspaper FAZ that cited the same connection. When I asked Yiannopolous and Bokhari for comment, Yiannopolous did not recall the context, and Bokhari has not returned my request for comment at this time. Since the claim has no basis in history and reads like a loose cribbing from RationalWiki, and since neither Yiannopolous or Bokhari was ever part of neoreaction or LessWrong, my honest guess is that Gerard aptly demonstrated the reason to treat Breitbart as unreliable by using a poorly sourced and false claim from it.

Given David Gerard's history of constructing his own reality and then force-fitting Reliable Sources into that narrative, it does not seem bad faith at all to assume that fabrication is precisely what he's doing here. He's clearly not a man who spends a lot of time on Breitbart.com looking to uncover the Truth. Something motivated a man who likely despises Breitbart in general and Milo Yiannopolous in specific to cite their website as a source. You can quibble about the semantics of the word "fabricate" in this context, but to be clear, he is deciding that This Thing must be true without reliable evidence, and then going out to find that evidence, even when it does not exist or is worthless by his own standards.

Whether or not you think the word "fabricating" is sufficiently accurate in this context, it's a huge leap to then claim that an obsessively sourced document in excess of 12,000 words is "bad faith." The article bends over backwards to be charitable to a man whose every action makes him look like, at best, a vandal of history with outsized influence on a website that constitutes the only source of information many people will ever consume on a given subject. In fact, I think a good faith reading of the article would reveal that Tracingwoodgrains was abundantly charitable and writing entirely in good faith, even if you disagreed with his interpretation of the facts. There is a massive canyon between "disagreeing with the precise word chosen to describe David Gerard's behavior in a comment summarizing a 12,000 word article" and "bad faith."

Not having read your article, and in isolation of whether or not this is actually a "problem", per se, this seems like a bad-faith article.

I'm not going to mod this because people can have shitty opinions, but "I haven't read your article but I am going to pass judgment on it being bad faith" is really on the border of obnoxiously low effort. On the subject of what the Motte is supposed to be and what it is becoming, we want it to be a place where people issue considered opinions after taking in the available evidence (including, you know, at least reading what you are commenting on), not just a place where people drop hot takes based on vibes and how they feel about the poster or the subject.

neoreactionaries like hanson

lolwut.

Your evidence is a breitbart article that lumps a bunch of people into a vague category that didn't mean much back in 2016, and that category is not "neoreaction".

Says a lot more about you than it does Hanson, who isn't nearly interesting enough to aspire to neoreaction.

Hanson isn't a neoreactionary. He's an elderly economist who loves freedom of speech and likes to be a bit trolly at times.

He never wrote a single important nrx post, didn't comment in nrx spaces, is not known for long edgy political posts either. His twitter interactions with Nick Land run to a grand total of cca 20 replies over 9 years.

Roko, no idea what he was up to but if he was nrx then, he was,at best, a lurker. You're free to find counterexamples to this, the entire xenosystems blog is archived. and practically everyone involved in nrx commented there while it was running.

Breitbart simply was never really good, and the article was co-written by Milo, who is an untrustworthy charlatan and that article of their is just plain bad. NRx wasn't really influence on the alt-right, contrary to what lazy journalists thought..

There was little overlap between the two. You can check out how a typical Xenosystems comment section looked like here. Then compare it to lesswrong.

Relevant lesswrong discussion

Compare the tone, informational content and themes and make your own judgement.

NRx wasn't really influence on the alt-right, contrary to what lazy journalists thought..

This is important. The alt-right is populist - it takes for granted that its core agenda is supported by the silent majority of "real Americans" and that its enemies hold power by some combination of mass media enabled deceit and the votes of imported "fake Americans". (Allegations of actual electoral fraud aren't part of the traditional alt-right playbook - they started with Trump - but are now routine as the difference between the alt-right and the MAGA right collapses).

NRx is unashamedly elitist - its foundational texts explicitly reject "ideal democracy" (rule by the masses) as impossible and real democracy (disputes within the elite settled by elections) and even "demotism" (elites legitimising themselves by claiming mass support whether or not this is actually tested at the ballot box) as undesirable. The rest of the Thielosphere is similarly elitist, but quieter about it.

You can listen to the article too (the AI text to speech is surprisingly good).

How can you call it bad faith without reading it? Isn't that bad faith?

Not having read your article

this seems like a bad-faith article

classic stuff.

From the article:

In particular, Gerard gradually started mentally associating LessWrong with neoreaction, though for a time he acknowledged he only saw incidental encounters between the two.

Also note that the claim is "more-or-less fabricating"

now-known neoreactionaries like hanson

Wait, what? That's news to me. Could you share a link, or perhaps a Reliable SourceTM?

You should read my article! I cover these sources and these individuals in some detail, indicating why I think the term is wholly appropriate.

For example, it seems almost certain that the Breitbart guys (who had no real ties to either neoreaction or LessWrong) just cribbed from Wikipedia, and they didn’t remember their reasoning when I reached out.

One question I think this doesn't answer is "How does he keep getting away with this?" Why hasn't someone stopped him from pulling all the crap he did? Why did Mike Godwin shield him from some of the consequences of his actions?

My answer is that the people who could stop him agreed with him, politically. They could pretend they were decent and neutral arbiters of policy even as they allowed (and allow) Gerard to do for them what they actually wanted to do. But I suppose there are other possibilites.

Last I saw Wikipedia renamed "Gamergate" as the "Gamergate harassment campaign". They've chosen a side. So on a larger sense this is asking why they don't punish one of their own soldiers for attacking.

Love the audio version, a good break from the monotone tts player nearly everything else goes through for me.

If anything should convince me to lurk moar, this would be it. Alas, like dog returns, so do I. Good luck being the tall poppy.

Your unintentional seclusion during the great ant infestation is doing you a disservice, here. It was Gamergate that pushed him over the edge, in my view, because so much of Gamergate was fought on Wikipedia. I recognized some of the names, such as David Auerbach and Ryulong and NorthbySorthBaranof, although I hadn't thought of the latter by name in, well, a decade.

Kotakuinaction had a number of other subreddits, including wikiinaction. Alas, that seems to have been invaded and conquered in the great purge three years ago. It was more focused on this kind of thing, although it was never as popular.

Still, I appreciate a good effortpost. Well done.

What's the deal with the ants/gamergate connection?

I only included it because Numba Nine referred to it that way, but yes, a gamergate is a type of ant.

When Gamergate became a culture-war issue, the anti-Gamergate people started talking about ants (a Gamergate is actually a type of ant, as well as an internet argument) to prevent pro-Gamergate people from seeing what they were talking about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate

It used to link directly to the ant page, but was updated in August 2021.

Checking the timing on everything, his malicious edits started in earnest well before the ant farming really kicked off. He participated in the Gamergate nonsense, certainly, but I will firmly maintain my reading that his shift came before that point and Gamergate just solidified things.

his malicious edits started in earnest well before the ant farming really kicked off.

I think this is true of the internet in general. You sometimes hear that Gamergate started it all, but really it was just the moment a certain faction of previously apolitical people realized that progressives were going to politicize the internet and everything.

but really it was just the moment a certain faction of previously apolitical people realized that progressives were going to politicize the internet and everything.

The moment they realized the progressives had already done it. When all the censorship hit at once, when Gamergate was still "5 guys burgers and fries".

I recognize exactly what I'm saying, when I say it, given your stated themes.

I can believe that, and I can't be bothered to check for myself.

thezoepost was middle of August 2014, and the #gamergate hashtag was coined at the end of that month after the Gamers are Dead articles. You cite March 2014 as the Eich imbroglio on Wikipedia, April 2014 as EA/NR/LW on RationalWiki, and July 2014 as when he started on LessWrong's Wikipedia.

Checks out.

It's an interesting piece. I'll repeat from twitter that a few of the flirting-with-salacious bits detract and distract from the central story, even compared to writing out their long-form version (eg, "hosted LemonParty" might well unspool to something like 'archived a whole bunch of sites from a defunct host, which included some shock sites like lemonparty', though I can't find enough information to confirm that).

I didn't think of Sandifer's ban from Wikipedia as the radicalizing point for him, but it's plausible. On the other hand, I'm not sure the timeline quite works out: Sandifer was banned (and the whole Manning rename snafu happened in) October and November 2013, and Manning was first publicly known as trans in August 2013. Gerard was still posting through it on LessWrong proper into 2014, and while it sometimes touched, he was still engaging (cw: the linked story is deadfic, though it did get to a reasonable End of Book One point) with people with opposing viewpoints (if often smearing them elsewhere) in a way that, say, his later tumblr persona never did.

Compare 2013 twitter to 2016. He definitely hadn't gotten to the point where he'd imply his political opponents would be "legally able to administer roofies to female patients", yet, in 2016, either, as close at PigGate got.

((tl;dr of that: It's quite possible that PigGate never happened, and the only evidence in favor was a second-hand story by a man who pointedly separated from David Cameron's political faction over Cameron's support for gay marriage, and coincidentally did he mention it that Cameron allegedly put his todger onto a boar's head roast. But no one liked David Cameron, so who cares if the allegation is being laundered by a homophobe!))

I know that an alternative explanation of 'it's just everything all together that did it' -- increasing frustration that all the insight in LessWrong couldn't dissuade crypto buyers or 'Roko's Basilisk' or neoreactionaries or Rationalist Dark Arts practitioners, the replacement of Palin-like social conservatives with the Trumpist-populist faction, the Kids-and-Boomers Eternal September of mobile smartphones, the collapse of the twitter ratsphere, trans stuff becoming politically centralized, Eugene_Nier and the broader soccon right's disavowal of whatever free speech interests libertarians might have once had -- is kinda meaninglessly vague and far less interesting of a story. And the "it worked, didn't it" answer, where gay marriage won by punching homophobes and the next fights weren't willing to punch hard enough is... personally tempting for me, but probably no more right to Gerard's internal model. And we might not be able to get the real answer anywhere but straight from his mouth, if then, and I don't seem him willing to give either of us the time of day.

"Hosted LemonParty" comes straight from the horse's mouth:

(I find myself in the position of being the only guy who has root and cares to do site admin on the server hosting Lemonparty (Wikipedia explanation). I found a few other shock sites hosted there too when I did a cleanout of dead accounts. It’s slightly disquieting to find myself responsible for maintaining this species of cultural icon.)

In fact, him talking about that is where I got the Forrest Gump of the internet line.

I don't personally see that as a smear at all, and he doesn't treat it as one when talking about it. It's just one peculiar, flavorful side point in a long history.

I agree that it's not a smear or technically false, I just think the likely full explanation is probably so much more boring than the summary one -- even going from your summary to his we go from "it meant playing host to one of the internet’s most infamous shock sites" to him being one of the two sysadmins on the box and the only one who bothered logging into it -- that it seems weird or off-theme to throw in.

EDIT: but yeah, that's a nitpick.

Fantastic work, though the sections on how Gerard manipulates procedural outcomes on Wikipedia to turn supposedly neutral, fact-based articles into hit pieces fills me with dread. This same kind of malicious citogenesis was used in the Kiwi Farms deplatforming saga back in 2022/2023 to turn the Wikipedia narrative on them into a one-sided hit piece, with journalists citing conjecture and laundering it into a Reliable Source. I assume anything controversial on Wikipedia is written this way now, but I don't think the average person does.

You're on a roll with this niche you're carving out for yourself. I'm excited to read about the next bizarre rabbit hole you decide to post about in 4-6 months.

Have you worked on getting this compilation published by Reliable Sources and into the hands of the enemies Gerard has made on Wikipedia? Assuming there are any left who haven't been banned.

If an editor approached me, I would do so, but in all honesty I'm quite lazy about reaching out to outlets. Writing on one's own platform is better for most self-interested reasons, and the whole process of working with editors and connecting with outlets and so forth mostly feels like more of a pain than it's worth.

A lot of journalists follow me these days, though, so you never know.

Hey, quick question, do you still believe we should lie down and take a beating from your side, hoping that we don't die from it?

  • -39

We're operating on the oppressed/oppressor paradigm now bud, turnabout is fair play.

  • -11

No, we aren't. As in, this forum does not run on the oppressed/oppressor paradigm, and if you behave like it does, users will report you, and mods will warn and then ban you. This forum is for discussing the culture war, not waging it. Low-effort sniping at people you don't like or disagree with falls squarely under waging the culture war. Don't do it, because we won't tolerate it.

Welcome to the motte!

Please use this one-day waiting period to read the rules in our sidebar. Especially those about the rest of the internet and, per your other comment, cheap shots.

It's who whom the whole way down. Unless my memory fails me entirely, which it may, I can barely tell half of you semi-anonymous handles apart, TracingWoodgrains fed LibsOfTiktok false info once upon a time to in an effort to delegitimize her as well.

Okay, you claim fooling the NYT without be okay because they are the paper of record, not because they are politically repugnant to you.

Would you pillory a guy who got one up on Jon Stewart in the same way?

It's less about the NYT being a paper of record, although that makes it worse, and more about the NYT being an institution which brags about being better than any individual, versus a mere individual minus a team or fact checkers or lawyers..

Re: Stewart, good question. It's tough because Jon Stewart constantly straddles the line between comedian, news "communicator", and political commentator. And lots of people have complained, not without validity, about his whole clown nose on, clown nose off schtick. Did he fall for a hoax on his (now cancelled) Apple TV show? That's not great, and kudos to whoever got one over on him. Did he fall for a hoax giving a random interview? I honestly don't care. Is he doing a random standup bit in a club? All I care about is if it's funny, hoax or not.

I would say, if you hoaxed Fox News or maybe a perceived right wing newspaper like the Wallstreet Journal or the New York Post, they should have done better to weed you out. Good on you for exposing their lack of journalistic rigor.

Is that different from the Sokal Hoax? Are they both bad? Both good?

You know, my mind pre-emptively went to "I'm gonna have to defend the Sokal or Sokal^2 Hoaxes aren't I?"

I donno. Personally, if it isn't clear already, I would never wage that sort of information war, for any reason, period. It's not in my nature to lie or deceive in such a premeditated, Machiavellian manner. Although sometimes my friends tell me I exaggerate for comedic effect. Then again, one time I was telling a story about how fat the people at Gencon were, and my friends thought I had to be exaggerating. Then they came the year after and apologized for ever doubting me.

I think a stronger case can be made for the Sokal hoaxes, in that an institution is claiming to process papers with rigor. You need to stress test that from time to time, like when internal agents try to get a bomb past the TSA.

The TSA nearly always fails too.

I think it's a lot less defensible when you can convince internet randos, even internet randos of some notoriety or influence, of nonsense. Then you are just acting like a run of the mill troll off Something Awful, 4chan or KiwiFarms. Especially when it's of specific false instances of things that are absolutely actually happening elsewhere.

Going back to the TSA example, it's almost like the test was not "Can we get a bomb through the TSA" but "Wouldn't it be funny if we convinced the TSA something was a bomb that wasn't actually a bomb?" Well no, that just makes you an asshole.

That last bit reminds me of this kid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Mohamed_clock_incident

Yeah, that would have been my answer too. Scientific institutions ought to be held to a higher standard than random people screenshotting bad behavior of the other side.

There's definitely overlap in framework that they're all pissing in the drinking water, so to speak, but I think there are layers of issues, here:

  • Sokal's hoax was pretty self-evidently not real, and the editors, at least theoretically, had the capability to check that. Even if they didn't, they could have asked almost anyone with a physics background for a sanity check. There's little, if any, evidence they felt it necessary.
  • (Sokal also published under his own name, and while that was part of how he exploited Social Text's vulnerabilities, it also meant that he was somewhat more vulnerable to counteraction: had Social Text noticed the paper was bunk and either reported him pre-publication or published with a disclaimer of some kind, it could have absolutely wrecked his career. Sokal Squared and Sokal III didn't, and at least a couple of the Sokal Squared articles weren't clearly wrong so much as just stupid, so I'd put them lower down the scale.)
  • The LoTT hoax was not sufficiently supported by the evidence. Trace's cover story could provide quite a large variety of explanations why any gaps or weirdness in the existed, but could not provide any way to confirm the story. To a rationalist should be a very good cautionary tale! And I'm absolutely an advocate of validating information no matter how expert the speaker is! But it's also a high standard in a context where a) it's very likely that a 'real' story would have been extremely hard to verify or disprove, b) his coexperimenters further provided support for his claims in ways that would have made even that marginal. (The cover story and rdrama community's laissez faire approach to preregistration of experiments also made this vulnerable to publication bias.)
  • Gerard's work here isn't really about testing the institutions, and to a much larger extent about making the checks not exist; checking his work was not just hard, unlikely, or practically impossible, but impossible at a logical level. At most, someone opposed to his edits could argue that he shouldn't be the one posting them (WP:COI) or try to argue that whole sites are unreliable. Wikipedia's tools for handling bad or marginal sources are ad hoc and kinda the crux of various contradictions between WP:OR and the impossibility of outsourcing evaluation of evidence, and in many cases Gerard had a pretty heavy thumb on the scales for those backup tools, too. That's... not just a difference in quantity, but of quality.

I'm not a fan of any of them -- I've pointed in the past to nydrwaku as an example of trolling aimed at people I hate that I still think is pretty damned bad for mainstream discourse, and I pushed back on the LoTT hoax contemporaneously -- but I think Sokal is less bad, and Gerard more so.

I mean, up front, I think I was clear I don't think Tracing is as bad as Gerard. At least not to my knowledge. Nobody has put together a comprehensive manifesto covering 30 years of his internet history yet. I was pointing out that they both have engaged in information war against their political opponents, and it doesn't sound like you dispute that?

He did, and went to consider it justified, since the fake furry school worksheets included reference to My Little Pony, which, according to TW, LoTT should have spotted and should have tipped her off they are fake. To me a weak argument, since MLP isn't something people outside the very online niche are familiar with, and even if it is referenced it doesn't mean the worksheet is fake, since a teacher referencing some media for children, to make it more relatable, isn't outside the realm of possibility.

But since he has established a pattern of pointing of dishonesty, even by people who politically 90% agree with him, I see him as force for Truth.

That's not why she should have figured out that it was fake. She could, and should, have noticed that she was talking to a person who did not exist about something he would not cite to a specific location, making excuses when she asked for info about the space it was initially shared. That the worksheet was silly and full of inside jokes added to it, but "this anonymous person sent me this document; therefore, this happened" is bad epistemics.

I'm not certain which of the people in the link 90% agree with me and continue to feel this forum has a bizarrely distorted view of my own politics, but that's a fight I'm pretty worn out on fighting. Regardless, glad I've made a good impression otherwise.

Give me a break.

A normie would think "if that's a hoax, that would require a huge, huge, amount of effort. Nobody would go through that much effort to pull a hoax on a random person". That's why she didn't figure out that it was fake.

You can fool anyone by being a weird person from the Internet, if you spend enough time tricking someone who isn't familiar with weird people on the Internet.

Verification is the difference between journalism and gossip. I think once you play at the former, you should be held to a higher standard than a random stranger. Once her attempt at verification failed, a journalist would have had a duty not to publish. The fact that LoTT did, regardless, is a tidy rebuttal to anyone treating it as hard-hitting investigative journalism.

Verification is the difference between journalism and gossip.

Proper Credentialed Journalism Outlets have a handy section called "Opinion" that helps launder the difference. I agree, LoTT should not be treated as more than a shitposter. True more generally, too, of course. Most talking heads are shitposters at heart.

Also, it strikes me that LoTT could be used as an example of "the media very rarely lies," if it's accurate that she mostly signal-boosts people doing things she finds inappropriate. I don't know how accurate that is, though.

Right. Like asking “why are you complaining about John Oliver? He’s just a comedian,” except more extreme, because social media is even less anchored to professional reputations. I’m sure it’s deployed at full scale on left-wing Twitter; we just don’t see as much of that shared here.

The latter is probably correct, too. I think she’s on a better epistemic ground than the Alex Jones types.

LoTT is literally a Twitter shitpost account -- whoever said that she was (is?) doing hardhitting investigative journalism? It's like those people posting "IT'S HAPPENING" on /pol -- way to go dude, you hoaxed a bunch of shitposters.

"if that's a hoax, that would require a huge, huge, amount of effort. Nobody would go through that much effort to pull a hoax on a random person"

I hear tell that that's the secret to magic tricks.

Wasn't this person already renowned for having some gorillion followers and profiled on major news media by the time Trace's hoax happened? If you don't have the capability to assess the accuracy of what you put before hundreds of thousands of people, then maybe you should recuse yourself from putting things before hundreds of thousands of people. Do you seriously think, hand on heart, that you would have accepted an "I am just a poor normie, you can't expect me to fact check" defense for a sneer celebrity with this much of a platform from the other camp?

The claim is that... LoTT is not familiar with weird people on the internet?

There are different kinds of weirdness. There is sincere weirdness. For example, some-one might believe that women punch just as hard as men, put their opinion on the internet, and be upset when other people reply with insults. There is trickster weirdness. For example, some-one (call them Tricky) might create a fake account that posts the claim that women punch just as hard as men. Later, when some-one else (call them Gully) thinks that the fake account is real, Tricky will enjoy using his real account to call out Gully for being gullible for thinking the fake account was real.

One might discover sincere weirdness on the internet and spend a merry year or two shining a light on it. Only later does one discover that trickster weirdness exists, and realize that one was in fact Gully from the paragraph above, and had blundered into being Tricky's lolcow.

We've already established that LoTT didn't recognize the in-jokes, so I'd answer "obviously not familiar enough".

That doesn't answer the question of whether she should have, though. It seems pretty clear to me that it was simply too good to check.

In any case, it's a little strange to say that a culture warrior with 3M followers is a "normie" or "random person".

More comments

Maybe. Maybe not. You either wage information war to humiliate, alienate and discredit your political opponents, or you don't. TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.

This viewpoint is basically your version of the social-justice activist's "police is racist for arresting a Black shoplifter", is it not? It doesn't matter that the arrested person was a shoplifter and police's core function includes arresting shoplifters, but only that they were black; it doesn't matter that the hoaxed person was a purveyor of bad epistemics and a rationalist blogger's core function includes obstructing purveyors of bad epistemics, but only that she was conservative.

There is a view that it is proper to enact violence upon and confine criminals and doing so doesn't make you qualitatively the same as those who would do so against any political opponent. It's not too much of a stretch to draw the same distinction regarding sneer celebrities and similar antisocial elements of the epistemic domain, and say that they ought to be humiliated, alienated and discredited regardless of political colour.

This viewpoint is basically your version of the social-justice activist's "police is racist for arresting a Black shoplifter", is it not?

No, and I don't understand how you can make that comparison.

It's: arresting shoplifters does not justify an elaborate sting operation, and an arrest made by a SWAT team. By the way, the sting operation involved a "free samples" sign left next to the shoplifted items, which may or may not have been obviously fake enough for a normal person to tell apart from a legitimate one.

Feel free to use the "well, technically they did shoplift" defense just don't whine about the townsfolk suddenly becoming rather uncooperative with officer Leroy Jenkins, who led the operation.

I can't find a good way to respond to your objection because it is not clear to me what part of the comparison you think fails. Just to be clear, you do understand that I think that LoTT's normal conduct of nutpicking the outgroup is the bad thing, rather than just the circumstance that LoTT reposted a hoax, right? I doubt any of our right-wing members think that the left-wing version of that behaviour (which is basically sneerclub and rationalwiki) is good; to assert that it's good when your tribe does it is just the same sort of trite who/whom that otherwise takes the form of "black people shoplifting is just".

I can't find a good way to respond to your objection because it is not clear to me what part of the comparison you think fails.

It's the part where you're implying people agree with you on the nature and the level of badness of the transgression, and only object to the reaction for tribal affiliation reasons, rather than because they think the reaction is completely disproportionate to the alleged crime.

Just to be clear, you do understand that I think that LoTT's normal conduct of nutpicking the outgroup is the bad thing, rather than just the circumstance that LoTT reposted a hoax, right?

The problem here is that the very structure of hoax, and all the commentary around it, did not attack that part of LoTT's conduct. The hoax could only criticize her lack of vetting of her source material.

I doubt any of our right-wing members think that the left-wing version of that behaviour (which is basically sneerclub and rationalwiki) is good;

They all have a function in a balanced ecosystem, and are all completely fine, as long as they aren't taken to excess.

To assert that it's good when your tribe does it is just the same sort of trite who/whom that otherwise takes the form of "black people shoplifting is just".

Check your premises before forming your conclusions, I guess.

Alright, admittedly, I'm 2 fingers of whiskey into my night, but I cannot follow you at all.

The only way I can pattern match your claim, is to involve entrapment. Because Tracing didn't merely catch LOTT spreading a hoax, he invented a hoax, and specifically messaged her evidence he fabricated. And I'd be totally against hypothetical police, I don't know, somehow entrapping Black people into shoplifting. Maybe they put up a sign saying "Free Watches" without the store managers knowledge or permission. I don't know, the whole comparison made little enough sense to me in the first place.

The shoplifting in the metaphor is not posting hoaxes, but doing what LoTT does normally - "nutpicking" and sneering at the outgroup based on the most outrageous examples of its members. This is entrapment in the sense that those porch thief bait packages people like posting about on YouTube are - the reason the porch thieves are bad is not that they took the bait, but that they took non-bait packages before. The bait package is just a tool to catch them.

If that's what the shoplifting means in the metaphor, then we could just catch the criminal shoplifting because they do it all the time, and setting up a sting operation instead of observing actual shoplifting brings no benefit at all.

TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.

That's your takeaway from the whole saga? It's far more reasonable to conclude that LibsofTikTok is the equivalent of David Gerard. She's a culture warrior to whom truthfulness matters not one whit through and through but unlike Hanania doesn't have the intelligence and social grace to present as respectable. I support her name being dragged through the mud for the same reason I support Gerard's name being dragged through it.

Do you think Trace would have published if the attempt to scam LoTT had failed? Or perhaps chosen a progressive target if the conservative ones proved less gullible than he hoped?

If a test is only allowed one result, it's not exactly a good example of truthfulness or nonpartisanship.

In the end this is the same issue LoTT has. Nutpicking is extraordinarily powerful--anyone can find thousands of terrible examples of people in the outgroup doing despicable things. Whether you're finding these examples, or creating them yourself, if you only target one side you're going to create a slanted, biased perspective of that side for anyone who follows you.

Trace's journalism since then has been significantly better, and he's also criticized his own side somewhat. While I have serious complaints about how this was handled it was still in the end a criticism of extreme leftists, meaning that while his most dedicated attempts at criticism may still be reserved for the right, there is still at least some degree of evenhandedness, more than I have come to expect from virtually any journalist.

Taking a look at LoTT's current front page (1, 2, 3, 4) I see a lot of partisanship, but much less nutpicking--most of the things being highlighted are more "look at large ongoing events progressives explicitly say they support" than "look at random isolated events which I claim are the inevitable result of progressive policies."

As I've said before, I don't mind the LoTT takedown. But, looking at the two accounts nowadays, it's unclear which is actually the better source of truth. Trace seems to be extremely honest about the facts of the case, really digging into the details, but will spin the broader picture/takeaway to such an extent that I have a hard time believing anything he says without verifying it myself. I've seen him say things that to me are nearly "the sky is never blue" level. LoTT seems broadly more interested in partisanship and less interested in the truth, but I have never seen it tell such whoppers as "[The FAA case] is not a fundamentally partisan issue".

I follow Trace, and don't follow LoTT, but they're really not so different as you make them out to be.

Or perhaps chosen a progressive target if the conservative ones proved less gullible than he hoped?

Well, given that Trace has spent a ton of time documenting the FAA hiring scandal which made the progressives look terrible, I conclude that he is actually interested in the truth rather than a partisan for a side in the culture war.

I concur with you sentiment that the FAA thing is fundamentally partisan. The 'equality of outcomes' demand which set the bad incentives which resulted in officials doing what they did was very much a demand of the progressive side, not bipartisan.

Personally, I think the test cheating is a direct consequence of the law making unrealistic, contradictory demands. "You have to hire based on merit, but you also have to hire enough black people, otherwise you are a dirty racist" is not a consistent goal in a world where black people are on average less qualified for whatever reasons -- something has got to give. So yes, I fully blame the progressive 'equality of outcome' laws for that.

The left-wing media shares my sentiment, because they elected mostly not to cover that story at all for what I assume are partisan reasons.

Suppose party X got rid of all restrictions on gun ownership and all public funding for mental health. Then some psychotic person buys an auto rifle and shoots up some mall. For some weird reason, Trace is the only one to report on it. He also says something like (changed words in italic):

People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of policy failure. A thousand things had to go wrong to get to this point, and if people want to harp on it—let them. But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that shooting, wants to defend it.

We should give Trace 100 truth points for covering the issue. We can debate if we should deduct a point for also calling it "not a fundamentally partisan issue" or if that was taken out of context, but either way, his credentials as someone who is willing to hurt progressive causes in the name of the truth are established.

Well, given that Trace has spent a ton of time documenting the FAA hiring scandal which made the progressives look terrible, I conclude that he is actually interested in the truth rather than a partisan for a side in the culture war.

Why not both? The way I see it, partisanship and truth-seeking are only somewhat contradictory. A pure truth-seeker is probably a mathematician or philosopher, and a pure partisan will lie, cheat, and steal to get what they want, but there are infinite combinations of the two qualities between those extremes.

The average reasonable person is aware of status games and plays them to at least some extent. Being a truth-seeker will earn you status in most circles. Being left-liberal will earn you status in most circles. When choosing what to cover there are tradeoffs between the two. I see the FAA scandal as such a good scoop that it was worth being somewhat critical of far-left extremists, and losing Progressive Points, because in this case the exchange rate for Truth Points is very good. The LoTT piece was pretty much the same but in reverse, losing some Truth Points in exchange for plenty of Progressive Points.

A rational person will pursue all such opportunities and gradually gain status in their circles in both respects. A partisan will perhaps ignore Truth Points entirely. I don't think Trace is a partisan, and I think he's chosen a reasonably Truth-slanted exchange rate between the two currencies, though of course I wish he were more on my side.

I concur with you sentiment that the FAA thing is fundamentally partisan. The 'equality of outcomes' demand which set the bad incentives which resulted in officials doing what they did was very much a demand of the progressive side, not bipartisan.

Personally, I think the test cheating is a direct consequence of the law making unrealistic, contradictory demands. "You have to hire based on merit, but you also have to hire enough black people, otherwise you are a dirty racist" is not a consistent goal in a world where black people are on average less qualified for whatever reasons -- something has got to give. So yes, I fully blame the progressive 'equality of outcome' laws for that.

I strongly disagree with this. If the motivation for the FAA's actions was solely to obey seemingly contradictory laws, it would have followed the lead of all the other departments that are not in trouble. Or just done what it has always done, which didn't get it in trouble.

You're telling me that an organization which was not breaking any laws, in a time where its actions weren't being litigated anywhere, went way out of its way to secretly adopt new questionably legal policies, out of a desire to obey the law? Do you really think, if they thought their actions were legal, they would have hid them as they did? Surely if their motivation was to obey the law better, and they thought their policies were less likely to be litigated than the previous ones, they would trumpet the policy from every rooftop in order to ensure everyone knew about the new, safer, more legal policy.

No, that's just ridiculous. Equality of outcome laws had virtually nothing to do with these policies. The leaders wanted a racial spoils system, knew it probably wouldn't be legal, and implemented it anyways, out of pure ideological fervor.

Suppose party X got rid of all restrictions on gun ownership and all public funding for mental health. Then some psychotic person buys an auto rifle and shoots up some mall. For some weird reason, Trace is the only one to report on it. He also says something like (changed words in italic):

This would hit a lot harder if there were prominent Republicans directly advocating for school/mall shootings, the way there are prominent Democrats directly advocating for reparations and other similar programs.

A better example would be abortion. Let's say X gets raped and tries to get an abortion but can't, because in her state abortion is banned even in cases of rape and incest. There are (a few, I think) prominent Republicans who advocate for these sorts of laws. In this case if Trace had said

People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of policy failure. A thousand things had to go wrong to get to this point, and if people want to harp on it—let them. But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that situation, wants to defend it.

then I would say the same thing--no! Obviously not! Plenty of people do want to defend that situation, but are smart enough not to do so in public, knowing it's outside of the current Overton window. And it's extremely partisan, because the people who made those laws are still in power and haven't apologized or otherwise expressed any regret at all, nor have any of their supporters condemned them for this. It's not a policy failure, it's a policy success, and the partisans whose policies worked as intended are still writing up new similar policies. (To bring the analogy full circle, Pete Buttigieg and co. are still appointing similar people to positions of power).

As far as I'm concerned Trace is better than any other journalist that I can think of, and deserves praise for that, but it's an amazingly low bar. I often visit the Fox News website rather than CNN's, not because I like it more or because it's more honest (CNN wins on both counts for me) but because its lies are far clumsier and more transparent. Trace takes this a step further, keeping every detail honest, but skillfully crafting the narrative such that if you're not paying attention you'll be led to the exact opposite of the correct conclusion, even with all of the relevant facts in hand. In the FAA case, one might conclude that the whole mess was just a bunch of innocent nonpartisan officials struggling to fulfill the law, rather than hyperpartisan officials fighting to secretly ignore the will of the people and enact their preferred agendas instead.

More comments

You really don't think anything even approaching "good faith" or truth-seeking exists online? That seems not only absurdly axiomatic, but also a miserable mental space to inhabit.

I do believe in good faith truth seeking. I just think that when an interlocutor has waged an information war in the past, that puts a permanent asterisk on their "truth seeking".

I've noticed this a lot. There is this strain of internet user that believes if you can create fake websites, fake images, fake users, etc to convince your political opponents of falsehoods to embarrass them, that's just good old fashioned internet fun. And yeah, I laughed too when local news reporters beclowned themselves reporting on Jenkem. But it takes a far darker turn when you muddy the waters of real, salient, political issues as TracingWoodgrains has done, and bragged about, here even.

But I donno. Maybe I have him wrong, and at some point he publicly apologized to LibsOfTiktok for hoaxing her, and has publicly expressed that he regrets waging an information war on her.

TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he's proven he isn't of a different type.

From the very bottom of my heart, go screw yourself.

Yes, yes, civility violations and all that. Mods, warn me as you will and ban me if you must; I believe this will mark my first violation of this sort. But I stand by it, and sometimes, things like this need to be said.

To you, to everyone like you who thinks that about me here: go screw yourself.

I have always been perfectly upfront about who I am, what I do, and why. I have aimed to remain earnest, consistent, open, and push constantly against falsehood and towards painting clear pictures of the truth, including in controversial and sensitive situations. I stake my reputation and my name on my work. The Libs of TikTok saga was poorly executed on my part but was motivated by precisely the same thing as my FAA reporting and this: a deep-running frustration at people's willingness to spread and cheer convenient falsehoods to advance their causes.

Have I made missteps? I don't know anyone in the arena who has not. But I am immensely proud of my work as a whole, and every time I return here and find miserable scolds like you grousing about bitterness you've never let go, it disgusts me.

Screw you, screw everyone like you here, and if I didn't know perfectly well that plenty of people here do not think like you, I would delete my posts here and never spend another moment on this site, because you and yours have dragged it into the gutter and I don't need to spend my time around people determined to see nothing but the worst in me. Imagine writing something like this after I spend a month exhaustively documenting the malicious history of one who has been spreading propaganda against communities like this before either you or I had anything to do with it. Imagine having nothing better to do than dig this rubbish up, than look to start a stupid fight over nonsense. You should be ashamed of yourself, but of course you won't.

You can insult me when you've put your money where your mouth is a fraction of the amount I have. Until then, go screw yourself. You and Gerard deserve each other.

Woah, I was not expecting the vote result for this comment to come out this balanced. This is currently the most controversial comment on the entire site.

Huh. You're right. Just for that, I upvoted it towards 0.

You can insult me when you've put your money where your mouth is a fraction of the amount I have. Until then, go screw yourself. You and Gerard deserve each other.

Yes, we've all thrown our hat in the ring in different ways. I chose to have children, be a father and a husband, live an honest industrious life as an example to my offspring, and attempt to preserve my way of life through them.

You contributed to a miasma of chaos around the state violating my parental rights to confiscate my children's reproductive capacity. You added one more talking point to the list I have to defeat when I'm arguing with my in-laws about the very real, documented shit our local school districts are doing that they've been MSNBC'ed about.

I wouldn't pat yourself on the back too hard. Although I suppose if you get your way, your impact on society may yet outlive mine, though I suspect my wife wouldn't survive the shock of it.

The fucking hubris to call that "Truth seeking" and play the victim.

To WhiningCoil, we're all in a propaganda war whose outcome is critical. To you, it's just a game of sorts. Not a life-or-death conflict whose outcome determines whether normies return to functional normality, or end up in cultural-revolution tier insanity.

I get why he's pissed at you, and I get why you as a young gay furry aren't overly concerned with the possible normalisation of cultral-revolution tier social insanity.

Like most young people, you probably believe, deep down that you're immortal and it'll all work out.

Have you yet been forced to perform a maoist style self-criticism session IRL where you admit to your sin of being white-ish and promise to do better ? I guess not.

Have you yet been forced to perform a maoist style self-criticism session IRL where you admit to your sin of being white-ish and promise to do better ?

There is precisely one place where people have tried to force me to do something like that. It’s here, by posters like Coil but unfortunately also posters who are otherwise good, and I find that sadder than anything else about this place.

  • -11

Nobody here except the mods has any leverage to force you to do anything. And the mods haven't (and all they can do is threaten to ban anyway). Someone here wants you to do something, you can just... not.

More comments

TW knows about the propaganda war, but has very different objectives to you. Much harder to balance ones too: he needs enough Progress for surrogate gaybies, but not too much that white gay guys can't get the good lawyer jobs.
That's why his targets range from LoTT to FAA-DEI. He can be useful to you guys, at least at the moment while your enemies threaten him more than you do.

Long term, of course, his brand of manipulation isn't compatible with your goals. But you don't need to be mean publicly, even if you know he'd eventually do an expose to get you fired (or you'd put him on the last train to Journawitz, depending on the breaks)

I think it is uncharitable to assume that Trace picks his stories to support some weird niche centrist agenda.

But even if his selection of stories was totally partisan, this would mostly be a problem if he was the only news source on the market. Last time I checked, he is not.

If there was a news story about how one in three gay men will eat babies which he would not cover because it does not fit the narrative he wants to push, I am sure that some investigative journalist somewhere could also pick it up.

From what I have seen, Trace provides truthful, relevant information. Such a thing is net good.

More comments

Long term, of course, his brand of manipulation isn't compatible with your goals.

I mean, I'm not a bioconservative or anything, to me if we avoid a dead-end or insane planetary monoculture it's all ok. Even if we end up with some people engineering actual furries out there, whatever.

Sure it's weird but I'm all for more human speciation. If we've got aquatic humans comfortable with not breathing for four hours making a living tending sea industry and gigabrained autistic scientist castes, then admitting that blacks aren't that smart and maybe we could breed them to be smarter as to not be too embarrassed by them isn't going to be a big deal. It's our biology, and treating a product of evolution as sacred is just too weird to me.

As far as I can tell mostly accidentally trolling LOTT is small potatoes and as far as culture-war commentators are concerned, Trace is a very good one.

Not that I'd trust him with my real name, phone number, address etc., but then I'm notably paranoid.

More comments

Long term, of course, his brand of manipulation isn't compatible with your goals

The goals don't help, but it's the "brand of manipulation" that's off-putting. Walt Bismarck is probably an even better example of it, because even though his goals are superficially more compatible, all my instincts tell me to stay the hell away from that guy.

But you don't need to be mean publicly, even if you know he'd eventually do an expose to get you fired

I agree people should calm the hell down, and I disagree he'd go after anyone's job. That said, "not being mean" is not enough for him. He himself said the kind of Highlander's Holy Ground you hint at is unacceptable to him, and he wouldn't hang out here, even if that's what we became.

Been said but for being from the old internet you should have thicker skin. You'd probably shrug off being called a fagot but this sends you over the edge? I'm guessing it's the insecurity knowing that you kind of fucked up and it's going to follow you forever. The left has big fancy institutions to gaslight us. They gaslight us on [A-Z+-]+, CRT, Biden's mental facilities and many other things. You pulled one over on a mid-whit, but how correct is libs of tiktok? Less then 50% or is it much much more?

It's more personal here, because this place used to mean a lot to me and it's tough to come to terms with it now being the only place on the internet I interact regularly with people who hold long-standing, deep grudges against me and want me to remember that every time I post. I'm not interested in shaking it off or in displaying a thick skin here. Anyone who nods along with their behavior here is not someone I want to share a community with, and I am more interested in loudly signalling that than in presenting in a stoic way.

As far as insecurity and things following me—look, I participate in a lot of online communities, and only one has a large sub-population of bitter grudge-holders who want to drag their conflicts with me into every interaction. Yes, that group has successfully ruined my perception of this community, but that has happened while I've been in the most successful part of my online career by far. You're not seeing insecurity here, you're seeing frustration at what's become of a place I once loved.

From behind a screen, I have plenty of time to consider my words and my self-presentation. When I want to be calm, I am, and my online history backs that up. What I wanted there was, for once in my time on the Motte, to tell the people who have delighted in making it a petty, vindictive space that clings to grudges to go screw themselves for contributing to the destruction of something beautiful.

The Motte that I loved is dead, and although good people still continue to interact atop its corpse, I would like those good people to know in no uncertain terms that the people who killed that Motte remain, while the posters they loved have mostly moved on to greener pastures. I've been returning here to maintain a point of contact with those who have not yet joined the motte diaspora, but now I want those people to understand that as far as I'm concerned, this community is no longer worth coming to and they should work alongside me to build elsewhere.

as far as I'm concerned, this community is no longer worth coming to and they should work alongside me to build elsewhere.

You should start your own subreddit. With how much everyone deeply cares about your opinion, I bet it would be a huge hit and not at all a stillborn laughingstock monument to your own unwarranted sense of importance.

More comments

As a pretty much uninvolved person (I appreciated your reporting on the FAA hiring scandal and recognize you semi-vaguely as a notable figure around here, am aware of David Gerard as a leading anti-crypto crank being a heavy Bitcoin investor myself, and check Libs of TikTok occasionally a couple of times a year when I remember it exists, think "I should check this more often because I love seeing left-wingers looking dumb.", and then forget to.):

If David Gerard has spread falsehoods, that's bad.

If Libs of TikTok has spread falsehoods, that's bad.

If you've corrected falsehoods, that's good.

...

And if you've spread falsehoods, that's also still bad.

Where in the rules of honest conduct does it say that even 10,000 truths elucidated gives you an excuse for a single lie? If you intentionally attract autists obsessed with truth-seeking to your online presence by writing thousands of words screeds about exposing the truth of various matters, of course they are naturally going to do the same to you as what you do to others like Gerard: nitpick your record of honesty.

Losing your shit like this doesn't make you seem righteous; it just makes you seem mad that the same eye of scrutiny you cast upon others applies to you too. (Incidentally this is the same thing that happened to Scott vis-a-vis Alexandros Marinos. If even he can get got, so can you. You've got to learn to handle it better than by just trying to play the victim.)

More comments

Dude, I'm glad @netstack already gave you your warning.

You're far more public than me, and you get less shit here than I do just by virtue of being a mod on the "wrong side." It genuinely concerns me that someone who's gone so public and is so clearly staking out a niche in the Culture Wars has such a thin skin. I agree with almost everything you say about your detractors, and I sympathize with your earnest attempts to be sincere and engage in good faith and be perceived as engaging in good faith, but even if you hadn't ever pranked LibsOfTikTok (which you may recall, at the time even I said had a bad look), you'd still be getting shat on for the Schism, for being so earnest, for being on the "wrong side," for a bunch of things. The miserable scolds are always going to grouse bitterly at you. For your own peace of mind and future career as a semi-public figure, get used to it and learn not to so easily be made to show that they're getting to you.

Hey, you've known me for a long time—long enough that you can know I am wholly capable of maintaining equanimity and responding with grace when I want to do so. Tonight, I did not want to do so. I wanted to react from the heart, without my usual filters, to the small group of people who have made it their mission to damage this space for years—and who have succeeded in doing so. I'm responding to everyone who made this place unappealing for CanIHaveASong, for paanther, for heterodox_jedi, for Gemma, for Yassine, for countless other posters a thousand times better than the miserable ankle-biters who drove them away in a quest for a twisted sort of purity. The miserable scolds are here, and the rules here are incapable of seeing the miserable scolds and chasing them away before they chase everyone else away, so it's time to let them have it and continue to build elsewhere.

My foot was already mostly out the door. Now it's out, and I want everyone I like here, and everyone who likes me here, to understand exactly why.

See you on the other side.

I say this with love TW, histrionic breakdowns of any sort are an invitation for the wolves to circle. They embolden your enemies, an indication that their needling is effective. I don't know if we're tugging on the same side of the rope here but there's enough in your writing that reminds me of myself and should I ever encounter a new article of yours in the wild again I will read the whole damn thing even if only to humor that connection.

More comments

The Libs of TikTok saga was poorly executed on my part but was motivated by precisely the same thing as my FAA reporting and this: a deep-running frustration at people's willingness to spread and cheer convenient falsehoods to advance their causes.

As the joke goes, you can build the pub, you can build the pier, but ya go and fuck one goat...

Your sin was goring the wrong ox, not trolling in the first place. If you had gotten the NYT to publish a positive story about furries insisting on eating out of dog bowls in school cafeterias, the majority of these people would be singing your praises. I don't recall the Texas abortion bounty hunter trolls provoking any real outrage.

At the end of the day, no matter how much investigating reporting you do to embarrass activists on the left, you'll still be the goat fucker my friend. IMO, stop apologizing and double down.

If you had gotten the NYT to publish a positive story about furries insisting on eating out of dog bowls in school cafeterias, the majority of these people would be singing your praises.

These aren't comparable at all.

  1. Convincing someone that their enemies are ridiculous is very different from convincing someone to support something ridiculous. Saying, "look, someone somewhere did something crazy" is obviously far easier to pull off than "YOU should advocate for something crazy."
  2. NYT should be held to a higher standard than LoTT.

IMO, stop apologizing and double down.

I don't think he should apologize. The stunt was fine. That said, I don't think he has apologized, either. Stating that it wasn't executed well, or that you wouldn't have done it if you had known what the reception would be, is not apologizing.

... I won't be so optimistic as to say no one would applaud it, but I think you're underestimating the number of people here with at least some interest in truth, especially given that there's people here already pushing back about false or misleading citations about Trace.

I'd be less disappointed given that I have (perhaps wrongly!) higher expectations from NYT than from Crazy Internet Karen LLoT, but there's a lot of active harm in throwing out this sorta stuff.

((And as professorgerm and gemma pointed out the very first time you made this comparison, Trace did not say during the Texas Bounty Hunter Thing that he was personally involved in setting up the trolling operation. I'm kinda hoping he wasn't!))

This ain't it at all. Hoaxing the NYT would be notable for the same reasons The Rape On Campus story out of Rolling Stone was notable. There are supposed to be fact checkers, multiple sources, teams of lawyers, etc vetting a story. There is supposed to be a rigorous institution in play here, with the pretense that it can course correct for any particular individuals biases or short comings.

Convincing a twitter anon, even a popular one, of a hoax is Kiwifarms material. It's giving your uncle a facebook chain letter. Doing it to score cheap political points is especially gross. It's like if I was engaged in a heated debate here, and to win it, I registered a new twitter account and said some bullshit, and then came back here pointing to it going "See, people on twitter are saying the bullshit I said they were saying!" And maybe some poor schmuck here believed it, and then I used that as further evidence of how gullible they are.

And this whole, "How dare you" attitude, and this pretense of "truth seeking". I mean... maybe. But like I said, it puts an asterisk. I know this is a guy who wages information war. I need to be weary of that.

Perhaps you're a man of principle, and 'thou shalt not lie on the internet to people who aren't the MSM' is the hill you're willing to die on. I laud your moral character.

I do not believe that most of the people who care enough about the culture war to know who Libs of Tiktok (regardless of their feelings about her!) is are principled observers passing judgment as opposed to partisans waging the culture war. I also maintain that Trace wouldn't have faced nearly the same level of backlash, and certainly not from the same people if he had owned some libs instead. You and Gattsuru can split hairs about whether any example I could provide is exactly comparable, but given that his complaint with the last example I gave was that Trace was not directly involved, and as far as I know Trace has only trolled one person, I've been given a bar that's literally impossible to clear.

Convincing a twitter anon, even a popular one, of a hoax is Kiwifarms material. It's giving your uncle a facebook chain letter. Doing it to score cheap political points is especially gross. It's like if I was engaged in a heated debate here, and to win it, I registered a new twitter account and said some bullshit, and then came back here pointing to it going "See, people on twitter are saying the bullshit I said they were saying!" And maybe some poor schmuck here believed it, and then I used that as further evidence of how gullible they are.

On the contrary. You talk about the Sokal hoax elsewhere; I'm prepared to bite that bullet and say fuck those pseudoscience humanities journals that provide nothing of worth. If they can't distinguish an actual paper from technobabble, why should they exist?

Okay, let's split some hairs - scientific journal is an institution, probably has an annual budget of literally tens of thousands of dollars that it can pay ramen-eating graduate students to review papers with, whereas libsoftiktok is an influencer with 3 million subscribers (I wonder how much money she makes across substack, twitter and tiktok, but I digress). The difference is that your uncle is some innocent dude trying to (presumably) browse some memes, whereas LoTT is actively curating, creating and distributing content with a direct political goal. She's waging the culture war on a daily basis. Once you switch from consuming content to generating it, you're playing by the rules of a different game.

Before you ask whether a twitter account with 10 followers is playing by different rules, no, they aren't. And no, I don't have a line in the sand I can give you to delineate the two. But I think it's pretty clear with the audience she had that she had crossed the line.

It's like if I was engaged in a heated debate here, and to win it, I registered a new twitter account and said some bullshit, and then came back here pointing to it going "See, people on twitter are saying the bullshit I said they were saying!" And maybe some poor schmuck here believed it, and then I used that as further evidence of how gullible they are.

What makes you think people aren't doing that, aside from making a believable new twitter account which takes a significant amount of effort? I assume most people here are lying some substantial amount of the time, rules against it be damned. I'm just not allowed to say so.

And this whole, "How dare you" attitude, and this pretense of "truth seeking". I mean... maybe. But like I said, it puts an asterisk. I know this is a guy who wages information war. I need to be weary of that.

He should know better, not because he's wrong, but because letting the other party know that you're pissed means they win.

As for 'knowing this is a guy that wages the information war' - you should be wary of everyone on the internet, not just Trace, and in terms of trustworthiness he's probably in a pretty high percentile. Most of the people here are waging the culture war on a daily basis. Do you think people writing weekly screeds about the Jews aren't waging the information war?

I doubt we'll see eye to eye, but thank you for the reasonable and measured reply.

More comments

I need to be weary of that.

I'm thinking you meant "wary", but I have to admit that "weary" is somehow even more accurate.

Convincing a twitter anon, even a popular one, of a hoax is Kiwifarms material. It's giving your uncle a facebook chain letter.

And in a world where millions of people don't treat a twitter anon as a source for reinforcing/building their beliefs then that may hold some weight. But that is not this world.

Once we are at that point then any influencer is as fair game as the paper of record. They have to be. Whether it is a "fitness" guru getting exposed as using steroids or a culture warrior being exposed as only posting material which hurts their outgroup true or not.

If someone is treated seriously by people as an information source then they must be able to be exposed if their information is bad or suspect.

You're stuck in a pre-social media mindset here. The world has changed and the sources of information people take seriously has changed with it.

Yeah, fair enough on that.

Before anything else, I mean this gently. I do admire you; you're one of the luminaries of the whole SSC-sphere. Which is, I think, why this is important:

It was indeed a misstep - maybe a strategic mistake for your career - to be that kind of deceptive. If for no further reason than this: your final line in this article says that you're "not a Reliable Source." Of course I get it - meaning from the perspective of Wikipedia's Gerard-inculcated sclerosis, it's because you're a "nobody blogger" rather than a "legitimate media outlet." But much worse it is to be able to be accurately described as an "admitted hoaxer." Your work deserves much better than to have that card in your adversaries' hands.

Of course, there's no changing the past, so I'd say the only thing to do is Be Good going forward. You have my faith that you can and will, as with this article.

This is silliness. Maybe you'd have a point if @TracingWoodgrains used his credibility to push the story but he didn't. LOTT ate bait posted by an anonymous source with zero attempt at verification. He did not pimp out his name. There is no reason to believe anything he writes is a hoax. The only lesson one can reasonably draw from the whole thing is that you shouldn't take the word of random anonymous people or those who do.

Of course, there's no changing the past, so I'd say the only thing to do is Be Good going forward. You have my faith that you can and will, as with this article.

Strictly speaking, there is a way to escape this trap, which is to fully admit to the past errors and stop using the tainted persona, adopt a new Internet pseudonym, and with it a new identity set unassociated with past errors. If found and pressed, (re)acknowledge the past errors, and make the point that the new persona is on the diferent path. It's hard, it doesn't assauge the worst opponents, but it is a clear and credible break with the past practices.

It also means, however, dropping the reputation of being one of the luminaries of the whole SSC-sphere, and for people who have devoted large parts of their identity and emotional sense of self into that sort of persona, that's unacceptable.

I don't think abandoning his old persona and pretending to be someone else is good advice. He will inevitably be doxxed/discovered and then it will just add another layer of accusations of bad faith and deceptiveness.

More comments

I mean, there is also apologizing to the party you wronged and swearing you'll never do that again. But that's clearly off the table since he seems to think the problem is that his hoax wasn't received well, and maybe he could have done something on the margins to address that, but it was otherwise absolutely justified. Which is largely why I regard TracingWoodgrains and the target of this piece as not all that dissimilar in the first place.

Well, I judged against that. That would mean covering up one lie with another, just waiting for the "Richard Hoste" trap to be sprung upon one's new "Richard Hanania" persona.

Maybe one could get away with it for long enough, but I'm looking for the high road here.

More comments

:(

You are correct; let this be your first warning.

That's fine. Participating someplace where a significant minority of the community care about nothing but digging through old grievances every time I post gets old very, very fast, and there's not really a point to beating around the bush on that. Once, this forum meant a great deal to me, and many of the individuals on it still mean a lot to me, but the space as a whole lost the mandate of heaven long ago despite your own good work and the good work of the other mods.

In the past couple of months, I've met more than a dozen motte users I read avidly, respect, and have fond memories of in real life, at several events tied to this broader community. Almost none of them post here anymore. The Motte had a good run and contains a lot of good memories, but for all practical purposes, I think its run is over. Here’s to a glorious diaspora.

I encourage those of you who enjoy what I have to say to join me on Twitter or elsewhere. At this point, the conversations there are richer, the community there healthier, and participation there is more meaningful than it is here, and I have very little to gain from kicking around someplace where some 1/4 of the userbase want it to be crystal clear that they loathe me every time I post. There was a time this was the best discussion space online, but that time has passed and it's time for relics like me to move on.

All the best.

  • -12

It’s alright Tracey we’ll always have rDrama :marseyevilgrin:

Where have these ex/motte posters moved to? Twitter, rdrama.net, or somewhere else?

More comments

Eh, you're a gay furry ex-Mormon (which is like a triple strike against you in my book) but I still like you well enough. I think the Libs of TikTok thing could have been handled better but I don't think it was an inherently wrong thing to do.

You do you, but I think you're missing out if you leave this place behind permanently.

More comments

Trace, our time posting here has hardly overlapped, but I do like what I have seen of you, and would prefer you stick around. Different perspectives can be enlightening, for one, and you generally (though not a few posts prior) seem to glow with civility.

I do think this particular piece was unusually likely to bring up the Libs of TikTok complaint—you write about someone misrepresenting things in order to hurt someone; you did the same. You are of course by no means the same as Gerard (for one, are far more open, and far more civil), and I have no reason to doubt that your motivation in doing so was earnest, but I see why people mention it. I also think that was unwise, and understand why that would make people trust you less. I mention this both to indicate that I do genuinely think that may have been a bad thing to do, not merely due to having the wrong target, but also to emphasize that I do not think that that would be the response to your every comment, and so you don't need to take this as the typical reaction.

At the very least, think carefully before doing things like that again. And consider that the reaction in this instance may have been worse than in others; I do not think that you will always be met the same way. But this was a good piece.

Anyway, I am sorry to see you go, and hope you someday return.

More comments

I still think a place like this serves a very valuable purpose---if only that whenever you get too upset about some DEI overreach like the whole SF algebra saga you can find some very pointed reminders that the American right is somehow even worse on issues of meritocracy.

  • -14
More comments

No reason to burn this bridge. I enjoy the new freer X as well, but the ground has not even settled yet. That is a land ruled by a mad an capricious man that any day may change his stance and wipe us from existence. That and, while I understand why the current obsessives might sour your experience, there is still magic here. I think before this election is done we'll need to rely on it again.

More comments

That's fine. Participating someplace where a significant minority of the community care about nothing but digging through old grievances every time I post gets old very, very fast, and there's not really a point to beating around the bush on that.

You just spent weeks digging through old grievances dating back a decade, and then made it a top-level post about it. On multiple websites, even.

Yes, I realize that you feel yours are important and valid and other peoples are beneath acknowledgement, but this is part of why you are getting pushback from people with longer memories of your past conduct.

Once, this forum meant a great deal to me, and many of the individuals on it still mean a lot to me, but the space as a whole lost the mandate of heaven long ago despite your own good work and the good work of the other mods.

In the past couple of months, I've met more than a dozen motte users I read avidly, respect, and have fond memories of in real life, at several events tied to this broader community. Almost none of them post here anymore. The Motte had a good run and contains a lot of good memories, but for all practical purposes, I think its run is over. Here’s to a glorious diaspora.

I encourage those of you who enjoy what I have to say to join me on Twitter or elsewhere. At this point, the conversations there are richer, the community there healthier, and participation there is more meaningful than it is here, and I have very little to gain from kicking around someplace where some 1/4 of the userbase want it to be crystal clear that they loathe me every time I post. There was a time this was the best discussion space online, but that time has passed and it's time for relics like me to move on.

How can it be a glorious diaspora if you keep coming back after denouncing it?

This isn't your first flounce. You came back after establishing the Schism, you came back after Liberals of TikTok, you came back after the site switch, and probably several more breaks I'm not recalling offhand. Between the recruitment attempts and the self-promotion efforts but also just to discuss emerging and contemporary news, you never stay away for terribly long. In much the same one that one is not stuck in traffic, but a part of the traffic, you are (still) a Mottizan.

You may leave for awhile, and all the longer for it being called out on it, but you'll return as you have multiple times before.

All the best.

Until you come back again, and not just for the last words tonight or tomorrow.

More comments

Quoting for posterity in case you decide to delete this as you have various other things that even you later realized countered your self-sought reputation.

There are, of course, many ironies that could be noted here, but again- posterity.

From the very bottom of my heart, go screw yourself.

Yes, yes, civility violations and all that. Mods, warn me as you will and ban me if you must; I believe this will mark my first violation of this sort. But I stand by it, and sometimes, things like this need to be said.

To you, to everyone like you who thinks that about me here: go screw yourself.

I have always been perfectly upfront about who I am, what I do, and why. I have aimed to remain earnest, consistent, open, and push constantly against falsehood and towards painting clear pictures of the truth, including in controversial and sensitive situations. I stake my reputation and my name on my work. The Libs of TikTok saga was poorly executed on my part but was motivated by precisely the same thing as my FAA reporting and this: a deep-running frustration at people's willingness to spread and cheer convenient falsehoods to advance their causes.

Have I made missteps? I don't know anyone in the arena who has not. But I am immensely proud of my work as a whole, and every time I return here and find miserable scolds like you grousing about bitterness you've never let go, it disgusts me.

Screw you, screw everyone like you here, and if I didn't know perfectly well that plenty of people here do not think like you, I would delete my posts here and never spend another moment on this site, because you and yours have dragged it into the gutter and I don't need to spend my time around people determined to see nothing but the worst in me. Imagine writing something like this after I spend a month exhaustively documenting the malicious history of one who has been spreading propaganda against communities like this before either you or I had anything to do with it. Imagine having nothing better to do than dig this rubbish up, than look to start a stupid fight over nonsense. You should be ashamed of yourself, but of course you won't.

You can insult me when you've put your money where your mouth is a fraction of the amount I have. Until then, go screw yourself. You and Gerard deserve each other.

I deleted my LoTT stuff because, in one of the worst moments of my time online, it was too much for me to engage with the community I had come up within as they reacted less charitably and more harshly to me than everywhere else on the internet. As for this one, don't worry. I meant every word of it and have no intention of deleting it. I reiterate the same to you. Go screw yourself.

People build the communities they deserve.

  • -19

I deleted my LoTT stuff because, in one of the worst moments of my time online, it was too much for me to engage with the community I had come up within as they reacted less charitably and more harshly to me than everywhere else on the internet. As for this one, don't worry. I meant every word of it and have no intention of deleting it. I reiterate the same to you. Go screw yourself.

Yawn. Get off your victim complex and grow thicker skin if you want to be a public writer in a community based around rhetorical argument. You just spent self-admitted weeks doing internet archeology for the sake of a slam piece, and you're flaming out of a modicum of pushback a much more recent time that you were duplicative, dishonest, manipulative, and deliberately so for another boo-post.

You've meant every word of your previous flame-outs as well, and had no intention of deleting them too until your temper cooled and your ego was pricked enough by the reputation damage to try damage control. This is merely cutting off your previous lines of retreat and preserving the record.

You have no high ground here, and your reputation is not beyond reproach. Defending your thesis on such will not protect it.

People build the communities they deserve.

How is the Schism going, anyway?

More comments

I get that I'm throwing stones from inside my glass house, here, but this is neither related to the topic at hand, nor a particularly apt summary of the old disagreements, in ways that undermine any serious discussion of that old disagreement.

I'm making some harsh comments here tonight, and I stand by every word in them, but given our history I want to mention that I'm not making them about you and, despite our continued tension and disagreements, I appreciate that you're coming from a place of principle and seriousness.

Could you please expand on what you mean by this? I’ve read a lot of Woodgrains’ stuff and never noticed any ideas in this vein. Interested in what you’re referring to.

I'm referring to his posts on Rittenhouse 4 years ago.

What is this place?

This website is 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. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats