4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
11d ago
If I were only taking seriously people who benefit from moderation, I'd put more weight on your objections
The logic there does not check out - the latter would follow if the insinuation were they you take all people who benefit from moderation seriously, not that you only take people who benefit from moderation seriously (= do not take people who don't benefit from moderation seriously). Anyway, I think that not being moderated oneself is a pretty low bar for "benefitting from moderation", coming across as somewhat alike in flavour to a tinpot dictator saying that all the people on the streets should just be grateful they have not been imprisoned yet. All that happened is that I had the sense to avoid fights with people who are evidently moderator darlings. Certain individuals getting lots of leeway for things including general culture-war obnoxiousness and even personal attacks, while any attempt at proportional defense is punished harshly, is in fact the primary way that moderator bias here manifests itself - and, of course, you don't generally mod people for attacking you, which makes it easier to suspend disbelief and maintain narrative that you are actually quite even-handed.
Now if WC speaks up and says "No, actually, I did wonder if @Belisarius was into cuckolding" - well, I'll own to granting him too much charity (and give him a warning not to do that again).
Do you not realise how absurd this sounds as an argument for your impartiality? "Well, of course if he were to step up and outright admit guilt in this specific fashion, I would have no choice but to punish him (that is, give him a stern warning)"
I mod people I like all the time, often with great regret.
I can't say I have seen any clear examples of that. In fact, I had you pegged as a clear instance of the "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law" sort of authority.
I know the history of "cuck" as a right-wing slur, and maybe you should consider that the word triggered a disproportionate response from you when @WhiningCoil was using it in a more literal sense (and talking about the historical figure Belisarius, not the poster @Belisarius).
My response was triggered by your post, not WC's. If I had seen that post on its own, I would have mostly likely dismissed it as typical 2025-motte low-quality posting (maybe, if I were in a particularly futility-seeking mood, I'd have reported it as a low-effort post, expecting nothing). The thing that set me off is that the recipient, who evidently did take it as an attack (perfectly reasonably!), responded in a level-headed manner that could even be taken as defusing if the previous post was in fact meant as a personal attack, only to earn a modhat comment from the moderator that I had already previously taken note of for doing the "rules will be applied to people I dislike when they have slightly heated arguments with people I like" thing before. I knew very little about the exact political position of the two users (I figured they were both somewhere on the right), but given how much more prolific WhiningCoil is, it seemed plausible enough that this was yet another instance.
All of this could have been avoided if you didn't think it is a good idea to exempt users "in good standing" from the rules as written - even if you want to have the charity to consider it a joke, aren't jokes that are plausibly taken as personal attacks among the things that "Make your point reasonably clear and plain." is supposed to guard against?
I think you're a bad faith objector whose objections are purely tribal
Does the objection here break along tribal lines somehow? I couldn't tell who of the two is more "right-wing" for sure. At most, my sense is that WhiningCoil is more of a prolific and popular user that I figure you like, and my objections are "tribal" insofar as "users that Amadan likes" constitute a tribe. In that case, though, any objection against favouritism is definitionally tribal, and in your concept space, the only people who can have "good faith" objections to moderator bias are those who benefit from it. Maybe you think that is right and well, but then I can only say it is unfortunate if it turns out you only favour users who lack the principles to protest favouritism they benefit from.
(Though maybe you think that not finding a beloved right-wing slur intrinsically funny is already sufficient evidence of bias against the Right that rises to the level of bad faith...?)
To be fair, I should say I do appreciate that you explained your reasoning here. It does help me understand why you arrived at that decision, though I still think that the optics of it are terrible and it betrays an extreme double standard that you can muster the level of charity to interpret WhiningCoil's post, which really does not read as anything other than a wanton drive-by attack to me, as an innocuous "bit of jocularity" while also the level of anti-charity to interpret Belisarius's really rather level-headed response as "antagonistic".
I would expect this quality of moderation from 4chan, not TheMotte.
Of course you know I have had a beef with your partiality and believe that you treat users and tribes you are sympathetic to favourably, but this is an entirely new level of tendentiousness. User A makes an off-topic post trying to relate User B's username to a common slur/fixation, User B responds in a mildly standoffish manner but actually clarifies the origin of the username, and User B - only User B - gets a modhat reprimand? Of course, I fully expect that any objections will be met with the same old "I disagree, and no, I am not going to justify anything" sort of response from you. Is that what it is going to be, or do you have something better to offer?
(I don't even understand what you find so funny. Is it just "haha bro just called him a cuck"?)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
13d ago
Driving cars is among the later capabilities you'd expect to fall, if you switch off human conceit and take the far view. You're asking to beat billions of years of evolution in a data-poor domain (navigating the real world) rather than some thousands (written) or at most hundreds of thousands (spoken) in a well-databased one (words and symbolic reasoning).
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
13d ago
The state of children transitioners is in my not so charitable opinion a giant Munchausen by proxy from the mothers being enabled by society.
How do you square this with the erstwhile right-wing complaint that schools will encourage kids to transition while keeping it secret from their parents?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
15d ago
Can you think of some examples of people you like believing false things that would support your political beliefs if they were true, or is this purely an outgroup affliction in your eyes?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
16d ago
Not OP, but in my view the least enforced ones are "don't wage the culture war" (typical violation: "how do we best organise to end immigration?"), "write like everyone should be included" (typical violation: "$outgroup behaviour is a disgusting perversion and I am tired of pretending otherwise") and the one against "boo outgroup" posting.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
16d ago
I'm a fairly active reporter, only a small percentage of things I report get acted on, and the exchanges when I complained in the open that no action was taken were maybe about 50/50 between very late responses insinuating that it was unreasonable to expect action to be taken quickly, and dismissals with either no particularly coherent reason given or some form of messenger-shooting ("we get lots of people wanting their outgroup to be moderated more").
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
16d ago
Do we? One of the reasons immigration has been so controversial is by being openly a way for the Left to rig politics by importing paid-up foot soldiers.
At the object level, the person this thread is talking about is Asian-American, a demographic that is hardly solidly left.
I think that first-generation immigrants are essentially guests and should refrain from any public criticism of their host - a policy that I follow myself.
If you are invited to the home of a kid (to be clear, in this metaphor, this is the university community) who has an ongoing conflict with their parents, and the kid brings up the topic, do you side with the kid, the parents, or do you try to awkwardly stay neutral saying it's not your place to meddle?
If you are invited to the home of an adult with roommates (with a jointly held lease) who has an ongoing conflict with their other roommates (say, the majority of them), [same question]?
(Up to you to decide which one of these is a closer model of the situation at hand, though the choice would also reveal something about your understanding of nations.)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
16d ago
Well, I mean, the implied problem is that only foreigners who have the wrong kind of politics as far as the administration in power is concerned will run into trouble - so as long as you admit international students at all, under this principle, they become a way to bolster the numbers of the pro-government camp on American campuses. Due to the nature of the "marketplace of ideas" at university, this is bound to have adverse effects on the political expression even of native students who happen to oppose the government line.
(On the other hand, if international students are actually all forced to be completely apolitical, this may not make people happy either - I remember hearing complaints about Chinese MA students on this basis from both tribes during my US grad school period)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
16d ago
Would this argument also work to defend a hypothetical instance of a Democratic administration revoking the visa of pro-Trump (and hence, in particular, in favour of Trump's current Ukraine/Russia policy) students?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
20d ago
This attitude is not exclusive to America. Brexit is probably a more notorious example: poor Britons who voted Leave correctly identified that their government considered their job not governance but selling them decisions made in Brussels. In their ignorance and naivete, they expected their own government to pick up the slack after leaving and believed they could do a better job of it by themselves. The reality is this: a government used to outsourcing their decision making process and shirking responsibility cannot be expected to suddenly pick up that responsibility when it is placed upon their shoulders.
Why do you figure it is this way around, as opposed to Brussels just being a fig leaf that would let politicians point and say "we had no choice, it was ordained from above" for unpopular policies that they themselves actually wanted all along?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
22d ago
I get the sense that going too far into this direction may actually turn out to be counterproductive for that goal, though - unlike in the case of the drunk friend, there is no doubt in the case of the Trump administration who ultimately was at the wheel during the "cruel texts", and so for some future Newsom or Buttigieg admin, any loss of credibility would have to factor through the perception that they could be followed by a Vance or Trump Jr. administration that would renege on its predecessors' promises all over again. But the more exceptional Trump's actions wind up being perceived as, the more credible a Newsom/Buttigieg assertion that this was a one-off and appropriate precautions have been taken to not allow a repeat will be, especially if Trump keeps pushing the envelope and winds up being repudiated/defanged/experience a mysterious heart attack/successfully impeached.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
22d ago
I wonder if the Staten Island boat graveyard still is a thing, if that sort of thing is your thing.
My favoured conspiracy theory is that the main utility of this is somewhat similar to mafia initiation rituals: the participants know that everyone gets a nuclear level of dirt on everyone else, which establishes a level of trust that would otherwise be impossible among the powerful and eccentric crowd that is the Who's Who. Every member of the group is incentivised to cooperate with every other member of the group, at least to an extent that nobody feels sufficient spite and desperation to trigger MAD. (Imagine an Epstein Islander were to go to jail for the rest of their life for securities fraud, and felt that the others could have pulled strings to prevent this.) That most men would not exactly be repelled by sexual attention from 16 year olds is just a nice plus that makes recruitment go more smoothly (and perhaps allows participants to deceive themselves that they are just reaping the fruits of power, rather than entering a death pact). On top of that, shared experience of transgression probably builds a feeling of camaraderie.
It's worth noting that corresponding rumours from Europe (the Dutroux case) involves girls that are much younger, corresponding to Europe's lower social and legal age of consent (as American national politics operate according to California rules). This is also consistent with the illegality being the point. (Perhaps Europe's patronage networks are less effective than American ones because fewer men are actually into sexual attention from 8 year olds, creating a recruitment problem for the web of trust!)
The association with, and cultural memory of, secret satanic rituals might just be a holdover from when those were similarly grounds for automatic cancellation no matter how powerful the person engaging in them. The weakening of cultural Christianity, under that theory, necessitated switching from Satanism to underage sex. If the rise of Social Justice had not been halted, we could one day have lived in a utopia where the rich and powerful could just go to some island to hold secret blackface parties, instead of having to diddle kids.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
24d ago
Huh, this is pretty good, and I had previously all but written off SCP as it got flooded by posers who can't write and people rehashing the same tired clichés /r/nosleep style.
Obvious similar recommendation which doesn't seem to have come up in this thread yet is Cordyceps: Too Clever for their Own Good.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
26d ago
It's easy to forget that before the Trump fan/TDS dynamic, a prototype of the same was already being sketched in Obama followers vs. what should in hindsight be labelled ODS. In the same way in which Trump inspires his adherents but inspires revulsion and a resulting willingness to cling to any smear that makes this feeling of revulsion rationalisable and communicable in his opponents, everything about Obama also clearly elicited visceral disgust in his detractors, who were then just searching for a justification to allow them to continue modelling themselves as sensible people who believe things for good reasons. Why does this president elicit such antipathy in me? Ah, right. He is not who he claims he is, and can't even legally be the president. He is a foreign deep cover agent and secret lovechild of Malcolm X raised to be the perfect political cult leader. His wife is also a man. No wonder I disliked him so much. I always had a good intuition about people.
The Trump counterpart are stories like Russiagate and piss tapes. Both of these are much more compatible with the smart critic's self-perception than "I am disgusted by his outgroup mannerisms and the idea of being subordinate to someone like that makes my lizard brain convulse". From the outside, both seem like extremely flimsy rationalisations to reject an elected president - like, so what if he does not meet some technical condition? It's a democracy, and more than half of voters voted for him. Even if Obama is foreign-born or Trump has to go to jail or whatever, people hypothetically should have been able to get the same politics by voting for a stand-in who promises to exactly implement the original's policies but is not encumbered by the gotchas, in the style of Thailand politics.
The Cuban Missile Crisis comparison falls apart because Ukraine wasn't pursuing offensive capabilities against Russia. NATO membership is defensive.
What was NATO defending when they attacked Serbia? I believe the answer that is usually given is "the Albanians of Kosovo", so it seems to be defensive only in a sense that includes non-state entities that are not part of NATO itself. This is a basically meaningless condition, which is moreover also met by Russia's "defensive" campaign in Ukraine.
Conversely, in what way was Cuba pursuing "offensive capabilities" against the US? I'll quote directly from the Wikipedia article:
In December 1959, under the Eisenhower administration and less than twelve months after the Cuban Revolution, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) developed a plan for paramilitary action against Cuba. The CIA recruited operatives on the island to carry out terrorism and sabotage, kill civilians, and cause economic damage.
(...)
In February 1962, the US launched an embargo against Cuba,[26] and Lansdale presented a 26-page, top-secret timetable for implementation of the overthrow of the Cuban government, mandating guerrilla operations to begin in August and September. "Open revolt and overthrow of the Communist regime" was hoped by the planners to occur in the first two weeks of October.[15]
The terrorism campaign and the threat of invasion were crucial factors in the Soviet decision to place nuclear missiles on Cuba, and in the Cuban government's decision to accept.[31] The US government was aware at the time, as reported to the president in a National Intelligence Estimate, that the invasion threat was a key reason for Cuban acceptance of the missiles.
It's also worth taking into account that Clinton actually made suggestive noises to draw parallels between Kosovo (which NATO "defended") and Chechnya, and that NATO is deploying nuclear bombs and missile defense systems in countries that are as close to Russia as Cuba is to the US, but unlike Cuba during the crisis are not regularly being attacked by the respective adversary.
On what basis do you figure that Russia did not invade Ukraine in 2014 due to "not being ready", as opposed to still holding out hope that they could achieve their objectives for it (at the time, they openly angled for a reintegration of the DPR/LPR with the rest of Ukraine under a federal model that would give them a veto over any future attempts to realign Ukraine with EU/NATO and away from Russia) in a cheaper way? If that was the case, Ukraine rushing to go nuclear would have surely just expedited the invasion before Ukraine was ready to defend itself (per the European assessment), and moreover might even have resulted in much more limited Western support as the narrative work to make general populations accepting of proliferation had not been put in yet.
rule-based world order
Rather than using the propaganda term that has a flexible interpretation, could you explain what the specific type of world order you are wishing for is? Is it just the "US playing world police"/pax americana model, where major wars are only to be started with US approval (under threat of US support for the defender) and we have to trust that the US will mostly remain sensible enough to not approve of wars that create too much trouble for us Western forum-goers? As far as I'm concerned, that trust had been long eroded by the wave of terrorism splashing everywhere from their own Middle Eastern misadventures.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
30d ago
the supposedly imminent fall of the strategic town of Pokrovsk at the time of the launch of the Kursk offensive
That seems like another instance of the "Western media proclaims that Russia has some internal milestone, then opines that it's a sign of weakness that the milestone was not met", which has been a recurrent strategy since the start - analogous to if the Russians said that the F-16s were supposed to stop Russian deep strikes, and the circumstance that the interception rate is lower than ever proves that F-16s are trash.
None of the Russian sources I follow seemed to be of the opinion that a fall of Pokrovsk is imminent, or even a high operational priority. Also, manifestly, the Kursk incursion did coincide with an increase of Russian advances, however small - we obviously can't access the counterfactual, but it's quite conceivable that without the Kursk incursion Ukraine could have by now conducted some successful larger-scale counteroffensives elsewhere.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1mo ago
And yes I am heavily, heavily invested in AI companies, so I have some skin in the game.
Do you have any interesting recommendations? It always seemed like apart from Google, the most interesting ones are not publicly traded. MSFT for a while seemed like a way to get exposure to OpenAI, but now there are rumours that they may want to divest.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1mo ago
On the other hand, have you seen old non-computer people trying to play video games? They make a lot of mistakes that sound very similar (due to a lack of "gamer common sense" about what parts of the UI and stage design matter and what sort of objectives there are), and that's with vision that is much less scuffed than whatever vision model has been joined onto the LLM here. I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be yet another thing where some token amount of 8xA100 finetuning on actual successful playthrough transcripts for a few games will result in the "play arbitrary games by chain-of-thought" barrier falling faster than substack AI doomers can prepare the next goalpost article (unless they get an LLM to help writing).
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1mo ago
I'm aware of the genetic distance thing. I used the vague "similar" on purpose.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1mo ago
Would you subscribe to the implied principle that the people who deserve land are the original settlers of that land? In this case, in South Africa it would be the Khoisan, not the Bantus who invaded later than the Dutch even. Will you demand the Bantus go back to the jungle so that South Africa can be rightfully inhabited by hunter gatherers again?
No, I think I stand by the rules I outlined here - the Bushmen have no claim against the Bantu except where their lands were directly taken by the latter. That being said, I think a lot of people instinctively subscribe to some sort of notion where sovereignty can be passed more easily the more similar conquerors and conquered are, so for example intra-European border shifts are accepted in ways in which Ottoman conquests in Europe were not.
The $variables, I think, come from PHP (which used to occupy approximately the role that Javascript does now as the lingua franca of amateurs making things that run on the internet), with acceptance being helped along by their older use in Perl (though it is manifestly not Perl: you never see @thing, %thing etc.).
The Jargon File is trying to be this, but thanks to the biases of its shepherd(s) it generally underrepresents anything from cultures that do not have a direct lineage from oldschool Unix hackers.
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