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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   4789 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How do you all plan on using your new found freedom?

I have already said (((nigger, faggot, tranny, retard, groomer))) in another comment, but I will do it just one more time. What a world to live in, finally can at least mention words !

Jokes aside, other than the commonly discussed pitfalls of infinite freedom (7 gorillion witches and all) , how do you think non-witchy discussions are to change now that AEO isn't breathing down everyone's necks?

Reading the CW thread, it seems to me people are subconsciously talking as if the threat of AEO still exists.

Reading the CW thread, it seems to me people are subconsciously talking as if the threat of AEO still exists.

Well, here's my personal view ( @ZorbaTHut can chime in, I think we're all kind of getting used to the "new normal" and will be for a while):

Yeah, you can use all the no-no words that risked getting you admin-banned back on reddit. Go ahead, retardniggerfaggottranny it all out of your system.

That being said, we don't want threads full of retardniggerfaggottranny. The Motte never has been and hopefully never will be that kind of place.

You want to call something retarded? Fine. You want to talk about the word nigger or quote someone else's use of it? Fine.

Actually referring to people as niggers or faggots or trannies is not fine.

As for all those sizzling hot topics, like Holocaust denial and whether trans women are men (or groomers) and whether HBD says blacks are too stupid to ever build rocketships, yeah, we can have those discussions now without worrying that AEO will come and put a boot on us, but we still expect a reasonable attempt at quality discussion, not just manifesto-posting and baiting.

We don't have emote reacts yet, but if we did, I'd be putting a "+1" emote on this post.

Hopefully we will get rigorous discussions on race and behavior/IQ. With western demographics changing quickly and equity being promoted, it’s important to understand the consequences of racial diversity.

What's the point of all that IQ if you have set your entire civilization into the population collapse funnel due to maxing out the intelligence section and single child resource focus segment of your cultural system?

Slow population decline wouldn't be a problem at all if IQ grew.

What do you mean by "collapse"? IIRC only South Korea gets somewhat close to 1 child/woman.

Uh... have you considered to possibility we act the way we do, because we want to, not because we're subconsciously threatened into it?

I don't know about this "we" but I have been posting in the motte for over 2 years now (various usernames) and have skirted around saying things plainly many times because of reddit associated nuisances (read my other comment on this post).

So I am pattern matching and assume that a lot of people speaking like I do, are doing it that way for the same reason I spoke that way.

I'm hoping very little.

I think there's a lot of people who think that we were hamstrung by Reddit, and we were always just waiting for our chance to show our true colors. I don't think that was accurate. The issue with AEO wasn't that it was actively preventing us from doing what we wanted to do, it was just making things slightly but increasingly difficult; it was a slow pressure threatening to squeeze the community into dust.

But practically speaking, we already weren't censoring ourselves much. We already had roughly the community I wanted, and I was worried about the future, not the present.

So I'm hoping things just continue along in roughly the same way they were before, except with, y'know, less comments removed for using specific parenthesis.

I mean sure as far as content was concerned there wasn't much self censorship.

But there still was plenty in the form of obfuscation. Even aside from the AEO threat, other redditors were a threat. Many professed complains about not being able to say what they want in the simplest of terms because they fear getting into an argument later in another subreddit and that resulting in someone going through their post history and causing a stink about wrongthink. I consider the elimination of that nuisance a massive positive side effect.

It will be easier to "speak plainly" now. Instead of saying "a certain demographic in the united states tend to cluster around a lower mean in psychometric tests" one can just say "African Americans as a group have lower average IQ scores". Shitty example, ik, but gets the point across.

I think just being able to speak plainly, for real this time! will produce some interesting posts. Yes there are a lot of failure modes, and are still ultimately constrained by "the Rules" but I'm keen on seeing how things pan out.

I'm actually worried that's gonna turn out to be a negative :V I think there's value in people kind of talking around the hotbutton issues. People often have real kneejerk responses to common phrasings, and you can avoid those by using a different less-common phrase.

But I have no idea how to, like, legislate that in rules, so right now I'm just gonna keep an eye on things.

Not exactly related to your point but have you thought about adding the slur filter that rdrama uses? I think it’d be a good idea to have it on for logged-out viewers, at least for certain words

Oh man I would be like a thousand percent tempted to start putting in troll slur filters.

Hmm.

Part of me thinks that isn't a terrible idea, just to get people reading the site and kinda, y'know, ease them in.

But another part of me thinks that this comes across as being ashamed of what we're posting, and I'm just not ashamed of it. I'd sorta rather look people in the eye and say "yes, we are debating controversial things, deal with it".

I'll keep this in mind but my current feeling is that it's not worth the downsides. I'm not entirely convinced by myself yet, though.

"Speak plainly, but not too plainly" ????

Yeah, that's a tough one. But I don't think kicking the can down the road really doesn't help all that much, those destined to have that reaction will have it eventually and will probably flameout and get banned in short order.

I don't see the utility in taking the responsibility to spare the feelings of people who are incapable of not having their feelings hurt. Nth order effects be damned?

Keep in mind that our goal is to be a discussion site for people with differing opinions. Nothing there says we need to coddle people, but it also doesn't say we shouldn't coddle people; if asking that people tone down their most extreme opinions gets us more of what we're looking for, that's actually a good thing.

And there are many many many people who have kneejerk reactions to things.

Yeah I understand that, but "speak plainly" is so self evidently correct/good/useful (imo), that I can't come up with any justifiable reason at all to not do that. Or any excuse good enough to give up a little bit of that.

Speaking plainly. For whom speaking plainly will cause them to have a kneejerk reaction; probably lack the epistemological foundations to be the kind of person you want to visit the motte anyways. I am sure as a mod you have plenty of datapoints to assert that I what I am saying is at least, directionally true.

I am not discussing the legislation, I am discussing your vision for the community. But anyways, I will make an CW post on it later, I think you are chasing a white whale.

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