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?
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Notes -
That was one of the moments that holds the most salience for me, yeah, alongside this from @FCfromSSC. This forum was very much the place I came into my own as a writer, which made it much more painful for me to hear how people saw me when I strayed from the anti-prog line. It's no small thing to watch a large crowd in your digital hometown, so to speak, cheer someone on as he emphasizes he wants nothing to do with you or yours, and no small thing to watch many of that same crowd go on to cheer others as they frame you as a lying agent of the Cathedral who should be banned from the space and whatnot. Many people I respect took issue with my LoTT prank; I remain uniquely disgusted with the reaction I got from this forum in a way that's not easy to shake. The shift from "my online home turf" to "just another forum I visit and post in sometimes" was a gradual one, but that settled it pretty unambiguously. And I'd be lying if I didn't look with grim satisfaction at the place others said would turn into a progressive monoculture and see that it has, despite being quiet, remained precisely the thoughtful discussion space I hoped it would be.
I have always been exactly who I claim to be, and always aimed to do exactly what I claim to be doing. Part of aiming to be honest and open in my self-presentation, though, is that it stings quite a bit when people I think should know better treat me as something I'm not, or reject me for who I am. Things get heated, yes; people don't mean quite that by it, sure; but I do remember.
You mentioned previously a concern about an attitude of "I'm going to cash in on a post from my niche hangout, and not give credit, because I'm afraid I'll get cancelled." I do think my behavior demonstrates pretty clearly that I'm not afraid of controversial associations, not even of attaching my name and career to them. I talk about rDrama in public regularly, where I'm a known regular; I go on podcasts with Richard Hanania and Alex Kaschuta and Walt Bismarck and anyone I think I can have a good chat with; I cover stories and topics sensitive enough that most won't touch them with ten-foot poles. I'll talk with anyone who will talk with me, and build alongside anyone who wants to build alongside me. But I also take very careful note of how people act when the chips are down and my back is against the wall, and when I see people place me on the enemy side of the friend/enemy distinction, I take that seriously.
It's funny, because in many senses I get along well with FC personally inasmuch as we interact; I've appreciated my interactions with you personally; I get on well with many people here and have a lot in common with many of them. In a sense, though, that's what makes it tricky: if my own experience here left me feeling burned, despite making many friendships, usually being well-received, and having a great deal in common with many here, how could I possibly recommend this place as a good conversation spot to anyone who doesn't share the dominant viewpoints here? If, every time someone gets frustrated and leaves this forum, the collective local mind sees it as an issue with that person, not crediting their critiques, what am I to think?
Unsurprisingly, I stand by my long-held critical analysis of this forum. I think it is torn between two purposes, one implicit and one explicit, and the implicit one has been winning for a very long time. Explicitly, it wants to be a respectful meeting place for people who don't share the same biases. Implicitly, it is a place for people who don't like progressives to chat about politics and culture. It works great if you want to be criticized from your right, or if you have an anti-progressive or a more niche idea to share, but people are doomed to disappointment at the gap between its implicit and its explicit purposes unless they share its biases, and if they share its biases they will only entrench those biases further.
I'm sorry to watch this forum stagnate, because after everything it still holds a special place in my heart, and out of respect to it and recognition that I already struck a blow against it once, I've refrained from encouraging people to join the space I think has broadly succeeded in the culture-building project this place envisioned (the postrat oasis on Twitter). If posts from here strike me, I'm more than happy to share them with attribution. When it's relevant, I'm more than happy to talk about this place and the role it's played in my own journey. I personally like, get on with, and respect a great many people here. And yes, of course if the users or mods explicitly want me to promote it in some form, I'm happy to take a look. But yeah, my memories of the Motte have been bittersweet for years now.
At its core this is a debate forum more than anything else, and most of the stuff you guys are talking about looks like fairly typical even-handed debate to me. I quite enjoy a lot of your more pro-prog takes, as do many people here. If how people reacted to your more liberal posts upset you, well, that's understandable. There can definitely be pile-ons here that make continued participation in the forum feel unpleasant.
That said, I think you're more partisan than you realize. Despite your very frequent throat-clearing about being an honest genuine seeker of truth, you (like the rest of us) have a very hard time truly criticizing your ingroup, or seeing it be criticized. I don't bring this up to score points or speak to the wider audience--I genuinely think you have a blind spot and am trying to convince you of this.
If your framing (essentially, If Only Buttigieg Knew) was a deliberate attempt to make your FAA post more palatable to your audience, I suppose I'll eat my words.
The reaction to the LoTT mess in particular was extraordinarily far from even-handed debate.
On my FAA article: It was absolutely a deliberate framing focused on being persuasive towards the people who could actually do something about the problem, and subsequent conversations I've had indicate that it was at least moderately successful in that regard. As a bonus, it was much more agreeable to many of the specific individuals impacted than a more partisan framing would have been. Eventually I hope I can go into that in more depth, but the short answer is that I think you're mistaken to see it as difficulty in criticizing them.
Note also that the Democrats aren't my ingroup and never have been, and government agencies as a whole certainly are not.
I can't actually find it, but the two discussions I did find (1, 2) seemed to be composed of left-leaning people who nevertheless had a somewhat negative view of that prank.
I like the prank, personally. LoTT obviously doesn't put too much effort into vetting its stories and it's good for this to be exposed. I mean, we should already know that, but making it clear to everyone is good. But, not to defend a debate I haven't even seen, if people in or near your tribe (Reddit-using Blocked And Reported followers, TheSchism commenters, etc.) have complaints about the journalistic integrity of the prank, then less-aligned people will surely have bigger complaints.
Fair enough. I've been falling uncontrollably towards doomerism for a while and am very distrustful of anyone who can actually do something about that problem--because where were they when the problem was actually happening? Those who were put in charge of the FAA were very up-front about their values for years beforehand.
I'm far enough gone that I think those people are the true enemies. They put the FAA people in power in the first place and are complicit in what those people did. I'm skeptical that such people can actually be swayed, and aren't just pretending to be swayed in order to let the FAA people take the fall. Eventually I'd love to see that depth, because some hard evidence that Buttigieg-types are not deliberately promoting these sorts of policies would go a long way for my mental health.
I deleted the OP, which makes the thread a bit hard to follow, but example replies can be found eg here, here, here, here, or here. There were many more.
I can handle complaints. I think I handled the process carelessly on the whole and appreciated much of the respectful feedback I got. But when people I've spent years speaking amiably with accuse me of being an agent of The Machine and tell me I should be banished from our shared community, piling on more than anywhere else at the single lowest point of my time online—well, that's the sort of thing that leads to long-term fraying of relations. I'm not going to place it on the whole community, and appreciate in particular those who apologized for their role in that sequence, but years later I remain disgusted with the whole affair. How the people around you act when your back is against the wall matters, and the way the zeitgeist of this forum reacted to me then was to call me a dishonest shill for The Enemy and tell me to get out.
Things had already been fraying for a while before that point, but that day has remained in the back of my mind whenever I've participated here since. It doesn't stop me from getting along with many of the mods and users here, it doesn't stop me from being grateful that my writing is usually so well-received here, and it doesn't stop me from appreciating this forum as having been key to my development as a writer, but it makes it very hard for me to see the forum as a whole as anything but just another place to argue with people on the internet.
It's strange. When I visit old /r/themotte threads, the discussions seem hotter and the tone more aggressive, while downvoting unpopular opinions was rarer. You'd figure those two behaviors would move together.
The people who pushed the consensus that kendi and diangelo were serious thinkers about "whiteness" and that arresting people for going to the beach or a hike in the woods (but not a BLM riot) was perfectly normal have backed off those extreme positions, so there's less open fighting.
But the people they were pushing it on remember and do not extend the same spirit of charity any more.
It feels like many people have been waking up from a 4 year bender of religious mania and don't quite remember what they did or why their friends give them strange looks and don't return their calls now. Suggesting "covid amnesties" the way a drunk at brunch might sheepishly ask "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right guys?"
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Honestly that doesn't seem that bad to me. I've been treated worse for some right-leaning opinions I've expressed here. Most everyone was careful to say how much they liked and respected you despite their disagreements, and the less polite were quickly censured.
Sorry, I don't buy it, and I'm pretty frustrated that's what you jumped to in response. Give one example you faced of "worse treat[ment]" anywhere near comparable in vehemence, scale, and forum support (keeping in mind that these were only some of many) or I simply do not believe you.
Your first example starts with "I like you," and everyone responding disagrees with their point. Your second was immediately banned and the only other comment disagreed with it. In your third, again, most of its replies disagree with it. In the fifth link, most commenters disagree with their take. The fourth link does, admittedly, seem to have some support.
Overall it looks like your reception was neutral to positive in terms of vehemence and support, i.e. there wasn't all that much vehemence and there was some net positive support. You had more defenders than attackers, especially if these are the worst examples you can find, and some of your attackers were very kind and even-handed.
Even the comments on the piece itself look fairly negative, so it really doesn't look to me like TheMotte is exceptional at all in that regard. I think if we conducted a sentiment analysis we'd find TheMotte to be very similar to your reception among your dedicated fans.
Sorry, can't compete there, because TheMotte is about 1/4 as big as it was back then, and I haven't been involved in any comparable scandals, nor am I a founder of this community, nor am I a semi-professional semi-journalist (I'd feel comfortable calling you a journalist, but I don't mean much by the term, and I'm not sure you'd agree). But after a certain point the scale really isn't important--what matters is whether an acceptable fraction of the community has seen the post, and what their average sentiment towards the post is.
I'm hesitant to even bring it up, because you're obviously still pretty affected by the response to your own writing, and my own unpopular post was both low-quality and something more likely than most things to be something you have your own strong negative feelings towards. Still, fair is fair, here's the post I had in mind.
It's an admittedly low-quality comment that generated a startling amount of disagreement (perhaps even "vehemence"). In particular, consider this comment, which is more vehement, lower quality, and less charitable than any of your linked un-modded replies.
Look at any of the responses to my original post. I had essentially no defenders. Everyone disagreed with me, many did so in quite rude terms, no mods stepped in at any point. I'm not too bothered by any of this because on a level I deserved it. My original comment was pretty much just drive-by sneering with very little substance to back up very substantial claims, and my follow-up replies were not much better. I don't think that justifies all the replies but it does explain them and very much prevents me from taking it personally. If I thought it had been a good post, I might have been more upset by the reception.
A better example (iirc) would be the reception to KulakRevolt's "banned books" piece, which I can find if you're interested. People were universally very dismissive of it. You can argue (and I'd agree) that that piece was lower quality than the fake furry curriculum piece, but the fact remains that your reception was nowhere near unique or exceptional and there are right-leaning commenters here who have faced worse.
You'll note I was kindly downvoted for my boring and tired atheistic statements and protestations against superstition.
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I do relate, honestly, to being a believer in a space full of nonbelievers and the sense of isolation it can provide as people attack your deeply held beliefs. The particular reply you link is obnoxious, low-quality, certainly unpleasant to receive—and downvoted, with no meaningful support from others. And it’s true—you were staking out a minority viewpoint difficult to defend in a forum like this, and receiving harsh responses for doing so.
You very badly misunderstand the situation and the comparison at hand, though. I’ve been in heated conversations before. I’ve had slapfights, I’ve had controversial posts that get a lot of pushback. That’s all well within the norm.
What is extremely far from the norm is having people en masse accuse you of being a shill, tell you your reputation has been destroyed, tell you you don’t belong in the forum, and receive mass support (see eg upvote totals) for doing so. You’re fixating on one person who respects me—and was still calling me a shill—and a handful of supportive replies, in the middle of a flood of vitriol. I didn’t link the worst ones—I linked some of the ones with the most support and one drive-by potshot in the middle of the flood. At the end of your conversation, nobody was threatening any longstanding impact or indicating that they would treat you differently moving forward. There were no spiraling ramifications, no deep-felt expressions of hatred. It’s apples and oranges.
Dismissal isn’t comparable, either. People weren’t coming around en masse to tell Kulak he didn’t belong in the community after the article. They just disagreed with it!
Like, you can see in the links—note particularly the one mentioning it was clearly costing me a lot of goodwill. People there were extremely well aware at the time that it was an extraordinary reaction in an extraordinary situation; to treat it otherwise is to badly misread it. I’m not going to act like nobody on this forum has ever faced worse—particularly around flameout posts—but I can emphatically tell you that the reaction here was uniquely ugly, of all the places that took note of the event.
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You know, sometimes I think this place was doomed from the start, and it's very existence is a fluke stemming from the zeitgeist of a particular time and space (which itself was a fluke). The idea of getting people with fundamentally different values to sit down and talk is nice and theory, and interesting things can come out of it, but it seems sooner or later it runs into an obvious issue of the values being, in fact, fundamentally different. We naively believed that this is just a bump in the road. Some differences make us angry and it's just a question getting past the anger, other things are just a misunderstanding, and it's a question of explaining yourself better. But with fundamental differences we understand each other perfectly, and still think the other side is wrong. Any anger is a result of understanding, rather than misunderstanding, but quite often it doesn't even enter the picture. In fact, to the extent it did, I think it's the fault of the rationalist ethos.
Such is the case here. I think I understand where you're coming from, but I think you're just wrong. It is a small thing to watch a large crowd cheer someone on as he emphasizes he wants nothing to do with me and mine. I get that it's more Impactful for you, but I can't muster up more than "sorry to hear that, bro".
Yes. I think that sort of behavior is out of line. It can stem from a mistake, so it's possible it happened in good faith, but it should be promptly corrected when it comes out.
But this I don't get. It feels like a very luxurious belief to me, and I think it contradicts the very mission of this forum.
Or more than that it might even be literally impossible to avoid. My impression is that you, Chris Pratt, and whole bunch of other progs routinely practice rejecting people for who they are, except you do it in a roundabout way that comes off as insincere to people like me.
I can explain what happened here. I wasn't trying to ascribe any motivation to you, I was just putting myself in your shoes. I am afraid of cancellation, so that's why I would try to hide my associations with this place. I'd probably have no chance to guess your actual motivations, even if I knew / remembered how you feel about this place, because that isn't how I'd react, and I don't know you well enough to guess how you parse the world.
That's great to hear! Though I don't know if I'll ever be appointed the Director of Marketing for this place.
“In your digital hometown” is the key phrase you excluded. I have large crowds yell at me every time I post anything vaguely controversial. Heck, half a dozen people called me a fascist for this. But “cancellation” and online mob dynamics mostly have any impact when it’s people you care about and have longstanding positive relationships with. They’re the ones who have some degree of power over you. The lesson from it was screamingly obvious: build elsewhere.
It’s not the fundamental differences, either, or not just that. It’s that this place takes them so dreadfully seriously. The same dynamic proceeds in a much more lighthearted way at rdrama, where those fundamental differences obviously exist but everyone just yells at each other until they basically get along regardless.
But yeah, that even here you label me as a “prog” is the sort of thing that makes me inclined to say goodbye and good riddance to all of this. I’m being direct because I do think you’re a good representative of the zeitgeist view that was embraced here; you’re pleasant to chat with and you also remind me regularly of what I began to find insufferable here.
You’ve built your culture, now enjoy it. People who have come from here don’t trumpet their associations with you? Not a lot of people you really disagree with stop by to argue quite so much these days?
Whoopsie.
So it goes.
I can edit it in, it doesn't change much for me.
Sure, which is why I understand why the LoTT affair bothered you so much, and why I explicitly mentioned it. But you said FC's post bothered you just as much, this is the part I quoted, and was responding to. There was no cancellation there, and no yelling. Now you're responding like this was about only the LoTT thing all along?
Oh for the love of... If I took offence at everyone calling me a "trad" we wouldn't get very far. If you don't like being called that, I'm sorry, I take it back. But I'd also like a map of this minefield I'm supposed to be navigating.
If I may briefly interject: there is a reason we tone police here, and it's because words (and their resonance) matter. You are expressing bafflement that @TracingWoodgrains took offense to you calling him a "prog." "What?" you say. "I don't take offense to being called a trad!"
Assuming you're being sincere (probably you are), I will just tell you: the two terms are not equivalent. Some leftists may call trads "trads" in a derogatory fashion, but I have seen it used much more frequently by trads themselves (or if it's being used in a condescending fashion, it's usually by traditional conservatives or DRs). (Leftists are more likely to call you "fascist.") Meanwhile, I almost never see progressives/leftists/wokes call themselves "progs." Everyone knows that's meant as an insult.
Generally speaking, we wouldn't mod someone for calling another poster a "prog," but depending on the tone and the context, it could very easily be read as intended to insult. Whereas while I suppose someone could take offense at being called a "trad," you'd have to be going out of your way to boo the outgroup to make "trad" into an insult.
While you may think this is a semantic argument, it gets to the root of your exchange with @TracingWoodgrains. You casually call him a "prog," which you and he both understand to mean that he is in the enemy camp, a member of your outgroup, one of Those People. He, not even considering himself a proper progressive, finds it indicative of what he's talking about - being put in a mislabeled box by people who don't bother to understand what he actually believes - and you blink in astonishment that he took your label as an act of belligerence.
If someone called me a "prog" I wouldn't take offense, exactly, but I would conclude two things: (1) This person is an idiot who doesn't care what I actually believe and just throws everyone with slightly left-leaning views into the same box; (2) This person meant to offend me (and will probably pretend they didn't and say "What's wrong with being called a prog?" if I call them on it).
Fair enough, I had no idea. I've never even heard the word used before Trace did in the comment directly above mine, and it sounded completely innocuous to me, so I thought I'd borrow it.
Just to be clear: no I didn't. I meant progressive in terms of worldview. That's something I consider beyond political camps. I believe Hlynkaesque alt-right progressives do actually exist.
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Re: the FC thing—that was mostly relevant as a reminder that if that sentiment was broadly shared here, then I should not put my energy into building this space. If the zeitgeist of a space is “we don’t even want to live in a country with you,” it sure isn’t the sort of space I want to put my creative energy into.
As for the map—the map is that I spend the overwhelming majority of my politically relevant time online pushing against prog excesses, I have never self-identified as one and continue not to, and at this point I literally work for a law firm that is overtly anti-prog, but due to a few high-level traits, a loud subset of people cannot help but map me into that category regardless. The map is that after years of watching you and yours form overtly and obviously incorrect models of who I am and what I do, then cling to them after you should very well know better, I prefer to spend my time engaging with people who don’t do that. The broader map is that some form of this sentiment, spread over a hundred excellent former regulars here, is why there are a hundred excellent former regulars here, and the problem is not with them.
Well, it all feels a bit out of left field to me. I never asked for putting your creative energy into here, and where you decide to put it doesn't even require justification.
I thought we were talking about the general sense of betrayal you feel with this community, and I thought this was supposed to be an example of what makes you feel this way. If it isn't - my bad. If it is - I have trouble seeing anything hurtful about that statement. It's normal for people to live in a country where there fundamental values are respected. I'm pretty sure you expressed such a sentiment yourself.
You don't think you might be reading just a little bit too much into a single word? I never attributed the excesses of progressivism to you, or dismissed your work against them. It was a shorthand, and it's a relative term, and I distinctly remember you playing it for a joke, that a gay furry is the most conservative person at your law school. Is it really so wild you still look progressive to someone from a different background?
It is a reflection of that sense of betrayal. I'm not sure what's odd about feeling betrayed by a large chunk of your online community rallying behind the idea that they don't want to share a country with you. That you would struggle to understand it is a bit baffling.
Like, c'mon: "I don't even want to live in a group of hundreds of millions of people that includes both me and you. Your ideals disgust me on a fundamental level. But hey, now that you've broken out, where's the promotion for us hometown lads?" Surely you can see why I'd find that a bit rich. You cannot at once reject someone as unworthy to share a polis with you and expect them to treat your companionship as meaningful.
The friend-enemy distinction matters. Put bluntly, I see you personally as wanting to put me on the enemy side of the friend-enemy distinction, repeatedly defend that choice, and then post in resentment about a lack of friendship resulting from that. Choose one.
I don't at all think I'm reading too much into a single word, no. It's obnoxious for people to treat me as a representative of a coalition that rejects me and that I reject, and it is a specific coalition, not simply a relative term. Using it suggests neither understanding nor a wish to understand, and I find it much easier to simply build elsewhere than to bridge a determinedly unbridgeable gap.
Well again, I'm not struggling to understand, I just disagree.
No? I don't know what to tell you... You can find me as disgusting as you want, but If I find some interesting bit of info at your Substack, I'll drop a link to it when sharing it with others. If I forget to do so, and rake in a million views from it, I'll probably feel pretty shitty about it.
I don't really expect anything from how your treatment of my companionship. I'm just trying to figure out what your grievances are, and figure out what I can learn from them, and if I can improve. But this particular one... like I said I'm not sure on what grounds you're expecting anything more than "sorry to hear that, bro". Like I said I consider it 100% normal to want to live in a country that respects your fundamental values, so if you're going to get sufficiently values-diverse group together, you will inevitably end up with people not wanting to share a country with each other. It is again quite strange for me to see you insist on this, since like I said you expressed the same sentiment yourself, or at least I don't know how else to understand "I want to live in a culture where my family and I can live according to our values and build alongside people who share those values". Maybe there's supposed to be a difference between "country" and "culture", but no matter how I slice it, it sounds at most like the same thing with extra steps.
It matters when you're doing political activism. This place is very explicitly not a place for that, so I don't see the issue.
Quite frankly it's not even about friendship. I saw what you did as akin to meme accounts on Twitter reposting some webcomic or another, but diligently removing the artist's signature. The analogy doesn't quite fit since the post in question wasn't written here, but I can't help but parse the situation this way. It's not even that much of a big deal as far as I'm concerned, so I don't get why you insist on portraying me as making unreasonable demands.
If you want to tell me how it came off to you that's fair enough, but you can't tell me how I meant it.
That's a bit ironic, given the above.
Compare it to individual houses in a neighborhood. A family's rules reign supreme in their own home, no one can demand they do something. But outside that house, they don't hold that power and have to negotiate if they want anything done.
The issue is the misuse of "country" because it implies a certain level of being able to make moral demands of others. We don't live in such an age. If a man from Kansas approached one from New York, the idea that the former could demand the latter change their behavior or views to align with a different morality would be considered absurd by most people.
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Or, if we're looking to 2020:
Sorry, I'm trying to not to take out a bad mood and what I see as a repudiation of Trace's entire ethos on him, and I get the distinction TW's trying to move around ("I'm not going to write off the half of the country who supported him"). But it's hard to read this conversation and not see my (and I guess @drmanhattan16 's?) participation in TheSchism (and TW's twitter sphere) as part of the problem.
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I post attribution to the things I link. In that specific case, what I linked was a Substack post that someone else had linked here, and I attributed it to the original post and told people where I found it as it was relevant. Inasmuch as you have a grievance against those who have left here with bitter feelings, turn inwards and accept that this place could have been the incubator you envision, and you and yours fumbled that. It will not be what it could have been, your own choices and efforts at culture-building contributed to that, and you can resent those who left if you'd like but you can't rebuild lost goodwill by wishing it were otherwise.
That's all I have remaining to say to you on any of this. I wish you the best of luck finding more people who want to spend time around you.
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