site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37754 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.

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.

Look, I’d be happier with an equilibrium where Twitter shitposters aren’t given any more credence than a tabloid.

LoTT has been one of the only people actually gathering and publicizing evidence of the batshit things teachers are pushing on American kids

You appear to be part of the cathedral's uncoordinated but totally non coincidental attack on the credibility of a rising anti-hegemonic outlet.

No news organization in America has done more to reveal the reality within schools than Libs of TikTok. The reporting is far more straightforward than anything you’ll find in the New York Times or the Washington Post.

That's because you try to pretend that the things she documents aren't happening, and want any excuse to dismiss the evidence in front of you.

TW's trick was a godsend for "head in the sand" libs.

More comments

"We live in a world where Twitter shitposters provide more information about what's really going on with CW issues than credentialed journalists" does not particularly imply to me that it is sensible to expect the shitposters to live up to the standards expected of credentialed journalists -- if they had wanted to be credential journalists they could have done that!

Shitposting is quite fun however.

More comments

"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".

What do you mean 'didn't check'? TW, by his own admission, claimed that he believed the 'jig was up' when LoTT kept asking for, gasp, more evidence of their claim!

Leading to them faking copies of the handouts.

Stop trying to play this off as LoTT just blindly accepting whatever was sent to her. She never did.

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.

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

I don't think this is fair to me at all. This is the final paragraph of my article.

I am confident that Buttigieg can see that just as well as the rest of us, that for many, it is simply the same neglect everybody else has shown towards the case that has led it to linger awkwardly unresolved for a decade. There is nothing to be gained from fighting the suit further. It is a black eye on the FAA, a black eye on the DOT, and a black eye on our public institutions as a whole. People have paid shockingly little attention to it as it's rolled through the courts, in part, no doubt, because anything touching on diversity is a hot topic that becomes a culture war football in a moment. My instinct, looking at the whole mess, is that the DOT and FAA should publicly apologize, settle, and do their best to begin making right what was so badly broken.

That's not a claim of struggling to fulfill the law--it's a claim that people did terrible things, got exposed as being terrible things, and have left a black eye on institutions that people have failed to pay attention to for partisan reasons.

I said, and will continue to say, that it is not fundamentally partisan. When I speak with partisans involved in it about the specific details, including ones with ties to the institutions in question, people are outraged. People certainly respond to it in partisan ways, but inflaming it as an issue where the people whose laps it got dumped in have no way to save face, where they're either conquered or they stick to their guns and win, does not actually help the issue get solved.

I will absolutely own up to framing my articles in ways that make people more likely to listen to them, but I think it's a grave misreading to take it as me absolving anyone of responsibility or treating it anything as other than a blatantly corrupt institutional failure on all levels.

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.

Yes, that’s how every social group works, and there are consequences for every “not.”

Anyway, you’re one of the highest-volume, lowest-effort partisans here and you’ve been that way the entire time I’ve known you. If this forum hated Darwin for the reasons they said they did, you’d get at least as much criticism. I hope you enjoy the forum you’ve helped build. Take care.

  • -18
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.

Perhaps not what SteveKirk was saying, but it seems plain to me that Trace promotes a centrist agenda?

That is, he often writes about things that he sees as problems, on whichever side they may be found (centrist agenda), and has something of a vision of the unusual things that he values (weird niche)?

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.

It's the difference between a woman wearing dresses as clothes and a crossdresser wearing dresses because he gets sexually excited at it. Furries aren't a type of transhumanists.

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.

We've been pretty lenient with people who want to pile on Trace - he kind of invited it with his own evident willingness to wade in for one last hurrah.

However, this is over the line, just pure sneering with no point to it other than that. And given your record of making it clear you are just here to sneer, you can go away for four days.

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.)

Some of the most obnoxious moments here are when someone dredges up a historical feud and the peanut gallery thinks it’s productive to opine at length on the object level of that feud.

The people still beating this drum hated me before that moment and see it as simply the most convenient attack vector. You’re welcome to play along, but I’m not going to validate it. Enjoy your site.

  • -11
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.

I respect and appreciate that.

The reality is that their needling has been effective. Not on my life, my career, or my writing as a whole, all of which are on a trajectory I could never have imagined or hoped for. But they have caused serious long-term damage to a place I loved over many years, made things unbearable for people I respect, and made this forum increasingly one-note and lifeless. Letting them know that they get to me personally does nothing to impact any of that, it just makes this a place I no longer want to spend my time.

At the same time, having watched it for years, I did want to share my sentiments with them directly before I left. I don't know whether they're bad people in some abstract sense, but they damaged something I loved and are now jealously guarding its corpse. So be it.

It doesn't matter whether they know they got to me or not. If they want to follow me elsewhere, I don't have to dance around the way I do here, and the chorus of malcontents on Twitter is large enough that another voice or two makes little difference. One way or another, I'm leaving this site, though, and it did matter to me whether I said how I felt before then.

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.

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

Dollars are sort of important things.

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.

It's bad faith and deceptive if done to avoid responsibility and guilt, as opposed to a process to acknowledge and overcome. Again, culturally-resonate examples abound: faking a conversion is contemptable, conversion as a new start is respectable. Or we could raise the more progressive-secular example of transition, or the chance to reset/reframe when marrying into another family, or so on.

Separately, there is a bit of amusement given that encouraging people to abandon old personas and pretend to be someone else, but in compliance with the rules, has been a Mission Accomplished success of The Motte's modding philosophy when dealing with sockpuppets who stay more within the rules. I realize Motte modding is non-generalizable, but it is applicable as a (sub)cultural example.

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.

Alternatively, treat / approach it as one does someone who does a late-in-life baptism/conversion and adopts a new name. Spiritual rebirth is a common cultural context, and part of that is to do away with both the sins and the gains of the past as part of the break in identity. This isn't 'lie for the sake of a new false identity' this is 'recreate the identity,' which has common cross-cultural analogs and context for understanding if demonstrated as sincere and approached from a position of humility.

:(

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?

I'm mainly just a lurker, but I've been on this site from the start; and from here, I went on to start using Data Secrets Lox, X, Rdrama.net, and especially Substack. Subjectively, outside of here I enjoy the content and discussions on Substack the most. There are a lot of Discords, but I don't really like using Discord to talk to anons very much.

The Motte and its predecessors have been my favorite parts of the Internet since I discovered SSC around 2013 or 2014. Somehow I still feel the sense of shared heritage and mindset, but I know that it's all fragmenting. I have tried to resist that happening, because I don't think I can build the same feeling of community as a Peachy Keenan fan or Yuri Bezmenov Comrade or whatever. I just came to those things too late. My next "community" will actually probably be the Old Men Eating Lunch group at my church.

Mostly Twitter, some into EA circles or away from online commentary and into irl stuff, some Discord, a few rdrama, some more than one of them. Twitter is the only one that fulfills a truly similar role.

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.

I've always enjoyed your company as well, but I have gotten almost nothing out of this place since it moved to the new site and my experiences elsewhere are becoming better and better. The one thing I am missing out on by leaving this place is the presence of the people I respect here who have not yet built presences elsewhere, and at this point, the only thing keeping me coming back around here has been nostalgia for what once was.

I'm a fossil around here these days. It's time to pull the plug.

See you on the other side, someday.

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.

There are places I will litigate the events of that time. This is not one of those places, and while you seem like a good chap, I'd encourage you to think about what it's like to have people looking, with every post you make, for excuses to bring up their old grudges rather than trying to litigate and rationalize the specifics of those grudges. See you on the other side someday, perhaps.

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

How is this place worse on issues of meritocracy? (If I read you rightly?)

My sense was that people here are usually fairly pro-meritocracy.

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.

There is every reason to burn this bridge. I'm not interested in politely ignoring the angry drunk ranting on the edges of my conversation every time I go to the local pub to chat with my friends. There are plenty of good people here, but at this point, most have either built accompanying presences elsewhere or can do so, and I think they should. I'm sure there is still magic here for others, but others don't have the angry drunk ranting on the edges of every conversation they have in the pub, and I have enough places without that that I no longer need to cling to what I once had here.

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.

I think it's misleading to call it "old grievances dating back a decade" when it's ongoing behavior that began a decade ago.

More comments

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.

Though he is getting pushback on something completely unrelated to the current post, purely because people are still holding grudges. I mean, this isn't the first time Trace has posted something since the whole LoTT affair, and while people sometimes bring it up (as people do - a lot of people here hold grudges against a lot of other posters), most people don't feel a need to snigger "Hey, what about that time you pranked LibsOfTikTok?" every time he posts.

@HRSCCK (an obvious alt spun up for such shit-stirring) started this with an unnecessary dig. When even @gattsuru tells you you're being petty, that's something.

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?

It’s going great! Here’s the most recent quality contributions roundup:

https://old.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/1dsozbw/quality_contributions_up_to_30_june_2024/

Culturally, it has become exactly what I envisioned it being, and I am proud to have helped lay the foundation for one of the healthiest discussion spaces online, even as my own attention has moved mostly to Twitter.

Thanks for asking, and take care.

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