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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37979 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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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.

The joke was that LoTT could very well have more of them than ye olde gender studies journal, although I had difficulty finding either her net worth or the ballpark budget of a humanities journal.

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.

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