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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37968 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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Does any normal person consider rationalwiki a reliable source? I always thought of it as a 'by lolcows, for lolcows' kind of site. Elon Musk's article for instance: four paragraphs on Teslas, one paragraph on SpaceX, at least 50 paragraphs on Twitter and probably another fifty on his tweets.

It has a roughly similar tone to the incel wiki page on women. Everything from the derisive nicknames to the snarky pictures is identical. Only difference is that the incels are succinct.

I mean, if you’re trying to learn about a suspected total crackpot, rational wiki will get the point that he’s a total crackpot across faster and more entertainingly than Wikipedia.

If you're trying to learn about a suspected crackpot, a piece of paper saying "yes" will get the point across even faster than that. But the piece of paper and Rationalwiki will both be bad at eliminating false positives.

I doubt that normal people know that RationalWiki exists or consider it at all.

My experience with non-Motte-related somewhat-left-y people on the internet is that RationalWiki is seen as basically left-wing Conservapedia, and completely untrustworthy, but I admit that's probably selection bias.

My understanding is that RationalWiki was originally founded as a left-wing foil to Conservapedia and the only reason why it is marginally more accurate and significantly funnier is the higher average IQ on the Very Online left compared to the fundie right.

Well, maybe I should try a test case.

Let's take, say, the Conservapedia page on Joe Biden and the RationalWiki page on Donald Trump.

(On a side note, I put 'conservapedia joe biden' and 'rationalwiki donald trump' into DuckDuckGo, and neither search returned me the page I needed. The latter did at least return RationalWiki pages, though for some reason it started with 'Policies of Donald Trump', 'Trumpism', 'Foreign Policy of Donald Trump', 'Donald Trump Jr.', and 'Trump-Ukraine Scandal', and never actually had the bare page on Trump. The former, however, was more suspicious - DDG refused to find Conservapedia at all. Instead, the first five results were Politico, NPR, the New York Times, Time, and Bloomberg, with further stories from NPR, CNN, Vox, and eventually joebiden.com, his campaign website. If I DDG for 'conservapedia' by itself it does correctly return Conservapedia as the first result. This makes me wary that there's some kind of disinformation filter here.)

Anyway, RationalWiki on Trump:

Donald John "Huge Hands Hans" Trump, Sr. (1946–), is an American businessman, rapist, reality TV host, four times indicted criminal, convicted felon,[6] and conspiracy theorist who was the forty-fifth President of the United States from 2017 to 2021. He is an adjudicated liar[7] and an adjudicated rapist:[8] yes, he's a sadistic "sick fuck".[9] Due to his involvement in an attempted self-coup after losing reelection, he has the infamous dishonor of being the first president in American history impeached and acquitted twice by the House of Representatives,[10] with the most bipartisan impeachment standing in US history.[11][note 1] As of 2024, he was courting the cannibalistic serial killer vote by praising the fictional cannibal Hannibal Lecter.[12] More proof of his self-described "very stable genius"[13] comes from being the first one-term president since George H. W. Bush in 1992.

His public life and career read like a Greatest Hits album of everything wrong with American society. Once tweeting a quote by radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who called Trump the "Chosen One and the King of Israel",[14] he is infamous for being a bizarrely unsuccessful businessman,[15][16] brash television personality,[17] fascist and neo-Nazi sympathizer,[18][19][20] con artist,[21] honorary Russian Cossack,[22] heelWikipedia wrestling personality,[note 2] sexual-assault enthusiast,[8][23][note 3] demagogue,Wikipedia[24] personality-cult leader,[25][26][27] and an aspiring strongman,Wikipedia[28] Nobel Peace Prize nominee,[note 4][30] and subject of extensive false equivalency.[31][32] Thanks to the confluence of his legendary narcissism and propensity for self-promotion, minimal attempts by his Republican supporters to moderate his malignant impulsivity, and four years at the tiller of perhaps the world's most influential public platform with an itchy Twitter finger, he holds the distinction of having likely told more public (and demonstrable) lies than any other person in human history.[33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]

Elected against all odds,[note 5] Trump's presidency was an unmitigated disaster. Responsible for numerous human rights violations and outright crimes against humanity, he was condemned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,[43] for taking migrant children from their parents at the Mexican border and putting them in literal cages.[44][45] His inflammatory rhetoric, defense of his antagonistic or outright homicidal supporters,[46] endorsement of police killings on leftists,[47] bragging that his government assassinated leftists and antifascists (and heavily implying under his direct orders),[48][49][50][51][52][53][54] and vicious scapegoating of minorities directly inspired multiple acts of violence,[55][56] including against political rivals[57] and their relatives,[58] and even actual politically-motivated murders by his supporters,[59][60] even against people unconnected to Trump.[61]

Conservapedia on Biden:

Joseph Robinette “Joe” Biden, Jr., aka Pops, Pedo Pete,[14] The Big Guy, Robert L. Peters, Robin Ware,[15] J. R. B. Ware[16][17][18] and My Chairman[19][20] (born November 20, 1942) is the authoritarian kleptocrat and dictator of the United States.[21][22] Biden has been described by a close confidant as an "egomaniacal autocrat"[23] and by his own Justice Department as incompetent and unfit.[24]

79% of Americans believe that the 2020 presidential election was unjustly manipulated by dishonest whitewashing of the Biden family's criminal activities.[25] The official position of the Biden regime as articulated by its chief press spokesperson is that political opposition is "a threat to democracy."[26] A poll conducted by the Daily Mail of Iowa Republicans in August 2023 after Biden's 3rd indictment of 2024 presidential frontrunner President Donald J. Trump found 57% believed America was becoming like Nazi Germany under Biden.[27] Biden's ongoing bid to retain the presidency in 2024 is backed by Russia.[28][29] According to the "left-leaning"[30] newspaper The Economist, the USA's Democracy Index ranking decreased from 7.96 in 2019 under Trump to 7.85 in 2023 under Biden. Biden is known for his use of the term "bloodbath".[31]

A prominent Holocaust trivializer, Biden has compared migrants who illegally crossed the U.S.–Mexican border to Jews who perished in the Shoah.[32] In the space of 25 months after seizing power, Biden single-handedly rehabilitated the reputations of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, turning Nazis into freedom fighters for Western liberal democracy.

You can keep reading both articles if you'd like, but you no doubt get the idea.

I think reading them both, my judgement is that Conservapedia is worse, but they are both basically unhinged rants, far more interested in just insulting their subject in the most over-the-top and childish ways possible than they are in understanding anything. Both are basically political entertainment, written only to amuse or entertain an audience of dedicated partisans.

They are both worthless.

They are both worthless.

I would say both are hilarious, though not for the reasons their authors intended.

I've known a few people who knew little about the specific internet subcultures, who at one time or another have cited RationalWiki to me as evidence that Scott Alexander is an unhinged neoreactionary rightist, or some other such nonsense. These people trusted RationalWiki mostly by virtue of its name alone (i.e. "well, it's a wiki that's trying to be rational, isn't it?").

RationalWiki is (or was?) a legitimately good source on a lot of cranks, especially from way back in the days when things were simpler and the chief debate on the internet was creationism vs evolution. But at the same time if you look at their article on Trump or anything remotely connected to the culture wars you're just looking at the same kind of junk they're so great at calling out when the political valence is flipped.

RationalWiki is (or was?) a legitimately good source on a lot of cranks

I don't know about now, but I always thought it's one of the worst. Being raised on James Randi style skepticism, seeing RationalWiki's takes on various cranks that seemed to boil down to a deluge of BooOutgroup, was like nails on a chalkboard.

IDK, rationalwiki seems like it makes it pretty apparent who's genuinely crazy and who believes probably false things for ideological reasons. I don't know that they're intending to do that but the difference between Ken Ham and David Icke on there is night and day.

I agree one could have seen the signs from the start, but it was easy to tolerate or even join in the sneering since many of the early targets were simultaneously ridiculous and unsympathetic, like scientology.

Does any normal person consider rationalwiki a reliable source?

Yes. Rationalwiki is high up (or used to) on the google search index. Most people that visit rationalwiki are directed from Google. Same deal with wikipedia. The average user doesn't know or care about any online drama.

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