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You have seen reddit meta sub threads where they talk about strategies for taking over communities and imposing censorship. You've seen literal government and NGO sponsored influencer campaigns complete with bot account boosting. In the last six months you've seen the most manufactured consensus enforcement machine ever created in the Harris campaign.
I'm asking you, do you honestly think that the correct way to respond to these is arguing over the definition of "brat" and whether Kamela fits it? Or is the only appropriate response to note and analyze the propaganda campaign for what it is?
At least when I signed up for it, this forum was not for developing and executing an efficient counterstrategy to the Kamala campaign, but for being able to discuss the culture war with people from all sides involved without having to deal with the sort of brainless dunking and bingo-board automatisms that define Twitter, Reddit and all the other political forums. Your post is not conducive to this: we already very nearly have a right-wing monoculture, and I doubt that any stray left-winger will be particularly encouraged to stay and contributed when they see a highly-upvoted post that describes their friends and allies on Twitter as inhuman automata. They would probably think of those Twitter users described as being the ones who are actually fighting off hordes of inhuman bots, and their canned responses as the only way those allies of theirs are managing to keep the upper hand over an onslaught of repetitive astroturfed narrative attacks.
If you really think the Twitter posters you are describing are literally bots, then you are frankly out of touch with reality. If you think they are not literally bots but it is strategically correct to treat them as such, then you are not noting and analyzing the propaganda campaign but fighting it.
I wouldn't call ourselves "a right-wing monoculture"; we have everything from colorblind gender-neutral 90s liberals, to centrists who just want to grill, to autistic libertarians, to God-'n-guns conservatives, to throne and altar reactionaries. The only thing we are really missing is the far left, either economic (communism) or social (wokeness).
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Do you not think that fighting against propaganda campaigns is helpful? One of the founding events of the SSC community was Scott countering the "men are more likely to be struck by a meteor than falsely accused of rape" propaganda campaign from our old friend Charles Clymer. (Who in his defense was never falsely accused of rape lol)
Fighting propaganda campaigns to keep their power outside your walled garden of discussion has always been a fundamental goal of the community.
I don't see any evidence that that propaganda campaign ever encroached in this particular walled garden. A much more salient founding event was when Scott talked about toxoplasma, and how "countering" a political meme actually makes you a vector for the very same meme - that's why to date, we have rules on paper about discussing the culture war and not waging it. If you prefer to take cues from the other side, Moldbug was on to a related thing when he talked about power leakage. The moment your forum/institution/whatever becomes a political fighting force of any import, it also becomes an asset worth capturing. Few factions would care to encroach on a forum that autistically discusses current events while prohibiting its members from openly taking sides or showing emotion, but once this forum actually starts producing innovations in fighting against one side or the other, this calculus surely changes.
The Harris one sure did.
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