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Sir_Pings_a_Lot  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   3744 thread views

Am I an acceptable poster for theMotte.org?

Hi, I'm a long time reader of Slate Star Codex and I used to post on the Reddit forum until I got banned. There are a few reasons that I believe I got banned.

  1. Uncharitably claiming that Leftist censorship was a threat to the rationalist community

  2. Advocating for violence

  3. Not being kind

I understand why all of these things could have been a problem on the Reddit community, but I would like to know if they're still going to be a problem here, since I don't want to invest a lot of time creating a profile and having good-faith discussions with people if I'm only going to be banned again. Here are the reasons that I think these three issues shouldn't be a problem anymore.

  1. I was right, and everybody who disagreed with me was wrong. The fact that the community had to move here proves it. I'm not expecting an apology but I think that time has proven me correct on that score.

  2. Violence is a completely justifiable response to tyranny. While calls to violence may be against Reddit rules (and the community was right to ban me from Reddit because my rhetoric could have caused problems for the mods) there are no such rules here. In fact, rdrama (which helped set up this offsite community, and whom you should all be grateful to) actively encourages calls to violence. If a rational and logical case can be made for violence then I think there is no good reason not to hear that case out. If you're forced to censor people you disagree with because you're unable to make a stronger case for pacifism over violence in the open marketplace of ideas, then you should question whether your pacifism is actually a worthwhile philosophy.

  3. Kindness and truth are different terminal values. If you optimize for kindness then it is self-evident that you will have to sacrifice truth at some point. Obviously the Reddit community has chosen kindness as its terminal value, but I'm hoping that this offsite community is enlightened enough to choose truth.

I'm linking to a few articles from my Substack here so you have a few examples of my style of writing and can make a better judgement about whether I would be a good fit for the offsite community. I'm also on rdrama where my username is sirpingsalot. If you think I'm not a good fit for the offsite either, then no hard feelings - I'm happy to take my ideas to more sympathetic communities instead. I just don't want to put in the effort of investing time and energy here if I'm only going to get banned again for the same reasons.

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I find online calls to violence not morally abhorrent, but uninteresting and discrediting as an online argument. It's perfectly possible that I'm the one and only terminally online pussy who wandered into a forum full of hardened experts in gorilla warfare. But I highly suspect that this isn't true. Claiming in a pseudonymous online forum to be a psychopath ready to murder your way to the top isn't really productive.

If you want to suggest that war is good, that violence is good, that revolution is necessary fine. But don't go around claiming you're going to do it, or that you're going to win, because you're not.

I'm gonna be that guy and suggest you mean "guerilla" warfare

It's a deliberate reference to the Navy Seal copypasta. But in a sense, you are correct.

Well now I feel uncool for only being sort of aware of the Navy Seal copypasta, at least not enough to catch the reference first time round. Here, have this bit of internet humor I am familiar with

Hey now, online pussies shoot up places all the time

Yeah, but online pussies outside of the USA generally don't have guns.

Do they form and lead organized movements or do they /self with ideological garnishes?

But don't go around claiming you're going to do it, or that you're going to win, because you're not.

I'm not going to do that, I'm going to spread infohazards to dangerous people and see what happens until I get what I want. Ideas are more powerful than individuals and I can achieve much more by working through others than I ever could on my own

An alternative way to frame this is that spreading infohazards is good for people near the bottom of society but bad for those near the top, since higher societal instability is like heating up a bubbling cauldron of soup - the increased volatility makes it more likely that ingredients at the bottom will bubble up to the top.

Watch "Mr. Robot" TV show. a) it's great; b) shows things going the other way around than you expect, so you might notice sth you haven't considered.

Then by your own metrics, the best thing someone could do is shoot you in the head, since you are a self-declared sociopath who has no scruples about destroying society since it won't give you what you believe you deserve.

Do you see why this is not a good model for running a society, or do you really think "Yeah, sure, shoot the people I don't like in the head, works for me!"

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