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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4031 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I don't know what to tell you other than what I was recently telling @IGI-111.

I don't think my comment was all that sneering, insulting, or culture warry. At least no more so than what has already been established as the baseline for participation on TheMotte.org. The only difference is who's sacred cow is getting cooked.

Which actually brings me to something I've been meaning to ask. If a comment were reported as insulting but the community had marked it as "neutral" to "good" what are the odds that a moderator would even read it, much less assign the comment a warning or ban?

Sigh. You really gonna tell me I'm only (lightly) modding you because you insulted my sacred cow?

If a comment were reported as insulting but the community had marked it as "neutral" to "good" what are the odds that a moderator would even read it, much less assign the comment a warning or ban?

I don't know exactly how Zorba's system is going to work - it's still being tested and right now we still only mod based on what we see (in the mod queue or otherwise).

Sigh. You really gonna tell me I'm only (lightly) modding you because you insulted my sacred cow?

Yes and no. I'm not going to claim that what I did was not necessarily worthy of a warning. But I would suggest that reason that I'm getting this attention is that I'm sneering at different targets than most of the other users here and thus I am the nail that sticks out.

I don't know exactly how Zorba's system is going to work - it's still being tested and right now we still only mod based on what we see (in the mod queue or otherwise).

That's actually encouraging to hear, I know that Zorba has always hated moderating and was worried that the new feature would be used as an excuse to offload that burden.

The biggest group of passing sneers I see here is basically some variation of "woke bad" particularly feminists, anti-racists and trans activists. Childless female democrats who complain about cultural appropriation seems to fall in that sphere as well so I don't think you are as much of an outlier (in this respect at least) as you might think.

I'm not saying that there isn't any sneering at progressives to. I'm saying that sneering is already the norm and the reason my comments stick out is that I'm sneering at the wrong targets, IE people rationalists typically identify with.

the reason my comments stick out is that I'm sneering at the wrong targets, IE people rationalists typically identify with

Amazing. Every word of what you just said is wrong.

Your comments don't "stick out" particularly. You got reported because your sneer was -- a sneer. Other people sneering at other targets (including those that rationalists "identify with" and those they don't) have also been reported, and not infrequently, modded. You have not come to our special attention, and while you do have haters who spite-report most of what you post, you are not unique in that regard, and we haven't become stupid since moving off of reddit. You didn't get reported just because you sneered at the "wrong" target.

There are no "right" or "wrong" targets here. There are people who are obviously very tribal, so they think some targets are right and some are wrong, and will report accordingly, but again - we are not stupid. You didn't get modded just because you sneered at the "wrong" target (implying that if you had sneered at the "right" target, it would have been okay).

This place isn't particularly rationalist, and really, hasn't been for a very long time. There is still overlap - maybe we are still "rationalist-adjacent" - but if this place has a "tribe," it isn't rationalists. You didn't get reported or modded because you attacked the in-group.

"Childless female Democrats" is not a group that rationalists particularly identify with, to my knowledge (I am sure there are childless female Democrats in the rationalist community, but that's not the same thing), and they are definitely not a group that the Motte identifies with. (I wouldn't be confident that we have a single childless female Democrat poster.) So you weren't reported or modded because you attacked a group that anyone here identifies with.

You were reported, presumably, because you threw out a low effort sneer. You were modded because a mod (me) looked at it and say "Yup, that's a sneer and we don't want that kind of thing."

Get off your cross. You are not a brave iconoclast challenging the groupthink here - you're becoming just another culture warrior whose enemy tribe is very slightly different from the people who hate wokes, women, and Jews.

But rationalists don't appear to identify with child free female democrats who complain about cultural appropriation.

Thats the (generalizing here) "woke" demographic not the rationalist one. Who are mainly male and overwhelmingly tech oriented. And at least here 1) Rationalists are probably not the majority and 2) those who post here are even more unlikely to identify with the group you targeted, and indeed more likely to target them, themselves.

So I don't think that really passes muster as an explanation. If you were posting on "normie" reddit then you might have more of a point I think.

But I would suggest that reason that I'm getting this attention is that I'm sneering at different targets than most of the other users here and thus I am the nail that sticks out.

You're kidding, right? You think sneering at "childless female Democrats" puts you in a different category from the median Motteposter?

You’ve got to admit, out of the thousand versions of the post one might have predicted, one containing a segway into celebrating polish redneckism is genuinely unexpected. I for one enjoyed the counterpoint to dead internet theory.

You're kidding, right?

No I'm not. See my previous link. I'm saying that while sneering at at niggers and normies is the accepted norm here, sneering at democrats and academics is not. and to be clear, If I eat a ban for saying this I'm not going to be mad. I will be the first to acknowledge that I am not without sin. My comment just now may have been a bit culture warry, but again I would argue that is no more so than many other comments here that have been met with Mod approval.

You're not saying anything banworthy, I just think you're talking shit (since we're being blunt and all).

Plenty of sneers at "niggers and normies" have been modded. You should know better than to join the "any post the mods don't issue a warning for is one they agree with" bandwagon, but I guess you don't. This is disappointing.

Appealing to consensus isn't the right way to buttress your point, whether you go against it or with it. For my own part I don't see any such anti-normie consensus, speaking as a pro-normie myself.

sneering at democrats and academics is not [the accepted norm here].

Er. What? One of the highest voted comments ever on this site is this one, which is basically "look at the ridiculous thing this progressive academic did", let's all sneer at the people who enable such nonsense. The key point, though, was that the sneering was at a specific bad action by a member of that group.

If you had found a killjoy childless academic condemning the Czech and Polish appropriation of American redneck culture, and the condemnation was related to them being a childless killjoy, I think that would have made the comment a lot less jarring. As it was, I felt like I was looking at a comment that said "I don't like childless academics, and also look at this amazing video".

ETA: also TW's comment was in the CW thread

I don't disagree with your overall point, but I do take issue with that article being labeled as sneering. I presented an ongoing story while taking pains to avoid unnecessary potshots at the guy at the center of it. His behavior was bad in a way enabled by current culture, but by no means a pathology unique to progressive culture.

I emphasize this because I think it's worth distinguishing between sneering (overt mockery of opponents) and other sorts of criticism or negative coverage.

That's fair. That "sneering vs criticism" distinction was what I was trying to gesture at, but my wording could have been better.

If you had found a killjoy childless academic condemning the Czech and Polish appropriation of American redneck culture, I think that would have made the comment a lot less jarring. As it was, I felt like I was looking at a comment that said "I don't like childless academics, and also look at this amazing video".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_tramping

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_tramping_music

This "appropriation" of American culture (more precisely image of American culture from cowboy novels and movies) is more than 100 years old (yes, for real) and is integral part of Czech culture by now.

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramping

In the Czech Republic, the first tramps were senior scouts who did not like certain rules of this organization - they paid more attention to taking care of nature. This took place during the First World War , when the name tramps did not yet function, they were called wild scouts.

Tramps gradually discovered still wild areas, such as the southern area of Prague (mainly in the basin of the Vltava and Sazawa rivers ), later the Berounka basin and forests near the Brda River. Later, tramps could be found in every corner of former Czechoslovakia. However, it was in the basin of the Vltava and Sasau that the first settlements were established, modeled on those organized when settling the West .

The tramps showed special respect for nature, their camps left no trace of human interference in the landscape.

https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramping

The oldest known Czech settlement was founded around 1918 on the Vltava in a place called Svatojánské currents , today flooded by the waters of the Štěchovice dam reservoir . An initially nameless group of former Prague scouts renamed the place where they went on weekends to "Roaring Camp" after the short story by Bret Hart . Later (according to the settlement chronicle in 1919) the tramp settlement " Ztracená naděje " or "Ztracenka" was founded here - on the forest land of the Strahov Premonstratensians. [1] The settlers chose the name of the settlement after the silent movie cowboy The Valey of Lost Hope (1915, Valley of Lost Hope). The settlers also included the Tramp lyricist and composer Jarka Mottl .

The first tramps were usually people from poorer social strata, or the unemployed for whom this way of life was socially acceptable. Later, when the movement became popular in the wider strata of Czech society, young people from the middle classes, fashionably even from the upper social classes, the so-called Astrakhans, joined the tramps.

City trippers with cars and fancy equipment were derisively called " thugs " or "greasers" - sometimes leaving behind greasy papers and other messes. In contrast, true trampers had respect for nature, there was no trace of their camping, they cleaned up after themselves.

All regimes in history hated this movement - pre war Czechoslovakia as obscene and communist, Nazis as American and Jewish, Communists as American and capitalist. If "childless liberal academics" object to it, they are not alone.

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