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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   5753 thread views

Quality Contributions Report for February 2023

This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).

As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.

These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful. Here we go:

Quality Contributions to the Motte

@Rov_Scam:

@wlxd:

Contributions for the week of January 30, 2023

@OracleOutlook:

@MathWizard:

Rowliphobia

@FarNearEverywhere:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

Identity Politics

@faceh:

Contributions for the week of February 6, 2023

@TransgenicSolution:

@Walterodim:

@Ecgtheow:

@Dean:

Who Teaches the Teachers?

@gog:

@Lewyn:

Identity Politics

@ymeskhout:

@RandomRanger:

@100ProofTollBooth:

@ChestertonsMeme:

Contributions for the week of February 13, 2023

@whatihear:

@ActuallyATleilaxuGhola:

@Dean:

@FiveHourMarathon:

Babies Everywhere

@wlxd:

@SSCReader:

Identity Politics

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@ThisIsSin:

Contributions for the week of February 20, 2023

@Rov_Scam:

@urquan:

@ThisIsSin:

Battle of the Sexes

@Ecgtheow:

@FiveHourMarathon:

Battle of the Genders

@hanikrummihundursvin:

@Amadan:

@Harlequin5942:

@RococoBasilica:

Identity Politics

@Hoffmeister25:

@HlynkaCG:

@hooser:

@FCfromSSC:

@FiveHourMarathon:

Contributions for the week of February 27, 2023

@TheDag:

@DaseindustriesLtd:

@dovetailing:

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@DaseindustriesLtd:

  • "Truly, the day when we have to portray moneylenders as a whole as generous folk just to not offend groups which have historically been overrepresented in this line of work (and still are, just less so) will be a dark one."

But on the other hand. The bigger issue here, the one that leads to such false alarms, is that Rowling's world, like all classical fantasy/sci-fi worlds and especially ones informed by British mythology, is biodeterminist. It's not just exaggeration of class differences; Rowling herself may be staunchly liberal but her intuitions are... quaint, and her commitment to not recognizing trans women as women is of the same intuitive root.

I expected see a link here to her friendly relationship with Stuart J. Ritchie, author of Intelligence: All That Matters.

Maybe I’m just primed by the shitshow in this week’s thread, but I find the Motte’s taste in sexual politics abysmal. It’s like a license to throw epistemic hygiene to the wind.

Gender politics, on the other hand, go pretty well. @ThisIsSin has really given me a lot to think about; I’m surprised I missed that the first time around.

I actually agree. I am rather amused (and slightly embarassed) that it is my anti-feminist rants I collect AAQCs for.

It’s like a license to throw epistemic hygiene to the wind.

Probably because it hits too close to home.

But then again, the reason this does feel slightly discomforting is because we are primed to be especially sensitive towards discussions that might be insulting to women.

But then again, the reason this does feel slightly discomforting is because we are primed to be especially sensitive towards discussions that might be insulting to women.

We had top level comment a few months ago discussing (arguing) that men are degenerate by default. While there was some disagreement and pushback (including from myself), no one really batted an eye at the topic, and is seen as a completely legitimate topic to discuss with no handholding. In stark contrast, any discussion that involves criticism of women and their behaviour, including this week's, is viewed with suspicion by default and is frequently demanded to have higher standard both in quality and decorum (isolated demand for rigor). Even in the Motte we can't escape it. And for what it's worth, I think the quality of discussion on this week's women/gender politics topic was noticeably higher than the one about men being degenerate, though I'm happy to admit I might be biased in this regard.

I think this is somewhat because when we (men, mostly) talk about men, we're analyzing ourselves, with some degree of introspection and self-awareness. Any man can at least sympathize with the "all men are degenerate" argument, even if one doesn't agree with it.

Whereas the discussions that typically come up about women range from, well, kind of uncharitable to "Why do we even let these succubi have rights anyway?"

That sort of forces people to up their game since they correctly perceive that going full Dave Sim requires expressing yourself very precisely to avoid getting modded. (Yes, this is by design, and does not only apply to women, people just notice it most often when applied to the groups that are most often the target of grievances here.)

I am rather amused (and slightly embarassed) that it is my anti-feminist rants I collect AAQCs for

I know that pain. (And whoever nominated the JKR one: did you care about the

«moneylender bad» aspect, versus the «Rowling's Wizarding world inherently runs on a magical equivalent of racial biodeterminism, which makes the anti-Rowling faction not-reasonably suspect her of thoughtcrimes relevant to the real world» argument I was making?)

Having one make it in in the last minute is weird too.

which makes the anti-Rowling faction not-reasonably suspect her of thoughtcrimes

Because that's not the rationale behind it all. Let me go full-on bitch here; the latest yowling about Rowling was the whole "if you buy this game, if you play this game, if you even review this game, you YES YOU PERSONALLY are contributing money to the literal trans genocide where she literally wants to build torture conversion camps!!!!"

Since that went over like a lead balloon with anyone even semi-normal because it was too fucking batshit insane, they then shifted gears to "how can you be unaware of the RACISM? ANTI-SEMITISM? Oh yeah and we might sometimes mention the slavery angle" campaign, hence unintentional gems of hilarity like the ANTI-SEMITIC CHEESE.

The problem is, there are enough boot-lickers out there who are firmly planting their cowardly backsides on the bandwagon and are all "I continue to sternly refuse to sit upon the curate's knee!" about the game, to the extent of "this is my website and I'm going to delete any comments that say 'hey maybe she's not a trans genocider?', so beware" knuckling under.

I haven't played the game, I'm not going to play the game, and I'm grimly amused that the kind of people wetting themselves with joy back in the day over Dumbledore gay, Hermione black are now 'away with the trans genocider!' because this is the new cause to signal about, and people like Rowling didn't get the memo and get with the plan. If they honestly had principles about biodeterminism etc. I could respect that. They have no principles that don't fade away like the morning dew to be replaced by a new set, if that is what the baying mob determines.

Since that went over like a lead balloon with anyone even semi-normal because it was too fucking batshit insane, they then shifted gears to "how can you be unaware of the RACISM? ANTI-SEMITISM? Oh yeah and we might sometimes mention the slavery angle" campaign, hence unintentional gems of hilarity like the ANTI-SEMITIC CHEESE.

I think you make a common mistake I see a lot here, the unstated assumption that woke activists are "getting memos,"shifting gears" - i.e., your typical conspiratorial thinking that assumes a hierarchy with someone planning and orchestrating things.

While I am sure there are people who actually sit down and consciously plot out how to "get" Rowling and other enemies, in the "that didn't work, let's try something else" model you are describing, I think for the most part it's all just free-floating outrage and what sticks is repeated, what doesn't gets forgotten.

The Hogwarts Legacy game is not the first time Rowling has been accused of using goblins as anti-Semitic allegories. Rowling had haters even before she came out as a "TERF." SJWs were on her case way back before the series even ended for her various infelicities regarding gender roles, racial archetypes, neoliberalism, Cho Changing, etc. And don't get me started on the Snape fangirls (or why I know more than any middle-aged man should about Snape fangirls) who think Rowling done their sweet prince wrong and also that he was a victim of sexual assault. And the whole "untrustworthy, greedy little bankers who live in their own clannish society hmm who does this remind you of?" definitely came up back then, a lot.

I don't think the anti-Rowling protesters have enough organization or savvy to do A/B testing to determine which accusations work best. (Indeed, I have seen trans activists complaining "no one cares about trans genocide, people only got upset when it became about Jews.") I think they just throw whatever they've got.

I think you make a common mistake I see a lot here, the unstated assumption that woke activists are "getting memos,"shifting gears" - i.e., your typical conspiratorial thinking that assumes a hierarchy with someone planning and orchestrating things.

While I am sure there are people who actually sit down and consciously plot out how to "get" Rowling and other enemies, in the "that didn't work, let's try something else" model you are describing, I think for the most part it's all just free-floating outrage and what sticks is repeated, what doesn't gets forgotten.

What might help us here is an earnest look at powerology (lol*). Particularly, this Yarvin piece:

Is there a coordinated attack on Facebook? Yes: the leakage pond is surrounded by a perfect circle of palm trees—anything but a random pattern. No: the trees need no tree-general to order them where to grow.

Facebook is indeed surrounded by enemies, but they are enemies of its own creation. Its business model creates a gigantic stash of power with no real way to defend it. It was keeping big bags of In-n-Out Burgers—animal style—in its tent in bear country. Now the bears are in the tent.

(...)

What we see here is a case of spontaneous coordination. The palms were not ordered to grow around the leakage pond; the bears were not invited to a bear party. When we try to understand what happened, we must start from two axioms: that there is order here, and that there is no center to the order.

The fact that Facebook could be bullied made journalists want to bully Facebook. It literally evolved their perspectives toward hating on Facebook, because Facebook’s enormous power leak emitted a pheromone that made all the haters in the world hard. Journalists, like political pornographers, had no choice but to service these super-needy readers: if one journalist didn’t, the next five would.

What we see here is a form of ideological coordination that, oligarchically, gets the same result as monarchical coordination, without any coordinating center. No one ordered all these journalists to start thinking Facebook is bad. Maybe Facebook is bad; but if it wasn’t, the incentive structures of journalism would make it look bad anyway.

The bully does not create the victim—the victim creates the bully. Of course, plenty of victims genuinely deserve to be bullied. But deserving is not an incentive.

*I swear, one of these days we're gonna meme ourselves into vindicating JB.

StopHateForProfit was only spontaneous in Yarvinverse. There's a lot of posts about it back on the sub.

We can argue about the meaning of the word spontaneous, but these are essentially culture war mercenary companies that exist because there is money and prestige to be made. Yarvin's supply-and-demand model is much more parsimonious than the alternatives presuming some kind of conspiracy.

Supply-and-demand is nice but the observation of hierarchical organizations that can create and channel demand should temper our expectations for its predictive power. The word «mercenary» is ambiguous too: mercenary attitude is just opportunism, but mercenaries have clients, don't they? There are many mercenary characters in Wagner; do you suppose those convicts would have had a particular effect on the war without Putin's bidding and Prigozhin's command? And likewise, there was a de facto client in the actual, concrete case of journalists and advertisers bullying Facebook. Yarvin says shit like:

The more Facebook censors, the clearer it becomes that Facebook is an accessory to murder and profits routinely from hate. Corporations are used to dealing with _rational_powers like the state, for which compliance decreases pressure. They are not at all used to dealing with the psycho type of power, for which compliance increases pressure—like Tony Soprano busting out a sporting-goods store.

So the victim creates the bully. The fact that Facebook can be bullied makes people—both journalists and their readers—_want_ to bully Facebook. Facebook’s _power leak_produces a kind of oasis of power—water in the desert. The water causes the palm trees; the palm trees don’t cause the water.

What we see here is a case of spontaneous coordination. The palms were not ordered to grow around the leakage pond; the bears were not invited to a bear party. When we try to understand what happened, we must start from two axioms: that there is order here, and that there is no center to the order.

Okay. but what I've quoted back then shows that specifics of the Hate-for-Profit routine is hard to understand with the no-center axiom::

To be clear, Mr. Zuckerberg has not yet approached the type of meaningful action that we want to see. The issue is not that Facebook just lags competitors in working systemically to address hate and bigotry on their platform. To use a favorite term of Facebook’s leadership, Facebook’s attitude towards seriously addressing how their algorithms push hate, violent conspiracy theories, and disinformation is transparently “inauthentic.” Mr. Zuckerberg treats meetings and dialogue as outcomes. He puts more effort into obfuscation, lobbying, and distribution of misleading talking points than seriously addressing the deadly consequences of his choice to profit from hate. In the words of one of their own engineers who resigned this month over leadership’s unwillingness to take action on problematic content, “Facebook is hurting people at scale.” Society cannot afford the Facebook status quo. [...]

This movement will not go away until Facebook makes the reasonable changes that society wants. The ad pause in July was not a full campaign – it was a warning shot across Facebook’s bow. This movement only will get bigger and broader until Facebook takes the common-sense steps necessary to mitigate the damage it causes. And it has spurred additional constituencies who also are demanding change. We saw this demonstrated in full force yesterday in Congress where legislators forced Mark Zuckerberg to testify and held him accountable for Facebook’s failures. And we expect more constituencies will emerge in the coming weeks as this movement gains even more momentum.

Now, we know that change will not happen overnight, and we remain willing to engage with Facebook when they are prepared to commit to a public timeframe and substantive action relative to our very straightforward demands.

Mark Zuckerberg, the ball is in your court.

This is literally a racket with clear finite conditions and demands, coordinated by a high-profile activist group, with a specific man, called Jonathan Greenblatt, calling the shots, as they say. They have invested a lot of effort into making it appear as some decentralized grassroots movement they have merely volunteered to champion and which would would have meaningfully existed regardless, but this is just a practical expression of what Yarvin talks about here:

The thought of studying itself is inherently foreign to power. Power does not want to know itself. The most powerful powers do not even think of their power as power. If power does know itself, it keeps that knowledge to itself; but mostly, it really does believe its own official myths. The real O’Brien is a rare figure.

Power is indeed decentralized and cognitively compartmentalized in many interesting and important ways. But if we allow speculations on Yarvin's level, it is perfectly parsimonious to not stop here and say he's also a facet of the purported Cathedral: by equivocating and talking in the abstract about concrete clashes, distorting their timelines and incentives, peddling warped axioms and very articulately persuading potential enemies of the power to not look at its crucial high-agency nodes, he maintains his good standing with other... elves.

But I'm no hobbit. I hail from Mordor.

More comments

You mistake me. I don't think there's any co-ordination at all, that's what is so comical. Person A starts a campaign, it gets picked up by their social media followers and spread around, like-minded others think it's a great idea and they all start copying each other (again, being a bitch, because the excessively online activist types love presenting themselves as tragically persecuted victims, and the idea of Rowling and the game being concerted trans genocide allows them to go full-on dying swan in their tweets etc.)

That didn't work, as pre-orders for the game, Twitch streaming (and that was a whole other kerfuffle) and reviews continued. So somebody decided they'd try the "goblin slavery = racism and pro-slavery" bit (didn't seem to get off the ground) and then the "goblins = Jewish stereotypes, anti-Semitism" angle, and that got passed around too. As I said, I've seen what could be copy-n-paste arguments all over the place repeating the same talking points. I don't think this was co-ordinated, I think it was the usual parroting of talking points that you get all too often, especially in closed communities (I see it all too often in fandom - how something becomes 'fanon' and gets treated as Gospel from then on).

So a bunch of Persons of Self-Importance did the dying swan bit about "literal genocide!!!!", their followers, hangers-on, and people who trip over themselves to be allies copied it and passed it around, they hoped it would become a campaign (e.g. reviews on Steam all downvoting the game) but it failed miserably. No co-ordinated action, no conspiracy, just an echo chamber. And occasional unintended hilarity and gems like the anti-semitic cheese.

You're generally right, you're also neglecting the part where she was actually the proto-woke's darling for a brief period early on. Does no one remember the whole 'Dumbledore is gay' and 'Hermione is a black girl' meme controversies? After all, Rowling (like all TERFs, if we want to call her that) is a woke heretic, not a heathen.

I remember that, and a lot of woke (it was "SJW" back then) activists flamed her for it because they accused her (with some justification) of trying to score SJ points with ex post facto declarations that she wouldn't write into the books.

I remember that the whole "Dumbledore is gay" thing was a subject of jokes and eyerolling for Rowling suddenly announcing it and it not showing up in the (original) books in any way.

As far as I know, far left types have never particularly liked Rowling, who has always been a liberal centrist Blairite, as far as politics go, though now with the "TERF" (she's never been an actual TERF, in the sense of being a radical feminist) stuff consuming most other things. "Harry grew up to be a cop" was also a meme even before the TERF wars.

Having one make it in in the last minute is weird too.

Most AAQC nominations happen within the first 24 hours or so after someone posts. Particularly good ones have a longer tail than that, but all the comments listed from this week's CW thread had multiple nominations already.

@naraburns

In the interest of reflecting position better, may I request a re-titling of the link from

...thoroughly doubts that the US wrecked the Nord Stream Pipeline.

To

...thoroughly doubts the Seymour Hersh article claiming that the US wrecked the Nord Stream Pipeline

?

My position for some time that I consider the US among the potential candidates. I do not find Seymour Hersh's claims credible evidence for reasons raised, but it doesn't change the position that I find all the regional actors as credible culprits between motive and capability.

Separately, I'll just add a note that an additional basis of doubt for the Hersh account only now available with a few weeks of retrospect is a lack of corroborating findings driven by the claimed reveal.

When new-and-true leak reports come out, it generally drives follow-on inquiries and reporting by interested/motivated parties who were not previously aware of the revealed information, and in the process validating the claims made in the reveal. Even when the official coverup is maintained, other motivated actors (activists, independent investigators, external government interests) are cued into where to look, and have access to publication channels where the new information is publicized and signal-boosted beyond the influence of the conspiracy. The nature of unraveling a conspiracy is that it unravels it becomes easier to unravel further, as more threads are identified to be pulled upon. With the numerous threads in the Hersh thesis- from the Norwegian complicity, the potential witnesses during the NATO exercise, regional airspace monitoring for the command detonation flgiht, or even Hersh's alleged source providing follow-on information- there should be things that interested parties would find, and there are plenty of people interested in validating Hersh's claims that the US was to blame.

Instead of generating substantiating reporting, however, the dissident-west reporting cycle never really moved past the phase of reporting on Hersh's story. The expected sort of signal boosting occurred, and Hersh attempted a media tour to try and keep visiblity alive and well, and the expected media ecosystem of pushback against pushback occurred with people decrying a coverup, but none of Hersh's supporting media ecosystem found or developed any meaningful new reporting. There were no new reporting or signal boosting of Norwegian media identifying potential Norwegian acting agencies / organizations in the conspiracy, no new interviews by Seymour's alleged source to any other media actor to validate his existence, not even counter-rebuttals to things like the aircraft discrepency issues that were identified in in the initial pushback. Rather than identify and signal boost the sort of reporting that might have justified further reporting, even the pro-Hersh media ecosystem has basically moved on rather than any sort of drip-drip-drip method of new reveals and expansions. This would be bad in and of itself, but is critical given that the immediate counter-Hershe claims regarding things like aircraft flight claims should- but haven't- been debunked themselves by identifying/validating Hersh's claims on the command-detonation flight timeline. This functionally left the media-cycle on expanding the story ending with the rebuttal, with weaker counter-rebuttals such as 'well, the data could be falsified' being utterly non-verifiable and requiring a buy-in to the conspiracy. As is, the media cycle has devolved into just variations of repeating the same initial claims- maybe with the addition of 'this is being suppressed!'- but without actually expanding it.

A conspiratorially-minded sort might point to this as proof of the effectiveness of the conspiracy, that records have been altered and dissident reporting repressed, but this is also the sort of media dynamic we'd expect with a dud story. Given the lack of any supporting follow-on reporting on the key Norwegian connections, including a lack of substantiating reporting to signal-boost to defend against the OSINT claims of the claimed flights not matching up, I wouldn't expect anything significant in the future either.

Done!

Thank ye

Surprised, not to mention startled, as I am to be nominated, I am both flattered and concerned. Thank you, but are you sure you won't regret this later? Probably when I pick up yet another mod reprimand, as seems to happen soon after I get compliments? 😁

Huge thank you to whoever recommended my post! (And a day before the deadline too.)

As someone who has always aspired to write but never really followed through until this site came about, it gives me immense satisfaction to get positive feedback here, and also refills my motivation to keep writing. I have to say it feels like I've been searching for this type of community for years without knowing exactly what I was looking for, and I'm surprised to still be so excited and grateful I get a chance to participate.

We may be a den of witches with our own quirks and repeated topics, lack of overall cohesion, or whatever, but I have to say I truly think the Motte has improved my own beliefs quite a bit, and helps me gauge the quality of my writing. Compared to the quality of discourse on the rest of the internet, and increasingly in other rationalist spheres, I have to say this site feels like an oasis in a scorching desert.

Cheers to us friends.

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