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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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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.

Yarvin would probably reply that if Greenblatt would disappear tomorrow, somebody else would just take his place. In fact, he does say exactly that:

The fact is that even if the Times and its hereditary absolute dynasty just vanished—perhaps disappearing down some kind of ginormous Midtown suckhole—the press would be the press. And if all these media companies were owned by Aryans so Aryan they made Max von Sydow look like Danny deVito—the press would be the press.

And I guess you could say that for the enemies of what Yarvin calls the Cathedral, it might make sense to focus on a specific mercenary as to raise the perceived costs of sword-selling. That might work. Or it might not - after all, you can call the villification of Schwab a lot of things, but effective probably isn't one of them. Soros becoming the Right's boogeyman might be a better example, but only because someone like Orban managed to grasp actual power. Him going after Soros is an outcome of him having won political battles, not the other way around.

Of course, your approach is much more actionable and less fatalist than Yarvin's powergazing, I give you that.

He surely would. Sorry, was a bit distracted, see edit:

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 have meaningfully existed regardless, but this is just a practical expression of what Yarvin talks about here:

Bluntly, I do not believe that leaders, coordinators, instigators, Machiavellians do not matter and do not determine how the vague popular sentiment and antagonism swells and turns. In some galaxy-brained Civilizational Big Picture it may be different, but on the timescale of real politics, at least, wins and losses are largely determined by the quality of commanding corps and their ability to not be handicapped, distracted and dispersed.

To think otherwise is supremely democratic, ironically. Yarvin consistently downplays the relevance of specific decisionmakers, unusual capabilities and intelligence (see his rhetoric on AGI). Well, I've already explained how I interpret this impulse.

Or it might not - after all, you can call the villification of Schwab a lot of things, but effective probably isn't one of them

To the extent that Schwab is not a figurehead, it could be effective. I just don't think Schwab is who he is alleged to be by right-wing conspiracy nuts. Greenblatt's authority over his organization is not a conspiracy theory but a fact of life, a fact that upsets even Jews who feel he's too focused on culture war bullshit they didn't subscribe to, compare him negatively to Abe Foxman, and it is plausible that him being replaced by a straightforward Bibi-style Zionist, as they'd prefer, would change matters for the better (or for the worse). Schwab, like @2rafa says, is for the most part just an old man, a normie European economist who likes to run conferences – he does not even peddle ideas right wingers attribute to him, nor does he have the power to compel others to act on his actual views. Actually the degree of Schwab demonization should be suspicious in itself – it's almost like he's a lightning rod to distract enemies of the forming political consensus (which is, incidentally, not «globalist» any more) from its high-agency advocates. See the previous point.

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