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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   27776 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Why are there no liberals to be found here? Scott Alexander himself appears to be one, and I’m assuming much of his readership would be too

They have many better echo chambers to reside at.

A lot of us are liberals, for certain values of "liberal." But we have long since drifted away from being "Scott Alexander's readers." We're a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off, at this point, with all the filtering that implies.

The SSC diaspora has fractured into a number of different communities with different leans - the ACX discord leans left iirc, we lean right, etc

The "there is no such thing as antifa" "actually I support antifa and their goals" routine eventually got old, and once the sub moved to an independent site there was no value to be had in colonizing a mainstream discussion space. The only draw now is discussion with people who disagree with you, which members of the previous leftist user group have said does not motivate them (quotes available on request, I take a lot of screenshots).

I just looked at all the left wing accounts that used to post on the motte. If they were still here we would be arguing over whether or not Israel is carrying out false flag attacks to end hostage trades so that people don't find out how kindly Hamas treated the hostages. There would be fights to justify Ireland's new ban criminalizing possession of material that might incite racial hatred. There would be, uh, lots of posts about how "right wing people fuck toasters" and every member of Trump's family should be executed? That last one might be an outlier, but theschism is welcome to it regardless.
Are we interested in that? I'm sick and tired of it personally, because most of the engagement on reddit was bad faith arguments and outright trolling by people who enjoyed torturing their opponents with the backing of reddit admins.

What a fascinating history. Thanks for recounting.

quotes available on request, I take a lot of screenshots

I am indeed interested in seeing that for myself.

The only draw now is discussion with people who disagree with you, which members of the previous leftist user group have said does not motivate them

Also, I don’t know how to phrase this in a less derogatory way… but why are leftists like this?

Power.

Intellectual flexibility is only beneficial if your interest group is not currently running things.

This is why the actual Marxists still have debates even with nationalists, why modern day progressives lost the ability to think from the point of view of their adversary, and why the moral majority was completely blindsided despite their ostensible control over culture.

Goliath is a giant, clad in armor and wielding the bigger stick. But his strength loses him the humility necessary to even understand the nature of David.

There's a sort of sliding scale among the SSC diaspora; DSL is way more to the right of this place; this place is fairly right-tolerant; ACX is in the middle trending centre-left, SSC remnant is more liberal/lefty, and TheSchism is for the liberals/lefties as a safe space for those who felt harassed off here/constantly being dog-piled.

The above is by no means authoritative or dispositive, nor intended to be taken as such.

Is DSL really way more to the right of this place? That wasn't my impression

What is DSL in this context?

http://datasecretslox.com, a forum with various old ssc comments posters

On some things it's definitely more conservative (I think there are a lot of economic conservatives and political conservatives both there and on here, but that's not necessarily the same thing as socially conservative).

Perhaps they do not like interacting with people whose opinions get them banned on large Western websites.

This seems more like a sneer than a contribution. Themotte's opinions, other than the few white nationalists, don't get you banned on most large Western websites, e.g. even pre-Musk most of the HBD bloggers had unsuspended twitter accounts.

There's a wide spectrum of people banned on various websites.

There's Alex Jones who is not antisemitic and not really a WN as far as I know.

There are elections / democracy skeptics.

There are antivaxxers who are not necessarily WNs (Alex Berenson is a zionist judging from his substack).

There are anti-feminists like James Damore.

There are TERFs.

There are gamergaters.

There are people who mock the obese.

There are anti-homosexuality people.

There are people who follow the same trails of thought as a Chappelle and who are not necessarily WN (Kanye West excluded perhaps?).

There is overlap, but a lot of these people are not WNs and most of the time they do not get banned for WN-related discussions.

You get banned on most political subreddits for bog standard conservative thought. I was banned from /r/science for asking an AMA poster whether IQ could explain the differences in his group outcomes...

yeah i agree that's bad, but that's not the central example of conservative thought. there are plenty of places 100x larger than us where conservatives and liberals debate, so op's reason isn't correct

Where do you think that is?

the specific thing i was thinking of was big politics discord servers. Twitter technically qualifies I think, there are a lot of "debates" in the comments of big posts.

Elon's Twitter still four routinely bans gimmick meme accounts for joking about the wrong people, and Discord is censorious as hell.

elontwitter bans leftist gimmick accounts for dumb reasons too? Pre-elon twitter definitely banned rightists more, but it's getting a lot closer recently. Discord doesn't censor conservatives at all afaik? As opposed to the far-right who they do a bit

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Ill admit I know basically nothing about discord outside of gaming with it. In those getting banned for being to the right is super common.

I did a few of those political compass type quizzes recently and turns out I'm a filthy centrist with opinions in the mushy middle 😁

And yeah, that seems to now be a term of insult, so probably I would get banned on large Western websites for that.

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