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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25097 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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From "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle" by Scott Alexander:

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

Same phenomenon you see in r/PoliticalCompassMemes. In fact, "Seven Zillion Witches" was considered as one of the possible names for what would eventually become The Motte, though I can't find the thread right now.

The alternative explanation would be that HBD and PUA are correct, so any place which allows uncensored discussion of those topics will eventually convince people to believe in them, and believing in HBD and PUA is sufficient to qualify as alt-right.

The only problem with the PUAs are the absolute degeneracy of it all. They are half-right about a certain group of young materialistic women. A good chunk of the alt-right as it exists rejects the PUA community on grounds of degeneracy.

I'm referring more to the epistemic aspects of PUA than the instrumental ones. As long as you agree with the PUAs about female nature, you are off the reservation even if your response looks more like "make women property again" than "enjoy the decline".

The alternative explanation would be that HBD and PUA are correct, so any place which allows uncensored discussion of those topics will eventually convince people to believe in them, and believing in HBD and PUA is sufficient to qualify as alt-right.

No, the alternative explanation would be that progressives are less willing to put up with crimethink for the sake of a good discussion than others. ‘Any uncensored online discussion inevitably becomes far-right’ is not an accurate description; any uncensored online space becomes full of things that are generally considered offensive, and racial slurs are one of those things, which shapes the tenor of political discussions there but, you know, 4chan is still mostly porn. It’s just that porn drives the far right out less than racism drives the left out.

As far as the motte goes, we have people preaching very offensive things here. There’s the pedofascist guy, our resident neo-Nazi, and then the bevy of white nationalists and hardcore misogynists. This drives out progressives because they’re used to seeing such things censored; right wingers don’t seem to mind as much.

He gave you a fairly good softball pitch for this posts.

I wrote a short reply and deleted when I saw you did it better but it was well set-up to just link to Scott.

Yes, if you found your space on Free Speech you'll attract seven zillion witches. And if you ban witches on sight you won't.

But that post doesn't say that those are the only possible options, probably because slatestarcodex.com was a clear alternative where discourse across the political spectrum occurred all the time.

So yes, the fact that TheMotte became "alt-right" was entirely predictable, but no, it was not inevitable.

Discourse across the political spectrum given that the really contentious issues are not broached. Freedom to discuss only matters as far as you apply it to topics that make your blood boil and no, SSC did not have a solution for that.

But that post doesn't give that a the only possible options, probably because slatestarcodex.com was a clear alternative where discourse across the political spectrum occurred all the time.

And was then nuked from orbit, or at least Manhattan. Q.E.D.

QED what? Make sure your mods are anonymous?

If you're implying that you've demonstrated "it's impossible to have a healthy community with diverse viewpoints", then I disagree.

Making the mods anonymous doesn't work. SSC stayed together because the community -- both leftists and rightists, but especially leftists -- trusted Scott as moderator. So leftists flouncing out because there were too many witches (as has happened over on Data Secrets Lox) didn't happen. An anonymous moderator couldn't really achieve that.

Agree to disagree I guess. I don’t think there is a lack of trust in our mods.

I trust that they honestly wish the foundation would actually happen. I trust that they’re doing their best to apply the rules impartially.

I just disagree with them that the rules, as they are actually enforced, will achieve the foundation.

It didn’t get nuked, the NYT doxxed him and he got scared and pulled the plug. There’s an alternate universe where it’s still going in the original.

Perhaps the type of people that would want to host a healthy community with diverse viewpoints, keeping away crazy radicals, are also those for whom the prospect of getting named and shamed by the NYT is a serious deterrent?

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