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It has been quite the journey over the last decade seeing this general space, in its various homes, drift from being a place for a variety of dissenters, idle imaginers, original thinkers, and malcontents to being just another space for Trumpers to get together and gripe about everyone but themselves.
Be the change you want to see: post relevant non-Trump content. Those griping Trumpers can't stop you.
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Unfortunate, because while this place rarely bans people and to my knowledge has never does it on the basis of their ideology, most online leftist spaces will ban you for having dissenting opinion (or even centrist opinion, hence that meme about how the centrists of the past are now considered far rightists). That leaves very little space on the internet for debate and discourse between the left and the right.
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Imagine what the forum would look like if every progressive who flamed out and tearfully quit after losing an argument didn't do that.
Well that is a pretty uncharitable way to put things. I'm to the right of most of my social circle but I'm to the left of whatever this place is turning into. People just get sick of getting downvoted and unable to post in real time, eventually they say something rude and get banned or they say "fuck it" and leave.
When the conversation turns to being worried about trump picking his VP based on possible assassination, putting guns in holes as a generational family gun stash in your back yard, "powers that be" conspiring to eliminate people like you, heavily downvoting someone pointing out having sex with blackout drunk people is probably wrong, being afraid to leave your red state for fear of being locked up for defending yourself, practicing religion harder being the only answer to societal ills, women only being truly happy barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen....I mean the parody starts to write itself at some point.
The votes don't matter at all. They should let you toggle being able to see votes in order to prevent the emotional distress some apparently get.
But they do matter. Negative "karma" slaps a cooldown on your ability to post.
On reddit yes. And auto-collapses your comment. And puts it at the bottom of the thread.
But I thought we didn't have all that around here.
@Amadan am I correct to think the worst features of reddit karma are missing here? It is just a number at the Motte.
afaik, the only effect of getting consistently downvoted here is that the poster will keep winding up in the new user filter, which means we mods have to manually approve their posts. This happened to @guesswho, despite his having been a regular poster for months, and now it's happening to @AhhhTheFrench.
Could you not just manipulate vote totals so they go +20 when they fall too far below 0.
Maybe. @ZorbaTHut handles feature requests.
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Can you defend how praciticing religion harder isn’t a solution to most societal ills?
Well it is make believe to start. How would you react to being asked why the 3 little pigs were a not solution to societal ills?
Also the countries that have tried that are all total shitholes. Been to a theocracy lately? Not great.
And the Deep South sucks ass. Alcoholism, teen pregnancy…
Correlation isn’t causation.
I'd prefer teen pregnancy to single and childless at 40 if those are the only two choices.
They aren't.
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Deleted post, what happened here?
Oh. Don’t worry about it.
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Anyone who's been around long enough could name names. "I lost an argument about HBD and the mods won't ban anyone for it, time to make a dramatic post about how everyone is Nazis and I quit" was a meme for quite a while in the Reddit days.
I've never mentioned anything about HBD. I tend push back against religious zealotry and related magical thinking, it is funny that so many religious posters can look at scientific evidence regarding race and draw logical conclusions, but can't do the same in their personal lives regarding "spirituality".
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You are nowhere near a good enough poster to adopt this tone and be taken seriously.
Case in point, last week you made statements referring to stay-at-home mothers as breeding machines and house servants. It was the kind of thing that would get updoots on most of Reddit, but you were clearly and utterly unprepared for any sort of pushback.
When asked what it was about an average menial job outside the home that elevates a woman from the status of machine or servant you completely imploded. I personally love the upvotes and downvotes here. They tell me interesting things, like how your claim that I was putting words in your mouth persuaded absolutely no one.
You aren't some hero fighting the good fight, you're an /r/atheism midwit who's out of his league.
Much as I hate to affirm French's passive-aggressive non-report report, he's right that throwing ad hominems is not allowed, and you've been warned enough that you know this. The only reason you're not getting a ban for this namecalling, given your track record, is that I don't want to reward either of you for flinging shit.
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Spicy stuff somedude! That Huxley line was gold, I just had a hearty chuckle re-reading it, -20 just proved my point. If I'm not wrong you've also just overstepped somewhat and there is a modpost incoming.
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I remember some of those specific comments you're referencing. But I don't see what the problem is?
Some of the views that get expressed here are views that I find deeply objectionable. Like, not just silly, but actually upsetting. But in spite of that (in some senses, because of that) I think this is a very valuable discussion space. Other people think differently than I do, that's life. I'm just glad we have a place that doesn't moderate on content where we can discuss controversial topics in a relatively civil manner.
That is what initially attracted to me to this space and why I was very excited about it. I'm just sad to slowly watch it turn from a rat adjacent discussion forum into more of a bog standard Tucker Carlson talking point partisan space. Maybe not in all the comments (yet), but the votes are there to turn it into an echo chamber once all the non-conformists are driven off. A right wing "Shit post" even one that catches a mod ban, will get 30 upvotes while a well thought out slightly to the left posing will usually be in the negative. The writing is on the wall and I'm unsure as to why I'm fighting against it.
You're not saying anything that hasn't been said for years - since before we left reddit.
The median poster here is not a MAGA Trump supporter, but a disaffected former liberal. Actual MAGAs, or even old-school Republicans/conservatives, are almost certainly a minority, albeit a vocal one. We have some (former) alt-righties and DRs and a few actual fascists, and a few lefties. But most are still somewhere in the center and only appear "right wing" simply because, as others have pointed out, we don't ban people for supporting Trump or preaching white supremacy or complaining about Jews or saying trans women are men, and thus we tend to attract people who really want to talk about those things.
Honestly, what would you like? More left-leaning opinions? Bring in some more (higher quality, non-trollish) left-leaning posters. Maybe you are right and we're doomed to eventually become a Nazi bar. But you aren't helping when most of your contributions read like shitposts too.
By the way, there is quite a dedicated core of left-wing posters who consistently downvote and report every right-wing post, and vice versa. Despite people claiming they don't want an echo chamber, empirically quite a few people do want an echo chamber. So we're always fighting against that too.
We really need a new poll. Maybe I'll ask Trace what his old questions were and see if I can put a form together.
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I haven’t noticed any uptick in Nazi posts. I suppose we’re more racist on average than we were on Reddit, we definitely have a higher fraction of socially conservative tradcaths. But most people here seem to be, on average, fairly centrist, blue tribe but fed up with antics, the sort of people who would be persuadable Biden voters in a better economy.
I don't have a graph over time or anything, but we do have, what, four prominent Neo-Nazis? Three? That's a pretty high number by internet standards, and plenty of people around them who are sympathetic in a soft way to them. We don't seem to have many actual left-wingers, though.
I'm not tarring everyone here - I'm here, after all. But I feel like we have more capital-R Racists here than we do lefties.
It's true, I think, that the Motte is mostly blue tribe. Even the racists and Neo-Nazis here are in fact blue tribe. (Per the original formulation, there are Republican-voting right-wing blue-tribers, and Democrat-voting left-wing red-tribers. The tribes aren't just voting groups.) Indeed, I suspect that their position is actually more appealing for a young, clever, right-wing-attracted blue triber. Being a Neo-Nazi is special - being a (pseudo?) intellectual far-righter obsessed with genetics and population IQ and ethnostates makes you just as anathema to the left as being a MAGA barstool type, but it at least makes you different to the MAGA type. You can still position yourself separately from the poorly-educated populist blue-collar beer-and-guns-and-Jesus type of right-wing, because I really doubt anyone in the far-right wants to be confused with them.
We don't have any socialists that I know of, but we've got some techo-optimist progressives. I think this is an expression of the IQ here; internet socialism seems like a phenomenon of just not understanding markets or capitalism, and techno-optimist progressivism has some of the same impulses towards utopianism and unlimited future progress, without the basic obvious factual errors and delusions.
We definitely have some prominent racists. And I'd definitely lean towards them being disaffected blue tribers- indeed, our white nationalist effort poster is explicitly so- but I'd dispute that far right wingers generally are opposed to being associated with guns, Jesus, casual homophobia, and beer-and-forklift-jousting blue collar America.
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Is the economy better because Biden is a really successful articulate president, with engaging ideas that get to the root causes of problems, imbalances and deficits in our country?
You can turn this one around, too, though: was the economy better under Trump because he was a really successful articulate president, with engaging ideas that get to the root causes of problems, imbalances and deficits in our country?
Or was it because the establishment republicans like tax cuts, and Trump was happy to oblige?
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I have been summoned.
I mean, you know who you replied to, right?
And I guess we lost a cath recently, maybe not so trad but certainly conservative. Hope she comes back.
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I don't want left leaning posts. I want rational posts!!!! I want hot takes on current events from a reasonable and objective body of smart people. Not this partisan shit. It just makes me upset and mad at what it could have been, and what it has been when in full form. I occasionally have been able to come on here and the former sub for some of the smartest and most informative information available anywhere on the planet.
Maybe the news is too slow now and it is impacting the quality of the posts, maybe it is ideological drift or capture, all I know is I'm not getting the discourse I would expect from a forum that perhaps I saw as a more august body than it was.
Are there any particular current events you'd like hot takes on, at the moment?
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Looking at the AAQCs from August 2022, something like half of those people are still posting here regularly. It's largely the same people posting here now that were posting back then. So I'm not sure when you think the alleged golden age was, but apparently, it was more than two years ago. (Which means you're still posting on a forum that you think has been shit for 2+ years.)
"Losing ~50% of the best posters" over the course of two years does seem like kind of a big deal? (and I do think we lost a lot of good people in the years prior to that, albeit for different reasons)
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Yeah I've been around this particular weird space since 2013ish so 2 years ain't a lot. The fact that I can see an admin amongst the posters from your example is not a point in the favor of this argument.
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You've been shitposting here from day one, dude.
One man's trash.
Sorry, I kind of have to agree with ArjinFerman—at least, it would be disastrous for the forum if everyone started adopting your tone and habits of response. You're consistently above-average in antagonism and dismissiveness. And this definitely is one of the factors in you drawing more downvotes—it's often the reason if ever I downvote you. That of course doesn't address the overall problem of voting based on whether people like it driving dissenting views away, but it could make a meaningful difference in your particular case.
So I guess, two.
I know you don't like deficit spending, but I don't think I was particularly rude or dismissive in that recent exchange. I didn't accuse you of magical thinking as you accused me for disagreeing on monetary policy (I save that for the religious debates where I am summarily chastised). I feel that budget hawks continually underestimate the power of extend and pretend, and we may, in fact, be able to do it forever.
No, you're right, you were reasonable in that exchange, and I probably shouldn't have said that. I was the one less able to control my
tonguekeyboard. I guess I was thinking of other comments of yours. If all your comments were like the ones in that exchange, well, I'd prefer it if you'd get further into the weeds of what precisely was going on, but you were certainly civil enough.If by extend and pretend, you mean the current policy, doesn't that end up requiring more of the world's resources each time, and is growing at a faster rate than the US's or world's economy?
I think infinite borrowing can be done at a sustainable rate; just not the one we're at. If it's below inflation, or below economic growth, there's not much of a problem. We're just in a much worse situation than that, and I think the way you tell that isn't by looking at who has e.g. the largest military, but at interest rates, amount of government spending spent on debt, rates of economic growth, etc.
Speaking of magical thinking. To quote Who's Line is it Anyway? "Everything's made up and the points don't matter". Debt is just a human construct. When you see people wax on about there being 200 trillion in ghost credit default swaps ready to doom the world economy when a butterfly in China's housing market flaps its wings it is hard not to just dismiss it all out of hand. MMT is, I think, a result of some institutions evolving to understand and use this concept. If we have the raw resources and the might to decide how they get divvied up, the rest is just semantics.
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Ironic shitposting is still shitposting.
I've never posted ironically. I stand behind every post I've made. Unlike those of you who hide their posting history.
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I think you're implying that we've become too ideologically homogeneous and people's viewpoints aren't being challenged often enough here. Maybe that's true if you restrict yourself to only looking at "basic" culture war issues - Trump, trans issues, DEI, etc. But if you look at the total range of issues that get discussed here, we have lots of arguments over lots of things. We have plenty of substantial disagreements with each other.
It would be better if we had more "garden variety" leftists who were anti-Trump, pro-trans, etc. so we had more ideological diversity, but, the reasons for our lack of leftists have already been discussed ad nauseam.
I also see that you haven't made a top level post in the last 3 months. You are the forum. If you think the posts here are low quality, then write the kinds of posts that you would prefer to read.
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Did anyone who complains about "trumpers" ever complain about the opposite, or it is just usual tactic of "identify the community population as problematic, suggest doing something about them"?
I'm more than happy to complain about Leftists and their 'liberal' fellow travelers and useful idiots, does that count?
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I doubt many people here are Trumpers. They are probably better described as anti anti trumpers.
Or even "anti-a-fraction-of-anti-Trumpers"? I think Trump was a depressingly sub-par president, but I'm still able to appreciate that the right way to beat him is "nominate someone much better", not "insist that prostitute hush money is clearly a campaign expense and prosecute misreporting it".
I’m not even sure reporting an NDA as a legal expense is misreporting it…
I take and agree with your larger point
Also Hillary funded the Steele dossier and falsely reported it as legal expenses. I notice she wasn't prosecuted in criminal court for doing that.
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It's ambiguous enough that I feel certain that had Trump declared it as a campaign expense, we'd see the exact same case with the prosecution making the claim that no, paying someone to keep quiet should not be recorded as a campaign expense.
Ambiguity should also be the death of the charge. Rule of lenity.
The problem is the prosecutor will argue that it was blindingly obvious that (insert bunch of opaque regulations) said Trump had to record it as a campaign expense and not a business expense. The defense will argue that no, (insert different bunch of opaque regulations) said he should have recorded it as a business expense and not a campaign expense. The jury, not being experts on the ins and outs of New York business accounting, will not be able to come to a conclusion on the merits, so it'll just be a matter of who they believe. The prosecution certainly won't admit to any ambiguity.
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