banned
FiveHourMarathon
c’è aria di frociaggine
16d ago
Core problem of competency. AA has been banned over and over with minimal impact. As long as Harvard is full of smart people who want to discriminate and will suffer no personal consequences for doing so, they will discriminate.
georgioz
16d ago
I observe that skiing is not actually banned. Neither is smoking or being fat.
One of those things was banned during COVID lockdowns, the other two were exempt. Maybe somebody thought through it stupidly, stopping halfway through and other stupid people ate it.
MaximumCuddles
16d ago
Oh this was years ago, and by the time I got banned I had very little illusions about most social media being in the hands of the enemy. The ban was merely amusing at that point, and not a surprise.
For a while they had to have at least some sort of plausible deniability that bans had to be related to rule breaking but in roughly the last four years they dispensed with even the slightest appearance of being rules based. They don’t even bother anymore, it’s easy to see when you have Reddit archives that allow you to read the comment or posts that people get banned for.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
16d ago
You can make anything sound stupider if you stop halfway through the reasoning. Preventing the collapse is valuable if it prevents massive amounts of unnecessary suffering. Doesn’t that sound like something people might want to avoid?
I observe that skiing is not actually banned. Neither is smoking or being fat. There is legislation to make them more difficult, especially smoking, but the reasoning is more “to reduce the bad thing itself” than “to prevent healthcare collapse.”
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
16d ago
Another wall of text full of polemics directed at your outgroup and personal attacks directed at the person you are arguing with. You've been warned about this repeatedly and banned a few times. I'm going to leave this as a warning since sometimes you dial it back a bit after being warned, and you had an AAQC recently which is just barely mitigating, but the mods were split on warning or ban, so take the grace and dial it down more.
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
16d ago
We have lots of discussion here all the time about the unfortunate state of black demographics. It is fine to "Notice" and comment on this. It is not fine to simply make blanket, very general assertions intended to be inflammatory, which you do all the time. Something about Haitians seems to be stirring up an unusual level of nastiness in the mod queue, but unlike the last few people I have warned, your record is nothing but shitty comments like this.
Banned for a week.
MaximumCuddles
16d ago
I got permanently banned from Reddit for saying literally this.
No slurs, no mean language, no violent rhetoric. Just the forceful and clear eyed observation that people without children still naturally seek to reproduce their memeplexes, and will use other peoples children to propagate it in the absence of their own. In basically that exact language.
Funny the things you can get banned for saying. What’s that saying? “A hit dog hollers?”
Up until 2023, Minnesota statutes restricted abortion under the viability standard, generally understood to be 20-28 weeks, with a not-especially-clear exception for health-and-life-of-mother. There was actually some weird legal status for the law due to an older federal court decision floating around, but the official story is that abortion providers weren't doing those types of abortions and the state enforcement pointedly wasn't going to go asking about it.
In January 2023, the PRO Act was passed. While this did not overturn the previous law on abortion, it did create a statutory right to terminate pregnancies that prohibited enforcement of any restrictions outside of that specific section. I don't know if anyone's been able to litigate the difference in court, but my understanding is that this has largely been understood to effectively allow abortion regardless of trimester.
A separate law passed in May 2023 did... a lot of random things, some abortion-related, including formally repealing the older abortion restrictions; after this point there are no situations where abortion itself was banned. It also modified an older born-alive statute:
Recognition;
medicalcare.
A born aliveAn infantas a result of an abortionwho is born alive shall be fully recognized as a human person, and accorded immediate protection under the law. All reasonable measures consistent with good medical practice, including the compilation of appropriate medical records, shall be taken by the responsible medical personnel topreserve the life and health of the born alive infantcare for the infant who is born alive.
Ostensibly, this was meant to remove some politically loaded text -- the born alive statutes were very much a pro-life slogan -- but the strict reading removes a lot of requirements for medical practitioners to actively keep the infant alive, rather than ameliorating pain. But to social conservatives, that's basically just letting the child die of exposure: while the mother may (often) be no more interested in keeping the child, all the safety and medical concerns for the mother are kinda done with by that point, and no small portion are within (and sometimes well within) the ability of modern medicine to keep alive.
There's a perspective where the point of abortion is more about whether a mother is stuck having had a child, where someone who has an elective abortion in the late-third or early-second trimester wants to kill the fetus when it turns out to just keep on living, but... uh, it's generally one seen as politically suicidal to spell it out. (And a highly social conservative framing).
The prevalence of third-trimester (and late second-trimester) abortions that do not involve a nonviable infant or a dire threat to the life of the mother are... controversial. There's a lot of progressives that claim it literally never happens, but that's pretty clearly absolutely not true. Social cons often point to the Guttmacher Institute-driven research that said "... data suggest that most women seeking later terminations are not doing so for reasons of fetal anomaly or life endangerment", but this includes a lot of late-second-trimester abortions and Guttmacher is really not great about allowing general access to anonymized data to narrow it down further. It's rare as a total of all abortion, but depending on source and where you split the categories you can get anywhere from a substantial minority to a slim majority of late-term abortions.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
17d ago
AI doomers, take note - if you're not willing to do this, as insane as Big Yud's missile strike proposal sounded in practice - then it's basically a moot point.
Yep, absolutely. For Butlerian Jihad to work, there has to be total escalation dominance, where trying to build AGI is banned everywhere, and any government that doesn't enforce that ban is knocked over and replaced with one that will. If a great power tries to not enforce it, the RoW has to have the willingness to go all the way:
RoW: You aren't enforcing the AI ban.
GP: Fuck you, we'll do what we want.
RoW: If you don't start enforcing the AI ban, we'll nuke you.
GP: If you nuke us, we'll nuke you back.
RoW: We know, but being nuked isn't as bad as getting exterminated by AI, so we've got nothing to lose.
GP: You're bluffing.
RoW: *launches nukes*
That's the goal line. Nothing short of that mindset will work, even if in practice I suspect that it could be implemented without requiring an actual nuclear war due to the limited number of great powers that need to get on board or decide not to force the matter (I have essentially zero hope that it could be implemented without war at all, but I think it could plausibly be just a few small and notoriously-defiant countries which have to be knocked over).
Absolutely not, because I remember this exact same scenario playing out at least three times, and in two of those cases a bet would never have been adjudicated fairly.
First and most obviously, Jussie Smollett. It was like pulling teeth, but eventually the people defending him shifted their counter-attacks to "why are you so obsessed with hoaxes when they're so rare?"
IMO the only reason that one might have settled is that the main representative for the losing side was so overwhelmingly disliked he had no social cover. Already unpopular people facing social consequences isn't great evidence for fair and impartial systems.
Second, the Virginia school bathroom rape case. To my knowledge nobody on team "there were no gender neutral bathrooms, ok but you can't prove there was actually a rape, ok but he wasn't really gender fluid, anyway it's super rare why are you so obsessed TERF" ever admitted wrongdoing. And I'm pretty sure that one catholic girl was banned for pressing them on it at least once.
Third and most recently, the Sam Brinton case where it took three arrests for stealing women's clothing for the people litigating it to go from pretending it was a right wing conspiracy to pretending they'd never heard of the guy.
Who's going to judge the bet? Some of the mods are the people from those other cases.
Even if we do get the absolutely overwhelming evidence we got in those other cases (and I admit we might not see the same Haitian guy arrested three times with a skinned cat in a sack each time), the bets will do nothing.
And you'd better believe the media will be pulling out all the stops to play the exact same "no evidence acknowledged by Reliable Sources" game they played in all those cases, until everyone's internalized that it was just another case of Republicans Pouncing.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
22d ago
To your basic question of "why specifically this year", the answer is probably "Elon Musk bought Twitter and this is one of the fruits". Prior to that, this was a banned opinion in mainstream venues, so of course the mainstream didn't hear it much.
Nuanced opinions like Martyrmade are always appropriate. Conversely people slandering him should be subject to pressure against their speech, or outright restricting their rule violating behavior based on the setting it happens and people disagreeing him without trying to label it nazi apologia, or being angry, but happy for him to have his views, are welcome.
In general these idiotic taboos must be made themselves taboos. It must be taboo for people to be intolerant of deviations from Hitler maximally evil, Churchil, FDR, Stalin, did nothing wrong, and that WW2 was unavoidable. People enforcing them by trying to cancel others must face cancel culture and are greatly harmful to our culture.
I am in favor of just people in moderated discussions at least temporarilly banned from "fuck you", "nazi, or more sneaky ways to attack his character in that light. And in general there should be a norm in media and in society against this kind of reaction towards people exploring such issues.
We need to enforce a minimum level of respect towards people deviating from immoral demands for black and white maximalism. Rather than them being subject to excessive rhetorical reaction, or cancel culture.
Obviously Martyrmade is right that WW2 is used to promote warmongering todays, far left agenda, and an anti right wing and anti european prejudice.
In general, the maximalist narrative for black american slavery, WW2 narratives, is part of a general black vs white, erroneous maximalist narrative. The very idea that it is sacred for people to have only one excessive view, is ridiculous, and part of weaponized history. It is directly related to the cultural far left excesses of today.
The antifa fanatics are damaging our societies while people like Martyrmade are trying to fix those problems and counter their damage, even with his own culpability of errors.
A synthesis of views from debate between people like Martyrmade and people who share his preference against both nazism and antifa types, who have some disagreements on areas he might get wrong, would be a way for a productive way this issue to be handled, that includes an opposite side.
The "fuck you nazi apologist" types (both saying it overly or sufficiently pushing in that direction with more polite language) have nothing of value to say and we would be better off if they stayed silent. And the people who talk about how they love the german deaths in dresden, and in general all the suffering of Germans, support Palestinian, Iranian, Russians today to die, supported Hiroshima bombings, supported the death of southerners in USA and for more of them to have died in the 19th century, support the destruction of right wingers, support authoritarian imprisonment of both them and of non self hating Europeans, support the extinction of Europeans, have a very monstrous ideology, and these kind of people we genuinely shouldn't allow them to use WW2, slavery, holocaust, colonialism, as weapons. They represent an evil, which actually shares part of what has been pathological among nazis in the way nazis are presented. In my own view there is a propaganda and fog of war but the nazis did do sufficient atrocities, and acted in a sufficiently murderous imperialist manner against other nations to deserve a negative reputation.
Even though other bad guys factions have used them in their propaganda overly, as a means of justifying their own immoral agenda. Still, as far as Europeans are concerned, the antifa faction is more hostile and destructive to it than the Nazis were. And more justifiable to suppress it than neonazis a million times over, considering the damage it is doing and its destructive nature and ideology.
Of course, I don't think our culture would be great if instead of one set of immoral reaction that is today too pervasive, the dominant narrative was a different one, and it was of Hitler fanboys. The antifa types genuinely have always been bad guys, including in the time the nazis were active, both the antifa far leftists and nazis held immoral ideologies. There is a better alternative to both and Martyrmade is part of that better alternative.
Kudos to Martyrmade/Darryl Cooper for his courage. Although I disagree with him on some aspects. I think it is true that Churchil wanted the war, and pushed for it, I am not sure I buy the willingness of Hitler to take back conquests for peace after the invasion of Poland if I got my timing right. x So on some of his points he might have overreached while promoting valid points that people don't want to hear elsewhere. But in any case, I don't really care about such details, the WW2 taboo and the antifa narrative is the problem. In general Martyrmade is pushing in the right direction and doing so while knowing he will get slander thrown at him. His courage and willingness to do this is praiseworthy. The world needs more courageous and sensible people like Darryl. He is a good man.
As for the antifa ideology, this is an ideology which justifies by distorting and enforcing an one sided narrative of history a lot of evil and unreasonable stuff, including the persecution of dissenters from that. One of the most notorious, well in addition the current program of destroying and persecuting the native people of Europe, includes what this movement did in previous decades. Putting German children in the homes of pedophiles while claiming that not doing so would lead to a new holocaust.
This applies to slavery of blacks as well. In the past like in WW2 until more recently, there was more debate. But the people claiming slavery of American blacks was the worst type of slavery ever succeeded in cancelling people with more nuanced views. Helen Andrews argued that this was an erroneous narrative, but in general it is in service of the woke progressive stack agenda. And part and parcel of various frauds that it is less taboo to question, that are now encouraged, that Andrews did expose such as the lies on the Congo, or the Indian mass graves hoax in Canada. For if maximalist narratives are unquestionable, it will encourage as it has other blood libel accusations that must be unquestionable.
In conclusion, respecting dissenters and even favoring nuanced peoples while disrespecting maximalist fanatics is a good thing. We genuinely actually need to gatekeep against the personalities whose reaction is to be more hateful towards southern people today over 19th century grievances, or Germans, or whoever, than many people that lived the events nearer that times had more timid reaction. The idea that maximalism serves stop a genuine neoconfederate, neonazi threat, is preposterous. It serves an evil antifa faction agenda and a foreign nationalist agenda, and of hatred against groups I mentioned and of a supremacist agenda that weaponizes a black and white narrative to promote a caste system.
People need to be deradicalized and to get over their immoral grievances. I wonder if in another 80 years, people will be weaponizing WW2, slavery, colonialism, the holocaust the same. Hopefully we manage to put an end to it and move on. There were never an ideal level of discourse, with antifa type organizations like ADL active and influential but discussion was actually more open on several of these issues in the past and it is in near decades that the maximalist antifa types have managed to become more dominant and to pass their hate speech laws and enforce their cancel culture, to the world's detriment. And especially to the detriment of the people under such regimes. Culture can change to a healthier level again by removing hate speech laws, promoting the right voices, instead of cancelling them, while disrespecting the antifa ideologues.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
23d ago
Seriously - what is your concern with the situation outlined above? STIs? The woman may have a child prior to the marriage? Okay, set those aside for the moment and let's explore cases where neither of those apply. Explain to me what is so wrong with a woman who has casual sex in college, settles down in her late 20s and has a family in her 30s without resorting to broader arguments about society and fertility.
He will not be able to explain this - he was banned right before you said this (I missed this too when I replied to his earlier post).
Amadan
You are capable of doing better, more often, and I wish you would.
23d ago
I realize I'm beating a banned horse here, but couldn't resist.
but still somewhat, since those dark days of Hlynka (though a certain Amadan seems to relish the idea of bringing them back at least in part)
The Amadan who banned Hylnka multiple times and whacked his alts when he kept coming back? Granted Hylnka the poster was not the same as Hylnka the mod, but you really have no clue what you are talking about. Hylnka was pissed at me for not modding harshly enough. And I am not the most trigger-happy or least lenient mod here.
So does anybody know what happened to these people?
CWR did not have the most intelligent people, just the most vitriolic, the ones angry that they couldn't just type "Fuck my enemies!" over and over.
It became boring because you can only write "Fuck my enemies" so many times before it becomes stale even for rage-posters. Some of them crawled back here, as you did, others are no doubt fedposting in some other dank corner of the Internet.
Where can actual men engage in unrestricted intellectual discussion in a truly properly masculine fashion without effeminate finger-wagging jannies from California all too frequently interfering to whine about "antagonism"
I don't do this often, but... LOL.
Maybe it's just me, but long, rambling, whiney rants with parenthetical after parenthetical, like someone who can't actually come to a point or close a sentence, is not a very masculine way of writing. Seethe-posting about how much you hate thots, sending screeching tirades by modmail and DM, a wall of text where you try to get in all your little digs about your Internet slapfights with everyone, these are not characteristics of someone looking for manly and intellectual discourse.
Good luck in finding glowier pastures, though if CWR wasn't based enough for you, I suggest just touching some grass.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
24d ago
Seriously? The only reason people endorse communism is to stomp on black criminals?
If you’re going to toss out theories like these, you need to put in more work making them coherent. There are any number of ways to be more accurate and less inflammatory.
Banned for one week.
confuciuscorndog
24d ago
additional income taxes on:
single people aged 21 or older ("if you're old enough to drink, you're old enough to settle down")
Oh really? Yet we must recognize that even though your policy is phrased in a gender-neutral fashion, the onus is of course going to end up on men (as the onus for everything always does) to organize that settling, even though the other gender is fighting them every step of the way. This type of tax is completely unfair unless you address that.
If you want to get Pigouvian, start charging women 50 bucks every time they want to for example post a picture of their ass online/send it to anyone who isn't their husband, among all of their other anti-familial and anti-civilizational behaviors, and then maybe you'll have at least the rudiments of moral license to tax men for not settling down under the notion that it is their lazy, selfish choice to be freewheeling libertines in a sea of good, wholesome women just waiting to adore them as loyal wives, as opposed to them understandably not wanting to pledge their lives and souls to voluntary pieces of the world's sexual leftovers, rampant social media exhibitionists, misandrist "feminists" who would need cult deprogramming-level interventions to have any chance of being even remotely good wives to men who aren't completely pushovers, unfeminine tattooed oddjobs, etc. (which means you're left in most cases with hundreds of men playing musical chairs with one winner, a situation in which it's hardly fair to tax all of the losers for failing to achieve the impossible of them all winning instead).
You'll still run into a big problem even if achieve success there though: generation vs generation. Perhaps with your new measures you restore a superior breed of valuable female who does not possess a morality (unfortunately so common in modern women) that only 5 decades or so prior would not have been considered superior to your average prostitute. A new generation of 18, 19, 20, and 21 year old girls arrives fresh on the marriage marketplace with a feminine value and virtue unthinkable a decade prior, ready to settle down and have kids as soon as as they are courted in a fashion their based fathers deem appropriate. No thotty Instagrams, tattoos, or excessive drinking here, just quality feminine human capital, good mothers waiting to happen.
Of course men their own age will want them, given that they stand to be taxed if they don't have one anyway. But also of course... so will the millions of men in their late 20s, early 30s, and even beyond who were left behind by the post-60s/70s (and especially post-90s) increasingly twisted feminine Tinder wasteland in which managing to find a good, reasonably marriageable woman, especially a Western woman, became more and more like finding a needle in a shitstack, a small spring in an endless desert. So again, musical chairs.
And what to do with the old, wretched breed of women that is used up and no good? This is millions of people we're talking about here. You cannot justifiably in any sort of good faith punish men for not wanting to "settle down" with a former college party favor any more than you could justifiably punish them for not agreeing to permanently staple a bag of dog feces to their forehead. The limit of public policy is where people would rather accept any punishment you can reasonably enforce than comply, and trying to force men to LARP a happy tradlife with former campus bicycles is definitely past that limit for a not insignificant number of men.
That is, there simply aren't enough women worth settling down with for all the men who want to settle down (as there haven't been for a long time), there can't be even if you fix the women because of older men, and therefore only decades of eugenics favoring female births to dramatically affect gender ratios would change this. (And without a basically totalitarian-level of masculine control over society (that is excruciatingly violent against any wannabe suffragettes or whatever, basically the Taliban and White Sharia), this would inevitably backfire as these women would then use their greater numbers to bring about an even more feminine triflefeels-pandering anti-society.)
I just don't get why you people never address this with your pontificating about singles taxes. The gender ratio of births is basically the same as it ever was, and yet modern culture has rendered anywhere from 70%-95% of Western women as totally unacceptable marriage partners. What do you expect men to do? Sure, the non-Western world offers somewhat of a relief valve here (as this policy's most prominent supporter yet JD Vance shows with his own exotic import wife), but we're rapidly exporting Western whore culture to them to the point that that well is soon to dry up too. How can you justifiably tax 100 men for not being able to snag one of five available slices of cake? Why not just have states issue limited edition golden licenses/IDs, enough for 1% of the population, and then tax people for not owning those too? Same principle.
Here's some modifications to these kinds of proposals that are absolutely necessary (without which they would be wholly immoral and invalid and should only deservedly lead to responses like this from aging men who had already been born into one of the worst time periods ever in human history to be a man seeking the traditional birthrights of all men and then had even more injustice from a sneering society blaming them for its own failure heaped upon them):
-
Men born during a reasonably defined wasteland period for finding a good, stable, marriage-material wife must be exempt from any singles tax forever. (This is the least society could do for them. Realistically they deserve straight-up reparations, but one step at a time.) The only exceptions will be men who have engaged in above a certain threshold of sexual promiscuity (perhaps we'll say more than five sex partners in 20 years, which is fairly generous), who will be deemed to have contributed to the problem and taxed considerably.
-
Age gap relationships will be monitored, and so long as younger women are going for the again many older guys left behind by the wasteland, the singles tax on young men will be pushed back to around 26 or so. (Or rather, to make it more general: no man will be singles-taxed in a situation where there are too few marriage material women marrying men in their demographic to go around. Men will be singles-taxed for their choice to remain single, not merely being the unfortunate victim of a mathematical reality.)
-
The promiscuous men mentioned above will be banned from courting, marrying, etc. the newer breed of superior, chaste female as an additional punishment for their behavior. Instead, they will be expected to take their wives from the older breed of damaged goods women that they created. They will be expected to take multiple wives too. Their breeding however will be restricted to avoid promulgating genes that induce promiscuity and immorality. (Many of these men are already married with children, and of course you're not going to break up their marriages and kill their kids, so this won't be a punishment for those.)
These are just a few small modifications I thought of off the top of my head though. Realistically, if you're going this far you might as well just institute a straight up anti-"feminist" reactionary reign of terror. Anything below that is probably a half-measure that won't actually accomplish much anyway.
Point is, you can't just demand people couple and reproduce by presuming to tax them for not doing so, any more than you can just demand a square peg fit into a round hole and think it'll have to fit eventually if you tax it enough. You have to address the tens if not hundreds of millions of women who have destroyed any reasonable marriage/reproductive value they might have once had and the millions of men who have thus been left without reasonable prospects. (After all, what's the point of having kids just to have kids if it's with a whore? To raise whore kids and make society's problems even worse? Part of the problem here is that birthrate fanatics don't seem to understand that a higher birthrate is not always better and therefore a declining birthrate is not always a problem, but often rather just a naturally homeostatic process regressing to a more reasonable mean, returning to the baseline its current surrounding conditions can comfortably support.) That would require nothing less than a complete transformation of society, and even then you'll still be undoing the damage of the previous regime for longer than the likely lifespans (assuming no longevity takeoff or whatever) of most of those men affected (unless maybe if you find a way to buy nice virgin 18 year olds from Asia by the millions).
Consequently, our present society (or even one that makes any sort of effort to return to sanity) is (or would be still) already walking a tightrope of hoping that porn and video games sedates so many men so much that they don't effectuate a collective realization (which so many of them have already come to, even if they aren't moving to implement it in its most literal form yet) that realistically the better option for most of them is to burn it all down and see what treasures might be found in the ashes (dignity, for one). (I mean I say they're not implementing it yet, but again that's only not literally, as they actually are, albeit indirectly: They're for the most part not openly literally burning down anything yet, but they are quiet quitting, lying flat, whatever you wanna call it, overindulging in the porn and video games (as it turns out, when you use drugs to pacify people, you get addicts) and leaving the working, leading, and innovating parts of life that strong societies have always needed men to take the lead on to the "strong powerful womyn" who they've been told are better than them anyway, which predictably has led to the "competence crisis", a heretofore unknown malady in the West's post-industrialization history. This may not burn anything down ever, but it is quite likely to leave it to rot.) Punishing them with an unfair singles tax that charges them for society's failures is unlikely to help this goal.
The only real quick fix I see for this issue is wonderfully truly feminine AI/robot waifus (which realistically at this point will come from China unless you get US government funding for a counterinitiative, introducing its own national security risk that will need to be dealt with) with artificial wombs capable of baring biological children. Introduce this technology, and I think you will very quickly find that it was not ever your average man who was the one standing in the way of family formulation. (This would definitely introduce some new issues with a generation of children where a large percentage of them have artificial mothers, and yet this would still be superior to the potential "motherhood" offered by ruined wasteland women, if not just for the fact that it would satisfy the basic necessary criterion of actually inducing men to make mothers out of these women, artificial or not, in the first place. After all, if men won't play ball, it's not going to happen no matter what. Whatever deficit in open rebellion modern man has developed he's more than made up for with an expertise in slacking and shirking what authorities insist is his "duty". See: Chinese coronavirus lockdown/masking/etc. policy)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
24d ago
Coming from the perspective of someone who learned vehicular cycling techniques in order to use my bike as a practical form of transport in a place (Cambridge UK) where this made sense, there is an underlying assumption that you are cycling on city streets (reasonable - rural distances are too far to cycle) with a design speed of 30mph or less (true almost everywhere where the street plan was laid out pre-WW2). This is consistent with speed limits in towns which are 30mph in the UK and 50km/h in the EU and Canada. (The US has a 25mph speed limit in neighbourhoods in most states, but critically the street plan is designed to force through traffic onto arterial roads with higher speed limits).
From an urbanist perspective, if the traffic is moving faster than 30mph then either you are in a rural area (in which case biking is a slightly weird recreational activity, not a form of transport), on a freeway (where biking should be banned anyway and alternatives exist), or the cars are dangerously too fast.
Vehicular cycling makes a lot of sense for sober, competent, adult cyclists who are trying to get somewhere in a hurry cycling on city streets where the actual speed of traffic is 30mph or lower. In my experience, this is the only use case where cycling makes sense anyway, but I am aware that my views on urban transport (best articulated by this guy) are considered weird by both sides of the culture war.
Musk reportedly banned the word "cis" on twitter despite his aura of a free speech warrior.
I don't think this is a accurate summary of this policy, and the implementation is more limited than the policy. There's supposedly an interstitial on mobile (app?), but on desktop, I don't even get that (and I've gotten interstitial for 'fuck'!), and I'd know.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
25d ago
For example, in response to "don't call people nigger on the public square" I would expect you to invent "offense" for the most milquetoast word describing you that was never considered a grave offense.
Oh this is interesting. After interrogating free speech to such an extent, surely you'll be able to give us a precise way of determining what is a "grave offence".
Musk reportedly banned the word "cis" on twitter despite his aura of a free speech warrior.
I see the word "cis" pop up ony feed all the time, so I have no idea what you're talking about. By contrast, progressives have argued at length how they should be able to call people "cracker" or "gusano", or invented offense at completely mundane things like the OK handsign.
sun_the_second
25d ago
I suppose the core of our disagreement is that I do not expect you to act symmetrically. I expect you to act in the worst faith, because you do not actually like symmetrical restrictions on free speech, you just dislike when yours is restricted in any way. This makes moot any discussion of fairness.
For example, in response to "don't call people nigger on the public square" I would expect you to invent "offense" for the most milquetoast word describing you that was never considered a grave offense. Musk reportedly banned the word "cis" on twitter despite his aura of a free speech warrior. I'd expect you to behave in bad faith similarly. You're welcome to deny that.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
25d ago
The best case for freedom of speech is that “ideas / types of social organizations float to the top”, but the worst case is that large swathes of the population get manipulated by bad values and lifestyles. We need some way to ensure that only the class of people for whom freedom of speech is genuinely useful are able to practice it. Some ways to do this: (1) restrict freedom of speech to men between the ages of 23-35 who have passed a feasible course on logic, psychology, and sociology either in a written or verbal test; (2) a social practice of electing benevolent censors who filter information for the rest of population, who have passed a more arduous course and are also selected by personality and honesty; (3) require new ideas to be judged in a dispassionate way first, written and read like a PhD thesis; (4) never throw out ideas deemed bad, but sort them and archive them away, so that they can be accessed by reasonable people but not unreasonable people.
If you have a social organization (whether political or communal) which manages to elect “censors” who are genuinely honest, intelligent, and wise, who are humble enough to elect people even greater than themselves, then you have an eternal upwards spiral of prosociality. That can be applied to people, ideas, media, everything. It is the number one most important social technology and is a requirement for human advancement.
So, as examples
(1) astrology would never enter the minds of young people, because they would never read it and be mislead by it — it has literally mislead millions of people who waste time on it, and millions more for centuries in the past.
(2) no song about drugs would ever enter ears of the youth.
(3) loot boxes and gambling would be banned forever.
(4) non-prosocial video games would be relegated to the infirm.
ControlsFreak
25d ago
There is a lot of tension in the problem statement that has been pointed out a few times. To what extent can "low IQ normies" actually understand somewhat complex topics that require a fair amount of marinating and perspective? So, I guess I'll contribute one little route that helps with one little ingredient that can go into the marinade and hopefully help them gain perspective over time. Hopefully, it's a simple enough contribution that it can actually somewhat stick with a normie. It's not meant to be a "now you oppose communism" point, but just a little contribution to make them slightly less susceptible and slightly more likely to fit other pieces into the puzzle. The first part is heavily lifted from Russ Roberts talking to Mike Munger in EconTalk.
The issue is that many have a very naive understanding of "fairness", as other folks have pointed out here. They imagine that you can just just elect the right politicians to grab the "fairness" knob and turn it toward "good", with no ill consequences. They obviously wouldn't be willing to trade off "fairness" for something as cold as "economic efficiency", which sounds like how capitalists exploit everyone. So, the point is to use two examples to argue that 1) Yes, you absolutely would give up some amount of fairness for some amount of efficiency, and 2) In fact, we have easy-to-understand historical examples of the relentless drive toward "fairness" being wildly harmful. The first proceeds with a theoretical exercise that feels practical enough to be within every normie's daily experience, and the latter hopefully helps connect the idea to practice in case they think it's just too disconnected and theoretical.
The first is a simple question about your morning commute. You come up to an intersection, and other cars come up to the same intersection at about the same time. Who should get to go first? Well, right now, you might think that it's just whatever the stoplight says or some local custom about how to deal with stop signs, but is that fair?! You're going to work, which you need to do to feed your family. Surely, you deserve to be able to pass through before some high school senior who's off on summer break and just picking up some coffee and donuts before spending his day just hanging out in the park, maybe playing some volleyball with his friends or something. At the same time, someone else may have more of a need. Their somewhat-senile elderly mother just called them, and they're worried that she's going to accidentally cause harm to herself with what she's up to. So, how do we figure out the fair way to make sure everyone in the intersection gets proper priority? We could have everyone get out of their car and have a little discussion about where they're going and why and then implement some group decision-making procedure in order to allocate priority fairly. Then repeat at the next intersection, and the next intersection, and the next intersection, all the way to work. Even normies can realize that this would be ridiculous. Really press them to make sure that they agree that they are willing to be "not fair", to make the guy going to his mother wait for the high school kid at the light, because the light system is vastly more efficient at moving everyone to their destinations, even if it's "not fair".
(A bonus here is if you can find a suitably shortened clip of a guy asking a commie prof if he can have a playstation in the prof's commie world. Commie prof was all like, "Well, we'd have to have a societal conversation..." and just point out that this is for everything. Stop and have a societal conversation when you want a playstation, when you want to buy a new game, when you want some DLC, when you stop at a traffic intersection, hell, even if you want to pick up some more charcoal for your grill, you're gonna need to stop and "have a societal conversation" about whether "society" is willing to let you have any of those things.)
The bonus could actually be a good connection to the second thing, which is a real-world example of exactly how the commie logic goes. Not only can you not do any of the fun things in life (or even get through an intersection to get to work), but you certainly can't acquire anything that could even help you do work. The Khmer Rouge took commie logic as logic, "fairness" above all else. Absolutely no chance that any Big Men of Capitalism could arise. In order to do that, you simply have to ban free enterprise. No one can hoard goods or money if they can't build an evil Big Business. If you let them just go start a business, they might make a bunch of money, and then we get inequality and unfairness. So, everybody works on the State farm, and they're definitely not allowed to do stuff that makes them rich, unequal, and unfair. At least, not without one of those "societal conversations" (don't ask when those actually happen, but spoiler, it's only when we want to give Party Insiders extra goodies). Don't even think about getting a computer; if you had a computer, you might program something and start a tech company, which might make you rich, unequal, and unfair. Hammers? Ladders? Literally anything that could be used to make money with? Banned, unless it's owned by the State, for use on State projects, which have presumably had a "societal conversation" approving them. Hell, the Khmer literally banned people who wanted to have a little more food for their family (because they apparently weren't satisfied by the outcome of the "societal conversation") from going out into the countryside and picking berries. Because that's "hoarding goods", and besides, you might try to sell them for other stuff, acquiring extra wealth, becoming rich, unequal, and unfair.
The result is hopefully that they can see that, while there is often an intuitive drive toward "fairness" (and some amount of this intuition may be fine), it actually gets extremely wonky as you blow it up in scale. It's directly connected to how it would negatively impact their normie life and a historical example of exactly that happening. They'll hopefully realize that they will, deep down, be willing to trade some amount of "fairness" for some amount of "efficiency", and I think that's enough of an accomplishment for a normie who is commie-curious. They'll definitely need more marinating to go much beyond that.
As a daily user of Matrix (but not via Element, usually via alternative clients such as SchildiChat, FluffyChat, Cinny, and Gomuks) to participate in various communities that happen to be there and talk to some people I've met on there, I have no idea why it needed this dramatic effortpost. It's just a chat protocol that works semi-well. What's the big idea? I don't see how it's a "dead end" (mostly because you seem to have a lot of your information wrong).
The willful refusal to implement table stakes features in order to pursue differentiation at all costs. (invites, emojis/stickers, user statuses, cosmetics)
Wrong. It has invites, emojis, stickers, and user avatars (which is a form of cosmetic).
Source: Literal screenshots from SchildiChat (which is a fork of the official Element client) that I have open right now:
https://pomf2.lain.la/f/kd2ff7b8.png
https://pomf2.lain.la/f/lhwijza7.png
It dutifully works on “trust and safety” to hide the CSAM so they can keep their matrix.org server running, a server which is a graveyard of dead discussions devoid of any meaningful discussion not about Matrix itself.
Wrong. I'm in multiple Matrix chatrooms that have nothing to do with Matrix itself, on the official matrix.org server and other servers.
As a result there isn't a single large community on Matrix with substantial participation over federation.
It depends on how you define "substantial", but there is cross-server activity in the rooms I use. Sometimes it causes problems, but not that often and increasingly less often. Protocol stability is increasing, albeit gradually. Most people do sign up for the default matrix.org server, but that's just because most people do the default in almost all cases.
Honest question: Have you actually used Matrix? How much? The post reads like the classic breathless "informational" YouTuber "explainer" about something they have no firsthand experience with. Like the idea that Matrix has no emoji support... It's had them for as long as I've used it, and that's been years. Where did you get these ideas?
No, it's not as braindead "easy" as Discord. (And I'm defining "braindead 'easy'" by a standard of someone I once talked to who claimed the Element interface seemed "too complicated" because... when she went to register, it asked her to enter in all of her info (desired username, desired password, attached e-mail, etc.) all at once in 3 separate form boxes presented in rows, instead of doing it like most modern apps where they have you enter in the first desired item in the only box on the screen and then send you to a new screen that says "Good job! You did it! And now we need [next thing].", repeating for all desired info.)
That's a good thing, because Discord, like New Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, etc. is designed according to the standards of Idiocracy. (The horror! In Matrix clients I can see actual dates and timestamps for things instead of "A day ago", "A few minutes ago", "A long time ago", etc. (But no I haven't used Discord in a long time so I don't know if it has those too.))
Why does it either have to be a "Discord killer" or a "dead end"? And why do you think that having stickers and invites (which again it does have anyway) is the difference between the two? It's all the network effect. People use Discord because everyone uses Discord because everyone uses Discord. That the primary users of Matrix are those who are banned from Discord is an expected feature, not a bug.
Most people are NPCs who simply use the most popular thing. That's all it is. Matrix does have flaws, and some pretty severe ones ("Cannot decrypt message") but those flaws are almost entirely irrelevant to this fact. It could be a 5x better or 5x worse Discord clone and it probably wouldn't be much more or less popular. You mostly haven't had dramatic vanquishings of incumbent services online since the days of Myspace and Digg. That's a fact that applies to even the best attempts. The network effect is a behemoth that basically only TikTok has been able to conquer in recent memory, and even then that's mostly only because Vine's shutdown left a hole. They also still didn't kill anyone.
Let’s talk about Matrix/Element.
With the Telegram CEO getting gotten and Twitter being banned, you may have heard Matrix/Element shilled as a potential alternative platform for communication. There’s also talk of interoperable messaging in Europe, and the pipedream of Matrix being involved. Unfortunately, Matrix/Element is a dead end, but it’s worth talking about. Information gathered from lurking Matrix discussions as well as private DMs.
I
In 2016, the folks at New Vector ltd. decided to make an end-to-end encrypted and federated instant messaging service. They created Riot.im (now known as Element), which communicated over a new protocol they called Matrix. Under the Matrix protocol, users on independent homeservers could communicate with each other, similar to Mastodon/ActivityPub. Also similarly, independent implementations of the protocol are able to communicate in the network. Like Misskey can communicate with Mastodon, apps such as FluffyChat can use Matrix to communicate with Element.
New Vector struggled to get Element off the ground, first positioning it as a Slack alternative. They even snapped up the declining Github-centric im service Gitter and subsequently did nothing as the entire userbase fled to Discord and Slack. When that failed, Vector pivoted to providing bespoke encrypted services to government spooks including shipping white-labeled walled gardens and trying to make Element a Zoom competitor. With a steady source of Cash, the Vector team lost interest in the rest of us. From the CEO himself:
... [Y]ou need to understand that Element has ended up making payroll by selling messaging apps to people like the UN, NATO and the French and German governments. And they value other things (reliable encryption; performant apps; UX which outperforms WhatsApp) more than building a Discord killer.
II
So where does Matrix come in? The Matrix protocol was supposed to be federated and Vector felt that adoption of the protocol with Element as the flagship client would be good PR. Vector set up the Matrix foundation with the goal of promoting federation in an ecosystem by offering the promise of an open protocol. The foundation was also put in charge of the “matrix.org” homeserver - ostensibly a peer to many homeservers but the de-facto hub for reasons that will be explained below. What the Matrix Foundation wasn’t given was the power or directive to implement features actually needed for growth. Something as basic as sharing an invite with someone off Matrix is something that’s impossible to this day. And even with Vector recently abandoning any interest in Element as a social platform, the Matrix Foundation has categorically refused to endorse an alternative (non-Element) app run by a team that cares more about growth.
They had a little bit of success in getting a few open source communities to dip their toes in, but it was fleeting. Unfortunately with a lagging featureset and inscrutable onboarding process, Matrix floundered while Discord, Telegram, and WhatsApp launched to the moon. Only the deplorables kicked off of Discord flocked to Matrix, most notably sharers of CSAM content. With a complete lack of algorithmic ranking and constant churn of discussions that fizzle out because they can’t onboard new members, the server has become a graveyard filled with unpleasant and illegal land mines.
Is there any hope for the Matrix protocol? Can any other servers step in where the Matrix Foundation failed?
The problem is the Matrix federation protocol doesn’t actually work! It can’t even ensure two servers think the same members are in a particular room, which has obvious consequences. As a result there isn't a single large community on Matrix with substantial participation over federation. While other homeservers exist, they effectively act as independent islands with communication happening between server members and little to no productive traffic transiting to other servers.
The Matrix Foundation is now a zombie, created to evangelize a protocol (that doesn’t work!) that is de-facto controlled by a company no longer interested in federation. It dutifully works on “trust and safety” to hide the CSAM so they can keep their matrix.org server running, a server which is a graveyard of dead discussions devoid of any meaningful discussion not about Matrix itself.
III - CW topics for discussion
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With the biggest tech platforms becoming explicitly left-wing, the space for the grey and red tribes online has shrunk. Federated solutions such as Matrix and Mastodon seem like a tempting way to escape censorship, but are plagued with organizational and technical problems. Witches may find respite in these places, but only because the admins are too incompetent to successfully carry out a witch hunt. Twitter orienting itself as a free-speech platform may be the only whitepill for the current generation of deplorables.
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Does the restriction of compliance tools such as photodna to major players act as regulatory capture against smaller players? Posting known CSAM on Discord or any other major platform will result in an instant permaban. Upstarts and deplorables don’t have the privilege of accessing these tools.
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What is the future picture of interoperable messaging? Is it an email-like level of federation? EU has mandated interoperability but will it promote free speech or stamp it out? (anyone want an unhinged rant about "RCS"?)
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The willful refusal to implement table stakes features in order to pursue differentiation at all costs. (invites, emojis/stickers, user statuses, cosmetics) The Slack competitors Chime by Amazon and Hangouts Chat by Google both fell victim to this, actively refusing (I have inside knowledge of this) to pursue feature parity with slack despite having blank-check level resources. I think this says something about human nature.
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The baggage of the broken protocol has been a deadweight on the team, but momentum has the team papering over the problem with additional layers and proxies. Vector's cash cow, bespoke white-label encrypted apps for government agents, benefits literally nothing from federation. Yet these apps carry the vestigial protocol like an albatross around their necks.
Edit:
You might think "I've used Element casually and it pretty much mostly works, so it's fine" but that's missing the point. A messaging service needs to work on the first try, every time. And even if Matrix can send 99% of your messages fine, and let 99% of people join your channel, that 1% sends it directly to the garbage heap. And Matrix can't work every time.
Telegram only went down once in its entire 10+ year history, and besides that outage, not one single message for anyone in the world was shown as delivered that wasn't delivered and viewable by every member of the group.
Different things are different, and different prohibitions are different. There are all sorts of substances that various societies ban, with a variety of success rates. Some factors include the source materials, manufacturing requirements, size/volume at critical stages, detectability, availability of substitutes, accountability of gatekeepers, etc. The silly example here is that the US banned Chinese drywall. Basically nobody is out there hunting for black market Chinese drywall. There are available alternatives, and the supply chain is relatively legible. No one makes completely context-free analogies between marijuana and Chinese drywall... they only make completely context-free analogies between marijuana and alcohol.
Marijuana and alcohol have some similarities, some differences. They're both pretty concealable, but at least in its final form, marijuana is probably a bit more so. Use of marijuana is a bit more detectable by smell. Cultivation of quantities of marijuana is likely more detectable. Possibly the biggest real difference is the source materials. Alcohol can be sourced by literally just leaving the food you bought at the grocery store in the cabinet too long (or, if you really want, from the toilet paper you stocked up too much for COVID). Marijuana requires a particular, identifiable species of plant. One could go on, but the primary point is that depending on the factors involved, one might be able to determine a lot or only a very little by analogy to other prohibitions. I don't think anyone would say that the world's experiments with nuclear (anti)-proliferation says much about possible handgun bans or vice versa.
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