Argh, I have no idea. Can't see it, personally. But well, it's always good to have an archive anyway.
Edit: okay, yep, I see it on the homepage, but clicking any of the links (the title, the comments, etc.) gives a 404. :/
>But in between all of that, there was some really impressive analysis, some good discussion, and even a few changed minds
Lmao, I'm sure the discourse between fascists and 'national conservatives' is so very productive, I'm glad!
>Baudrillard’s Marxist perspective on consumerism
Heavily depends which Baudrillard we're talking about, but I don't want to click the link. Baudrillard later reject Marxism nearly in whole
>I also benefitted from its weekly roundup of interesting social science studies
>Superficially, this is remarkably well-balanced. 51% of Culture War Thread participants identified as left-of-center on the survey, compared to 49% of people who identified as right-of-center.
Ok, so *now* self-identity counts.
>Right-of-center people were more likely to be either libertarians or neoreactionaries (a technocratic, anti-democracy movement that the survey instructed people to endorse if they wanted to be more like “for example Singapore: prosperity, technology, and stability more important than democratic process”).
So fascists were 18%? Why not just say it outright?
>Although straight-out “liberal” had a better showing than “conservative”, the ranks of the Left still ended up divided among left-libertarians and social democrats
Oh so I guess the tendency for conservatives to obfuscate their ideology with the guise of 'classical liberalism' is ignored yet again!
>This isn’t what the data suggest, and on the few times I looked at it myself, it wasn’t what I saw either
Perhaps because you're taking the self-reports of right-wingers calling themselves 'liberals' uncritically
>After being challenged to back this up, I analyzed ten randomly chosen comments on the thread; four seemed neutral, three left/liberal, and three conservative
Yes, I'm sure the upvote ratios, the general attitude of acceptance towards certain viewpoints don't matter, it's just about raw numbers of comments!
>my working theory is that most of the people I talk to about this kind of thing are Bay Area liberals for whom the thread was their first/only exposure to a space with any substantial right-wing presence at all, which must have made it feel scarily conservative.
Lmao, ok. I live in the center of Christian America in the Midwest, and that thread is far more right-wing than where there.
>Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are
Only by a particular definition of intelligence :rollsafe:
>I disagree with most of them but don’t want to be too harsh on any of them
So which one do you agree with? Is it immigrants destroying 'cultural cohesion' or that blacks are inferior and deserving of slavery. Or perhaps its the pedophilia acceptance, that's too common among psychology academics.
>Every Twitter influencer who wants to profit off of outrage culture is going to be posting 24-7 about how the New York Times endorses pedophilia ...
This entire paragraphs reads like it's accepted the prima facie justification for not censoring the comments and that the concerns 'outrage culture' people bring up are completely and wholly invalid
>sometimes I sympathized with some of their points.
Scott downplays it yet again!
>Some people started an article about me on a left-wing wiki that listed the most offensive things I have ever said, and the most offensive things that have ever been said by anyone on the SSC subreddit and CW thread over its three years of activity, all presented in the most damning context possible; it started steadily rising in the Google search results for my name. A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking me personally and Culture War thread participants in general got started; it now has over 2,000 readers. People started threatening to use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the causes I cared about most.
Rational Wiki and this sub right here!
Also, he surely hasn't used this subreddit very much if he thinks it's devoted to "mocking him personally"
>At this point this stops being my story
But what if the evil anti-Scott left-wing Bolshevik outrage culture people still attack you because it's tangentially related to you?
Especially given:
>I’d like to advertise r/TheMotte,
..
>Third, I would like to offer one final, admittedly from-a-position-of-weakness, f**k you at everyone who contributed to this. I think you’re bad people, and you make me really sad. Not in a joking performative Internet sadness way. In an actual, I-think-you-made-my-life-and-the-world-worse way.
"I'm innocent, I never did anything wrong, the points people bring up about the CW thread are completely invalid!!"
>As a result of some of what I’ve described, I think I’ve become afraid, bitter, paranoid, and quick to assume that anyone who disagrees with me (along a dimension that too closely resembles some of the really bad people I’ve had to deal with) is a bad actor who needs to be discredited and destroyed
Oh, OK so the exact mentality that you and SSC accuse 'SJWs' of all the time. Ironic ain't it
>Superficially, this is remarkably well-balanced. 51% of Culture War Thread participants identified as left-of-center on the survey, compared to 49% of people who identified as right-of-center.
>
>Ok, so now self-identity counts.
Back in 2016 the Gamergaters surveyed themselves and concluded that the left out numbered the right 4 to 1. That should tell you how much to trust self-reported political leanings. So Scotts number of 50/50 is consistent with SSC:ers being 63% Gamergaters and 37% pure right-wing.
I can believe SSC:ers are "liberal" on marijuana legalization, healthcare, and a other issues they never talk about. The problem is how they keep talking about women, non-white people etc.
> Third, I would like to offer one final, admittedly from-a-position-of-weakness, f\*\*k you at everyone who contributed to this. I think you’re bad people, and you make me really sad. Not in a joking performative Internet sadness way. In an actual, I-think-you-made-my-life-and-the-world-worse way. I realize I’m mostly talking to the sort of people who delight in others’ distress and so this won’t register. But I’m also a little upset at some of my (otherwise generally excellent) friends in the rationalist community who were quick to jump on the “Oh, yeah, the SSC subreddit is full of gross people and I wish they couldn’t speak” bandwagon (to be clear, I don’t mean the friends who offered me good advice about separating from the CW thread for the sake of my own well-being, I mean people who actively contributed to worsening the whole community’s reputation based on a few bad actors). I understand you were probably honest in your opinion, but I think there was a lot of room to have thought through those opinions more carefully.
"yeah, I set up a safe space for alt-right fuckwits, but fuck you in particular, well meaning friends who pointed this out!"
How is it a safe space when you're allowed to discuss with them? Safe space is what you're pissed CW was not - it'd be a "safe space" from alt-righters if they were banned. /r/The_Donald is a safe space for alt-right, for example.
Imagine walking past your local community centre and seeing that they've posted a sign out front saying "Fascists are welcome here, come on in!".
Thats essentially what has been done in SSC. And unsurprisingly, it became infested with fascists! Further unsurprisngly, all the regular people who walked in and saw [unironic advocation for the 14 words](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6j9yse/what_are_some_true_beliefs_deep_down_you_knew/djde7xb/) quickly noped the fuck out of there.
>Imagine walking past your local community centre and seeing that they've posted a sign out front saying "Fascists are welcome here, come on in!".
>Thats essentially what has been done in SSC.
What has been done was posting a sign saying "Everyone is welcome here as long as they're civil".
>all the regular people who walked in and saw unironic advocation for the 14 words quickly noped the fuck out of there.
And that's why these threads became solely populated by fascists. No opposing elements.
Why did "regular people" flee from there, and not fascists?
Anyway, is it better that someone potentially swayed by fascist rhetoric sees it, and then sees people disagreeing -- or sees it in a safe space for fascists, where every community member agrees with it? And there is always some small possibility that the fascist can be turned. Which disappears if he's moving to fascist safe space.
And your link? It's about halfway in the thread. You don't "walk in" and immediately see nazis everywhere.
> And that's why these threads became solely populated by fascists. No opposing elements.
Yes, agreed.
You know people aren't obligated to """debate""" fascists, right? Like, most people will just be like "hey this place sucks" and leave. And, then, when they're asked about the subreddit they're proooobably gonna reply "yeah there's a lot of fascists there."
What part about this confuses you?
"Everyone is welcome here as long as they're civil" -- where what counts as "civil" is determined by a gaggle of fascist sympathizers. I once got banned for 10 days just for suggesting that opposition to gay marriage was motivated by homophobia, while in the background white supremacists were going around calling motherfuckers "mulattos" and "mixed breeds", and citing the Nazi proverb that "the Jew cries out in pain even as he strikes you".
>What has been done was posting a sign saying "Everyone is welcome here as long as they're civil".
Ah yes, what an interesting definition of civility going on here:
Uncivil: saying mean words
Civil: open advocation of white supremacy, but said politely!
>Anyway, is it better that someone potentially swayed by fascist rhetoric sees it, and then sees people disagreeing -- or sees it in a safe space for fascists, where every community member agrees with it? And there is always some small possibility that the fascist can be turned. Which disappears if he's moving to fascist safe space.
It would absolutely be better for fascists to be confined to stormfront, where people know what they're getting into. Right now, people who mainly like SSC for its pop psychology are being funnelled into the innocent looking subreddit, then the culture war thread, then seeing highly upvoted fascist propaganda specifically phrased to be palatable to their ears...
>Uncivil: saying mean words
>Civil: open advocation of white supremacy, but said politely!
... yeah, that's the most extreme case. Less extreme would be for example advocation for Trump. Don't you think this approach maybe has some merit? Is it better if right-wing is shunned, so they go to their own safe space and radicalize there? How has it worked out?
> Right now, people who mainly like SSC for its pop psychology are being funnelled into the innocent looking subreddit, then the culture war thread, then seeing highly upvoted fascist propaganda specifically phrased to be palatable to their ears...
That would be the case if "fascist propaganda" was consensus there. But if it's not, if majority of population actually *doesn't* endorse fascism, and they argue with fascists, then people seeing that will come out of it with better arguments/stronger opinion against fascism. Unless "fascist propaganda" is more convincing to them.
But they will be exposed to the arguments. If instead we will carefully purge fascism from every place we can, and pretend it doesn't exist then someone may find themselves on fascist populated site. Where they will be exposed to fascist propaganda. Without counterarguments.
> How has it worked out?
How well has your method turned out? with the cesspool that is the culture war thread. I'm not speaking in the abstract when I'm talking about reasonable people being driven out by calm fascists, this literally just happened.
The CW thread is not supposed to have an ideology–the CW thread
“permits racism” as a part of permitting almost anything. “The left” by
definition implies an ideology, and excludes enough other ideas that
permitting hatred of white men can’t be justified the same way.
We can permit racism, because we permit everything, except leftism
because leftism excludes other ideologies! WOOOOOW I really can’t tell
if this is trolling or if the poster is just that oblivious.
If you tolerate hateful people in your community, those people will
eventually push less crappy people out, until all you have is crap.
Advocating a ethnostate is inherently uncivil and threatening, no matter
how politely it’s advocated. > It only takes one person being really
consistently hostile to have a significant impact on your life and
mental state.
Asians and Jews aren’t integrated even if they’re successful. They
don’t share the same values - values which, I hasten to add, are largely
heritable.
Tr*nnyPornO comes to white supremacy’s rescue with this s*vage
destruction of the k*kes and Or*ents.
NSFW:
!Again, heritability doesn’t imply genetic causality. And I would
have thought they’d recognize that given that they allegedly have read
all of the literature and use Rushton’s arguments to explain while that
is true, we ‘have reason’ to belief that heritability indicates genetic
causality (we really don’t though) :thinking: !<
And people give that exact criticism of his arguments in the CW threads on a very regular basis. I have made similar criticisms to his posts on several occasions. The idea that most SSC readers side with him, or those arguments, is not correct. But the idea that because mods/Scott didn't ban him, Scott or the subreddit must basically be pro-Nazism, is also not correct. "Freeze peach" me all you want, I still think the best way to tackle ideas you don't like or disagree with is to debate them, not ban them.
edit: Both seem to be pretty common sentiments in this subreddit, but I know you did not make either of those claims or connections. Sorry for implying you did.
I think we're all being a bit broad and unparsimonious here. We haven't crunched the numbers on how many replies to his posts are critical or supportive, how many upvotes he gets in relation to others, etc. But my own anecdotes are that he gets a lot of serious, long-form pushback from many users, often resulting in 6+ level-sub-threads of debate. A lot of people there significantly disagree with his premises and his claimed evidence and challenge him strongly. I don't know how many people essentially agree and how many essentially disagree, but I don't think the majority agree with him. If I ever thought the majority of posters just agreed with his HBD stuff uncritically, or if the majority of posters spent the majority of their time caring or talking about genetic differences between races, I would definitely stop posting in the threads. I think that's what a lot of people here think the CW threads are like, but that hasn't been close to my experience.
Why do you think I'm being uncharitable? Am I misrepresenting the idea that this subreddit considers Scott or /r/SSC "basically pro-Nazism"? You can swap that out with "generally apologetic towards racists" or "willing to hear white supremacists out" or something else lighter, but from the sentiment in these and other comments, I don't think that's too uncharitable. (Also, I think TPO is some kind of weird Jewish supremacist or something, so "Nazi" probably doesn't fit him appropriately, anyway.)
>I think we're all being a bit broad and unparsimonious here.
Speak for yourself, I've seen enough support for TPO's comments to make my own judgements. Getting serious pushback as well as that does not negate any such claim because that isn't how distributions work, and I didn't say the majority of people on /r/slatestarcodex, *and* neither did /u/musicotic - so you're putting words in people's mouths there. I think you're being uncharitable in exactly that sort of manner: nobody said that debating people's ideas doesn't work.
You didn't, and you may not express that sentiment, but it's so common in this subreddit (and seemingly in this particular thread) that I assumed you were trying to imply TPO's positions are reflective of the typical /r/SSC or CW comment. But yes, even if you were, that couldn't be inferred just from that post, so I was being uncharitable and I apologize. I edited my post to clarify.
> I didn't say the majority of people on /r/slatestarcodex, and neither did /u/musicotic - so you're putting words in people's mouths there. I think you're being uncharitable in exactly that sort of manner: nobody said that debating people's ideas doesn't work.
True, you didn't say that and neither did they, but I've seen enough support for basically that position on this subreddit to make my own judgements.
Oh, I get it, you were talking about *other* people, who *aren't* the people you're talking to, who just happen to also be in the same subreddit, so the generalisation is warranted?
Fuck off dude, classic SSC "I can make up any generalisation I want as long as it fits my priors"
The generalization is definitely not warranted in the context of replying to you or them and I apologize for making the generalization; I was just cheekily miming your "I've seen enough support for TPO's comments to make my own judgements".
I was not in the right to apply that generalization when replying to /u/musicotic, so I was trying to kind of ironically (but poorly) acknowledge that my own generalization of this community's views may not be entirely accurate, just as I think your generalization of the reception to TPO's posts may not be entirely accurate. However, from reading this thread and subreddit, it seems hard to shake my generalization as it applies to this subreddit on average, even if it may not apply to you or /u/musicotic; but I'm definitely willing to change my view.
Surely it's better to just not start with a generalisation? A little knowledge of the subreddit reveals it has at least three strata of users:
(1) people whose originary interest in the subreddit was poking fun at Yudkowsky and especially the wackier rationalist shit
(2) people whose originary interest in the subreddit was disillusionment with SlateStarCodex and the associated subreddit
(3) people whose originary interest in the subreddit was advocating left-wing politics against perceivedly reactionary politics in the Culture War Thread
And there's some overlap, especially between the second two. Nonetheless, even within each stratum there's significant ideological and personal disagreement between individuals, as well as differences in emphasis. *Moreover* the reason for all these differences, whether of attitude, original attitude, background attitudes, emphasis, whatever...is each person is still reasoning from their own perspective and background, so *starting* with a generalisation from somebody's comments *just in one thread or subreddit* is a non-starter.
The problem you seem to be having, and which an *enormous* number of people are having over in /r/TheMotte and /r/SSC is not *checking* whether these early generalisations fit any sort of usable data. Surprising, but not that surprising, for a bunch of people whose main unitary feature is an avowed commitment to empiricism and countering biases. The problem is that I know a lot better than those people do what this subreddit is about, and what people are here for - and I include you in that group "those people".
The idea that one should comport one's beliefs to the evidence is an old one (which, incidentally, is one of the reasons I got into this whole thing: I always thought it was really funny that avowed "rationalists" often seemed to think they were doing something innovative).
> If I ever thought the majority of posters just agreed with his HBD stuff uncritically
What would it take to convince you of this? That's a pretty obvious claim from my point of view. Almost every HBD discussion ends up with one-sided vote counts (the exception are the discussions linked by sneerclub).
He still doesn’t get it, which is so sad. A (small and desperate)
part of me hoped he’d gotten rid of the thread because he realized the
criticisms had a point to them after all.
Sorry, but if you’re a moderator, it doesn’t matter if only 10% of
your users are openly white supremacists. If they get hundreds of net
upvotes and never get modded away, you’re allowing white supremacy to
take hold. I firmly disagree with his slippery slope argument that, if
you ban pedophiles, you have to ban everyone.
Also, I find it hypocritical that he criticizes people for saying the
thread was “full of Nazis” when it was only a few Nazis. Ater all, he
takes a few (admittedly) monsters who harassed in real life and
generalizes that to “all these sneerers and critics just have no empathy
so fuck them”.
>As much as the reader survey says that hard-right folks are in the minority
Honestly, I'm not sure how much we should believe this. Someone could be a weirdo preoccupied with pedo or "race realism" or whatever, but still click "left leaning" on a survey.
Plus the "counting comments" methodology is nonsense. Most posts are going to be short and low effort. If you select uniformly, you won't see much. The point is, some posts have "weight," which is hard to measure.
That said, sure, as a trans person, I could go in and write an essay length rebuttal each time a transphobic shithead decided to spew -- but *I don't fucking want to! OMG!* I want to live my life free of transphobic dipshits. I want them to go away, precisely because they're wretched.
The transphobe, by contrast, gets off on it. To them, it's their lifeblood, presumably because of their own messed up gender preoccupations. But whatever. If you give them a forum, they'll smear their shit all over it.
I can easily see somebody clicking left-leaning because they think, "I would be OK with free college and health care for me, and I don't mind gay people marrying, so I'm obviously left leaning," ignoring the part where their center-right at best on other cultural issues.
It's like all the anti-sjws on youtube or whatever who get offended at being called right wing, even though they spend 98% of the time attacking the left. It doesn't matter how left your personal beliefs are, if you only ever advocate for the right then you are functionally right wing.
if you see the 3rd pie chart where he breaks it down by political identity it gets juicier and casts a lot of doubt to the conclusion of a politically balanced subreddit
He's clearly drawing a distinction between "hateful people posting in a space designated for open conversation" and "hateful people deliberately seeking ways to make individuals miserable through personal targeting". Maybe this is not a useful distinction, but I don't think it's right to say just "it's the same with racists".
Yeah, a big problem is the moderation, saw a thread where somebody was just dropping neonazi memes aka '(((globalists)))' he got an inconsequential warning for being uncharitable, the post was left up.
I hope the moderator is just a bit naive and going 'just don't do this' but it can also be read as 'don't reveal your power level'. Anyway, in a subreddit that thinks a lot about how signaling should be costly, or else it is worthless, I can understand why neonazis and other fascists think this is their group. And why antifascists go 'wow fuck, burn this infested place to the ground'.
There was an SSC article a while back where Scott was talking about sexual harassment demographics in Hollywood, and a commenter posted something like "Most of the harassers are in the author's ethnic group, almost like he's distracting the issue away from them" in around that many words... and Scott was like "Did you mean Jews? Yes? Well okay you'll have to substantiate that claim or I'll have t-" SCOTT HE'S NOT ARGUING IN GOOD FAITH JUST BAN HIM.
I think Scott has a good faith belief in freedom of speech (unless the dude who based a story around Jewish kabbalism became a closet anti-Semitic behind our backs), but as you noted that's not the same as zero moderation.
And the followup never is 'you didn't substantiate your (bullshit) claim, so now you are banned' it is always left at that (it seems to me at least, I don't follow all the moderation actions, and I do get that moderation is hard (I empathize with the horrible job mods have))
They should delete more, warn anybody who uses the ((())) thing (you could argue that some leeway is allowed for when it is used ironically, or meta like here, but well, that didn't work on the main blog and the word neoreaction).
This applies to all the rationalists communities of course, not just scott and the subreddit. For a group who worry about infohazards, they allow a lot of infohazards around.
Edit: another moderation problem, not 100% on this btw, is that I think they only moderate in reaction. So if nobody pushes the 'report' button. No mod will look at it. (which prob self reinforces rightwing thought due to more rightwing people there).
> He still doesn't get it, which is so sad.
I know, right. He wrote:
>The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him.
And I read that thinking "Oh my god! He's getting it!"
And then he wrote a bunch of excruciatingly long paragraphs about how that is fine, actually, the problem is the damn Wreckers who just want to tar good, innocent comments-section-havers as pedophiles.
Doesn't seem to touch on how having a bunch of people dragging their awful rotting carcass of a pet issue into every thread might be a problem in and of itself.
Alright, gonna take a break from telling concern-trolls to post their hogs and actually respond for once. Stupid I know.
It's a little hard to explain, but it's analogous to how markets of free trades nonetheless produce undesirable results. Talking about edgier subjects is like putting out a kind of memetic pollution: it has distributed, hard-to-measure costs. In the case of this example, there's the problem that people who were abused as children aren't going to be at all comfortable participating in a discussion where they're going to have to defend themselves from the pro-pedo guy. And for a lot of other people, this is going to be a difficult and upsetting topic, even if it's not enough to make them leave the discussion. They'll be on edge, having to work harder to keep the discussion focused (something something optimising for light rather than heat).
Now, you might say that the "point" of the CW thread is to have that kind of high-difficulty conversation where everyone's surrounded by opinions they hate and having to work hard to not scream at everyone. I could say this is fundamentally unfair because the political right-wing are more frequently the kind of psychopaths who don't give a bean for other people's comfort where they're not actively revelling in its absence, but I think you'd say that this is my own bias. Still, I think it's ultimately the case that any given conversation online is going to exclude someone. Saying "everyone is welcome" just ultimately means "the people most willing to put up with shit are welcome." Saying "the only requirement is CiViLiTy" just ultimately means "the most unfeeling lizard-people are welcome." It doesn't really matter if that biases the results one way or the other politically; it matters that the conversation tends towards being dominated by terrible people - for examples of which see, oh, I don't know, about a third of the posts in this sub. You can end up thinking that "moral progress" means dettaching yourself from the warm feelings that made you moral to begin with and aping their bizarre lizard-culture of galaxy-brained takes and endless gay cakes (seriously, that one incident seems to take up about 50% of some of these people's minds, what's the deal).
I don't really have a good answer for the fundamental incompatibility of sufficiently different potential-participants-in-The-Discourse. But I object very strongly to anyone who thinks the CW thread was even close to being one.
Here, I'm going to reveal a powerful secret to you: when you change the words in a sentence, the sentence means something different! (I got that one from Ozy, actually, so I won't say rationalism never gave me anything). Yes, the meta-level principle "sneer at weird discussions of subjects apparently beyond the moral horizon" would have gotten the wrong answer in the 1800s. But that's not the logic at work here. Instead we *start* from the dirty corrupted sublunary object level where statements like "homosexuality is okay" and "ethnostates are not okay" are decided, and then sneer at people who want to keep having both those conversations forever while claiming that they're actually they're just following a principle that would have put them on the forefront of morality in the past. Though it seems overwhelmingly more likely that they'd have been out measuring skulls and advocating for eugenics then, too.
You're right that no one forced anyone into the CW thread. I don't even think that it should cease to exist; it's an endless supply of sneerworthy takes for those weeks when the core rationalists aren't on their best game. Like, I can see how this might seem contradictory. What am I sneering for if not to try to effect policy changes in how communities like that thread are run? Well, for fun, obviously, but it's hard to deny that people here do say things to the effect of "urgh they need better moderation to rein in all the shitty topics." So how can I say I actually want the thread to exist? Well, it's like complaining about the weather but with a stronger moral dimension, is the best explanation I can offer. You'd probably be best off just lurking here until you get a feel for it.
> Shortly, because that is how I see us to make moral progress.
That has nothing to do with how actual moral progress has ever been made. MLK and the civil rights movement made a lot of progress, but nobody at the time thought they were "on topic and polite."
I have a dream that my posts will one day live in a subreddit where they will not be judged by the content of their text but by the tone of their prose.
There was no 'communication' between racist white people and struggling black people. The federal government made an executive decision to help black people because having constant riots at home was a bad idea while fighting the Cold War, and lynching black people was a bad look when most of the world is full of brown people (https://networks.h-net.org/node/512/reviews/612/goddard-dudziak-cold-war-civil-rights-race-and-image-american-democracy).
Exactly this. He somehow cannot handle criticism of himself, but thinks it's just dandy to host a gaggle of pedos, racists, and transphobes. He just cannot see.
I think he meant that some people suggested that \*most\* of the contributions in the thread were racist/anti-trans etc., and that that wasn't true. He did not similarly say that "most of the people who message me are bad faith critics".
Even if he did, this is not necessarily hypocritical. He could be OK with people writing racist (or marxist) things in a thread associated with his blog (whether they are the majority of posters or not), but not be OK with people doxxing him (or others) and trying to get him (or others) fired (whether this accounts for the majority of his online interactions or not). I don't think this is hypocritical.
I believe a socialist state would lead to the death of millions of people in the United States. This is not unreasonable and is a fairly common view as the founding of socialist states have lead to many deaths in other countries.
If I was was moderating a political forum and had the idea to ban the most harmful views, socialism would be near the top of my list, along with white nationalism.
Do you agree with me that socialism discussion should be banned in this scenario? If not, do you have any reason why I should not ban socialism discussion in this scenario other then that you think I am exaggerating it’s danger?
Because that is the obvious response by someone who is a socialist or who doesn’t think socialism is a danger.
My point is that people will disagree pretty strongly about what is and is not a dangerous ideology. If you don’t have an agreed upon norms for speech(such as a general principle of freedom of expression) you have no appeal when someone cuts off ideas you believe in other then “my ideas are right yours are wrong”. Obviously this will not be respected if those who disagree with you are in power.
Right now the people who control speech generally allow socialist ideas to be spread, but this might not always be the case.
Also, as someone against both socialism and white nationalism, wanting all these threads shut down but not their own makes leftist look hypocritical. Why should I care that they want these threads shut down when they would complain endlessly if their own were.
I’ll make it very simple.
What are your norms for speech other then “shut down the speech I dont like?” Any norm that would keep someone who didn’t like socialism from shutting socialist speech down?
yes, lots of them, most of them rely on not my preferences but on carefully analysing the pros and cons of different kinds of speech. My advocacy thereof tends to get derided as insufficiently abstract or "meta-level" by fans of silly online blogs, which I'm perfectly happy with. Some of those norms would presumably stop people from shutting socialist speech down some of the time.
That sounds like you're not listening, or you somehow think that having a belief isn't anything deeper than having a preference, or both which is what I anticipated in the first place
Not 100% sure what your point is here, but the point of a norm is that it can be agreed upon by a lot of different people. If it is personally specific to you or you won’t even say what it is that’s basically the same thing as saying “shut down all speech that I don’t like”.
No, that's a stupid thing to say. If it's personally specific to me then it might be hard for other people to agree with me. That doesn't mean that it's effectively "shut down all speech that I don't like" because I can still be *right* and those people who disagree can still be *wrong*.
The arch-relativism of some free speech absolutists is terrifying sometimes.
But I highly doubt you are right all the time. Neither am I, that is the point. We need ways to be able to still discuss things if we disagree. If we don’t have this, discussion doesn’t happen and it becomes whoever has access to the most guns and money gets to decide what can and can not be spoken about.
I’m glad you like discussions, but to have robust discussions we need to have, if not a totally free discussion, at least a reasonable framework for what is and what is not allowed. If we don’t have that, it will just be people arguing over narrow differences.
I favor discussions with moderation for low effort comments and troll posts, but that are otherwise free.
I am assuming you are against these discussion standards, even in places you don’t visit. I am wondering what standards you would propose instead.
I am also assuming, based on your comments, that you favor restrictive moderation in line with your personal views, which I think is ironic considering your professed love of discussion.
What do "low-effort comments and troll posts" have to do with this talk about socialism.
>I am also assuming, based on your comments, that you favor restrictive moderation in line with your personal views, which I think is ironic considering your professed love of discussion.
I can't really rebut this unless you *clarify* what you think I want, instead of just repeating what you've said before. I asked you to give me new information, not repeat the old.
I mean people who actively contributed to worsening the whole
community’s reputation based on a few bad actors
Holy shit then ban the fucking bad actors JFC this has been suggested
a million times forever by every single reasonable person in the sub
going back to CE 0. Seriously, there are bad actors and they
will influence people’s opinions and when they do and
when people leave they leave with a snapshot of their opinions
at that time, influenced by the bad actors.
I’m not saying this as someone who’s in it for the sneers, I’m saying
this as a former sub user who left because bad actors were
constantly getting away with acting badly. So, when I
say “yeah the CW thread is riddled with (actual) Nazis” (note: I haven’t
actually said, this, but if someone asked me, I probably would) it’s not
because I hate you, or the sub, or the mods, or anything in
particular–it’s because I’ve seen evidence, time and time again, of it
being used that way to absolutely no moderator response.
If you don’t want your name attached to Nazis, ban the god damn
Nazis. The amount of effort being done to show that false rape claims
should be taken seriously or whatever while simultaneously ignoring the
comparatively insane amount of white supremacy posts while fucking
handwringing about how unfair the comparison is is absolutely
stupefying.
I will be honest and admit I rarely read the thread myself.
This so, so, obvious. You have skin in the game; read the thread
attached to your blog’s name sometime–you’ll actually see why
people are saying these things about it.
Eighth, as a final middle-finger at the people who killed the Culture
War thread, I’d like to advertise r/TheMotte, its new home, in the hopes
that this whole debacle Streisand-Effects it to the stratosphere.
It’s good to know Scott fully endorses this new subreddit and culture
war thread. I thought he was trying to distance himself from it, but
nope!
Yeah, seems quite counterintuitive to write a big post about how you were persecuted for platforming bigoted views / espousing them, and then turn around and give a big thumbs up and a wink to the new platform. The only distinction between the two is that one isn't directly associated with his brand, it's not like the new sub is any less popular
Eighth, as a final middle-finger at the people who killed the Culture
War thread, I’d like to advertise r/TheMotte,
its new home, in the hopes that this whole debacle Streisand-Effects
it to the stratosphere.
What? I thought the point of all this was that he wanted the Nazi
stuff to be less associated with his reputation, but then later in the
same post, he’s making a public endorsement of it. It seems to me like
we’re more justified than ever in criticizing him and his blog. Is he
really trying to appease us by doubling down on the exact behavior that
we were mad about in the first place?
Of course, doxxing and harassment should still be absolutely
prohibited in all contexts.
Some people started an article about me on a left-wing wiki that
listed the most offensive things I have ever said, and the most
offensive things that have ever been said by anyone on the SSC subreddit
and CW thread over its three years of activity, all presented in the
most damning context possible; it started steadily rising in the Google
search results for my name. A subreddit devoted to insulting and mocking
me personally and Culture War thread participants in general got
started; it now has over 2,000 readers. People started threatening to
use my bad reputation to discredit the communities I was in and the
causes I cared about most.
of course not saying, or doing, or posting these things is not on the
table
rationality: talking about the awful things I say and do is so
much worse than me doing them
This is a pretty damning admission from him. He can't say any of the things were said "out of context", so he has to say it was in a damning context, which isn't any sort of escape from the guilt.
Maybe my experience up til now has been a total fluke, but like, I’ve
had a way easier time talking about politics or social issues with
members of what Scott would call the red tribe than with rationalists or
similar tech-libertarian types. That may not be the same as rationalists
being more right-wing than the typical Republican voter, but in practice
it can definitely feel that way.
Yeah, because your common or garden reactionary has all the typical blind spots and contradictions of a regular human being, but hasn't built themselves an entire worldview saying that they've discovered the capital-T Truth.
Edit: in retrospect, this is maybe a bit unfair -- Evangelical Christianity is all about the having discovered some kind of ultimate final knowledge -- but I think that there's something different in the rationalist self-conception that makes talking politics or social issues with them different than talking to the right wing dude at the corner bar.
Smart Red Tribers may disagree with me on policy, but at least we're both talking the same language of politics. OTOH, many rationalists basically discovered politics the equivalent of nineteen seconds ago and have no historical knowledge or backing on why things the way they are.
I’m a bit disappointed that it was harassment that did it in, rather
than principles or something. Some people are genuinely awful, and I’m
not really sure how any Internet community should deal with the
existence of 1-in-10000-type sociopaths.
But I’m also a little upset at some of my (otherwise generally
excellent) friends in the rationalist community who were quick to jump
on the “Oh, yeah, the SSC subreddit is full of gross people and I wish
they couldn’t speak” bandwagon (… I mean people who actively contributed
to worsening the whole community’s reputation based on a few bad
actors). I understand you were probably honest in your opinion, but I
think there was a lot of room to have thought through those opinions
more carefully.
There’s something very hard to sympathize with this whole narrative,
though. It’s always this obsession with being oppressed, the
getting-stuffed-in-a-locker complex for lack of better words. There’s no
room here for the person who thinks the CW thread is bad yet
doesn’t think everyone who posted there should be locked away in a
Siberian gulag.
Fuck you Scott. I’ve always been something close to a supporter of
you, personally, thinking that the community around you mostly only
spoke to your naivety, but I remember when you posted that “After being
challenged to back this up, I analyzed ten randomly chosen comments on
the thread; four seemed neutral, three left/liberal, and three
conservative”–the categorization was complete fucking bullshit. The
survey means fucking nothing, I took it, I was duly counted as a leftist
who has posted there, but I’m a guy who posted maybe 40 comments total
(and deleted most of them in genuine embarrassment over having earnest
engagement with such awful community in my comment history) and the
survey counted me just has hard as fash powerusers like Namrock, qualia
of mercy, and trannyporn who, to be clear, aren’t lonely voices in the
wilderness but reap the upvotes wherever they go
Someone who relies on such idiotic data in the face of the obvious
still doesn’t deserve doxing, fuck that forever, but a sad few weeks
that results in him breaking the favorite toy of a bunch of shit people?
Yeah, that sounds like justice to me
Some people seem very eager to forget that the very concept of 'culture war,' at least in the US, grew out of second New Right populism, that progressive and social liberal tolerance was an attack on 'traditional' American culture. Like, no shit it's going to serve reactionary political agendas. That's its goddamn home. It's a justification for waging retaliation.
If you ever had any doubt that Scott is anything but a dishonest, passive-aggressive coward I think this post should disabuse people who hold out hope for Scott. Here's the thing that really gets me: Scott isn't dumb. He *knows* what he's saying is bullshit. He *knows* that the CW thread was never anything more than an anti-SJW circlejerk that harbored plenty of outright racists. I mean, it got so bad that the mods decided to ban any discussion of HBD for a couple of months. (So much for free speech!) But even though Scott knows this he will persist in this deception that no, the CW thread was really quite fine and the problem is the pearl-clutching liberals who can't handle actual conservative arguments.
This is what fascinates me, personally: the will to self-deception. How is it that intelligent people can so easily lie to themselves?
I suspect that in the end guys like Scott really are just cowards. They live in a state of just constant, overwhelming *fear* and this really, really warps them. One of the first posts I read about SSC was how Scott was deathly afraid of talking to women at his job for fear of sexual harassment but he was also enormously bitter about stupid men -- I think called Larry or something -- who fearlessly approached women and had fathered multiple children by different mothers. The post stuck with me because it was such a crystal clear example of neurosis. I still find it remarkable that real people live in such real fear of such wholly imaginary things. This is the incredible power of ideology: you can make real people enormously afraid of things that don't exist at all! Guys like Scott don't live in the real world. They are trapped in a paranoid fantasy. It's a fantasy where men are immediately thrown into jail just for talking to women and the "Left" (a vague, formless blob, note how Scott never ever quotes any actual Leftist thinkers) are constantly threatening to overthrow the system and replace a mostly good system (at least for guys like Scott) with anarchy.
I think in fifty years historians will look back on these early days and marvel at the overwhelming power of fear. They will call ours an Age of Fear. This was a time when even the most privileged and powerful people on the planet were prone to flights of fancy against the great threat of the SJWs.
But why?
There's an argument to be made that at the end of the day capitalism has to find some way of preserving itself in the face of overwhelming inequality and rampant environmental destruction. This to me, at least, is why this the idea of somebody like Scott, one of the most privileged and powerful people on the planet, hiding in his dark room, quaking with fear, suffering a nervous breakdown because the SJWs are on to him, is so funny and remarkable. It's practically magical. The best part is that nobody planned this. Nobody told Scott to become a stupid and dishonest coward just like nobody told a bunch of poor rural white people to kill themselves with alcohol and opiates and nobody told Millennials to stop having babies. The market, unbidden, produced this. That's absolutely magical. (Well billionaires certainly helped but I don't billionaires can actually make people internalize the logic of the market.)
Anyways I think Scott is a victim but not of the fearsome SJWs. We should be contemptuous of cowards, yes, but there's a certain sympathy to be had for the sick and for children who are not raised well. I've now come to believe that guys like Scott and Tucker Carlson really are extremely fragile. They are also enormously dishonest about their role in the larger capitalist project. But this is not an act and their goal is not to deceive. The fear is real. I might also say the market produced these guys: it found them, elevated them, gave them an audience. It literally raised them. The market needed cowards and cowards is what we got. In the end Scott is a product of the capitalist project just like Fox News and over-packaged fruit. This is also why his histrionics always seem so cheesy and overwrought, right? Does anybody else detect this?
Anyways, enough drunken rambling.
Edit: BTW I can't find this Scott post where he talks about his overwhelming fear of being accused of sexual harassment and his bitterness towards Larry. I wonder if it's been deleted? Anyways I swear it existed though I provide no link.
> I think in fifty years historians will look back on these early days and marvel at the overwhelming power of fear. They will call ours an Age of Fear. This was a time when even the most privileged and powerful people on the planet were prone to flights of fancy against the great threat of the SJWs.
>
> But why?
Because their power (or, in the case of the hoi polloi who buy into this worldview--the power they feel vicariously by submitting to powerful people) is their source of identity, so they're terrified at the prospect of losing it because they don't know who they are without it and don't think they can compete without it.
When everyone else was learning to take care of themselves, process emotions, have human relationships, justify themselves, improve themselves, develop skills, etc., the powerful people were busy forming an identity that said, "I don't have to do any of that, because I have what trumps all of that--power." It's why, to give a blunt example, with all the resources he has, Trump's idea of a first date is to have the woman watch him eat dinner in his housecoat in his hotel room, and then tell her to give him a blowjob. This isn't a coincidence, it's not because he's incapable of behaving like an adult, it's because *that ineptitude, and having the power that lets him take from people precisely in the circumstance where everyone involved knows he's completely inept, is exactly what he values*.
You take people like this and suggest to them that their power is illegitimate and should be taken from them, and you're striking at the heart of their sense of self--naturally, this horrifies them viscerally.
To everyone else, their terror looks ludicrous and childish, because all that's being suggested is that maybe, under ideal circumstances, they might be expected to do and be treated like literally everyone else on the planet. But that's just the thing, they identify with *not* having to do what everyone else on the planet does.
> I can't find this Scott post where he talks about his overwhelming fear of being accused of sexual harassment and his bitterness towards Larry. I wonder if it's been deleted? Anyways I swear it existed though I provide no link.
I need that post in my life
He does talk in that post that fear is what drives censorship. Fear of doxxing, of having their lives endlessly harassed, etc. I don't need to laundry list the people who had their lives essentially ended by internet rage.
I struggle to see how the comfort of women and the help of men are isolated from each other: the point of the word *you used*, "safely", is to put the two in the same sphere. The comfort of women is, to put it bluntly, the "help" of making sure men exhibit their sexuality safely. And if you don't want to speak for my life I'd prefer you simply don't, instead of giving a mealy-mouthed justification for why you've just done so.
>The feminist response to people in this position should not be focused on the well being of the women they are attracted to, but of they themselves. You don't give such a person advice on how they could better to others, you give them advice on how they could be better towards themselves.
Except the paragraph you quoted from theunitofcaring is entirely about how she feared her desire to kiss girls was inherently harmful and pressuring *to the girls*. Advising TUOC on her own wellbeing therefore must centrally involve guiding her to a better understanding of how she affects *others*. (A topic that feminist relationship guides discuss at great length). You cannot separate the two when the wellbeing of Person A is affected by their fear of harming Person B.
Feminism has never "laid claim" to the entire domain of gender and sexuality, though it supports liberation from patriarchy there as well as elsewhere. Feminism has also had plenty to say about healthy male sexuality, including (especially) for gender nonconforming and neuroatypical men. This is so common among feminists that any claim that they don't do it strikes me as dishonest. But feminism isn't a nanny, a therapist, or a dating-coach, and Scott's dating woes do not signify any failure on its part.
Your "challenge" to the argument that feminism does handle it is empty. You don't like *how* feminism handles it. Feminists and feminist allies have written entire books and blogs and essays that bear on this topic, but you don't like what they say. You don't like what Laurie Penny says, or probably Dr. Nerdlove, or Nora Samaron's essay on masculine nurturance culture, or The Good Men Project, or the AskFeminist subreddit threads on positive masculinity, or the menslib subreddit, or bell hooks on masculinity and love, or the insights of gay and bi men on gender roles, or the feminist-run spaces for male sexual assault survivors. No one is forcing you to take their advice, but neither can you honestly say they don't handle it. You want feminism to cater to your values and preferences and needs, when it has no reason to do so.
You claim it has a reason to do so, through a poor analogy to women seeking raises. First of all, some of us don't want to teach women to be more assertive or companies to change how they interview. Some of us want women to seize the means of production. Some of us want to do away with wage labor entirely. Some of us want women to "lean in" to corporate structures and for corporate structures to accommodate us, but that's in no way universal. But regardless, women's economic equality & liberation is part of the core mission of feminism. Helping you in particular, with your particular set of problems, get a date, without telling you anything you don't want to hear, is not.
Now, maybe your problems are private. Or maybe they're structural, but that doesn't automatically make them feminism's problem. Maybe they have more to do with, for instance, accessibility of mental health services.
As for "or else they'll pick up the red pill": do you honestly believe threatening women with adopting a rapist's mindset is the way to go here? Plenty of people don't pick up the red pill, despite their misery. I'm quite comfortable not catering to the threats of the ones who do. "Take care of our dating needs or we'll pick up the red pill" is not what someone says if they actually recognize your humanity.
That's the post! Wow. 2014 seems like 20 years ago.
Thanks.
> I sometimes view social justice as capitalism's way of preserving its self in the face of overwhelming inequality.
I can see the argument for this but somehow I suspect capitalism would still be strongly against calls for equality even if "social justice" wasn't entirely a thing. You can see this most clearly if you review the history of slave rebellions going back to Sumer -- a bit before social justice was entirely a thing -- when people calling for justice were regularly executed.
> is largely due to a failure of the feminist movement towards gnc and or neuro-atypical men.
I don't know if Scott has ever professed to be neuro-atypical. It's possible. Either way I don't think that makes guys like him any less *useful*. I mean, logically, the argument that feminism fails to account for neuro-atypicals doesn't justify the total rejection of feminism but it sure is useful.
Edit: Re-reading that post I think I must've mentally combined two posts. That's the post where Scott whines about Henry. I think there was another post where he talked about being in sexual harassment training and becoming increasingly paranoid. (Interesting how my brain compressed these things into one "emblematic" post that doesn't exist. This is why I try to provide links to stuff. The brain plays tricks. But here Google really is failing me.)
I meant it more like: I have no desire to talk about the merits and pitfalls of the various forms of feminism here and I should have not posted this. But I lack self control.
> three left/liberal
And that is the problem right there. There is a lot of room inbetween those two stances.
And you can take [lord foppington out of the subreddit, but you can never take lord foppington out of the subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/at1vwp/neanderthal_genes_influence_contemporary_humans). (By which I mean, the problem isn't just the 'x comments are left/rightwing' it is also the type of things that get discussed).
Rationalists pride themselves on being "logical" and relying on "facts" but then all their arguments are based on flawed premises.
And they'll use garbage data too
Fuck the threats, to be clear. Anyone who does that shit is a psychopath on par with the worst of the culture war thread posters.
But we're also talking about a community that sneers at far more vulnerable people who get far less justified abuse *all the fucking time*. People who have built their entire political identity around convincing themselves that said people are villains instead of victims, and not just any villains, but paramount villains necessitating endless hand-wringing and discussion. I'm not going to cry because he resisted calls to reject that until he was past the breaking point.
eh. i just got out of inpatient + outpatient treatment for an emotional break (plus a fun cocktail of mental issues they discovered while i was in there). it was a painful experience, but i think it was ultimately very healing, in part because it led me to step back and acknowledge the painful things i was avoiding.
the fact that scooter had that experience and emerged utterly unreflective reduces my sympathy for him. (for christ's sake, his solution to "everyone thinks i'm creating a safe space for wordy nazis" was "i'll add a single layer of indirection between me and my wordy nazi safe space!")
reactionaries should be deplatformed. i don't care if they're happy about it.
and honestly, if Chad Thundercock or whatever his name is isn't seeing patients anymore, well, cry me a river.
It's one thing to be reflective if he lost readers or had a unflattering article written about him ("maybe they're right?"), but rebounding from an non-constructive threat is a *bit* much to ask ("Well, does the dude threatening to doxx me have a point?").
> and honestly, if Chad Thundercock or whatever his name is isn't seeing patients anymore, well, cry me a river.
We need more psychs, Scott losing his practice would be a bad outcome for SF mental health if nothing else.
yeah i guess that's kinda victim-blamey.
really i just want the people i don't like to suffer and am hiding behind a facade of recalcitrance and performative suffering as disingenuous protection from bad press if my real name is ever associated with this account. good thing nobody else does this
> We need more psychs, Scott losing his practice would be an awful outcome.
i don't think jordan peterson or scott alexander should be seeing patients, change my mind
Peterson, god no, Jungians basically believe in magic, the man's an utter quack
Alexander, though, is so good at compartmentalization and so hyper-scrupulous about anything resumbling a rule (including professional norms) that I bet he's genuinely good at his job
That's possible, but I can't see how compartmentalization can give him empathy and warmth if he didn't have any in the first place. Unless he's mainly the kind of shrink who writes prescriptions. And being a good therapist or shrink isn't easy in the first place--out of, the four or so that I've seen, I've never had anything more than a mediocre experience, and every single one of them had better people skills than Scooter seems to.
I mean,Empathy at least is not a mystical quality that you have or don't have, it's a skill that everyone should be able to learn, and much of the time you are just thinking through a situation from another person's perspective, which Scott is perfectly capable of doing and does frequently.
Warmth is more ehh, but I imagine at least some people prefer a more cold "lets put our heads together and clinically work through your neurosis" approach.
> you are just thinking through a situation from another person's perspective, which Scott is perfectly capable of doing and does frequently
A whole bunch of feminists, POCs, and sundry other leftists are going to have to agree to disagree with you about that.
I'm not a sociopath either, but there are plenty of social situations less complex than a therapeutic situation that I flub.
As for reasons to doubt his warmth, they're all over his tumblr and personal blog. That thing he wrote about how nobody enjoys Halloween parties, that other thing where he said he regards most people with a mixture of boredom and terror (in his essay about cuddle puddles), and _this_ little gem: https://www.tumblr.com/dashboard/blog/slatestarscratchpad/182599433221
> Speculation: nobody really enjoys social situations. Everyone is just driving to Abilene, all the time. People want the warm glow of knowing they have friends, but it’s impossible to have a friendship without one party eventually cracking and worrying that they need to invite the other to a social engagement or else they’ll “be a bad friend”, and then the other party feels duty-bound to accept. Then this becomes part of the lore that keeps people convinced that social situations are necessary and widely enjoyed. Eventually people become so oversensitized to this whole dynamic that they can’t even distinguish between the feeling of wanting something versus feeling obliged to do it to maintain their relationships.
>
>This is also my theory for board games, movies, office parties, fancy restaurants, and sex.
What kind of human being suspects a vast social conspiracy wherein nobody actually likes sex??
> high tolerance for engaging with monsters is probably a very positive and useful tool for a clinical psychologist
Just saw this. Come the fuck on, why assume that most people seeing a clinical psychologist are 'monsters'?
imo the Halloween post is 110% relatable if you read it in the context of his immediate IRL social group including people like Brent Dill, a longtime Burning Man power-user who was tolerated, despite being the world's most obvious domestic abuser, because he was good at costuming and event planning
but this is kind of a silly point to belabor and a borderline creepy discussion so I'm not going to do it anymore beyond emphasizing that if Scott is not a competent psychologist, the schooling he finished not too long ago and the professional accreditation board he answers to are infinitely more qualified to judge that than the likes of us
> Brent Dill, a longtime Burning Man power-user who was tolerated, despite being the world's most obvious domestic abuser, because he was good at costuming and event planning
I doubt that. Sounds more like rape culture than anything else. I've seen my female friends go through plenty of awful shit outside of the rationalist community, at the hands of people who weren't pillars of the community. Getting away with rape isn't just for rich white frat boys; you can be a socially awkward POC and do it too.
Besides, how you react to costuming is entirely in your head, and still says something about you. I went to Burning Man itself once in cargo shorts and felt not the slightest qualms about my lack of costuming.
> the schooling he finished not too long ago and the professional accreditation board he answers to are infinitely more qualified to judge that than the likes of us
Speaking as someone who's tried to find a competent therapist...no, the current system for producing mental health experts sucks. And I have considerable privilege when it comes to finding a good therapist. I can't imagine what it's like for people who don't make six figures in the Bay Area.
> but this is kind of a silly point to belabor
Why? I have spent literally years trying to get over bad therapy experiences. You can very easily do a lot of damage with one or two poorly-phrased comments. If Scooter fostering a platform for racists is a problem worthy of a sneer, why isn't his performance as a psychiatrist? That does a lot more direct, obvious damage.
I agree with a report here:
>high tolerance for engaging with monsters
This phrase scoots past "some subset of people are difficult, even monstrous, who go in for psychiatric care" and into
1) Generalising people with mental health issues as "monsters"
2) Implying that "monsters" are over-represented amongst mentally ill people, please *heavily* edit your comment if you want it unremoved
how about "but if you can engage with monsters you're probably great at dealing with people who are merely mentally ill."
(which, to be clear, is 100% what I meant from the start--but the alternative reading is understandable)
Fine but if you're gonna take your moderation that tight please say something to the guy I was talking to, only reason I even went down that far in the thread is because I wanted to rebut the pro-doxxing argument he was building
You have _seriously pissed me off_ with your accusation that I would be pro-doxxing. I am not pro-doxxing. Where the fuck did you see that in my comments? Neither I nor /u/brokenAmmonite think he should be doxxed. We think Scooter is a bad psychiatrist and should leave the field, and I gave _ample_ reasons as to why, including firsthand experience with seeing therapists, none of which you bothered to address.
Have you any sense of fucking proportion? How is it possible for you to read "I think he's a bad shrink" and think that automatically leads to being pro-doxxing? Nobody, nobody ever said, "Scooter should be doxxed because he's a bad shrink."
I don't need to "build up" to doxxing if I think that's the right thing to do, because this is an internet forum. I could have just said it right from the start. For example, I'm not going to "build up" to calling you a rotting bellend. You are a rotting bellend.
As far as I can tell, you built up this edifice of unsupported suppositions because /u/brokenAmmonite thought that Scooter not being able to see patients as a result of the doxxing would be, at least, a positive outcome, which isn't the same as being pro-doxxing at all. No leftist likes diseases, but if Trump caught the measles and died, who would be complaining? Does that mean leftists actually like measles now?
> I even went down that far in the thread is because I wanted to rebut the pro-doxxing argument he was building
So when you type too fast, casual bigotry towards the mentally ill falls out, good, good. Great look after all the breathless words you typed about how SSC was so bad for the marginalized, but when two people with experience with the mental health system tell you they think Scooter would be bad for the mental health system, you act like a dick. I don't believe you that you wanted to rebut a pro-doxxing argument. Doxxing is prima facie wrong, and the mods would have banned me if I'd said anything of the sort. I bet you just wanted to argue because you still like Scooter and you don't like hearing criticisms of his ability to do his job, especially since you clearly don't take the concerns of those with mental illness seriously.
You call yourself a leftist, who cares about the marginalized? _Try fucking listening next time_ when they're speaking.
Maybe that's not what you were doing.
> As far as I can tell, you built up this edifice of unsupported suppositions because /u/brokenAmmonite thought that Scooter not being able to see patients as a result of the doxxing would be, at least, a positive outcome, which isn't the same as being pro-doxxing at all
And maybe that's not what he was doing. But you were both was sure a *fuck* giving an excuse to anyone who did. You are talking about the professional expertise of someone you have not only never been the patient of, someone you have never observed, but someone *you've never even fucking met,* and saying "it would be better if they lost their entire career." And in an everyday conversation it would be only ridiculous, nothing more, in a regular SneerClub thread it would be next to nothing, but here? This thread is largely about someone who quite possibly thought exactly what you did, and only took it the half-step further and acted to protect patients from this person and his lack of basic human attributes like warmth and apathy.
And you seemed really stuck on the fucking point too. Frankly I was wondering if I might be talking to the guy who actually did it. But, at any rate, I didn't want to see a line of argument about "why it would be better if this sociopath lost his job" go unrebutted in **a thread about how someone tried to make him lose his job.**
If you want to interpret that as some kind of expression of my deep seated bigotry, be my guest.
I'd really rather just drop it but... do you *really* not see how saying that a professional psychologist shouldn't see patients because he "never had" any "empathy or warmth" is toeing the line of justifying a dox? Like, what's the position here, Scooter is a terrible psychologist who is probably hurting his patients by virtue of lacking basic human skills but it goes without saying that we should absolutely leave him alone because those are the rules of Reddit? And I'm an asshole for not assuming that people (both commentators and readers) who think the first part aren't going to be held back by the second part?
No I don't.
The position is that he shouldn't be seeing patients because he doesn't have empathy or warmth, which is a different thing from "we should stop him from seeing patients by harassing him", the same way that "Jeremy Corbyn should not be prime minister because he's incompetent" is different from "Jeremy Corbyn should be removed from office by MI5 if he ever gets elected".
I hold the first opinion but not the second: you see?
Ban is permanent.
No joke you can find people in the history of this place saying they've had violence threatened against them because (non-exhaustive list):
1. "Gimme your lunch money"
2. Threatened to have their heads shoved down a toilet
3. Said their views were wrong
4. Said their views were evil
5. Said their views were abhorrent (that was me)
If people with a following like SA and Yudkowsky are going to go around making claims that people from here are doxxing people over trivial shit like this, then I'm gonna take a pretty strong line against people who throw out random accusations without evidence, it's not interesting so much as dumb.
> Like, what's the position here, Scooter is a terrible psychologist who is probably hurting his patients by virtue of lacking basic human skills but it goes without saying that we should absolutely leave him alone because those are the rules of Reddit?
You finally learned to read!
> And I'm an asshole for not assuming that people (both commentators and readers) who think the first part aren't going to be held back by the second part?
Bingo. I'm proud of how far you've come.
I just think it's extremely sketch to be like "this guy is probably really bad for his patients"--based on basically nothing--in a context where someone who got his real name just called up his boss and said "this guy is probably really bad for his patients."
I wouldn't say anything posted crossed the line, but I'd also say that nothing I did either, so I'm ultimately not really sure where the line was. Whatevs, what's done is done.
So you're saying that you don't have any evidence for your allegation that /u/zhezhijian was justifying doxxing?
Because if I were in a testier mood I'd probably have said to you: "stop fucking waffling and own your mistake". I could not care any less what "I think" is "extremely sketchy" unless it turns on the doxxing issue you raised. I did, after all, green up for a reason: do you want banned or what?
What "line" you're discussing I have no idea, but your previous line (the one *you drew!!!*) was, quote, "the pro-doxxing argument he was building"
I didn't say I wanted anyone banned or anything deleted, I said I wanted you to say something. My main concern was that the "this guy shouldn't have his job" discussion would continue without anyone rebutting it, but that didn't happen, and the main guy who was doing it made a great big show about how much he hates doxing, so THERE'S NO PROBLEM HERE OFFICER.
> a high tolerance for engaging with monsters is probably a very positive and useful tool for a clinical psychologist
wow you have a healthy view of mental health 😬😬😬
Not for people outside his own tiny clique, which is the entire fucking point. If you think Scott has empathy for women, for people of color, for traumatized people, for anyone he considers an intellectual inferior... then you don't understand what the word empathy means at all.
I'll give you a hint: if you're comfortable considering genocide against a group, you do not have empathy for them. Just a handy little heuristic.
good post attempt but youve fumbled the landing. I didnt write "have less influence", i wrote "suffer". weakening the wording takes all the juice out of it. you just come off as a stuttering nerd trying to get a comeback off in debate club
>i just got out of inpatient + outpatient treatment for an emotional break (plus a fun cocktail of mental issues they discovered while i was in there)
Damn... I can't believe this is the psychological profile of someone who would threaten and harass someone to the point of nervous breakdown.
Do you have evidence that the poster you are responding to harassed and threatened Scott? (That is, they actually harassed and threatened Scott, and didn't just say in a third-party forum that they don't feel bad for Scott.) If you do, then could you please send a message to modmail spelling out that evidence? We take harassment seriously and if u/brokenAmmonite was among those harassing Scott and his friends then we'll pull out the banhammer.
On the other hand, if you are just speaking out your ass, kindly fuck off.
fwiw i've never communicated in any way with scott / yudkowsky / any of the other big sneer targets.
i do make post angry posts on sneerclub because im angry about things tho. can't say whose read those.
also one time i posted 'ban me nazi pricks lmao' on /r/themotte to get them to ban me, i guess that could maybe count as harassment??
I've never been in this subreddit before, I found it today after reading Scott's blog post and searching for the community that he was referring to.
I just wanted to say that I think you are truly a bad person. I think people like you are more harmful to society than any racist ever will. I'm a random person you have never met and never will, so you can ignore me, or call me names, or go through my post history and find something you can point at to show I'm a hypocrite or a liar or whatever you want. The mods may also delete this comment, I don't know if this is allowed or not, I don't really care. I just wanted you to know that a random stranger thinks you are a terrible person, and I wanted to say this publicly. I truly honestly hope you get to grow as a person and get look back at who you are now in disbelief.
The moral condemnation of a community whose highest moral priority--not just something they like in the abstract, but the the thing they organize all their discussion and values around--is creating a space in the discourse for race science, petty contrarianism, authoritarianism, and the utterly neurotic concerns of a class of white male nerds who are the only fucking people in on this gay earth actually enjoying a modicum of upward mobility is a badge of pride. I'd tender a similarly condescending hope that you "grow" but I know you will not--most likely, its not in your immediate self interest and if you haven't developed the temperament to overcome that yet you're not likely to develop it later.
I don't expect the mods will delete this but if they're on the fence, please don't. Leave these pearl clutchers, overflowing with weepy sympathy over their parasocial friend having a couple bad weeks but happy to entertain the prospect of social orders leading to the suffering of millions if not billions, to stand as further exhibits for the prosecution
I wonder about this, though. We preach a certain set of values but prove unwilling to internalize them. We want justice reform, but don't even think about adjusting our own approach to punishment, (dis-)proportionate retribution or resocialization. I'd like more people to stop and think if maybe they've internalized some shitty fashistic tendencies, simply as a consequence of living in their (capitalist) society? "Fuck em, they deserved it because of the greater good" often seems like an attempt to justify acting out these tendencies to me.
It's funny how, if you strip out the part about "race science" - not really a major part of SSC - you are just complaining about neurotic white male nerds who are petty contrarians and authoritarians having their own space. That "race science" bit really needs to be there, because otherwise you're just bitching that even privileged white males get to have spaces where they can do their thing.
...Anyways, I'm not happy about millions or billions of people suffering, but I'm also not directly contributing to that (?). Sure, you can say that in some vague societal way I'm contributing or not doing enough, but I'm also not actively going around trying to make their lives worse, like you are. (And of course, everyone probably contributes in some vague societal way and doesn't do enough.)
> It's funny how, if you strip out the part about "race science" - not really a major part of SSC
lols upon lols
> Sure, you can say that in some vague societal way I'm contributing or not doing enough, but I'm also not actively going around trying to make their lives worse, like you are
Not by your standards I'm not. Outside of the culture war thread comments I've made, which were almost all earnest and respectful even if they shouldn't have been (and the exceptions being very short go-fuck-yourselves) all I've done is talk shit in a small subreddit specifically made for that purpose. I've several comments in said subreddit condemning doxxing. If you don't have to answer for the implications of SSC community's ideology and for its routine dismissal that the complaints of genuinely disadvantaged groups are irrelevant, overblown, and/or maliciously pretextual, then I don't have to answer for the assholes who doxed him (who I've never seen btw, I personally have no idea what the man's real name is) or called his boss (who are the lowest of bootlicking scum if you ask me)
>lols upon lols
I'm not the most frequent frequenter of the SSC reddit, but I've been there before and race science doesn't come up very often. So...lols upon lols, indeed.
> Not by your standards I'm not.
But by your standards you sure are. I mean, if talking about race science on SSC reddit is promoting it, then isn't talking about ruining the lives of certain people on this reddit...promoting it? I mean, you're actually right that, by my standards, I was overstepping - you're actually just being a jerk in your own subreddit and maybe I should leave you to your safe space. But maybe you're helping promote an environment where people feel comfortable doing certain things, even if you condemn those things? Hey, who knows, but either way white males doing things in their own space isn't enough of a problem to warrant this type of reaction - even in your own space.
What about community whose sole purpose is personally attacking really niche community on the internet? /r/SSC has 15K subs. And that's only subscription count, who knows how many of these are dead accounts. I don't know what's the size of lesswrong, but I doubt it's more than 50K people.
>whose highest moral priority--not just something they like in the abstract, but the the thing they organize all their discussion and values around--is creating a space in the discourse for race science, petty contrarianism, authoritarianism, and the utterly neurotic concerns of a class of white male nerds who are the only fucking people in on this gay earth actually enjoying a modicum of upward mobility is a badge of pride.
Do you really think it's sane description of /r/ssc?
I've read a few threads here a while ago, and there's everything. Baseless insults, claims that community contains much higher than average amount of sexually harassing people, that people in the community are particularly stupid, or obsessed over their intelligence, or morally bad people. Even saying that effective altruism is bad because you can't perfectly quantify performance of charities(even if that made sense, why would you make fun of people donating to charity)?
Basically anything goes. It's not that this sub has some concrete valid criticism of it's targets. Any criticism is welcome.
Why do you personally spend time here, criticizing niche internet community, instead of IDK, criticizing actual Trump supporters? Or even neo-nazis?
Look, SSC/LW is about something. People spend time thinking on/discussing ideas there. This community is about personal attacks on the other one.
I just don't get how do you think you're standing on a higher moral ground.
> Do you really think it's sane description of /r/ssc?
It's an accurate description of the Culture War thread. I don't have any problem with people talking about machine learning or obscure history or web serials or whatever in the main part of the forum, but my comment and the post it was replying to weren't discussing that stuff.
>This community is about personal attacks on the other one.
This isn't a community. Its a small subforum I post comments on a couple times a week. I'm not subbed to this to attack Effective Altruism, and most of the critiques I see of it fall very flat to me. I'm not subbed to it to attack LW, because that's just not a website I have any strong feelings about. I'm just subbed here because I've spent 15 years talking politics and culture on the internet and a startling, jaw-dropping proportion of the worst people I've *ever* came across online do twenty posts a day in that terrible fucking thread.
>I just don't get how do you think you're standing on a higher moral ground.
Easy, I don't support a white ethnostate, I'm not bizarrely preoccupied with the question of whether or not black people have low IQs, and I'm not a seething ball of frustrated sexuality blaming every problem in my life on feminism.
but yeah I'm real bad for talking some after-the-fact shit in the most easily identifiable and avoidable place I could possibly have found to do so
>It's an accurate description of the Culture War thread. I don't have any problem with people talking about machine learning or obscure history or web serials or whatever in the main part of the forum, but my comment and the post it was replying to weren't discussing that stuff.
These are most fringe views there. It'd be accurate if these were the consensus.
>Easy, I don't support a white ethnostate, I'm not bizarrely preoccupied with the question of whether or not black people have low IQs, and I'm not a seething ball of frustrated sexuality blaming every problem in my life on feminism.
But majority of people there also don't. Scott certainly doesn't. Your criticism is solely that they allow these people there.
Frankly, I may even agree that it'd be better to limit topics there a bit so they don't include worst ones. But this sub just blows everything out of proportion. Few people posting in obscure subreddit, and people discussing with them there isn't that bad. Maybe even at least some of these people will get at least slightly better. What will happen if you ban them? They will just go and form a separate community. And enforce symmetrical rules, so you can't even argue with them.
Result of excluding right-wing people is just /r/The_Donald.
Also, from your previous comment:
>but I'm a guy who posted maybe 40 comments total (and deleted most of them in genuine embarrassment over having earnest engagement with such awful community in my comment history)
I've seen similar stories here a few more times. I don't understand it. How is discussion with these people embarrassing? You presumably didn't agree with them. Maybe these people's views would be de-emphasized there if people who oppose them... opposed them? Instead of attacking Scott personally. Despite him not even running the thing.
>This isn't a community. Its a small subforum I post comments on a couple times a week. I'm not subbed to this to attack Effective Altruism, and most of the critiques I see of it fall very flat to me.
The problem is, people here are reluctant to object to these "criticisms". So some people have issue with one thing, others with another, others obsessively hate certain people for some reason. End result is that it if one took consensus here seriously, then one would think these targets are strangely, uniquely bad/evil autistic morons. And from what I understand, that's the explicit goal of this sub. There's even a rule that criticism can't be "serious". So, IDK. It seems like it's not about them being deserving of that criticism, but some perverse form of entertainment. Explicitly.
I'm not saying you specifically are doing that. But you're here.
>These are most fringe views there. It'd be accurate if these were the consensus.
I just don't agree. It is clear enough to me that anti-SJWism is the central connective tissue of the thread/sub-community. [This guy said it better than I probably could, and certainly more diplomatically.](https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/atfbhe/rip_culture_war_thread/eh118az/)
> I've seen similar stories here a few more times. I don't understand it. How is discussion with these people embarrassing? You presumably didn't agree with them. Maybe these people's views would be de-emphasized there if people who oppose them... opposed them? Instead of attacking Scott personally. Despite him not even running the thing.
The culture war thread being Mensa Gamergate is why it's bad, but if it were openly the thing it was I'd never give it a second thought. Instead, though, it maintains a pretense of being non-ideological/impartial/balanced, and it does such a remarkably good job of doing so that I was fooled for quite a while. So I was a sucker, and that's embarrassing. Furthermore, part of how that works is a steady stream of people who find it through Scott's apolitical or more genuinely centrist writings show up to create a simulacrum of diversity. We all flare out, eventually (save poor Darwin, natch), but until we do we help to maintain the illusion, and for my part in that I am embarrassed and a little ashamed.
This is also why I'm glad to see it seperated from SSC, even though all the same people will be saying all the same things over in the_motte. I think the community will probably continue to chug along just fine, but without the steady stream of gullible newbs coming along from the main site, it'll finally complete that "evaporative cooling" and be forced to abandon the pretenses.
> The problem is, people here are reluctant to object to these "criticisms"
I could point to my comments in this thread defending Scott's professional aptitude against a line of argument I found both facile and disconcertingly close to a justification for doxing, or the mod intervention against me in that same comment chain for getting too close to what he considers to be ableism. A few weeks back I reaped [plenty of downvotes](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/aimcq8/global_warming_officially_less_dangerous_than/eeor1tx/) for defending thingofthings against an attack that seemed unreasonable to me.
But the real answer is that, you're right, that's not what the subforum is designed for, that's not what the moderators want. If I were running it, I'd probably run it a little differently--less about entertainment, more about venting and sanity checks. But I'm not willing to do the work of building a subreddit (and I could if I really wanted to, I've been modsquatting on r/shitslatestarsays for years--initially did so as a defensive measure for a website I liked, believe it or not), and the people who did are still willing to make me make the kinds posts I would if I were, so, yeah, here I am
> It is clear enough to me that anti-SJWism is the central connective tissue of the thread/sub-community.
I wasn't talking about anti-SJWism. That is probably true. Depends on what one means by SJW. If it's about "identity politics", then yes. But it doesn't imply being on the right, or being fascist/white supremacist etc.
What this guy describes is OK, but what's the solution exactly? Do we really need to discuss Trump everywhere? It's already everywhere. Nothing new can be said. I frequented /r/politics for a while, and if anything it numbed me to the current ridiculous situation.
>Instead, though, it maintains a pretense of being non-ideological/impartial/balanced, and it does such a remarkably good job of doing so that I was fooled for quite a while. So I was a sucker, and that's embarrassing. Furthermore, part of how that works is a steady stream of people who find it through Scott's apolitical or more genuinely centrist writings show up to create a simulacrum of diversity. We all flare out, eventually (save poor Darwin, natch), but until we do we help to maintain the illusion, and for my part in that I am embarrassed and a little ashamed.
But how is it an illusion? Until you disengage, how is it an "illusion" of diversity? You say that it's ideological - but how? Is allowing people with 'obviously' wrong views which are shunned in other places not 'impartial'? Again, I get why we may not want that, but I don't think that qualifies as not being impartial.
I mean, someone posted example of horrible comment, someone advocating ethnostate. But then I looked at this guy's comment history, expecting more of it and frequent contributions to /r/the_donald or something. But most of it seems to be apolitical, about tech & programming. So this guy isn't completely hopeless, maybe? If he spent all the time arguing about his political views, then that probably would be the case. But he's not, so maybe he doesn't identify with these views all that hard. Maybe he can be convinced to change his mind, or at least tempered a bit.
>I could point to my comments in this thread defending Scott's professional aptitude against a line of argument I found both facile and disconcertingly close to a justification for doxing, or the mod intervention against me in that same comment chain for getting too close to what he considers to be ableism. A few weeks back I reaped plenty of downvotes for defending thingofthings against an attack that seemed unreasonable to me.
Well, that's fair. I haven't analyzed specific people here, but not everyone is as bad as the sub as a whole, and you seem to be reasonable. I just think that initial exaggregation, that community's highest value is enabling alt-right / white supremacists is unfair. You could've said that it's enabling discussions about every view, which is bad because it includes horrific ones -- and you think that it's wrong and these should be banned. That'd be fair. Unless you believe that goal really is *specifically* to enable them. Which would mean that Scott or originators of CW either are white supremacists or are supporting it for some other reason.
> What this guy describes is OK, but what's the solution exactly?
I don't have one.
> But how is it an illusion? Until you disengage, how is it an "illusion" of diversity?
Partially because many of the people I was talking with were not a tenth as willing to concede points, as objective, as open to changing their mind, as they pretended to be. But more significantly and uniquely and fuckin infuriatingly, because there are a lot of people there who have a range of opinions that a pollster would pick up as center or center-left, who like gay marriage and moderate taxation and reasonable environmental regulation, and who you think are normies until you engage long enough to find out that all those opinions are totally secondary to their "feminists and other SJWs are destroying everything and must be opposed at all costs" agenda.
That's why I had such a strong reaction to this post in particular. He keeps reaching back to that well as if its exonerating instead of being one of the most insidious aspects of the whole thing, and I'm starting to be not so sure that it's an innocent mistake.
> I just think that initial exaggregation, that community's highest value is enabling alt-right / white supremacists is unfair. You could've said that it's enabling discussions about every view, which is bad because it includes horrific ones -- and you think that it's wrong and these should be banned.
I view most things through a Marxist lens. The full formal outline of a system isn't as important to me as what it actually *does.* And the system of "enabling discussions about every view" in the Culture War threads only actually seems to promote one particular flavor of controversial opinion.
>Partially because many of the people I was talking with were not a tenth as willing to concede points, as objective, as open to changing their mind, as they pretended to be.
That being the goal doesn't mean that people will always succeed. I don't think anyone there claims to be super successful at that. They're just claiming they're trying. And creating an environment in which it's maybe a bit more likely?
> But more significantly and uniquely and fuckin infuriatingly, because there are a lot of people there who have a range of opinions that a pollster would pick up as center or center-left, who like gay marriage and moderate taxation and reasonable environmental regulation, and who you think are normies until you engage long enough to find out that all those opinions are totally secondary to their "feminists and other SJWs are destroying everything and must be opposed at all costs" agenda.
Well, but at least on objective level you're in agreement. And about SJW; I don't think they're/I'm using the same definition as you? SJW is a derogatory term, generally means things like trying to prevent you from arguing if you're not in correct group, judging people collectively, trying to censor stuff. If they are opposed to that, it doesn't mean they are opposed to the left. Just to these particular behaviors. Which are sort-of opposite of the community goals and values, so I don't think that's strange.
It seems to me you use another definition of SJW and that's source of disagreement? Or possibly that they're exaggerating.
>I view most things through a Marxist lens. The full formal outline of a system isn't as important to me as what it actually does. And the system of "enabling discussions about every view" in the Culture War threads only actually seems to promote one particular flavor of controversial opinion.
That's fair. But then, how should it work? Nazis should be banned; should Trump supporters? Where do we put a line? Everyone will disagree. And what's the benefit in this specific case? Giving nazis a voice in front of mass audience is IMHO bad, but it's a niche sub.
Where I live(former satellite state of USSR) people don't really distinguish nazis and communists morally. IDK, in USA it's probably similar. So, if I understand first cited sentence correctly, general public would agree with your opinion of excluding fringe views, then exclude you.
Anyway, about CW enabling specifically racism/nazism/etc, community is ultimately composed of people. If people upon encountering some small amount of these people decide that community is bad and go away, then naturally that'd be the result. With original vision of the community, these people would be just noise.
>Do you really think that’s a sane description
Wasn’t there a recent post on themotte about how a statistical analysis of the culture war thread showed that the most popular discussion topics were Damore and HBD? (Feel free to correct me; it’s too cumbersome to navigate there on mobile). I also distinctly recall that “g” and “HBD” were identified as words used by posters in ssc but not elsewhere.
It was even worse before the one-month HBD moratorium; that definitely sounds like the top concerns involved “race science, petty contrarianism, and neurotic concerns of white male nerds” to me.
You'll never understand the value of free speech until it's taken away from you or some cause you care about. Then you'll weep at the way you treated other human beings today.
I'm old enough to have been politically aware during the Iraq War. I know what it is like to have the range of discourse narrowed through mechanisms at least as coercive as what you people complain about (on far more important topics), and more importantly I know that all the people who demand that I extend liberal pieties of free speech to Nazis and incels have zero interest in doing so to me and mine.
Who is "you people"? Who do you think I am, and how does whatever grouping you imagine me in have anything to do with my statement?
There are universal truths, and there's short-sighted political fads. If you're a remotely reflective person I think you'll eventually find more value in the former.
If you don't want to be lumped in with the kinds of people who posted in the culture war thread, don't make a comment attacking someone for celebrating its death. I don't have any more of an obligation to read past the immediate context than you did to me.
I don't support restrictions on free speech by the state (at least in my country, I acknowledge that certain European countries have their reasons), and I go past many libs and emphatically reject the use of doxing to economically suppress speech. So I guess we're not in disagreement after all, huh?
Also I got down a link rabbithole and found the 14 words person:
The left can organize a dozen protest marches in the time it takes us
to say “when you control for applicant qualifications discounted for
affirmative action, there is no net racial discrimination in the ____
sector.”
Lmao what. Like I see no easy way to quantify that
Well this is shitty. Partially because I was hoping the decision was
based on a better examination of the thread, partially because this’ll
be used to dismiss criticism… but mostly because Scott got legit threats
and had a mental breakdown. Whatever guilt by association/complicity he
has here, it wasn’t even close to warrant something like this.
Absolutely. As much as I disagree with Scott's whole point of view on this thing, the threats and doxxing and resulting mental health problems are a really shitty thing to happen, which Scott absolutely didn't deserve.
Nobody does? Sorry to break it to you pal, but these are your club members:
> I’m so proud to be among the select few Scott Alexander hates. Scott, I know you’re here. I know you read this subreddit. You love yourself too much to tolerate anyone speaking ill of you. I’m so happy you hate me. This made my Friday.
I can't speak for that person, but I stand by my claim that nobody deserves online harassment: do you think this poster is somebody who deserves online harassment?
Or do you think *that* person thinks Alexander deserves harassment (a misreading of my post, but fine)? If you do think that, I'd be happy to ban them given some evidence that they think so.
You don't think sneer club has Scott Alexander haters, who foster the kind of emotions that enable doxxers? I see a parallel w/ sneer club and doxxers : culture war and pedos.
I find your stance towards this thread amusing given that its main shtick is that Scott causes white supremacy by not moderating enough. Nice doublethink ability, I give you that.
Is the suggested problem that SA doesn't moderate enough to get rid of the white supremacists--or whomever is being complained about?
I thought the suggested problem is that /r/ssc cultivates attitudes which support [whatever the complaint is about].
I mean, the former suggestion seems to imagine that [whomever the complaint is about] are just randomly distributed around the internet, and the only relevant variable is whether they're moderated away--i.e., so that their presence in /r/ssc doesn't have anything to do with any attitudes common to /r/ssc. And that just seems like an awfully strange way to think about the situation.
I have no idea, but I fail to see how this place would be any sort of reasonable null hypothesis, given that from what I know of people who post here all are opposed to that sort of harassment, and some have experienced it themselves
Yeah, I agree here, for all the shit towards Scott he is still a human being and deserves empathy, and not doxing etc. Esp as the culture war thread was not under his control (in a way it was, but he has no more options than 'allow it, or shut it down' as he has a job, and a life etc. And online community management is a job and skill all in itself).
(this is not to say that I agree with scotts actions or that he never did wrong, or has nothing to apologize for btw, just that this go to far).
Third, I would like to offer one final, admittedly
from-a-position-of-weakness, f**k you at everyone who contributed to
this. I think you’re bad people, and you make me really sad.
After reading On
Smarm last night I was struggling a bit because I agreed with it but
I still have this lingering internal instinct towards defending the
concept of civility. This post by Scott was what finally made everything
click for me.
There is no civility in advocating an ethnostate. There is no
civility in homophobia or misogyny or transphobia. There’s certainly no
“kindness” or “charity” in those things. But those things are protected
and defended by Scott here as “special”, “weirdly good discussions”, and
“deep insights”.
But that defense doesn’t extend to those who criticize Scott or SSC.
We get a “fuck you” and a “you’re bad people”. There is nothing on this
sub that’s less civil than your average HBD discussion in the CW thread,
but that doesn’t matter because these people never actually cared about
civility. Civility is just a way for them to shut down criticism while
pretending they’re being kind and noble.
I think that Scott seems to be talking about the people who are actively harassing him, and I think I agree with the general consensus here that that is unacceptable, at least in terms of doxxing/threating his real life.
I 100% agree that the harassment was wrong and I genuinely feel bad for Scott that he had to deal with that. He does pretty explicitly suggest that he thinks this sub was behind the harassment though:
> As I became more careful in my own writings, the Culture War thread loomed larger and larger in the threats and complaints. And when the Culture War thread got closed down, the subreddit about insulting me had a “declaring victory” post, which I interpret as confirmation that this was one of the main things going on.
Which I take to mean that we're included in the "fuck you".
Regardless of who he's talking about with that quote, the pattern holds for the rest of the post beyond just that one "fuck you" section. Throughout the post he demands civility and understanding towards himself and SSC, but offers none to his critics.
>Throughout the post he demands civility and understanding towards himself and SSC, but offers none to his critics.
I would say this bit counts as civility towards his critics:
>One of the really bad parts of this debacle has been that it’s made me a much worse person. When I started writing this blog, I think I was a pretty nice person who was willing to listen to and try to hammer out my differences with anyone. As a result of some of what I’ve described, I think I’ve become afraid, bitter, paranoid, and quick to assume that anyone who disagrees with me (along a dimension that too closely resembles some of the really bad people I’ve had to deal with) is a bad actor who needs to be discredited and destroyed. I don’t know how to fix this. I can only apologize for it, admit you’re not imagining it, and ask people to do as I say (especially as I said a few years ago when I was a better person) and not as I do. I do think this is a great learning experience in terms of psychology and will write a post on it eventually; I just wish I didn’t have to learn it from the inside.
I think that much of the RIP Culture War Thread post is an example of Scott doing exactly what he's describing in that section you quoted. He has two separate groups that he repeatedly muddies the water between: the people threatening and doxxing him, who are scumbags, and the people who think that the CW thread is a cesspool of hate and far-right extremism, who just disagree with him. But he applies the "bad actor who needs to be discredited and destroyed" attitude to both.
This contrasts with how he treats horrible ideas in the CW thread, which get bundled into something he describes as special and insightful, and he seems to believe that allowing those ideas is crucial to the specialness of the CW thread. This is where the hypocrisy lies. HBD, for example, is a fundamentally uncivil topic. No discussion of HBD can ever be civil because it is by definition an attack on a group of people. But Scott and SSC seem to draw an arbitrary line where "Black people are genetically inferior to white people" is acceptable discourse, but "People who support HBD are morally inferior to people who don't" is unacceptable. It's a shallow and near-meaningless conception of civility that cares only about image.
I also want to make clear that I'm not demanding Scott or SSC be civil, I'm irritated that their application of civility is inconsistent. That "fuck you" section of the post is probably the best part of the entire thing. The people who harassed him deserve to be told to fuck off, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying "fuck you, you hurt me." But if Scott had been a random user and posted that in the CW thread, he likely would've been told off for being uncivil and overly emotional.
If you want to run a grand conversational experiment with no taboos, then go for it, but such an experiment can never be civil. If you want to discuss ideas that are taboo and potentially awful and destructive, then go for it, but don't then act surprised or wronged when people who know about your experiment say, "fuck you, you hurt me."
>If a black NBA player says "white men can't jump" (a statement about human biodiversity), is that an attack on white men "by definition"?
No, because basic social skills and context clues would lead me to believe that the statement is a harmless joke rather than racist pseudoscience. It's not even remotely analogous to "Black people are inherently intellectually inferior to white people and we should craft political policy around that," which is what I generally see in HBD discussions in the CWT.
>Just the opposite. If there's one thing everyone in this discussion can agree on, it's that the CW thread has been bad for Scott's image.
Just because something is shallow and image-obsessed does not mean it is guaranteed to result in a positive image. Scott's image is suffering precisely because people see through the shallowness of SSC's civility.
“White supremacy” is of course, undefined. And is of course, still a
problem, the flock continues to stray.
Yes, because you’re only a white supremacist when you lynch
a n****, not if you just say some mean words!! Why would you accuse me
of being a white supremacist, you hysterical racist liberal
And of course, there are the snakes that do not hide behind a mantle
of virtue:
Remember when ‘rationalism’ was about ‘charitability’ and
‘steelmanning’?
Reposting my comments on it from the discord with minor edits.
Personally I don’t think anything he’s done is bad enough to justify
all the harassment he gets. One of the things I like about the sneerclub
subreddit is that it does try to be charitable to the people, if not the
ideology. E.g, banning the posting of Scott’s real name, banning
referring to rationalists as ‘rats’ to avoid dehumanization, and the
general number of people who participate in this sub who are also
rationalists. If he’s experiencing the levels of distress that he seems
to be, I think it’s worth being empathetic. I can get that the “Be nice
and charitable to people you disagree with” stuff can be really toxic
when it comes to fascists and bigots and the like, but I doubt anyone
here really has a disagreement with SA deeply rooted enough to justify
him losing his job and mental health, so it’s worth extending some
sympathy.
> Personally I don't think anything he's done is bad enough to justify all the harassment he gets.
Absolutely! I can empathize/sympathize with what Scott's been put through. But I *can't* empathize with the "death" of the CW thread, which seems to be what he wants people to do. Hence my (admittedly dismissive) title.
Yeah that's gotta be my position too.
Like I've quite literally been a radical left-wing campus activist (still radical left, but I graduated) and have no patience at all for 99% of right wing rhetoric, and I think that a lot of the stuff he talked about about like the kind of harassment you get on tumblr, is outrageous.
Yeah, personally I don't give a crap about the real person behind the blog, anyone going after the real persons twitter or trying to get him fired is a total scumbag.
"scott alexander", on the other hand, the construct of the slatestarcodex blog, is a massive fuckwit who is actively doing his best to provide safe spaces for monstrous ideologies, in the insane belief that if he does not personally provide a platform for them their free speech rights will be destroyed forever. The blog deserves all the criticism it can get.
I'm actually quite livid that he just threw that one out, if nothing else because if he claims this is a site for targeting harassment at him it puts a bit of a ballseye for retribution on me: I've had people try to threaten me in this sort of way before and it wasn't pleasant - *and he didn't even contact us* over any of this shit before he made that allegation.
I can virtually guarantee you many of those same people doing the harassing and lying and doxxing post in this sub. This might even be largest gathering of them.
Every wonder *why* the mods had to ban those things?
We pre-emptively banned them on the basis that that's not what we're here for, because we're conscientious. No evidence has ever shown up of anybody from here targetting Alexander for harassment. What have turned up are numerous speculations about what this subreddit exists for, none of which have any evidence to support them.
You might be able to clear that up if you actually wrote down your purpose somewhere, like say the sidebar.
Though as far as I can tell your current EY quote is pretty accurate. How you manage to not see that as a bad thing is a mystery to me.
> You might be able to clear that up if you actually wrote down your purpose somewhere, like say the sidebar.
I'm in love with your complaint now being "I don't think your sidebar is clear enough 😤".
That's not my complaint at all, it's just a side comment on why maybe nobody understands what this sub is supposed to be.
It's not hard to see what it *is* though.
> It's not hard to see what it is though.
Of course. It's a place to point and laugh at a certain brand of badness on the internet. I would think that someone who posts on r/drama would understand such a forum.
I don't see too much laughter here. In r/drama terms you have an epidemic of seriousposting. Probably because you're dedicated to "pointing and laughing at" (in reality hating) a specific community.
Don't feel too bad though, every sub created to do this is or becomes trash. SRS for example. But also SRSsucks. And if theres a SRSsuckssucks I'm sure that ones trash too. Turns out when your whole purpose is hate you attract shitty people and reward shitty behavior.
>Probably because you're dedicated to "pointing and laughing at" (in reality hating) a specific community.
Why are some people so hell-bent on equating mockery and hate?
> Every wonder why the mods had to ban those things?
Hi! I'm one of those mods, so I can speak authoritatively on what we have had to do. There's two main categories. First: We have removed a few posts from day-old accounts. It's possible that those are throwaway accounts by a regular, but I have no evidence to believe such. And my recollection is that they happened around the same time that r/SSC was putting up with a similar troll, so my suspicion is that it was all the same person. Fortunately, they appear to have realized that that sort of behavior isn't appropriate here and so stopped trying to rile us up to harassment.
Second: We removed a half-dozen or so invocations of Scott's True Name. But none of those were part of a doxxing project, but rather were just using his name for whatever reason. E.g. one person who did it multiple times has interacted with Scott IRL.
So all in all, I don't think we're a den of doxxers. Again, I cannot say with certainty that no regular participated in the harassment. If you have evidence otherwise, please message mod mail, as we don't truck with that here.
The reason we take such a firm stance against harassment is that, duh, it's bad. I think Scott is wrong about many things, but trying to get him fired is not an appropriate response to what he has said. It gets brought up because we get accused of harboring harassers, but I have yet to see any evidence that we've done more than sneer from our corner of the internet, or had people occasionally jump into r/SSC to touch the poop.
----
On a side note, I never again want to hear SSCers complain about sneerclub brigades after today's invasion.
I'm sure you mods do your best and delete dox and harassment and all that. IDK if you do it out of an actual commitment to basic decency or if you just don't want to get banned, but either way you do.
But I'd also bet if you didn't have these rules your sub would turn into a hate free-for-all the way all I-hate-those-people-having-fun subs do. Your premise inherently attracts those people. They just learned not to do it in front of you.
> IDK if you do it out of an actual commitment to basic decency or if you just don't want to get banned,
As I just said, the reason we do it is out of a commitment to decency.
>But I'd also bet if you didn't have these rules your sub would turn into a hate free-for-all the way all I-hate-those-people-having-fun subs do. Your premise inherently attracts those people. They just learned not to do it in front of you.
I just want to highlight that this is the sort of reasoning Scott derides in his eulogy for the CWT. He doesn't like that he gets smeared for associating with the sort of person attracted to the CWT.
> I just want to highlight that this is the sort of reasoning Scott derides in his eulogy for the CWT. He doesn't like that he gets smeared for associating with the sort of person attracted to the CWT.
Dude the name of this sub is literally sneer club. You have a section in your rules about "preserving tone for sneers". If this sub sucks, I think you mods have to take responsibility for that.
People keep saying that but I've never been able to understand how: I keep getting reports saying that somebody's "harassing" someone for negatively commenting on something that's been posted here, even "targeted" and so on.
I'm thoroughly against cyberbullying and online harassment and will (and have) ban(ned) people who do that sort of thing as I understand it, not least because I and people I know have been through that or something like that.
What, and I really want an actual explanation here, with reasons given, not just incredulous stares like "how can you not see it!?" because it would make it a lot easier for me to see where this stuff is coming from.
There was a thing linked here, for example, where somebody was accusing online rationalist bigwig "Ozy" of dehumanisation because they said a view was "evil". I was accused of "dehumanising" somebody because I said their views were "abhorrent".
Where's the bullying, when the vast majority of comments I've seen flagged as "bullying" being somebody saying "this person, who is saying x, y, z on the /r/ssc subreddit, has horrible views and I can't believe they've said it"?
What's weird here is not just the "free speech" crowd's equation of criticism with harassment--itself already weird enough--but moreover the obliviousness of their hypocrisy in asserting this principle. *Their* criticism of *others* is free speech, *other people's* criticism of *them* is harassment.
I feel like reality is continually bludgeoning me into applauding Stanley Fish. That might be a tragedy, but still: everyone should read *There's No Such Thing As Free Speech*.
I have to put curricula together, and I structure my curricula around disputes. "Read Mill, Fish, and Marcuse and then *you* figure out what to make of this situation."
Some day I will get Neurath into a syllabus. Alas, history of early analytic got dolled off to someone else. Probably for the best, mine would be too idiosyncratic.
Sorry, I'm still processing buddy here's argument that there's no noteworthy preoccupation with culture war at /r/ssc, because they're no more invested in culture war than, like, /r/the_donald is.
The more I hear about this, the harder it becomes to resist the idea that what is going on here is we're dealing with people who've simply never encountered sensible ideas before, and so just don't know what they look like.
And if that's so, it seems to me it underscores how much of these issues are fundamentally a failure of education. When we don't teach people how to think about the world, when we don't expose them to good ideas, we've left a gap that extremism will readily fill.
I'm delighted at the discovery that (i) there is such a thing, and (ii) it seems to be a *QI* thing.
My initial expectation was a Verso publication.
(Which is probably just lower on my google results.)
Speaking negatively of an anonymous, public persona like Scott, or their followers, in a remote corner of the internet that they wouldn't see if they didn't look for it isn't bullying. Like, for fuck's sake.
Bullying would be directly emailing Scott threats, something that people in this thread have 100% called out as bad and stupid.
Don't worry, I'm not a smearer. I won't create r/smearclub and then spend my life posting about how awful every comment you make is. I also won't go around to any conversation you're mentioned in and bring up how you mod a sub full of bad people. I'll even commit to not calling you pro-dox/harassment/lying just because some of the people who use your sub do that.
I was just trying let the few decent people who use this sub know what kind of company they're keeping. Maybe give them their ["are we the baddies?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU) moment.
> Maybe give them their "are we the baddies?" moment.
Yudkowsky did [this bit](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/amvped/yudkowsky_subtweets_us/) better.
Third, I would like to offer one final, admittedly
from-a-position-of-weakness, f**k you at everyone who contributed to
this. I think you’re bad people, and you make me really sad. Not in a
joking performative Internet sadness way. In an actual,
I-think-you-made-my-life-and-the-world-worse way. I realize I’m mostly
talking to the sort of people who delight in others’ distress and so
this won’t register. But I’m also a little upset at some of my
(otherwise generally excellent) friends in the rationalist community who
were quick to jump on the “Oh, yeah, the SSC subreddit is full of gross
people and I wish they couldn’t speak” bandwagon (to be clear, I don’t
mean the friends who offered me good advice about separating from the CW
thread for the sake of my own well-being, I mean people who actively
contributed to worsening the whole community’s reputation based on a few
bad actors). I understand you were probably honest in your opinion, but
I think there was a lot of room to have thought through those opinions
more carefully.
Is this addressed to people who have merely complained about the CW
threads? That list includes several current and former mods, several
members of the rationalist community, and quality posters such as
yodatsracist. Are we all bad people? Do we all get the (extra nice and
charitable) “fuck you”?
I think you’re bad people, and you make me really sad. Not in a
joking performative Internet sadness way. In an actual,
I-think-you-made-my-life-and-the-world-worse way. I realize I’m mostly
talking to the sort of people who delight in others’ distress and so
this won’t register.
The world got better now that the culture war threads are less
visible. I am sympathetic if your life got worse - that’s certainly not
anything I desire - but the claim that the culture war threads are a
bastion of alt-right thought is a claim I’m willing to defend with
evidence, and have defended several times in the past.
I view myself as a good person, and I certainly don’t delight in
others’ distress. I’m sorry you’re upset. But you’ve never even stepped
inside the culture war threads, you literally don’t know what you’re
talking about, and while I understand the urge to lash out at the people
who’ve upset you I cannot take your criticism seriously on this matter.
You’re simply wrong about the facts.
>The world got better now that the culture war threads are less visible.
Honestly, I'm not even sure about that. Maybe r\/TheMotte will end up having *more* visibility than the SSC thread, and that would be terrible.
It depends how much slatestarcodex links to it.
I don't particularly care if /r/TheMotte gets as many subscribers as /r/slatestarcodex or even /r/The_Donald. I care if the thread can still maintain the illusion of neutrality, as it could when it was still under the banner of slatestarcodex. I care if harmless nerds start becoming convinced that SJWs are a grave threat to society and that HBD is true and that muslims are genetically inferior and the media is too harsh on Trump and there's no such thing as racism but racism accusations are the worst.
Now, if Scott insists on linking to /r/TheMotte over and over again like he does for his own subreddit (every open thread of SSC links to that one), and if he describes it as a neutral place, then yes, that might end up being a net negative for the world.
Here is the archive of the SSC blog post, which was deleted.
Edit: 230 comments? Wow, people had more to say about this than I anticipated!
We can permit racism, because we permit everything, except leftism because leftism excludes other ideologies! WOOOOOW I really can’t tell if this is trolling or if the poster is just that oblivious.
If you tolerate hateful people in your community, those people will eventually push less crappy people out, until all you have is crap. Advocating a ethnostate is inherently uncivil and threatening, no matter how politely it’s advocated. > It only takes one person being really consistently hostile to have a significant impact on your life and mental state.
He’s so close to getting it.
r/selfawarewolves
Tr*nnyPornO comes to white supremacy’s rescue with this s*vage destruction of the k*kes and Or*ents.
NSFW:
He still doesn’t get it, which is so sad. A (small and desperate) part of me hoped he’d gotten rid of the thread because he realized the criticisms had a point to them after all.
Sorry, but if you’re a moderator, it doesn’t matter if only 10% of your users are openly white supremacists. If they get hundreds of net upvotes and never get modded away, you’re allowing white supremacy to take hold. I firmly disagree with his slippery slope argument that, if you ban pedophiles, you have to ban everyone.
Also, I find it hypocritical that he criticizes people for saying the thread was “full of Nazis” when it was only a few Nazis. Ater all, he takes a few (admittedly) monsters who harassed in real life and generalizes that to “all these sneerers and critics just have no empathy so fuck them”.
Give me a break.
Holy shit then ban the fucking bad actors JFC this has been suggested a million times forever by every single reasonable person in the sub going back to CE 0. Seriously, there are bad actors and they will influence people’s opinions and when they do and when people leave they leave with a snapshot of their opinions at that time, influenced by the bad actors.
I’m not saying this as someone who’s in it for the sneers, I’m saying this as a former sub user who left because bad actors were constantly getting away with acting badly. So, when I say “yeah the CW thread is riddled with (actual) Nazis” (note: I haven’t actually said, this, but if someone asked me, I probably would) it’s not because I hate you, or the sub, or the mods, or anything in particular–it’s because I’ve seen evidence, time and time again, of it being used that way to absolutely no moderator response.
If you don’t want your name attached to Nazis, ban the god damn Nazis. The amount of effort being done to show that false rape claims should be taken seriously or whatever while simultaneously ignoring the comparatively insane amount of white supremacy posts while fucking handwringing about how unfair the comparison is is absolutely stupefying.
This so, so, obvious. You have skin in the game; read the thread attached to your blog’s name sometime–you’ll actually see why people are saying these things about it.
It’s good to know Scott fully endorses this new subreddit and culture war thread. I thought he was trying to distance himself from it, but nope!
What? I thought the point of all this was that he wanted the Nazi stuff to be less associated with his reputation, but then later in the same post, he’s making a public endorsement of it. It seems to me like we’re more justified than ever in criticizing him and his blog. Is he really trying to appease us by doubling down on the exact behavior that we were mad about in the first place?
Of course, doxxing and harassment should still be absolutely prohibited in all contexts.
https://archive.fo/E3ZXL
of course not saying, or doing, or posting these things is not on the table
rationality: talking about the awful things I say and do is so much worse than me doing them
Maybe my experience up til now has been a total fluke, but like, I’ve had a way easier time talking about politics or social issues with members of what Scott would call the red tribe than with rationalists or similar tech-libertarian types. That may not be the same as rationalists being more right-wing than the typical Republican voter, but in practice it can definitely feel that way.
I’m a bit disappointed that it was harassment that did it in, rather than principles or something. Some people are genuinely awful, and I’m not really sure how any Internet community should deal with the existence of 1-in-10000-type sociopaths.
There’s something very hard to sympathize with this whole narrative, though. It’s always this obsession with being oppressed, the getting-stuffed-in-a-locker complex for lack of better words. There’s no room here for the person who thinks the CW thread is bad yet doesn’t think everyone who posted there should be locked away in a Siberian gulag.
Fuck you Scott. I’ve always been something close to a supporter of you, personally, thinking that the community around you mostly only spoke to your naivety, but I remember when you posted that “After being challenged to back this up, I analyzed ten randomly chosen comments on the thread; four seemed neutral, three left/liberal, and three conservative”–the categorization was complete fucking bullshit. The survey means fucking nothing, I took it, I was duly counted as a leftist who has posted there, but I’m a guy who posted maybe 40 comments total (and deleted most of them in genuine embarrassment over having earnest engagement with such awful community in my comment history) and the survey counted me just has hard as fash powerusers like Namrock, qualia of mercy, and trannyporn who, to be clear, aren’t lonely voices in the wilderness but reap the upvotes wherever they go
Someone who relies on such idiotic data in the face of the obvious still doesn’t deserve doxing, fuck that forever, but a sad few weeks that results in him breaking the favorite toy of a bunch of shit people? Yeah, that sounds like justice to me
Goodbye and good riddance
Good comments in the thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/atfbhe/rip_culture_war_thread/eh13lpa/
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/atfbhe/rip_culture_war_thread/eh118az/
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/atfbhe/rip_culture_war_thread/eh1820i/
Also I got down a link rabbithole and found the 14 words person:
Lmao what. Like I see no easy way to quantify that
Well this is shitty. Partially because I was hoping the decision was based on a better examination of the thread, partially because this’ll be used to dismiss criticism… but mostly because Scott got legit threats and had a mental breakdown. Whatever guilt by association/complicity he has here, it wasn’t even close to warrant something like this.
After reading On Smarm last night I was struggling a bit because I agreed with it but I still have this lingering internal instinct towards defending the concept of civility. This post by Scott was what finally made everything click for me.
There is no civility in advocating an ethnostate. There is no civility in homophobia or misogyny or transphobia. There’s certainly no “kindness” or “charity” in those things. But those things are protected and defended by Scott here as “special”, “weirdly good discussions”, and “deep insights”.
But that defense doesn’t extend to those who criticize Scott or SSC. We get a “fuck you” and a “you’re bad people”. There is nothing on this sub that’s less civil than your average HBD discussion in the CW thread, but that doesn’t matter because these people never actually cared about civility. Civility is just a way for them to shut down criticism while pretending they’re being kind and noble.
Oh magical, they’re talking about this sub here
Yes, because you’re only a white supremacist when you lynch a n****, not if you just say some mean words!! Why would you accuse me of being a white supremacist, you hysterical racist liberal
Remember when ‘rationalism’ was about ‘charitability’ and ‘steelmanning’?
Reposting my comments on it from the discord with minor edits.
Personally I don’t think anything he’s done is bad enough to justify all the harassment he gets. One of the things I like about the sneerclub subreddit is that it does try to be charitable to the people, if not the ideology. E.g, banning the posting of Scott’s real name, banning referring to rationalists as ‘rats’ to avoid dehumanization, and the general number of people who participate in this sub who are also rationalists. If he’s experiencing the levels of distress that he seems to be, I think it’s worth being empathetic. I can get that the “Be nice and charitable to people you disagree with” stuff can be really toxic when it comes to fascists and bigots and the like, but I doubt anyone here really has a disagreement with SA deeply rooted enough to justify him losing his job and mental health, so it’s worth extending some sympathy.
Is this addressed to people who have merely complained about the CW threads? That list includes several current and former mods, several members of the rationalist community, and quality posters such as yodatsracist. Are we all bad people? Do we all get the (extra nice and charitable) “fuck you”?
The world got better now that the culture war threads are less visible. I am sympathetic if your life got worse - that’s certainly not anything I desire - but the claim that the culture war threads are a bastion of alt-right thought is a claim I’m willing to defend with evidence, and have defended several times in the past.
I view myself as a good person, and I certainly don’t delight in others’ distress. I’m sorry you’re upset. But you’ve never even stepped inside the culture war threads, you literally don’t know what you’re talking about, and while I understand the urge to lash out at the people who’ve upset you I cannot take your criticism seriously on this matter. You’re simply wrong about the facts.
[deleted]
You have to admit that, for a four-year-old, his vocabulary is pretty big.
deleted ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^0.1983 [^^^What ^^^is ^^^this?](https://pastebin.com/FcrFs94k/59484)