#themotts

[tpell514]

Meze Greek restaurant brooklyn

[archacovercosine]

voters: man, we really cared about the economy this time, everything is too damn expensive, at least trump gave us stimulus checks

discourse-poisoned tumblr rightwinger: well if the democrats hadn't been racist against white people for 10 years they would not have turned these people away

sorry man, but your hobby horse hasn't been relevant for years outside of themotte or whereever these fucks congregate now, replaced by immigration and the economy.

[centrally-unplanned]

Jesus, I thought the anime blog links were a graveyard, I hadn't gotten to my 2018 collection of policy/rationalist blogosphere links. Not a single one of them that isn't to a thinktank or collective org is still alive! A few are SlateStarCodex types, sure, off to a new locale. But not most of them! Most of them are gone. You don't notice it in politics-space as much, because the zeitgeist never goes away, a million new writers replace the old. But the churn rate is harsh. And a lot were from academics - that certainly has faded, academics blogging is a real 2010's thing. I still miss Pseudoerasmus - I am happy you make twitter threads bashing Acemoglu still, but it isn't the same!

I had Spotted Toad on there?? God I remember him - in the 2010's he was a good source for dissident right critical thinking. I recall reading some education posts he made where I was like, okay, fair enough, this is some valid points, you are a decent part of a balanced political diet even if I rarely agree with anything. He went totally off the rails in 2020, full on MAGA election denialism, reading the tea leaves of ballot counting wave timings in Milwaukee or whatever. Eventually he nuked his entire online presence, I don't think he has been heard from again. People in r/TheMotte - another mass grave of political discourse past - were big fans iirc until he vanished. The lifespan of these things is so much shorter than you realize when you are in it.

[mitigatedchaos]

Haven't watched the Putin interview, but the online right are mocking him.

TheMotte says he came off as an aloof imperialist Russian boomer, not a genius critic of the Western ideological system who could cut apart Western political coalitions. This is likely to lead to a shift within the contemporary right-wing ideological vanguard - the world is smaller than they thought, fewer people are doing ideological development work than they expected, and talent is rarer.

So, a new era. Though where they go from here, I don't know.

Did Putin get any advantage from giving Tucker Carlson a 30-minute lecture on Russian history? Well, it apparently dropped the same day as a report that noted:

Biden reportedly "did not remember" when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended. "If it was 2013 — when did I stop being vice president?" he asked.

[auroratellsstories]

Watching Dune and thinking nothing without that Themotte is Regulus Black and this is a AU🙂

[arcticdementor]

'The time to stop this was decades ago. Now there's nothing to do but suffer and try to find any way to stick a knife in your tormentors so they suffer some consequences for their evil.' SteveKirk from themotte

You first.

[analyticrambles]

Wow, TheMotte has gotten really right wing.

[iteratedextras]

The American Prospect (a left-leaning publication) did the linked piece on the MBA-fication of Boeing recently (Mar 28). I've heard rumbling complaints among more technical people about Boeing for years now, so I doubt it's just spin. From the other direction, tracingwoodgrains, a former moderator on r/themotte wrote extensively about an attempt to sabotage testing in order to hire underqualified air traffic controllers for political reasons (favoring the Democratic coalition). Trace is more of a liberal, but "DE&I is harming the airline industry" is generally taken up more by right-wingers.

I think you're correct that the techbros and the progressives have different worldviews.

On the other hand, I think there is an important similarity between MBAs and DE&I when it comes to air travel:

Neither group actually cares about aircraft.

Between the two of them, the right-wing approach is less of a problem, since at least someone could still make a replacement company.

There's yet another article on Hacker News right now about Boeing, and just like all the other HN articles about Boeing, the majority of the commenters are incandescent with rage that MBAs and finance types have taken a company once known for its engineering excellence and destroyed it.

This is what makes me sad about the "libertarian techbro" stuff from a lot of the left. Many tech types are fully aware of the problems with unrestrained capitalism, and probably would be on board with a feasible alternative, if it was effectively marketed to them. That they haven't done so yet is mostly because they are not swayed by how-dare-you-not-already-agree-with-us rhetoric, and that's the only rhetoric a lot of the contemporary left knows.

[tpell514]

The fried calamari from Tristano's Pizza in Brooklyn, NY #friedcalamari #tristanospizza #brooklyn #feastbigornotatall #tommytastesny #tasteisking #orderup #yourewelcome #themotts #avisualstimulant https://www.instagram.com/p/CR2H02gslWepLgE69gNl_DDL0WqotSW7ylaH6U0/?utm_medium=tumblr

[poetponyofmidgard]

Doing a Sopranos-a-day rewatch & spotted #themotts remember those amazing Mobbed-up #tvads from @motts In the 80s Genius #productplacement 🍎🥃 #yougotthemotts #mottsjuice #applejuice #juice #80stvads #90stv #sopranos #sopranosaday #jamesgandolfini #hbomax @hbomax @hbo https://www.instagram.com/p/CLWz171rOme/?igshid=cdc79ebo5v6h

[max1461]

Look, woke liberals are annoying. But if your entire politics is just "woke liberals are annoying", and this has contorted every single political opinion you hold to that degree that you can't even have a direct discussion about some policy issue without tying it back to your grand totalizing theory of Why Woke Liberals Are Annoying, and you've been immersed in your anger at woke liberals so long that you've convinced yourself that they are not just ordinary wrong annoying people but evil, malicious, an existential threat to society, and you've now dropped every thread of down to earth political thought you once had and replaced it with increasingly out-there social theorizing about How To Combat The Woke Scourge, then guess what... your politics suck so much fucking worse than theirs does!

This is about r/themotte.

[mitigatedchaos]

Have you heard about chaosprime?

I drafted a short post about the incident, since it's both relevant to the scene and provides information about how ethics in the scene are doing. However, I declined to post it, as the seriousness of the allegations was quite severe relative to my level of certainty about the allegations, and I didn't want to go digging to verify (especially as chaosprime has already deleted his Twitter account).

Twitter user chaosprime was associated with TPOT / the rationalist community on Twitter.

Apparently, there were allegations that he engaged in three instances of consensual at the time, but bad somehow, sex. (It was pretty vague.) Given members of the community's history with questionable accusations and norms of evidence from conflict with the feminist movement in the 2014 era, he could have weathered this.

However, during the arguments surrounding the accusations, some twitter users reportedly dug up his arrest and conviction history, showing that he was previously accused and convicted of sex crimes against multiple individuals, including a minor.

It appears that he agreed that he had been charged with all of those crimes, except for the specific dates.

Another user posted a screenshot of a tweet in which chaosprime apparently said that he 'didn't mean to brag,' but his sexual orientation was too taboo to discuss on Twitter.

At some point following this, he deleted his Twitter account.

TracingWoodgrains (tw: tracewoodgrains), probably better known from TheMotte, said,

I appreciate the thread and always appreciate pushes to humanize and show general compassion. I also think as a matter of policy someone who has a history of sex crimes should probably stay away from any sort of weird sex stuff from that point forward.

How do we assess whether someone has truly reformed, or whether they're the Type of Guy who still represents a risk? I think TracingWoodgrains' approach here is a good one.

(Chaosprime and I are of no relation. My Twitter account is q-----md------k, as shieldfoss can confirm.)

[utilitymonstermash]

DeanTheDull on institutional credibility

https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/on89vw/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_july_19_2021/h6clm7b/

Institutional trust is developed by institutions publicly purging bad actors at their own initiative and by taking politically and popularly unpopular positions and hits to institutional interests for the sake of a stated principle.

The former is a demonstration of professionalism, that an organization is self-policing and will curb its own excesses even in the absence of public failure. In any country you go corruption of some sort, explicit or implicit, is generally accepted and understood as part of the system, but social trust is often highest in organizations that not just claim to oppose such things, but regularly kick out members who are violate the rules. In an American context, the best example would probably be the US military, which is one of the most trusted institutions in the country. The US military, by it's very nature and job, routinely kills people (fight wars), doesn't tell the truth (classification), is often hugely inefficient or costly with taxpayer dollars (even if just in the sense of 'every dollar spent on the military could have been invested elsewhere', and routinely has stories of incompetence emerge. It's also largely filled by highschoolers, with all the basic competance and maturity that implies. These are not 'good things' that should breed confidence.

But the US military also has an exceptional institutional turnover and ejection rate, routinely kicking out the corrupt and incompetent as a matter of course at a rate almost no other institution or corporation dares. Part of this is the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which is routinely applied to soldiers who commit crimes, on or off duty, for a multitude of sins and errors. It never has, and never will be, a perfect justice system, but with everyone who's been in knowing someone who's been kicked out, and likely multiple, it produces a more credible reputation for  removal than, say, the Rubber Rooms of the New York City school system.

Another aspect is the 'up or out' nature of retention- the US military requires members to either be on track for future promotion, or be separated, without the sort of 'rest on a career at a single position' you find in other militaries where someone could, if they wanted, rest in a single rank for an entire career. Because the rank hierarchy always gets narrower, this means that every few years a certain percentage of a year group will always be let go, and the military's evaluation/comparison system supports the people being let go being the less competent/worst remainers. Can you find incompetents in the military? Absolutely. But it's far harder to continually fail upward to settle at your level of incompetence: when everyone is raising or being weeded out, incompetents will often fail first.

None of this is to say it's all great or good or you can't find bad actors or corruption or anything else. But the American military can credibly claim to try to weed out the evil and the incompetent- and do so as a matter of course without requiring a public uproar- and it likely enjoys a high public trust in part as a result. Wrong-doers do get punished- routinely- without the public having to pressure the institution into it. (That other wrong-doers do not get punished doesn't necessarily take away from that- public legitimacy often follows the effort, not universal success.)

The other way to build institutional trust is basic credibility signalling. Trust is based on belief that you mean what you say, and if you want people to believe that you prioritize a stated value you must be able to demonstrate occasions where those values are put above other interests. This means cases where you lose money/backers, oppose ideological allies, or even confess to wrong-doing that you could have hidden (as in, apologies that were not a result of public/external pressure).

[...]

The flip side of this is that institutional credibility will often crater if there's an unjust conspiracy pursued for blatantly self-serving reasons. People aren't necessarily upset about conspiracies or secrets per see- publics generally accept things like proprietary rights or secret strategies as legitimate. It's when conspiracy is used to protect political interests from censure that was deserved that institutional trust plummets, because this is a demonstration that the appearance of no wrong-doing is what matters more than ejecting wrong-doers. The Catholic Church is probably the best example of this on an international level, as the priest sex abuse scandal was truly an institutional coverup. More recently, the American medical institutions hemorrhaged public trust during the epidemic not simply for things like flip-flopping about masks and vaccine target goals, but also for the stance on good-vs-bad political protests as public health risks. These revealed a political interest, rather than a commitment to principle, that leads to second-guessing and skepticism of people who are having their own political self-interests affected on false pretenses. Not taking those people to task in turn reveals that the institutions they represent- formal or unorganized- are uninterested in addressing this sort of hypocrisy and deceit.

[arcticdementor]

Some thoughts on territorial integrity

One of Steven Pinker’s much touted metrics of the world improving is that from WW2 onwards, no country had their border changed by force (Crimea is generally considered the break in the trend, though debatably there are scattered others like Kosovo). Territorial integrity is a precondition for making sustained national sovereignty possible, and both are key elements in the post war world order. On its face, the knowledge that your country won’t have its borders arbitrarily redrawn by a bigger, stronger country is an incredible sign of progress that allows smaller, developing countries a level of safety and security never previously enjoyed.

But a while back I had to do some research on secessionist movements and was staggered by how many there were. For the random two decades we looked at there were over 70 different secessionist groups scattered across almost as many countries. There are a few countries with multiple movements (Myanmar is the undisputed winner here), but even cutting out the repeats leaves dozens upon dozens of countries containing some group of people that desperately wants out. Realizing this sort of made territorial integrity look less like an unambiguous sign of progress for me.

These secessionist groups are basically always ethnic or religious minorities. Sometimes they’re trying to secede because they’ve dealt with brutal oppression or discrimination, sometimes they just don’t feel like they signed on to some post-colonial country that had its borders drawn by outside actors, sometimes they’ve just gotten pretty good at self-governance and want their polity made official.

These secessionists aren’t all innocent victims, they include violent terrorist organizations like the Tamil Tigers and Abu Sayyaf. But many of them are; many of these groups have legitimate claims to oppression, decades or centuries of enduring ethnic cleansing and brutal state oppression. Many of them have valid desires for independence and self-governance. The strength and durability of the surrounding nation they have to live within doesn’t provide them safety and security, it’s often the very thing forcing them to live without safety or security.

This isn’t a polemic about how territorial integrity or national sovereignty is bad, or how the US or whoever should encourage secessionist groups, which I generally oppose. I have other issues with strict interpretations of national sovereignty, like the fact that diplomacy must be conducted state-to-state in denial of on-the-ground realities of who has authority (ex: Somaliland is a far more functional “country” than Somalia, but we insist on negotiating with the failed state half of the nation). But these objections aside, territorial integrity and national sovereignty still seem important to me for all the normal good reasons, like international stability and peace.

This is mostly a thought dump of something weighing on my mind. But I gotta say, learning that almost a third of the world’s countries contain people who want to escape sure made those unchanged borders look a lot less like progress and a lot more like cages.

[arcticdementor]

I'm reminded of two separate cases in the late days of r/themotte where two separate left-leaning posters engaged in rather stark examples of exactly this sort of anti-Catholicism.

American nativist anti-UN sensibility should be seen in continuity with the historic American nativist anti-Papist sensibility.

Mind that the Roman Catholic Church as a historical institution included not just the ceremonial corps of a particular religious memeplex but a transnational social welfare and education system that operated in coalition with or to exclusion of host nations, a forum for and arbiter of international diplomacy, and the smiling front of great powers’ colonial apparatuses.

And also a secular, territorial, internally elective empire in its own right, that tended to pursue its own interests by forming the core of multinational military coalitions and using its mythology of universal human brotherhood, as promulgated through that embedded welfare/education apparatus and its affiliates, to constrain sovereigns through internal political pressure.

That cartoon of priests as alligators crawling from the ocean menacingly towards little children was about the fear that the church establishing a role in American education represented a move to capture American youth by, and in the interests of, an overseas and politically unaccountable sovereign.

Because that is exactly what it did represent, because that is exactly what that kind of institution will do if you let it.

The American mythos has drifted far enough from the Germanic Protestant one to make it hard to understand how having an official state church with the monarch as head could be taken as a proud symbol of freedom and independence.

[mugasofer]

A seasoned and popular /r/TheMotte moderator, and their buddy the /r/SneerClub poster who's currently banned from /r/TheMotte and every other rationalist-adjacent subreddit, have joined forces to present a collaborative project:

A left-wing(?) subreddit for rationalist-adjacent Culture War discussion named /r/TheSchism.

So ... that's a thing.

If this isn't going to immediately collapse - and I'm not gonna deny there are red flags - they're probably going to need some people contributing other than the most frustrated lefty Motte users, which is why I'm advertising it here. I'm going to try it out myself. It's currently operating with no rules but "if you seem like you're not the sort of person we're aiming to attract you're banned", but in practice this seems to shake out to "don't literally advocate for a second Civil War" so far.