While I’ve heard of them, I’ve never even accidentally gone to the motte before (despite vaguely following along rat/rat-adjacent/sneer-at-rat spaces for years) and I regret clicking on this link. What is this, rat-4chan?
Themotte is a spinoff from the slatestarcodex subreddit, they used to have a culture war thread every week, which always filled up with (far) right culture war grievances which they then all pretended to talk neutral about. (The effect was mostly that peoples overton window was drawn right). Eventually the stink of it got so bad that Scott Alexander had to take action (he wrote slatestarcodex before he sold out and now runs a substack), so he told them with his semi blessing to go make their own subreddit.
Which was pretty bad, a place where you could said anything (esp rightwing) as long as you used enough words to explain it. (the 14 words did sneak at times, and I saw (sadly didn’t archive it) openly neo-nazi homesteaders try to recruit there. So a lot of ‘themotte people didn’t think they were on the same side as the far right, but the far right certainly did think that’). Etc etc. Eventually the reddit admins got more and more annoyed with the place, and (this is a bit speculative on my part) after somebody got banned(*) for explaining the triple parenthesis dogwhistle by the admins they freaked out and made their own site.
*: A thing I noticed at the time, which themotte people didn’t this guy who got banned was from Germany, which has a little bit stronger rules re antisemitism so the admins banning them for that wouldn’t surprise me, esp if it was automated. And for the people who don’t know, on reddit every forum has mods who come from the forum(called a subreddit), and the site itself has admins, so that is why there is sometimes some moderation conflict. The mods were afraid the admins were about to ban the subreddit, which would destroy all the past content, so they made a new site.
E: also wow themotte has gotten a lot worse when it went offsite. Jesus some of the comments in that thread. I feel bad for TWG.
The guano-hole is dark, but full of bat-diamonds. Just presenting an excerpt of the reply chain, for the reader’s pleasure:
Reply A, “WhiningCoil”:
Yes, we’ve all thrown our hat in the ring in different ways. I chose to have children, be a father and a husband, live an honest industrious life as an example to my offspring, and attempt to preserve my way of life through them.
You contributed to a miasma of chaos around the state violating my parental rights to confiscate my children’s reproductive capacity. You added one more talking point to the list I have to defeat when I’m arguing with my in-laws about the very real, documented shit our local school districts are doing that they’ve been MSNBC’ed about.
I wouldn’t pat yourself on the back too hard. Although I suppose if you get your way, your impact on society may yet outlive mine, though I suspect my wife wouldn’t survive the shock of it.
The fucking hubris to call that “Truth seeking” and play the victim.
Reply B, “No_one”:
To WhiningCoil, we’re all in a propaganda war whose outcome is critical. To you, it’s just a game of sorts. Not a life-or-death conflict whose outcome determines whether normies return to functional normality, or end up in cultural-revolution tier insanity.
I get why he’s pissed at you, and I get why you as a young gay furry aren’t overly concerned with the possible normalisation of cultral-revolution tier social insanity.
Like most young people, you probably believe, deep down that you’re immortal and it’ll all work out.
Have you yet been forced to perform a maoist style self-criticism session IRL where you admit to your sin of being white-ish and promise to do better ? I guess not.
I’m not sure what the second paragraph in reply A is referring to but my gut says it’s going to make me deeply sad as someone who has even the tiniest amount of empathy for trans kids.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted@swlabr As a parent myself I understand that my kids are not in fact my personal property but human beings in their own right who are capable of independent thought. That’s never struck me as being a particularly controversial point of view, but then I look at these creepy fuckers with their identically dressed kids smiling for the camera because they’ll get a beating later if they don’t and that just makes me shudder.
I’m not sure what the second paragraph in reply A is referring to
To understand themotte you need to realize these are rightwingers/centrists (according to them) who are just marinating constantly in the culture war. About half of the posters there have their brains basically turned into rotten soup and they think that everything is an attack on ‘their way of life’/genes.
No idea why people stay there when every other comment is some weird hateful argumentative piece of shit.
TracingWoodgrains may be of a different quantity than David Gerard, but he’s proven he isn’t of a different type.
lol quality sneer. (and of course themotte would react like this, as they consider TWG a centrist at best and often a leftwinger, see the comments upstream)
Some of the most obnoxious moments here are when someone dredges up a historical feud and the peanut gallery thinks it’s productive to opine at length on the object level of that feud.
Ah, I see TWG made the rookie mistake of thinking they could endear themselves to internet bigots by carrying water for them.
^Also, fuck this nazi infested shithole. Absolute eye bleach.
Open post in private browser window, click profile… Oh, wow, he is.
As for carving out my own little space online where dissent is purged, everyone from Steve Sailer to Zero HP Lovecraft to BAP follows me on Twitter, where I openly and emphatically argue against them.
Dude. Not healthy.
I feel like I should quote some proverb about not mud-wrestling a pig or debating a creationist. This is like going out of your way to make the Nazis feel at home in your neighborhood bar.
lol these people are so much more vicious than people here holy shit. i can’t even discern what their problem is. babe please stop hanging out with fascists.
I think they’re actually being pretty clear, it’s just hard to accept they’re being this baldfaced about it: they hate that he’s gay, they hate that he’s a furry, but above all they hate hate hate hate that he’s not quite as fashy as they are
Right! You’d think they’d want to actually try to look like rationalists, put the petty bigotry aside and bask in the race-realist camaraderie. But no, being a gay truly is beyond the pale.
In addition to the lack of fascism, I think that the attitude towards shitposting here creates a much healthier social environment. Like, your shitpost may serve to inspire a serious comment but you’re also allowed to just spout off because you think it’s funny or you need to get a emotional response out of your body or whatever.
I’ve seen people say that /uj is essential to keeping communities healthy. If you only allow ‘reasonable discussion’, you allow all kinds of awful people in as long as they’re not too obvious, while regular people get reprimanded for responding to it. But if you only allow shitposting and no genuine discussion, it’s going to become genuine whether you want it to or not (see: Gamers Rise Up or similar)
On here, you can see people write earnestly on a bunch of different topics, but you can also see them just tell a promptfan “you can’t get it up unless the fingers are wrong, can you” and ban them. It’s great
LOL he’s gotten pissed
https://www.themotte.org/post/1070/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/227907?context=8#context
While I’ve heard of them, I’ve never even accidentally gone to the motte before (despite vaguely following along rat/rat-adjacent/sneer-at-rat spaces for years) and I regret clicking on this link. What is this, rat-4chan?
Themotte is a spinoff from the slatestarcodex subreddit, they used to have a culture war thread every week, which always filled up with (far) right culture war grievances which they then all pretended to talk neutral about. (The effect was mostly that peoples overton window was drawn right). Eventually the stink of it got so bad that Scott Alexander had to take action (he wrote slatestarcodex before he sold out and now runs a substack), so he told them with his semi blessing to go make their own subreddit.
Which was pretty bad, a place where you could said anything (esp rightwing) as long as you used enough words to explain it. (the 14 words did sneak at times, and I saw (sadly didn’t archive it) openly neo-nazi homesteaders try to recruit there. So a lot of ‘themotte people didn’t think they were on the same side as the far right, but the far right certainly did think that’). Etc etc. Eventually the reddit admins got more and more annoyed with the place, and (this is a bit speculative on my part) after somebody got banned(*) for explaining the triple parenthesis dogwhistle by the admins they freaked out and made their own site.
*: A thing I noticed at the time, which themotte people didn’t this guy who got banned was from Germany, which has a little bit stronger rules re antisemitism so the admins banning them for that wouldn’t surprise me, esp if it was automated. And for the people who don’t know, on reddit every forum has mods who come from the forum(called a subreddit), and the site itself has admins, so that is why there is sometimes some moderation conflict. The mods were afraid the admins were about to ban the subreddit, which would destroy all the past content, so they made a new site.
E: also wow themotte has gotten a lot worse when it went offsite. Jesus some of the comments in that thread. I feel bad for TWG.
TL;DR:
Yes
so that makes r/themotte rationalist /pol/ and themotte site rationalist 8chan
The Singularity (of hating that we know what those words mean) Is Near
The guano-hole is dark, but full of bat-diamonds. Just presenting an excerpt of the reply chain, for the reader’s pleasure:
Reply A, “WhiningCoil”:
Reply B, “No_one”:
I’m not sure what the second paragraph in reply A is referring to but my gut says it’s going to make me deeply sad as someone who has even the tiniest amount of empathy for trans kids.
@YourNetworkIsHaunted @swlabr As a parent myself I understand that my kids are not in fact my personal property but human beings in their own right who are capable of independent thought. That’s never struck me as being a particularly controversial point of view, but then I look at these creepy fuckers with their identically dressed kids smiling for the camera because they’ll get a beating later if they don’t and that just makes me shudder.
To understand themotte you need to realize these are rightwingers/centrists (according to them) who are just marinating constantly in the culture war. About half of the posters there have their brains basically turned into rotten soup and they think that everything is an attack on ‘their way of life’/genes.
No idea why people stay there when every other comment is some weird hateful argumentative piece of shit.
lol quality sneer. (and of course themotte would react like this, as they consider TWG a centrist at best and often a leftwinger, see the comments upstream)
Edit Ow god TWG what are you doing? do you have no selfawareness? Are you self harming?
we’re all looking for the guy who dredged up a historical feud
zoom and enhance
pull back, split screen
Uh-huh.
Ah, I see TWG made the rookie mistake of thinking they could endear themselves to internet bigots by carrying water for them. ^Also, fuck this nazi infested shithole. Absolute eye bleach.
that tracingwoodgrains dude is admin at themotte, that’s a few steps above just carrying water
Open post in private browser window, click profile… Oh, wow, he is.
Dude. Not healthy.
I feel like I should quote some proverb about not mud-wrestling a pig or debating a creationist. This is like going out of your way to make the Nazis feel at home in your neighborhood bar.
lol these people are so much more vicious than people here holy shit. i can’t even discern what their problem is. babe please stop hanging out with fascists.
I think they’re actually being pretty clear, it’s just hard to accept they’re being this baldfaced about it: they hate that he’s gay, they hate that he’s a furry, but above all they hate hate hate hate that he’s not quite as fashy as they are
Right! You’d think they’d want to actually try to look like rationalists, put the petty bigotry aside and bask in the race-realist camaraderie. But no, being a gay truly is beyond the pale.
In addition to the lack of fascism, I think that the attitude towards shitposting here creates a much healthier social environment. Like, your shitpost may serve to inspire a serious comment but you’re also allowed to just spout off because you think it’s funny or you need to get a emotional response out of your body or whatever.
I’ve seen people say that /uj is essential to keeping communities healthy. If you only allow ‘reasonable discussion’, you allow all kinds of awful people in as long as they’re not too obvious, while regular people get reprimanded for responding to it. But if you only allow shitposting and no genuine discussion, it’s going to become genuine whether you want it to or not (see: Gamers Rise Up or similar)
On here, you can see people write earnestly on a bunch of different topics, but you can also see them just tell a promptfan “you can’t get it up unless the fingers are wrong, can you” and ban them. It’s great