I can't imagine what might have created tensions bad enough to erupt like that - I'm sure each party had an excuse they thought was valid. They probably lost sight of why the conflict started in the first place.

I don't think there's a satisfying solution to warring neighbors. You could jump in and force them to stop fighting, but you can't force them to negotiate. A skilled and neutral mediator wouldn't even be able to work if the parties involved refuse to cool their heads. You could try to install a new ruler, but there's no guarantee the new guy would help (and it sounds like some fucked up CIA stuff anyway). It's hard to solve even at a small scale of two individuals acting out a feud, so scaling it up to countries is naturally more complicated.

I assume no one really talks about places like Kosovo because the conflict has no end in sight? Well, it doesn't help either that I have no mental image to associate with them, so maybe it's hard for others to make an association as well. History stuff's cool, but I don't see how anyone can properly keep up with it all.

It would fail to respect liberty.

That's difficult to counter. On a level, I agree, and I'm forced to side with liberty. On another level, it is not inherently impossible for an insider to challenge their community's values/rules and succeed in creating an exception. I think that's a basic form of liberty. Obviously it becomes a problem when a community punishes every insider challenge with death, but I'd also say that such a community has doomed itself to annihilation. Similarly, I could go so far as to say that the ability to engage liberty by permitting insider challenge is an essential quality for long term success.

History shows quite convincingly that communities with strongly enforced cultural norms inevitably choose a very specific way of "dealing" with outsiders.

Yes, and those often caused problems for otherwise successful communities. But I have to consider "strongly enforced" to be a bit loaded because to me that means that they went beyond banishing undesirable members and violently threatened them into compliance, which I'd consider a liberty violation and proof of failure. Then it's a matter of how many outsiders they'll try to drag down with them before the outsiders hopefully make use of their successful policies to find sufficient military aid. And that is messy and ugly, but I think it's acceptable.

I'm unfamiliar with Bosnia, so maybe I've missed your meaning. If they're bothering people outside their own territory, I'd say they're inviting retaliation. If they're keeping to their own turf and being assholes, just cut off all exchange with them.

Could you re-draft this? I'm seeing several problems.

You've taught all felons marketable skills for working with the blind. Is that the intent..? Put all ex-felons to work as aides for the blind?

I think this would be more expensive than our current silly system. Even substituting out all four surgeries, I think the cost would still be too high.

What happens if they're already blind?

If the last thing they hear a human say is the suicide instructions, how are the medical exams handled without communication? Logistically, how do you learn braille without help? Both of those things seem much harder if you can't hear any speech.

Law is an artificial thing, something that we have invented wholecloth.

What we know as law now, I agree. But I think it has an organic basis in cultural norms upheld by communities.

There wasn't any need to write down the rules, they were chiseled into your brain by being raised within that particular social environment. I don't have any reason to believe that this would fail as a system to enforce order - the common criticism of "subjective" loses meaning when everyone involved shares the values and outlooks that give weight to that subjectivity.

Eventually, communities consider dealing with people outside their community. Whether it's the formation of a large town or even the simple tolerance of a merchant, these communities end up being asked and expected to produce a concrete list of rules that must be followed. The purpose is clear: to allow outsiders to interact with the community without accidentally breaking the rules. This easily shifts to allowing outsiders to comingle, immigrate and integrate successfully.

However, it invites some dangers. First, now any time that the community has a need to update its rules/values, it must engage that concrete list to update it. What was a simple process of communal understanding now demands the extra step of formalization, but this may involve negotiating with a law master when the community has to share territory with other communities. Second, because the purpose of the concrete ruleset is to be understood by outsiders, these outsiders must be consulted when writing the rules because what's easy for the community to understand may be hard for outsiders to understand. So now you've got outsiders able to sneak loopholes in with clever wording. Third, it invites outsiders to challenge the rules as written. Challenge is a good thing, but the process of making the results concrete can create the start of legalese by making the rules overcomplicated or harder to understand. Example:

Say a community has the rule "don't eat meat on rainy days". An outsider would challenge it, saying "rainy days" is too broad because one might eat meat for breakfast and end up breaking the rule due to rain at noon. So now the rule is "don't eat meat during periods of rainfall". Well what if the meat's in your mouth when it starts raining? "don't put meat in your mouth if it is currently raining". How much rain counts as raining? "don't put meat in your mouth if it is currently raining audibly". My hearing isn't good, can you give another indicator? "don't put meat in your mouth if it is currently raining audibly or the rain is enough to cover your hands in water" etc etc until you need to create a new job for the sole purpose of translating the rules.

The history example you give is solid. My only proper counter is that while the positives outweigh the negatives, the positives do not increase over time while the negatives do increase over time. It only really demands reform and/or rebellion, but that can get really messy.

Even with all this, I can't quite say that making communal rules into a concrete form for outsiders is a doom flag. I am autistically bitter about it, though.

[tagging u/exilde since I'm butting into the conversation]

free beer from Sam Adams and a Krispy Kreme

Fuck yeah, by the end of the year they'll be able to give out a coupon satchel for a special vaccine happy meal. We got a sweet, now a beer, just need a couple more items. Maybe some mcdonalds fries or food from a vegan place.

All aboard the burgerpunk circus express!

Side note: the rules for these things are amusing. The donut rules mention that people not getting the shot can get free donuts too, but implies these no-vax donuts will come from a special allotment (sounds like an invitation for sabotage). The beer is a damned sweepstakes, so you might go through all the social media related hoops to find that you get nothing.

Current slapfight withheld, I did recognize the username from my time on Voat. I was gonna leave it alone and see how he adapted to this area, so I said nothing - he hasn't been posting here for long, after all.

Not that I'm implying all voat users are trash, but this particular user always had intellectually repulsive arguments following them. Maybe it's just caused by personal grudges that follow him? I remember him generating conflict by attacking popular voat opinions (siding against "nazis"), so I did not accurately predict a problem. Unfortunately old voat posts got deleted so I cannot verify if my memory is correct.

One way or another, it looks like your workload is going up temporarily.

Leftist have this great argument, I did not chose to be your child so I owe you nothing and you must take care of me.

I've seen this and tried to seriously engage it. Not choosing to be born is pretty much a non-point unless you want to make some esoteric buddhist argument.

"I owe you nothing" is a little more involved. It necessitates some form of contempt or abandonment. If your parents didn't raise you at all (like they were in jail and you grew up in an orphanage), then I could accept the claim because it'd prove that the parents did not fulfill their roles. If your parents at least tried, however, you cannot deny them being your parents because to do so is to deny the influence they had on your development, ultimately forcing one to deny themselves. This part actually clicks for leftists to me, as they provide no evidence that they either accept themselves or are happy with themselves.

"You must take care of me" doesn't quite follow unless you take a jump from the previous point to them actively hating themselves and hating their parents for giving them a life of misery and contempt. It's clear the context is of an abusive sort of manipulation.

If the whole phrase were "I did not choose to be your child and you must take care of me" I could accept it as a benign appeal to nature, as it'd be bizarre for a parent to not want to take care of their child - though I would assume that there are some hard limits on being taken care of, such as no abuse tolerated and support not being infinite.

You're right that it's a good representative saying.

If it's culture that might be interesting to you, and you're still looking at Sowell, I found Immigrations & Cultures and Conquests & Cultures to be excellent.

I'll start a backlog for audio books. I'm not much of a reader, so do you have any further culture-related recommendations? I'm done being frustrated at a lack of culture acknowledgement in public discourse; I'll only be able to advance my theories by going to books, it seems. You'd think it would get brought up in at least 1/5 of discussions about "multiculturalism" or "culture war", but nope.

hatred of middle-men minorities comes from resentment of a single group's success, typically observed by a domestic population that doesn't understand why that group succeeded.

I mostly agree there. But it's slightly complicated by some other factors. Say you're some prole that actually understands how they succeeded and you want to join in too - can you? What if they've already garnered support from governing or regulatory power structures to inhibit competition? A "fuck these guys" attitude is appropriate at that point. But I know little about the history of free markets and whether they ever existed.

I'd wager that in most of those cases where the middlemen minorities got banished/killed, there were a bunch of businessmen waiting to take up those middlemen roles they failed to innovate themselves. That's where a lot of the problem is, in my view. They understood it, but chose to engage jealousy instead of just being angry. If the businesses engaged with the middlemen would just get together and talk, they could probably come to an arrangement that saves them money and creates new infrastructure that makes those middlemen positions obsolete (for some middlemen roles, at least).

The same type of skillset used to discover and innovate business opportunities like middlemen is also used to subvert law. A nation would be nuts to embrace such people unless it's prepared to make their legal system more robust (not that it's 100% bad stuff that can come of it; they might work towards eliminating various forms of corruption). Some poor immigrants aren't gonna be able to influence politics easily, so that's probably a solid reason to ignore their abilities. But they stop being poor without a lot of trouble due to their ability to innovate (I'd even say that they may have been forced to innovate) and gain the ability to move superpowers within a few generations. Maybe it's just proof that money should be disconnected from power influence. You could also argue that negative feedback should be directed towards legislators who failed to adapt, but that gets into an argument about whether a weak man deserves to be conquered by a strong man (and whether the weak have a duty to be conquered).

Further negatives come from what I recognize as jewish culture, but I'll just state one of those: responding hysterically to criticism. There's an eagerness to take the least generous interpretation of criticism ("greedy? that's anti-semitic!"). It shouldn't be hard to understand what a terrible feedback loop this creates, we all saw it in grade school when nerds got bullied. It feeds into other issues like the refusal to adapt to your host culture and a desire to be treated as a victim (I wonder how common self-deprecative humor was 200 years ago). Sowell's point about jews being generic is terrific because it means I might be able to find more sample data sometime (whereever the fuck white armenians went) to see if any of this jewish culture stuff applies to them, which it might if enough circumstances match up to trigger the same evolutionary psychology principles.

So okay, yeah, middlemen have a valid marketable skillset and they provide tremendous innovation opportunities where they pop up. But that's just the positives. I could make a similar argument for sociopaths, a group that I'm actually jealous of because it seems extremely liberating to be a monster incapable of caring for others.

I don't even need to blame middlemen for the existence of managerialism, as I think it's an organic product of other systems (much like a tumor). It doesn't demand a similar skillset, though it can still reward it.

As far as a takeover, it could happen right now just by the wrong people worming their way into positions of power. So the admins already must be ready to deal with a takeover.

I don't agree that user created .wins would make that worse. They don't need a .win to organize and plan attacks, they can just use discord for that. It could cause some other problems, though, so I'd be fine if there was some kind of test or investigation for every attempted .win creation - preferably something handled manually by the admins and the details not being publicly disclosed so it would be very hard to cheat (if it were something dumb like post karma, that's really easy to pump with bots).

Counterpoint: wouldn't it be the good females? By what I understand of your matriarchy theory, evil women would be welcomed and supported as productive members of society. This matriarchy would want to destroy, evict, imprison, or corrupt any dissidents, wouldn't they?

Gaming's logs should be public, actually, so you can check this.

I'm interested in checking this, but I'm unsure where I'd look over there? I didn't notice anything obvious while checking just now. I think public mod logs are a great tool to build community confidence, so it'd be cool to see it get adopted.

I had some time and listened to an audiobook version on youtube. It was overall worthwhile.

I prefer your summary here to the long-hand version of that essay, but there were a couple of extra bits, such as cracker also coming from "wisecracker", which is pretty satisfying from an etymology angle. It'll be interesting to see how frequently I see "cracker" used in a way that directly conflicts with all of this information. I expect it to be very frequently, based off of all the prior reports I got about what it meant.

My major gripe was with him fellating middlemen so much. Surely he understands that not all middlemen are perfect super workers..? I think he sabotaged his argument by not discussing the possibility that anyone at any point might have been right to despise middlemen. I certainly refuse to accept managerialism just because hard workers existed in the past. Oh well. At least I learned that there were other groups that got conflated with jews for that kind of stuff, which reaffirms some assumptions.

Maybe I'll look for an audio version of Culture of Critique next. Reading a review of that years ago was what led me to take the culture pill. (My real reading time is still stuck on Nietzsche, he's definitely not an author you can speedread)

Overall, I only really reaffirmed some of my labelling positions. I gave it some consideration due to new information, but I'm gonna have to stick with the goal of having my words understood easier rather than being more correct in proper labelling. I have more terms I can use in restrictive normie areas, at least.

I think it'll be fine. Powermods will end up being a thing again, but that only matters long term when the users are denied the opportunity to pack up and make a new camp. It'd be interesting if some sort of system were attempted to try to counter the phenomenon, but I won't get my hopes up.

I'm sure we'll end up repeating a lot of dumb stuff that happened on reddit. Just so long as it doesn't get totally wrecked like they did, it should be okay. I don't want to see shit like shadowbanning, bots checking post history for naughty words, scripts that auto-ban users from one section because they made a post in another section, groups dedicated to harassing neighbors, etc.

And yeah, it's sad, but I know schizo posters are real. I try to talk them down occasionally but it doesn't seem to help. But letting them run their own little camp? That should be no problem. Who could they bother there, the 4 people that follow them? I'd even abide my own enemies a place to gather as long as they keep to themselves.

will report innocuous posts as "degenerate", they have very strong political views and want opposing views removed

The report screen implies that false/frivolous reports are punishable. Do you know if that is the case? The mods would probably need a record of who reported what for this to be possible. I think that sounds fine. If a mod starts using it for bias, the admins should be willing to step in.

Actually, I'd be tempted to force reports to be public. "snitches get stitches" should only become a serious issue if the group has a problem with their ruleset. Maybe only test it in one community to see how it goes.

I think that rule is really lacking. As best as I can remember his top level post, it was accusing jews of being to blame for some thing. That isn't the same as accusing them of conspiring. I can accuse my in-laws of doing something bad without them needing to have conspired it into action.

Maybe I'm wrong? No one knows but you now so the opportunity for me to potentially find I was mistaken is stripped.

Also, I would like the opportunity to discuss the use of labels with some of our members and it becomes impossible to do so organically when my opportunities are deleted.

So here's a proposition of compromise: get wordfilters as a mod power. Rule16 is there for the longevity of our survival, I get it. But straight deletion? I think it'd be sufficient to delete or change the offending word (and we have banned words within certain contexts, let's not pretend otherwise). Doing this would allow for bystanders to learn from secondhand experience what some of our rules actually mean by granting them contextual examples that no longer break the rule.

Wordfilters get used often on imageboards for moderation purposes and also jokes. Normally it's done to auto-translate site-wide one phrase to another phrase. 4chan filters the word "soy" to "onions" for example (long story). To be clear, I'm not suggesting you make a site-wide filter. I'm suggesting you force an edit on posts marked for deletion where it can be solved by changing one word.

Would that post have been okay using a euphemism like "vampire"? If it were something benign like "cats" it would surely pass.

To bystanders: yes, inviting spez shit sounds dumb as fuck, but I'd rather that than entire posts get nuked.

Hm, that's an excellent point. Even if you deny a skill involved, there is clear informative value for viewers. Anyone finding glitches without relying on luck potentially has a marketable skill.

Though this sort of value could be shared without the video format (text faqs and forums often shared exploits), video can help explain complex bugs. I'm not sure how I'd explore the possibility of skills being involved - I'd wager a solid third are discovered by "just playing around".

The best competition I can imagine coming from it is a work competition to find the most bugs during a phase of testing/development. I participated in one of those once for an mmorpg, it was a lot of fun. Not simple to set up, of course.

Everything you said seems correct. However:

you have to have a disciplined and well ordered society which you don't get from libertarian policies

This is a feature, not a bug. If you got it from policy, you would inherently break libertarianism's disfavor of governmental manipulation. You must instead get it from other sources, like culture, upbringing, philosophy, intelligence, etc.

I support the flavor that permits entire civilizations to try and fail this process, which will likely destroy them completely. But I reject large scale civilizations, so it wouldn't be so bad for a few towns to fail.

The logistic reality is basically impossible, though. It'd be insane to attempt anything like this without enormous preparation or some desperate cataclysm. Or something outlandish like Bioshock's Rapture.

Rolling out a pet theory here: positive goals versus negative goals; alternatively, constructivism versus destructivism. "I don't want to fight, I just want to play games in peace" is a positive goal, as it expresses an outcome where something is created or a lost thing is regained. "Your ideas are an evil and I must see you undone" is a negative goal, as it expresses an outcome where something is destroyed or a desired thing is taken.

Argument is simple, that the maintenance of civility demands positive goals, because negative goals are a direct threat to civility. The implication is basically a meme: that "ends justifies the means" may be just only under a positive goal.

I'm inviting feedback because I've hit a wall in development. (I'm still considering whether it could also apply to uncivil scenarios, such as military strategy, but it's looking doubtful so far.)

But then one has to determine to what extent something adds value, which justifies taking some measure of risk. Honestly, I don't think users calling people 'niggerfaggot' adds that much to justify taking any risk with the sub.

Fair enough. Ex-voaters aren't so numerous or special that they demand special risk. I think you can agree on some simple terms that reddit treats as slurs, such as "faggot" and "tranny". Not exactly intellectual labels, but they're pretty useful for communicating issues that pop up regularly. The exception you mention about pollution is acceptable to me.

I am eagerly awaiting the inevitable attacks to hit the .win network. So far, I've been pleasantly surprised with their ability to stay online. Just hosting the_donald was a damned big target. Now they're practically challenging the citadel by trying to make their own reddit (I think .win is more threatening than the other places like saidit).

Though that's their issue, a bad actor trying to remove us merely has to convince the .win admins that our presence is a liability and I don't know them personally so who knows how easy that may be. I don't think they've stopped by to lay official mandate? I assume Dom would make a sticky about it if so.

Racial slurs are too risky. Don't blame me, blame America.

That's the good thing about your Constitution. That will never be the case. Corporate tyranny is where it's at.

Contradiction? Or implying a total corporate takeover like cyberpunk without lasers.

From watching more niche sites struggle with foreign hosts during attacks, I don't think even america is a useful blame target. If someone wants to break your business partner that has no skin in your game aside from a one-sided contract, it won't take a federal effort to accomplish it. I hope one day we are done with all this cancel culture and deplatforming stuff.

One more point.

FOUR: Do not post ISM. Involuntary Salacious Material means NSFW material of a manner that was not intentionally made public.

I'm going to assume the point is based on legal issues, since you maintain that "porn" cannot contain the content described by this rule.

This rule functions only with a discernment of intent behind an item's distribution. I'm not great at the legalese game, but this seems very exploitable to me. It largely has to be based on claims, right? Could you append the rule to describe how the intent is verified?

There will be occasions where it's obvious, of course. But as it stands, wouldn't a simple drawing posted online alongside a text message 'this work may not be redistibruted without explicit consent' fall under this as soon as you're notified? What if it isn't the artist or their lawyer contacting you? What if the evidence is falsified?

It's basically the IP law nonsense that youtubers struggle with now. I don't really expect us to receive that kind of harassment, but it's not impossible.

Initial thought: would it be permitted if an archive is available? Legal stuff is real iffy, but that seems like some kind of lead because archives generally only function on public documents (I think? never tested). Then you'd have to make it clear whether we can post archive links that depict rule4-breaking items. I think this has come up on reddit in the past, but I don't recall your ruling.

Oh yeah, sure, I don't disagree with the premise of the thread. It's total bullshit it got smacked away like it did.

I just wanted to vent a little and invite others to engage in critique (as I believe sincere criticism can be a great help to creators). You did engage, so I suppose it was a success.

I couldn't make it past chapter 3, so I'll accept that the images could have increased. I suppose even with many images, there's still a formatting sort of problem, close to what you express.

It's like, well, consider how your eyes move when reading. Simple motions for plain text, that builds a foundation. Once you arrange the text in seperated chunks across a page (especially a page with illustrations), the complexity increases and normal reading rules get slight modification so panelling can control the order your eyes hit a bunch of different text blocks on a page. This rule is standardized due to industry production workflow in part, but it's also pretty useful to have that kind of tool accepted because once you control the pattern followed by the readers' eyes, you then can try to control the pace that their eyes move with.

This work is what occurs when you attempt to disregard panelling completely. Maybe the author just hates comics. Maybe they understood that their content would generate a fanbase that simply does not care. Maybe they are performing an artistic experiment in defiance of industry norms. One might interpret that it is simply an issue of deficient organization, but that's nearly the definition of zero panelling in such a work.

I can't pretend the author is unaware of related principles, as he utilizes them. I'll reference the OP example. The first sentence is segmented in a style that suggests in text to use meter in recitation, like a poem. No telling if that's the intent or it just looked neat, but a reader familiar with prose would likely adjust how they read it. Third sentence comes in strong with a flipped gradient and increased font size, okay that's done for emphasis, fair. Big space, then fourth sentence, same presentation as the third, but split into two lines. Why would you put full emphasis on two sentences back to back? It isn't a meta narrative, so it must be emphasis. Unless it's a seperate narrator? But then it's still presented with more "depth" than the other narrative speaker. Why put the large space between the two sentences when there's not even a mode shift? It creates an emphatic silence. The last two sentences are gradient-flipped again, but this time there's no weird vertical spacing, the font only increased slightly, and it hilariously breaks what little boundary there was by putting text too far out left and right.

That's just a snippet or single page, the whole thing had my mind racing with such thoughts. You can write it off to autism (and funposting), but I think I just have a low tolerance for emotional manipulation. I can't help but then question the validity of the author's content because I find it hard to grasp that a person who grew up suffering emotional abuse could stomach trying to emotionally manipulate others. But that's a psychology issue and I may be wrong to think that.

I don't think I agree about reddit being fixable in a single night, but I'd agree that it could be made tolerable. Just that it'd be likely for similar problems to come back afterwards.

I think Win's anti-politics stance will provide some protection against moderators with ulterior motives.

I'll interpret this favorably, but I want to point out that it will sound suspicious to others here. I'm sure you've seen some online spaces get dominated by some one-sided politics alongside claims that amount to "your ideas are political, but my ideas are moral".

Specific example. I was actually a bit alarmed when I stopped by the gaming .win, because I've had it ingrained in me from reddit that every gaming space that openly declares "no politics" will not implement the rule fairly. Reading the actual threads there afterwards, however, I did not notice evidence of such a corruption.

Back to the idea of fixing reddit, a great motion towards that end would be ensuring that all rules are applied fairly. But the nature of a ruleset is to bind its subjects, so it organically attracts bad actors who wish to place others beneath them. If you could conjure some AI supermod to eliminate that human element, the bad actors would just be pushed to the next softest target. I will not suggest attempting a purge like they have done with us, as it solves little and breeds conflict. Merely preventing the highest tiers of power from becoming compromised could be enough in the long term, but that in itself is not a simple feat.

I see both sides but no easy compromise. There's a bunch of possibilities, at least, but trying any of them practically denies the option to try the rest.

The current trajectory makes the goal clear enough, at least: make reddit v2. We'll have to wait and see how well the admins understand why reddit failed.

KiA2, now that I look at the front page, isn't necessarily as political (although we have a wide definition of politics to include social issues).

I would recommend considering us political, since we're quite involved in culture war stuff. Almost a political meta, as the culture war involves a lot of non-political fields (like gaming) becoming intentionally politicized.

While you're around: any word on allowing user-created communities? I have not seen any moderator-tier failures so far on the .win network, but I believe it is inevitable to occur and reliable countermeasures should be made.

Ah, thanks. I vaguely remember seeing those before now.