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   ≠ Brett Stevens ≠ (amerika@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Wednesday, 24-Jan-2024 14:44:40 JST ≠ Brett Stevens ≠
   On the WJ Maggos thought experiment:
   
   https://freespeechextremist.com/notice/Ae5dpDiAjF0uol3sIq
   
   Here, he posted some politically incendiary material in a thread started by a well-known and widely-admired user about the death of his canine companion.
   
   My thesis: he wanted to create an equivalent of a racial slur or insult to see if people would call for censorship.
   
   Unexpected: they seem to want to debate him or beat his ass instead.
   
   It's a useful thought experiment but I think should move from the original thread.
   • pistolero :thispersondoesnotexist: and ✙ dcc :pedomustdie: :phear_slackware: like this.
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     pistolero :thispersondoesnotexist: (p@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Thursday, 25-Jan-2024 01:49:35 JST pistolero :thispersondoesnotexist:

     in reply to

     • william.maggos
     @amerika @wjmaggos I think by now he'd know that no one is going to demand censorship; he's never paid very close attention. Underlying that post was the presumption that some categories of complaint are ignored on FSE, or that mean words on the internet are an actual problem, neither of which was true. I don't think he's paying close enough attention to play 4D chess. He gives orders or grandstands, he's never said anything particularly insightful or even actually responded to anything. He says "Because of $x, you have $y" and I point out that $x was never true but he's not noticed. I think he's just a bot, despite meat-based composition, and he's tuned for Twitter rather than anyplace more thoughtful. I've written some about this: https://freespeechextremist.com/notice/AIB2yWD51ohVAc7ekK .
     
     Bill Burr told this story about going to see Bill Clinton. There's this procession, and Clinton jumps out of the car, and people are reaching out to shake his hand but he's acting like he doesn't even see them and he's just waving in slow-motion with his mouth half-open. Nobody knew what was going on, but it turns out that this was a thing done so that he'd photograph well: he was pretending to engage with the crowd for the sake of a photo op, so instead of shaking hands or high-fiving people, he was just posing, and the crowd of people that came to see the president were the unwitting backdrop.
     
     There was also this: https://reaction.la/security/social_networking.html :
     
     > Conversations became one man with one microphone attached to a thousand megaphones, and replying was like talking back to the national news broadcast, because you could reply to a shill, but the man giving the shill her script was not listening, because he was running a hundred similar shills, and his shill would just stick to her script, the script he had assigned to her no matter what you replied to her script.
     
     I don't think he's literally received a script from a shadowy figure; it's metaphorical. He's got his script, and there's no point trying to reason with him. Any sentence is wrong if you stretch it far enough, but it's more obviously wrong the shorter the sentence you start with, and that's the heart of his complaint that I write too many words: he's frustrated that his job isn't easy enough and demands that I reduce my own argument to the strawman version and he's got to construct the strawman himself. So he just skips replying to any point I make and addresses the strawman. Fine, whatever; just makes him safe to ignore.
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