I love the “uh, you know we can see what you’ve done” reply.

I have never edited the LessWrong article, not sure what you’re talking about.

receipts posted

I meant I have never disruptively edited the article. (…) I’m not a power user of Wikipedia and don’t understand all your specialist terminology

Dude physically unable to take an L.

Lol how has that user not been banned yet. Clearly somebody with a very specific axe to grind.

And of course the Rationalists start to the things they accuse others of doing. How quickly the pretense of civility disappears.

Trace started his research on the site for banned Wikipedia cranks. I don’t know if he can presently edit Wikipedia, but he writes like someone who can’t.

NGL the AI generated image make DG look cool AF

If we’re framing this as a breakup, david won the breakup.

Didn’t he violate Wikipedias rules though

no, no, it’s fine. the less readable they are, the better.

Huh. OK, so I boiled away more of my precious time on this plane of reality chasing links and reading old Wikipedia arguments instead of doing something healthy, like discovering a new genre of porn. Anyway, one of TW’s complaints is that “outlets like PinkNews […] are treated as reliable despite long histories of misconduct”. He points to a discussion thread where PinkNews was supposedly deemed to be terrible, horrible, no good and very bad despite David Gerard saying it was basically fine. But the analysis proving that PinkNews is terrible, horrible, etc., is itself weirdly bad. I mean, take a look at this:

Another example of a dodgy source is at is [11]. where the claim “Queer-coding has affected many fictional villains. These evil characters are generally either shown as flamboyant and overly dramatic, like Disney characters Scar and Hades, or written as having a deep fixation on the main character, like Jafar, Kim Possible villain Shego and Catra from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. In the past few decades, Disney fans have seen Governor Ratcliffe and Professor Ratigan—as well as Scar, Jafar and Hades—being portrayed as queer characters.” The source for this claim? A Twitter tweet by “Jay, a self-described ‘transmasc enby’ who uses they/he pronouns”.

But the story doesn’t actually use that “Twitter tweet” as the source. It just springboards from a viral tweet to talking about the larger picture. The tweet didn’t say any of the specifics that PinkNews supposedly sourced to it. And the claim that Disney villains have been queer-coded is … not exactly shocking. I mean, just look up any of the authors that James Somerton plagiarized.

Or consider this article,[12] with the breathless headline “Star Trek: Picard season finale sees iconic character finally come out as queer, inspiring a million new fan fictions. The Star Trek: Picard season finale has confirmed a same-sex romance for iconic character Seven of Nine, and fans are thrilled.” The evidence? Two characters holding hands. In a series that already had more than one openly gay couple and thus no real reason to be ambiguous.

Well, actually, Star Trek: Picard did not “already” have “more than one openly gay couple”. Star Trek: Discovery had one, and the Kelvin timeline movies had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it implication of one. The PinkNews article didn’t just go aflutter over two characters holding hands, but also pointed to an interview with showrunner Michael Chabon:

There are hints that both Seven and Raffi are bisexual.

Oh yes. […] With a character like Raffi, to the extend we imagined her history in a fair amount of detail, her history included all kinds of sexual partners. There’s a father of her child, but that was far from her only sexual or life partner. She’s had relationships with all kind of people. If it was ever to come up, it was always going to be organic. […] Same thing with Seven of Nine, having to catch up after such along absence from the human race. If you think about that, it almost seems unnatural that she wouldn’t’ have had partners of other genders. It seems clear she would have. So even if we didn’t see that on Voyager, years have passed. In that time, she’s continued to explore the spectrum of human relationships in a broader way. So in our show, there are echos and implications of that.

And it’s not like the article was actually wrong, was it? Jeri Ryan said that Seven is “canonically bi”, and the Seven/Raffi romance went on to become a whole thing.

I won’t go to bat for PinkNews being good, but this investigation of what’s wrong with it is itself irritatingly flawed and superficial.

Winning sentences of the day so far:

Conservapedia is 100% true and correct. Evidence: https://www.conservapedia.com/Garfield_(comic_strip)

Whoever wrote that deffo wants to fuck Nermal.

Reddit can be really hit or miss, but I’m glad subredditdrama and /r/wikipedia aren’t buying TWG’s bullshit. Well, some of the /r/wikipedia assume TWG is merely butthurt over losing edit wars as opposed to a more advanced agenda, but that is fair of them.

I’m noticing that people who criticize him on that subreddit are being downvoted, while he’s being upvoted.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, as part of his prodigious self-promotion of this overlong and tendentious screed, he’s steered some of his more sympathetic followers to some of these forums.

Gotta love how the SRD thread has more comments and updoots than the original.

Conspiration should totally be a thing. “Omg, your 30,000 word Grassy Knoll post was conspirational!”, “Just the conspiration I need while I drink my defluoridated coffee and put on my tin foil hat to not go to work every morning!”

The comments are quite a selection of typical things. ‘harassing innocent IQ researchers’ ‘the sneerclubbers are all losers who hate crypto’ etc etc. Hitting the familiar beats.

My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, “okay, in a world where the rationalists weren’t closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren’t known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people’s money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut…”

I hate that you made me know this exists, but I thank the acausalrobotgod that you cannot make me listen to it.

The lesswrong Rationalist sphere people all write like this. And I assume he gets paid via various podcasts/substack subs/a patreon. So this is prob mostly their job.

I don’t know i had to skim it too. Its hard to see what point he’s trying to make. I can see why many of wikis choices are shit but he also seems to complain about takis magazine being removed witch just seems like a sensible choice. And he’s still up on his high horse about that conference where HBD people were invited to speak. They think “rationality” is about seeking heterodox thinkers but you don’t see anyone who believes in shit like miasma theory or any other discredited idea besides race there.

I’n not joking when I say he’s probably using an LLM to write this junk. It reads like it, and he’s already perfectly comfortable with illustrating his diatribes with embarrassing midjourney slop.

Prolix insanity is kind of a Rationalist / Rat-adjacent calling card.

For the rat & rat-adjacent soi-disant “communities” David is like the bogeyman. You see his name used in places like SSC to stand in for the otherwise nameless woke menace that’s coming for their precious bodily fluids.

what is the entire point of singling out Gerard for this?

He’s playing to his audience, which includes a substantial number of people with lifetime subscriptions to the Unz Review, Taki’s crapazine and Mankind Quarterly.