That isn’t true at all.
1,453 karma · joined February 17, 2025
Which areas are you referring to?
MRAs were a minority of a minority of users; even when the site was mostly white and Asian men talking about computer science, it was overwhelmingly liberal. There are far more who fit into the MRA category now but those have come about due to the cultural trend towards sexual doomerism among Gen Z men, who inherited it from millennial incels (most of whom fled the site around the time of Ellen Pao’s tenure). MRAs were mostly Gen X and elder millennials.
> I assume the actual political makeup of the user base hasn't changed that much in that time
Why? The site used to have a minority of right-leaning users (/r/conservative, /r/anarcho_capitalism, /r/DebateFascism, /r/TheDonald, /r/altright, /r/darkenlightenment, /r/politicalcompassmemes, etc.). All of these communities are completely marginal now; half of them were outright banned from the site. Reddit doesn’t have a positive reputation among people who are even moderately conservative because of how heavy-handed the moderation is. It has always had this reputation, but there was a brief time from around 2014 to around 2017 when conservatives could actually engage with parts of it in a way that they just don’t bother to do anymore.
> Why do this? Well, it's likely this is done as a means of circumnavigating some subreddits filters to ban mentioning of gambling. The word Stake has likely been filtered out of some subs or mentions of gambling outright banned, and this is a way around it. I noticed too when you utilize Ctrl + F, you cannot find the word "Stake" when searching for it on these posts, due to how these figures are considered different.
I saw the comment you linked a while ago and looked for some of the phrases on Google and turned up five or six hits before getting bored; there were a lot more in the search results that I never checked. This was also around the time that Kick was showing up everywhere because they had been paying for their clips to appear on other sites.
It’s hilarious to see people complaining about lawyers being overpaid and incompetent on a forum dedicated to an industry that was completely unregulated up until about a month ago. A lawyer can be disbarred from his profession for making these kinds of mistakes; can you?
This isn’t true at all.
An absurd claim presented without evidence.
Libraries have become obsolete as the public’s media consumption patterns have changed. The premise of the public library system was that knowledge would be made freely accessible so that it couldn’t be gatekept by elites. In practice, however, most libraries have turned into the fiefdoms of the librarians who manage them; these librarians will appeal to the access-to-knowledge premise the institutions were built on only to turn around and tut at patrons who expect the facilities to be clean, quiet, and dedicated to accessing knowledge.
Librarians don’t want to be put out of the job, so they have redirected funding into operating as community centers. Patrons also abuse the spaces to use them as remote offices and daycares. All three practices result in a degraded experience for those who are still interested in using libraries as libraries.
Peter Zeihan
Similar arguments were made to defend Harvey Weinstein.
> And yes, if you feel that strongly, you absolutely do have the option to vote with your feet at any time.
People shouldn’t have to switch jobs because they don’t want to provide Bill Gates with their phone number.
Those numbers don’t make any sense. Alphabet had 403 billion in revenue in 2025. The UK’s population is around 69,000,000. This amounts to $5,840.57 per person, which is nowhere near a lifetime of retirement savings.
Correct.
> So by extension we do already accept that neutral procedures are possible
Doesn't follow.
> and that we have achieved them.
Doesn't follow.
> The English Common Law systems and their derivatives are an astonishing success in achieving general fairness.
That depends entirely upon what you mean by "fairness," which will itself be loaded with presumptions about how the world is and ought to be.
> People arguing against it have, with remarkable consistency, failed to come up with anything that reaches it's level of neutrality.
Define "neutrality."
> Neutral procedures are a solved problem
If this were true we wouldn't be having this discussion.
> the tricky part is convincing the law enforcement system to do things by the book.
"Draw the rest of the owl."
This requires that we accept that there is such a thing as a neutral procedure, and even if we accept that such a neutral procedure exists in principle, it doesn’t follow that we agree on what that procedure looks like. Deferring physical conflicts is only possible if factionalism doesn’t win out. The last decade and a half of western political history has been defined by the recognition of certain factions that this deferral can’t go on forever.
He did.
Give it a few years.
> J.D. Vance might represent a kind of domestic counter-force in the U.S. that leans more toward 'America First' rather than prioritizing Israel.
Do you mean like he’s going to drain the swamp?
Correct.
> Larry didn't just buy his way to digital dictator by bribing the right people
Incorrect.
> it answers a question in a way other people are avoiding, because answering it requires a lot of work and uncomfortable tradeoffs.
Larry Ellison is not interested in public order. The surveillance system isn’t going to be for normal people, it’s going to be for Larry Ellison. California isn’t filthy because it lacks a panopticon; it was cleaned for visiting Chinese dignitaries without one. If Ellison had wanted to clean up the street and has the appeal you think that he does, he could have just run for governor.
If you tested the claim it wouldn’t tell you about human nature, because it’s possible (and I think likely) that most people are simply conditioned to believe they need purposeful work to be fulfilled, so you could just as well argue that if society were to be radically re-engineered, it would be worthwhile to re-engineer it at the psychological level (such that no one felt the need to work), rather than the economic level (such that work was made available to everyone).
> We're ruled by people who don't work.
I don’t have any data to support this but I suspect the majority of those people that we would characterize as happy are still engaged in an occupation (not a “job” as such, but purposeful work that goes beyond mere leisure). I’ve seen dozens of well-to-do retired boomers who waste away on Twitter or YouTube and don’t seem to do much of anything anymore, which is what I’m guessing is the behavior you’re imagining when you talk about oligarchs not working, but I don’t see much evidence that the oligarchs are like that; most that I can think of have made no indication that they will ever retire. Now, granted, work looks a lot different if you’re Warren Buffett, but what we’re looking at is not the social benefit of work as such but the impact of structured, purposeful activity on an individual’s psychological sense of wellbeing. In that sense, I think it’s unlikely that these people would disprove the premise.