~ born within 10 miles of Rastrick, Scholes, Wyke, Tong, Hanging Heaton, Heckmondwike, Farnley Tyas and Slaithwaite (which is pronnounced ‘Slow-ett’).

The made up names from M&B actually sound very like real place names from the areas of Europe those places approximate.

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That is to say that an intersectional feminist or someone who would simply define themselves as socially liberal and at least moderately economically left wing (both political identities that predate ‘SJ’ as a term by a long way) may agree with an SJW on every important point except a few details of terminology, but not be ‘Social Justice’ because the latter is actually understood to mean things like ‘using Tumblr’ and ‘being uncompromisingly hostile to certain groups of people who disagree with them’.

If SJ is, as I believe, a style of writing and presenting rather than a distinct political ideology then anti-SJ isn’t a political stance either, it’s an opinion on how people should express their opinions.

@Zorgon: this means that, in my model, being against the values of SJs because of the way they express them isn’t in any way rational.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this but tbh I feel it would be more productive if ‘SJ’ and ‘SJW’ were tabooed when people are trying to disscuss actual positions.

(For the record, I agree with SJWs about almost everything, politically speaking, but I do not identify as an SJ because I choose to distance myself from a lot of the way in which they express the opinions we share. I’m also a lot less certain of things than the prototypical SJW and view, for instance, ‘the kyriarchy’ as a useful model with flaws that has definite potential to be replaced by a more useful model).

I would take exception at how SJs are apparently all white and middle class but due to aforementioned distancing from the label I kind of have an online social circle of nontypical SJs and SJ-adjacent people. It’s entirely possible that the ethnic and class diversity there isn’t a representative sample.

Oh and alternative model, which also applies to a lot of the time I hear the term used: ‘SJW’ actually means ‘someone in a particular category of political opinions (such as feminist, trans-positive, LGBT-positive, anti-racist) who expresses their opinions in a way I, the person labelling them, dislike’

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We made clear that we weren’t having it, being forced to remove ad links from their signatures and so forth, but not having actually banned them, they too got bored and drifted away after a week or two.

Our site had exactly the same dynamic though – 10-20 active contributors the precise identity of which varied over time without affecting the numbers – and we made similar efforts to try to improve the situation with no success.

If you haven’t already, though, take a look at NationStates. This is a very very large conworld site, which seems to have divided itself up into chunks of about that size. Not all of the Regions are so small, some are in hundreds or thousands of members, but I’d bet none have more than say 50 real active members.

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What if these various group size thresholds refer not to the number of people you can know overall, but to your maximum social frame size? Like you can only load and manipulate enough information to model so many people or relationships in your mind at one time, but you can store the information to create more than one such model as long as the modeled spaces don’t intersect too much?

I know that before the advent of Facebook, I had parallel social existences for “going out friends”, people from school, people from work, family, etc. When I was in one setting or another, I would be one version of me or another, and I would be immediately aware of the personalities, relationships, and interpersonal histories of the people in that social frame. If my mother mentioned my great aunt, I would immediately picture the woman and her significance, history, etc. But if you had approached me at work and asked me about my great aunt, I would have been flummoxed by the very question and probably struggled to recollect the most basic things about her.

How often did your micro-nations friends interact with your IRL friends? How often did a member of your family invite you to engage in dinner table gossip about them?

I remember early Facebook and the rest of the “real name” internet being like a bomb exploding in my social life: Suddenly, my work network was invading my regular social life which was bleeding over into my extended family. My ability to cope with it all collapsed, and my social existence ever since has been radically depopulated and simplified. Now I basically have a work network and a non-work network. I suspect this has happened to a lot of people. Maybe throw in a interest-based online community (pseudonymity helps to fend off Google), and everyone else in the world has to stay on the “cardboard cutout” level of modeling just to stay sane.

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And thus the focus of tribal politics changes to the fight over who are the non-political, moderate economists.

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I might not agree with moderate libertarians but I find them personally very respectable in their convinctions.

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Though I understand what you mean about centralized vs. free market solutions, the problem is, which omniscient angels get to decide which problems are to fall under central control? If you put a group of politicians in charge of deciding whether x does or does not need to be centrally regulated, guess what solution they will come up with?

As David Friedman has conceded many times, an anarcho-capitalist society will tend to be sub-optimal with regard to a few collective problems like global warming, though it’s also not at all clear governments do a good job with those.

But I’m not even calling for an ancap society, though I think it’s a worthy goal to move towards; I’m just saying countries need to be smaller, as I think that’s the only real way to incentivize governments to do a better job.

Though this is also not super likely to happen in the near future, I think it’s more plausible and ultimately more fair (because I’m not trying to force everyone to accept libertarianism, just to get them to let libertarians break away from governments they don’t support) than trying to get a libertarian elected everywhere.

Therefore I will always strongly support almost any secession movement for just about any reason. I was very disappointed, for example, that Scotland did not vote for independence, even though they were breaking away to become more socialistic, so far as I can tell–the principle of more governmental competition producing better results in the long run is more important, imo, than demanding any one particular govmt be run more in accord with my personal preferences.

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Fort d’Hiver I do like, but then I’m a sucker for French and Romance language names, so Conte Rosso also gets past without pinging my lámatyávë alarms.

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