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Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?

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Re: Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?

#181
post #54
post #11

> On both Discord and Reddit, wallstreetbets users frequently refer to themselves collectively as “retards” and “autists,” and have been known to deploy the kinds of racial slurs and deliberately offensive language that have become commonplace in 4chan-style posting forums. I read WSB daily for years and cannot recall a single usage of a racial slur. They definitely referred to themselves as autists/retards in a self…

> They definitely referred to themselves as autists/retards in a self-deprecating manner but that's hardly the same thing. I fail to see how 'autist' is any less of a slur than e.g. 'trap' or 'gay', when used in the right (wrong) context. It's not a racial slur, but it's quite certainly a slur.

I am entirely comfortable with the fact that some people on the internet choose to use words I don't like.

Re: Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?

#182
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused, what is the lesson here? That quote seems to get thrown around so often that it can be applied to anytime that anyone gets criticized for anything. The moderator's statement appears to be asking for more help with moderation, not advocating for less moderation or advocating for more hateful behavior to be allowed.

There are two lessons: 1) Language is imprecise. We do not communicate with the idea that our words have a unique, specific meaning. This means that you can do things like quote my statements out of context in order to change their intent. 2) People are not perfect. You can almost always find some "fault" in even the best people. People should not be punished for a "fault" unless it does measurable harm to someone el…

Those don't seem to matter here, the business apparently is saying that the language was precise and they were experiencing measurable harm from it.

Re: Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spillover from medical terms is very common. You sometimes hear someone being called a "psycho" or a "sociopath" but you don't make the assumption that the accuser is a trained psychiatrist. "Idiot" used to be a medical condition, someone suffering from idiocy. "Retard"; someone whose mental development had been retarded and remained in a childhood state into adulthood. These words are not supposed to be taken litera…

You make some good points, I think. The extrapolation I’d make is that even that last statement is offensive. As some say, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. There’s a culture of decency, and it is opposed to a culture of liberty. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t have decency, but that everything should be kept in balance. We shouldn’t embrace Gilead’s “freedom from”.

I'm not quite sure how these are inherently in conflict. It seems like a community might allow the use of slurs as insults while also discouraging insults in general. In different words, "Please be nice to each other. We don't ban for the use of any particular words, but we do ban for disparaging others."

I could easily imagine a policy like this in, say, a linguistics forum, where it's totally allowed to discuss the usage of slurs, as long as they're not directed at someone.

Re: Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying Discord openly permits groups that share child porn? Or discusss how to find it? I could understand the latter if the discord itself has nothing illegal but that’s still pretty shocking.

I know for a fact that it happens. Certainly they would stop it if they knew about it, but they don’t police this stuff like you might think. They rely on their users to self-report for the most part. [1] “ On April 23, 2020 at 1:55 p.m., the Marysville Police received a tip that child pornography had been uploaded while using a discord online service.” There are groups like this all over the place. I know who this p…

There is probably no public service on the web that someone _hasn't_ tried to upload illegal content to.

Re: Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?

#185

What I really want to know is how the WSB guys learnt that these funds were shorting GME, AAL etc. Can anyone tell me? :)

Short interest is reported daily. You don't have to do much guess work to know who is short, in general. And funds have to report beneficial ownership above certain thresholds, so highly concentrated "tactical" managers are susceptible to news or sentiment driven herd events involving stocks in which they have large positions.

Re: Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?

#186
post #59

I love the trading advice, just buy and hold. This is the next generations occupy Wall Street

It's just manipulation- as a flood of rubes come in to "buy and hold" the price explodes and then some rubes get into options trades that give them downside exposure, some short the stock, some believe the hype and think it's an investment, and some are there to speculate but can either only go long or get the timing wrong.

So the buying pressure at some point subsides, and momentum to the short side builds as people exit.

Participants in these forums like yahoo finance before it are constantly trying to exhort the group to move into names in which the touts already have positions setup.

Re: Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the dangers of using "hate speech" as an nebulous term. You can then turn it around and use it as an excuse to ban whatever you want. I could easily read through any of the front page posts on Reddit, and find what I consider to be hate speech, and if I were in a position of power, I could just use that as a justification to ban the entire domain. Moreover, it easily allows adversaries the ability to p…

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." Cardinal Richelieu (Alledgelly) A lesson this generation will have to learn again.

The lesson in that quote is that it doesn't matter what you write, if someone with the right authority wants you hanged, or wants to shut down your discord, it'll happen regardless of due process.

This is different from what the parent poster is implying. It's about the dangers of authoritarianism. No plants or justification are necessary.

Re: Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?

#189
post #145
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are talking about a subject that's completely out of your depth. WSB has always been about greed and making profit. The so called revolution is just a halo that they attached to themselves so they can all look like heros. From an economic perspective, what they did is irresponsible and dangerous. I agree with most of what OP said. It's just that some facts are harder to swallow in the current political cl…

If what WSB did was irresponsible and dangerous, then all of Wall Street is irresponsible and dangerous. That's the point here. The only difference is that regular people made money this time.

Mostly done by one hedge fund but it's easy to jump on the band wagon to overgeneralize and criticize the entire Wall Street.

You are essentially proving my point..

Re: Where do we go from here and who is going to step up to help us?

#190

Why should I care about them? They are perpetrating a financial bubble that will harm its participants, the economy (possibly to a significant degree), and that is specifically designed to hurt certain people. They are encouraging a mechanism that could do far more damage in the future. It's an angry, violent mob, and what I see looks very much like other violent, angry mobs I've seen recently, including the portraya…

You have fallen victim to propaganda by wall street billionaire vultures. This is not a bubble. This is a high stakes market movement speculation game that billionaire vulture short sellers are playing. They just got careless and lazy and got caught in money losing position. Now, these billionaire vultures are crying and whining to the government to help them with bailouts and change the rules in the middle of the ga…

Genuine question: If you believe AMC and / or Gamestop is a failing business model, why is shorting the stock bad? (NOTE I am not well read on what's happening, other than the gist)
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