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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 01:50:31 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


And I'd argue that signalling "I'm a male feminist" is about as cheap as it gets. It is basically free, you literally just affirm what a woman says and denigrate males as a class while subtly implying you're not really a member of that class.




I think that this part is a bit of a cope/emotionally comfortable belief about the triviality of the outgroup. The dating market is not so uncompetitive that a priori one would expect any successful strategy to be cheap. Gaiman's schtick was hardly just that he is "a male feminist" - he is a bestselling author, gregarious convention-goer, and supposedly a commanding storyteller in person and all around magnetic personality, on top of being a male feminist. It is this whole package that allowed him to enrapture groupies so easily - of course there must be some natural predisposition involved, but he nevertheless would have worked hard his whole life to become the New Feminist Man that a particular type of woman finds irresistible. Neither you nor I would get anywhere by just suddenly going out there, affirming what women say and denigrating males as a class; people like that are dime a dozen, and they are more likely to wind up as sad caricatures or give up in short order to churn through other cheap-and-ineffective approaches than to even get to the point where they would be #metoo-ed.


I have encountered a good number of guys who fit the same archetype in my life, and it is always abundantly clear that they pour a lot of effort into verbal skills and social standing, like by volunteering as DMs for D&D sessions, volunteering for all sorts of things in general, or attending improv theatre. One of them even forced himself to pretend to be bisexual.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I too was actually invited to Zorba's wild ride once (for two non-consecutive iterations, no less). The discussions I remember taking place seemed to come down to something that amounted to "solidly right-wing, but demonstrated grace and level-headedness in interactions with the outgroup" - the specific mechanism was talking candidates up for instances where they demonstrated particularly impressive feats of tolerance, but because no particularly extreme left-wingers were in the running, this naturally favoured the extreme right as their room to impress was greater.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, the times I have butted heads with you and naraburns (and that's just the recent ones I remember) over moderation still stand out to me as the most hostile interactions I have had on here with anyone. Of course this could just be a consequence of everyone who is not a moderator routinely keeping their offense at me and others to themselves for fear of the mods above, so the level of anger I felt from your responses in those contexts was actually below the ambient SNR...?


Two AAQCs seems like something a monkey on a typewriter prompting ChatGPT should have outperformed in expectation over the course of >1000 posts. I'll take my "upstanding mediocrity" achievement, I guess.




Whether or not Zorba uses his "doge" mechanism next time he needs new mods, the way to become a mod is not by kissing our asses.




Eh, that just makes it into a countersignalling game. The way to most any favour is to kiss ass in such a way that not even the target realises; as a system designer the duty falls on you to achieve alignment between your system's value function and easy entryways for ass-kissing ninjas.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think there is a class of "sex pest" that has always been around, which is men who are hyperattuned towards what is popular with women and optimise their personality and social strategy around charming and bedding new partners. They only become "pests" in that their handling of partners, once bedded, is essentially consumptive - rather than trying to build a relationship, they just speedrun whatever sexual acts they feel amount to having "used up" the sexual partner (often by maximising extreme/degrading acts, which register as conquest milestones), and then move on to the next.


This is not to say they don't believe/inhabit the personality they arrived at by optimisation - much like Mr. Beast is an honest product of reinforcement learning under the YouTube algorithm, the pump-and-dumper is an honest product of reinforcement learning under the female attention algorithm. It's just that any attendant preference structure remains strictly subordinate to the "conquer more women" terminal value.
The actual manifestation depends on the fads of the day: in the '40s, it could be a dashing young GI, an Elvis-like character in the '50s, a philosophical druggie rogue in the '70s, ..., or a soft-spoken feminist alpha nerd since around 2015.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thanks for the sentiment, but - no, there's something to be said for "don't pick people who are too interested in the job" as a perfectly reasonable heuristic for any sort of policing/powertrippy occupations. Also, it seems far-fetched to not expect people to consider personal affinity and vibes in picking future colleagues, and their use as a criterion is easily steelmanned. Moderators are people too. Amadan all but stated that his modhat actions are constrained by his aversion to "getting flack" in public for unpopular decisions. It presumably wouldn't exactly help him moderate if he already had to engage with individuals he finds aversive at the backchannel stage that seems to precede every mod action.


Also, cities like NYC pick Chinese beat cops to deploy to Chinatown etc. for good reasons.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In what way are reports an "enforcement mechanism"? They do not enforce anything - unlike votes and comments, they don't even leave a public record.
Reports are a mechanism for drawing the attention of moderators, and nothing else.


I do not come here for a discussion that is curated solely or primarily by the demos, as defined by everyone who has an account and bothers to click arrows getting a vote. There are plenty of spaces like that all across the internet, many with bigger crowds, and they generally don't work, or at least they don't work to produce a space in which political discussion that is worth reading can be had. An internet forum, in its natural form, is an island in Scott's meta-libertarian archipelago, not a community of people who are chained together by birth and geography and are thus compelled to organise in a way that to them feels fair - it is easy to join, and fairly easy to leave. The appeal of the archipelago is that any island can offer whatever it wants, be it democracy or compulsory-two-buckets-of-shit-a-day Soviet hell; and if you don't like it, you can just leave for a different island, or go and create your own and hope that the customers will come. The Motte's pitch was not a democracy, but a carefully tended autocratic garden with a particular prominently stated set of rules. If it devolves into a democracy, and if these rules are being enforced selectively or not at all, then in the best case it is simply because its operators are inattentive, in which case reporting helps draw their attention to the right place. In a worse but more realistic case, they are failing the criteria they promised to uphold due to bias or the human fear of social censure, as hinted at by @Amadan in his parallel response, in which case reporting serves to convey my disapproval, thus levelling the social censure incentive landscape a little. In the worst case, they are simply committing sticker fraud. I cling to the hope that that is not the case, because exit, while cheap, is not free, and the archipelago is actually finite and shrouded in a fog of imperfect information.


On top of this, on the object level, the main signal that our demos sends by up- and downvoting is "we want more content that helps the right wing". I can see that from my own posting history easily enough - I generally make posts in a fairly narrow range of length, type and sophistication, and the only ones that reliably get over +20 upvotes are those that contain strong unhedged defenses and concurrences with right-wing talking points. Conversely, any attempt to directly argue against right-wing positions is capped at +10, and without careful hedging and gratuitous but-of-course-leftists-also-bad disclaimers it's easy to land in the negatives.




I can't recall the last time I reported anyone. That's how little I use the feature.




That's perfectly consistent with a scenario in which the community heavily leans towards your preferences, and you trust that the mods will take care of it when it doesn't even without your prodding.




Do you want to be a moderator? You have a thousand posts... a lot more than me. Obviously you have opinions on what the Motte should be.




At this point I am so exasperated with the moderation that the answer to that is "yes", which of course categorically disqualifies me. So, reinterpreting your question, the reason I am reporting is not that I want to be a moderator. If I were to aim to become one, what I did (picking fights with and getting myself personally loathed by most of the current staff, antagonizing the ideological core of the community and saying we actually need more of that, ...) would be among the dumber approaches - I should instead have made a point to defend the mods in public, posted solidly right-wing but slightly more thoughtfully and measuredly than everyone else, and perhaps helped Zorba with backend work at some juncture.




I am also aware that the Motte has problems with ideological diversity. But that isn't my fault, that those on the left evaporatively leave.




Of course it is also your fault. When you make posts that are actively unpleasant to a class of readers, such as ones that are pitched to rally your tribe to bring about their defeat or ones that say it's "always acceptable to [engage in the act of harassing, intimidating, or abusing them, especially habitually or from a perceived position of relative power]" (circumscription courtesy of dictionary.com) (here), you encourage them to leave. The obvious mirrored example is unfortunately not so effective because American online right-wingers have all grown a thick skin out of necessity, so maybe try to imagine how inclined you would feel to stay in a forum where a bunch of Mexicans are circlejerking each other about plans on how to illegally immigrate into the US and defraud dumb gringos out of their money, or Russian soldiers planning torture of American volunteers they caught in Ukraine if you want an even more colourful example.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It would be helpful to understand sometimes why you don't mod particular posts, such as this one. Reporting, most of the time, just feels like a waste of clicks these days; raising a stink in a comment sometimes attracts a statement, but between poisoning the atmosphere (you can't really publicly call out a comment without it coming across as a personal attack) and most likely putting whatever moderator chooses to respond on the defensive from the outset, it's also not really a good way to go. Would it be possible for the mods to aim to make a public statement on every post that receives more than a certain number of reports, even if just to explain why they disagree with the reporters' view of it violating rules?


(I don't think "you are the only one who reported that particular post though" would be a slam-dunk retort; if you look further downthread, there were definitely more people who were unhappy with it, so if this didn't translate to reports that is just a sign that this part of the community has given up on the reporting mechanism)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for February 12, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it depends on the place and individual. In Austria, two out of three pharmacists will look at you like you eat puppies if you ask if they have any chemical options (and like a potential druggie or vexatious patient if you name a specific active ingredient), but once I was passing through Munich and the lady at the pharmacy in the Marienplatz subway station enthusiastically and unpromptedly gave me two of Big Pharma's finest (this was also in a blocked nose situation).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There is a number of people on this forum who clearly would like to see it as a place for smart right-wingers to organise and rally, rather than a carefully tended neutral ground. Unfortunately, the mods don't seem terribly interested in acting against it unless directly called out for inaction, so the only way to reduce it would probably be to persuade the majority on a grassroots level that it is not in their interest either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 9, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Wouldn't you have to pay capital gains tax on the dividends you collect right away, if you were to follow the collect-and-buy-manually algorithm? If you get $1 in dividends and buy $1 in shares which you later sell for $3 from a cost basis of $1, you pay tax on $1 initially and $2 at sale. If you use your DRIP to auto-buy the same shares, you pay no tax initially and later sell an $3 share with $0 cost basis and hence pay tax on $3.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
    

  1. 

    Poor countries find new sponsors, like China or Russia
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Poor countries start advocating for China and Russia and against the US on the world stage
    

    3. 

  3. 

    Europeans, who think of poor countries as intrinsically virtuous, pick up the tune
    

    4. 

  4. 

    Europeans become more anti-American and wrestle their governments into reducing support for US plans and military logistics
    

    5. 

  5. 

    Core US interests abroad, such as supporting Israel, suffer or become significantly more expensive
    

    6. 

  6. 

    More money winds up being spent on workarounds than it would have cost to continue bribing the poor countries
    

    7. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Transnational Thursday for February 6, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, but it wasn't always so, was it? I still have memories of a different Germany, where children and their parents would throw Polish firecrackers at the other kids and families who pissed them off for catharsis, where a bunch of 9 year olds could walk into the local OBI, buy a hammer and nails and go build a treehouse in the woods from trash collected in the local gravel pit, of looking for a flatshare in Berlin for a summer job and finding that the place I contacted was actually a ruined squatter house, of taking a ride from a ride-sharing side and the driver turning out to be a construction worker driving a decrepit Opel station wagon at 210km/h the whole way to Munich. Some generations back, I hear, kids would still collect discarded car motors and build human-sized soap-box cars to race each other in.


Germany is the country that begot the CCC and actually saw its foreign policy being made to yield to popular protest time and time again. German is the language that has words for something like the natural sovereignty of an adult individual (Mündigkeit), with attendant rights and responsibilities, and the taking away of it (Bevormundung), which don't even translate into any other language I know. I don't think this aspect of the culture would have shriveled as it did without enemy action; but to see culture as a static inevitability when the enemy sees it as a target is just surrender. What can I do if I want to bring back these things?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, the mistake is in thinking that "left" and "right" as used in practice represent any object-level political positions at all. The true extensional definition, as I understand it, is that "left" means that you imagine yourself as a rebel fighting against an oppressive system, and "right" means that you fancy yourself holding the line against chaos and decay. These are constraints on form, not on content, and even the form is merely a constraint on mythology that can survive a lot of friction with reality (so Trump's unpredictable bulldozing of norms and institutions still can be perceived as "right", and the SJWs' reliance on the same and treatment of their opposition as a wild element that needs to be dealt with by managerial techniques is "left"). However, the Left can never rest easy without believing in the existence of a greater, more powerful and more organised enemy they are fighting as underdogs against, whether it is the Patriarchy, Trumpism or international capitalism; and the Right needs to believe that its enemies are less structured, more unstable, and ultimately incompetent.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But liberals, for the most part, don't even seem to know of the existence of these people. Most of them seem to think there are no enemies to the left of them, or if there are any, it's just a handful of crazy college kids. The largest criticism I've seen is "nice going you berniebros, you got Trump elected", but nothing besides. It's a far cry from how the right wing tends to exist in this country, where they are all very cripplingly aware that there are enemies to the right of them that must be disavowed when discovered.




Is this perception not an artifact of awkwardly projecting onto a 1D left-right axis? To the Western normie, "more left" now means "more LGBTQI+ and environmentalism" - if pushed on it they might actually contend that tankies and Bernie bros can very well be enemy because they are actually to their right. This in fact tracks with some local instances of discourse I have seen - there's often a sense of betrayal when casual SJWs learn for the first time what old-school commies actually believe, and how even though they were sold as the legendary leftiest of them all the positions of theirs that the normie cares about actually reek of "fascism" and "right-wing disinformation".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Transnational Thursday for February 6, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well, if I become single-issue for anything it would make sense for it to be my top entry (civil rights), which however has the distinction of presenting a dilemma all by itself - the only apparent civil rights party on paper (FDP) turns out to actually more often function as an, uh, Steigbügelhalter (handmaiden?) for the most anti-civil-rights party (CDU).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At least at the German school I attended they covered in sufficient detail the beliefs associated with communism and the various skull mountains associated with it, but apart from the one token card-carrying neonazi kid (who wanted to become a tank driver but I think grew up to be a ski instructor instead) everybody still walked out with the standard differential assessment of the two. Of course morality rarely spontaneously materialises out of nowhere and people ultimately believe that aiming to advance one race at the expense of others is intrinsically evil because they are instilled with this message from early on, but all I am saying is that this is the deontological moral package that most people wind up with, and given that package the conclusions that they arrive at are correct in the sense that no amount of additional information about communism or Hitler is likely to change them. If you want to rehabilitate Hitler or throw communist leaders in the pit with him, there is no shortcut around convincing a majority of people to actually change their morality, rather than merely exposing them to some "glossed over" forbidden information.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I still can't discern a single argument that any of the gods discussed is supposed to symbolise the people that worshipped him or her. You just keep asserting that it is so and must obviously be so, against a wealth of literature that is replete with claims of those gods symbolising all sorts of things but people, and not a single example of anyone ever understanding worshipping the god to entail worshipping the associated people. There is of course a trivial sense in which they do, in that people who both believe in the god and in the story that a particular group of people are the god's chosen necessarily will treat that group in a special way, but there is no evidence whatsoever that the latter belief follows from the former, or that this amounts to worshipping the group as synonymous with the god.


Ask any adherent of religions in the Judaism-derived family and they will probably tell you that yes, they worship the exact same god as the Jews do, no, that god is not a symbol for the Jews, and no, they definitively are not expected in a symbolic way to worship the Jews. They will probably also tell you that the thing about the Israelites being god's chosen for some reason or another does not apply to modern-day Jews, and they are just confused. Even the Jews themselves make a point of not requiring non-Jews to believe the part about the covenant.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I assumed we are talking about the beliefs of typical people rather than us assorted degenerates haunting the Motte, since we are trying to explain why the general populace is more comfortable with Mao/Lenin quotes than with Hitler quotes. If you do not actually believe Hitler quotes to be less appropriate to quote approvingly than Mao/Lenin quotes, then your moral beliefs on the topic are not particularly relevant.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't understand why gods have to be symbolic of anything beyond what their believers claim them to be symbolic of, whether that is "wisdom" or "a choleric narcissist father figure that created the universe and everything in it". The blood covenant also does not need any special interpretation: it's just the claim that the all-powerful figure has specially favoured a particular lineage. Can you not believe yourself to be the favourite son of a father with many children without claiming that the father is uniquely similar to yourself? If I think my boss or advisor likes me, does that imply I think he is the same as me? Every medieval European royal house claimed that their lineage was chosen to rule by the Christian god. Does that mean that each house saw the Christian god as a symbolic representation of themselves, in your understanding? Why did different royal houses then ever get along at all, if they apparently had a fundamental disagreement that amounted to "Jesus is symbolic of us! - No, Jesus is symbolic of us!"?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think you specifically would've been around last time I had a similar discussion, but Hitler's stated goal was to make the world better for ethnic Germans at no expenses spared for other ethnicities (and with particular vengeance towards some specific ones that he considered their sworn enemies). For better or worse, most people consider such a goal already more evil than the same thing with people selected by socioeconomic status, but that's neglecting that the communists' stated goal as commonly understood does not mandate killing or even displacing any fixed set of people (that's why they ran reeducation camps).


Having to kill capitalists rather than being able to brainwash them all into becoming good workers was presumably seen by most communists (with the exception perhaps of outliers like Cambodia) as a failure and unfortunate compromise with reality. If you conflate "do terrible thing to everyone who doesn't fit in your world" and "do terrible thing to everyone who you can't reform to fit in your world no matter how much you try", then everyone supporting law and order in the US could also be said to want to make a better world by brutally robbing the liberty of everyone who doesn't fit into it, a number that is bounded below at ~0.5% of the US population.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Yahweh creates a blood covenant with the Jews. It's a tribal god, Yahweh is a metaphor for the people he represents. Very straightforward reading of the mythos. If some Roman gold selected the Romans as his Chosen people and formed a heritable blood covenant with the Romans wouldn't it be very obvious to you that the god is a symbol for the people represented in the covenant?




No. I think you are stretching interpretations to force your hobby horse. There are plenty of examples of tutelary deities among pagan religions, including ones that were reused. Do any of the number of deities that the Aztecs believed they had a personal responsibility to keep fed with blood lest the universe get destroyed count as a representation of the Aztecs themselves, even though other Mesoamerican peoples were found to have the same gods with etymologically related names and the same attributes? Were Greeks worshipping Athena worshipping the city of Athens, even as they waged war against it? What about Apollo, who the Spartans considered their tutelary god with the lexical connection being less obvious?




It is universally acknowledged that the Roman pantheon was fluid and integrated the idols of foreigners that came under the hegemony of the Roman people. The Hebrew mythos demands sole worship of Yahweh above anything else and declares a holy mission to destroy all the idols of all foreigners. It's a major difference in the religious orders that is not acknowledged by OP and is going to undermine the direction he is trying to take this.




This is true of Romans (with respect to some foreigners), but not of all pagans; e.g. Atenism. Therefore intolerance of foreign gods is not a uniquely Hebrew feature, and can't be used to distinguish Hebrew(-lineage) religions from pagan ones.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Define "caught". We're getting into territory where "how high on TDS do you have to be to believe that actually happened, rather than being an insane slander thought up by his enemies" would trump most sorts of evidence that could realistically be produced.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Hebrew conception of God is simply a metaphorical and symbolic representation of themselves




This is not an interpretation I have heard before. What do you base it on?




Differentiation between pagan and Hebrew worship




The counterexample that immediately comes to mind is Atenism which during its brief life went full iconoclasm on the normal Egyptian religion and afterwards got eradicated in turn. Occasional Chinese persecution of Buddhists also comes to mind. The Romans also had little respect for Celtic religion.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Transnational Thursday for February 6, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
German elections


The German parliament snap election is coming up, and for the first time I actually managed to get my postal voting documents on time and am in a realistic  position to send them in before the deadline. That being said, I am really at a loss regarding who to vote for, as I find the Wahl-o-Mat style matching to each party's stated views to be useless due to the gap between what they say and what they wind up doing. I would therefore like to take the opportunity to give a short account of the German party landscape as seen through my distant eyes, and solicit both corrections (especially from our German posters) to these perceptions and advice (from everyone) on how you think I should vote given my own values and weights. (It would probably be a waste of time to try to convince me to change those values and weights so that I vote for the party you would prefer in this setting.)


@mods, let me know if I should just hold it and repost it in the next Transnational Thursday instead.


In descending order of latest polling,




CDU (the Christian Democratic Union), around 30%. The right-wing side of the old "two-plus" party system. Famously the party of Merkel. Now running Friedrich Merz, an old fox who has been hovering around the candidacy since prehistoric times but was never allowed near it because of his negative levels of charisma.
Their primary terminal value is the preservation of the post-war societal order of Germany, with the US representing the Lord God in his heaven, a CDU chancellor as the Pope, a college of cardinals consisting of assorted old-school industrial magnates, publishing house elites and wealthy widows, and the middle and lower classes staying quiet and attending catechism (TV and tabloids). They are pretty agnostic as to how to achieve this, but the chaos of the '00s (Pirate Parties, protests against transatlanticists ventures (Iraq, trade pacts...) that actually worked, people gluing themselves to tracks to sabotage nuclear waste transports...) scared them and so they are firmly convinced that they need to (1) control the lawless element that is internet culture and (2) break the back of grassroots leftist~anarchist civil society orgs.


(I think that half of the reason for Merkel's opening of the refugee tap is in this list: it was openly a hail-mary to improve the increasingly bad bargaining position of their industrial magnate base relative to their workers, and Merkel's political instincts told her that it would drive a wedge right into the contradictions of the civil-society orgs. The other half was EU political checkers downstream from the 2009 debt crisis.)


AfD (the Alternative for Germany), around 21%. Everyone's favourite alt-right populist boogeyman. Formed as a somewhat Frankensteinian merger of various groups, including a "dark enlightment"ish dissident intellectual wing that sublimated out of the old block parties, the rubble of various predominantly East German neonazi parties that had close brushes with being banned and grassroots identitarian anti-Islam movements like PEGIDA. Their terminal values are obtaining respect for a broad coalition of "deplorables" (blue-collar workers, the East German poor, low-openness rural dwellers), reducing the number of visible foreigners, and defending masculine-coded aspects of German culture (cars, engineering, firework, beer). Other parties, with the encouragement of the media, have agreed upon a "firewall" which says that the political system should produce outcomes as if they did not exist. Defecting e.g. by proposing laws that would not pass but for their votes is punished harshly.


SPD (the Social-Democratic Party of Germany), around 16%. The left-wing side of the old "two-plus" party system. Lost their status as a possible solo governing party irretrievably, after entering a coalition with Merkel's party in 2005. (Just imagine if, in Trump's first term, Bernie ran on an independent ticket, no single party wound up getting a majority, and the Democrats agreed to give their EC votes to Jeb in return for some cabinet positions.) The current chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is running again (he was carried by a coalition with the Greens and the FDP which fell apart), but barring some complete upheaval he is understood to stand no chance. Traditionally, they were the party of blue-collar workers and socialists, but by the early 2000s had become culturally alienated from their base and earned resentment for a severely pursestring-tightening reform of social programmes. It's hard to discern what their terminal values really are now - my sense is that they just pine for the old political arrangement, and think that if socialism must be wound down, it should be them doing it, since they will do with gentle sadness rather than hatred (think the Goebbels family poisoning its children).


Bündnis 90/die Grünen (the Greens), around 14%. A counterculture party that gradually worked itself into being the culture party as its members grew up and got white-collar jobs through the '90s. They are sort of like the medieval church, in that everyone within the mainstream must profess that they are the arbiters of morality, and just disagrees about the piety-practicality tradeoff. Accordingly, every major party can form a coalition with them, though their relationship with the FDP is strained. They had an interesting character development arc that started when the foreign minister who led Germany to join the American crusade in Afghanistan in 2002 was from their party, and resulted in them gradually turning from a virulently anti-American hippie party into the most pro-American party in the German landscape. They are the party of the young, well-educated, and urban women of all ages. Their terminal values are to destroy the masculine-coded aspects of German culture, US-style SJ, environmentalism, and to instantiate a decisive struggle of good against evil, with themselves as the vanguard of Good. The "grown-up" wing of the party believes that the principal battleground of this struggle will be the USA, and the proper role of the Greens and Europe more generally is to be the angelic mentor figure that guides the protagonist (US progressives) on his quest and orients his moral compass to save him from his human flaws (attachment to idiosyncrasies like free speech, unregulated business and self-sufficiency), but this sometimes creates tension with an unruly youth wing that takes America's performative self-loathing too literally (which results in clashes over Israel, Facebook etc.), as well as remnant elements from before they fell to American memes (e.g. anti-vaxxers, anti-globalists, pacifists).


Die Linke (The Left), >5%. A party that came to be as a merger of West German hard left, some SPD evaporates and the remnants of East Germany's communist uniparty. Actual communism is thoroughly discredited in Germany, which left them in an ideological vacuum that was filled by an incompatible combination of Greens-but-anti-bourgeois and East German cultural identity (\setminus the neonazis) plus more socialism. This resulted in the party finally fracturing into two a few years ago, with most of the sitting parliamentarians joining the BSW listed just below. This party got the "anti-bourgeois Green" component, and for a while it looked like they would just sink into irrelevance, but they are experiencing an eleventh-hour comeback. I can't get a good read of their terminal values, but I guess it is some patchwork of "more socialism" and instantiating the same decisive struggle of good against evil as above, but with the USA and Israel shoved into "Evil" coalition. It is conceivable that they could get into power as part of a coalition with SPD and Greens under certain circumstances.


BSW (the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance), <5%. The "East German identity" splinter of the above, and the newest party on the map. Uncharacteristically for Germany, they are completely centered around the eponymous founder, a rhetorical firebrand East German communist cadre with a microeconomics PhD. Their terminal values amount to "Sahra Wagenknecht should have a say in German politics", more socialism, and a "respect for masculine East German culture" package that is quite similar to that of the AfD; flowing from that, they advocate for keeping out refugees, reindustrialisation and rapprochement with Russia, but those details seem to be negotiable. They seem to vote and speak against the CDU's police state agenda, but this might just be because they expect to find themselves at the business end of it. They inherited many parliamentary seats from the Linke and initially looked to be pushing 10% as they absorbed anti-system sentiment from people that for one reason or another could not palate the AfD, but teething problems/drama (such as a whole state chapter going rogue against the federal party) and a deeply unsympathetic press has now driven them below their other half and the 5% threshold that generally needs to be cleared to enter parliament.


FDP (the Liberal Democratic Party), 4%. The third member of the shattered governing coalition. A party that has been part of the post-war German fabric from the very start and has been through some extreme highs and lows, being the "kingmaker" quite similar to the British Lib Dems for a while. They are ostensibly a civil rights/libertarian party, but in practice their national incarnation has been a "business bro" party for as long as I can remember. (The Europarl offshoot is a different story.) Their only terminal value is to lower taxes and hurdles for their upper-middle-class freelancer and independent white-collar business owner clientele, though they think that if this clientele could also have lower obstacles to do whatever pastimes they enjoy (sex, drugs, rock and roll, cars) this would be a nice plus. Because of this, for the longest time, their preferred partner was the authoritarian-leaning CDU, as they found that the CDU is not particularly opposed to business bros as long as they don't threaten the true elites (Bertelsmanns and Albrechts) and can be effectively nudged by the threat of remembering the civil rights component of the party platform. The media has been dragging them through the mud continuously since they were seen to have backstabbed the coalition (in a way that is particularly damaging to the cause of the Greens, who are unsurprisingly overwhelmingly supported by the newsrooms), with the result that they will almost certainly not make it past the 5% threshold. There is also a element of most everyone being fed up with their shit, since the 4% represent approximately all the people that actually care for tax breaks for freelancers/independents and they have time and time again proven to be a terrible political ally (as they don't care about anything else, but are willing to theatrically pretend to have other pieces of agenda just to have bargaining mass to trade for them).




Now, I am really unsure who I should vote for here. My own preferences are, in loosely descending order of weight,


    

  1. civil rights (I'm opposed to the CDU's onslaught of mass surveillance, encryption breaking, copyright enforcement, policing of dissidents, abortion restrictions; everyone-but-the-FDP's occupational licensing; the Greens' plastic bans, gender-inclusive language mandates, and the planned speed limits and firework bans that also seem to be pushed by the SPD)
    2. 

  2. education (I'm opposed to the Greens' lowering of school standards, levelling of distinctions etc. in the name of diversity, also partially supported by the SPD; and to the AfD's likely Trump-like broad-spectrum reprisals against universities, as well as the Greens' ideological ban on certain areas of science and tech - nuclear, GMOs (especially!), some human genetics, partially shared by SPD and CDU for different reasons)
    3. 

  3. opposing safetyism (related to "civil rights", but also including the whole aesthetics and philosophy that resulted in people over the last 10 years having started to wear helmets while skiing, raising mandatory child seat minimum ages, etc.)
    4. 

  4. foreign-internal policy (I'm opposed to the USA bootlicking by everyone except for the Left, BSW and AfD, and the damage to the economy that results from it as instantiated in the Ukraine context. I'm also opposed to the Greens deindustrialising tendencies)
    5. 

  5. internationalism (I'm opposed to the AfD's apparent goal of actually cancelling all foreigners rather than merely the refugees) and
    6. 

  6. economic freedom (I have concluded it is unrealistic to operate as an independent software developer or tech entrepreneur in Germany, and I would even loathe to touch my stocks while resident in it).
    7. 



As I see it,


    

  • 

    Voting FDP would weakly signal a theoretical vote for civil rights, but in reality it would only be a vote for economic freedom (far down on my list) and I'd have to watch my actual top preference being made a mockery of. They will also almost certainly not get in.
    

    • 

  • 

    Voting AfD might seem natural considering the dot product, but apart from a personal distaste for the neonazi component that lives on in them, I don't think it would actually be tactically correct. They also lean pro-surveillance/police state, being authoritarians. They are well outnumbered by people who categorically consider them to be the devil, and empowering them further has a pretty strong effect of also strengthening Green ideology by toxoplasmosis. It's needless to say that every subvariant of the Greens is my political nemesis, but the limit of letting the AfD-Green toxoplasma spread in Germany in my expectation looks like maybe 65% Green to 35% AfD, which would be much worse than the current situation. Alternatively the system could just ban them if they get too close to power, which would demoralise and create precedent for banning any out-of-window opposition.
    

    • 

  • 

    Voting BSW is my current teeth-gritting top choice, insofar as they are a neat non-toxoplasmic "against the system" option that actually has a chance to get in and I agree with them on a lot of points (Russia, industry, anti-Green, anti-refugees, anti-surveillance). However, they are now more likely to not get in, I find their focus on the person at the helm silly and politically a doomed meme in the German landscape, and I'm not actually on board with a lot of their tankie DNA.
    

    • 

  • 

    Voting the Linke might be an interesting "preemptive compromise" signal like "if it has to be something Green, this is the most palatable form of Green politics to me", and also signals opposition to the system as the CDU-SPD block tried and only recently failed to uphold an AfD-like "firewall" against them. However, my volume of object-level agreement with them is fairly low.
    

    • 

  • 

    The SPD, to the extent they have an identity of their own, are being something like a party of moderation (note e.g. Scholz's resistance to maximalist support for Ukraine). However, they are now weakened even further, which almost guarantees that if they get into power they will just be a canvas for whatever other parties are in the coalition to paint on. If they do not make it into government, a vote for them is at most a weak signal that Scholz's politics of moderation was not so bad, because they really don't stand for much.
    

    • 



I have taken to shocking my normie friends by saying that if they actually go through with the fireworks ban I will snap and vote AfD (since that is just going too far with the sadistic culture defacement, and I'm a card-carrying pyromaniac), but so far this is just meant as bluster.


I'm not considering the other two parties because for both of them negating every single vote they cast in parliament would have gotten closer to my preferences than what they did. Minor party voting in Germany is a non-starter at the moment (and the Pirate Party got converted into a Green Party Youth Wing without the lame adults watching). What should I do?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think the point about Hitler's identity politics is as surprising as you make it out to be, given that the deaths caused by Lenin and Mao are not exactly a secret. In fact, this is what the difference in their assessment often openly stems from - Hitler's stated goals (which really are those same identity politics you are talking about) are taken to be evil, but the goals of Lenin and Mao are generally actually perceived as a deontological or virtuous good even by many of those (common in the US) who consider them a utilitarian evil. If you wreak murder at an inconceivable scale in the service of evil goals, you are a particularly insidious (because effective) kind of evil; if you however wreak murder in your pursuit of good, you are seen as closer to something like a tragic or merely misguided, even antiheroic figure.


It's easy for resentful right-wingers to see this as a simple case of who/whom thinking being conveniently weaponised against them, but unless you specifically subscribe to (or want to no-enemies-on-the-right) Hitler's brand of identity politics, you are not actually the [antonym of beneficiary]. In the grand scheme of things, most murderous movements in history are actually tolerated, including ones that would unambiguously code conservative in the modern eye - nobody bats an eye at Genghis Khan branding, and even crusader chic is still on the menu (could you imagine a grand strategy game like Crusader Kings II, but modelling the political tug-of-war between Hitler's Gauleiters?) despite their portfolio including religiously motivated rape, murder and land grabs against people further down the progressive stack, use of child soldiers and much more.