Bartender_Venator
No bio...
User ID: 2349
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
I'm in the Balkans right now and trying to load the site when Americans get up to post during their morning coffee shit is, well, messy and unsatisfying.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
If you're trying to imply that I'm some other poster for disagreement then that just seems odd.
No, I'm not. Other people are saying that in the comments, I'm disagreeing with them (not only did Darwin put a fair bit of effort into his arguments, good or bad, he was sincere in his liberal beliefs and didn't play games pretending to hold other positions). You might be a busy guy but reading comprehension is important in life.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
I don't think he's Impassionata or Darwin (justawoman is also clearly not Impassionata, though I thought Imp was a woman for quite a long time). I'm not even sold on him being an alt. There are a lot of these Hananian contrarian-against-the-right types floating around in our general sphere now, Turok was far from the only one. Mkc is clearly not a practiced or polished troll, so my guess lands closer to my comment on "people coming here to argue with the forum".
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
For my sins, I checked through all your responses. You provide no response to my point that describing Gaines' employment with DHS as somehow linking him to the Republican Party is dishonest, and you haven't addressed Torba in a single comment. For what it's worth, I don't think you're Darwin - Darwin at least tried.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
justawoman has been around the block here before, and parsimony would suggest that this is her rather than magicalkittycat (or whoever mkc may be).
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Cheers!
Hmm, that's actually a really hard question. Bronze Age Pervert makes an excellent argument against the "Dork Right", but it's in service of fighting the threat of high-IQ Asians to his Nietzschean dream rather than supporting small-l-liberal-HBD public policy. Likewise Nick Land, whose "hyperracism" (racism as the pure ranking of intelligence) is a very reasonable response to HBD - if you're a Landian in service of totalizing intelligence maximization instead of looking for any policy goals that would be palatable to the typical American. Freddie DeBoer acknowledges individual ability from a leftist perspective, but understandably can't bring himself to say anything about groups. Yarvin approaches it at points (Moldbug-era Yarvin is a small-l-liberal, fight me), but obviously he's trying to be maximally provocative and maximally against existing American models of government. Scott's writing may often be informed by an understanding of HBD, but it's buried under infinite layers of esoteric writing. I don't think there is a single figure who presents the maximally reasonable version of the "HBD, so what then?" perspective. A market niche many here could fill if they wanted (don't get attached to your job). Education Realist might be the closest, in his particular field, and he does seem to have genuine empathy for students of all classes, races, and abilities, but I haven't read him in a long time.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Requiescat. I'll raise a glass to him tonight - just a montepulciano d'abruzzo, my seething prole resentment won't let me drink anything fancier.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
I agree with you almost entirely. But that's the issue, there's not that much to debate, except the boring old "how much exactly should we redistribute and how much exactly should we reward merit?" That sort of Bush v Gore stuff doesn't really get people fired up. Of course, there is the CRISPR point, which I think can reasonably safely (between the anti-HBD FAQ and Society is Fixed Biology is Mutable) read as Scott's esoteric position: "Don't talk about this shit until we can just gene-edit everyone to decent IQ and prosocial personalities". Then when you get to the practicalities of moving towards these policies, it's a tremendous kettle of worms that nobody wants to even think about.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
I don't know how I could make it clearer that I'm not trying to consensus-build - should I add in another couple disclaimers that this is just one old-timer's opinion? Why, when I was a boy, this town was a great place, we all used to go down to the soda fountain...
As for magicalkittycat, people shouldn't call him retarded, and I should think the mods will get to whoever did once they see the reports. But he is a very bad poster even at making the arguments he wants to make. While themotte is supposed to show charity to people who make arguments against the prevailing winds, they still have to be good arguments, and you can't ask people here not to tear apart bad ones, and particularly not bad ones made in bad faith. Dogpiling a bad post has nothing to do with building consensus when it's being done to magicalkittycat any more than when it was done to securesignals.
The other thing I have noticed is a consistent decline in the quality of non-RW posters (some honourable mentions excepted) - RW posters have declined in quality somewhat, but not nearly as sharply. We started off with some great non-RW posters, some of whom were driven off by the ickiness of the HBD debate (rip yodats), more by the continuing success of HBD arguments against the strong environmentalist thesis, more of whom were lost due to 2020 covid/blm/election fedposting, and more of whom have since evaporatively cooled off, or flamed out over some particularly emotional point and gotten banned. There are a couple reasons for this, some better and some worse, though I suspect a major one is that there's just a deep incompatibility between the discourse norms of themotte and those of liberal/leftist spaces, such that somebody who is a high-quality poster in those spaces is unlikely to be able to transition to themotte, and that there will always be a certain psychic friction for people who are on themotte to debate in good faith but are otherwise marinated in those spaces (there's also an incompatibility with people who are totally in the jug of hard right-wing spaces, but they usually get themselves banned pretty quickly).
Your assessment of themotte as an echo chamber does bring up my assessment of the stage of decline we're currently at. I've seen this happen on many 4chan boards, for instance - it's the stage of forum decline where people come in specifically in order to argue with the forum. Incels on /fit/ are the purest example, but also just about everything on /pol/ post-2020 or so (and /pol/'s decline into that started much earlier). Both low-quality liberal posters and low-quality Hananian contrarians like kittycat/Turok all see this place as a featureless Outgroup blob and want to come here to Argue With The Forum. I'm not sure where we get new blood at this point; I see every non-RW poster with the intellectual subtlety and emotional stability to hang here as a minor miracle.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Yeah I'm not debating your wider point, just couldn't let the amusement of the Hlynka point go. Something I do notice is that non-liberal anti-HBDers tend to end up getting a lot more emotionally het up about it (sometimes, not in the case of the mods here, but sometimes jumping straight into outright dishonesty, like Michael Lind). It's understandable, in that the threat is coming from inside the tribe and so can't be instantly dismissed as liberal anti-HBDers prefer.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
Yes, you are a different kind of troll from a leftist concern troll, but not a particularly original or interesting one. I notice no rebuttal on the other points?
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
No, they’re not. Very different guys. But I think there’s something similar, not the same but similar, in their general approach to race/culture (though KD has taken it to the next level with all his travels).
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
If Hlynka was here to see you call him "bourgeois right" I think he'd get himself banned again. Hlynka was an actual Red Triber and as far as I can tell he saw HBD as Blue Tribe Right egghead nonsense.
This is just my personal opinion, not an attempt to consensus-build, but the way I see it (picture your friendly bartender chatting about the customers he's seen come through over the years), the forum went through the HBD wars relatively early on in its lifetime and, well, the HBD side won so conclusively it's sort of in the background now. This isn't to say that any particular hard HBD thesis has been proven ("the IQ gap between Belgians and Malaysians is x points and y% genetic!"), our scientific knowledge isn't there yet, but the soft HBD thesis ("genetics matter and vary between groups") won. Sometimes arguments just get won. People move on. Like I say, this isn't a crushing victory, it's mostly just disproving the hard environmentalist thesis ("humans are blank slates, environment explains all mental differences") and the specifically anti-HBD hard thesis ("genetics may matter for the individual but don't vary meaningfully between groups") - and we still do have plenty of environmentalists arguing softer theses (e.g. "we just don't know yet, so we can't assume a genetic cause"), and even right-wingers arguing against HBD from religious/tribal perspectives. But this has a couple effects which massively reduce the level of HBD discourse:
- HBDers no longer feel the need to argue as passionately for their basic beliefs here, obviously.
- Discussion that takes any level of HBD as accepted, or even discussion that doesn't give environmentalists the null hypothesis and HBDers the burden of proof, is viscerally unpleasant (and, back in the day, seriously personally/professionally threatening) to many anti-HBDers, so they either left or stopped discussing it. There are also plenty of more centrist/liberal posters whose position is now "it's probably real but I don't want to think/talk about it", and nobody can force them to.
- Once you accept some level of HBD, the next discussion is finding the policy implications, usually in the context of how to make effective and humane public policy in an HBD world. This is both wonky/unsexy discussion, and also fairly depressing for anyone who likes good policy and dislikes race wars. (It also turns off low-quality anti-HBD posters, for whom the assumption is that anyone acknowledging HBD is advocating for Jim Crow at best, so they don't join in to create toxoplasma and therefore visibility).
- The level of scientific knowledge required to discuss new findings in the field keeps going up. Back in the day just twin studies and similar stuff was enough to push back against hard environmentalism - nowadays, while I consider myself conversant with what's going on in genetic research, particularly paleogenetics, I'm not so confident I'd stake a mottepost on reading the studies right.
- Many of the smarter HBDposters have moved on beyond the basic question of HBD. This can mean a huge gamut of things - getting big on Twitter on their own, performing Hakanian/Druqkpan ethnography, pondering the spiritual natures of various groups, getting really into fine-grained genetic history, Ray Peat as the missing link to synthesize genetic and environmentalist theories, BAPist vitalism and selective breeding, etc. etc. Speaking for myself (never a massive HBD argument partaker), if I get into an argument over it, I don't expect to hear anything new, just arguments I saw refuted here ten years ago, often with a heavy dollop of bad faith. That's pretty boring.
Bartender_Venator
2mo ago
On the first two points, I don't know what's going on with the flag (apparently Taylor's office claims that some outside actor put them up in multiple offices, and most were removed), and I can't say I'm a fan of the clumsy edgelording from various government social media accounts lately. I don't care if being the social media dogsbody for a government department is boring, you're supposed to be boring. The other two "examples" are worth correcting:
Myron Gaines, host of the Fresh and Fit podcast (1.58 million subscribers on YouTube alone). Gaines is also a former employee of the DHS, which is just another point of evidence of low level gop aligned staffers having pro Nazi/antisemitic views.
For those who don't know, "Myron Gaines" is a /fit/ and Misc meme ("mirin' gains"), and the screen name of a Sudanese-American Muslim manosphere YouTuber. Think knockoff Andrew Tate and you'd have it on the nose, but even his knockoffs can get huge followings nowadays. He had Nick Fuentes on back in 2023, so has been JQing for a while, and is extremely pro-Palestine. The """connection""" that OP draws to the GOP is that, before becoming a podcaster in 2020, Gaines was a DHS special agent - i.e. a regular employee of the department, with no connection to the Republican Party whatsoever.
But in fact, all of this seems to be par for the course, according to Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab. who also wades into the ring of antisemitic Holocaust denialism with comments like
Gab and Torba are far out of even the hardline fringe of the professional Republican Party, and have been for almost a decade. Gab is a classic example of "free speech platform that doesn't just get witches but exclusively markets itself to witches" - they started out aligned with Spencer and the Charlottesville Crew, and have only gone further off the deep end since. Torba claimed that Trump explicitly refused to join the platform, and the most recent connection to the GOP seems to be the Mastriano campaign paid them $5k for promotion in 2022, which they then disavowed and apologized for. It's basically a sump pit for online crazies who can't even stay on 4chan (naturally, Gab has since gone big on Qanon), with no relevance to GOP politics whatsoever.
As Richard Hanania (Writer of "The Origins of Woke" who has been in many conservative spaces before)
You are trolling. A faux-naive/faux-serious description of "Richard Hanania, writer of 'The Origins of Woke'" could be a little flourish one time, twice makes it pretty obvious you're trying to build a schtick. What I find amazing about posters like you, AlexanderTurok, that one other more forgettable EHC poster, etc. is that you seem to genuinely believe you're coming on here and winning arguments and unmasking the chuds. The thing is, you're just not very good at trolling - all you're doing is making yourself and the little Hananiac niche look silly and obnoxious. You should probably spend more time studying how Richard does it.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
In Classical philosophy, this question is generally framed as "should the philosopher engage in political life", where he can maximally help his city but at the cost of cultivating wisdom. The simple answer is generally no, because the best way the wise man can help others is making them wiser, and some of those he teaches will go out and help the city themselves (and much better than if they didn't have his teaching).
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
I can't say anything about Parker and Stone, but the creators of The Office (US) were big DFW fans and wrote in a lot of references to his work.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
So many German books on the Hohenstaufen I will never be able to read... Oh well, I don't really need to, considering that Kantorowicz's Frederick II is an entirely true and accurate portrayal of just how great he was.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
This is a very mottizen reading in that I can't tell if it's bad-faith hostile or just so overly literalist it misses point by point and becomes fisking with a mis-sighted gun. A couple points:
Also, is Armageddon not a required part of the apocalypse and thus a good thing?
Armageddon is not the total destruction of human civilization, that's a casual use of the word. Armageddon is a gathering of the world's temporal forces for battle at a central point (Megiddo), at which point things will be Revealed.
Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.
The Nazis would never stop with 50,000 top people, they went root and branch into the population. That's the point of Churchill's approach - you take powerful, symbolic, deadly vengeance against the most responsible, and from then the stain is cleansed and you don't create a machine of eternal revenge that locks up nonagenarians to this day. It's a Girardian end-the-cycle-of-violence thing.
The Dr Strangelove thing is an odd choice, but if you're familiar with the literature of the time, it seems to me that Thiel is referring (with an esoteric joke?) to the Faust myth and similar stories, which begins with the Protestant Reformation and culminates at the end of the 18th Century with Goethe. Goethe made Faust the paradigmatic literary figure of modernity in his time for a reason.
That are leading figures of the climate movement, rationality/AI safety, and e/acc. Now, I may not be very up to date with e/acc, but lumping Andreessen with the "luddites" seems a questionable choice.
This is just reading comprehension. Thiel is not saying all three are luddites, he's saying that the reason Marc Andreesen cannot be the Antichrist is because he's not popular like the luddites are.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Very Roman of you!
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
I recall dealing with both that and the $2 bill a lot in college. The ticket machines for the train didn't take cards, and for some reason gave dollar coins as change, so if I only had $20s I now had 18 Susan B. Anthonys in my pocket. Then one of the officers in my frat had the bright idea of giving $2s as change at our parties, so people would associate us with those and I guess come to parties more. Must have annoyed the hell out of cashiers.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
Plutarch’s Athenian Lives: if you have any interest in history, human nature, or human greatness, you owe it to yourself to read Plutarch.
Walter Ong, Fighting For Life: picked this up because I wanted a different perspective on some of the stuff in The Mountain. The first 40% or so of the book is awful, one of the worst attempts at psychoanalytic writing I’ve ever read, and I’ve read some stinkers. It’s just starting to get good now as he dives into a field he’s qualified on - agonistic competition in academic and intellectual history. Cautiously excited to see if he can turn it around, since I’ve greatly enjoyed his other work.
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: well, the section on linguistics drags, but now it’s heating up again. I’m frustrated at times, cruising at times, mindblown at times, but it’s a hell of a ride.
Machiavelli, The Prince: like Plutarch, a re-read, but very interesting to compare the two directly. Machiavelli has this very incisive, diagrammatic way of analysis that, now that I say it, reminds me of some stuff Deleuze says. He writes in a very “arborescent”, binary-tree way, but the cumulative effect is a tremendous deterritorialization that rips the prince from the feudal order. I don’t think Strauss’s claim that Machiavelli and Bacon are the beginning of modernity is at all a stretch.
Bartender_Venator
3mo ago
There seems to be some kind of quality of 'general alignedness' which breaks across low-pressure generations. I just wrote a more technical post about this here though it's speculative.
Yeah, and this quality of 'general alignedness' would not be any particular trait, but a group of traits which are either necessary themselves or in combination for fitness in a given selection environment, and are very difficult to improve on and easy to fall away from (because different is generally worse). One way to think of it is that we have G as a general factor of intelligence, but that can be reasonably approximated by tests, and so a lot of people mistake it for a single trait rather than a general factor because it can be determined by tests, whereas a general alignedness factor can only be determined by contact with the environment, or approximated by someone who knows the environment well. It's something that's over and above traits and is determined by the relationship between phenotype and environment, until that environment changes. To take an extreme example in humans, extreme physical bravery in young men suddenly became much less selectively advantageous in August 1914. It seems to hang together well conceptually as long as one can see it as a kind of overlying factor composed of many traits instead of a single trait in itself.
My understanding is that while Sicilian culture was highly Arabicized compared to the rest of Christendom, Frederick II was not much more notably Arabicized (or Byzantinized) than his predecessors on the Sicilian throne. Roger II, for instance, Frederick's grandfather, spoke Arabic, employed Arab scholars, and even wore a coronation robe using Arabic writing and the Muslim calendar - but he also spoke Greek, employed Byzantine scholars, and adopted Byzantine customs he liked. By the time of Frederick's life, Sicily had been a melting pot for over a hundred years, and many Arabs had melted in there, but that doesn't mean they were the dominant element, just an unusual one (the Crusader States, of course, had many Arabs, but their leaders were generally far less cultured and intellectual than Sicily's). What Frederick really brought to Sicily that was new was his Latinizing, Classicizing impulse, the desire to restore the Roman law of the Roman Empire that he inherited from his other grandfather, Frederick Barbarossa, and while the intellectual life of his administration owed much to the Arabo-Byzantine influences on Sicily, his political program and specific policies would be much more in a Classicizing, proto-Renaissance mode. Essentially, he added the missing element to the melting pot to turn Sicily from a prosperous and uniquely cultured regional power to a base for truly imperial ambitions.
More options
Context Copy link