Chrisprattalpharaptr
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User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
21hr ago
Which mods have acknowledged this?
Hmm, this one I misremembered...
Yes, the community here has suffered evaporative cooling and a hardening of consensus viewpoints.
...although this is somewhat tacit acknowledgement.
This is just wrong and tells me you're either being disingenuous or you just don't pay attention.
Who have you banned for saying naughty things about blacks, immigrants, women or progressives on par with hanikrummihundursvin? I don't think faceh or sloot have been banned for ranting about women being the mental equivalent of children (afaict this ban was for being a generic asshole). You'll say whiningcoil is on the edge, but as far as I'm aware he hasn't eaten a 90 day ban and has plenty to say about immigrants wrecking his town.
No we don't. This is, again, flatly wrong. If we were free speech absolutists, we wouldn't ban people for calling brown people locusts and Jews parasites
Yes, this is my point...
How many places on reddit or elsewhere can I very calmly and civilly argue for why I don't think trans women are women, or HBD may be real?
...and how many places can hanikrummihundursvin calmly and civilly argue that he hates the subhuman subcontinental filth and Jewish parasites that are holding down the proud Aryan race? You're proud that the speech you like is allowed here while being verboten on reddit, even as you ban the speech you dislike and put boundaries on what the deplorables are allowed to say.
But someone coming in saying Black Lives Matter and Trans Rights Are Human Rights would be allowed to argue for those positions.
I have not, and would not deny it.
BUT - it must be said, one reason they break so readily is that they are just not used to people being allowed to dogpile them, instead of the other way around.
There is some truth to this. But there's more to the story than libruls are thin-skinned snowflakes who can't handle disagreement. Not everyone wants to share a space with people calmly and civilly advocating for political violence or genocide any more than you want to share a space with 4channers.
But your criticisms are off base and mostly just wrong when not outright disingenuous.
We've done this a couple times, and usually your argument is just repeating that you're wrong, Chrispratt. Do you think you're going to change my mind just by repeating that you think I'm wrong, or do you feel the need to defend your record to the audience? Are you worried I'm going to evaporate as well? If it's the latter, I'll probably hang around until this place dies from a lack of activity and things get boring - no need to try and convince me one way or another.
But anyways. You're wrong, Amadan. I think you're ingenuously wrong. I think you're all doing a good job as moderators, but I'm less and less impressed with the free speech argument the longer I stick around.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
He said "progressive/liberal." "Progressive" is kind of a dirty word hereabouts, basically interchangeable with "woke," but do you not consider yourself a liberal?
In that case, why say progressive at all? And even then, the word 'liberal' contains multitudes. A Texas democrat, a Freddie De Boer flavor liberal who rarely culture wars, some kind of lawyer from Pittsburgh and some kind of software-adjacent lawyer are the vanguard now that everyone to their left is gone. Who's who, and whether that's an accurate cross-section of the label 'liberal' is left to you. 3-4 people is still not that many.
Once, I would have gotten pushback and been told I'm too sensitive and used to my progressive safe spaces and there's an even balance of left/right viewpoints. Now, there's tacit acknowledgement even from the mods that this is true and the party line has shifted to liberals are just too thin-skinned to deal with how wrong they are.
Sure, I'm probably a liberal, although I rarely participate in discussions and Mr. delVasto probably wasn't around when I did.
Really? So you think he could have said something similar about another group and not been modded? Why do you think that? Or are you agreeing with Hanik that the mods are ZOG collaborators? That would be a twist.
No, you aren't on the AIPAC payroll (or if you are, make me a mod daddy - I'll ban all the jew-haters tomorrow). But he was relatively polite, speaking clearly and it certainly wasn't low effort. His participation adhered to the rules better than Jiro saying 'Yeah, no' because he was butthurt about Jews being called parasites.
But yes, I'm pretty sure he could get away with hating on American blacks or illegal immigrants or Islamists or progressives or plenty of other groups for a lot longer than he could get away with hating on Jews. Coincidentally, there are a hell of a lot more Jews here than blacks or any of those other groups. Why do I think it would be modded differently? Because people hate on blacks and illegals all the time without consequence, maybe a bit less monomaniacally than SS, but just as virulently and often less articulately.
I mean, do I need to point out that in your link, @naraburns was not speaking as a mod?
What does it matter? His views on his objectivity are the same whether he's posting with mod flair or not.
"You're doing a good job and you also suck" is such a special snipe.
I don't have time to fully flesh this out because life, so concisely:
- You (the mod team and userbase more broadly, not you specifically) pride yourselves on being free speech absolutists and sneer at [insert lesser forum here.]
- Actual free speech absolutism leads to autistic 20 page screeds about holocaust denial and eventually devolves into 4chan.
- You know this. You tell those people to shut the fuck up and ban them when they get too obnoxious, or, as people here like to say: 'start scaring the hoes.' Iterate for definition of hoes moving rightward over time.
- 'Free speech' now works great because most substantial disagreement is gone from the platform and people pulling you too hard towards chanhood get banned.
I think you're right to do #3, and that you do a good job of it. I just think it's hypocritical to claim to be advocates of free speech when the only difference between you and reddit is where you've drawn the line in the sand, and that line is largely a product of the views of your userbase.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
Can you name a single progressive here? I guess magicalkitty and whatever the other person's name is (aka darwin and impassionata), although I'm not sure they count given that they've been permabanned in the past and mostly troll now. There aren't any left to mod.
On the flip side, there's nothing in the post being modded that would deserve a ban on any other topic. There's no objective rule here (however much the mods may protest to the contrary), just an arbitrary line in the sand that the local userbase happens to draw further to the right than reddit does.
To be clear, I think they're doing a good job. But the hypocrisy and chest-thumping around free speech is profoundly irritating.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
The only thing that the above reveals is that US suburbs are largely preferred to US cities (and, more specifically, by the kind of upper middle class striver who uproots from Europe/China to the US), but this does not generalize to suburbs and cities as a whole. Maintain a Singapore quality city in the US and I don't doubt many suburbanites would trade the yard and those extra beds/baths for a condo.
It's a fair argument, but I'm not sure I buy it. Millennials revitalized city cores and gentrified the shit out of many historically run down neighborhoods. They couldn't conjure up a world class mass transit system, but most of the ones I knew lived without cars anyways. Then they all hit 30, tried to buy a house in the burbs at the same time and the housing market chaos of the early 2020s ensued.
Also, ironically, I ended up taking a ton of cabs when I was in Singapore. It was nice, but I'm not sure I'd say it was in a different class from the American cities I like.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1d ago
I think this is too fuzzy an analogy to be much help.
Fair. It's not a particularly sophisticated model, but then, I'm neither a historian nor an economist. It seems to be the playbook the CCP believes in, though.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2d ago
Tyler Cowen had Dan Wang (author of Breakneck, originator of the 'China is run by engineers, US is run by lawyers' meme) on his podcast last week. IMO, Tyler's podcast is at it's best when he's debating rather than interviewing, part of why his year-end reviews are some of his best episodes. It's particularly interesting watching someone intelligent actually defend America and moreover champion causes that inevitably would code as lower-status to the intellectual class.
tl;dr, Tyler's views —
- Suburbs good, cars and highways good
- HSR/mass transit overrated (but we should still do better)
- America can build (gives the example of AI data centers)
- American Healthcare + rate of healthcare spending good
- China pandemic response bad, America pandemic response good
Massive quotes incoming. Skip ahead if you don't want to read Tyler's arguments:
COWEN: A very simple question. Doesn’t America just have better infrastructure than China? Let’s say I live in Columbus, Ohio. What exactly am I lacking in terms of infrastructure? I have this great semi-suburban life. It’s quite comfortable. What’s the problem?
WANG: America has excellent infrastructure if you own a car. If you are driving every day on the highways into the parking garages to work, that is quite fine. I’ve never been to Columbus, Ohio. I’m sure its airport is perfectly adequate. I live mostly in between Ann Arbor as well as Palo Alto. These are cities that enjoy access to two excellent airports: DTW as well as SFO. All of that is fine...
I think there should also be much better transit options within cities as well, because we are working through these subway systems built mostly 100 years ago now in New York City, which are screechingly loud. The noise levels on BART as well as New York City are sometimes exceeding these danger levels experienced by most people. I think that there should be just more options, rather than cars, as well as airports.
COWEN: Aren’t those relatively minor problems? I agree that we should build more rail, but mostly we’re not going to. We’ll improve airports, add more flights. The New York subway is clearly too loud, but part of the American genius is you don’t have to live in New York City. Say we did everything you just mentioned. Would GDP be more than 1% higher...Just get everyone a car, or almost everyone... I don’t see how we could make American cities into European cities. What we have are the very best suburbs. Chinese suburbs strike me as really quite mediocre. They can have excellent food as pretty much all of China does, but after that, I don’t see anything to recommend them at all.
And honestly, this seems to me to be the revealed preferences of most people. Europeans and Chinese who move to the US largely move to the burbs and buy the big car even while (at least the former) tut-tutting about how barbaric it all is. People, at least once they hit a certain age, want the SFH and the big yard with the fence and the space to raise their children.
WANG: I think that my hypothesis is that China will continue to build much, much more because it doesn’t have a lot of these American notions of being super obsessed with financial measures, like profitability, as well as these other ratios. I think there is something much more common in China, as well as the rest of East Asia, where the business leaders are much more concerned about simply market share than they are about having really high profits.
COWEN: This critique that the United States is too financialized or too concerned with the bottom line, hasn’t recent experience with AI infrastructure and data centers shown we can rise to the occasion? It’s not obvious all of that will make money, but we’re going to put up trillions of dollars to do it. We’re going to do it pretty rapidly. We’re way ahead of China, certainly ahead of the rest of the world. The Gulf may end up in the running there.
On the pandemic and vaccines:
COWEN: That seems wrong to me. US underperformed by different bureaucratic measures, but what really mattered for saving lives and reopening was vaccines.
WANG: I agree.
COWEN: On that, US overperformed. China is miserable at the bottom of the barrel. They even had the Pfizer contract and wouldn’t even use those vaccines. They used their own inferior vaccines because they didn’t have a society of lawyers who would go crazy suing everyone. US, I think, in pandemic, everyone did terribly, but US got the vaccines, got them quickly, way ahead of schedule, and did certainly much better than China.
And yet. And yet! At one point we have this brief exchange:
WANG: ...What I am always asking is, what if they succeed on being the global center for automotives?
COWEN: Which is likely, right?
WANG: Which is likely. They’re on track to do that. Right now, they have about a third of global manufacturing capacity. They may continue gaining share, in part because they’re deindustrializing everyone else, deindustrializing Germany in particular, as well as Japan and South Korea. The US has mostly already deindustrialized itself, so it’s not in the firing line. At some point, there will be a second China shock coming for America’s manufacturing industries. They’re going to make all the drones. They’re going to make much of the electronics.
I can buy some of Tyler's takes, and as I mentioned it's refreshing to see an actual contrarian take about the competence of America. But at some point, it just transcends a contrarian take into cope territory. Why are we complacently accepting that China is going to be the global center for auto manufacturing on top of drones and everything else? Life might be good now, but if China is just 1950s America, and 1950s America was just 19th century Britain, aren't we headed for the same stagnation and broad irrelevance of the UK today?
Maybe some of the catastrophizing about China is overwrought and some of America's apparent weaknesses are just the invisible hand of the market moving in mysterious ways, while the gleaming bridges and HSR to nowhere are albatross projects and a drag on growth. Maybe our apparent decadence and vice are really just the product of a system optimized for giving it's people a good life, while Chinese grind 996 work weeks for shit wages to stroke Xi Jinping's ego. But man, I don't want to get hit with the rare earth metals stick whenever the POTUS doesn't kowtow to the emperor. I'm still torn between whether the economists should be running the show or whether we should keep them as far away from the levers of power as possible.
Make some actual tariffs that bite and laws that promote onshoring; and if consumers don't even notice an increase in prices it ain't working. If your argument is that we can't match the Chinese in whatever way, deregulate or bring Chinese companies here so we can learn from them or do whatever it takes to compete. Instead, we just decided to sell them H200s and erode one of our few remaining advantages (maybe someone more plugged in can comment on how significant this is?).
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
20d ago
The current era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
Still? You can keep saying it, but that doesn't make it true. The current era is best understood as social media-induced brainrot afflicting each generation in it's own way, with zoomers doing whatever it is they do on tiktok, boomers/gen Xers schizo posting incoherently in news comments sections and millennials straddling the line. Then some idiots on the margin actually Do Something, and the rest of us are dragged through the ensuing shitstorm.
If you still believe your model has so much explanatory power, make some predictions:
This time, I'll ask: do you genuinely think my prediction was wrong, and that we are in fact moving away from large-scale violence? Do you genuinely believe the Culture War is winding down? And since no FCfromSSC post would be complete without a link to some other excessively-long comment, nor with a listing of recent violence datapoints, here's both in one from last week.
I do not think I am obsessed with small-minded, zero sum games. I am interested in what is going to happen next, and what is happening next is, it seems to me, largely determined by such games. Most people are obsessed with winning and losing, and because their values are now mutually-incoherent, cooperative victory is no longer a viable option. I think that internalizing this insight gives me a clearer picture of where we are heading, which is of course the main question we've debated for some years now.
As for myself, I am already saved. I think my side will win, but whether it does or not does not is a matter of no true consequence; nothing that truly matters to me is protected by victory or lost by defeat. I do not believe in progress, moral or otherwise. There is nothing new under the sun, all things are wearisome more than one can say. This is the bedrock truth as I understand it, and while I freely admit that it does not come naturally to me, I try to maintain a clear sight of it, even at some personal cost, even here.
Riots and political violence failed to manifest after a brainrotted zoomer killed Kirk two months ago, elections ran smoothly and the political momentum seems to be swinging away from 'Your Side.' I'll give you and @ThomasdelVasto ten to one odds that there's no civil war before the completion of the next presidential election, and I'd give you much better odds if I sat down to think about it more and actually had the money to bet on it. I'd wager that if we had some indices of political violence and economic prosperity, the former would be below 1960s/1970s level, the latter would be close to some ATH and the only way the current era is remarkable is how efficiently the internet has divided us.
But please, make your own predictions.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
How do you, personally, decide who is to blame for the government shutdown? If Republicans had made concessions to Democrats, would you then be here arguing that it was a 'Republican shutdown?'
Chrisprattalpharaptr
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1mo ago
Thomas Jefferson was a botanist, architect, paleontologist, president of the American Philosophical Society, politician and other things I'm surely missing. Benjamin Franklin had a similar resume. An LLM or a better historian than myself could fill in the blanks for some real Renaissance era Renaissance men.
Fast forward to the mid-late 20th century, and we're in an era where scientists can conceivably read every manuscript/major text in their field. By the 90s, the scope narrows a bit so that you could reasonably have read every paper in your subfield, by the 2000s we're talking sub-sub field. Today, if you look at one of the popular genes to study there are literally >100,000 papers published on it, with about 5,000 more coming out per year. The scope has narrowed from comprehensive knowledge about biology -> subfield (genetics, immunology, oncology, etc) -> sub-subfield (autoimmunity, leukemias, etc) -> gene or gene family -> some aspect of a gene family or cell type. Teamwork, communication and interlocking specialties are hugely important in ways that they weren't before. My main paper had over 50 authors and included dozens of different specialties and techniques I have no idea how to do.
Now it's beyond that, it's systems of shoggoths that we can tweak and manipulate, but none of us can truly grasp as a whole - and we can't even really imagine someone who can.
Biology is a shoggoth we can't ever grasp as a whole. Maybe there are limitations to intelligence, and no being is ever going to truly grasp biology in a comprehensive way. But if you want to keep making progress, you either need to build a shoggoth-oracle and have it teach us or you need to enhance our brains somehow a la neuralink. Otherwise, we're just going to keep spinning our wheels pumping out shitty papers that nobody reads or can fit into any kind of coherent picture.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I'm sure the respectability centrists among us will pop in to drop some absolutely scathing denounciations of the Virgina Democrat party.
Who are you even thinking of when you say this? Respectability centrist isn't a label I'd apply to anyone here.
In the event you're thinking of me, Charlie Kirk's assassination was Bad with a capital B, Jay Jones' texts were Bad and should have been disqualifying, if people voted for him as an endorsement of those feelings then that is also abhorrent. I'm not sure the latter is true, but I'm also fairly far removed from Virginia.
Are you ready to denounce the bullshit on your side too, or do you get to dodge that responsibility by not identifying as a 'respectability centrist?' Next time Trump does something bad, shall I demand you pop up in the comments to say something about it?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Don't know. Probably around a dozen, maybe more.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
This type of reaction you've shown to me makes me angry. You clearly don't respect my values enough to even ask why before you start telling me how it looks, and ridiculing the thought process right out of the gate. But maybe that was your intention.
For what it's worth, no, I wasn't trying to troll you or make you angry. I had assumed we were starting from a position that your values or worldview were maladaptive given that you're asking for help in 'getting over it,' and use the word preoccupation which to me at least carries a negative valence.
But if you want to dig in and insist on your values, I wish you luck in your coping.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
For men: in a relationship, do you ask about your partner's body count?
No, but it tends to come up naturally. But also, I and most of the people I've dated didn't really know? Depending how you define body count, I'm probably somewhere between one and three dozen?
Does asking about it actually help with the preoccupation at all? How do you get over it?
What preoccupation? Who cares how many people either of you have slept with? Being preoccupied with exes or their penis size (as described below) just reeks of insecurity. It seems more productive to focus on being a good partner in and out of the bedroom and having confidence in your self-worth.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I'm a tech development and "innovation" nerd. There's a small, but growing, especially in recent years, online commmunity of people who read organizational histories of places like Bell Labs and the original Lockheed Skunkwords to try and figure out the best ways to do real tech development. Not academic science projects and not VC backed bullshit which is mostly business model innovation (that even more often fails).
Can you point me towards the community you're referring to? Is this related to roots of progress? I've been a bit underwhelmed by them, but also haven't checked in for a while.
Side note on the hard tech angle: patent issuance used to be a decent enough and standardized enough measure for "innovation." Since the rise of legalism post WW2, however, it's so much more noisy now that it's questionable if it remains a valid "fungible currency" for studying innovation and tech development.
What do you think is a robust measure, then?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Interesting, although I'd push back and say that (without actually looking for any data) I doubt those numbers don't apply to Israelis, Jews further down the orthodox spectrum and the boomer-Jews who have real money/power outside of Hollywood/conventional media. Even the doctors/professors I meet are not at all like the anti-Israel protestors. But I take your point more broadly.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
This is a point I've brought up privately to Jewish friends of mine: Israel is burning through goodwill that they and their parents and their grandparents have spent decades building in the American public.
Just so I understand your argument, you're saying that Israel/American Jews built goodwill by pushing Holocaust education in school and anti-Nazi/antisemitism propaganda? What have they now done differently to burn the goodwill? Is it this:
This was what gave the Jews a special exception from the liberal world order in Israel for decades, what allowed them freedom of action. And now it seems to me that they've pissed a lot of it away on a few years of mowing the Gazan grass.
Because the American right writ large does not give a shit that Israel has turned Palestine into rubble. After October 7th, plenty of people here were gung-ho for a little genocide/purge. Precious little of the conversation in this thread is focused on Palestine, whereas most of the standout comments focus on Jewish control of Media/Finance/Hollywood and other institutions.
So it begs the question - why is the American right turning against Jews now, and what changed in the last 20-30 years that enabled it? Decentralization of the media and sources of information has disproportionately benefited fringe people like Fuentes at the expense of traditional media. Cynically, and depending which movie screen you're watching, this either makes it harder for Israel to spread their propaganda or lets Fuentes spread hateful antisemitic tropes.
Neither has much to do with American or Israeli Jews 'burning the goodwill of the American people,' nor is there anything they could really do differently to mitigate it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Maybe don't take claim of abolitionists if you don't want to be saddled with everything else over three centuries?
Then how should I respond to the accusation that liberals are to blame for right wing skinheads? Is '"Liberals are the only people with agency" theory undefeated' the professorgerm approved line?
Dubyah? I'm not quite as old as you think, I guess; I couldn't vote yet. Given my druthers I probably would've voted third party.
Who cares? I obviously couldn't vote for LBJ in 1965. Most people couldn't vote for Reagan, but apparently he was the last 'real' Republican president prior to Trump, everyone else was a Dem or Dem dressed up as an elephant. The only other real Republican presidents in the 20th century were Nixon (unfairly set up by the CIA/FBI btw) and Teddy Roosevelt.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Well of course not, they strategically located their weapons depots under the hospitals universities.
What?
I learned from the best!
Who, me?
The vast majority of the modern left are identitarian, so not incorrect but also not a clarifying statement.
This is my point. What does it matter if Nara dresses his partisanship up in pretty language when the functional outcome is more or less the same?
If Rachel Maddow or whatever other blue partisan hack you want to choose went on MSNBC and said I don't hate Republicans, I just hate people who oppose immigration, would you be fooled into thinking she's some enlightened centrist operating on lofty principles?
Why not?
Because for the purposes of this conversation, the cause of the differences doesn't matter. If I don't utter that shibboleth everything inevitably devolves into a discussion about HBD.
If you want to own abolitionists, you have to own the eugenicists too. Is that really what you want?
In a single conversation, I've been told I need to take responsibility for:
- All the inner city slums and attendant race riots - 1910-1970 (built by progressives, progressives imported black people from the south)
- Right wing 'ethnonationalism' or whatever euphemism is deemed inoffensive by the users of this board - present day (it's the fault of progressives)
- 9/11 (progressives passed an immigration law in 1965 enabling hijackers)
- Antisemitism in America/running cover for Islamofascism - present day (Spoiler: it's progressives who are the real antisemites!)
- Eugenics movement in the US - 1920s?
Lol, alright. If you want me to take responsibility for a hundred year old eugenics movement, maybe try taking responsibility for the president you elected 20 years ago instead of frantically trying to recast him as a democrat. How's that for a non-sequitur?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
It started 30 years before that
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
No actually it was racist white southerners lynching them and denying them economic opportunity that drove millions of them north
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
My point was that magicalkittycat was engaged with a mixture of whataboutism
How can he engage in whataboutism when he is the one initiating the conversation...?
Chinese Robber fallacy
So your argument is that antisemitism is vanishingly rare on the right, and common on the left?
Insofar as 'running cover' implies the news media has some secret agenda to promote antisemitism, no, I don't think it's true. Insofar as they're sequentially denying, deflecting blame, minimizing and whatabouting, yes, they're running cover for antisemitism.
Again, you're deflecting and refusing to engage with the object level by reverting to criticizing the way the 'news media' (a, how did you put it? Unmitigated bullshit line? if I've ever heard one. As if the news sources consumed by your average MAGA footsoldier has any overlap in coverage whatsoever with the NYT) covers what you see as leftist antisemitism. You're minimizing the existence of antisemitism on the right (Chinese robber fallacy), and in the rare cases where those Chinese robbers get caught, they were pushed into it by the lefists!
Right, and the circlular firing squad for this argument is the one where I point out that you're playing the role of the leftist who simultaneously speaks as the arbiter and adherent of objectivity and truth while downplaying the possibility (or at least likelihood) of objectivity and truth.
I'm not downplaying it - reaching some Platonic ideal of objectivity is impossible. Thinking otherwise is foolish. Discarding the pursuit of objectivity is equally foolish.
I'm not the arbiter of objectivity and truth, and neither are you. But the data don't lie. I'm fairly confident I could go through your post history, tally up the posts that are right-wing coded, tally up those that are left-wing coded, and I imagine a statistically significant pattern would emerge. But, 1) I assume I'd run afoul of some kind of harassment wildcard rule and get banned and 2) there would be a hundred reasons you could give to preserve your self-image.
And yet exactly one of us in this discussion has frankly admitted the existence of, and offered criticism against, both right-wing and left-wing antisemitism and racism, and it isn't you.
This is just blatantly false, but I suppose if Trump taught us anything, there's a lot of value in making truthless accusations without any supporting evidence. If nothing else, it puts the other person on the defensive and makes them respond. So, this is the closest you come to criticizing right-wing antisemitism:
That said, just speaking from personal experience, in my social feeds earlier today I read some surprisingly outright racist remarks in response to Ketanji Brown Jackson's ill-advised suggestion that being a racial minority be considered a kind of disability. As an anti-identitarian liberal this concerns me greatly, but I do think it is (as others have suggested) directly downstream of leftists spending decades crying wolf.
Which is hilarious that in your mind you consider this some even-handed criticism of right-wing antisemitism. Throw in some tiki-torch cosplaying and you've got some quality partisan hackery going on here!
Insofar as you're accusing me of not admitting to left-wing antisemitism, I did break it down into multiple components, but if you'd like me to be pithy and explicit: Yes, I agree that it exists. I think it's fundamentally different and less dangerous than right-wing antisemitism in the ways I described and with which you completely failed to engage with.
Why is it that forums with actual free speech so often begin leaning to the right--almost as though leftism can't stand on its own two feet?
Well, thankfully this space offers a valuable refutation of your point. We've been here for nearly a decade now and there is still an equal balance of left and right-leaning views, right?
And I think a lot of Leftists are not identitarians, though sometimes they have to be reminded of that.
You'd be surprised, although again your desire to label someone as an (anti-)identitarian will elide a lot of heterogeneity in political views.
The main difference between left-wing identitarians and right-wing identitarians so far is that left-wing identitarians mostly control their political coalition (the Democratic Party) while right-wing identitarians remain at the fringes--albeit, less at the fringes than they were before the Great Awokening.
Indeed, that is why AOC and her crew ran the table with the old guard and toppled Nancy as speaker of the house. But sure, while I think 'mostly control' is another unmitigated bullshit line, before we get another 'exactly one of us has frankly admitted the existence of both right and left wing identitarianism and it isn't ChrisPratt!' moment, I acknowledge the existence of what you're alluding to and won't debate it in order to avoid an entirely new conversation.
But, the fact that you think Trump and MAGA are not identitarian just lays bare the gaping blind spot in your entire self-conception. And may be one of the funnier things I've read today. I know, I know! Circular firing squad. I guess I'd better let that one slide so we can break this cycle of violence.
With specific reference to antisemitism, the antisemites on the Right are reactionaries who fetishize a failed effort to implement national socialism in a country they often know nothing about.
No; there are plenty who dislike black people, who argue that some Jewish elite controls [X] institution, that immigration is a Jewish plot to dumb down the gentiles, and whom never bother invoking the Painter or tattooing swastikas on their foreheads. But you'd rather focus on the latter to fit your Chinese Robber narrative.
The antisemites on the Left, by contrast, are the vanguard of Islamofacism, a movement with at least tens of millions of supporters around the globe, who are prosecuting a centuries-long grudge against the ideological descendants of Judaism and Christianity.
Muslims make up 1.1% of America, and antisemites make up some much smaller fraction of that. Are you genuinely misguided enough to think that these people are the 'vanguard' of islamofascism in America? What do you think follows the vanguard, an invasion force of Taliban led by the spirit of Mehmed the conqueror to purge America of the Jews? What western nation has ever been so influenced by 'Islamofascism' that it started pogromming Jews?
White nationalists and Christians, on the other hand...
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
They are fools running cover for the most relevant group of anti-Semites in the modern world (a large subgroup of Muslims, fronted by the Palestinians).
Or they genuinely believed the lies about 'Never Again' that they were sold by their leaders.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Harvard, Columbia, and many other universities are still fighting court cases about their abject failures to make that distinction, aren't they?
Maybe you're right, I'm not particularly familiar with the details of the court cases or what specifically happened during the protests.
That said, I'm also not impressed by the mere fact that Trump decided to sue a bunch of Blue Tribe institutions.
And the people most likely to preach that white people are the scum of the earth are progressive white women and pick-me progressive white men. Projected self-hatred is not exactly an uncommon psychological ailment.
It's a bit condescending to suggest that Jews protesting Israel killing thousands of Gazan civilians must be doing it out of some psychological ailment. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone here defending American Adventurism in the 21st century (to the point of obsessively redefining George W. as a democrat, and Trump as the first true Republican in forty years), yet I imagine this is a rational argument rather than a bunch of self-hating Americans?
Still waiting to an answer on this one first.
Then you can keep complaining about woke, Magicalkitty can keep complaining about nazis, and I can write 10,000 words to gesture at the ascendant [redacted] in the west.
There is a lot of a cope. But there's also a lot of reflexive anti-jingoism where America default bad. I confess, I don't know whether to trust the economists or not.
I'll read it and get back to you.
Out of curiosity, do you speak/read Mandarin?
I'm not really interested in arguing with you on the subject and I'm not even sure I disagree, but on this point that you might find amusing - the dim sum place near my house is also called 'peaceful mountain dumpling shop' (obscured for opsec reasons) and I can tell you it's anything but. I'm reminded of the Chinese copypastas from World of Warcraft:
patchwerk fat american 胖胖美国人angered hits on armored men对装甲兵的怒吼intentional pain river keeps others safe故意痛苦的河流使他人安全medics focus those who eat fists医务人员将重点放在那些吃拳头的人身上
邪恶的骑士 Evil horseriders 一起站 Stand together for falling sky 带走武器 Steal weapon 避免黑洞 Avoid pancake of darkness 圣光波 Change position often
They're funnier if you've actually played the game...
Thanks - I'll try a book about Xi and/or his father.
The point of that argument is not that China is incapable of building datacenters, but that America hasn't lost it's ability to build - it's just very focused on profit.
Cope? Maybe. Like I said, I don't know if I should trust the economists the way I trust psychologists and social science majors, the way I trust engineers or somewhere in between.
Again, I think Tyler's point is that a lot of what looks like dysfunction is actually function downstream of people's revealed preferences.
I'm honestly 100% uncertain on whether China wins, America wins, or both muddle along on roughly equal terms for the rest of my lifetime. I'm still skeptical of your apparent certainty, but I guess we'll see.
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