Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
I am actively attempting to deradicalize myself. I dislike puritanism and intolerance. DM me if you want my Discord, Twitter, Reddit, etc.
User ID: 1719
Into the Spider-Verse was my favorite movie of 2018. I only found out this year that one of the film's directors was someone whose values are antithetical to everything I believe and as harmful to me as ideas can be. I knew he wasn't returning to direct the sequel, so I thought that meant I could go see it without feeling shame, but I just found out (again, surprisingly late) that he's an Executive Producer on it. This likely means he gets a share of the box office gross, though I don't know how big that share would be.
This presents an e̶t̶h̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ psychological dilemma that feels as though it's ethical for me. This is one of the few movies where seeing it in the theater is very important to me, and I do feel that I'd be missing out by seeing it on my tiny laptop screen several months after release. However, I would feel emasculated if I gave this person any more money than I already have. Is there a way I can have my cake and eat it too here?
I know it's unlikely that anyone here has a better idea "than stop giving a crap about what filmmakers believe," but I'm asking anyway, just in case. There's nobody else on the internet where I'd expect people to be sympathetic to my problem in a way that's more than superficial. Left-wing spaces (as I've experienced them) would say "you should only care about political violence and life ruination if you're the kind of person we'd be using it against," and right-wing spaces (as I've experienced them) would say "these tactics are actually good and we should use them against left-wingers when we're in power" after making fun of me for liking children's movies. I do not mean to imply all left-dominated or right-dominated spaces are like the ones I describe, but that's my expectation of them based on experience, and it's always demoralizing to get those kinds of reactions, so I don't want to go seek them out.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Holy moly. I hadn't thought of it like this. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that what upsets people about the Holocaust isn't just that millions of people were murdered, but that the end goal was exterminating a group of people in its entirety. I'm deracinated enough that it makes little difference to me, but if I had a stronger sense of Jewish identity, then that might make a difference. Thank you.
I've learned to be distrustful of mainstream conservative commentators, but I still had hope that Dennis Prager was one of the intellectually honest ones. Having read his latest column, my disappointment is immeasurable, and my day is ruined.
I understand that accusing someone of intellectual dishonesty without clear evidence that they are lying is frowned upon here and likely anywhere else that meaningful discussion happens. If anyone has a defensible reading of this column, I would greatly appreciate hearing it, because I can only see two possible readings.
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The subject of the holocaust hits so close to home for Prager that he suspends all rational thought when discussing it, leaving him incapable of recognizing his own hypocrisy or recusing himself to avoid embarassment.
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He is consciously trying to enforce a norm that you can't question anything about the holocaust; he is aware that this contradicts his encouragement of vaccine hesitancy and other forms of wrongthink, but he doesn't care, because those are forms of wrongthink he likes, and this is one he doesn't like.
The first possibility fills me with pity. The second one fills me with outrage, not only because I consider that attitude to be morally wrong, but because I consider it to be counter-productive. The best way to encourage holocaust denial, and the anti-Semitism that it so often leads to, is to tell people not to question any details about it. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that Prager does not want people to question any details about it whatsoever. He says so himself.
Yet, some people, including an American named Nick Fuentes, aggressively deny the Holocaust, asserting that a few hundred thousand Jews, not millions, were killed.
Prager does not define the holocaust as "the German government's mass-murder of Jewish citizens," or even "the deliberate attempt by the German government to kill all of the Jews in Europe." He defines the holocaust specifically as the murder of millions of Jews, meaning that if you put the death toll at anything under 7 figures, you are denying the totality of the event in his mind. If Prager was giving a live lecture, I would excuse this implication as an accidental result of speaking off-the-cuff, but this is a written column, which means he had the opportunity to proof-read his words and think about what they mean, and he still thought that this was acceptable.
Based on my conversations with others about holocaust denial and revisionism, I suspect there's an unspoken implication in this column that people who are neurotypical (or just not autistic in the same way I am) are capable of picking up on: that anyone who questions any detail about the holocaust is a bad faith actor trying to Ship of Theseus it out of the historical record. I've had many people, even in ratspace, tell me that this is so obvious a reason to ostracize holocaust revisionists that it doesn't even have to be stated explicitly when condemning them. Well, not only is it not obvious to me, but I think it takes an astonishingly poor imagination to think that there might not be anyone out there who, in good faith and without denying Hitler's genocidal ambitions, questions how many people were killed in the holocaust or what methods were used.
This is not a defense of Nick Fuentes. While I can't read Fuentes's mind, I have inferred based on his tone when speaking about the holocaust that he likely either doesn't believe it happened or wants other people to not believe it happened. The column, however, is not about Nick Fuentes. It's a column about the general subject of holocaust "denial," and it merely uses Fuentes as an example. And while I'm at it..
Second, Holocaust denial is not only a Big Lie; it is pure Jew-hatred, i.e., antisemitism. The proof that it emanates from antisemitism is that no other 20th-century genocide is denied (with the exception of the Turkish government’s denial of the Turks’ mass murder of Armenians during World War I). No one denies Stalin’s mass murder of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago or his deliberate starvation of about five million Ukrainians (the Holodomor); or the Cambodian communists’ murder of about one in every four Cambodians; or Mao’s killing of about 60 million Chinese. The only genocide-denial is the genocide of the Jews.
Prager, buddy, do you have any idea how many people on my university campus alone denied "Stalin’s mass murder of tens of millions of Soviet citizens in the Gulag Archipelago?" I don't, because once you're counting in the dozens, it's impossible to keep track without administering a structured survey. I know that Bob Avakian's group canvassed there every day for years without incident, while right-wing events were met with hostile protests. I was one of the first people to know that Quentin Tarantino spoke at one of their events, but it took Breitbart a month to report on my tip, and not a single other outlet picked up on it because they didn't care.
What world does Prager live in where Stalin apologists are marginalized, but holocaust denial runs free? It's not the world he lived in five years ago, because 3 minutes into this video, he approvingly quotes a professor's statement that denial Stalin's genocide is common. Did Prager's assessment of the culture change over the past five years, or is he just contradicting himself to effectively enforce his preferred censorial norms? I'm inclined to think the latter, and it's a darn shame. I used to be a Ben Shapiro fan until I caught him doing stuff like this, and my search for people who recognized the problems with wokeness without enforcing their own intellectual taboos drove me further right to places like VDare and Unz, because they were less obviously dishonest. Several years later, I don't think those places are particularly honest, but I'm sure they're more honest than Daily Wire, and I expect many people to get stuck at that level of the radicalization rabbit hole without graduating to the general agnosticism and confusion I'm at. Shit, now I'm getting emotional.
Also, whoever chose that headline did a bad job. Prager is Jewish, and his reference to hell in the column was clearly meant to be a figure of speech. Making it the headline makes it sound literal. I wonder if Prager approved it.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
4mo ago
It's a Decemberween mackerel!
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
9mo ago
They do force an interpretation via Ferrara's monologue, and they have blatantly counterfactual stuff like an all-male board room in a state where there illegal. But if you edit out the more on the nose parts, the movie does become open to interpretation, yes.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
I didn't KNOW that there were 3 guys, let alone that only one of them was white! Damn!
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Why not? If people are interested, then I think these courses should be offered as electives.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
This is a good essay and I have shared it with people. While I can treat the doxing incidents as outliers, as Hanania has instructed me to, it still troubles me that the people who do these things continue to find employment in an industry that allows them to do such things. Taylor Lorenz may be best-known for doxing LibsOfTikTok, but she also doxed Pamela Geller's kids in response to hate speech committed by their mother, which they were obviously not responsible for. Until Lorenz apologizes for going after Geller's kids, I can't think of the Washington Post as a good institution while they employ her.
Also, I'm not convinced that Trump playing "QAnon music" was a signal to his base like Richard thinks it was. That was stock music that QAnon followers had been using in their videos. For all I know, they started using that stock music because they heard it at Trump rallies.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Elon Musk was transparently lying about his level of offense as an excuse to keep one of the most controversial public figures in America off his platform. He was also transparently lying about Kanye West inciting violence. I hate liars, but Musk is in a uniquely tough spot where he wants Twitter to be freer than it was under the previous owner, but he can't make it too free because that would drive away advertisers and make the site unprofitable.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Is it my imagination, or has the political balance tipped to the right since The Motte switched sites? There's still left-wing people here, obviously, but it feels more right-wing than before. It could be my imagination. The main reason I come here is to be challenged by people I disagree with who also happen to be smarter than me.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
9mo ago
Those are not the people who need to forgive Hanania. The people we need to forgive him are the Republicans in Conservatism Inc. Typically, they go along with left-wing cancellation campaigns, then brag about how much better than the left they are for ousting the "bigots" from their ranks, while still engaging with the bigots on the left. The smart people who do this like Ben Shapiro are acting in bad faith, but most Republicans are just too stupid to notice the contradiction on their own. If Hanania points it out, there's a chance some of them will get it. And we NEED conservatives to read his upcoming book. Mass awareness of Griggs v Duke is the key to getting it overturned, which is the key to defeating wokeness.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
What's weird is, I've never had this problem with "woke" movies. I even thought the 2016 Ghostbusters remake was an okay, but largely forgettable comedy movie. I've seen TV shows that have obnoxious messaging forced into them, but not movies. In fact, the messaging of Into the Spider-Verse was, by the standards of POC-centered media, surprisingly conservative. I don't think spoiler tags work on The Motte the way they do on Reddit, so stop reading now if you care about spoilers for this movie.
! Miles's dad is a cop, and he wants his son to be responsible, but Miles prefers the relaxed attitude of his semi-estranged uncle, who takes him to do graffiti at the subway stop after closing. Miles later finds out that his uncle is a professional hitman, and it's implied that the falling out his father and uncle had led to his uncle getting deeper and deeper into the criminal lifestyle. Miles convinces his uncle to quit, and in response, he's killed by his boss, the most powerful gangster in the city. Miles makes up with his father at the end of the movie and they make a "Rest in Power" memorial for their lost family member. <!
It's anti-criminality, respects the police as an institution, and even says that people who've done bad things can always redeem themselves and become better.. which, funnily enough, is something one of the movie's directors doesn't believe, at least not when applied to his outgroup.
Actually, now that I've typed this, I did think of one thing that bothered me politically in a recent movie, and that was in Spielberg's remake of West Side Story. I loved it and it was one of the best movies of 2021, but they took the tomboy character, Anybody's, and made her into a transgender man. I'm fine with trans people existing and being represented in movies, but this tomboy erasure is frustrating. It's as if they're saying, "you can't be a tomboy, you have to be a transgender man or a butch lesbian." I wish they wouldn't do that.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
he writes, after implying that the total death toll was fewer than a million
What?? I don't understand where you're getting that, but I don't want to argue with it because it feels like a distraction.
After all, if it was only half a million Jews who died, well then that would be roughly similar to the number of German civilians who died via the Allied strategic bombing campaign, or the number of ethnic Germans who died in the ethnic cleansing campaigns in Eastern Europe in 1944-46.
It would not be similar to the civilian casualties of war. War is morally complicated in a way that straight genocide isn't. As for your second example, I wasn't aware that there was a genocide that took place against ethnic Germans, but if such a thing did happen and was deliberately orchestrated by the government of whatever European country this took place in, then I do think it is morally equivalent to the Holocaust. That doesn't, however, mean it warrants as much attention as the Holocaust. The Holocaust is exceptionally well-documented by the very people who perpetrated it, and there are also thousands of hours of recorded interviews with survivors. The ethnic cleansing you speak of here is presumably less well-documented because I haven't even heard of it.
Germans were disproportionately and unequally punished for this
To my knowledge, their only punishment is living in a country where "hate speech" is illegal, and every Western country except America has unfortunately been given this punishment.
Hell, given the rough-and-tumble nature of total war it would be natural then to suggest the Holocaust wasn't deliberate,
They were put in camps, for Pete's sake! The camps are still standing! How can people be accidentally put in camps? I know you're trying to play devil's advocate, but I can't even follow the devil's advocacy you're doing.
I'm much too well-versed in the rhetorical style and strategies of Holocaust deniers not to get a lot of red flags popping in my brain as I read this post.
If I have to accept the label of Holocaust denier to have this discussion, then fine. I don't care. My point is that I don't understand why getting details wrong about a historical event is a moral failing and that people who do it should be "damned to hell." I also don't understand how someone could feel that way about the Holocaust, then turn around and express other taboo ideas without any cognitive dissonance. Dennis Prager is viewed by many leftists in prominent positions in the same way that he views people who underestimate the death toll of the Holocaust.
Again, I apologize if I'm making less sense now. This is one of the few subjects that makes me really emotional, and when I'm emotional, I don't make as much sense as I otherwise would. But that's why I need to talk about this, and there aren't any other places for me to talk about it.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
10mo ago
I'd like you guys to refrain from responding to this message (the one you are reading right now) unless you either are someone who holds the beliefs I am trying to engage with, or you can steelman how someone who holds those beliefs would respond to what I'm saying. Expressions of agreement are useless to me here. Thank you. (I have tried to get this discussion going on Twitter, but as one would expect, it hasn't worked.)
clears throat
So you, hypothetical person, believe that if a trans child has been on puberty blockers for the maximum of two years, then they should be allowed to switch over to HRT, even if they haven't reached the age of consent. So, for example, if a child starts blockers at age 12, then they should be able to switch over at age 14, even though the age of consent is no lower than 16 anywhere in the United States.
Why should the age of consent for HRT, the "real deal" of transitioning, be lower than the age of consent for sex? If you say that HRT is less harmful for children than sex with an adult, you need to be able to substantiate your claim.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
11mo ago
You seem to think that HBD is silly, but also that the claim that differences in outcome between groups are primarily caused by oppression is silly. And that's fine! My point is that the strong preference in polite society for one over the other is hard to reconcile with evolution being similarly preferred over intelligent design unless one takes the Schmittpill.
("Preferred" is putting it mildly, since we're talking bans and blacklisting, but I'm too tired to think of a better word.)
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
You're absolutely right. I was being inarticulate. The accusation of bigotry, itself, is not dehumanization. The dehumanization comes when you say that because someone is a bigot, it's okay to "punch" them. That their rights, the rights that are supposed to extend to all of humanity, no longer exist. The trigger word they usually use is "Nazi," and they expand the definition of that term enough to include wrongthinkers of all races and religions. That's the most extreme example, but even it is frighteningly common.
I don't think Archie Bunker wouldn't be tolerated in today's world. While he was absolutely portrayed as in the wrong, he was also tolerated, even loved. Today, people like that are not deserving of tolerance. They get "cancelled." It's like.. you know how in the 00's, some Christians had a "love the sinner, hate the sin" attitude towards homosexuality, while others didn't want to let gay people anywhere near them? Leftists used to be analogous to the former, hating problematic attitudes while still loving people who possessed them. Now they're the latter. Or at least, that's how I perceive the situation.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
People hate Musk because he wants to allow transphobic (and other hateful) speech on Twitter. People hate Chappelle for being transphobic. People who like Chappelle are willing to tolerate his transphobia, so I figured they'd also be willing to tolerate Elon's.
Not that I consider either of them transphobic in any meaningful sense. The point is that the media views them as transphobic for having insufficient reverence towards trans people.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Cheezus. You're right, I didn't know the full extent of Jim Crow. This is nuts and I appreciate you telling me about it.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Based on my experience asking these sorts of questions, I figured that at least some people would assume that I'm acting in bad faith. I appreciate you answering my question in spite of this assumption.
Slavery has an obvious economic incentive in that it's profitable for businesses to make people do unpaid labor at gunpoint. When you say that the purpose of Jim Crow was to maintain the subjugation of black people that started under slavery, you seem to be implying that subjugating people was an end in itself. Slaveowners, for the most part, weren't people who found human suffering an inherent positive. They were indifferent to human suffering, which means they would gladly enable it for the sake of profit. To my knowledge, Jim Crow was not a way for white businessmen to make money, and so it did not serve in any way the same purpose as slavery. If there was a way for Jim Crow to be used for profit, then that would change my understanding of this period in history.
Telling me to read books doesn't work unless you name specific books. I don't trust my own education, or anything I'd randomly pick up at the library. I'm well aware now that any issue relating to race will be skewed in the present-day news, and I have no reason to believe this would be different for books about historical racial issues.
In addressing your last paragraph, I know that some racists of the kind that you describe exist, but I have no idea how numerous they are now or how numerous they were historically. I only know that I, and many others, have been falsely accused of being this kind of person, no matter how much we champion liberal values or equality under the law, and the amount of false positives does make me wonder how common the real deal ever was. If I take your description of historical racism as the truth, and I try to imagine how that would work with my understanding of tribalism today, I suppose that historic racism would poor whites treating poor blacks as their outgroup and rich whites as their far group. That would be comparable to things I'm aware of.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
6mo ago
Maybe they're afraid to let their hypocrisy on Israel's border vs. America's border be too obvious, especially in light of Tucker Carlson bringing it to the attention of boomers.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
7mo ago
What article was that?
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
9mo ago
I thought kids tell their moms what toys they want based on whatever kiddie stuff they've been watching.
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
11mo ago
That makes sense, but it's also infuriating, because as far as I'm concerned, it means nothing, but I'm supposed to be able to tell what it means.
I support all trans rights except the right to receive hormones prior to the age of consent, and I hate their language policing and intolerance of comedy that pokes fun of them (which is a problem with leftists in general, but especially trans people as of late). Does that mean I should say I support trans rights, or that I want to protect trans kids? I don't know! From what you're saying, it sounds like, in doing so, I'd be performing a shibboleth for the wrong clique. This concept really does remind me of how high school is depicted in movies and TV.
My K-12 education didn't have cliques. It had friend groups, but nothing like the hierarchies and allegiance tests you'd see in Glee, Heathers, Mean Girls, High School Musical, etc. But my adult life has been full of them. I wonder why my school life didn't have them. Did they go dormant for a couple decades after the 90's before resurfacing? Were Hollywood writers projecting adult experiences onto teenagers all along? Were they always there, but I just didn't notice because nobody cared about politics until I finished high school?
Conservautism
Doubly Afraid of Change
1yr ago
Feces is referenced in cartoons all the time. It's almost never showed on screen because of S&P stuff, but it's talked about.
You say that "you can engineer someone to develop a preference or fetish based on what shows you shill them when they are young", but isn't that anecdotal? I'm not disagreeing with you, I'd just love to see research on people who watched Willy Wonka as a kid and developed inflation fetishes.
I agree that a Jewish rejection of idolatry would be akin to a rejection of tyranny, but the Jewish voices you see in the media don't actually reject idolatry. You can tell that by the way they treat the holocaust. Dennis Prager said that questioning any part of the official narrative means you're denying it in its totality, which means you're evil, which means that if hell exists, you will go there. And this guy is a dissident Jewish voice!
And yeah, the fact that Jews are a monotheistic religion is important, I guess. But so is the role that Jewish people (were believed to have) played in the formation of the USSR. Why isn't that mentioned in this article? Or in most articles on this subject?
By the way, what're your views on the holocaust, if you don't mind me asking? The fact that people get so mad about holocaust revisionism leads me to believe there must be something to it, but I'm not educated enough to say what that something is. I do believe the Nazi party deliberately murdered several million Jews because they don't want Jews in their territory. I don't care about the specifics beyond that, and I think calling anyone who disagrees on the specifics beyond that a "denier" is insane. It's weird to me that David Cole gets so much flack for saying the gas chambers were fake, when he still claims that the Nazis committed genocide. (And in case anyone lobs an accusation at me, I don't think the gas chambers were fake. I just think that if they were, it would change nothing.)
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