I used to argue with white nationalists a lot many years ago on /r/anarcho_capitalism and what I found very frustrating is they refused to properly defend their point of view, particularly on the point of who counted as white. The rare time they would say, it was usually strictly people born on the European continent, so Turks in East Thrace were white but not Turks on the other side of the Bosporus strait were not, I guess. Attempts to pin them down on definitions like this were taken as bad faith tricks to undermine their cause and there was not a lot of interest in having real intellectual discussion about the merits of white nationalism. I found I could get them to explain why they thought whites were superior to non-whites, but I could not get anywhere discussing the practicalities of how a white ethno-state would work.
I completely agree that it makes more sense to select immigrants by the traits that whites are claimed to possess. Selecting them based on race is extremely crude.
Walt seemed like he was participating in good faith, but I found he rambled on a lot and would have preferred to have him pinned down more on some of these issues. I think he reinforced my impression of the alt-right, which is not that they were a bunch of super intellectual misfits but that they actually had terrible epistemic habits and were white nationalists more for the vibes as the kids say rather than its intellectual merits. I've read some of Richard Spencer's stuff and seen interviews with him. He's not that smart. I haven't been impressed by anything from the alt-right as far as intellectual arguments go.
I think that's separate from believing in human biodiversity. It's the leap from human biodiversity to white nationalism that I have never found convincing. I think there is a parallel here with communists, who are extremely difficult to convince to enter into a serious debate. Attempts to debate communists are shot down as risking undermining class solidarity. Similarly, attempts to debate white nationalists are shot down (though not nearly as quickly and definitively) as risking undermining white racial solidarity.
Another parallel is how communists put a huge amount of effort into debating theory (though not at addressing the best counter-arguments to that theory as they mostly only debate other communists) and almost none in how a communist society would actually work.
Glassnoser
20d ago
That is still really vague. I am talking about people who want to restrict immigration based on race. What would that actually mean? Once they can answer that, we can talk about whether that actually makes sense, whether it could work, how it would be done, and whether there are better ways of achieving those goals. White nationalists don't seem to want to do any of those things. But they are decisions they would eventually have to make.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
We, the West, shouldn't be standing behind the Israeli military, supplying the bombs and shells they're using, bankrolling their operation, threatening anyone who attacks them.
Why not? If Israel is in the right, it only makes sense to help them.
Glassnoser
19d ago
Were you specifically asking how the state is supposed to go from 50% nonwhite to 0% nonwhite?
No, I was asking who counts as white.
First of all, those are very different situations. It's not true that if Israel is justified in attacking Palestine that those other causes are justifiable, nor is it necessarily wise for the US to get involved. Secondly, it's not true that if the US helps one country it has to help them all.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
This is populism. No competent technocrat would propose something so obviously at odds with basic economic theory. The problem is that programs like these are very popular. The whole point of putting technocrats in control is to avoid disasaters like this one.
I really don't get why it shouldn't be allowed. This isn't even illegal in many places and in many places where the age of consent is 16, it was 14 not long ago. Is having the age of consent two years lower really such a massive mistake that was causing more than $10 million worth of harm every time a 14 year old had sex? That's more than we're willing to spend to prevent someone from dying.
I don't think he's trolling. I think he's showing how irrational people about sexual morality. It's an excellent poll that reveals the absurdity of most people's black and white thinking on this issue. A lot of people talk as though if it's bad, it should be stopped at all costs, even though no one actually acts like they really believe that.
Glassnoser
19d ago
No, I'm definitely not expecting them to agree with each other. I've witnessed arguments over whether Jews are white or whether Iranians or Armenians are white. I've witnessed arguments over whether you need to be 100% pure European or whether some lower threshold is good enough. I'm just saying that when you ask any given white nationalist for a definition, they usually reject the question outright.
Flipping the woke pyramid doesn't work because the main question is who makes the cut and is allowed to stay or immigrate to your ethno-state.
Glassnoser
14d ago
This is not correct. Where are you getting your information?
Glassnoser
19d ago
No, I think many want a racially white society where there is a substantial reduction in the non-white population and immigration restrictions based on race. For example, I've heard proposals to split the United States up so that part of it can be a white ethno-state and another part can be given to blacks. To achieve that, you do have to actually define who is white.
The wealthy aren't the only ones who buy things. Everyone benefits when the wages of others fall, causing prices to fall. Immigrants to Canada are actually better educated than average and there is even an investor class of immigrant. It's actually a system that equalizes wages. It's professionals who most notice how little they're paid compared to their American counterparts. Whereas low skilled workers in the US, at least in certain industries, have to compete with a large supply of low paid illegal immigrant labour that doesn't really exist in Canada.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
It's "paid" not "payed".
Glassnoser
7mo ago
There is no rule against posts that aren't effort posts. Most effort posts are bad. I'm worried were incentivizing people to write a lot of uninteresting wordy posts just so that they can start a discussion on something interesting. I don't see the harm in asking what other people think about something. What I think we do want is something to stop people from posting just anything. There should be something to explain why something is worthy of discussion. I don't see why it has to be something that requires a lot of effort.
I'm saying it isn't because you can control notifications within apps on Android. For example, on Instagram, I can click my face on the bottom left, then the three lines at the top left, and then notifications. Every app has something like this.
In Instagram's case, controlling notifications through the OS doesn't work because they're labelled too vaguely. They don't even mention Threads.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
Is a Palestinian state going to attack Tel-Aviv? Or Jewish locals in EU-administered Jerusalem? Then it's the EU's problem to solve that.
And how do they solve that?
That's a better arrangement than America being forced to fight all the enemies through the Middle East of a rogue Israel which it doesn't control.
The US isn't being forced to do anything. It's choosing to support Israel which is retaliating against Hamas. It can stop at any time if it doesn't like what Israel is doing.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
You can sell your house and have more wealth than before your house increased in value.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
It does mean that things are getting better. We want low and stable inflation. If prices were falling, that would be corrected by the central bank printing more money, which results in an equal increase in wages. It doesn't reduce your purchasing power, but it does help avoid a recession.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
Not only do people not spend a very large portion of their incomes on food, but they spend an even tinier amount on mayonaise, and it isn't even necessary to live. My point being that people fixate on a few specific things whose prices have risen by a lot and ignore the many things whose prices have not risen by as much or at all.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
It isn't verifiable though. It's anecdotes focusing on a tiny non-representative sample of the data. Who has actually collected the data in a proper way and is reporting much higher numbers than the government?
Glassnoser
6mo ago
What does it mean for land to be stolen in this context? We don't have any agreed upon system for deciding what country owns any given land in Israel or Palestine.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
Why should doctors need to be able to prove they can speak English to be allowed to work in the US? The point of medical licensing is to make sure that doctors know what they're doing, something that is not easily verified by patients. But patients can tell immediately if a doctor speaks English. If he can't, no one is actually going to be harmed by it and he may still be able to help patients who speak some other language.
If insurers in the US negotiated a lower price for drugs, that would kill the incentive to develop new drugs.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
Has anyone else noticed Twitter being really buggy since Elon Musk took over? It's worse than Facebook Messenger. For example, it has had trouble loading images for the last day. I don't get why people have concluded that you can fire all these people and have everything be fine. The content moderation is better, but Twitter as a piece of software is obviously much worse now.
I'm not saying that means firing those people was a bad idea. Maybe having software work perfectly is not worth the cost, and the stock market's reaction to the mass layoffs at FAANG suggests they weren't pulling their weight. But that brings me to a related question. Why was it so common up until recently for people to say that, despite the very high salaries of software engineers in California, they were actually very underpaid given the amount they made for their employers? This now appears not to be even close to true. Why did people think this? Was it just some dumb profit divided by headcount calculation?
Glassnoser
4mo ago
Food can be transported, so you don't need arable land. And there's a lot of arable land anyway. If the land isn't cleared, it can be cleared.
Canadian winter gets prohibitively expensive,
Clearly not, since people live in very cold parts of the country. If Winnipeg exists, then people can build in the ample open spaces of southern Ontario, let alone in the rest of Manitoba.
if you want to bring in millions of immogrants, you need to have an idea of where to put them.
As I said, they could easily fit in the GTA, let alone the many other cities we have and similar environments that haven't been built up.
Glassnoser
5mo ago
As an elder Millennial that has worked for a large tech firm and handled some customer support for a much smaller company, might I posit that the hyper-preference for everything to be done via text and e-mail is often correct?
You may posit it, but it's wrong. It takes much less time to say something than to write it and if you're speaking to someone, they can interrupt and much more easily ask you questions to get the information they need and therefore you don't have to anticipate those questions as much, resulting in less redundancy. It's usually a much more efficient means of communication. To replace meetings where most people don't need most of the information and people are less inclined to interrupt? Yes, emails are sometimes better. But 90% of the time, they're not.
He willingly gambled everything for the possibility of attaining what capitalism offers, and, having lost, he faced the possibility of, at worst, suffering a standard of living typical of a citizen of a communist country. So, I think his suicide is actually evidence of the brutality of communism, not capitalism.
More options
Context Copy link