In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding — symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power.
-Frank Herbert
Though this is a quote, I believe that it is so precisely said that it is worth posting on the top level.
Goodguy
3mo ago
If the US military stayed within its own borders except when genuinely attacked in an unprovoked way, I would be more willing to grant that US nativists have a worthy moral argument. But as long as the US constantly attempts to exert its will on the world using force, I see no moral argument for why people from the rest of the world should refrain from trying to influence US politics for the benefit of their own countries or ethnic groups or why they should refrain from moving to the US and enjoying the benefits of living there while having absolutely no loyalty to it and instead just exploiting it for their own purposes.
To be fair, many US nativists are actually in favor of a less interventionist US foreign policy.
It's not our place to belittle those who march off to fight and die at our direction, at the will of the white-collar class.
They sign up to potentially kill complete strangers on government orders, because they believe in the cause and/or for money. They willingly turn themselves into tools of the government. Hence I will belittle and mock them just as surely as I belittle and mock the government itself. If you are fine with belittling and mocking the government, then there is no reason not to belittle and mock the people who willingly make themselves into that government's agents.
The vast majority of the moral harms were committed by careless policymakers and senior officers who committed troops to achieving the unachievable.
100% of the actual harms were committed by the soldiers, not the politicians. If the soldiers did not follow the orders, the harms would not have happened.
Do you want to go and risk getting turned to meat paste by Chinese hypersonics?
Nobody has to risk that to begin with. The US is more than well-enough protected by its nuclear arsenal and, on top of that, by the oceans. If some American decides that going to fight for Taiwan or South Korea or whatever is really important to him - either because he cares about those countries or because he cares about maintaining US global military dominance and economic might - then alright, fine, but I'm not going to pretend that it has anything to do with defending the US itself from a threat of being militarily attacked.
I am not an American by birth, only by residence. I feel almost no loyalty whatsoever to America and am almost entirely happy to exploit it for my own benefit without feeling any sense of duty to it in return. I feel only slightly more loyalty to my ethnic group than I do to Americans (while recognizing that this is an irrational emotional urge), and none whatsoever to the government that currently rules my birth country. I do like Americans on average and feel a good bit of loyalty to certain specific ones who I am friends with but of course, I feel no loyalty whatsoever to the US government or to any abstract notions of "America".
I myself am not advocating for the moralistic argument and am quite content with leaving things at the selfish argument level, I'm just pointing out that US nativists could only be consistent by either grasping the selfish argument and abandoning moral ones or by advocating for non-interventionism.
In general, I simply do not respect borders, rules, or abstract notions of distinctions between nations or ethnic groups on any sort of ideological level. I am pragmatic - in practice, I respect the realities of such distinctions insofar as that is necessary to protect myself from violence, but I do not value borders, rules, or national distinctions in any ideological sense. When I cross a country's border, I have no sense at all that I am crossing some sort of line on a map that requires me to change anything about myself - I simply feel that I am moving from one place on the surface of this big rock, which is dominated by people who follow certain patterns of behavior, to another place, which is dominated by people who follow different patterns of behavior.
At the same time, I will of course not be so stupid as to not avail myself of other people's genuine ideological beliefs in things like borders and nations to benefit myself if it ever proves necessary. For example, I am perfectly happy to avail myself of the benefits of America's relatively strong rule of law while at the same time feeling almost no obligation whatsoever to America as a geographical, ethnic, or legal entity.
And I do not consider myself immoral for this. I do care deeply about certain Americans - to be precise, my friends and those I view as allies. And in that, I am very much American. How much does the average Democrat care about Republicans? How much does the average Republican care about Democrats? Most Americans, it seems to me, at least the ones who care a lot about politics, which includes most people on this site, in reality operate just the same as I do. Any US-dwelling right-wing Motte poster who feels more affinity to some foreign writer who agrees politically with him than he does to some SJW leftist who was born and bred in the US is just the same as I am.
Goodguy
2mo ago
That's interesting. Anecdotally, I don't think I've ever heard a woman make such an argument around me, even though I live in a heavily politically "progressive" area. Not even the most fervent SJWs have done it around me. I wonder what kind of social circles you are moving in that you see so much of it.
This is veering pretty close to waging culture war and, while not building consensus, assuming consensus.
My understanding of the spirit of the Motte is that when you write on the Motte, you should not assume a background of people who share your political views.
That is, my understanding is that this is not supposed to be a place where you share excited "inside opinions" about how your preferred politics are going.
I say this not as someone who is for the "Yes", but just as someone who does not want more culture war waging here.
Goodguy
5mo ago
What makes standing for the national anthem important? Like, which one? The national anthem of England, or the one of the traitorous colonists? If in Nazi Germany or the USSR, is it a basic civic norm to stand for the national anthem?
In my book, trying to force kids to stand for the national anthem is practically child abuse. Loyalty to country is a thought-terminating cliche.
Goodguy
1yr ago
I think that violence is, if not necessarily a good reaction, at least an understandable reaction to being forced by the state to spend eight hours a day at a containment center run by a bunch of glorified babysitters. Of course in practice, many school shooters target not just school staff but also their fellow students, often not even because of any justified personal grievances against them.
I am sure that with some people, this actually is a moral principle. Tolkien, for example. Based on his works, at least, he seems to have truly appreciated that sort of emotion, something like "I may not be the king, but I wish that whoever is the king is a good and just king who helps his people". There are a number of other such right-leaning (by modern standards) intellectuals who seem to have genuinely been motivated by at least some altruism.
A funny thing though is that on the right, this emotion has long been mixed with something that is very different: an extremely powerful and (mostly) closeted, emotional-sexual complex with overtones of father issues. The anti-egalitarian right has a strong streak of closeted mostly-homosexual eroticism that revolves around dominance/submission. Think of those Nazi uniforms and the Nazi cult of the virile young man, and the adulation of Hitler as some sort of almost living god, for example. and in general, think of the whole Prussian style of life, with its stern fathers and hyper-focus on discipline, social rank, and obedience. Or think of Mishima, whose life speaks for itself. In the modern day, think of the Bronze Age Pervert / Greek statue Twitter style of aesthetic, with its emphasis on toned male bodies and the constant dancing around the fact that many of the actual ancient Greeks enjoyed having sex with men very much. Nothing wrong with some gay sex, but it is funny to see the sublimation in action. Even if they have never heard the word, such people long to be part of a Koryos - although, if in reality they actually did get to be a part of some such group, with its intense hazing and male bonding, they might wish to flee from it quite soon. They have their admiration of masculinity bound up with their psycho-sexual natures. While they might be horrified at the idea of being an older ancient Greek man's young companion who gets both mentored and dominated, maybe even fucked, they long for the softer version of something similar that can be found in Fight Club, or in movies about the tight bonds between soldiers. There is a strong psycho-sexual need for an older brother or a "daddy" of some sort. Now, we all could use a nice older brother or a loving father, but among some of the highly online right it is clear that these archetypes have become fetishized.
Such people often have a powerful obsession with the idea that modern society lacks transition rites to turn boys into men, that it is missing a Koryos of some sort. The modern highly online right has a high over-representation of people who for some reason feel like they need to become men by doing something. Now, normally this just happens as one goes through life. One meets challenges, faces them, sometimes gets defeated and learns something to come back to the fray, at other times conquers the challenge and advances to new heights. Over time, one gains a stronger and stronger sense of one's own power.
Men who, for whatever reason, get stunted in this power process, to borrow a term from an infamous writer, make up a large fraction of the people who get drawn to extremist politics with strong sexual connotations. This is perhaps the grain of truth behind the meme of "young anime-loving autist boy has two possible paths in life: either become a super-leftist transgender with pink-and-blue socks, or become a Nazi LARPer who hates women and posts online going by the name of GasTheKikes1488". In either case, these people seem to have a powerful feeling that something key is missing in their self-image.
The 10% of the right that is made up of actual humane intellectuals is simultaneously struggling with the weight of the 80% of the right who have about the intelligence level of a piece of wood, and with another 10% of the right that is made up of raging, messed-up edgelords.
I don't think the statues should be destroyed if someone wants to take them, but I also do not think that it is reasonable to expect black Americans to be ok with there being official statues of people who enslaved their ancestors just 150 years ago.
The history is too recent. It is like expecting Latvians or Poles to not want to destroy statues of Lenin.
You would probably feel the same way, I think, if you were part of a racial minority living in a country where the racial majority had enslaved your ancestors 150 years ago.
Of course, if you want you are free to take a position of political selfishness and just say "screw them, I only care about white people" or "I only care about descendants of the English" or "I only care about my own friends and family", or whatever level you want to take it to.
Political selfishness is of course immoral by any standard definition of morality but it at least has the benefit that unlike every single political ideology, it is internally consistent.
Of course, don't expect people who are not part of your in-group as you define it to back you up if you are honest to them about your political selfishness.
For thousands of years people also "knew" that the Earth was the center of the solar system. I too think that the conventional notion of men and women maps better onto the actual distribution of human characteristics than the trans activist notion does*, but appealing to common sense is not a good argument for it.
*With the caveat that it is actually a distribution rather than a pure binary distinction. However, the distribution is so dominated by the two clusters of "men" and "women" as traditionally understood that the conventional notion of men and women does not lose much from a pragmatic perspective even if it is not technically accurate.
Goodguy
1yr ago
Many people here get really fucking cringe whenever the topic of sexuality comes up. This comment thread reminds me of that one about Aella from the other week. Just a palpable sense of barely disguised seething towards women from some commenters.
Goodguy
9mo ago
What's unhealthy about being gay or lesbian? I guess transgenderism is different because it's kind of defined as dysmorphia even by its activists, but I don't see anything unhealthy about homosexuality.
Goodguy
11mo ago
If I am between one side that believes men can become women by taking drugs and doing surgery and another side that believes a guy 2000 years ago walked on water and rose from the dead... well, I will be happy not being on either side.
It's a pretty common rdrama.net term. In my experience usually people who use it on rDrama are just as happy to call people on the other side "rightoids", so even if it doesn't necessarily meet this site's rules, it's generally not a partisan statement.
On rDrama "leftoid" and "rightoid" are certainly terms of mockery, but generally the "-oid" suffix is specifically meant to single out leftists and right-wingers who are are perceived as following their ideologies in rigid, conformist, and/or unintelligent ways. They're not necessarily terms that are used to refer to all left-leaning or all right-leaning people. Although sometimes they are.
Thanks for reading my bit of cultural ambassadorship. Come to rDrama, we have fun over there.
There are of course many reasons to worry, but the modern US is still one of the freest and least corrupt societies in human history. We have a lot of corruption and stupidity in the US, of course. However, the average human society, either today, or historically, would be amazed at how well the modern US is doing at balancing individual freedom and collective action. I don't like wokist authoritarianism, DEI corruption, or inflation, but if you feel that they are such great threats that they are worth becoming deeply emotionally distraught over, you are doing the same thing that leftists do when they become deeply emotionally distraught over the (in my opinion, near-zero) chance of Trump becoming a dictator.
The reality is that most things are going alright. The number of minors getting sex change treatments is a drop in the bucket. All the DEI corruption in the world hasn't stopped the strongest economy in human history from continuing to innovate. Inflation sucks but we're not living through the Great Depression or anything close to it. The Hamas supporters in the US didn't get any identical memo, they're just excited about somebody sticking it to what they view as an oppressive regime and they are ignoring the various atrocities that the rebels commit... which means that, while they are not being objective, nonetheless they're just indulging in an extremely common human psychological pattern that people on all sides of the political spectrum regularly indulge in. Musk owns Twitter and Google Gemini is widely mocked, the scary predictions about how the wokes would put us all in gulags have not panned out.
Basically, things are just not that bad. It's just that they seem bad if you focus a lot of attention on everything that is going on that you dislike.
Goodguy
2mo ago
For me, it makes more sense to focus on the ~1 million infants who are circumcised every year in the US than to focus on the relatively much smaller number of minors who undergo gender hormone treatment or surgery. Circumcision isn't as harmful on average, however it is happening to a much larger number of minors than the number of minors who are gender-transitioning, and unlike with gender-transitioning minors, there isn't even a faint amount of consent from the person who gets the surgery, there is literally zero.
I think it's fine to focus on both at the same time, of course.
Goodguy
7mo ago
declining fertility, declining religious belief, increased alienation of the individual, and increased mental illness
Declining religious belief does not seem like a negative to me.
Increased alienation of the individual is compensated for by the fact that humans are now more free from having their lives dominated by the small communities in which they grew up.
I am not sure that mental illness actually has increased, especially if you classify at least some forms of religiosity as forms of mental illness. Stuff like the Children's Crusade and the Salem Witch Trials do not seem to me like signs of a mentally healthy culture. Pre-Enlightenment Europe had horrific things like the 30 Years War happening, it was not some bastion of mental health.
Declining fertility might actually be a real problem going forward, I do agree with that, but it seems to me that most current cultures that have high levels of fertility have their own very real problems.
Goodguy
11mo ago
Maybe, but I hope people realize that there are still many people in the United States who think that they are under hostile occupation by conservative Christians and have good reason to think so. The typical TheMotte commenter, I think, has lived in liberal urban areas for most of his life and does not realize that oppressive conservative Christianity is still a force to be reckoned with in some parts of the country. I think that the kind of people who enjoy mocking Christianity are probably disproportionately drawn from people who escaped such oppressive environments when they were young, much as many of the most fervent anti-communists are people who escaped communist regimes.
The overall highly online right's position on these issues is somewhat incoherent. I understand of course that the highly online right is made up of many people, so a degree of incoherence is inevitable. It is hard enough for even one person's political opinions to be coherent. Yet I think it might be interesting to examine some of the contradictions anyway.
First
The highly online right-wingers maintain that women were happier before the sexual revolution and that this counts as a mark against the sexual revolution. Yet they would not judge many other social phenomena mainly based on whether those had increased happiness. These are the same kind of people who like to glorify war, struggle, endurance in the face of opposition, maturity, a cool-headed and objective look at reality, providing for the tribe, and other such stereotypically "adult man" things.
Now, when a boy grows up and stops believing in Santa Claus, and then has to go make his own living, the boy might become less happy as a result. But none of these highly online right-wingers would argue that becoming a man is a bad thing because men are less happy than boys. They understand that becoming an adult man should be judged by other things in addition to just whether it makes a person happy. Yet they are not willing to look at the sexual revolution in the same light.
Ok, so maybe (if the phenomenon of decreased happiness is even real, which as To_Mandalay points out it might not be) women are less happy after the sexual revolution. Can't this just be explained by the fact that after the sexual revolution, women have more responsibilities, are much more present in the workplace, and have to navigate a more complex sexual landscape than before? But if a boy becoming less happy when he turns into a man is not necessarily entirely a bad thing, then why would a woman becoming less happy when she goes into the workplace be entirely a bad thing that needs to be reversed? For the boy and the trad woman alike, the increased responsibilities and stresses are one price of the greatly increased power and freedom that they come into once they become men and modern women, respectively.
Second
The highly online right-wingers tend to glorify evolution and eugenics. They delight in poring over genetic anthropology theories, presenting HBD arguments, and using genetics to explain why some groups of people are more successful than others. In light of this, the idea that there is something bad about 20% of men sleeping with 80% of the women seems a bit contradictory. Isn't that just evolution in action?
"Ah", some might argue, "but it is not eugenic or good for society for women to sleep with bad boy rappers and violent criminals. That is not the kind of eugenics I favor!". Sure, I understand that point of view. But then you are not saying that there is anything eugenically bad in principle about 80% of men going relatively sexless, you just disagree about which kind of 20% men the women should be picking.
In any case, the idea that there is something bad about most men going mostly sexless sits in unhappy contradiction with the highly online right-winger's typical tendency to glorify evolution, power, and success. As usual, the highly online right is split between a craving for socialism (sexual in this case, economic in other cases) on the one hand and a glorification of power, strength, and individual success on the other.
Goodguy
1yr ago
I didn’t unintentionally end the man’s life due to a tragic and unforeseen accident;
Penny applied a form of restraint that obviously can very easily lead to death instead of applying any of many other kinds of restraints that just lock the person's arms and/or legs and so pose almost no threat of killing the other person.
I have been in fights before and so I know that in the heat of the moment one does not think clearly about exactly what one wants to try to do to the other person. So I don't judge Penny in that sense.
The question for me boils down to, was Neely actually attacking other people when Penny attacked him.
Goodguy
1yr ago
But: is it in an insult to call her a whore?
Well yeah, that is why you called her a whore. If calling her a whore was not insulting then you would have found some other word.
Goodguy
1yr ago
Through a relatively unimportant happenstance of contingency. The same kind of mindset that would kill people to prevent them from consensually putting substances in their own bodies is the kind of mindset that would kill people to prevent them from disagreeing with them.
Different people want different things. We don't live in a US where we all fundamentally want the same thing, but we just have different ideas of how to get there. No, we truly want different things.
For me, for example, leftist seething is a plus. I enjoy it. I don't care about national unity. It is not one of my preferences. I like the political tensions and the rage. For me it's a plus of Trump. I like right-wing seething too. The seething tastes good. The reasons why I don't like Trump are his authoritarianism and his foreign policy. If he suddenly supported drug legalization, promised to pardon Assange, and said that he would end all foreign aid to Israel, there's a good chance I'd vote for him. But those things aren't going to happen. So I'm not going to vote for him, but if he wins I will at least enjoy all of the leftist seething that he provokes.
Infantile seething is not just a leftist thing. I well remember all of the Republican seething during Bill Clinton's time. Populist republican forums practically considered him the Antichrist, his wife to be a murderer, and discussion of X-Files-esque black helicopter UN theories was not uncommon. Obama generated plenty of seethe on the right too, hence birtherism. It's just a part of modern American politics.
That you wrote six paragraphs to vent a simple emotion that you could have stated in one sentence does not lure me into thinking that you are making a rational argument. I am not that much of a Motteizen. Plenty of people disagree with your idea that the greatest current failure of American civilization are the violent homeless drug addicts. There are so many other options. For example, the endless foreign interventionism... the NSA domestic surveillance... the war on drugs...
You are a Singapore-style authoritarian but I am not. If you want to move to Singapore, I doubt that it would be difficult.
"Lock the addicts up, slaughter the dealers, forget about the problem."
Aha... but in this authoritarian utopia of yours somehow you think that The Motte would still exist? You think that a government that literally kills people for selling substances that people consensually want to consume is going to... let people post on a forum that allows free speech?
"Lock the addicts up, slaughter the dealers, forget about the problem."
...
"Lock the free-thinkers up, slaughter the spreaders of dissident thoughts, forget about the problem."
No, fuck you.
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