Goodguy
1yr ago
When the news shows you some incident with horrible optics and constructs an expansive and emotionally-manipulative narrative around it, will you stand firm and reject fundamental elements of that narrative? Will you say, “it’s completely fine that this happened, and we should change nothing about our society to prevent it from happening again”?
If it is similar to the George Floyd situation, then why would I say that? In the death of George Floyd, the cops acted - and this is the most charitable interpretation - incompetently. I do not want cops to advertently or inadvertently kill people who are doing nothing more dangerous than trying to use counterfeit money, weakly resisting arrest, and being on drugs.
The fact that afterward, a bunch of activists misrepresented the facts about overall police performance around black people and tried to turn this issue into a race war against white supremacy or whatever is a separate matter. I was clear about it then and I am clear about it now - yes there absolutely are huge problems in America's criminal justice system. I support police reform. But I do not support hysterical activists who twist reality in support of their ideological narratives and go crusading against some sort of hated white enemy.
Why do you care? How does it affect your life or the lives of anyone you care about?
You could just as well ask this about most of the things that people typically discuss here. Most of the topics that you bring up here, I suspect, also do not really affect your life or the lives of those you care about that much.
Do you have any relatives or loved ones who are even remotely likely to end up dying in a similar matter?
I do not want to go into too many personal details but in short - no it is not likely. However, I have certainly known or at least known-through-friends people who were treated by the criminal justice system in a way that I disagree with. One was jailed briefly for criticizing incompetent cops to their face. Another was imprisoned for years for drug transportation, and in my view almost all laws against recreational drugs should not exist.
In any case, I can sympathize with people who are hurt by the criminal justice system even if I personally do not know them.
Your attitudes towards recreational drug use are totally alien to me. I have no idea why anyone would have your attitudes and I have never seen a good argument in favor of them that did not boil down to being pro-authoritarianism/pro-social engineering. And I am not pro-authoritarianism, although I am also not some kind of unrealistic libertarian. I think that obviously some authority is necessary for society to function, but I prefer to limit it and the idea of using state power for social engineering - which the war on drugs basically is - is distasteful to me just as it would be if, say, a communist state did it. Again, obviously some degree of state-imposed social engineering is necessary for a society to function but I prefer to limit it and certainly the idea of using force to prevent people from consuming mind-altering substances seems absurd to me, as absurd as say would be the idea of using force to prevent people from wearing certain styles of clothing or the idea of using force to prevent people from consensually having sex with certain other people.
It is hard for me to understand the mindset of pro-authoritarians. It is almost like trying to understand some different species.
Hard-heartedness cannot be imposed without authoritarianism.
Does this mean that we should let violent people run wild without trying to stop them? No, not at all. I am not anti-police. I am for competent police who do a better job of using the minimum of force than the current police do. If that means we need to fund the criminal justice system more so that they can hire a higher quality of person, I am for it.
Should George Floyd have been executed for breaking into a woman's home and holding her at gunpoint? In my view, no. I am absolutely against capital punishment if for no other reason than that it occasionally kills innocent people. Should he have been imprisoned for life? That is a different matter, and I think that "yes" is certainly a reasonable position to have on that question. There are decent arguments pro and against. People do change sometimes and lifetime incarceration is a very harsh sentence to impose. On the other hand, it is clear to me that letting people who have a track record of gun violence back on the streets is not fair to their possible future victims. So I am not sure about this issue.
Goodguy
1yr ago
I do not know how much truth there is in your rant about the Chinese, but I have known enough Chinese-Americans to be able to tell you that whatever differences in behavior exist between Europeans and Chinese are not genetic, at least not more than to a trivial degree. In my experience, Chinese-Americans who were born in the United States act indistinguishably from European-Americans who were born in the United States.
I think that this is basically Nietzsche's concept of master/slave morality and resentment.
One thing I would add is that this kind of psychology is as common on the right as it is on the left. For example, /pol/acks tend to be people of resentment and sexual frustration, as is fairly obvious from all of the whining that they do about women and from their longing for sexual communism in which society would ensure that all men would have sexual partners. And even among more mainstream right-wingers, the whiny victim mentality is extremely common. "Why are the leftist meanies oppressing us?". Of course there is really is such a thing as leftists oppressing right-wingers, but the whining quality of some right-wingers' discourse exposes the psychology at work and also, among some right-wingers at least, contrasts comically with those right-wingers' attempts to put forward a macho persona.
The fascist/Nazi movements of the 1920s, too, were largely fueled by resentment and a sense that the people were being unfairly oppressed by the dominant world order.
Generally speaking, highly online political activists on both the left and the right are very often people who are full of resentment because it is precisely that resentment which drives them to spend most of the day writing about politics online. The nature of mass media means that one person who spends all day every day writing about politics online will end up creating 100 times more political content online than the average person. As a result, the Internet in particular very highly over-represents such people relative to the general population, which can lead other highly online people to sometimes have a skewed idea of what the average American is actually like. Off the Internet, a large fraction of people do not even care about politics at all. And the ones who do are often much more moderate than one might think from reading political social media.
Goodguy
1yr ago
I have not read it but I will check it out. Thanks for the recommendation!
Teach us your ways! I am a guy with a mid-compensation nerdy job in the Bay Area. I like to think that I am good-looking but I suppose that I cannot quite be sure. In any case, more than one woman has told me that I am attractive. I used to do quite well with women but then for various reasons I took a long time off from pursuing sex. Recently I have been trying to get back in the game and I have had some success - I made out with a few women whom I met at bars but have not gotten laid so far. I have never seriously tried online dating so far but given how often I hear guys say that they are getting good results from it, I think that I am going to actually seriously try it. I should just go ahead and put in the work of getting some good photos and writing up a good profile. At the same time I also intend to keep meeting women offline, since I find that it can be quite exciting and fun and anyway, I already spend more than enough time using technology at work.
How do you usually meet women? Got any pointers?
Tangent incoming. Your post made me think of Assange for the first time in a while. I do not know if he is a rapist or a Russian agent or whatever but I am uncomfortable with how the mainstream narrative in the West, at least from what it seems to me, has made his story into a story of his sexual assault allegations or his Russian connections or whatever while largely ignoring the simple fact that he made most mainstream journalists look like the establishment drones that they are. The very existence of an Assange in the world, a journalist who actually plays power games and does what it takes to leak info, automatically by contrast exposes the typical journalist as a coward. As for the allegations against him, well if he is a rapist that is really bad and his victims should get justice but at the same time it does not make his work as a journalist any less significant. And if he is a Russian agent I really do not give the slightest shit because I would like for there to be a bunch of Russian agents leaking confidential info about the American establishment and a bunch of American agents leaking confidential info about the Russian establishment. That way I, as someone who wants access to more information about the world's power structures, win all across the board. Actually, given the recent geopolitical tensions between the US and Russia, I am rather surprised that the US has not leaked more information about Putin's theft of public resources or whatever. I would guess that US intelligence agencies have some good information about that. Being usually more of a believer in incompetence as opposed to complex conspiracies being the more significant driver of history, I guess I chalk it up to incompetence for now.
Goodguy
1yr ago
"All gay guys are flamboyant"
"All vegetarians are annoying in-your-face activists"
etc...
There is a tendency to think that the most obvious in-your-face representatives of a group are actually statistically representative of the group, but in reality they might simply be statistically representative of the most obvious in-your-face part of the group. One might interact with a dozen gay guys every day and just not realize that they are gay because they are not flamboyant and straight is the default. One might interact with a dozen vegetarians a day and just not realize that they are vegetarian because they never mention being vegetarian and eating meat is the default.
Goodguy
1yr ago
I think that there is nothing inappropriate about being forward, but being forward in a way that is geeky and needy is pretty unlikely to work. I speculate that this guy, if the story is real, probably suggested sex while projecting a logical vibe rather than a playful or seductive vibe and that he might have projected more of a "this is super important to me" energy rather than a "I can take it or leave it" energy. Such neediness can be creepy. I think that the fact that he was crushed by what happened lends credence to my theory. Every day loads of guys are even more forward than this guy without provoking the same kinds of negative reactions from women. And it is not because of the "be attractive / don't be unattractive" meme, although I am sure that plays a role, but because they are forward with a playful and seductive vibe rather than with a hyper-logical or needy vibe.
Goodguy
1yr ago
I think that Reddit is a pretty bad sample of the overall human population. It tends to attract overly sensitive people, would-be moral crusaders, and people who are overly confident about being right despite having limited experience with what they are talking about. When I put it that way, I guess it is kind of like The Motte, although without the typical Motteizen's extreme verbosity. However, people on The Motte at least tend to be much more aware that they could possibly be wrong about things than people on Reddit are, and people on The Motte at least tend to not have their thoughts completely dominated by the conventional wisdom of the day. I would not base my opinions of humans in general on Redditors.
A friend with benefits is not a prostitute and I do not see how an invitation to be friends with benefits is sexual harassment unless the person doing it persists despite having been rebuffed.
Edit: Also, something that I just noticed. You might have misread me when I wrote "geeky and needy" and thought that I wrote "geeky and nerdy".
Goodguy
1yr ago
I think that there are rdramanauts among us. Not that I would be one of them or anything... umm... just saying.
Goodguy
1yr ago
Well, it can feel good to imagine that one is an emotionally tough and rational person who from a distance is poking fun at the roiling masses of sensitive people who are seething about issues that the emotionally tough and rational person calmly and amusedly regards from on high while poking his majestic and very rational chin out to the horizon. Not that this is a very charitable feeling to have I guess but it is a thing.
Goodguy
1yr ago
True, I guess as someone who is looking for casual sex rather than for a romantic relationship I can sometimes fail to realize that people who are looking for a romantic relationship might be offended when they fight out that someone else wants only casual sex from them. They might be offended even if that person does not want a romantic relationship with them not because they don't measure up to some preferences but simply because the person just does not want a romantic relationship with anyone at the moment.
Goodguy
1yr ago
How is it that so many people who are in favor of criminal penalties for recreational drugs use also came to believe that the covid lockdowns were bad because they were an assault on liberty? I think that an authoritarian argument such as "we like small businesses but we do not like drug users" at least is logically consistent although I find it disagreeable. But how is it that so many people who think of themselves as fans of liberty do not notice the contradiction? I believe that even here on The Motte there are some people who make libertarian-ish arguments against the lockdowns yet support the criminalization of recreational drugs.
In general much of the non-authoritarian right's attitudes toward recreational drugs make no sense to me. I dislike the authoritarians but again, at their arguments are consistent. Is this largely a matter of conservatism still being dominated by older people who have a learned-long-ago and now reflexive dislike of the idea of recreational drug use? A reaction against the hippies, some sort of view that drug use in general is politically left-coded and/or linked to sexual promiscuity? As a new generation of currently-young conservatives becomes dominant in the movement will we see the right become more accepting of recreational drug use? Given that so many on the right now enjoy thinking of themselves as dissidents against establishment orthodoxy, perhaps they will at least begin view psychedelics more favorably given that those drugs have at least some power to liberate people's mental attitudes from orthodoxy.
Goodguy
1yr ago
And have The Motte turn into yet another boring right-wing circlejerk? No thanks. It's better even to have some leftist trolls on here than to have no leftist opinions at all. The soup must be stirred if it is to be tasty.
Anyway though, I am not sure who you mean by leftist trolls. What would be an example of it in your opinion?
Goodguy
1yr ago
I guess it is predictable. Probably something like 99% of people care about sex, whereas the fraction of people who care about other typical The Motte topics like AI, HBD, and religion is much smaller.
I find it interesting that The Motte tends to treat Christianity with kid gloves that are not reserved for other belief systems. For example, the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans is widely called out here as being simply wrong. Which it almost certainly is, in my opinion. But consider the idea that a man 2000 years ago was god incarnate and rose from the dead and we should believe this because a few people who lived decades later wrote that this was true and because some other people have had some visions and powerful feelings. This idea is, I think, even less likely to be true than the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans. But Christianity on The Motte is usually not met with accusations that it is as absurd, indeed perhaps more absurd, as any flavor of wokism. Wokeism gets often and in my opinion properly pilloried on here for being nonsensical on the level of correspondence to objective reality, but Christianity typically gets a free pass. Even the atheists on here mostly refuse to really call it out as being absurd when the topic comes up.
Does this happen because Christianity is largely not viewed as a threat and because since wokeism is this community's main out-group and Christianity is vaguely right-aligned in the modern West, people here tend to follow the principle of "the enemy of an enemy is my friend"? Or, to be more charitable, maybe it is because wokism can fairly easily be criticized on the level of normal scientific investigation, whereas the claims that Christianity makes go so far beyond typical materialism that one makes an exception for it because its claims are fundamentally viewed as being orthogonal to scientific investigation?
One thing that many popular fictions have in common is that engaging with them feels more like discovering than like inventing. For example, I can pose to myself and others the question of what Sherlock Holmes' childhood was like. Sherlock Holmes is fictional so any speculation that I or others do about his childhood is invention. But the fiction is so rich that one can enter into it, basing one's speculations on the known written material and the less effable "spirit" of the work, and it feels as if one were researching the history of an actual human being. Similarly, one can for example discuss with others what the relationships between Lovecraft's various invented fictional entities are, or speculate about the nature of Tom Bombadil, or write an essay about the motivations of the Bene Gesserit. The fictional universe is rich enough that it easily supports adding new creation to it because it has established a certain consistency and coherence of logic, flavor, and spirit so that one can pick up where the original creator(s) left off. It holds together. The boundary between what is acceptably part of the universe and what violates its nature is of course blurry and no two people view it in exactly the same way, but nonetheless pretty much everyone feels that there is some kind of difference between new creations that are more consistent with the fictional universe and creations that are less consistent with it.
Goodguy
1yr ago
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.
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.
Goodguy
1yr ago
Oh no doubt that it is possible! I agree with you. I just disagree with 2rafa's murderous fantasies. It is not that I do not have murderous fantasies myself. I do, plenty of them. But I regard them as fantasies that allow me to vent my animal emotions, I do not actually want to implement them. There is plenty of political room between the current state of the US public transport system and 2rafa's "slaughter the drug dealers". I want to operate somewhere in that in-between space. Preferably on the side that is a bit further away from 2rafa and her ilk.
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
In liberal countries, I am not sure that it really should matter much on the political level whether HBD is true. Even if it becomes widely accepted as true, in liberal societies that should not lead to any significantly different political policies. HBD being true would not justify race-based discrimination. Even support for affirmative action does not need to rely on the belief in racial equality. It can be supported on the grounds that certain groups of people were oppressed in the past, which leads to modern-day consequences for them.
As long as society stayed liberal, I think that probably little would change if tomorrow HBD being true became the dominant opinion. Now of course we have plenty of authoritarians here on The Motte who will be happy to argue that HBD being true is yet another good reason for why society should stop being liberal. I like living in a liberal society, though, so my ideal would be that people could argue about whether HBD is true or not while decoupling it from the idea of what political policies society should follow. Being a liberal, in my view the truth or falsity of HBD should have about zero impact on political policy. At most, if HBD became widely accepted as true, it would lessen the degree to which people would support race-baiting political programs which depend for their support on the notion of the white boogeyman. But I already do not support those programs, HBD being true or not changes nothing for me in that regard.
Richard Hanania's recent article about how, according to him, this year has shown that liberalism is stronger than many had previously thought inspired me to wonder about what comes first, the liberalism or the success. I would guess that this question is probably meaningless since the answer is that they arise at the same time. At the very least, it is probably not as simple as the liberalism coming first and the success resulting from it.
I was wondering what people here would think about the matter so I will re-post my comment here:
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