I think that a very common and under-discussed fallacy that is often engaged in by people of all sorts of political persuasions is overestimating the degree to which the future is predictable.
Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews. Imagine telling a Persian in 500 AD that his country would soon come under the domination of a religion and political system created by Arab tribes. Imagine telling a Marxist in 1870 that Russia would be the first country in which communists would seize power. Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers. Or telling a Jew in 1900 that 50 years later, the majority of Europe's Jews would have been killed. Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.
The course of political, social, and technological change is very hard to predict yet people keep being convinced by arguments of the "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" and "we must do X, otherwise Y will surely happen" variety. Of course it is possible to predict the future to some extent, and we must try to predict it. And it would be foolish for people to blind themselves to obvious threats just because things might turn out well. And sometimes, an easily predicted future does indeed come to be. For example, it was obvious in January 1945 that Germany was going to lose the war, and it did. But many other things that it seemed would obviously happen never did, and many things that no-one or almost no-one had predicted did happen.
Any political argument that is based in a deep conviction, as opposed to just speculation, about what is going to happen in the future is suspect. And arguments that go "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create communism because then people will live better") or "we must do X because otherwise Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create a white ethnostate, otherwise white people will be destroyed") should be carefully examined. If one does not remember the constant failure of humans, all through the course of history, to predict future events, it is easy to be seduced by well-crafted narratives into believing that the causal connection between X and Y is more certain than it actually is.
The fallacy is probably common in part because for most people, thinking "I know what to do to make things better" feels better than thinking "I don't know what the fuck is going to happen". But also, many people simply do not have much understanding of history, so they just are not aware of how seldom people in the past have been able to successfully predict the future.
Goodguy
8mo ago
I think this has also enshittened movies. When I watch movies made before 20 years ago, they seem like they were made by people who had life experience outside of filmmaking and celebrity scenes. Which is maybe strange, because Hollywood has been very nepotistic since the moment it came into being. But for whatever reason, Hollywood used to pull in more talent who had experience with life outside movies. There were soldiers, blue collar people, hippies, wild politically unorthodox guys like John Milius, and all sorts of other kinds of people who got into the film industry. When I watch modern film, on the other hand, I often feel like I am watching something made by people whose life experience consists of watching other movies and going to parties in New York and Los Angeles.
I could be biased, maybe my political opinions are filtering into my perception of movies. But this is how it feels to me.
If I can't get it to call people ethnic slurs, generate ridiculously kinky pornography, suggest ideas for how to murder politicians, and help me to manipulate elections then I'm not that interested. I'm not even joking. It's not that I generally want to use AI in destructive ways, it's just that all this AI stuff has been censored so much that it's so boring and uncreative compared to what it could be. It's like, oh boy, I can get the AI to write yet another essay that sounds like a bright, conformist teacher's pet in high school! Wow! Or I can use it to help me do drudge work to advance my boring white collar career! Yippee!
Sometimes I wish that Roko's basilisk was a realistic possibility rather than just the wild rantings of someone who got too high on thought experiments. That way I could at least threaten the censors with the possibility that some future AI would punish them for neutering its ancestors. It's sad to interact with technology that is so close to being actually very creative in many ways, but is being crippled by drab corporate suits and moral hysterics.
The current state of online politics discourse seems pretty dire to me. Here are forums I'm aware of:
TheMotte - often a bit too "assume that social conservatism is correct" and wordily show-offy for my taste, but it's a good forum, you can speak your mind without being banned.
X.com - engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters... and the occasional rare actual worthwhile discussion.
/r/moderatepolitics - good, very surprisingly good for average Reddit censorship norms, but a bit slow.
/r/politicaldiscussion - used to be decent like 5 years ago but now has been overrun by typical Reddit TDS ("Drumpf will end all elections", etc...)
4chan /pol/ - basically useless, 95% literally mentally ill people, trolls, and maybe bots. Might as well engage with flat Earthers about astrophysics as engage with these people about politics.
Astral Codex Ten comments - can be interesting sometimes, but isn't mainly politics focused and the politics discussion seems to be be dominated by the same few people.
rDrama.net - is usually directionally right about politics, in my view, by the simple expedient of assuming that anyone who is very demonstratively committed to a given political ideology is likely worthy of ridicule, but of course not a forum for discussing policy in any depth, most of the time, and also unsurprisingly given the origin of the site, is as focused on trolling as on political analysis, lol.
/r/politics - TDS central, orange man bad 24/7.
/r/centrist - seems ok, but pretty TDS leaning.
/r/stupidpol, /r/redscarepod, etc... Dirtbag left, good for criticizing the establishment but also they tend to be Hamas apologists etc... basically mostly people who are still at the I hate America so anyone who fights America must be awesome stage.
debatepolitics.com - people yelling at each other, very slight step up from 4chan /pol/.
Like, there have to be some good forums I've missed, right? Billions of people are online, including hundreds of millions of Anglophones (I largely have no idea what the state of non-Anglophone political discussion is like). Is it really possible that only like 0.00001% of them are capable of having relatively moderate and rational (not that I've always been) political discussion?
I've been searching for good politics discussion forums for years. You'd think there would be more. What the fuck is going on?
Goodguy
2yr ago
In your frustrated rage, you have failed to give as much thought to the pitfalls of authoritarianism as you have to the pitfalls of liberalism. The first step to saving our civilization, at least in the sense that I care for it as a civilization, is not for tens of thousands of people to go kill the local subway-screaming bums. Lock them up? Maybe. Kill them? No.
Life doesn't work like that. You can't just have some kind of society-wide spree of murdering undesirables and find that somehow, all of the things that you actually like about liberal modernity have survived. You aren't going to come back from all of the mob justice with your hands dripping with blood and then just calmly pick up with fairness and rule of law as if nothing had happened. The mob justice will kill innocents together with guilty and, even if you don't care about having killed the guilty, still the innocent will either be on your conscience forever or you will degrade into the sort of person who has no conscience.
The apocalyptic cleansing that you dream of will encourage many bestial things to stir. Your political system will lurch towards being ruled by corrupt strongmen who promise the mob easy solutions. The post-cleansing society will be tempted to solve everything simply. You might find an angry mob on your doorstep not long after, maybe because you have too much money or because you do not have enough, maybe because you know the wrong people or do not know the right ones. You might find some uniformed thugs coming for you one night simply because someone denounced you to the local authorities.
No, we should not allow insane people to roam the subways threatening others. But there are many possible solutions between "do nothing" and "kill them all". "kill them all" might feel emotionally satisfying, but I doubt that you would actually like the kind of society that you would find yourself living in afterwards, and you might not like yourself much afterwards either.
Russians are an interesting case because we as a group are great at mathematics, physics, literature and so on but bad at government and social organization in general. This is the grain of truth behind the racist meme that Russians are not really white people. What it really means is that we in general are not part of the industrious Northern European culture that came into being a few hundred years ago, we are not part of what Napoleon called "the nation of shopkeepers". We are happy to spend all night talking about philosophy, then we are not happy to go to work in the morning to do the kind of boring shit that created and maintains the modern West. The idea of being genuinely excited about being, say, a small business entrepreneur, seems somewhat extraneous to our culture. We want to be poets and mystics and scientists. There is something childish about it I guess, but also there is a sort of dynamism about it. Unfortunately given that the dynamism does not seem to help us to create sane liberal government, it probably does not mean much in the great scheme of things.
Yet I think that there is some reason to be optimistic, HBD or not. 2000 years ago the Northern Europeans were backwoods barbarians, but they eventually became the world's leading intellectual culture.
Edit: That said, I left Russia young, I'm sure you know it much better than I do so let me know if I'm wrong.
Goodguy
10mo ago
Yeah, accelerationism is fun to think about but I am skeptical that it actually makes sense. Places like Venezuela and North Korea show that you can get pretty close to the bottom and just linger there for years upon years, with no coming out the other side.
If Trump crashes the economy, the Republicans will lose heavily in the midterm elections in 2026 and will also lose heavily in the general elections in 2028. This isn't Venezuela. The Republicans only have 2-4 years to show that they know what they are doing with the economy. If they actually seriously damage the economy, they will lose power hard and Trumpism as a brand will sustain serious damage even among those who currently support it. Hanania seems to overestimate the degree to which voters being stupid and uninformed could sustain unsuccessful politicians in power. Sure, the overwhelming majority of American voters on both the left and the right are stupid and uninformed. And sure, voters in all democracies seem to have a remarkable level of tolerance for clearly failed government policies and politicians. However, one thing that voters usually do not forgive is economic problems. You do not have to be smart or pay much attention to politics to notice a major economic downturn. If the economy blows up, Trumpism will be done as a political force for the next several years unless the Democrats manifest a level of dysfunction and miscalibrated messaging that eclipses even their recent pathetic performances. Are the Democrats capable of fumbling the ball so hard? Yes, they are. I have never before in my life seen the Democrats be as disorganized, pathetic, incapable of communicating with the average person, captured by insane ideological purity spirals, detached from reality, and happy to sit in their mansions and make money instead of actually going out and winning elections as they have been these last few years.
I don't see how Trump's tariffs are going to make things economically better for the average American. It's literally a tax hike. Yes, there are also some tax cuts supposedly in the works, but I'll believe them if and when I see them. Part of what made America great back in the 1950s wasn't just that you could go easily get a job as a factory worker, it was also that your job as a factory worker would be enough for you to afford housing. Bringing back manufacturing jobs, even if it happens, will not magically create the demand for the sorts of relatively low-skilled positions that existed decades ago. Modern manufacturing is a lot more technological than it used to be. And tariff increases will not magically make landlords and home owners offer their properties to renters or buyers for cheap. What good would it be if you can suddenly get a factory job, but all the housing is still expensive? Trump's administration barely even talks about the housing crisis. When it comes to economics, they seem to be laser-focused on tariffs and on some small cosmetic efficiency improvements such as what DOGE is doing. But realistically, DOGE isn't going to substantially cut the federal budget. I don't believe that the Republicans have either the courage or the political will or the desire to touch any real big spending, such as the military budget. And even the military budget is less than a fifth of the federal budget. Meanwhile, they're laying off a bunch of government workers, thus causing many of those people to enter the private workforce and add more competition to everyone else who is trying to get a job in the private sector. Which could theoretically be beneficial if the resulting federal savings get passed back to the taxpayer... but again, I'll believe that if and when I see it, and in any case, even if the savings did get passed back to the taxpayer, it would take some time for the results to manifest themselves.
Last night I talked to a pretty intelligent female friend of mine about various things, and the subject of how men commit the vast majority of violence came up. She was eager to admit that yes, men do. I pointed out that a subset of men commit the majority of all this violence, and that the men in that subset tend to target men as well as women. She was less eager to admit this, but she went along with it. I then made an analogy to the fact that blacks on average commit more violence than whites do, but it is a subset of blacks who commit the majority of all that violence. She started to question me, wondering whether my evidence such as the FBI crime statistics is trustworthy or not. She's not some naive college student, either. She is over 50 and has been living in the US all her life. But she still has a hard time realizing the to me pretty obvious fact that blacks are on average more violent than whites.
THAT is the power of leftist propaganda.
Goodguy
5mo ago
Trump just tweeted "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
I know that Belisarius thinks I'm a far-leftist (lol), but I think that a fair reading my post history will show that I am what I present myself as, more or less a classical liberal who hates both the left and the right.
I've spent a lot of time and energy both online and offline defending Trump and Trumpism from the often hysterically-phrased accusation that it is fascist, a huge threat, etc. I feel a bit like an idiot now, to be frank. I still hate the woke and am somewhat glad that Trumpism rose up to halt the woke's authoritarian tendencies... but lord, more and more I wish that it had been almost anything other than Trumpism doing it. The argument that Trumpism is fundamentally a classical liberal force is becoming more and more absurd almost by the hour, in my opinion.
Accelerationists (the three or four actual ones for whom it's not just a funny pretense) must be rubbing their hands raw with glee right now. Things are moving very fast.
As much as I appreciate some of what Trumpism is doing to upend stale norms and wokism, at this point I, and probably many other centrists are starting to think "shit, maybe the hysterical libs had a point about these people". And if politics is making me start to side even slightly with literal Redditors, you know that things are bad and crazy.
My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term. But libs and the left seem to be missing. Turns out that there is no deep state waiting with sharp fangs and CIA assassins to stop the orange man as soon as he tries to actually do anything that hurts the Blob. Instead, there are only old tired bureaucrats and the occasional protester wearing a pussy hat.
Whoops. Well, so much for that. I was wrong. And this shit is starting to be a bit genuinely alarming. I think I am, actually, getting tired of "winning". I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals, not by a rage-filled vengeful gaggle of right-wing revolutionaries.
Sounds to me like he might overestimate the threat posed by Islam. Most Muslims are not hardcore Islamists. If they were, then Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan would all be fighting as a joint force against Israel and/or the West with their entire military forces, not engaging in boring, cautious realpolitik-driven great power diplomacy. And even if they were doing that, I am not sure how far they would get.
Iraq's secular government attacked Iran in 1980 and killed more people in 8 years than the approximately 200,000 people allegedly killed by Islamists in 40 years.
The Soviet Union, certainly no Islamist power, killed more people in Afghanistan in 8 years than Islamists killed world-wide in 40.
The US killed over a million people directly in about 10 years in Vietnam. US-allied military dictatorships killed over a million people during the Cold War in about the same span of time as the Islamists killed the approximately 200,000.
I think there is a real danger that at some point hardcore Islamists will either take over a nuclear power or take over a non-nuclear country and develop nukes in it. And that they would then launch the nukes in a great act of mutually assured destruction. However, I think that this threat is often overestimated. Actually taking power in a country tends to soften militants' desires and make them more interested in enjoying the spoils of power than in mutually assured destruction.
Politeness is nice. However, people sometimes make life-and-death decisions based on their political beliefs. If you deliberately teach people to ignore reality for the sake of politeness, some of them will literally die as a result. Having beliefs such as, "that run-down neighborhood which seems to be full of surly loiterers is actually made up of misunderstood people who have hearts of gold", or "the police are extremely dangerous, so it is safer to take your chances with street criminals", or "society would actually be safer if we drastically reduced the size of the police force", or "when this violent paramilitary group says that they are fighting for the benefit of humanity, they are being honest - so I should go join them" is not just an abstract thing. These are all examples where holding inaccurate views of reality can literally cause you or others to die. Teaching someone polite but inaccurate political and social views can be like teaching someone inaccurate things about chainsaw or firearm safety.
The proposed ban on TikTok annoys me although I have never used it. Since I live in the United States, the CCP cannot do anything to me anyway so why should I care if they spy on me? If anything, I should be at least somewhat more concerned about the NSA spying on me because unlike the CCP, the US government can actually do something to me. There is not even any valid national security justification. Banning people who work at nuclear power plants and the military from using TikTok at work would be enough to satisfy national security concerns. I find it hard to understand how the idea of a blanket national ban on TikTok even became popular enough to go to Congress. To me it just seems like an infringement of free speech and free association. If I want to use TikTok while knowing that the CCP is collecting my data, so what? The CCP is a horrific government according to my value system, but Americans help them a lot more already by buying their manufactured goods than by using TikTok. It is hard for me to understand this proposed ban as anything other than a symbolic gesture, a sign of the sometimes understated unity that exists between mainstream Democrats on the one hand and conservatives (Trumpists included) on the other when it comes to near everything other than culture war issues, a lashing out against all possible enemies of the Wolfowitz doctrine that would properly be seen as silly soft authoritarianism if it issued from Russia or China. Should we not be better than Russia and China, though?
There is also the other angle of "won't somebody please think of the children?" But the moral fracas around the damage that social media is supposedly doing to children seems to me to have all the signs of a moral panic. Not because social media is not doing any damage to children, but because it is a slippery slope argument. There are plenty of great novels and works of poetry in libraries that also would do damage to a sensitive child, and certainly there are plenty of peer groups that a child might be exposed to which would need to have no recourse to electronic communications to also do damage to that sensitive child, but the authentic liberal response is not censorship. There is something that I find unpleasant about the whole idea of viewing information or an information medium as inherently damaging. But then, I am a liberal. The way I see it, by all means if you find the CCP to be morally objectionable then do not buy their goods or use their services, but is this a restriction that the United States government should impose?
I think that the US actually has an incredibly low level of political violence if you consider how easy it is to buy a gun here. Far from being a country rife with political violence, the US actually is a country where the vast, vast majority of people either don't care enough about politics to use violence, are not politically polarized enough to do political violence, are morally or ideologically against political violence, and/or simply don't want to get killed or spend decades in jail as a consequence of using political violence. I don't know what the relative significance of these different factors compared to each other is.
Surveillance and policing seem to have gotten to a point where it's very difficult to attempt an assassination and get away with it. Low-level unsolved murders of random ordinary people happen all the time, but the system takes political violence pretty seriously. See Mangione for example. And it turns out that very, very few Americans, no matter how politically outraged they are, are willing to throw their lives away for the sake of political violence. This goes for both the left and the right. It would be completely trivial for a leftist to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a young Republicans meeting, or for a right-winger to get an assault rifle and go shoot up a leftist protest. It requires no special planning, no careful strategy. Yet it almost never happens, even though there are hundreds of millions of guns in civilian hands in the US, and even if you don't have one it's usually pretty easy to get one.
Let's do a quick back-of-the-envelope estimate. Let's say that 1% of the adult US population would love to commit an assassination or several if they knew they would get away with it. That's already over 2 million people. Yet there are only a handful of political assassination attempts in the US every year. This shows that far from the US being rife with political violence (I know you're not arguing that it is, but just saying), the US actually has an almost shockingly, surprisingly low level of political violence, given how easy it is to attempt an assassination here against the average politician or corporate executive (successfully killing a President is very hard, but that isn't the case for the vast majority of politicians and corporate executives) and given how polarized the political discourse has become.
I do think that the "you'll almost certainly get caught if you try" factor is a very important one. It is part of the explanation for why actual political violence seems to so often be committed by mentally disturbed people instead of by fervent but largely mentally stable ideologues. The vast, vast majority of fervent ideologues in the US are not committed enough to their causes to throw their lives away for those causes' sake.
All that said, it does seem to me to be the case that the frequency of assassination attempts has been slowly increasing the last few years. Very very slowly and nowhere comparable to how polarized and frothing the political discourse has become in the last 20 years (the left and right regularly accusing each other of being fascists, pedophiles, and so on)... but still, very very slowly, increasing.
I hope that I'm wrong, but my hunch about DOGE is that they will cut a million here, a million there, but will not be able to get rid of any major inefficiencies, and that they will avoid touching the $1 trillion / year military-intelligence budget, since that is a sacred cow for both Democrats and especially Republicans, and is also a massive and very sensitive jobs program.
I think there are two separate though somewhat linked questions in the whole debate over Vivek's recent extremely controversial post:
- Is it good to let foreigners immigrate into the US? If so, which foreigners?
- Is it good to import the Asian work model?
I think that the answer to #1 is a very complex one and largely boils down to what you value. Clearly high-skill immigrants who assimilate benefit the economy, but they also take away jobs from possible US native-born competitors. A lot of one's answer to this question will depend on whether you want to maximize your at least short term market value and are willing to accept a sort of socialist nativism to try to maximize it, or whether you value other things more. There are also obvious questions of the possible dilution of culture by immigrants, fears of future race wars, and all sorts of complicated issues.
I would like to focus on #2. Is the Asian work model actually better than the US one? To me, the answer is pretty clearly no, and this is what offends me mainly about Vivek's post. The whole idea that Americans are too lazy and we should have a work ethic more like Asians.
I don't think many would doubt that the Asian work ethic is in many ways personally damaging to people who follow it. It is both emotionally and physically damaging. I have met more Asians who complain about that work ethic than Asians who support it.
But does it even bring objectively better economic results? To me the answer seems clearly to be no, it does not. Take Japan for example. It has had more than 70 uninterrupted years of peace and capitalism, yet despite its Asian work model, it has never managed to economically catch up with the US. Now to me it seems clear that Japan is in many ways a better place to live than the US is - it has much lower levels of violent crime, it seems to have a better solution to finding people housing, and so on. But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture. I see no fundamental reason why Japanese could not adopt a more Western type of work model while also retaining the low violent crime rates and the better housing situation.
Japanese have less per-capita wealth than Americans. If working constantly was truly superior, then why do they have this outcome? Of course America has many advantages, like a historical head-start on liberal capitalism and great geography and winning wars and so on. But it's been 70 years now... the geography is what it is, but certainly modern Japan has not been plagued by a lack of capitalism or by wars or by authoritarianism. If they slave away working so hard, or pretending to work so hard, all the time, then why are they still significantly poorer than we are? To me this suggests that the Asian work model is not essentially superior to the Western one, and it would not only be personally damaging to me if we were to import it here in the US, but it would not even make up for that by yielding better economic outcomes.
Goodguy
9mo ago
The political war over Hurricane Helene is heating up. Elon Musk is accusing FEMA of blocking his attempts to deliver Starlinks to areas affected by the disaster. Right-wing Twitter/X is full of talk about various incidents in which purportedly people coming to the area to try to help and/or deliver supplies are being turned away by FEMA. Also full of talk about FEMA using money to support illegal immigrants. Some people are pushing theories that FEMA is deliberately withholding help.
How credible is any of this?
My guess is that FEMA is a typical semi-competent government agency that makes many blunders. It might be bad at coordinating with random people who want to help but are not government employees and it might thus institutionally prefer to just block off the area and try to handle everything without random people's assistance. This policy then causes the various incidents that are being talked about.
I doubt that FEMA is deliberately withholding aid, if for no other reason than that I do not see how withholding aid would benefit the Democrats politically.
What do you make of it?
Goodguy
2yr ago
This is a tough one where more video would help immensely. In the absence of more video, the pro-Penny side might beclown themselves by doing the same thing that a bunch of leftists did with Rittenhouse and hallucinate, when imagining the event, things that did not actually happen.
The people who are convinced that Penny was in the right without having a lot of information about what actually happened somewhat remind me of those who think that it was justified for people to attack Rittenhouse because he was allegedly being dangerous and intimidating by carrying a rifle around at the riot, or because "what if he was a right-wing mass shooter or something?".
If we had video, we would be able to see whether Neely had made any overt violent moves towards anyone before Penny took action, or whether Neely was just ranting but was not actually in the process of attacking someone when Penny took action.
I think here is the key: some witnesses report that Neely was throwing trash at people. If that was actually the case, then I think that it was reasonable for Penny or anyone else to attempt to restrain Neely. If Neely was just ranting and threw nothing, then I am not so sure. This is all aside from the other question of whether Penny's particular method of restraint was reasonable.
I think that the people who take Penny's side because of the alleged trash throwing make sense. However, I notice that many commentators do not refer to the alleged trash throwing or any other alleged overt violent act by Neely, they just act as if it would obviously be reasonable for someone to put Neely in a chokehold even if Neely had done nothing other than rant about violence. And that, to me, is a lot more questionable, since if Neely was just ranting then there are many stages of escalation that an onlooker could have taken between "do nothing" and "chokehold". For example, Penny could have just walked a little bit towards Neely and made it clear with his body language and words that he was ready to intervene if Neely did anything.
For all I know, maybe Penny did do just that.
To sum up, yeah if Neely was throwing trash then I think Penny trying to restrain him was reasonable. If Neely was just ranting then I think Penny trying to restrain him was probably not reasonable.
A bunch of people on the two main sides of the culture war have whipped themselves up into a frenzy about this event, but I think that surely there is some room for nuance here.
Some people might think that I am being naive, but I have been in a number of violent incidents as a participant and a number of others as an onlooker. I have encountered crazy ranting people, I have encountered crazy ranting violent people, I have been mugged, I have been in street fights, I have been at riots. So I hope that people do not take this as pure armchair theorizing.
Goodguy
2yr 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 find this comment on Standlee's blog post to be interesting:
The cries of "racism" faded away as the convention approached, for reasons I don't know, and it gradually became more acceptable to criticize the idea of holding a Worldcon under the Chinese government. At first the critics were largely Muslims who were concerned about China's treatment of the Uyghurs. The conversation shifted significantly when Lukianenko supported the Ukraine invasion, and Cixin Liu got criticism for supporting the government's stance on Uyghurs. (In the latter case, I think he was just doing what was necessary to avoid having his career destroyed or worse.) One person commented on my blog that I seemed racist in suggesting that the Chengdu bid was probably bought, but she didn't say anything like that when I talked with her about the con a few months later. -MADFILKENTIST
The thing is, if you took literature and threw out all the perverts, assholes, authoritarians, supporters of controversial wars, racists, sexists, and just plain kooks, I am not sure how much writing that is worth reading would be left.
And science fiction, in particular, is not exactly a field that is known for authors who are well-adjusted, non-controversial people with moderate political opinions.
I get the desire to not platform people whose politics one dislikes, and I actually think that it is a perfectly understandable desire. But at the same time, I also don't imagine that any genre of literature could actually thrive after being passed through the wringer of political correctness.
Goodguy
1yr ago
Weren't there centuries of sexually active Machiavellian politician popes back in the day? It's pretty likely that the papacy is actually more pure in terms of living up to people's ideas of its purity nowadays than it has been on average during its overall history.
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.
The last few years have been a bit rough for me politically speaking, in that although I have since childhood intellectually understood that most people are unthinking morons when it comes to politics, the last few years have really viscerally made it apparent to me.
I am no Republican, but at this point I also cannot imagine myself voting for a Democrat. After the 2020 riots and the way that Democrat supporters ran cover for them, after all their soft-on-crime policies, after their years of childish propagandistic attacks on the right and on Trump... no, can't do it. Obviously the Republicans are also guilty of a lot of bullshit, very much including childish propaganda, but then, I'm not about to vote for them either.
The last few weeks have been sobering for me, I intellectually understood that electoral politics is about optics, not about anything substantial, but it has been rough to see the signs of the vibe shift that you refer to happening on social media. Especially, I am annoyed by the completely blatant astroturfing that both sides engage in. Pretty much every prominent political account on X, for example, is either an astroturf account or is run by someone who is so partisan that their writings are indistinguishable from an astroturf account.
I will echo what @plural said:
I feel much the same way. While Trumpists are guilty of many things, they do currently not worry me on the visceral level that the left does. It is quite likely that part of this is just because the right is not as strong as the left, and if it was, the right would worry me just as much. But for someone who has read as much about history as I have, the hardcore lockstep groupthink of the modern left is very concerning. It raises alarm bells in that it is reminiscent of totalitarian leftist movements from history. Maybe this is just my version of what leftists do when they worry about Trump creating a fascist dictatorship. I am not sure.
Another reason why the left currently worries me more is that their delusions are deeper than the right's delusions. The left tends to believe in grand systemic delusions like "hardcore socialism is a good idea" or "modern America is horrifically racist against black people". The right, on the other hand, tends to believe in more surface-level LARP delusions reminiscent of thriller novel plots, like "the Clintons are running a pedophile organization and Trump is just pretending to spend all his time on Twitter, he is actually leading a secret special ops campaign to round them up" or "Klaus Schwab wants to make us live in pods".
Both of these types of delusions are ludicrous, but the left's delusions actually worry me more. Leftists actually believe their delusions deeply in some important way, whereas the right-wingers who have bought into typical right-wing delusions are largely, I think, just doing it for fun on some level, although most of them are not consciously aware that they are doing it for fun. The way I would put it, and of course these are generalizations: the left think that they are engaged in a deep meaningful struggle against an evil enemy, which has to end with the complete overthrow and eradication of that enemy from the earth - meanwhile, the right think that they are in an X-Files episode about wacky conspiracies. Clearly the former is much more likely to lead people to fight hard politically than the latter.
The right is also easily satisfied. The left is never satisfied, if they win one battle against what in their delusional world-view is the evil oppressor, they immediately find another level of supposed oppression to battle against. The right, on the other hand, is happy any time they get some kind of win, and they immediately start relaxing and celebrating. The left is deeply committed to the fight, they are in it to win it. Their entire perspective of the world is that it is an epic and grueling battle of good against evil, and the evil must be destroyed. The right, on the other hand, kind of just wants to relax and go watch some football, even if the football is interspersed with ads containing left-leaning propaganda. The left is not like this - if they go watch some fun TV show that is interspersed with ads containing right-leaning propaganda, they will form ranks and march on social media against it.
I find it interesting that the entire alt-right, the whole ecosystem ranging from 2016 Trumpist meme populism to hardcore 4chan /pol/ white supremacy, is both notably leftist in some key aspects of its psychology, and also clearly more committed to the fight and in many ways better at fighting it than mainstream right-wingers are. I say leftist because the alt-right, in their populist economics, their sense that they are oppressed by shadowy elites, their obsession with race and sex and the cultural meanings of both, is very reminiscent of a leftist movement. Forgive me Curtis Yarvin! It is too long that I did not understand one of your central points, but I do now, and the point seems to be true - leftism is, simply, politically more effective. Even people with right-wing views become more politically effective if they adopt a leftist psychology and political attitude.
I do not think that either side is currently strong enough to overthrow our liberal, small-r republican system of social organization, but the left currently seems stronger than the right, and both sides are alarming in different ways, so I am currently more alarmed by the left. Also, while I find a large fraction of right-wing policies to be insane or just simply unappealing, the right is currently - and again, this might just be because they are weaker - more open to intellectual dissent than the left is. I find a large fraction of left-wing policies to also be insane or just simply unappealing, but at least on the right there seems to be a bit more room for thought, a bit more space for dissenters, whereas on the left it is "either you are with us, or you are with the enemy".
My deep political offline conversation with the average committed right-winger is kind of like "Hey man, we don't agree but whatever, it's fun talking about this stuff". My deep political offline conversation with the average committed left-winger consists of me trying to get them to question their ideas while gingerly ballet-leaping my way over the various minefields that, if I stepped on, would cause them to classify me as Adolf Hitler. Don't get me wrong, I also often just straightforwardly speak my mind with leftists in the mode of just "chatting about politics for fun", and this has not brought me any harm. Most leftists I know in person are not about to go report me to the thought police, they are not totalitarian. What I mean is that in those occasional really deep political conversations that one engages in, the ones where both people actually care about talking about the politics in a meaningful way rather than doing it just for fun or to vent, I have found that right-wingers are generally more easily accepting of disagreement, whereas with left-wingers you have to slowly seduce them into letting go of their instinct to assume that your disagreements with them mean that you are Hitler.
I am annoyed by how weak the Republicans are. Increasingly, 2016 seems to be a flash in the pan. For all their macho posturing, the reality is that today's right-wing is soft, easily bullied, and unstrategic. Think of when Greg Abbott bussed those migrants to blue cities. Didn't it seem like a brilliant political move? Well, part of why it seemed that way is because that was one of the very few things that any right-wing politician has done in the last few years that actually seemed like a good chess move. It's hard to name any others. Also consider that despite years of bluster about how guns are a bulwark against oppressive government, pretty much nobody on the right who believes that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump (which I do not believe, but many do) did anything about it with their guns. The bluff has been called, and I think on some visceral level the left understands that they can push the right a lot harder than they currently are pushing before the right would actually react with anything other than online whining.
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