TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Nonsense. The Soviets never demanded high immigration from their puppets. Likewise, the Americans (at least those from the 1950s) didn't demand high immigration either. The "import third worlders en-masse" agenda is from the woke bug that bit all Western societies in the 2010s. There are no treaties or diktats you can point to where immigration is "forced" on Germany by the US. Maybe there's some bit in there about the EU pushing it, but Germany under Merkel was at the forefront of accepting refugees with the "we can do this" mantra.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I don't get the point of your comment. I assume you're implying that you're not able to call atheists delusional, and that makes it symmetric? First off that's not true e.g. this post had almost 300 comments with no mod warnings that I could see. It uses the term "irrational" which is slightly less fighty than "delusional", but it's in the same ballpark. If you have an example of someone getting modded for decrying atheists as delusional then I'd like to see it.
Also, my point was that there should be broad consistency in using such terms across different topics, not just consistency if you're for or against religion. If someone can call trans people delusional and not get modded, they should be able to call religious people delusional as well.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Funny you mention church attendance since that's also been in a tailspin. The percent of people never attending church has more than doubled since 2000. Combine that with religion's increasingly irrelevant cultural position and yes, it's fair to say religiosity is definitely declining. There's no use trying to hide it with No True Scottsman of "they weren't really Christians in the first place".
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
but the first two examples do seem to narrowly keep within our Overton window of permitted antagonism simply because they keep the assertions of delusion within the requisite "I think that..."
I haven't of this being a thing. If this is an actual rule then it's completely stupid. Subjectivity is implied through the nature of online communication. "I think that" or "In my opinion" or any variation thereof shouldn't be a shield against moderator action.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I didn't get banned for it, sure, but I sure did get warned for it. It was back on the old site where I said something along the lines of "Biblical literalism is delusional belief in fairy tales" and I got a warning from one of the mods who told me to use the term "superstitions" instead. I can't find the exact comment unfortunately since Reddit is horrendous to search through.
...try calling atheists delusional, and see what you get. Try saying that atheists are treated with kid gloves, and see what happens.
I just hope there'd be some consistency from the moderators. Outside of the mod team, you'd obviously get flak for being wrong, especially if your implicit belief was that Christianity was the alternative, but that's to be expected.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
From what I can read on Wikipedia, prelest is just referring to a person thinking they're less sinful than humans normally are. It's an interesting word to be sure, but not particularly helpful when adjudicating the truthfulness or delusional-ness of religious claims.
If I'm misinterpreting something here feel free to clarify.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Apply a commandment in your own life and your life will improve. Miracles will not usually benefit those who are entirely unready for them, so until then the only evidence is more general (and easily explainable) statistical evidence to do with longevity, life satisfaction, marital/family stability, etc. among practicing Christians.
None of this is proof of a Christian deity, nor that the claims of literalists or semi-literalists are true. At best, it's proof that the Bible can teach some helpful lessons about how to live your life, but that's hardly a high bar. A fairy tale about trolls and gremlins could do the same.
Some have gotten their lives in order when faced with literal miracles, but most continue to live as they did, inventing new reasons to doubt what they saw, and deeply wounding their own souls in the process.
There is no evidence of supernatural miracles ever having occurred. If you have some evidence, then please share it, as this sounds like a fun avenue of debate.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Agreed. This forum's meta treatment of Christianity is very goofy. You can call trans people delusional and nothing will happen. You can call people in favor of covid lockdowns delusional and nothing will happen. You can even call people you're arguing against delusional as an ad-hominem and nothing will happen. But call religious people delusional and you should absolutely expect to get warned/banned.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Nope, Christian nationalism won't amount to much. At most it could get a seat at the table at the evangelical coalition, but evangelicals are far, far less culturally relevant than they were 20 years ago. It'll be nothing more than a fringe position.
There are 3 main issues:
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The Christian part. It's clear a lot of people want some form of "cultural Christianity" without the actual religious superstitions, but all attempts to create something like that have been failures. A lot of Christians do genuinely believe much of what's written in Bible either literally or semi-literally. But this places them at odds with younger generations that demand some actual evidence. Despite tons of trying, nobody on this forum or anywhere else on the Internet has been able to come up with a compelling argument for a deity. At best they ramble on about goofy metaphysics that’s either unfalsifiable, or merely haranguing about definitions. None of it’s particularly persuasive.
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The nationalism part. A lot of Christians see their religion as more of a passive thing, not something that demands extreme fervor that a pugnacious nationalist movement would require. Again, born-agains and evangelicals might be willing to go along with it, but there's a whole bunch of less committed Christians who take part as more of a habit or because it’s just a social gathering. They're not going to want to sign up to be Soldiers of Christ.
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The combination of the two. Christianity is not a naturally aggressive religion. Sure, people will ignore tons of contradictions if politically convenient, e.g. the Crusades happened. That said, it comes at a cost of things being generally more difficult to be pushed in that direction. There will always be an undercurrent of people saying things like “hey the Bible tells us to Love Thy Neighbor, not Love Thy Neighbor Unless They Vote Against Trump”. There’s a reason white nationalists have long flirted with Paganism and Norse stuff, as it’s much more consistent to be aggressive when your god is Thor. On the other hand, much of Christian morality boils down to being servile, of always turning the other cheek. It’s not a natural fit to any degree.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
judging what will be true in 5-10 years based on brand new technology is a fool’s errand.
It's rather goofy that you lead with a sentence saying how it's essentially impossible to predict the future of tech, then you... do exactly that, but in the other direction. Obviously there's very wide error bars here on both sides, but I don't think accurately predicting an impending tech revolution is any easier than predicting a tech fizzle as you seem to implicitly think.
In 1992, only the true dreamers imagined the internet as always on, available, and in everyone’s pockets. Outside of the optimistic futurists, you would not have predicted Űber, DoorDash, Grubhub, or the like.
There have also been a bunch of failures like VR, NFTs, the Metaverse, and Crypto (as more than just a medium for fraud and bigger-fool speculation). Even self-driving cars seem decades away from mass adoption. The number of tech startup failures dwarfs the amount of success stories by at least an order of magnitude. As such, I believe our Bayesian priors should be calibrated towards pessimism in general, only veering towards cautious optimism for the most promising possibilities.
a lot of the anti-hype is often not only based on early versions on AI
Promises of "it's only just begun, surely the next version will be even better which will lead to mass adoption" were used for all those listed failures, but improvements either didn't manifest, or were so marginal as to be irrelevant.
wishful thinking and a high view of what it is they actually do. Journalism isn’t that difficult
A lot of the pro-hype arguments here are based less on historical technological developments, and more on wishful thinking that it would somehow hurt their outgroup. "Your days are numbered, journalist!" is a pretty good example.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I doubt there will be widespread adoption in the next 3-5 years. People galactically overhyped chatbots as the effective advent of AGI, but it was more of an iterative step like any other. A useful one, to be sure, but not immediately transformative to all aspects of human existence that some have claimed.
Search results were already sort of an issue from SEO slop-factories gaming the system so aggressively. Chatbots will lower the price of that stuff a bit so we'll probably see a bit more, but I doubt it's going to be that much more of an issue compared to what could be done a few years ago by paying some ESL third-worlder rock bottom prices to produce the stuff. I doubt that AI-powered RSS feeds are going to be the wave of the future as well. Search results aren't great, but you can usually find what you're looking for if you enter the right query (for most things, that means appending "reddit" to the end).
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Yes, my point is that doubting that Putin had Navalny killed because it's hard to think up a motive is weak evidence, especially because it's easy to be biased - someone looking to condemn Putin can overrate the plausibility of such motives, someone looking to exculpate Putin can spend minimal time actually trying to think up possible motives. When someone says, "I can't see how..." I usually initially doubt that they looked very hard.
I think we're mostly in agreement here, and you're probably mostly just prodding me over the fact that I should have had a "low-confidence speculation" qualifier in my initial post above. I don't think speculating on a leader's actions is always low-confidence though. I have medium-high confidence that Putin had Prigozhin killed for a number of reasons.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Putin's thoughts are sufficiently inscrutible
You could say that about practically every leader, especially autocratic ones. Any speculation is necessarily low-confidence because of this, although examining motives and wargaming out possibilities still serves some purpose. E.g. we can probably be quite certain that Prigozhin was assassinated due to being a perceived threat, either directly or merely by what he represented. Offing him was the clear logical choice.
Putin may have used Navalny's death to send a signal to oppositionists ahead of the presidential elections - "Don't cause trouble, this is my show."
This isn't a bad idea either given that one opposition guy was gaining a bit of traction, although, yeah, still low-confidence.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Putin ordering Navalny to be killed doesn't make a ton of sense given he posed no immediate threat and was safely rotting in prison. But obviously being in jail could have hastened Navalny's death by quite a bit. I think there were reports that he was denied needed medical care. There shouldn't be much of a question that Putin is certainly willing to assassinate people he views as a threat, as he almost certainly did with Prigozhin. Also, other dissidents like Girkin fear being offed as well.
Whether Putin directly ordered Navalny to be killed doesn't really matter that much, nor will it likely ever be definitively answered.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Biden considered committing to be a one-term president in 2020, but decided to go again since he really doesn't like Trump, and thinks he's person with the best shot at stopping him.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Why does the fact that the US has troops in places like, say, Germany, give someone from Somalia carte blanche to "exploit" the US?
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
This list is fairly good, but it's missing something important: men and women getting married in the first place. Maybe you bundled this into your third point but I'd say it deserves explicit mention. The marriage rate has been collapsing due to a variety of factors, and this poses a huge issue to solving the problem. We could have the most optimistic future, cheap living standards, and people who are so rich that they could afford to stay at home, but none of that matters if men and women hate each other and refuse to form long term commitments with each other. I guess some women could become single moms by going to sperm banks, but that hardly seems like a society-wide solution.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
Of course he wasn't indicted! That's the entire point I was bringing up - the Carter Page warrant was transparently a figleaf designed to let the intelligence agencies surveil Trump and his entire campaign while delivering intelligence reports based on that surveillance to his political opposition. Again, I struggle to believe that you've got a real understanding of the situation if you think the problem with the Carter Page warrant was that he wasn't actually indicted. The problem was that the Trump campaign and early days of his presidency were under hostile surveillance by the intelligence agencies, and the fruits of that surveillance were given to his political opposition... and all of it was based on a document that everyone involved knew was fraudulent.
The problem with this line of thinking is that Carter Page certainly wasn't the only reason the investigation started, as Papadopoulos was also an early target and would eventually be convicted. After it started, it was clear there actually was quite a bit of wrongdoing by Trump's campaign, including even the chair of the campaign, Manafort. Not sure what "fruits of surveillance given to his political opposition" is specifically referring to here, so I'll let you clarify before I address it.
No, this isn't an issue at all. The investigation was started from partisan motives, and if you're familiar with the documents in question and the outcome of the Durham investigation, there's not really any debate to be had on this subject.
The Durham Report (which itself was created/elevated at the behest of Trump to discredit what he saw as the "Russia hoax") didn't even explicitly accuse the FBI of bias, since that's a fairly difficult bar to reach. The final report actually discusses more about confirmation bias than on political bias. It's personally pretty clear to me that political bias was probably a factor, but again it's hard to prove definitively.
In order for this equivocation to be valid, the republicans would have had to have manufactured Hunter's laptop and all the evidence on it, selectively leaked portions of it to the media, used it to get a FISA court warrant to surveil Biden's whitehouse, then given regular copies of the intelligence summaries based on the information they gained to the Trump campaign. Hunter Biden's laptop became an issue because he took a lot of photos of himself committing crimes, along with a bunch of records of him selling influence and access to his father, then got super blitzed and forgot about dropping his laptop off to be repaired, then ignored the repeated messages saying "please come pick up your laptop or it becomes our property".
If you zoom in too closely then obviously there are object-level differences between the two "scandals", but I never said they were identical. Giuliani's involvement still allows Democrats to point to the blatantly (biased) political nature of how the investigation started, from a man who is verging on lunacy, who claimed the election was stolen by the heckin Commies, and who likely committed crimes himself for which he is now being charged. The laptop stuff has long been his personal project, and the fishing expedition ultimately failed to prove anything related to the president himself. You'll obviously say that's a ridiculous interpretation, but plenty of leftists use something along those lines to dismiss the Hunter story, while seeing the Russia stuff as far more damaging. Again, there's clear symmetry there.
Also, while I'm enjoying the more substantive parts of this discussion, I'd urge you to drop the high and mighty attitude you've been displaying so far. I've discussed this topic with several other people on the Pro Trump side, and each one comes at it from a different angle which makes it difficult to have a single uniform rebuttal. Saying things like "I struggle to believe that you've got a real understanding of the situation" or "you haven't done the required research" or "dishonest to even imply it" or "lazy thinking" or any of that obnoxious crap is not helpful and makes me not want to engage with you. Again, I have done quite a bit of research on this, maybe not as much as you, but enough to know a fair deal. Keeping that in mind would be helpful so that you might ask for clarification if you've misunderstood the argument I was making, instead of leaping to ad hominems that I'm some foolish idiot who "hasn't done the research".
The Carter Page stuff was bad, but ultimately more as a factor against the FBI than to the broader investigation as a whole. Carter Page was not indicted, nor did he feature particularly prominently in the final report compared to people like Papadopoulos or Manafort. Then there's the issue of whether that stuff meant the investigation was started from partisan motives, but similar accusations have been levelled in the reverse direction for Hunter. It's also pretty easy to point to Giuliani, who was one of the leading proponents of the Hunter stuff since it's inception, as Giuliani isn't exactly the cleanest guy himself. Or heck, even the recent deposition stuff, where House Republicans initially said they'd accept any type of deposition with Hunter, before reneging and saying they'd only accept a closed deposition, something Hunter specifically wanted to avoid due to the likelihood of the Republicans selectively leaking testimony to present a skewed picture.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I agree with most of these, and I think most rationalists would as well. However, some of the super libertarian ones go way too far. The shining example would be open borders, which practically anyone would tell you is a disaster waiting to happen. At the very least you simply can't have open borders with a welfare state, but even if a society instituted welfare chauvinism there would still be the looming specter of nationalist backlash. Nobody would be willing to die for the North American Economic Zone, and natives really, really don't like feeling like they're being replaced, intentionally or otherwise.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I've done quite a bit of research of both. Not as much as many extreme partisans who keep track of daily updates, but more than enough to get a good picture. I stand by what I said: if you want to find bias or wrongdoing then it exists in both investigations. If you want to find crimes by people merely involved in the scandal that aren't the president, you can do it. If you want to actually get to wrongdoing by the president himself, that's a lot harder. There's morally grey stuff, but not much that's technically illegal.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I should really write a longer effortpost on this, since I've heard you and several others use the term "oligarchy" this way. This line of thinking is common enough on this forum that it deserves a dedicated response. Until I get around to that, I'll type out something briefer.
I think you're warping the term "oligarchy" in a similar way that leftists have warped the term "racism". I feel it's not motivated out of a desire to be maximally descriptive to people unfamiliar with the ideas, but rather it's being used to smuggle in political arguments through wordplay. In short, it's the noncentral fallacy, i.e. the thing Scott once described in this article.
I agree there are issues with scoring democracy. But the response shouldn't be to turn around and declare that nothing short of 1:1 representation of popular-request:elite-policymaking is a "democracy", and that anything which falls short is an "oligarchy". That's setting up an impossible standard for democracy, and furthermore is not how average people would use or understand the term. There's a big difference in how much popular will impacts policy in democracies like the US or Germany, vs how much it does in Russia or China. Meaningful voting for which politicians get in power is one of the best ways to ensure popular will remains important.
On some of your specific points:
wherein Fidesz winning straight majorities of the electorate is a lack of democracy.
Fidesz winning fair elections is democracy working correctly, but Fidesz can do things that then hurt democracy. Heck, this can even happen without enacting specific policies simply by breaking norms. I'm not an expert on Hungarian politics so I won't use examples from there. Instead I'll point to something like J6, which absolutely tore at the fabric of American democracy. It didn't do that because of any direct outcomes (Trump was not kept in power), but the fact that many on the right excused Trump's behavior or even celebrated it means other more competent right-wing politicians could are more incentivized to contemplate an actual coup in the future.
when you compare "consent" in the "consent of the governed" meaning with "consent" in modern "affirmative consent" ethics;
Modern definitions of "consent" in sexual contexts are completely screwed up, and I criticize them as much as I criticize anything else. They shouldn't be the basis of broader definitions of democracy... or anything really.
define "democracy" as something more along the lines of the above — or even just 'democracy is when the correct people are in charge' — wherein "responsiveness to public opinion" is a relatively minor component at best.
The people who do this are hacks who abuse words to try and gain leverage over the instruments of power. Pushing for the "correct" people or "correct" policies inevitably degenerates into pushing for "things that help the leaders themselves the most". The correct response is to call out the people who hold this opinion for their shortsightedness, not argue that the only thing that can stop a dictatorship of the left is a dictatorship by the right as many people on this site do.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
There are problems in the enforcement of justice, but it's not nearly as bad as you're making it out to be. I presume you're referring to the Hunter Biden stuff? Well, that's largely symmetrical to Trump's Russia investigation: Lots of smoke, not much actual fire (at least by the president himself), yet partisans whip themselves into a frenzy over the issue since they're getting a maximally damning picture due to their filtered media consumption. Biden could very well face a frivolous impeachment trial like Trump did as well.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
2yr ago
I agree it probably skirted the line after rereading it, but I have two questions:
- Would it still get dinged if I balanced it by saying the far left could probably do something similar?
- Do you think Arjin's post down below also violates the rules? It's basically the mirror inverse of mine, but I notice you haven't modded it like you've modded mine.
Your cite about atheism and kids gloves doesn't really prove your point since the moderator clearly saw that you were flipping the script (without mentioning it in the post) to try to do a "gotcha". That and your belligerent attitude is what got you modded, not specifically the atheism and kids gloves aspect.
I sincerely do want consistency. The best policy would probably be a blanket ban on words like that for any large group of people. Calling trans people delusional might be how a lot of people genuinely feel on this site, but it doesn't add much light to the conversation.
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