TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
No bio...
User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
as religion is getting a bit of a upswing
Not a thing, source 1 source 2 source 3. At most you could say that the decline has levelled off by some metrics, but statistics keep showing that the importance of religion in peoples' lives is slowly but monotonically going nowhere but down.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "postmodern" here other than as a vague gesture at a blob of liberalism-wokism-rationality etc. Perhaps the Right will come to dominate. Currently, the Right is dominated by conspiracists like Candace Owens, Just Asking Questions connoisseurs like Tucker Carlson, and shitposters like Catturd. As bad as it is right now, I have faith that it will eventually be replaced by something even worse.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2d ago
A lot of the hate for Jews comes from the following areas:
- Genuine (stupid) Neo Nazis that hate Jews for little reason other than because Hitler hated them 80 years ago. Some people want to keep up the LARP.
- Disgruntlement that the US has acted like an arm of Israeli foreign policy with almost no pushback for peoples' entire lives.
- Jewish domination of culture relative to their population count, and their pushing of leftist propaganda from their positions of power. Jews are overrepresented due to their high verbal IQ, and this has given them quite a bit of clout. Dumb rightists have hallucinated a coordinated attempt to destroy America, when the reality is much simpler: smart people are just overwhelmingly liberal no matter where you go. There was also extra incentive for Jews to push for leftism since they perceived the Right as their main threat for a long time and many probably thought that an America that was dedicated to multiculturalism was the best defense against anti-Semitism.
I personally agree that Jews are pretty great overall, and it seems like they've been having a slow-motion awakening on the threats of mass-migration. A good chunk of them are becoming socially conservative, but are leaning towards a more intelligent conservatism rather than the conspiratorial populist rightism. Maybe they'll be the ones to eventually salvage the Republican party, doing the job that the tech-right was supposed to do but utterly failed at.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
I mean, the Nazi Bar analogy explains a decent chunk of it at least. But this is the type of Nazi Bar where anti-Nazis are viewed with deep suspicion by most of the patrons, as well as the barkeep.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
I don't recall Amadan explaining that to me, but maybe I just forgot or only glanced at his reply at some point. It doesn't really change my point, thought the fact he's not banned right now is something I'll keep in mind.
The conversation I linked is a great example of him not being hostile to anyone involved in the conversation, while people like Amadan are using tons of personal attacks.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
Darwin was banned for a long time at some point. Is he unbanned now? I thought it was a permaban, but maybe I'm misremembering.
He confidently asserted something as fact, was shown that he was wrong, and then got hostile about it.
I've never seen an example of him getting hostile despite asking people multiple times for examples of his worst posts. I've only seen people getting hostile towards him.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14d ago
I have stated a couple of times before that this place is not right-wing, it has not ever been.
I'm coming to this post from the AAQCs thread. This is farcically wrong. This site absolutely tilts right pretty far. That's not to say it's exclusively right-wing, but the following are all true:
- The Quality Contributions threads are a combination of nonpartisan wonkposts, and right-wingers creatively sneering at the left. There is no equivalent of left-wingers creatively sneering at the right due to a combination of fewer left-wingers, and since any left-leaning effortpost is much less likely to be nominated.
- Upvotes/downvotes skew rightward. They also skew towards longer/higher quality posts which some people try to point as the only effect, but low-quality left-leaning posts will almost always be heavily downvoted, while there are plenty of low-quality right-leaning posts that will be highly upvoted.
- Consistently left-leaning posters have much higher moderator scrutiny and can follow all the rules and still get banned for frivolous rules that plenty of right-leaning accounts violate all the time. A great example is Darwin, who was a prolific left-leaning poster. There was plenty of consensus that he was "bad" in some nebulous way, but when I asked repeatedly what was wrong I was only ever given vague runarounds and examples of posts that proved my point like this one, where I disagree with Darwin's political point, but in terms of debate etiquette and rule-following his detractors are massively worse than he ever was.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18d ago
Fair enough then.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18d ago
Scott Summer (Sumner?) is making a valid point here, but this is like the least convincing way he could put it if he wants to persuade the MAGA right, which I presume is what he's trying to do. They'll tend to read this argument as "You'd be 8 times richer but think of all the processed goyslop and TikToks you'd miss out on!!!"
I certainly prefer living in 2025 to 1959 all things considered, but I'm something of a futurist. I wish I could live in 2125.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
18d ago
If you can't afford occasional takeout on a salary of >>$100K, you either have a family of 6+ or have very poor budgeting discipline.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1mo ago
The feminine = delusion and the corollary of masculine = truth-seeking take is mostly nonsense, but I think Hanania has a better take on why that is.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
It's all either:
- Reasonably limited, like "we should only go after people who are inciting violence", but that's not representative of what's actually happened (i.e. the Right certainly hasn't limited itself to just that); or
- It accurately describes the Right's actions, but is excessively broad, like "it's fair to go after anyone saying mean things about Kirk".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
Sure, people were misinterpreting my toy example there as if I always thought self-defense was hypocritical, which isn't true for the reason you listed. I've added a note to the original post for clarification.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
This is a valid point, although I'd (lightly) push back in a few areas:
- To what degree was this actually true? I definitely remember it happening in at least some instances, but I also remember people saying that cancel mobs had short attention spans. Sure, you might get a few wackos keeping tabs, but the vast majority of the fury was a one-time deal.
- Right wing cancel culture is still new, and there's a chance they could do this too. I... kind of doubt they will to be honest, but I would guess the reason would be due to a lack of institutional power rather than a lack of wanting to do so. Granted, that would still be a difference, no doubt.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
What? My argument wasn't about misattributing motives, it's that political violence isn't so uniquely special that it justifies what the Right is doing with its attempt at cancellations right now.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
The same response I gave to Jiro applies to you too. You vaguely claim I'm "gerrymandering definitions", and then don't provide any definitions of your own. Where specifically do you think I'm misrepresenting what the Right is doing?
Why do you think this situation is materially different than what the woke Left did back in 2017-2020? Nobody's been able to give me a compelling response to why we should accept what the Right is doing now, but that's different from what the Left was denounced for. It's all either:
- Reasonably limited, like "we should only go after people who are inciting violence", but that's not representative of what's actually happened (i.e. the Right certainly hasn't limited itself to just that); or
- It accurately describes the Right's actions, but is excessively broad, like "it's fair to go after anyone saying mean things about Kirk".
Also, I'm not sure what your point about violence is. That was a toy example I included to show that it's obviously better to be hypocritical than dead, not that I thought any self defense is hypocritical as a rule. Most people understand self defense is a necessary evil, so we accept it ahead of time, and accept it (to some degree at least) when others do it, so it's not hypocrisy.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
That's... not what they were saying back during Peak Woke. The Right often made explicit appeals to free speech in their critiques of cancellations. And if we are just talking about "narrowing the Overton Window", then how is the Right's behavior any different in this case? It's not like they were being particularly scrupulous and only going after people who were inciting violence. They used terms like "celebrating the death" that were highly ambiguous and thus expansive to almost anyone who said anything bad about Kirk.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
Political violence is still fairly rare in the US, but it's not clear to me why that should be grounds for broad cancellations. The Right didn't think this was the case when Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer, for instance.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
Cancel culture was always a thing, but it became a Thing with the emergence of a faction of illiberal progressives that had the clout to actually apply pressure and a desire to do so. This inversion of the 'proper' order of things was deeply upsetting to the many conservatives who saw themselves as rightful hegemons of American culture.
I'm curious about this part. What do you mean by "conservatives saw themselves as rightful hegemons of American culture"? Are you talking about things like evangelical dominance during W Bush's administration?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
I never said game theory broadly doesn't apply to coalitions in any scenarios, I said the fundamental assumptions that would make tit-for-tat a dominant strategy are broken. Most game theory arguments assume a small number of competitors and perfect information. Cancel culture of one coalition vs another is a case of millions of competitors sort of half-playing the game (along with dozens of other games simultaneously), also the pieces and the board are shrouded in fog.
As they say, hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue. The old social trust has been dynamited: there is likely no escape from this partisan cycle. This is the post Christian world that the postmodernists wanted. We now hate our enemies and wish the worst for them, as the president says.
This type of stuff is accelerationism, which I addressed in the post.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
the retaliation has to be stiffer
This just exacerbates the third point I made why retaliation to re-establish deterrence doesn't work: it'll be perceived as uncontrolled escalation by the other side. At this point you're just throwing gasoline on the fire.
The problem the left has at the moment is that moderates just don't matter
This is so much less true today than during peak woke (roughly 2017-2020).
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
political hypocrisy is almost always a symmetrical phenomenon
I don't disagree.
Kimmel himself said "I want to say kudos to my bosses at ABC for doing the right thing and canceling Roseanne’s show today. It’s not an easy thing to do when a show is successful, but it’s the right thing."
I wasn't aware of this, so thanks for posting it. It seems Kimmel got a little bit of what he deserved then.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
Well sure, people dislike unfair representation, but 1) a lot of that is due to FPTP, not gerrymandering, and 2) they don't really care enough to do much about, certainly not enough that it'd be worth 8-20 House seats to continue being unilaterally semi-disarmed.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2mo ago
Tit-for-tat might work when it's only one individual vs another, or if it's something like nuke strikes where only a handful of people have access to the Big Red Button. But it's just flatly not going to work in cases of big amorphous coalitions for all the reasons I listed. Also, the Left hardly had their behavior for "free", they plausibly lost 1-2 elections because of it, and the specific woke subfaction that is most loving of cancel culture hasn't been this politically irrelevant in a decade or more.
I read through it and I'm still not seeing any good examples. I see two main examples with you claiming they're violating the unwritten rules of debate by making a "flat dismissal" and being "uncharitable" in some nebulous way. Once again, this seems like a case of "you just don't like his arguments". I don't either, as I think they're bad arguments, but I'm really not seeing anything objectionable in terms of debate decorum, at least not something that right wing posters do on a nearly constant basis without any intervention.
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