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ZeStriderOfDunedain

Ze Strider

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joined 2022 September 06 04:34:38 UTC

No Iranian called me an incel

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User ID: 812

ZeStriderOfDunedain

Ze Strider

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 06 04:34:38 UTC

					

No Iranian called me an incel


					

User ID: 812

Verified Email

That those deep state connections and not much else are driving the foreign policy wrt Israel, is my point. Remember Genocide Joe?

Is there? Than explain to me what difference there is.

The difference is between the justification of a policy and the principle it purports to establish. Affirmative action is defended as a corrective to slavery and Jim Crow, not as an affirmation of permanent racial hierarchy. You can reject that justification as incoherent or discriminatory, but it doesn't follow that the public perceives the two propositions as morally equivalent. That distinction matters because my argument concerns cultural legitimacy, not whether progressive racial politics can survive a philosophical consistency test.

How is that different from "no, you don't understand, making the darkies pick our cotton is our way of life!"?

It is not, and I already addressed this:

Now you can argue that anti-white racism should be included in that vocabulary, and I bet many people will agree, that doesn't mean the underlying taboo against anti-minority racism has evaporated.

Yes. The point of the question is to establish which one of these makes you an American.

Okay, so what should the criteria be, in your opinion? A civic idea of nationality, a cultural idea, and an explicitly racial one entail very different political arrangements. Americans can disagree about the first two, and they will overwhelmingly reject the latter, so if that's what you're going for, you'll have to readjust your expectations.

From there it can at least be used to put forward the question if being born on a plot of land is enough to determine nationality.

If objectionable behaviour is enough to question someone's belonging, why shouldn't we subject Donald Trump to the same scrutiny? Americans gave him a historic victory, despite relentless attacks on his character and legitimacy from the left, and how did he repay them? An economy in tatters and a war that nobody wanted. We can apply your principle, but it will engulf a lot of people in your putative ingroup as well.

I doubt it. SocJus ideas are quickly pattern matched to all sorts of unpalatable ideas

Well duh. That doesn't answer whether the association is warranted in particular cases. Sometimes the accusation is lazy pattern matching, other times the speaker really does believe that ancestry should determine membership in the country. When was the last time you raised these concerns with someone who is 100% European and whether they should belong? You're not the only one doing the "noticing".

Citizenship? Open the borders

Closing the borders, and treating your citizens equally independent of their heritage are not mutually exclusive positions.

Cultural assimilation? Which culture do they have to assimilate to? What happens if they don't? What happens to all the people who have the passport, were born in the country, but have not fully absorbed the culture or are actively opposed to it? Can they be deported or denaturalized?

What do you want, exactly? What rituals should they participate in to prove their belonging? What are the practical policies that will ensure that 350 million people are conforming to the culture, without severely (understatement) impeding on civil liberties? Does this apply to everyone or just non-white people?

Shared historical identity, ancestry, or racial membership? Congratulations, you're a Nazi now.

There is that minor problem of ~150 million non-white Americans who are not going anywhere.

I still don't believe it. There are things that a hostile public opinion cannot move. We're talking eight decades of military cooperation, intelligence integration, co-developed defense systems, congressional commitments, and bureaucratic planning that have created substantial institutional inertia. A Democratic administration could restrict arms transfers or adopt a more confrontational diplomatic posture without dismantling that architecture, but we've seen glimpses of this before even under Republican administrations (Reagan and Bush Sr). Israel simply isn't a client state waiting for Washington to withdraw its blessing.

I'll push back on number 3. America's bonhomie with Israel goes beyond a handful of politicians, too many locked-in commitments to reverse in one election. Maybe they will slow-walk some munitions, but nothing else changes.

On number 4, we shall see. Democrats will certainly try to appear pro-immigration to counter the GOP's perceived bigotry, but I don't expect to see more H1Bs anytime soon.

We can only hope the GOP takes the midterms as a census on the economy and foreign policy, learn the right lessons. They will probably lose 2028 though.

There is a difference between Americans tolerating racial preferences dressed up in the language of remedying historical discrimination and Americans embracing racial hierarchy as a positive political principle. The white racist has occupied the role of a stock cultural villain in American public consciousness for several generations now. From the civil rights movement onward, opposition to racial discrimination and fascism have become deeply embedded in the country's civic mythology, educational institutions, popular entertainment, and understanding of its own moral progress.

Whatever the inconsistencies of its application, antiracism is not some recent progressive affectation that can simply be discarded once people grow tired of DEI seminars. It is part of the moral grammar that mainstream America uses to understand its national identity. Now you can argue that anti-white racism should be included in that vocabulary, and I bet many people will agree, that doesn't mean the underlying taboo against anti-minority racism has evaporated. The initial rhetoric made sense, constantly injecting grievance literature will never allow black Americans to move on from racial consciousness and even unravel the social fabric. This is not what Bo French and the groyper right believe though.

but questions like "what is an American" are 100% valid in my opinion

Are we discussing citizenship, cultural assimilation, shared historical identity, ancestry, or racial membership? These are different propositions with different implications. Simply insisting that the question is legitimate doesn't establish that every proposed answer will be equally acceptable to the public. Vivek's conduct can be criticised without establishing anything about whether Indian-Americans (those born and raised in America, not H1Bs) can be legitimate members of the national community. That question draws so much ire because it is quickly pattern matched to white nationalists who are too shy to admit they believe in racial membership, and they're not at all a minority of right wingers.

I mean, everyone thinks a pendulum swing to "their" side is the new consensus that will break the cycle. The cultural trajectory towards wokeness has invited some mainstream scrutiny over the years, but it's been largely undisturbed. White men "won" 2024, in a symbolic way, but still didn't deliver much of what was promised in defiance of the culture, and thunderously delivered a war that nobody wanted. Party of the white men failed, that's the price you pay for rejecting the black woman President!

There is "racist", then there is racist. The difference lies in whether normie voters find those accusations credible.

The GOP convincingly argued that woke activists had rendered the word practically meaningless. When everything from immigration restrictions to perfectly innocuous statements about affirmative action could attract the accusation, it became relatively easy to dismiss the charge as ideological overreach. You bring up perfectly fair criticisms of that rhetoric. My point is not that Democrats have been saying the same things for ten years. It's whether the conduct being criticised, and the public's willingness to believe the criticism, have changed. "Racism is based" is simply not a winnable position in a culture that prides itself for its multi-racial heritage. You could get away with it if you delivered on the economy though. Now it's a double whammy.

Jon Rosenthal leads the race for Texas Railroads Commissioner

I'll drink one to Bo French's hail mary racism.

It was right wingers themselves that were beating the drums about a "client's list" for years, and fanning blatant falsehoods. So chalk that up as another self-own.

The Israel fetish is built into the system, it sucks for Americans but gotta get used to it!

It's gonna be the latter. They simply have no incentive to do any soul searching anymore. The party was in tatters in 2024, now the GOP has sawn off its own legs with a chainsaw.

Unlike 2016, 2020 and maybe even 2024, the GOP cannot escape the "racist party" brand. Groypers are no longer an embarrassing subset of Trump supporters in the distant boonies of the internet. Watch the Dems capitalise this "I told you so" and inject every future piece of cultural output with a primer on "how not to be racist!"

Jesus. Texas going blue in any capacity was a pipe dream for years. Never would've expected this after Trump's 2024 win.

Immigration is the white whale of the right, but it's not going away because the people demanding its abolition want to dismantle the engine while retaining everything it powers.

This will animate a lot of people, but serious anti-immigration rightists need to sell a practical program after closing the borders. Believe it or not, corporations do NOT possess an inexhaustible treasure chest of profits which can simply be redistributed to American workers without affecting prices, employment, investment, or competitiveness. Economics is not a zero-sum ledger in which every foreign worker represents an American deprived of his rightful wages. Someone needs to foot the bill! Usually, that's the American consumer.

No, I am NOT for mass immigration (don't shoot the messenger!). I strongly believe that GDP should not be the sole measure of national well-being, and a country is entitled to care about social cohesion, domestic wages, or demographic preferences over maximum economic growth. But the tradeoffs those priorities involve are not at all minor. You can't have inexpensive software and cheap subscription services without cheap labour.

Editing to add that the above is triply pronounced in the matter of offshoring, another white whale of the right.

See, you correctly identify that the forum has gradually become more ideologically homogeneous. And the problem cannot simply be dismissed by saying that nobody is formally preventing leftists from participating. A forum can be perfectly open in principle while becoming rather inhospitable in practice. If every dissenting opinion attracts six hostile replies, three demands for citations, and a running commentary on the poster's intellectual deficiencies, it shouldn't surprise anyone when the supply of willing dissenters dries up. You're not wrong to recognise the patterns at work.

But your proposed solutions mistake the symptoms for the underlying problem.

There is a selection effect on the participation as Amadan notes below. The Motte did not become disproportionately right-wing in a vacuum. There is simply no incentive for leftists like Darwin to stay here when he could just jump on reddit. It's unreasonable to expect the mods to manufacture ideological diversity when the incentive to participate is weak. They can prevent harassment, enforce standards, and avoid rewarding low-effort sneering. They cannot make people interested in arguing with one another. And some of the forum favourite topics like HBD and black criminality sit so far outside the Overton window for your standard leftist to even dignify with a response.

Darwin is an urban legend here, so much has been written about the guy that I would be shocked if he wasn't hopping back just to get a good chuckle seeing his specter haunt the site years later. He's left his mark, and maybe that's all he really cared about.

These pro-choice people breed Lindsay Clancy supporters and Lindsay Clancy supporters breed Lindsay Clancy copycats etc.

I mean, I understand why you'd pattern match extreme pro-abortionists to LC supporters, though there isn't a straight line between the two, it's usually the same people batting for the same side at every culture war flashpoint. But then wouldn't you rather every future Lindsay Clancy copycat and supporter was aborted instead?

Marriage was firstly a legally and socially enforced arrangement between a man and a woman designed to reliably allocate resources and responsibility around offspring. By binding a specific man to a specific woman and her children, it created a workable answer to the problem of paternity uncertainty and gave the resulting family unit a clear claim on property, inheritance, and mutual support.

Modern economies offer earning vocations for women. We are in the age of Long Peace, we also have modern medicine, paternity tests, birth control and stable populations. The conditions simply aren't there to retvrn to your preferred idea of marriage.

Vidya character designs are not neutral aesthetic choices. Like it or not, now they function as tribal signaling and flag-planting.

The “not every character needs to be attractive” platitudes are almost exclusively mono-directional. They are invoked to justify making female characters unappealing to the dreaded male gaze, while male characters continue to be drawn to conventional standards of attractiveness with far less pushback. In practice the principle rarely produces “realistic variation.” Almost all the time, a noticeable skew toward designs that many players find actively unappealing (TLOU2, Dragon Age Veilguard, Insomniac Spider-man 2) in mainstream IPs, which suggests the real goal is ideological correction.

I find that normies who repeat that line are, more often than not, responding to social pressure rather than stating a deeply held aesthetic preference. It is a low-cost way to signal alignment with the dominant cultural posture in certain online and industry spaces. Once the social incentive is removed, the enthusiasm for deliberately unattractive designs tends to drop.

Given that the core gaming still leans disproportionately straight men, the expectation that this audience should continually cede ground on visual appeal to satisfy feminist sensibilities is a political demand dressed up as design philosophy to treat design preferences that lean into conventional attractiveness as a moral failing. No thanks, I'll take more "goon fuel".

There is no charitable way to interpret you telling me it's a warm bath when I'm being boiled alive, except you know it's happening too and think it's a good thing.

There is no polite to way to put this but. Quit it.

I'll grant your numbers. Your county has become substantially less white, including in absolute numbers. You dislike that change. Nobody needs to pretend you imagined it.

But explain first, who is "we"?

You seem to think white Americans are a single political bloc with a shared understanding that demographic change is an attack on them. But plenty of white Americans vote Democrat, welcome diversity, and reject your understanding of the country. You can call them dupes or traitors, but that doesn't make your position the consensus they secretly hold.

What do you do about the "native traitor" who feels more affinity with an educated, well spoken, law abiding brown American man who shares his profession, hobbies, neighbourhood, and outlook than with you? Why should your skin colour override everything else those two people have in common? From his perspective, you're demanding ancestral solidarity while sounding like those individuals he was taught to regard as villains. You may dislike that judgment. “But we're both white” is unlikely to change it. Your conception of American belonging hasn't been the consensus for a very long time.

And the demand for dead “traitors” makes the problem considerably worse. You want net zero immigration? We can work with that. But what about the "foreign" citizens of America? There is no way to "sanewash" the social desirability of your calls to ethnically cleanse ~100 million people, which is in no danger of happening anyway.

Or maybe I've misunderstood you, and you are not actually calling for the literal death of all traitors and enemies. What exactly do you want then, and how do you hope to accomplish it? “Stop replacing us” leaves so many questions conveniently unanswered.

And that is in the crux of all your concerns. Members of your putative ingroup can understand the demographic change perfectly well and disagree with you about its significance. If an immigrant espouses secular western values, is productive and pleasant to be around, you're not gonna get the normies to care about (in their view) an aesthetic change.

In China, a female tennis player had an affair with the then vice premier, who was married. Some time after they stopped seeing each other he contacted her again for sex. And by her own account the encounter was pressured but consensual, and she later stated she was not alleging sexual assault. Western outlets and activists treated the episode as a suppressed MeToo story, especially after she became difficult to reach. State media had already tightly controlled domestic discussion of such accusations especially if they involved senior officials. Then the Women’s Tennis Association suspended events in China over the case before returning two years later. Whatever the precise facts, the intensity of the western response far exceeded any visible domestic mobilisation.

More recently, see the Teruyuki Kagawa controversy re his casting in Yakuza Kiwami 3. This man was involved in an incident in which he had inappropriately touched a hostess in 2019. His agency eventually acknowledged it and conveyed an apology in 2022, so by the time the story was resurfaced and circulated by western fans, it was already a settled matter. Reddit and discord started loud and persistent campaigns demanding recasting and the removal of his credit. On the other hand, Japanese audiences largely ignored the story. Contractual and production realities meant the studio kept him. Sales appear to have been completely unaffected. The controversy was almost entirely a western online phenomenon.

See, I used to believe in the self image of the online MeToo as a purely harm reduction activists who, while misguided, had their hearts in the right place. I don't believe that anymore. Now, it looks more like status competition and narrative maintenance. Predators and victims function as raw material for a recurring morality game in which players demonstrate virtue, police boundaries, and accumulate credit within their peer group. This has created a world where the social rewards of fighting the problem exceed the positive outcomes of actually solving it.

If we were entering a world in which the underlying offenses actually became rare, the stage on which that performance occurs would shrink considerably. In other words, I don't think it's wild to assume a non-insignificant number of these people would actually be more disappointed if 100% of rapes and abuses disappeared tomorrow, cuz how else are they gonna keep the activism engine running and "win" the gender war.

Welcome to the real world, I suppose. If we were all prosecuting every morally objectionable act regardless of how inconvenient and impractical it is to do so, we'd have unlocked world peace a long time ago. Unfortunately, you need those soldiers guarding your village when you're the one getting invaded, raped and pillaged.

But what Griffith did to Casca is the imagery that rape invokes for most people when they hear about it, not the dubious "He was drunk, she was drunk, she said no, then said yes, then they banged, then she felt bad about it the next morning" grey area. Even if the victim wasn't a main character, rape by an antagonist in fiction is explicitly meant to establish their wickedness (eg: Wyald, and the goblins in Goblin Slayer).

Not quite. They may have understood that rape and pillage are bound to happen so the men can cool off, and looked the other way, but it was still morally objectionable.

Replying to you @the_others.

It's not generational IMO. Take the Berserk series, for example. Its earliest readers in the west were Millennials and Gen X'ers, followed by Gen Z (I discovered the series around 2019ish). Griffith’s violent rape of Casca, committed in front of Guts after he has already sacrificed the Band of the Hawk, is one of the most viscerally hated acts in the entire series. It is personal, deliberate, and performed largely to wound the man who called him brother. Now by sheer body count and scale of suffering, Emperor Ganishka’s genocidal atrocities carried out against nameless victims eclipse anything Griffith does. Yet Ganishka is treated with a certain dark intrigue, while Griffith reliably appears on every “most hated anime villains” list.

To most people, the act of rape is uniquely contaminating because it is viewed as pure appetite. The perpetrator could have simply not done it, and the physical and mental damage suffered by the victim could've been avoided altogether. On an evolutionary level, rape imposes the costs of unwanted pregnancies solely on the victims. But male-on-male killing has historically occupied a different category. When committed within the group, it is deemed murder and is punished. Between rival groups it was treated as ordinary and recurring, even heroic.

Or, they should take a page out of their neighbour's playbook and build their own Great Firewall, block off all the cringe from the global net. Maybe stop issuing tourist visas as well while they're at it.

Anyway, somewhat tangentially I raised similar points in the last round of HBD discussion.

EDIT: I thought about it a bit more. I still think you're broadly correct, but every so often you get stuff like this as well. To be fair, it's not the same kind of racism. They like Asian culture cuz no 3rd worlders and they fetishise Asian women, but still believe in a racial hierarchy where white people should be on the top.

I am reminded of this time I was in Milk Beach with my buddies (mostly 20-something white guys). We ran into a couple of dudes, one Indian and one Chinese, clearly international students, role playing some shonen anime battle. They looked fun, we invited them for drinks, had a genuinely memorable night, traded socials, and went our separate ways. Now I really dislike our universities treating international students as a revenue strategy while soft pedaling the difference between temporary study and permanent immigration. I also dislike what large scale, rapid demographic change has done to the character of cities like Melbourne over the last fifteen years. That being said, yes, those two can stay and I hope they do. But I suspect Bo French and his fans would expect the sight of them to horrify and disgust us instead.

See, every so often a clip or a headline goes viral and lights up the ethnonationalist corners of the right. Usually an immigrant crime story. This time it is a group of Indians at a football game, maybe a dozen young men who look like one friend group cheering for their college football team. Odds are most of them were born and raised there, international students are not exactly known for caring about American football.

There is a coherent standard for assimilation that even white liberals would be willing to defend. People who come here, or whose parents did, must leave behind third world honour culture practices and obey the local law. Chuck your arranged marriage bullshit, lose the caste system, and do not bring sharia law. A reasonable standard that actually tracks social trust and compatibility.

But then the bar takes a rather arbitrary turn. It becomes “don’t speak Hindi in public,” then “don’t worship your monkey god too visibly,” then “don’t cluster in the same majors”. Now it's "don't hang out in ethnic circles, stop existing as a noticeably Indian social presence at all, but of course I have zero intentions of actually including you".

The problem though is that the average "Heritage American" will never support this White America project. Even Republicans have been calling out Bo French’s tweet, which is a useful pulse on how far outside the actual Overton window the maximally groyper right winger sits. There is a hard limit on what can be achieved through ordinary democratic politics. The people who talk as if American-born citizens from disfavoured groups are essentially foreign are not describing the median of the coalition they claim to represent. They are describing a vanguard preference that most of their putative ingroup will never actually enforce. No amount of shrieking "these people are not Americans" will move the needle in that direction.

Mass migration can happen and within one generation, this is seen as the new default and any complaints about this are seen as against the new values.

Isn't Asian American TFR, which includes South Asians in America, the lowest of all races? H1b is a pipedream now, fewer new arrivals and you can safely expect the demographics to self-correct in another generation or two.