ahobata
16d ago
It's not that "How would you decide who is white" would never need to be settled, but it's often used as a gotcha in the exact same way as when trans advocates try to nail their opponents down to a precise fully biological definition of gender and then make a big deal of it when they struggle to handle all the edge cases with a single definition.
The specific way they "make a big deal of it" is to act as if these terminological questions need to be dealt with at the outset, otherwise all subsequent discussion must necessarily be confused. But they fail to consider why their opponents might see their own priorities differently. White identitarianism has gained traction online because of the way whites have been treated. Despite anti-whites probably being more likely than most to deny that there could be any definition of the white race, they certainly see no problem with talking about white people as a monolith.
This where the bad faith accusations are coming from. When a group of people is being attacked, most would agree it's in their interest to organize to defend themselves. Explicit anti-whites can be forgiven for trying to shut this down by muddying the waters on whiteness; why wouldn't they want an enemy that they can organize against but that is epistemically incapable of organizing against them?
More annoying are the centrists who do the same thing: "How can you expect people to give a sympathetic hearing to white nationalism if you can't even define one of the two words in that moniker?" The answer is that it's a peripheral question that need only be answered once white nationalism is closer to the levers of power. It's very easy to classify most Americans or Europeans as white or non-white; that's enough for now. There are factions that might prefer to include, e.g., Armenians, and there are other factions that might prefer to exclude them, and so on for other populations of coarser or finer granularity. White nationalists are aware that nature only provides us with racial clusters connected by gradients, not sharp, one-dimensional boundaries. It's simply unreasonable to demand that a single definition spontaneously coalesce from out of their reasonable diversity of internet opinions. Not to mention that any one definition would look silly and arbitrary to outsiders for the same reasons that white nationalists themselves can't agree on a definition.
That will change if and when one of the factions gains the political edge over the others. Even the hardest of the hard right generally fall in line behind Trump, whatever their personal disagreements with him, because he is doing the most (so they believe) to advance their causes. Imagine how ecstatic they would be if a US president deported all recently arrived, unmarried, non-white immigrants, severely clamped down on immigration, reasserted the accomplishments of white people in the teaching of American history, curtailed the anti-white animus in media and academia, etc. Contrary to the "But what even is white?" people's demands, they wouldn't really care whether some Istanbul satellite made the cut. It's an edge case, it belongs on the edge.
Once WNs have a power gradient to follow, then will be the time to start hardening feelings into policies, a process that will be constrained by whatever alliances and compromises make sense to those people, in those positions, with those connections, at that time. It's understandable that internet randos who know the impotence and arbitrariness of their own opinions are not willing to make themselves the spokespeople of the entire movement.
ahobata
22d ago
I agree with everything you say here. Whether Holocaust revisionism belongs in the same general category as moon landing skepticism, though, is an object-level question to which the mods (collectively) have reached a different answer than myself and some other posters here.
(I suppose it has about as much contemporary relevance as moon landing skepticism would if its claims turned out to be true. But that on its own isn't disqualifying; I doubt that someone who submitted a thoughtful post every few months about why the Parliamentarians were the bad guys in the English Civil War would get nearly as much pushback, despite that having much less contemporary relevance than the Holocaust.)
ahobata
22d ago
I disagree that his revisionism posts suck. Whether you are sympathetic to his conclusions or not, they are more high-effort, more rigorous, arguably more original, and generate more high-quality*, spirited engagement than the majority of top-level posts. And I would hardly say that he single-handedly manages to "clog up the feed" with revisionist posts, the way other unpopular posters like Julius Bronson or Vintologi really did hijack almost every culture war thread while active. When was the last top-level post he wrote on Holocaust revisionism? It's been a while, and I'm sure several HBD and anti-trans threads have cropped up in the meantime.
So I think it's fair to say that, despite the mods' protests that no topic is outright banned and so they can't be accused of selective censorship, the reality is they (like other commenters) have less tolerance for some subjects than others, they allow that to affect their enforcement decisions, and it's probably due at least as much to what they consider to be objectionable as it is to how irrelevant or tendentious SS's posts "objectively" are. Which is perhaps best practice for managing a forum in general -- we don't want to drive good posters out of here by failing to cater to their interests (and prejudices) -- but a bit disappointing to see on themotte.
*And low-quality, to be fair -- but mostly from the chorus of drive-by detractors who add nothing to the conversation beyond signaling a distaste for the topic and for SS personally.
I know. I mentioned you as a reductio ad absurdum of the idea that simply posting about a certain topic a lot (which you do) while also posting about other topics (which SS does, also with AAQCs to back it up) is or should be enough to put someone on the mods' radar for a potential banning, modulo the topic.
ahobata
22d ago
SecureSignals posts about other things too. Sort his comments by top and on the first page you'll find plenty of highly upvoted comments and top-level posts having nothing to do with Jews. Sort by new, and you'll find... well, a lot of JQ debate (and he is hardly the only one on this forum with an interest in that topic), but not a whole lot of revisionism. A periodic return to the topic every few months, well-written, well-sourced (by the usual Motte standards) and with a new angle.
There are others here with a lopsided posting history. No one is going after @Stefferi for being a single-issue Suomiposter, and while perhaps you couldn't find an HBD enthusiast or trans skeptic with quite as much of an agenda as SS, I don't think he's nearly as much of an outlier as the comments about him usually suggest. And that's if you consider his agenda to be antisemitism, not the much narrower Holocaust revisionism.
The fact that he's treated differently than other posters on the single issue spectrum seems pretty clearly to be related to his choice of issue. Partly it's because it concerns events that happened almost a century ago and are only indirectly related to most current culture war happenings. Hence the bait-and-switch SS had to pull to work it in to a post seemingly about the Israel-Palestine conflict (which was obnoxious and may have deserved a mod warning). But the mods' and commentariat's contempt for revisionists, independent of how well they argue their case (or their number of AAQC nominations), also seems to be part of the reason he is thought of as a single-issue poster, and to that extent, this ban leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Another parallel is that BIID is also partly driven by a sexual fetish in the majority of cases. I can't find the paper right now, but I recall having read one showing that patients tend to conceal that fact from their doctors and form communities where they help each other find willing surgeons and publicize techniques for duping less willing ones into going along with it. But AFAICT the similarity is shallow, it's just that the gratification of paraphilias is considered a questionable motivation for major surgery by most of the medical community.
ahobata
25d ago
Journalists had no issue pointing out when a police officer who allegedly did something abusive is White.
Because when gangbangers shoot other gangbangers it's expected. If the shooters are caught, they invariably go to prison. It isn't complicated. Cops are supposed to be there to protect the public
"The police should he held to a higher standard, therefore we should make a big deal of it when the officers involved in an incident are white"? I'm not following your reasoning here.
If there were a case to be made that the race of a police shooter is more important than that of a gangbanger, we would either have to exempt black cops, or be open about the fact that they are, for one thing, way more likely to shoot than their white partners at the same crime scene. I would be very surprised if the alleged racism of white cops towards black suspects were enough to outweigh their less trigger-happy baseline.
In practice, the racial angle is never played in the opposite direction, and with a few exceptions, shootings by black police officers do not make national news. (When I asked GPT-4 (!) to provide counterexamples along the lines of Mohamed Noor, it pretended to misunderstand and gave me a list of black police shooting victims after stipulating it couldn't vouch for the shooters' also being black; when reprompted, it could not find any.)
Even as someone who appreciates the enormity of black violence, particularly black on white, I find it easier to recall the names of white (-coded) on black shooters. Where is the black George Zimmerman? Statistically there should be many of them, but no one comes to mind. Your conflating "white" and "police officer" is telling, in that expectations are higher for both. In my opinion, the correct framing is more that blacks are incapable of being the target of the media outrage machine, which strongly prefers white people when available, and their being a police officer is just a bonus (and relatively frequent compared to the extremely low overall rate of white on black crime).
ahobata
28d ago
A white nationalist isn't someone who merely wants, personally, to avoid contact with non-white people. If it was, they could achieve that by never leaving their own home, which would also be about as politically effective as moving to Latvia.
ahobata
1mo ago
Republicans obviously aren't immune to blaming the outgroup for their woes, but they are still consistently more likely to endorse the bootstrap perspective. While not a politician, Oliver Anthony was widely feted by them as well as the rank and file. Relevant line from his song:
But God, if you're five foot three and you're three hundred pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
That's a pretty harsh way to talk about your ingroup, but they gobbled it up (so to speak).
you're addicted to fentanyl because of corrupt doctors and politicians in bed with Chinese companies flooding the country
Having just looked it up, I (a non-American) am surprised that needle exchange programs enjoy the level of support among Republicans that they do, but it's still almost twice as high among Democrats, and Republican states are far more likely to ban them. To be sure, this isn't a perfect proxy for embracing personal responsibility; it sets the bar below that. But the difference is still clear: Republicans are less likely to endorse policies that amount to buying people the opportunity to remain mired in their self-induced problems.
Taking a step back, you can believe in people's (qualified) agency without being a full-blown existentialist. All the conservative takes you list are accurate to some extent; if China stopped exporting fentanyl to the US, there would in fact be fewer addicts. It's a difference of degree.
ahobata
1mo ago
I don't know if they pile 'em on enough to spot individual cases, but there are already some known LLM style signatures that can be used to detect subtler uses in collections of documents. https://twitter.com/mishateplitskiy/status/1769433162122232127
Sadly, with the speed at which these detection methods are being developed, I doubt we're in for much Schadenfreude of the Claudine Gay type -- sudden fall from grace after getting away with it for years.
Completely uninformed speculation, but could it just be a holdover from when inflation was extremely high? Cost of living went up faster than many could adjust to; they never got used to it. And it's still going up! The fact that people don't notice the deceleration could be attributed to confirmation bias. Whenever they notice that something has gone up in price, it's "See, the prices really are going up still! And they would have me believe I'm imagining things." They're probably better at noticing price increases now too, anecdotally quite a few people in my circles track them more deliberately than before.
It's similar to how critics of the establishment sometimes allege that announcements that "Inflation has gone down" are misleading. I personally am not misled, but a small part of me might be unconsciously translating "Inflation has gone down" to "Inflation is under control", which it doesn't feel like it is, because prices still seem unreasonably high.
As for why we would be especially prone now to such a post-inflation vibecession, maybe it has something to do with the fact that millennials, who have outsize influence on the vibe economy (on social media), saw the highest inflation rates of their lifetimes through most of 2021, all of 2022, and the first half of 2023, and at least through the remainder of 2023 inflation stayed well above what they'd typically experienced in the preceding 15 years.
ahobata
1mo ago
Martin isn't Jewish if your standard of evidence is posting images of 23andme results not sourced from Google images (he's NW European, mostly English iirc). He's also talked about his Christian background on spaces.
Like most posters in BAP's clique, he's critical of "third-worldist" anti-Zionism and lowbrow antisemitism in general.
ahobata
1mo ago
On the journalist side, Gamergate was a mask-off moment; on the gamer side, it was a revelation. But the masks have mostly stayed off since then, at least for those with eyes to see. Gamergate took place on the eve of the Current Year. By now most of us know what side we're on, and our threshold for a story turning into a rallying flag that outlasts the <weekly Current Thing outrage cycle is much, much higher. Maybe some of the very young will be swayed, although most of the commentary I've seen on this story has been from millennial Gamergate veterans ginning up their audience to mobilize for WWII, some of whom I think are mainly motivated by nostalgia. (That's why they're dragging Anita Sarkeesian back into the fray: getting the gang back together.)
Besides, the original Gamergaters were utterly vanquished. Gaming is one of the wokest industries now, unlike back then when there was a sense that it wasn't too late to claw it back from the brink. Pretty much all that's left for them to do is make half-ironic self-deprecating jokes about gamers being the most persecuted race and the like.
How would you apply this model to music, where the direct imitation of nature is naturally more of a niche thing (though it can be quite nice in some cases)? And why are rugged, mountainous locales so popular in landscape painting -- maybe that too is a cultural idiosyncrasy and things like the Lascaux cave paintings represent art in a more pristine state? What makes symmetry pleasant?
Teeth blackening is unusual in that it resembles "naturally" blackened teeth, which are disgusting. Most art fads aren't like that.
I think you give nurture short shrift. The thing is, so does post-modern art, which by prizing novelty (and sometimes ingenuity) over all else, simultaneously rejects the fruits of both biology and culture.
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