atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
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User ID: 2162
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
22d ago
Like hell they have.
I'm sorry, this is complete and utter bullshit. Polling has consistently shown that Americans overwhelmingly support the diversity of their country---Here's a recent one (see page 5). MLK has an effective shrine in DC and judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin is like commandment 1 of the national religion. A majority of the country thinks immigration should be kept at current levels or increased and basically has since about 2005.
Seriously, I'm astounded how you can make this claim. Americans have been choosing this expanded, non-race dependent version of identity for decades. Like the taboo is so strong---when was the last time that being publicly outed as a white supremacist wouldn't ruin an American's life?
My ability to earn a paycheck is affected by PMC white liberals in a way that it isn't by white nationalists.
This is a very strong counterpoint, and I definitely understand that my point here is not going to be very compelling to the stereotypical Motte user working at a Bay Area Tech company where they are only exposed to the excesses on the left.
Just beware of the free speech example here. I'm going to make an assumption that you haven't lived in parts of the country where the bias goes the other way and dealt with their orthogonal set of excesses that are even worse (though I would be very interested if that assumption is wrong).
As a meritocratic individualist, I completely disagree. The anti-meritocratic hereditarians here might hate mi abuela, but they still treat me with respect and state their points clearly. Dealing with DSA-types has been an exercise in frustration - try to argue with them fairly and they posture, form social alliances using whisper networks, make emotional appeals, play status games, etc.
I'm very surprised by this. I've spent significant time in some of the most infamous universities in the country and I've had a very, very different experience. As long as you can play an elaborate game of taboo---never explicitly saying words like "meritocracy" and instead directly appealing to the core values of MLK-style egalitarianism, I've found those on the left extremely pleasant and rational. I can very easily argue about how standardized tests are good, Harvard's affirmative action policy was bad, Claudine Gay was incompetent, etc. It very much felt like talking with people who had all the right values but were just very confused on some correctable factual points.
Conversely, trying to discuss anything with right, for example on this forum, generally means dealing with many unjustified personal attacks from people very explicitly not on board with individualism and meritocracy. Discussing with the right is useful to do to keep my perspective broad enough, but it is far, far more unpleasant.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
3mo ago
It's very clear siding with the DSA types is more damaging. Precisely because they control most of the power already
This is an interesting consideration. However, I think it presupposes that the badness caused by extremists on the left is somehow balanced and counteracted by badness caused by extremists on the right.
I think it's more accurate that the badness on both sides is orthogonal so this sort of "we need to push the unbalanced scales the other way" logic doesn't quite apply. The example of free speech seems instructive: there was a general perception around here that the left having too much power caused a lot of unjustified censorship of the usual topics. However, while shifting power towards the right did sort of fix this, this was only at the cost of even more extreme censorship of completely different topics (evolution, gay relationships, etc.)
Unfortunately, one side's extremists aren't going to save you from the other's---the only way out is to get both sides to police theirs effectively.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
3mo ago
In 2020, during a period of mass rioting and looting.....
It's a matter of comparison---the most direct analogue is the literal president of the US encouraging an attempted violent overthrow of the legislative branch.
Black Lives Matter, an explicitly Marxist police abolitionist organization
The analogue here is explicitly hereditarian and anti-meritocratic authors like Moldbug/BAP/some parts of the Claremont Institute being inextricably enmeshed in the intellectual foundations of the modern right.
The Biden administration is overseeing the largest influx of unfettered immigration to this country in over a century
This is also not necessarily so objectionable to people who value meritocracy over hereditarianism like most of the "centrist" authors in the original post. Skilled immigration is definitely not---even the most ostensibly right-wing, Elon Musk, supports dramatically increasing skilled immigration. Increased illegal immigration is getting huge amounts of pushback from the mainstream left and the numbers for that are always more about economic conditions than actual policy.
This is an incredibly risible claim
From your postings here, you are quite hereditarian and anti-meritocratic. Of course the comparison I'm making would therefore feel risible. From the point of view of the listed authors, who have much more mainstream American values, it makes a lot more sense.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
3mo ago
It's a question of threat assessment. You can either give the DSA-types more power, or you can give creationists and BAP/lots-of-posters-on-this-forum-style explicitly ant-meritocratic racists power.
It's not at all clear that choosing the side with DSA-types is more damaging. In the last 8 years in the US, the Democratic party in particular has done a much better job of denouncing its extremists. Just look at the most prominent recent examples: if you look at NT Times articles/their comment sections, you can see that the mainstream left's reaction to pro-Hamas protesters or the whole Claudine Gay affair has been pretty condemnatory.
Trying to make the same check on the right for strict abortion restrictions, someone like Stephen Miller being put in charge of immigration policy, etc does not present a compelling case to to change your vote. You can even make a very unflattering comparison by just reading this forum for a bit and seeing how much support explicitly anti-meritocratic and anti-individualistic racism has in even the more intellectual part of the right.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
3mo ago
The specific "state's right" that was trampled over in the civil war was the right to keep slaves. This is not something that the modern red tribe supports. The particular culture practicing slavery deserved to have its corpse be pissed on. The modern red tribe does not.
And that's without addressing the suspicious move where you substituted "people who prefer not to have Confederate statues destroyed" with "people who rebelled to support slavery" as the outgroup being discussed
I'm sorry, what? The discussion was about gleefully melting down a statue of a person who led a rebellion to supported slavery. The "outgroup" (well, their values are so opposed to anything commonly held in the modern US that outgroup seems like the wrong term here) that's scorned by this action is the people who rebelled to support slavery.
Part of the bizarreness of this entire discussion is all the posters (including you!) making claims along the lines of "no, I can read your mind, you're really trying to teabag modern southerners"---there's a pretty big difference between "haha, we destroyed this statue of a horrible person" and "haha, we destroyed this statue even though other people didn't want destroyed, stick it to those other people". I assure you that most people happy about the melting down are happy for the first reason, not the overly complicated second.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
Contra the popular narrative the Nazis were not uniquely evil, they were bog-standard evil
Is there something you have written explaining this? It seems to be the crux of the disagreement.
To me, their belief that someone's ancestry could give them so little moral value that it's perfectly ok to kill them seems uniquely evil by any modern standard. Replacing kill with enslave, the Confederates fell the same way. Is judging by "modern standards" the part that you are objecting to? I think modern standards are the right thing to judge by if we're worrying about slippery slopes.
Progressive can't seem to imagine the shoe ever being on the other foot.
The shoe is never again going to be on the other foot with respect to people who believe so strongly in hereditary racial hierarchies that they think Confederacy-style slavery is the best way to organize society.
They can't seem to imagine ever finding themselves on the "wrong side"
This question in particular is one the very rare exceptions where we can be extremely confident what the "right side" actually is. There are in fact certain values that are so obviously wrong that you don't have to extend any charity at all to them and it's ok to be as cruel as possible to those that support them. Whatever led to confederate-style slavery is one of them. Kill-all-non-Aryans Nazism is another. Almost nothing else is like this, but it's important to recognize the very special cases where you can make such strong statements.
..and that question is the first step down a very steep and slippery slope.
When we're talking about things like actual 1940's-Germany Nazism and the the literal Confederacy, we're so far away from any normal political question that we really don't have to worry about slippery slopes. It's like saying taking antibiotics is a slippery slope of normalizing killing that will end in murder.
I realize that people have abused the words like "Nazi" so much that this kind of statement pattern-matches to something that's very worrisome and not true, but we can't let the corruption of the word make us unable to consider the concept---there were historical cultures in Virginia in 1850 and Germany in 1940 that really were that horrible. If the moderation team actually believes that insulting these specific historical cultures isn't ok here, then please ban me. I'm really not interested in discussing with any hypothetical poster that actually agrees with their tenets.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
Huh, I'm pretty sure I've seen much harsher language against "the woke" or whatever around here. You're really going to play into this what I though was a strawman where you can insult wokeism but need to be careful how you talk about literal confederate slaveowners?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
This is an extremely heterodox interpretation of history. You can argue that the entire field has been "captured by the left" and therefore shouldn't be trusted, but please be clear that this is the level of claim you're making.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
Can someone explain to me why teabagging this particular outgroup is a bad thing? Drop the moral relativism: some cultures/societies are so execrable that symbolically "teabagging" them is great. The Confederacy/Antebellum south is one of these---one of the worst cases of hereditarian, anti-egalitarian nonsense in modern-ish history.
no quarter to moderates in the culture war.
What exactly do you mean by "moderates" here? Not hating a person who rebelled to support slavery isn't what I would call "moderate".
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
When kids turn 18 we don't check if they agree with our ideals and send them to Canada if they don't
Kicking someone out from where they grew up is a pretty extreme action. They will however be thought of as "unamerican" and deal with serious social consequences if those contrary ideals become widely known---the same way someone might be ostracized within but not exiled from of a stereotypical close-knit small town.
The difference in the US is that this ostracism doesn't happen based on just descent.
I'm not talking about tense culture-war issues---I'm talking about more basic and universal points like the egalitarianism in "judge people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin", the idea that ambition is good, some notion of the idea behind meritocracy (even though the actual word might be corrupted) etc. Regardless of extreme voices amplified on the internet, 80-90% of Americans would strongly agree with these ideals, even if they might hide it behind some torturous word games (e.g. most advocates of something like affirmative action do so because they think that it's the best way to actually achieve colorblind egalitarianism).
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
However, they are lies that I reject
It's what the majority of people in the country agree upon. What does it even mean to call something like this a lie? That it's different from what it used to be in the past? The culture that dominates now is superior practically and morally for reasons that have been written about a lot here.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
No, I suppose it's not their fault, but they're the ones I want kicked out of my country, so they're the ones who will suffer for it regardless. So it goes.
Given some of the statements you've made in this discussion, the US is very clearly not "your country". It's a cliche, but being part of the US is defined by ideals, not descent---this is taught in elementary school civics. You clearly do not fit these ideals.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
What do you call this if not a Christian fundamentalist coming to power in the US? Perhaps that's not what you meant---maybe I should read this as you'll worry if Christian fundamentalists were able to get their policy preferences passed? Do you remember the Dobbs decision? As far as policy goes, Christian fundamentalists are doing way better than they were in the early 2000's.
I feel like a lot of this sub is people who have no experience of the US beyond places like the SF Bay Area and therefore have no idea about which extreme ideologies are actually at risk of gaining power. Go visit the suburban South for a bit, pay attention to the social communities there, what the schools are like, etc. and then check back on your judgement of how close Christian fundamentalists are to being a serious threat.
I'm just going to abstract the speaker's powers as significant influence over which bills get passed in Congress---we can assume that the speaker being one person instead of another pushes these towards that speaker's particular idiosyncratic beliefs. I hope this simplification is acceptable.
So first, what practical impact does it have if the US government is passing laws significantly closer to a young-earth creationist's belief than otherwise? Most directly, it screws up science funding and educational curricula pretty badly. Science funding would be pushed away from geology, astronomy, and certain parts of biology---we'll be less able to understand where oil/ores are, how volcanoes and earthquakes work, frameworks for understanding examples of metabolic pathways in various organisms and all the drug discovery, etc. they can be used for, how ecosystems develop and adapt, whatever future high-energy physics we need astronomical observations instead of particle accelerator data to develop/the technologies that come from this, etc.---I am sure an actual expert in these areas could give a million more examples. For educational curriculum, teaching people wrong beliefs this foundational to understanding the world can horribly warp their ability to think logically and correctly. It's actively lowering the sanity waterline.
Beyond that, young-earth creationism is just the most obvious symptom of a bigger problem Mike Johnson has in how he forms beliefs about the world---massively overweighting evidence from one particular 2000-year-old book. That 2000-year-old book has all kinds of horrific and/or impractical policy prescriptions that could do untold harm if people took them without question. Just in the realm of biology again, stopping funding of stem-cell research the last time fundamentalist Christians had power in the 2000's was devastating in how many medical technologies were delayed---we might have had a cure for diabetes by now. How much other important medical research might some sort of fundamentalist "bible-based" ethics stop? In hopes of being more agreeable to everyone, I'm not even talking about more culture-war things, which as the comments below mention, can feel much more impactful.
Most broadly, it's just scary to have someone in power delusional enough to make a mistake like believing young-earth creationism after being given a modern education. What other insane things might they do? It's worse than if someone who constantly talks about how they were abducted by aliens were elected speaker---that's at least a harder belief to refute than creationism.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
5mo ago
A literal young-earth creationist is now Speaker of the House. I'm surprised that we don't have more people upset about this on a rationalist forum. That he was elected should be a pretty damning indictment of the US Republican party---anyone here voting for them better have a really strong benefit in mind that is worth this crazy of a trade-off.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
6mo ago
I am simply extending the principle of family inheritance to societies and ethnic groups as a whole.
This is much bigger complaint than your second paragraph. Why is ethnicity the right way to group people and why don't you like extending the principle to groups that share the same values and culture instead? I normally see "patrimony" used here to poetically sneak in this connotation of hereditary descent when it's never justified.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
6mo ago
Thanks! Well, it's only that heinous if it's about things like ethnicity that no one gets to choose for themselves---in the previous comment and I think most of the time it's used here, it's seems to just be based on who you're parents were instead of the alternative of which values and culture you choose to follow.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
6mo ago
Can you please explain what exactly "patrimony" is and why anyone should care who's "patrimony" something may or may not be part of? As far as I see it used here, it just seems to be a pretty word constantly constantly used to defend extremely anti-egalitarian and anti-meritocratic policies.
The three objections you list seem to be about par for the course for senator badness. I could list five that are equally objectionable about one of the current senators from Alabama, but I'm not sure simply listing flaws of ideological opponents is a productive way to discuss anything. It's a bit too close to making isolated demands for rigor.
The point is that Butler's pros as pointed out by many other commentators outweigh the specific cons you listed for the sort of voters whose opinion matters to Newsom even though they may not do so for you. This is the exact sort of thing thing I would say to myself about Tuberville or Trump.
Have you paid attention to the comments and voting patterns on this very forum? I have the impression that this place is pretty representative of the intellectual parts of the right and antisemitism here tends to be an upvoted and therefore not at all fringe position.
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