atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
No bio...
User ID: 2162
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
22hr ago
Not exactly an invitation to “reconciliation”.
It's a point that can actually be argued---if you don't agree maybe you can describe why instead of pulling out about 150 words of debate-team kritik?
On the other hand, this:
However, I would caution that I’m not confident the posts alone will be persuasive to you, since they will not be in combination with the specific and non-transferable life experiences I’ve had which caused me to be more sympathetic to these ideas than I likely would have otherwise.
is not something that can be argued or lead to any kind of reconciliation. I either have the same life experiences as you or there's no way that I'll ever understand why your values are valid?
That would be difficult, simply given the lack of any effective search function in this site’s design. I have been meaning to put together a master spreadsheet of links to some of my more successful/important posts, such that I would be able to supply those links when prompted, but I have not gotten around to doing so
This is a frustratingly long post that somehow manages to dodge every possible chance to give a concrete argument on the actual value issue in favor of making meta points. I guess the most productive thing to do here then is wait until there's an actual substantive point to discuss. I mean, there hasn't been much in 3 years of trying, but maybe something better will come out of this.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1d ago
I think quite possibly the largest contingent of people here are in favor of colorblind meritocracy, roughly. But in the absence of data, then your priors would be affected by race.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I think the most prominent writer fitting the view you describe is Richard Hanania. I'm searching through comments to see what this place thinks about his writings on racial issues---here's something sitting at +28 against it, though here's another at +14 possibly in favor though it's hard to tell what they would think in the perfect world where colorblindness was possible. (I'm not super good at searching for things, maybe you can do better?). Somehow this still leaves me with the impression that the voting population here is further towards racialism that Hanania.
I also think the link I gave above about what one of the mods thinks about the general attitude towards colorblindness is also very strong evidence.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1d ago
The first is a point I haven't seen anyone make here
See the discussion here.
and the latter already a step down from your original claim, and still want to know who you're talking about
Sorry, let me clarify---I also think there are a lot of people here who "honestly believe that people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". I think the strongest evidence for this is what I linked above: one of the mods of this place saying that their posts supporting colorblindness tend to be very controversial because those posts are against the prevailing attitudes here.
There's another sort of of-topic interesting point: I'm not really sure that "people should be treated differently based on how far back their ancestry goes in the US" is significantly different from "people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as". The cardinal, anti-meritocratic sin of judging people by their descent instead of their own accomplishments appears just as strongly in in both cases.
I think I wasn't very clear---I totally agree that values differences are in principle reconcilable. I've even on record in this sub saying that values can be derived from other concerns and can definitely be argued.
My point was that I've found that specifically my values difference with most of the racialists on the Motte is irreconcilable. I've been bashing my head against this since my first post in this sub and basically consistently gotten replies that are unmoderated personal attacks instead of any substantive argument, particularly from a certain poster who believes only Russians have souls and his following. Again, one of my very early interactions with this community was someone ban-evading and calling me a slithering rat just for having the temerity to try and argue value points. I guess a lot of racialism is just motivated by idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences that are too strong to be overwhelmed by any other consideration---how is this anything but not irreconcilable?
This experience has not meaningfully changed in the last three years, although I will say that you have been much more reasonable. So trying again, do you mind explaining/linking to some place where you've explained these specific facts?
We have the policy preferences we do because we disagree about important facts regarding humans and what they’re like
Political appointees are picked for ridiculous reasons all the time. This isn't the most objectionable thing that's happened in VP or Supreme Court choices. I also don't think these choices really made a policy difference over the alternatives. The only material impact was to the other people who could've been chosen otherwise---like 5 people in the whole country who are doing pretty well in life either way and purposefully chose a career where they knew they would be judged in bizarre and unfair ways.
Do you have other examples that are a little more materially impactful/out of the ordinary? Maybe you can try for same level of material impact as Trump's policies on legal and skilled immigration that were very plausibly motivated by Stephen Miller/Motte-style explicit racialism?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1d ago
I honestly thought that most of the complaints about racism in the US were mostly caused by unconscious bias---things that the perpetrators would feel very guilty for and stop if they realized what they were doing. Otherwise, I thought the stories were some combination of exaggeration, cherry-picked bad luck, or very special circumstances---being in a certain part of Idaho or in a circa-2002 airport.
but I don't remember seeing anyone say an intelligent black people shouldn't be treated as intelligent, because they're black
People maybe don't say this---they'll question whether there are intelligent black people in the first place or say that people should be treated differently based on how far back their ancestry goes in the US. The first is a factual point that can be pretty quickly refuted, but the second is a values difference.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2d ago
I don't really like either extreme. I have lots of evidence already of one side existing, its depressing to get evidence of the other extreme existing as well.
Here's one person's experience that might make at least part of it not so depressing: I've spent a lot of times in universities in extremely left-leaning areas (Like Jill Stein beating Trump extreme). There are routinely literal communists in my circles. I've never not been able to pull an IRL political argument back from extremes through tying everything back to core ideals like egalitarianism (and playing word games to avoid certain triggering phrases)---no standardized testing isn't a white supremacist plot, which alternatives do you think are going to be less biased? Rent control isn't as obviously good as you think it is, you have to be careful not to screw over people trying to move in, have you looked at what the actual minority groups you're speaking for think about police funding? Do you really trust elite college admissions committees to implement a non-transparent, "holistic" affirmative action policy without sneaking in a bunch of details that turn it into something mostly benefiting the privileged under the cover of tokenism? etc.
I therefore thought that both extremes were basically covered by the Lizardman Constant. Reading this forum has been one of the biggest shocks I've experienced to my beliefs about the world in the last 5-10 years (second to the Ukraine invasion I guess)---here are a large number intelligent people I share a country with who actually just have irreconcilable value differences; people who have such crazy policy preferences to me not because they disagree about facts like the far-left people I meet, but because they honestly believe that people should be treated differently solely because of the race they were born as.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2d ago
too many people that share their opinion vote
Why do you think that there is any chance that there are lot of people who share this opinion? This part:
Doubt if I’d buy that piece of land in [Small Town, Southern US State] for fear of the ancestor’s spirits, Native and African slaves wandering around looking for descendants in 2024 to be released from their bondage and inequities thrashed upon them for wealth by its oppressors.
really makes it sound like a fringe crazy---the left variant of the people screaming about adenochrome. As pointed out below, people who care about racial equality suddenly saying that judging others for their ancestry is ok are preemptively giving up their entire argument.
It's definitely not like a very active forum where merely supporting race blindness makes a comment one of the most controversial in your posting history. I would be much more worried that there are lot of people voting with this opinion.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
4d ago
but plainly, that hasn't happened so far, certainly not on any appreciable scale
I don't think this is generally accepted---certainly not to the point of "plainly". There's a very prevalent narrative that the rise of the alt right in Europe/US is exactly the widespread social instability you would see because of this---for example see here:
"One in three young men in Germany has never had a girlfriend. Are you one of them?" Krah asks and continues with advice: "Don't watch porn, don't vote green, go outside into the fresh air. Be confident. And above all don't believe you need to be nice and soft. Real men stand on the far right. Real men are patriots. That's the way to find a girlfriend!"
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
24d ago
Does this make me a conservative?
Yes it does! Specifically, the vision you describe appears to be one of boring stagnation and endless, cozy mediocrity (it's also so stereotypically European). I would much prefer the world to be like the SF Bay Area that despite (there are enough arguments that this is actually "because of") its many flaws, produces amazing things like Google, Nvidia, SpaceX, OpenAI, and the general research output of Stanford and UC Berkeley. The average person would definitely be much worse off, but the greatness it produces would be worth it, both for making the future nicer and for making society feel like it has an actual soul.
This part in particular:
who prioritize friends and family above work, but who work hard
would grind technological and scientific progress to a halt since it dramatically underestimates how much hard work and obsession is needed to make breakthroughs. The architectural preferences also suggest an aversion to experimentation which, while it can produce a lot of short term ugliness, is necessary in the long run to avoid boring homogeneity and settling for not-so-great local optima.
I don't know how properly to argue that my preference is better than yours---your vision is extremely cozy and comfortable. I would start with a worry that your world would collapse through not being able to progress enough to keep up with population growth, resource depletion, or unexpected disasters. You're settling for the good that we have right now instead of taking the risks necessary to either improve it or protect it in the future.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
I don't know the situation in your country so that very well might be true. However, it is definitely not relevant in California where there actually is huge space for building more housing without much disruption (as many other posters have given various arguments for).
In addition, people tend to overestimate how full their cities/countries actually are. There are very few places in the world that are as densely populated as Somerville, Massachusetts which is a super pleasant place looking like this on Google streetview. No skyscrapers needed and with that density, the countryside can be kept clear too. I suspect that your country could build housing for hundreds of thousands of more people while still only looking like Somerville and avoiding what you want to avoid.
"the outgroup" in this comment is pretty clearly referring to contemporary people, not the Confederate slavers.
This is not clear at all (except for literal neo-confederates who want to bring things like slavery back). The confederacy is a completely different culture from the modern south and making the connection from destroying a statue of a confederate leader to somehow teabagging modern southerners is almost a non-sequitur! Sure, some people mistaken about who actually represents their values might be upset but this is an unfortunate side-effect and really the fault of those people. It's definitely not anyone's intention in melting down the statue and really confusing if it's referred to by such a motivated word as "teabagging"---to the point where the most natural thing is to immediately dismiss that as a possibility.
Again, the far-and-away most reasonable interpretation for which group is being teabagged by a statue being destroyed....is group the person led/was part of.
I'm clearly missing something here that made modern southerners an at-all reasonable interpretation for that group: which of the following is it?
- Most modern southerners somehow still identify with Confederate leaders even though Confederate values are completely antithetical to their own and everyone here just buys that this is a reasonable thing for them to do.
- There's some weird politics bubble thing going on here where it's just accepted that lots of things are some sort of "liberal elite" or whatever attack against people who don't live in the Northeast or California
- Because the above two are too uncharitable to possibly be true, something else?
He's talking about one thing, you respond with a line that makes it seem like he's talking about something else
Like maybe it was clear to you he was talking about one thing, but that's completely opaque to anyone who doesn't share the politics of this place.
I find it doubtful that you were actually confused by what he meant by "moderate".
I thought he was referring to neo-confederates as moderates and trying to double-check this because that isn't really a reasonable definition of moderate.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
Do you think there are no Indian or Chinese, bay-area tech workers on this forum? I thought part of conceit of a public forum like this is that you are talking to some notion of "everyone". Either way, I'm definitely sure there aren't any antebellum southerners on this forum (they're all dead), so it's still super confusing why my linked comment wasn't also not antagonistic by this standard.
The objection in that thread, as described to you repeatedly at the time, was that you were conflating people to object to the destruction of Confederate memorials with slave owners.
I never conflated these two groups in that entire conversation and repeatedly tried to explain that I didn't. From the very first post, I tried to be very clear that I was only talking about the antebellum south:
The Confederacy/Antebellum south is one of these---one of the worst cases of hereditarian, anti-egalitarian nonsense in modern-ish history.
This is in fact the main issue. If you try to argue many points on this forum, you get pattern-matched and rounded-off to a very different point that is actually objectionable. You can take however many pains you want to say that you are just talking about the antebellum south, and even the moderation team thinks that you are somehow also talking about the modern south. Like how are you supposed to interpret the group that's being teabagged by melting down a statue as something other than the group led by the person the statue represented?
In the case here, a similar effect creates huge blindspots when applying the guideline:
You do in fact have to be careful about how you talk about any group here
How is "infested with Indian and Chinese tech workers taking over" at all being careful while talking about a group? Pointing this out, however, gets conflated with other crying wolf about racism, so this rule about not casually and unjustifiably sideswiping large groups of people doesn't really get applied properly.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
You guys are allowed to mod however you want---it's your website. It's just dishonest to pretend to be a neutral "place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases" when there's a pretty clear bias in which groups you're allowed to use this kind of antagonistic language against and which you aren't.
Whatever you guys might claim to be, this seems to be a place where it's ok to call an immigrant group an infestation but not to say that the antebellum south was an execrable culture.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
You have to tear down old buildings and start building massive multi family units
This is putting way too high of a standard. Buildings are demolished and replaced all the time! If you don't allow this, you get nonsense like the "historic laundromat" in San Francisco. Putting all the cases like this together, there's a ridiculous amount of space in San Francisco itself for more housing when so much of the city looks like this.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
There are two reasons why I think the description is fair
- First, the "war on the suburbs" rhetoric specifically talks about how "your investment and lifestyle may soon come under attack." This isn't just about exclusionary zoning; it's about anything that could significantly depress housing prices
- Second, Republican organizations have been using "war on the suburbs" are rhetorical demagoguery against almost any policy to increase housing supply: see this as another example.
I'm sorry, but this is just sloppy demagoguery. If you're being priced out because supply is artificially restricted to such brutal extremes as housing in California, you don't blame the other people who are similarly being screwed over, you blame the people causing the artificial restriction! Anyone telling you otherwise is probably manipulating you.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
Wow, does sideswiping an entire group of people as an "infestation" not count as being overly antagonistic here?
I don’t understand why Trump isn’t more popular
It's pretty commonly accepted that the housing issue is caused by restrictions on building new housing. It's been Democratic leaders like Scott Weiner and Gavin Newsom that have been pushing hard to remove these restrictions. Trump's party on the other hand has been actively fighting against this, calling it some kind of war on the suburbs.
It used to be almost all white and now it’s just insanely wealthy tech workers who are probably majority Indian and Asian
However, I get the impression that being priced out isn't what you (or the original poster) are mainly focused on here, rather this demographic change. Well, that's easy to address---contrary to what you might think if you spend a lot of time in places like this forum, most Americans and definitely most Californians care that people have similar values and ideals as them rather than that they look superficially similar. "Why aren't more people being radicalized because my personal and unpopular aesthetic preference isn't being satisfied?"---that question answers itself.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
Anti-semitism on the right really seems to be restricted to a bunch of fringe characters no one in power really wants to be publicly associated with
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.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2mo 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
5mo 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.
Right, so this is a good point that needs to be addressed. However, I don't think that the cousin being related to you is the key detail here---for example I would say the same about a childhood best friend but not about a hypothetical cousin whom I just met and never knew existed until then.
The principle here is really about close personal relationships, whatever might cause them. These come with an obligation of strong loyalty that overwhelms many abstract notions of fairness. The loyalty should be there when the close personal relationship is there even if there's no hereditary connection and doesn't need to be there if there's a hereditary connection with no close personal relationship.
Yes, this isn't purely meritocratic, but there's no one value that determines what you should do in all situations. We have a pretty good system of rules and expectations around professionalism---like how you should act differently in public-facing roles---that help us balance society's needs for fairness and meritocracy with personal needs for loyalty. It's ok to invite your cousin to a party over the other person, but not to hire them for a job.
More options
Context Copy link