atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
No bio...
User ID: 2162
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
I've decided to abstain from responding to you the last time you wrote it, because – as before – I did not recognize you as a good faith interlocutor.
You are under no obligation to reply to anything, though you also have no justifiable reason to claim that I'm not a good faith interlocutor. It's like clockwork, every time you reply to something I post here it needs to include at least one unjustified personal attack. Please stop.
As for the rest of your comment, this is just a very poetic way to express what it feels like to be confronted with aesthetic preferences different from your own. The point of my original comment is explained in more detail here and the way to argue against it is to discuss why your personal aesthetic preferences are actually universal enough, not post a bunch of poetry about why you think they're superior.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
7mo 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
1yr ago
I will second this comment. Comparing my actual personal experiences in what was supposed to be the most extreme possible environment to what I read on the internet is what made me completely distrust the "wokeness is taking over everything" narrative in the first place.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
As stated, it requires a heavy dose of blank slatism on top.
I don't think this is at all true. It requires a much weaker claim than blank-slatism: simply that non-whites are capable of being these 100x contributers. As long as the relative fraction isn't so extreme that like 80-90% of top-level talent is white even though whites are a much smaller percentage of the world population, then there are still serious costs for excluding non-whites. I've never seen HBD claims this strong---probably because they're patently ridiculous if you look at, for example, what the US IMO team looks like, the demographics of difficult STEM classes at elite universities or workers at tech companies, etc.
Of course, as asked by @aardvark3, this isn't the group that you guys are usually interested in discussing, though I note that the original post was only about the acceptance of any non-whites at all. Even in this case, saying something like there are almost no prominent black scientists is just false---this is the the strength of claim you would have to show for the argument not to apply. (Asking for von Neumann-tier is very unfair because there are only a few people of that tier a century---you can plausibly argue that he's literally the only example, so trivially no ethnic group except his own reaches that bar.) Whatever differences might appear between groups are dominated by differences within a group---I think even the strongest HBD positions accept this. Therefore and at the very least, the right specially selected subset of any racial group will always be very beneficial to accept.
The first issue is fascinating: there is a serious disagreement between the left and the right in the US about what freedom of religion actually means. I think the left qualifies it in a sort of paradox-of-tolerance way: you don't get to excuse intolerant views by claiming that they are part of your religion. Otherwise, religion just becomes a giant loophole in the rules that make the pluralistic society of the US actually work: believe whatever you want as long as it doesn't make you impose anything on other people. All the recent fights about LGBT rights vs. religious freedom are a pretty strong demonstration of this actual fundamental values difference.
Therefore, for a lot of the left, the actual answer here is bluntly that these parts of Christianity are actually bigoted---drop them or deal with the justified condemnation. Omar/Miller's particular fight is just an important reminder that the divide on how much deference to give religious beliefs doesn't cleanly split left/right. If you feel that this divide is important, maybe you should rethink whether certain politicians are actually on your side or not. I personally much preferred the political alignment from back in the day of internet atheism fights.
Not every field in math and science is as abstruse and inaccessible as higher category theory. For example, look up any recent breakthrough in biology: MRNA vaccines, techniques for neural imaging, etc. You don't need to be an expert to be in awe of the clever things people had to come up with to make these work. There's also a ton of beauty being created in recreational math---see for example the elegance of something like this. Anyone can understand that! Even better, popular science/math exposition is also getting better and better so even the "serious" ideas are more accessible than they ever were before---even aspects of your example of higher category theory are open to way more of the population than you claim these days.
Sure not everyone is capable of appreciating every aspect, but this is like saying that novels are a super elitist form of beauty because only English professors have a hope of understanding everything in Ulysses.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
I think you should read what the founders thought about titles of nobility. They explicitly say it's bad to consider yourself any more special or claim any special privileges due to what your ancestors did.
Ignoring "all men are created equal" because of this one single word "posterity" that may not even mean literal descent is bizarre. I'm always confused by people who identify so much with being Western or American and still hold such anti-individualistic and anti-meritocratic values.
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
4mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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
6mo 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 think a lot of people commenting here are very confused about the idea of what "assimilation" into American culture means, how arduous it actually is, and how strict Americans are in requiring it. Most correctly identify that American culture is exactly the universal culture described here. However, they completely miss that assimilating into universal culture can be quite difficult; it's very much not anything-goes-and-you're-racist-if-you-disagree!
The key point is the section on Noahide laws later in the article. While it does allow anything that doesn't conflict with them, universal culture has some very strong Noahide laws. Some are meta-laws that are necessary for melting-pot-type things like universal culture to even function: a tolerance or even celebration of diversity that doesn't otherwise conflict with these laws (this last bit is important!), not caring about/judging what other adults do too much if it doesn't directly affect you, extreme openness to new ideas and ways of doing things, comfort with change and a weaker attachment to the superficial aesthetics that you may have grown up with, etc. However, there are a few that aren't meta-laws: particular to the US, a very strong commitment to freedom of expression, greater comfort with deserved inequality in the upper tails, and a rejection of any kind of hereditary hierarchies in favor of meritocracy ("people's fates should be decided by their choices instead of the circumstances of their birth", "content of your character instead of the color of your skin", "all men are created equal", etc).
These are very demanding cultural commitments to live by! They are definitely enough to form a strong, uniting national identity. Immigrant groups can fail to assimilate into them very easily---most recently mentioned here, recall the example of the city in Michigan with a lot of recent Muslim immigrants that passes anti-gay laws that were intolerant by this standard. Most Americans, even very progressive ones, will agree that this failure of assimilation was a bad thing (though they won't literally use the word "assimilation" because many on the left have weird complexes about certain words that can make discussion very confusing). However, the rarity of these stories shows that the US even still does successfully assimilate most immigrants.
Summarizing for emphasis, assimilation into these Noahide laws is very strongly desired by almost all Americans, is actually a serious requirement, and does happen for most immigrants.
I think a large part of the confusion is that a lot of ostensibly American posters on this sub do not themselves abide by these Noahide laws (if I am allowed to be a little glib, the tolerance of diversity and rejection of hereditary hierarchies seem to be particular sticking points). These posters should realize that yes, immigrants are assimilating to the culture of the country in which they live, just not assimilating into their culture. From the inside, this will of course feel like like assimilation isn't happening or isn't required.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
10mo ago
No, it wouldn't because Western countries need all kinds of workers not just high skilled ones. And culture is intrinsically tied with race to a greater extent than even religion
This is not too hard to fix---just do the salary sorting independently for each position after you've decided how much of each you want. Furthermore, I don't think it's so hard to do some cursory test for cultural compatibility that again, would be much better than the weak proxy of race. Again, saying the first thing that comes to my head just to emphasize how close it comes and how easy the problem is, even just English proficiency might suffice. Knowing nothing else, would you prefer a natively English-proficient Christian Nigerians over random Muslim Indonesian? Seriously trying to come up with a filter would do dramatically better than just looking at race. Immigration officials have so much more information about prospectives and this completely overwhelms any evidence provided by race.
Saying this another way, filtering by race doesn't make sense unless you can somehow argue that race is actually a strong proxy for merit/cultural compatibility/whatever you want from immigrants. Even the most extreme HBD positions don't deny a huge overlap in distributions of whichever characteristic you care about, so such a position would seem ridiculous.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
11mo ago
Holding them to a different standard than yourself due to things completely different people did is neither individualistic nor meritocratic.
Many have remarked how the cosmopolitan product manager/twitterati of New York, Toronto and Paris are much more similar to each other than they are to the Freedom Convoy, Gilets Jaunes or Dutch farmers dropping manure in highways and vice-versa.
I've always been a little confused by this. I'm American and I would be pretty upset if the values that I think the American elite hold are replaced by those of the elite of other countries. To emphasize the differences, I'm going to exaggerate this a lot and focus entirely why they seem bad from an American perspective: European elites feel too far in the direction of stuffy old-money terrified of change, Chinese elites too far in the direction of stereotypical spoiled rich heirs, and Indian elites too far in the direction of clannish religious fundamentalists (for example).
I therefore think the more dynamic, meritocratic American elites would have more values in common with the average American. Maybe I'm not elite enough to know true elite values, but I think people that claim there is truly some global elite class should travel more. I also think people sometimes confuse either an anglophone elite class or a global subcultural community (e.g. a particular academic field or readers of a particular blog) with a global elite class. Even with the second example, while I definitely have more in common with a random European mathematician than a random American lay-person, I feel more of a culture-clash talking with the average (non-UK) European-born mathematician working in Europe than with the average conservative American mathematician.
Even if people are more talking about the particular values of the liberal, American elite being particularly good at spreading and taking over parts of the elite of other countries, I'm not sure the process has gone nearly as far as needed to reasonably claim that elites everywhere are homogenized (as much as I would like this to be true).
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
Yes, I know, and maybe about 50 others? Once you reach a certain level I'm not sure distinguishing who was absolutely worst is relevant and probably pretty impossible---how do you weight how many were affected, how brutal they were to each individual, how they were relative to others at the time, what they personally did vs. what others did on their orders, etc. This is why I said "some of the".
The British Empire was pretty exceptional in its scale and recency however.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
12hr 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.
"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
7d 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.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
29d 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.
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
4mo 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.
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.
As more hopeful news on another topic that's also of great interest here, This NYT was published recently. The comments are even more hopeful. As an even crazier example that I realize will be very hard for people here to believe, I figured out sometime last month that a large majority of my department at a liberal university in a county that went for Biden almost 90-10 is very strongly oppposed to Harvard in the ongoing supreme court fight over affirmative action (just to qualify it's more "we're against affirmative action as Harvard is currently practicing" it instead of "we're against affirmative action period").
To get to the fight-y, culture war part, I've tried to argue over and over on the old site that certain of this places extreme, bogeyman views are usually straw-men used to tar the entire American left. These views get outsize attention because of all the standard media/clickbait reasons and were never really supported that much. If you just talk to normal people and don't raise suspicion that you're not on board with the egalitarian ideal that people's fates should be mostly decided by their choices instead of their birth, you'll probably also find this.
The standard kumbayah, everyone-should-band-together-against extremists model isn't really so bad: 80% of people on either side mostly agree with each other on values. Such normal people on different sides of the political divide nevertheless have serious factual disagreements that lead to very different policy preferences. The problem is that each side attracts a 20% of moral aliens with bizarre value systems that happen to make them want far more extreme versions of these policy preferences. To achieve their goals, the best thing the aliens can do is disguise themselves as normals to convince at least the normals on their side. As a nice bonus, this might also make the other side suspect that everyone supporting these preferences is an alien, giving them even more support out of solidarity against "unfair" accusations. For the left, this has hopelessly tarred any kind of diversity initiative, for the right, any kind of tough-on-crime thing.
The best way to fight this is to be really careful in distinguishing who you have factual disagreements with vs. who you have values disagreements with. Both sides need to police themselves and kick out the aliens with bad values even if these aliens might agree with them on object-level policy questions. Also, be much more cautious before concluding someone on the other side is an alien. On the other hand, be really careful to emphasize to the other side that your values aren't alien---this is really hard because there'll be a lot of enemy action from the aliens who want to keep their side extreme. I can't say I'm super successful at it here, but I try to emphasize that I care about egalitarianism at the bottom and that my disagreements with the majority of the American right are due to factual disagreements about what's necessary to actually achieve true egalitarianism.
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