atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
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User ID: 2162
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
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
6mo 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
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'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
6mo 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
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
7mo 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
7mo 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.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
7mo ago
She's being selected to represent the median voter in California, not you. Given the prominence of abortion issues these days, being the president of EMILY's list is a pretty great qualification for that! Also taking into account the issue pointed out here, she seems like a pretty great choice overall.
If there was a vacancy in Alabama instead, I could imagine myself making a similar rant about the possible literal creationist the Governor there might appoint---there's nothing more to it than not liking representatives from parts of the country with prevailing political views far from your own.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
8mo ago
You are the third person to interpret my joke as a serious statement....
That drops the situation from "abnormal and worrying" to "within the range of normal but not healthy", leaving aside points others have made about whether the joke was a Freudian slip and whether that's a valid way to infer things about someone. The point that you're never going to interact with them again is doing a lot of work here---why waste mindshare making them one of the first things you think of in a situation like this?
I think that the conclusions suggested by my personal anecdotes are sufficiently similar to the conclusions that the available data suggest,
Sure, as long as you understand that this is not going to mean anything to anyone who doesn't already agree with your interpretations of the stronger, macro-evidence. I think a lot of the pushback you got was because people interpreted you as saying that it should---the Motte isn't that much an echo chamber yet.
Here's what I specifically assumed about the story in that post: there are some people who wronged you in the past---a few months to a few years ago. You cut off contact with them and are likely never going to interact with them ever again. However, you still keep a list of their names in your head as those who would be first to die in fantasies where you're a dictator. Please let me know if these specific assumptions are substantively incorrect.
Even this by itself is not normal. It is also very different from simply just "making...negative statements about specific non-white individuals who have pissed you off or wronged you" or "obsessively ruminat[ing] about [your] contempt for them". Please don't play this kind of debate game of skewing the strength of a claim to make it sound wrong (though you're definitely not as bad as some of the other replies here).
On your second point, there is a hierarchy of types of evidence. Personal experience and anecdotes are at the bottom and really on acceptable when you're dealing with something so hard to measure that you don't have a better option. For the specific question you raise about the inevitability of racial conflict, there is much stronger evidence---you can find statistics, research trials, multitudes of case studies of different modern and historical societies, etc. Just as a heuristic, if something is an active field of academic research (well, barring certain fields), you shouldn't be reasoning about it based on personal anecdotes. In fact, your strongest, most thought-provoking posts are the ones where you stick to these stronger forms of evidence.
By ruling out one of those factors (the personal experiences part) as inherently illegitimate and discounting the possibility that others also played a part, you’re holding your ideological opponents to an impossible and anti-human standard.
I do have to disagree far more vehemently here. You can see above exactly what standard I use to discount the personal experience factor as illegitimate---I personally care more that my evidentiary standards lead me to conclusions that are correct than that they feel "human" to me. Obviously people are imperfect and not perfectly rational in seeking truth. However, I can't see any other interpretation of what your saying here except that this means that we should give up because trying to improve is "inhuman" (please again correct me if I'm wrong).
From another perspective, I'm someone who strongly disagrees with you about some particular argument; if you make a mistake because of human failings, that's your problem and I'm perfectly justified in writing off what you say as not convincing. However, please note here I'm not taking this as evidence that your point is wrong (just pointing out that many people definitely will!). I'm simply asking you to fix your argument and holding judgement until I see what happens.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
8mo ago
The three most egregious examples - the people who will be first against the wall if I’m ever magically granted dictatorial power - were, respectively, half-Filipino-half-black, fully black, and half-Puerto-Rican-half-white. These three individuals (and they’re far from alone) have significantly damaged the lives of a number of people whom I personally know, and they’ve successfully terrified a great many more people into staying in-line with the approved opinions.
This is really not a healthy way to live. You don't need to take it from me, just pay attention to the sheer number of cliches along these lines---it's overwhelmingly accepted wisdom that keeping grudges like this is not good for you. "Living well is the best revenge", "don't let them live rent-free in your head", "you're just letting them hurt you even more", etc.
Even beyond that, revealing this kind of mindset dramatically weakens the potency of your arguments. It makes you sound like a strawman---the person who only becomes a white supremacist because they can't get over what some specific minorities did to them in their past. However many words dress it up, none of their beliefs are based on logic or correctness, just emotions they can't deal with properly.
I can literally point out this comment to people I know IRL as a way to argue "yup, racists really are what you think they are, here's some more confirmation that nothing they believe in is based on anything logical". This should tell you that something has gone terribly wrong on your end.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
Common Carrier v thick markets
Do you mind expanding on this? I'm not familiar with the terms.
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.
There's another aspect to this whole thing that might reveal more of what's going on. Examples of dramatic gerrymanders like Wisconsin's, have been in the news a lot recently. At least among people I talk to, this seems to make a lot of the left think of state legislatures as illegitimate and non-representative. For example, I think this is what drove the panic around the independent state legislature supreme court case earlier this year. Even more telling, a lot of the celebration I've heard around this vote has been almost more "screw gerrymandering" than about abortion!
It's therefore not completely unreasonable to expect a question about changing how much power state legislatures have to polarize along partisan lines and unite more of the right than something purely about abortion might. You can see some of this in the steelman that's part of the comment below.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
I'm a little confused about what the original aesthetic complaint against the modern west is then. I always read the "Why can't we build anything beautiful anymore" from neoreactionary-types as being followed by a claim that this is caused by something fundamental to our culture and it can't be fixed until the culture is overthrown.
The examples you gave do not seem to fit this---both are very easily fixed by money and you can see this if you walk around any rich part of the west where there is very little squalor and much fewer fat people (well, San Francisco is it's own weird thing, but consider Bay Area suburbs instead---maybe more precisely any part of the west where poverty is excluded). I don't think any culture has done a good job of keeping its poorer parts aesthetically pleasing.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
There's no necessary link between the two.
I agree that in my original post there was no clear link between the two and apologize for the bad writing. I hope the edit I made clarifies things more.
I think the parent comment I made was bad writing and left out a lot of context. So the complaint from this particular segment of the far right is that there is something essential to modern, western culture (they'll use a term like "globohomo") that destroys something aesthetic. I'm currently a little confused about what exactly their aesthetic complaint is---people's living environments, public buildings and spaces, people's bodies, some sort of missing abstract search for glory? However, as far as I understand them, they think that this aesthetic issue cannot be fixed without changing the foundations of western culture. Usually, they argue it necessitates some kind of ethnostate.
I wanted to make a point---even accepting their premise that the aesthetic issue can only and will be fixed by getting rid of "globohomo" culture, it's not actually that clearly an issue. I personally think that the modern, western physical environment is adequate, even though it could be better---airports and suburbia, for example, are moderately ugly to beautiful (visit Changi or walk around Palo Alto to see the good side) depending on how rich the area is. However, in this trade for adequacy instead of greatness (again accepting the questionable premise that culture change would actually lead to greatness!), we get greatness in another place: beauty coming from scientific and technological advancement.
The hypothetical was meant to ask if people think this trade is ok. Obviously there are also other aesthetic benefits from modern, western culture. I just thought this one was most compelling (though obviously I was wrong here).
So earlier this week I tried to have a discussion about the common complaint here that modern, western culture is deficient and should be overthrown because it is extremely bad at creating beauty. I tried to argue that this particular judgement depends on aesthetic preferences that aren't as universal as its makers seem to think and gave a particular example of one of my own preferences (that is shared by many I know IRL) that actually judges it as exceptionally good.
The response was pretty shocking. There are some topics here that I know will provoke a lot of heat---immigration, racial identity, trans issues, etc. I never suspected this to also be one of them. The sheer amount of anger in the replies and the subsequent to emotional arguments and strawmanning was crazy--I really did not know it was this controversial. On second thought however, this aesthetic judgement really is the core objection a lot of the far right has towards the modern world and a lot of their policy suggestions to fix it that otherwise seem bizarre to me make a lot more sense when viewed as based on their particular aesthetic preferences. Therefore, questioning these preferences is really questioning the foundation of their political identity, much more than talking about immigration might be.
I'm therefore interested in polling this forum on the issue. I think it helps with the strawmanning to be very precise and try to clarify it into a dilemma. Pretend god offered you a trade: all future advances in science and math that aren't directly useful for technological advancement will stop. In exchange, the supposed squalor of the modern, western physical environment will be fixed---think replacing all of suburbia with stuff that looks as nice as your favorite ones of these. Would you take the trade? [Edit: maybe a better option would be changing all brutalist buildings to things that are as nice as cathedrals?] Now I know that "directly useful for technological advancement" is a very fuzzy, but please try to answer the question in its spirit---we're trading away only the aesthetic value of these advances, not their material and practical effects.
I would also be very interested in the correlation between the answer to this question and people's political views. I personally would be strongly against the trade (the same as most people I know IRL) and I'm a pretty standard American liberal.
(EDIT: on second thought this was a very unclear post missing too much context. See here for clarification---hopefully this helps to anyone still looking at this).
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
Come on, you know that's a completely skewed, exaggerated, and not-at-all fair representation of the choice. What about this instead:
You stop the flow of all future ideas in math and science that aren't directly useful for practical technology. In exchange, all of cookie-cutter suburbia looks as nice as these instead of whatever they look like now. I agree that some people would take the trade, but I think this would be extremely controversial. I would think that taking it would be a horrible decision.
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
9mo ago
(This is also a reply to @5434a)
I don't think I want to argue that there aren't any aspects of aesthetic preferences that are held universally enough to be objective. I just want to make the narrow claim that the common condemnation of 21st-century Western culture that it is particularly bad at producing beauty is questionable enough that it is completely dependent on idiosyncratic personal preferences that lie on top of these more universal considerations.
To do this, I gave an example of an idiosyncratic preference that I thought was within the bounds of reasonable that also judges modern, western society as exceptionally good at producing beauty. There are others that also suffice, some based on more earthy considerations that may feel more compelling to you. For example, it's not implausible that many medieval peasants may be more in awe of the Manhattan skyline or the Ground Zero memorial than a Gothic Cathedral. It's also not implausible that many might think the dramatically increased accessibility of natural beauty---Banff, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Iguazu Falls, things medieval peasants can't even dream of---is worth the cost of having cookie-cutter suburbia everywhere.
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).
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