atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
No bio...
User ID: 2162
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
6mo 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".
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
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
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.
Who is building beautiful things these days in the public realm?
I'll keep making the same reply whenever I see complaints about beauty---any judgement like this depends on your own, idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences. Personally, I find new ideas in math and science to be the most beautiful thing in the world and the quality and amount of this that is being discovered/made publicly available has never been greater. I am extremely happy to have this even at the possible cost of whatever's going on in our physical environment. I also don't think similar aesthetic preferences are that rare, especially in a community like this one.
So I completely disagree, by a very reasonable definition of "beauty", we are in a golden age of people creating beauty in the public realm (you just have to go beyond physical things).
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
10d 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
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.
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.
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
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
6mo 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
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.
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
1yr ago
If HBD/average human capital concerns are that important for you, there isn't really that much difference. Furthermore, shouldn't it be a much lower bar to let people in vs. kicking them out? Unless you're some kind of extreme Malthusian, there are far fewer bad moral side effects to increasing skilled immigration than to forced deportations---like this big difference makes opposition to skilled immigration even more bizarre.
Anyway, I hope you noticed the convenient demonstration of the extreme vitriol bringing up this argument always seems to produce in this community---it's like a pattern match to the storybook reaction to cognitive dissonance. It's also the one topic where the moderation team is ok with constant personal attacks being made instead of arguments.
Interactions here have made it quite hard not to conclude that a very large fraction of HBD-talk here is really motivated by exactly what @HlynkaCG was pointing out in his comment---it's simply a convenient argument for an ultimate goal of a world where people are judged by what they were assigned at birth instead of what they control.
That's an unusual view. Might makes right is really not generally accepted as a good basis for morality. I guess it's best to link that instead of me badly summarizing a bunch of well-known arguments.
Edit: I think I understand better---you're saying that morality for countries/civilizations interacting is very different than that for people. I agree that this is probably true, but it would still be nice to justify why this particular difference exists. I think all the logic for might makes right being wrong for people transfers over? Most simply, it's better if societies could focus their energies on productive endeavors instead of zero-sum building of war-making potential so they can conquer and avoid being conquered.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Queen Elizabeth was an direct inheritor of stolen wealth who personally claimed fame, importance, and power for the sole reason that her ancestors were some of the worst war criminals who ever lived. For the reason she didn't renounce it all as soon as she could, she definitely deserves every insult.
This makes matters even worse. I think we have an obligation to insult world leaders this morally compromised who protect themselves from criticism through censorious laws and policies. In that spirit, Queen Elizabeth is a dead, inbred, nepo-baby under the delusion that her family's legacy of warcrimes was something to be proud of and (example below) Xi Jinping is an incompetent Winnie-the-Pooh look-alike running the world's second-largest economy into the ground. Don't be afraid to say so!
More options
Context Copy link