atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
No bio...
User ID: 2162
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
This is an extremely heterodox interpretation of history. You can argue that the entire field has been "captured by the left" and therefore shouldn't be trusted, but please be clear that this is the level of claim you're making.
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).
On the other hand, opposition to skilled immigration seems super common amongst HBD people here. While not as egregious, that's pretty close, especially because the definition of "skilled" can easily include things like English ability or other markers of ability to assimilate.
This is the main reason I don't really trust the stated motivations of the average HBD person. Race is at the very best only a super loose proxy for the things that actually matter and you can always easily measure and filter on much better proxies instead. Not noticing this and asking to filter on race is super suspicious.
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.
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
10mo ago
Middle Eastern and African migrants making it to the US are incredibly filtered as opposed to the dregs who wash up on European shores. Oceans tend to be handy in that regard.
I never really bought this argument. The US has also had a pretty big inflow of unfiltered immigration from Mexico/Central America recently. Previously, the US had an even larger (proportionally) unfiltered flow from Ireland/Italy/Eastern Europe. These immigrant groups seem to be doing pretty fine---definitely much better than MENA immigrants in France.
The one group that causes the greatest uproar is arguably the segment of the US population that has been the least successful at integration (still better than the EU! At least Ebonics isn't an outright different language) are the ADOS.
This particular group had been actively kept in poverty in deprivation until the late 60's and is still effectively (though not forcefully) segregated away from the general population. Obviously this group isn't going to be assimilated very well---HBD/culture are not the only plausible explanations! Furthermore, this in fact doesn't really contradict my original point. Groups that are treated as the US treated voluntary immigrants do fine and assimilate great. Groups that aren't don't.
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
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.
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
11mo 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
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.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
6mo ago
Thanks! Well, it's only that heinous if it's about things like ethnicity that no one gets to choose for themselves---in the previous comment and I think most of the time it's used here, it's seems to just be based on who you're parents were instead of the alternative of which values and culture you choose to follow.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
6mo ago
Can you please explain what exactly "patrimony" is and why anyone should care who's "patrimony" something may or may not be part of? As far as I see it used here, it just seems to be a pretty word constantly constantly used to defend extremely anti-egalitarian and anti-meritocratic policies.
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
11mo ago
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.
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.
Your model is nice as far as it goes, but the whole thing is built on the presumption of the successor ideology's innate correctness and legitimacy. Remove that assumption, and the pleasant portrait curdles.
I didn't say anything in the previous post about this being a pleasant portrait, though maybe this is moot since you're correct in assuming that I think so. For the current technological environment, the culture that I described is correct and legitimate because it's the one that best motivates and mobilizes human talent into solving the scientific and mathematical problems necessary for prosperity---see details here. In a different technological environment, this can change I and will happily accept that.
How do you distinguish this model from one where a minority culture imports sympathetic clients until it establishes itself as the new majority, then tells the previous majority to get fucked?
I am not trying to. By the above, I think this is the culture that made the US the successful and powerful country it is today. Therefore, if what you say is correct, good for the new majority that they found a way to drag the old majority kicking and screaming into prosperity!
Are they? Can you point to a place where these cultural commitments form a strong, uniting national identity
There was a great 4th of July post on this forum poetically describing exactly how these cultural commitments can form a positive, uniting national identity. I've heard similar sentiments very frequently from friends and family (that are US citizens).
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.
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