atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
No bio...
User ID: 2162
Why would you counterprotest a protest against the knifing of schoolgirls? Well, apparently the original protests were racist.
Really? You can't think of any other reason why the counterprotestors might have felt the need to counterprotest?
Saying that there were counterprotests against the knifing of schoolgirls is an extremely disingenuous interpretation of events. The counterprotests were against violence by far-right mobs. These groups pointed to a bad thing that happened, made some mostly vibes-based links to their pet issue, and then committed extreme acts violence about their pet issue claiming justification from the bad thing. Saying that opposing these group is supporting the bad thing is extremely sloppy. I think someone helping run a website with a goal of helping people move past shady thinking should hold themselves to a higher standard.
Let me try to guess what's going on here? There's a really obnoxious bait-and-switch that white supremacists tend to do (it's really important here to emphasize "supremacist"). Everything is at first justified through the lens of something like meritocracy or "master morality ---look at how inferior these examples of other races are, or look how "multiculturalism" is just "slave morality" where the strong are forced to support weak parasites (since Nietzsche is on everyone's mind again from the recent ACX post) .
However, when push comes to shove, it becomes very clear that their true motivation is not any kind of meritocracy or "master morality" at all---it's just wanting the members of the group they're part of to have increased status for the sole reason of having been born into that group. This is of course decidedly anti-meritocratic.
Posts like the OP's are a great way to highlight this contradiction (I tried something similar with this question posted on the old site). If you're actually going to judge some people as superior to others because of their achievement and greatness, no reasonable judgement is going to come out the way white supremacists (and racialists more generally) say it will. It really emphasizes that they have no basis for their positions besides naked, defecting-in-the-prisoner's-dilemma selfishness.
Of course, all the liberals hate the argument because you're judging some people as inherently worth more than others and all the racial conservatives hate it because the judgement is actually by merit instead of what they want: arbitrarily putting the group they were born into on top. See also the Nietzsche article's description (section X) of why everyone gets mad a Richard Hanania despite him being the only actual "honest-to-goodness Nietzschean master moralist".
In summary, think of this as "Ok, Mr. white supremacist, I'll grant you your stated motivation that we should follow some kind of 'master morality' and judge some people as superior and therefore of greater worth than others, let's see where that actually takes us. Oh, it should actually make you sound like Richard Hanania, supporting skilled immigration and all, instead of whatever you are. You really don't have any grounding in your policy preferences besides naked selfishness in favor of your birth group do you?". Whether the OP actually believes that you should rank people this way is less interesting.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr 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.
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
1yr ago
Wow, does sideswiping an entire group of people as an "infestation" not count as being overly antagonistic here?
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr 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
1yr 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.
This was a very enlightening comment, thanks.
However, I think there's a very good reason people think of used-car salesman lying as reflecting much more poorly on character than lawyer lying. The used-car salesman style demonstrates sloppiness with and disregard of details---this is a huge red flag if you want your leaders to have any sort of ability to understand technical or scientific questions. Conversely, being able to pull off lawyer-style, technically-true lying is a great demonstration of being good with details.
Lawyer-style lying is never going to lead to travesties like sharpiegate, which actually harmed the ability of the National Hurricane Center to function as a scientific organization. This sort of thing is very dangerous if you want government policy to accurately reflect reality.
I don’t understand why Trump isn’t more popular
It's pretty commonly accepted that the housing issue is caused by restrictions on building new housing. It's been Democratic leaders like Scott Weiner and Gavin Newsom that have been pushing hard to remove these restrictions. Trump's party on the other hand has been actively fighting against this, calling it some kind of war on the suburbs.
It used to be almost all white and now it’s just insanely wealthy tech workers who are probably majority Indian and Asian
However, I get the impression that being priced out isn't what you (or the original poster) are mainly focused on here, rather this demographic change. Well, that's easy to address---contrary to what you might think if you spend a lot of time in places like this forum, most Americans and definitely most Californians care that people have similar values and ideals as them rather than that they look superficially similar. "Why aren't more people being radicalized because my personal and unpopular aesthetic preference isn't being satisfied?"---that question answers itself.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr 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.
Vivek Ramaswamy gave an interesting talk at Yale's Buckley institute a few days after the election. What I specifically want to focus on is the part starting at 34:35, where he describes what he thinks is a divide in the Republican party between two different notions of American national identity. The first is that being American is about following a common set of values---meritocracy, free speech, self-governance, etc. The second (starting 39:12) is that being American is about having deep, ancestral ties to a particular piece of land---"blood and soil". He sees the coming years as an almost factional fight within the Republican party between these two notions of identity.
This topic is very close to my heart---I think the majority of my interaction with this forum has been very unsuccessfully arguing in favor of the ideals-based notion of identity. Ramaswamy fervently supports the same and I hope hearing his much better-argued case (from a much more authoritative source) is far more compelling than anything I've tried to say.
However, what I'm actually interested in is what people here think the outcome of the factional fight is going to be. What do you see in Trump's choices of appointees? Is Ramaswamy going to be pushed out or is he going to be an influential figure moving forward? Which side do you think various major figures in the Republican party land on?
Just to put my cards on the table, I personally think Ramaswamy is delusional that it's even a fight and that the Republican party is fully dominated by the blood-and-soil side. This is in fact the main reason I vote Democrat and if I believed the ideals side was going to win, I would immediately become a die-hard Trump supporter. I believe that if you actually hold the ideals-based notion of identity, then the Matt Yglesias/Noah Smith-wing of the Democratic party is the right political home for you. As for why I believe this, I always thought that support for legal, skilled immigration was the best litmus test for this divide---if you are on the ideals side, then it is a no-brainer win-win and if you're on the blood-and-soil side, then it is very dangerous. Both what happened in the last Trump administration and experience talking to right-wingers here seemed to very strongly demonstrate that US Republicans are very against skilled immigration.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr 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.
This is sort of my point: if someone is able to positively contribute to the country they immigrate to, integrate well into the social fabric, be involved with the local community, etc, then it's their country too (I'm not going to use your "house" framing since that manipulatively plays on intuitions about small family groups that do not at all apply to countries of millions). You judge people by their actions instead of where they arbitrarily happened to be born.
Of course someone with OP's absurd level of contempt for such a large fraction of his country's population is at the very least not integrating well into the social fabric. However there are many other people that satisfy all the above requirements that you would arbitrarily exclude to their and your own country's loss.
I wouldn't expect to be treated like a native because I'm not one.
You are explicitly rejecting any sort of meritocracy here---is that actually what you mean to do? It is complete nonsense to have a privileged class of "natives" who through no hard work of their own are forever in a separate superior class that is locked out to everyone else.
(@jeroboam, look how quickly we get someone saying that all immigrants, even the positively contributing ones, should be forever treated as inferior)
I mean, there's another pretty huge assault on meritocracy in how hard skilled immigration is---even IMO medalists have a hard time immigrating to the US. Anyone upset about the impacts of DEI on competence should also be upset about this.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
too many people that share their opinion vote
Why do you think that there is any chance that there are lot of people who share this opinion? This part:
Doubt if I’d buy that piece of land in [Small Town, Southern US State] for fear of the ancestor’s spirits, Native and African slaves wandering around looking for descendants in 2024 to be released from their bondage and inequities thrashed upon them for wealth by its oppressors.
really makes it sound like a fringe crazy---the left variant of the people screaming about adenochrome. As pointed out below, people who care about racial equality suddenly saying that judging others for their ancestry is ok are preemptively giving up their entire argument.
It's definitely not like a very active forum where merely supporting race blindness makes a comment one of the most controversial in your posting history. I would be much more worried that there are lot of people voting with this opinion.
I'm sorry, but this is just sloppy demagoguery. If you're being priced out because supply is artificially restricted to such brutal extremes as housing in California, you don't blame the other people who are similarly being screwed over, you blame the people causing the artificial restriction! Anyone telling you otherwise is probably manipulating you.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr 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
2yr 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 I wasn't very clear---I totally agree that values differences are in principle reconcilable. I've even on record in this sub saying that values can be derived from other concerns and can definitely be argued.
My point was that I've found that specifically my values difference with most of the racialists on the Motte is irreconcilable. I've been bashing my head against this since my first post in this sub and basically consistently gotten replies that are unmoderated personal attacks instead of any substantive argument, particularly from a certain poster who believes only Russians have souls and his following. Again, one of my very early interactions with this community was someone ban-evading and calling me a slithering rat just for having the temerity to try and argue value points. I guess a lot of racialism is just motivated by idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences that are too strong to be overwhelmed by any other consideration---how is this anything but not irreconcilable?
This experience has not meaningfully changed in the last three years, although I will say that you have been much more reasonable. So trying again, do you mind explaining/linking to some place where you've explained these specific facts?
We have the policy preferences we do because we disagree about important facts regarding humans and what they’re like
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1yr ago
There are two reasons why I think the description is fair
- First, the "war on the suburbs" rhetoric specifically talks about how "your investment and lifestyle may soon come under attack." This isn't just about exclusionary zoning; it's about anything that could significantly depress housing prices
- Second, Republican organizations have been using "war on the suburbs" are rhetorical demagoguery against almost any policy to increase housing supply: see this as another example.
I think you should take the responses and general lack of sympathy here as a wake-up call about what exactly right-wing rule in the US means for you these days. I've found this forum to be a very good representation of the substantive ideas underlying what becomes right-wing politics/the mindset of people pushing those ideas.
In this case: anything, no matter the cost, as long as it hurts the woke! Scientific progress? I don't care about your fake tears and sad puppies.
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