atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
No bio...
User ID: 2162
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1mo ago
Like hell they have.
I'm sorry, this is complete and utter bullshit. Polling has consistently shown that Americans overwhelmingly support the diversity of their country---Here's a recent one (see page 5). MLK has an effective shrine in DC and judging people by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin is like commandment 1 of the national religion. A majority of the country thinks immigration should be kept at current levels or increased and basically has since about 2005.
Seriously, I'm astounded how you can make this claim. Americans have been choosing this expanded, non-race dependent version of identity for decades. Like the taboo is so strong---when was the last time that being publicly outed as a white supremacist wouldn't ruin an American's life?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
I think Europe should be a bit "pragmatically racist" in selecting groups from countries that have a track record of integrating well, e.g. I'd give preference for South-East Asia, but it appears that such a moderate policy is too racist even for the "far-right".
Again and again, why do people keep on jumping to race as the most accurate way to filter for being able to integrate? I will keep repeating, it's at very best just a weak proxy for anything that actually matters. It's really not hard to construct a better proxy: just as literally the first thing that comes to my head, selecting people for a work permit based on the salary of the job they're getting would be a much better way than race/country of origin to pick out immigrants Italy might want (even if it's still not even close to perfect).
This is exactly why immigration concerns are so often dismissed as motivated mostly by literal racism. Such a crazy and bizarre logical jump happening this consistently is really, really suspicious.
Whatever the system, these periodic events happen in diverse societies and then they are forgotten until the next outbreak.
A key point you're ignoring here is that such racialized rioting doesn't happen nearly as frequently in the US. When it does happen it also never comes from any sort of immigrant group that failed to assimilate---it's not at all fair to try to fit summer 2020 in the US under the same framework and use it to make arguments about assimilation. Immigrants in the US tend to assimilate extremely well and usually do better than the native population in various statistics.
There's an alternate framing of the narrative that actually supports the liberal point of view here (I think you're aware of this?). Yes, the French method of forcing assimilation is silly and doesn't work, but this doesn't mean that assimilation is doomed and will never happen. Rather, we already have a model of assimilation---race aware and everything---that works extremely well in the US. The French should copy this instead of sticking their heads in the sand about human nature and ignoring the necessity of actively combating the insidious power of irrational bias against people that look different.
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.
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
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
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.
I can't seem to find a discussion on this yet, and I'm very curious to hear this site's interpretation of events. Yesterday, judge Matthew Kacsmaryk ruled that the FDA should rescind it's approval for a commonly-used pill for abortions, mifepristone. The narrative I'm reading in mainstream media frames this decision as so cartoonishly insane that I'm struggling to see how it can be accurate. However, I'm also struggling to see where exactly the narrative is misleading.
First, the civics-101 explanation of how an agency like the FDA or the Fed should work is that certain regulatory problems are too technical and change too quickly based on new science for lawmakers to deal with them directly. Therefore, Congress delegates its power to a group of skilled experts who can react to the cutting edge of research and make reasonably policy. Of course, this is the civics-101 explanation and reality is presumably much more complicated, but the point is that laypeople who don't really understand the subject matter, like judges or members of Congress, should not be the ones making the final decision on technical questions.
Kacsmaryk's decision is framed as exactly this happening---the FDA made a complicated judgement about the safety of mifepristone based on their expertise and a non-expert judge decided to invalidate it based on their personal disagreements with the technical science. Articles emphasize quotes from the judgement where he explicitly disagrees with the FDA's interpretation of studies: "“Here, F.D.A. acquiesced on its legitimate safety concerns — in violation of its statutory duty — based on plainly unsound reasoning and studies that did not support its conclusions.", etc. Unfortunately, the actual decision (Edit: better link from ToaKraka) is very long with most of the pages being about legal details like establishing standing, making it hard to find the true reasoning behind it (though props to NYT for emphasizing the primary source so prominently, beat my expectations for news sources).
There has to be more going on here than a random judge deciding that they are more qualified to decide technical medical questions than actual experts; as a general rule, political opponents aren't ever this insane. What are the details I'm not understanding in the decision that make this more reasonable?
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
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
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.
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
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
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
1yr ago
There's a standard argument about gun control in the US that you hear a lot in the liberal bubble. Obviously, this argument does not appear to be very compelling to the anti-gun control side. It's pretty hard to find the counterarguments while embedded in the bubble, so I'm asking here in the hopes someone might explain them.
The argument comes from making a comparison between cars and guns. Both create about the same magnitude of danger when in the wrong hands, but cars are significantly more important for being able to function in modern society. Therefore guns ownership and usage should be regulated at least as strongly as cars are. In particular, car ownership has a strict licensing requirement including a safety/competency test and also requires insurance in case of accidents. We should therefore pass additional gun regulations requiring the same.
I can imagine the counterargument being in almost any step of this chain of logic:
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For some reason, cars are actually far more dangerous than guns in the wrong hands, maybe when you appropriately consider the kind of car or kind of gun people most commonly have.
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Maybe it seems that cars are more important for modern living, but actually guns are more important, maybe as protection against low-probability really horrible things---tyrannical government, breakdown of society, etc. I guess this would require making some kind of expected value justification, that the horrible thing is likely enough and guns ownership would actually help enough.
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I can't really see anyone disagreeing with cars being regulated to the level the argument claims.
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We don't need to pass additional gun regulations like those for cars. Because of so and so reason, guns are actually already regulated more strictly than cars. Just look based on this and this example how much easier it is to get a car than a gun (though as long as it's not actually super misleading, the stereotypical Texas Walmart example makes this hard for me to see).
Which of these points can actually be expanded into counterarguments you guys find compelling? How do you do so? Is there something else I'm not considering?
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.
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.
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