No doubt to many people these events will serve as further proof of the failure of Britain to integrate South Asians, yet if anything the reactions I've seen to them have bolstered rather than eroded my faith in multiculturalism. It's quite clear that many Leicester residents, both Hindu and Muslim, have strongly condemned the disorder and violence. Many are self-evidently proud of their city, and proud to be British Asians. They appear to deeply resent the fact that due to the actions of a proportionally small number of miscreants, very many of whom seem to be neither Leicestrian nor British, a negative light is being cast on their communities—for they understand that when it comes to brown people, many white Britons are not inclined to draw distinction between local and foreigner.
For those proud Britons, born and bred here, who have always struggled for acceptance because of their ethnicity, their religion, and the colour of their skin—I feel profound sympathy. When an Old Firm derby descends into carnage it is viewed with nothing more than muted disapproval, but when sectarianism involves South Asians it is framed as tribal warfare†. Let me be perfectly clear: I wish that the offenders be dealt with—yet I hope also that all those here who consider themselves to have a more clear-eyed understanding of masculinity than the progressive orthodoxy can recognise that the anger of listless young men who seek a flag to rally around is a trait shared by every swathe of humanity that lives under modernity.
† A proposal for reconcilliation in Leicester: a flag with three coloured stripes, one orange representing Hindus, one green representing Muslims, and one white in the middle representing lasting peace. Stop me if you've heard this one before...
Does this really come down to just a different work culture in the US vs UK?
It's a combination of factors. On the one hand I'm actually rather sympathetic to Meghan because I deeply suspect the palace is full of blue-blooded slackers earning extremely comfortable salaries from the taxpayer for doing not very much, not very quickly. On the other hand, unless you're a character in The Thick Of It there is a baseline expectation of politeness in the workplace in Britain that probably exceeds the American norm, and no-doubt this expectation is turned up to 11 at Kensington Palace.
This reinforces my pre-existing opinion on this entire saga, which is that I don't like anyone involved and would rather like to do away with the lot of them.
atomised
1yr ago
I didn't want to make a separate thread for this, so I'll leave it as a comment: I think we have a serious issue with diversity of opinion. This was already pretty bad on Reddit, but there seems to have been a step change for the worse in the few days this new site has been up. I'm not against people sharing reactionary or anti-woke points of view but when there's nothing to counterbalance them it feels less like a forum for debate and more like the world's highest effort Daily Mail comments section. I foresee this being an increasing issue, since now the Motte is moored in the digital equivalent of international waters, there is a far lower chance that progressive voices will chance upon the community by accident. Moreover, lack of diverse perspectives induces a harmful feedback cycle, since if someone sees at least some representation of their viewpoints they are more likely to pitch in, while if they just see a load of right-wingers competing to be the most critical of 'wokeism', in all likelihood, they will leave as quickly as they entered.
I accept that I'm not the first to raise this point (I believe this was a motivating factor for the removal of the bare-links repository) but since this isn't a problem that looks likely to solve itself I feel obliged to raise it again in the hope that we can work towards a solution.
I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.
This assumes as axiomatic that we all agree with white nationalism, which is consensus building.
The stated purpose of this community is for defending ideas. That is to say, users are expected to present earnestly held views, along with a reasoned case explaining why they believe them to be true. The OP has instead chosen to reel off a sequence of searingly controversial opinions—an explicit defense of white nationalism, as well as an implied condemnation of homosexuality—with markedly little effort to avoid polemical and ideologically weighted language ('tsunami of ... immigrants', 'drink the corn syrup'). To the extent that they prompt discussion, they do so by posing questions which invite only those respondents who agree with their stances on race and sexuality.
As a result of this framing, the implied terrain for debate is not 'is it important that Poland be a white ethnostate?' or 'is it right for Poles to oppose homosexuality', but rather 'given that Poland is relatively successfully defending itself against non-whites and gay rights, why would they undermine this by allying with America and the EU?'. It's frustrating and dull to unpick this sort of pre-discursive stage-setting, which is why most people who disagree with white nationalism or anti-homosexuality will simply roll their eyes and pass over comments like OP's. Thus, the entire thread is doomed to become an ideologically homogeneous round-table discussion that may raise some interesting points about the realpolitik of national alliances, but that—ironically for a culture war thread—will scarcely tackle the contentious underlying issues.
This is why consenus-building is disallowed. I'm happy to lay my cards on the table: it won't come as a surprise that I don't personally like white nationalism. Yet I value the fact that the Motte does not censor such viewpoints. It is critical, though, that when one presents controversial ideas, one does so according to the principles of the community, since laxity in this regard will induce an echo-chamber before you can say 'globohomo'.
I believe she is fundamentally correct that we have robbed society of their identity and tried to replace it with whatever pronouns are.
Pronouns are words that serve as stand-ins within a sentence for nouns, including the names of people and things.
You should be more precise here. Have we robbed the individual members of society of their individual identities? Have we robbed the individual members of society of some shared collective identity? Or have we robbed society, considered as a gestalt, of its identity, separate from the identities of its members?
The consumer stuff gets a little silly but whatever it sounds good. Need to have an enemy your fighting against.
I'm surprised that you consider modern society to be rootless but don't see this as downstream of consumerist ideology. This is something that is widely agreed upon in anti-neoliberal circles on both the left and the right. I think that you've actually misunderstood Meloni's argument - you think she positions herself as opposed to the nebulous enemy 'pronouns', as you yourself have. In fact, she positions herself as opposed to the globalising and commodifying trends in modern capitalism and views pronouns as being simply detritus strewn in the wake of these forces. Her vision is of a reactionary and illiberal opposition to neoliberalism; I would favour a more socialist and egalitarian approach - but in any case, we would find common ground in the idea that global capitalism makes homogenised consumers of us all. You say it yourself - empty people. Consider that this may be a direct consequence of the consumption patterns that we are subjected to.
atomised
1yr ago
active media psyop
It's called diplomacy and it's ten-thousand years old.
atomised
1yr ago
there's only so much we can do to foster that
I would like to see a higher standard of charitability for criticisms of progressive leftism. I would like all posts criticising progressivism to be required to start from the sincere premise that the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place, and for any subsequent argumentation that rejects this idea to be required to explicitly demonstrate it. Far too many posts here are along the lines of 'as we all know, the woke progressive left are trying to force their ideology down our throats and the throats of our children to achieve cultural hegemony, and here's the new way that they're doing it'.
I make this request in the interests of the medium-to-long-term ability of this website to live up to its stated raison d'être. I definitely don't consider myself woke, but I'm not a reactionary either, and my most common response to reading Motte threads is a vague mix of annoyance at the monotonality of the know-it-all-white-stem-guy vibe and a creeping suspicion that most of the posts I'm reading are by fascists hiding their power level. Please forgive the lack of charity in this admission: I share it only to demonstrate that if this is my response to reading these threads, as a know-it-all-white-stem-guy with the habitual chan-browser's acquired tolerance for edgy politics, I worry that most visitors here would be far more strongly repulsed.
As much as it winds me up, some of the best long-form effortposting I've ever read on the internet has been on The Motte and I would be sad to see that end. Any moderator who cares to check can see that I have made source code contributions to the site, so I hope readers of this post do not assume I don't have its best interests in mind. I would appreciate any responses from anyone else who has had a similar experience to me, or (for that matter) from anyone who feels I am misrepresenting things.
This is not really an argument, this is just a list of things you dislike.
It's funny to me when people say that the left can't meme. In one sense I get it: the edginess and nihilism that characterises imageboard meme culture is mostly not compatible enough with progressivism for them to create something like the soyjak. And yet, consider that the 'tolerance of tolerance paradox' went from being an obscure philosophical musing to an almost globally enforced rule of the internet in less than a decade. In memetic warfare terms, that's a victory on the scale of desert storm. A similar argument applies to 'stating ones pronouns' and 'the power plus prejudice definition of racism'. These might not be memes in the same way soyjak is a meme, but they are memetic ideas nonetheless and they have won big time.
P.S. There are a few good leftist memes in a format recognisable to the average reactionary shitposter. 'le pol face' is probably the best example.
P.P.S. All souffles collapse, even expertly made ones.
Interesting post, much of this mirrors my thinking in the last few days. The members of this grim little cabal are rationalists in the first degree, each one of them a type specimen. And though they claimed to be effective altruists - and would have been proudly lauded as such up until two weeks ago - it turns out they're degenerate gamblers and crooks whose amoral recklessness has hurt millions of people. It is statistically nearly certain that some victims of FTX will kill themselves, if they haven't done so already.
You can't delegate morality to mathematics. All it leads to is arrogance, and the 'freedom' to always be able to justify your own behaviour to yourself, even when your actions are those of a base criminal. Rationalism is not a wholly failed project; effective altruism is an important and useful dogma - but these ideas must be alloyed with traditional morality to be effective at inducing virtue.
atomised
1yr ago
largest breach in American-German trust since the NSA spying debacle last decade
I would feel fairly comfortable in saying that it would be larger than that. Spying won't win you friends, but it's been a tacit axiom of geopolitics since the founding of Jericho that everyone spies on everyone. Damaging critical (not to mention obscenely expensive) national infrastructure, however? Wars have started over much less.
If this is Biden's doing I commend him for his pluck. I have my problems with NATO, but Ostpolitik really should've died with the USSR. There is nothing redeeming about Putin's Russia.
atomised
1yr ago
Germany and America not making a public display out of their misgivings for each other is quintessential diplomacy.
atomised
1yr ago
Laying out an array of controversial opinions and then inviting other people to discuss questions which are only coherent if one a priori regards those opinions as true is absolutely a form of consensus-building. It's not as explicit as saying 'we all agree that...', but it's equivalently powerful, because it still essentially obliges the subsequent discussion thread to conform ideologically to the root comment, lest the whole debate lose its consistency. The question 'Did Poland really need money so badly that it had to join the EU?', and any responses to it, are trivially incoherent unless you assume that the EU is an inherently malignant entity.
In fact, this form of consensus building is more potent than the syntactically explicit form ('we all agree that...'), since though it is equally able to enforce conformity among respondents, one cannot as easily demonstrate with a quotation the manner in which debate is being ring-fenced.
atomised
1yr ago
I share your intuitive revulsion to state-sanctioned suicide of a physically healthy young person. Yet doesn't euthanasia, at least for the non-paraplegic, require you to drink the latter-day hemlock yourself? In which case, does this not require an approximately similar amount of courage as downing a pint of vodka and swallowing a handful of barbiturates? And yet the latter would be acceptable to you, simply because it is not done with the sanction of the healthcare system? I am not sure the difference is truly as great as you profess.
atomised
1yr ago
Towns in subjected areas will purposely reduce sidewalks or veto funding for sidewalks in order to deter Hasids from moving in.
I'm not sure if I'm being thick here but what's the relationship between sidewalks and Hasidis?
atomised
1yr ago
I'm not totally sure what you mean by the 'red pill' in this context but I will try and answer. I do not see orthodox 'Third Positionism' coming back into vogue: besides the stain of historical association, it is anachronistic - politics from an age when modernity was symbolised by screaming-fast newspaper presses and the broadcast tower at Alexandra Palace.
American right wingers don't even know what socialism is for the most part so it's barely worth listening to their opinions. However it is true that far-right parties have always been, let's say, undogmatic about economics. They just don't find it interesting. They care only about power: power over people, power over institutions.
atomised
1yr ago
Many people say this, and you probably won't believe it because I didn't either, but until you get a pocket knife you don't realise how useful they are. They allow you to solve problems that beforehand it wouldn't have occurred to you to use a knife to solve.
atomised
1yr ago
But I think that they're a bit similar to latent diffusion models: they are more efficient, due to compressing the trappings of a social network into a lower-dimensionality space
Isn't this a property of autoencoders in general and not just diffusion models? Nice analogy though. I think the question of 'why are imageboards so powerful' is pretty fascinating. It's remarkable their reach; I was on facebook the other day for one of those annoying things that can only be done on facebook, and was recommended a page, the title of which was in the format of the "For me, it's X" meme, which I'm quite sure was a 4chan invention. It's a well-known trope that 4chan is the petri dish from whence memes spring, and yet even so I think normies would be surprised if they really knew how much of their culture and idiom was concocted in such a tiny corner of the internet.
atomised
1yr ago
Let's be clear here: pocket knives are legal to carry in the UK, at any time, without any specific reason. I carry one myself, for such varied uses as cutting sticks for cricket stumps and opening mayo packets at Weatherspoons. The catch is that such knives must be no longer than three inches and must not lock. For day-to-day usage, this is perfectly sufficient, and if you need anything more heavy-duty it's likely that you're camping or otherwise obviously engaged in outdoorsmanship, which is a problem that solves itself since such activities would count as a valid justification were you to be stopped by a policeman.
I'm not sure how I feel about the UK's knife laws personally, but they do often get misrepresented, and their nuance is not often fully considered.
atomised
1yr ago
You shouldn't feel bad about not caring much about the politics of a country on the other side of the world from you, and whose political system you don't understand. But you would do well to not embarrass yourself by publically rolling around in your own ignorance.
atomised
1yr ago
For every person on 4chan who uses slurs as a tactical normie-filter there's three people who just enjoy being shocking and hateful.
atomised
1yr ago
I sympathise with your frustration: I note only that the reason the poster above you is doing that is because there is a sort of de-facto standard system of abbreviations for political parties in Sweden, under which Sweden Democrats are referred to as SD (and the Social Democrats as S, if you're curious).
A fairly large problem with this argument is that under 'the English gaze' Meghan doesn't parse as black. In this country our black communities mostly are only two or three generations old so there are relatively few very light-skinned black people. Moreover, this isn't Norway - even going back centuries there has always been a non-trivial proportion of ethnically English people at least as 'swarthy' as Meghan. Personally, I did not realise that Meghan was officially black until the media kindly informed me, and that's as a young person with an unhealthy interest in the culture war. I suspect this to have been a common experience among Brits.
So, if we are to argue that racism was a large factor in Megan's treatment by the Royal Family, we must suppose that either (a) the British aristocracy are unusually well attenuated to the American racial classification system or (b) that despite not sub-consciously categorising Meghan as black, the Royals were racist to her on account of the consciously received knowledge that she is of African-American descent.
Now I accept that an argument can be made for both these cases, but neither seems obviously true to me. More probable is the suggestion that she was disliked for being American.
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