curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Oh, to actually answer your questions:
I don't think the moderation is a significant issue. Maybe lower activity is an issue, maybe post quality is an issue (but there are more than enough good posts still), maybe the 'high barrier to entry for toplevel posts so so many topics are left undiscussed' thing is an issue, but I just don't think the amount of moderation that happens is enough to affect the place's activity.
So are there good alternatives to the motte out there?
No. ACX comments are, honestly, not that bad if you're able to weed out the 9/10 posts that are terrible quickly by scanning and clicking the minimize button on the side. Various (almost entirely private) discords have good discussion. I think it'd be interesting to have a discord with the same people as here.
His opinions are merely a mirror of extreme pro-white viewpoints that are popular here
I'm pretty sure if you swapped the races in that comment but kept the words the same it'd still be considered rulebreaking.
There is no realistic way to present his honest opinions in here without coming across as hostile, ‘baiting’, ‘trolling’, etc
Nah, not at all. What about: "In the tradition of Nietszche, I hold that the moral value of humans comes primarily from their will to and ability to exercise power. Just as Europeans came into greatness as they conquered the known world several centuries ago and brought their civilization's seed and bounty to all, a new class of Great Men is emerging - this time selected not based on skin color or ancestry - correlated with merit via genes, but imperfectly - but directly via social stratification based on intellegence and competence. Racial nationalists long for the aesthetics of the old order, but fail to perceive this material logic of the new one."
And "As a high IQ person, yes, I've observed that intelligence is correlated with race. And yet, the people I work with, spend my time with, just happen to chat with on the internet -- the people I judge to be worth interacting with - are members of a variety of races. I just see no evidence that an Indian, Jew, or Chinese person lacks any essential qualities that White Men have. And, indeed, Indians, Asians, and Jews have ascended to every height of post-European society seemingly by merit alone. Given that, BAP's complaints about the new multiracial elite seem tinged with ressentiment - just like white overrepresentation is 'structural racism' and the bailey is 'intentionally exists to exploit black people', jewish/indian overrepresentation exists to ... intentionally hurt white people."
(I to a significant extent agree with both of those, although they weren't written as my view, have various problems, and they're more half truths due to missing a lot of context (and no the full context doesn't 'sound better'))
I agree that insults are to a large extent just direct statements of things that directly make people look bad, and people shouldn't react negatively to them. But it's very easy for anyone here to reword their statement to communicate the same idea without getting moderated.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I don't mind Kulak's tone and insults themselves, but I think that pattern of posting is quite closely connected to a lack of intellectual carefulness or willingness to consider that one's latest leap of passion might be wrong. And I think the ultimate reason that rules for tone exist in the first place is that people who have bad tone, accuse opponents of having various bad motivations, and insult are generally are making terrible arguments and create discussions that have terrible arguments. Same to a somewhat lesser extent for HIynka. Burdensome's point is plausibly correct if interpreted correctly, but still, I don't think regulars have ever been given a total pass on the rules, and these blatantly break them.
Also, I remember those three being modded a lot in the past.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Men with guns and the ability to shut down websites do tend to depress volume.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I read him as referring to the use of the capitalized "He", which is generally only done for divine beings. You could also attribute the He to Kulak's intentionally strange writing style.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
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.
What about HBD liberals? There are a lot of people somewhere in between Scott Alexander, Steven Pinker, Charles Murray, (much closer to the edge) Steve Sailer, etc. Or like Cremieux. The first three aren't at all anti-meritocratic racists. You could argue (but it's a bit tortured, and there are deeper causes for far-right growth imo) that the wokes disempowering people like that enables the far-right to grow.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I did audibly laugh as I read the blurbs, and a few times during the articles. On the other hand, I think if you strip out the apocalyptic prophecies, the first few articles are right that Trump's actions on around J6 were pretty bad for "democracy", and that Trump's going to nominate a lot more officials who are from Trump World as opposed to 'the swamp' and as a result will be much less competent at basic government functions. Which isn't too huge of an issue, but it'll just make a lot of things somewhat worse.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
You can get a 10lb bag of rice for $10, that might as well be free. And rice and beans and lentils honestly aren't that bad, I'd much rather eat just that than whatever the average american eats, both by taste and by health.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I couldn't quickly find polls. I agree America was much more racist back then, but iirc the lingering effect of the recent world war made america very much against the term 'fascism'
Please tell me the title of His memoirs from them. Or any of the dozens of works he published.
Okay, here are 'any' of the dozens of works he published:
Pinochet was publicly known as a man with a lack of culture and this image was reinforced by the fact that he also portrayed himself as a common man with simple ideas.[163] He was also known for being reserved, sharing little about his opinions or feelings.[163] Before wresting power from Allende, Pinochet had written two books, Geopolítica (1968) and Campaña de Tarapacá (1972), which established him as a major figure in Chile's military literature.[163] In Geopolítica, Pinochet plagiarized his mentor general Gregorio Rodríguez Tascón by using paragraphs from a 1949 conference presentation of Rodríguez without attributing them to him.[164][165] Rodríguez had previously lectured Pinochet and René Schneider and Carlos Prats in geography and geopolitics. In contrast to the two latter Pinochet was not an outstanding student but his persistence and interest in geopolitics made Rodríguez assume the role as his academic mentor.[165] Rodríguez granted Pinochet a slot as assistant lecturer in geopolitics and in geography. According to Rodríguez, Pinochet would have been particularly impressed by his lectures on The Art of War.[165] Pinochet would later succeed Rodríguez in the geopolitics and geography chair.[165]
I was not immediately able to find the title of his memoir, but I think that's reasonable, given wikipedia is hardly perfect, Pinochet's life has a lot of stuff to cover, and you're able to cherrypick. And, yes, this might be an excessively negative tone (I'm not sure without checking if it's true or not), but as I noted above, there's a difference between writing about something in a biased way and actively suppressing it. I'm claiming the latter isn't happening.
there have been persistent campaigns to remove Irvings works from libraries
There have also been persistent campaigns to remove the fake-banned books about transgender and gay stuff from libraries. I agree that this does not make those books banned, but I apply the same standard for Irving.
and the pressure on used books stores especially is intense (I've spoken with multiple used booksellers who say this)
I mean, it's still available on the used book websites. That's not a ban, that's just the culture war, which we're all aware of.
This was my experience TIME AFTER TIME researching this list. Notably every regime-friendly author had an uncontroversial "Works" section. but as soon as you get into people prominent for holocaust denial, or alleged war crimes... suddenly Wikipedia's very reticent to direct you to further reading
Sure, so a specific example would be nice (other than pinochet, which wasn't super convincing)? My guess is wikipedia's coverage is spotty and random, and you're just not being careful about inferring when people are secretly trying to hide things from you, and it's very easy to choose evidence from randomness to support any point.
This happened on Amazon at the peak of the trump and post j6 years with Scores of books being pulled from Amazon and removed from kindle, i found a list of such works and included many in my list.
I agree that's bad, I don't think it's a "ban" because I can still find those books on google books, abebooks (which is owned by amaon!), etc. Also they're all available for free on various places on the net. And more importantly that's still a small minority of the books on your list.
I also I note you don't mention the works later on... which Carry criminal sentences. (Read the piece and skip down to "How-To Guides of Horror"
I did.
and for an even rarer subset, mere possession can result in years if not decades in prison even in countries all the indexes and US diplomats proudly label “Full Liberal Democracies”.
... Yeah, some non-Ameican countries are terrible about free speech. I think these books are the ones it's reasonable to describe is banned.** As you say, though that's "an even rarer subset".**
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I think your 41% number is correct. And if half of the US population served in the military, then I'd be comfortable calling the South the warrior class informally. But since only 7% ever serve, I don't think that makes sense.
In particular, OP's inference was that people who insult the south are "sneering at our warrior class". To whatever extent the South has distinct cultural attributes from the rest of the US, I don't think it's reasonable to call criticism of that culture 'sneering at the warrior class'. Things like "Cavalier hedonistic indulgence papered over with cheap aristocratic pretension" aren't really true IMO, but they could be, and if they were I don't see what criticizing that has to do with sneering at a warrior class. The people he's criticizing are mostly not warriors! 9% of them are warriors, as opposed to 6% of the people he's not criticizing.
Like, Ranger's post just feels like a non-sequitur to me.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I think I'd maybe slightly disagree with that because occupations are fungible, but not really that strongly and I don't know much.
My much bigger disagreement is I don't understand why that undermines DBDr's original post. He's insulting the South for bad reasons, but (see math below) the south is like 9% "warrior" while the non-south is 6% "warrior", so it doesn't feel like the insults are motivated by, or really related to, that 'warrior class' aspect. And I think it's quite plausible (not true though) for the South to have significant negative cultural features while also providing 41% more of the military than you'd expect, and it'd reasonable to criticize those. If, hypothetically, the black community provided much more than its share of America's soldiers, I'd still support far-right statements about black culture because they're true!
(note: this post has an aggressive tone, because, well, your posts do too! I'd still love to be corrected if I get any, or especially many, details wrong)
REAL Banned Books are decades out of print with publishers who refuse to rerelease them despite used copies going for hundreds of dollars due to pent-up demand
The actual books you list later 'go for hundreds of dollars' because there's very little volume, demand, or supply, so the 'spread' is extraordinarily wide and the market is very illiquid. Hundreds of dollars is the ask, not the bid. If there were hundreds of bids at hundreds of dollars, independent reprinters - think people like dropshippers - would just print a run of low-quality copies and sell them. The modern economy is quite decentralized for low and medium volume items, anyone can start selling these 'banned books' if there's demand. And, indeed, various far-right individuals have started selling old right-wing books on the internet as that movement has grown! I think it is extremely unreasonable to use 'this book costs hundreds of dollars on amazon' as evidence for a ban, when it's also evidence for 'not many people want to buy this. There are so many out-of-print books that cost hundreds of dollars.
Wikipedia editors, and librarians slowly remove and suppress references to the work that they increasingly become impossible to even be aware of.
As far as I can tell, this straightforwardly does not happen in the present day. Can you please provie a single example of this? I feel like you're just making that up because it fits a narrative. Wikipedia loves talking about things like the Turner Diaries and Mein Kampf (and, yeah, how bad they are). Various leftist academics I follow on twitter just love digging up an old and forgotten far-right thinker to discuss.
and for an even rarer subset, mere possession can result in years if not decades in prison even in countries all the indexes and US diplomats proudly label “Full Liberal Democracies”.
... Yeah, some non-Ameican countries are terrible about free speech. I think these books are the ones it's reasonable to describe is banned. As you say, though that's "an even rarer subset".
If the book is truly effectively banned, if the post-totalitarian state has truly effected its disappearance, it will not appear anywhere one might search for a forbidden work, even in mention. It will have merely disappeared… as if it were never written
I don't think this is slightly true for any of the books you mention!
I remember digging a copy of James Burnham’s The Machiavellians
... . James Burnham "chaired the New York University Department of Philosophy" and "was an editor and a regular contributor to William F. Buckley's conservative magazine National Review on a variety of topics". The Machiavellians is in his wikipedia infobox under 'notable works'.
(you said on twitter) Burnham was $700 on Amazon 8 years ago… the fact he’s back in print now after a major effort does not change the fact he was disapeared
He was not disappeared! People became less interested in him, so his work was printed less. Then people became more interested, so it was printed again.
I glanced at the "full list" image, and the first thing that I spotted was a book by Jimmy Carter - Palestine, Peace not Aparthied. A US President? ... Really? I found some controversy over the book, but was unable to find something that seems to be a "ban" as you'd describe above.
So ya, I’m already trapped like Johnny Depp in this oldest and most dangerous of obsessions
On War, Mein Kampf, Various books by nazis
Not currently banned, widely available for purchase, on reading lists for university history courses, etc. Less popular ones than Mein Kampf are harder to find because they're ... less popular, not becuase they're bannd. It feels like you're mixing "currently banned by our post-totalitarian regime" and "banned in the past right after a war by a state significantly less liberal by current standards than we are" into the same "vibe".
David Irving’s Hitler’s War
When was this banned or suppressed? Note that it has an incredibly long wikipedia article dedicated to it, discussing it and subsequent rebuttals. Remember what you claimed:
Wikipedia editors, and librarians slowly remove and suppress references to the work that they increasingly become impossible to even be aware of.
This is not happening.
... In general, this seems like a quite decent list of "divisive, controversial, taboo, and sometimes banned" books. It is just not a list of banned books. You don't even attempt to justify the "banned" status of most books on the list. I get that wildly exaggerating your claims is your whole "thing", but I think in the very long run it hurts you and your positions more than it helps, by fractionating your potential audience such that the exact people you want to reach - people who are extremely smart and mostly disagree with you but are interested in hearing you out - are put off by your work. And in the 'barberpole model' of culture, this means you're missing out on converting people at the top of the pole, and everything flows down from them. Also, it means you'll end up believing a bunch of incorrect things and developing ideas carelessly, which might end up meaning you focus on things like the aesthetics of historical warfare and romanticizing the idea of looking sexy as a moral value while your progressive enemies keep their eye on the ball and obsess over and gain increasing control over the most powerful technology of the century and maybe all of history. Hypothetically.
I will say, this post is a great window into how those unreliable, huge 4chan political image collage memes are made.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
While it's not explicitly illegal to have it, if it ever comes to the attention of the wrong people that you do, I would expect you risk getting busted for something made up or trivial that everyone else normally wouldn't be prosecuted for and some kind of sentencing enhancement citing the fact that you possessed it to document how dangerous you are.
I'm really extraordinarily confident this isn't true. One, there are, like, several hundred thousand Americans who actively consume far-right online content as bad as anything in those books at this point, and at least tens of thousands who actively produce it. They are just not prosecuted, even the ones who are explicitly calling for the gassing of various ethnicities online. Two, merely possessing a book isn't actually a strong signal of believing in its ideology - one of the significant consumers of old far-right books are left-leaning (often far left) historians, political theorists, and writers.
Potential counterarguments: 1 is 'ricky vaughn', but that's one of many and the political motive there would be 'trump + election interference' and not 'far-right'. I think he was probably genuinely antisemitic, but I think he'd still have been prosecuted if he was merely MAGA. 2 is that far-right organizations that do things 'in real life' are targeted by the feds, but I think that's very different from 'owning a book' and they do that to far-left orgs too.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I'm pretty sure literal fascism is more popular now with the internet than it was in the sixties and seventies.
The rules are all about structuring an environment where people openly challenge each other, state their position and opposition plainly, and have a battle of wits, skill, and knowledge
I don't think this is true as stated. It's more of a place where we can discuss ideas and share perspectives. People do stake out opposing positions, but don't really battle as much as they do elaborate and try to convince. I understand why this feels right, the analogy fits. But this place is, if anything, one of the least "battle"-based "political debate" spaces on the internet. Does anyone, for instance, mentally keep track of who's winning the most arguments? I certainly don't - I do have a sense of who's writing well or poorly, but that's almost never based in winning, it's just based on how informative or enjoyable I find reading individual posts. George_E_Hale would be up there if I had to make a status ranked list, even though he just posts little life stories totally unconnected to anything else. Whereas, in say, a community for a small online game, there's a strong competitive spirit and desire to win, people carefully watch who's beating who and try to copy their skills, and form teams based on winrates and stats. Or even in other political debate spaces, there are formalized 'debates' and people discuss after the fact who won the 'debates', who had better arguments, etc. In both of these, while it's not normative, people regularly get very mad when they lose repeatedly, which I don't really see here. So IMO themotte is significantly more feminine in the respect you describe than the kind of 'fair fights' you see in sports - and that's a good thing.
And, indeed, themotte has significantly more women than most other high-intelligence online spaces I participate in, and women are if anything overrepresented among posters I enjoy reading the most versus average posters. (although it's still obviously very male skewed)
Also, iirc most of the major innovators in critical theory, postmodern philosophy, and other in-large-part-BS academic fields (I think there are some good parts in critical theory and postmodernism, but it's undeniable something went wrong) were male. I don't think women have much to do with why Derrida, Freire, or Lacan are like that.
In my experience, advocates of veganism (as opposed to all vegans) tend to disproportionately belong to the latter group, and so they aren't going to feel comfortable and competent at interacting with the Motte
Eh. There are a ton of extremely 'masculine' (in terms of discourse style) vegan advocates, even though you're right that vegan activists are disproportionately female (iirc), so I don't think this is actually an issue at all. Random examples - avi bitterman, vegan gains (both of whom are also very "masculine" in the physical sense), also Effective Altruists (less so in the physical sense)! One of the much more aggressive and combat-oriented debate communities I was referencing above is significantly composed of vegans.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I think this is in part true, but it's also true that both he and his audience genuinely believe that Chinese, Indians, etc genuinely have spiritual racial qualities that make them deleterious to civilization. And it's possible to troll to make people think, but his trolling has - in practice - had the effect of creating a culture that vibes their way into genuine belief in nonsense. The idea of racial differences in psychology itself isn't implausible - we had a discussion about the racial characteristics of the Chinese a while back, and I found the arguments to the effect of few significant differences other intelligence to be much more persuasive than the ones claiming more significant differences. But the 'vibe' surrounding BAP isn't one that even engages in such arguments in ways that might lead to changing one's mind, in favor of an aestheticized sense of intellectualism and 'old books'
Oh, sorry, my bad, I should've clicked that. I think what happened is I parsed this as a 'post with a lot of links, so I'm not going to click on most of them', and then didn't pay as much attention to individual links.
I think my main argument is just that I don't expect moral philosophers to have insightful comments in every domain of ethical behavior for the same reason that I don't expect mathematicians to be experts at every domain of math. I see Singer's comment there as less a flaw in utilitarianism and more this xkcd comic. Most people who are very smart have huge blind spots outside of the area they're experts in, and this is often worse for smart and contrarian thinkers, because they have a habit of coming up with their own ideas, and the first few times (usually many more) you try that in a new area you'll be retreading the mistakes of others in the far past.
When I interact with people who claim to be philosophical utilitarians in person, I don't really see a 'lack of duty to the near' - they seem to have similar levels of personal attachments and duties to their friends and families as non-utilitarians, with various rationalizations. There's a significantly higher rate of 'polyamory', but they still consider cheating and 'trading sexual favors for status at work' to be bad. (And, indeed, there are strong consequentialist reasons to believe those are bad). They also seem to have similar levels of interpersonal bad behavior as non-utilitarians.
Second of all, I don't disagree too much with that passage. I think the context is important - this is the second and third paragraph of the first chapter of his book on ethics, and it exists to introduce / frame his philosophical approach, not specifically to make an argument about sex.
There was a time, around the 1950s, when if you saw a newspaper headline reading RELIGIOUS LEADER ATTACKS DECLINING MORAL STANDARDS, you would expect to read yet again about promiscuity, homosexuality and pornography, and not about the puny amounts we give as overseas aid to poorer nations or the damage we are causing to our planet’s environment. As a reaction to the dominance of this narrow sense of morality, it became popular to regard morality as a system of nasty puritanical prohibitions, mainly designed to stop people from having fun.
Fortunately, this era has passed. We no longer think that morality, or ethics, is a set of prohibitions particularly concerned with sex. Even religious leaders talk more about global poverty and climate change and less about promiscuity and pornography. Decisions about sex may involve considerations of honesty, concern for others, prudence, avoidance of harm to others and so on, but the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by safe sex.) Accordingly, this book contains no discussion of sexual morality. There are more important ethical issues to be considered.
He isn't really trying to make a novel point about the unimportance of sex - he's mostly claiming his ideas are aligned with the mainstream perspective (the 'progressive, tolerant' one) in not placing the kind of moral taboos on sex as history's conservatives. And, he's not claiming morality has nothing to say about sex, just that it's not special - the standard 'duty for the near' requirements of honesty, concern for others, avoidance of harm, are still present! He is still underrating the importance of sexual ethics somewhat, but eh.
And I do think people think more about the morality of sex than they should, and less about the morality of other things (the impact of their occupation on other people, AI, ...), while even progressives think a lot about the morality of sex.
Even philosophically, I think utilitarianism is very compatible with quasi-virtue ethics behavior in interpersonal behavior. Indeed, I think that's actually the standard line from Yud and rationalists - "yeah, i'm a utilitarian, that's why I act virtuously and care for my friends, because it has predictably good consequences!"
I'm not sure the 'behavior following from ethics' thing applies well here. It's easy to make that argument for a monk who says his Way grants you equinamity, freedom from desire, and universal love, his affairs and fraught personal drama are good arguments against his ideas. But the e.g. drowning child argument isn't a prescription for smooth interpersonal interaction, it's an argument for donating to the Against Malaria Foundation or GiveDirectly. And given Singer has done a lot of work on things like that, it's not obvious why affairs undermine that, it's just a different area. You can be a useful moral philosopher while behaving badly in your personal life in a way similar to how you can be a good mathematician but a bad engineer, I think.
I don't really find the argument that utilitarianism leads to this persuasive, tbh. The philosophical utilitarians I personally know still manage to find some rationalized justifications for why cheating and other common non-normative behaviors are bad, and they seem to do negative interpersonal behaviors as much as more normal people. And there are a bunch of utilitarian public figures, so it should be expected that some of them will cheat. A lot of people cheat. I think it's analogous to SBF - just because he's a utilitarian and fraudster doesn't mean that one led to the other, there's a certain base rate of financial criminals (and that base rate is already pretty high in crypto) and you'd have to show that the rate among utilitarians is even higher, not that utilitarian financial criminals exist.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I'm curious if people who downvoted can explain why? I just don't think there's a significant material link between the South and America's modern "warrior class". Or was it tone? The third paragraph was intended to be self-deprecating and indicate my uncertainty.
7.3 percent of all living Americans have served in the military at some point in their lives.
This is a factor of ten smaller of a difference than would justify the above comment. 90% southerners never serve in the military, and those that do serve only 20% more often than northerners. Calling them the 'warrior class' is absurd.
Or, you know, maybe the first numbers on Google are wrong. That's possible. (I skimmed the articles, they seem reasonable). But if you're going to make fiery moral pronouncements, maybe bring a number or two with it, so we can check if the claim is justified?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Among women, it still seems to be decreasing?
I wouldn't put the % abusing pills above 10%? This site gives 5% in past 12 months.
enthusiastic consent
I was only able to find laws in California about enthusiastic consent for college sexual harassment policies eg here. If it's the law for sexual assault in general I might be wrong, but what law specifically is that?
Saying that it is “not actually enforced enough to entirely change the culture” is, pardon me, nothing but a cope, even if it’s technically true
Well, we're discussing the material causes of the decline of the PUA scene, so I think the law has a lot less of a chance of causing the PUA scene to decline if it isn't enforced enough to matter. It can be somewhat taboo to do PUA stuff and it can still work.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Hm. First off, I think the 10% alimony stat is a correct rebuttal to the common manosphere narrative, which is straightforwardly wrong, because the manosphere - whether or not they're directionally correct - doesn't have much of an appetite for precision. Your claim is interesting generally - but I think divorce doesn't take that much wealth from most americans, because most americans don't have that much wealth in the first place, especially when (relatively) young, and assets acquired before the marriage can stay with the original owner.
So I think the specific manosphere claim that women 'divorce rape' men for their own benefit isn't true, unless you're decently rich and married a woman who isn't, which itself isn't as common as the manosphere claims.
Warnings that never result in punishments are meaningless, just like a stock that'll never pay a dividend or buyback or ever return profit somehow.
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