cuwurious_strag_CA
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User ID: 190
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
The idea that we live in an exploitative system, where people are divided into classes, one designated the oppressor, and the other the oppressed.
This is the point - both are progressive, in that both want to liberate the tired masses or oppressed people. But the idea that's specifically "marxist class conflict", as opposed to generic progressivism / universalism, is misleading.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Well then we're working with an idiosyncratic definition of 'deplatforming', where if the emperor biden instated a 'conservative censorship committee', that'd be US law and therefore not deplatforming, and similar past instances where newspapers were shuttered for breaking contrived or broad laws also aren't deplatforming, which is the point
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
that it took Marx's theory of class conflict, and applied it to cultural conflict
What does this mean? It's not marx was the first person to come up with "different cultural groups have conflicts". What specifically from "marx's theory of class conflict" is present in today's cultural conflict that wasn't in any other cultural conflict?
Now, of course they are related in that both are progressive. But the "marxism" part is a total distraction, "gender ideology" is about as marxist as a republican is
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I don't think they're crazy or trolling, and while I won't pretend I believe that their experiences are real, nor will I start a fight with them. I don't feel obligated to sneer and say "You're just experiencing things you've convinced yourself are real."
It's not nice, but ... it is true, and what would've happened if voltaire, jesus, moldbug, etc took this approach? Even if it makes the person 'mad' or 'sad', surely it benefits them to understand the situation better? They're making significant decisions based on these claims, and .. what else is there to their belief in god, besides the way they understand things, and decisions they make resulting from it? (no, not saying moldbug is jesus, they are varying examples of the same point)
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
just like the opposite of stupidity isn't intelligence, the "regime" or any power censoring something doesn't mean it's either high or low quality - they get more upset at "random white guy kills a bunch of random muslims" than thiel.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
If a statement is true, but is boo outgroupy, you can make it not boo outgroup by just fleshing it out more and explaining why it's true. If you make novel or compelling, or even just interesting, points that are 'boo outgroup', the mods will probably allow it (see: kulak's regular genocidposts), but the OP was meh
Left-wing of course is an organizational structure where low performers pledge their loyalty to managers in exchange for loot
Did jesus give anyone loot? What about philanthropy? Left-wingers really do care about the poor minorities (not that they should), and really do want to free them from pain, complexity, oppression. This isn't just 'pledging loyalty for loot' exactly
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
One local 'john brown chapter' twitter account saying that (and it's plausible it was some guy trolling, like all the 'portland city antifa' accounts - although the links below seem real) doesn't mean all john brown chapters are automatically awful. Same goes for right wing orgs or w/e
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
only way for the world to function is for society to assume parents have their biological children's best interests at heart, which they do 99% of the time
Not that circumcision is that important, but - say we took this approach with 'lead paint', or unregulated medicine for serious medical conditions, or, when polio was widespread, polio vaccines. It doesn't really make sense.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
... it would make sense to include attacks on wikipedia as a source in a context where: wikipedia was being used to support incorrect claims - wikipedia was making incorrect claims - or wikipedia was a key pillar of my argument. But in no cases is that true here - what was being debated was vaguely "did a significant group of people call themselves alt-right, or was it a media term to label conservatives". And I was using it to show how easily accessible that information is, and also supported it with direct links, so I don't see why it's worth questioning wikipedia here. And the wikipedia article very effectively answers that question -
The alt-right, an abbreviation of alternative right, is a loosely connected white supremacist and white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s and the early 2010s, before increasing in popularity during the mid-2010s and establishing a presence in other countries, and has declined since 2017. The term is ill-defined, having been used in different ways by alt-right members, media commentators, journalists, and academics. A far-right movement, it rejects mainstream political ideologies such as conservatism and liberalism.
I think the connection between the alt-right and white supremacy is more 'very close' than 'entirely', but that's very complicated, and this is a decent introduction to the topic.
In 2010, the American white nationalist Richard B. Spencer launched The Alternative Right webzine. His "alternative right" was influenced by earlier forms of American white nationalism, as well as paleoconservatism, the Dark Enlightenment, and the Nouvelle Droite. His term was shortened to "alt-right", and popularised by far-right participants of /pol/, the politics board of web forum 4chan. It came to be associated with other white nationalist websites and groups, including Andrew Anglin's Daily Stormer, Brad Griffin's Occidental Dissent, and Matthew Heimbach's Traditionalist Worker Party. Following the 2014 Gamergate controversy, the alt-right made increasing use of trolling and online harassment to raise its profile. In 2015, it attracted broader attention—particularly through coverage on Steve Bannon's Breitbart News—due to alt-right support for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Upon being elected, Trump disavowed the movement. Attempting to move from a web-based to a street-based movement, Spencer and other alt-rightists organized the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to violent clashes with counter-demonstrators. The fallout from the rally resulted in a decline of the alt-right.
This is also a decent introduction to the topic, and would've been very useful for the people who claimed 'nobody called themselves alt-right" to read. The mention of dailystormer, occidental dissent, paleoconservatism, dark enlightenment, etc - those are definitely relevant!
So, given that many people in this thread would have been informed by reading just the first two paragraphs of the wikipedia article, the claim that "[wikipedia is not a better source than a random blog / not a great way to get broader context] on topics related to American contemporary culture war" is, imo, false. The rest of the article is certainly morally against the alt-right ... but that's to be expected, everyone is against the alt-right, they're "nazis"! Outgroup, the hated enemy, etc, it's really not worth expecting anything else. The rest of the article is also worth reading - much of it is misleading, of course, and wikipedia's article about priming is also misleading, writing things that are entirely accurate is ... quite hard, but it's still worth reading.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
You claimed that "abusive" meant nothing more than "bad". This isn't true. It is a specific subclass of bad
I mean, does it mean anything more than "very bad act done to vulnerable group"?
If it was, it would not be necessary to hide these things from parents.
It isn't necessary to hide it [specifically, drag and gay people, not children doing drag] from most parents!
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
sorry I thought it was common knowledge
As you clearly know, many people who lean left would disagree with that. In an attempt to convince them, or at least give people something to discuss, you should post evidence, and discuss context in more detail.
Also the entire "White house censorship" thing is irrelevant. Reddit mods have been censoring the exact same things, misinformation, right wing stuff, nazis, etc for a decade now just on a volunteer basis. Why does it matter if it's the white house doing the same thing?
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
they aren't mental illnesses
Which is my point, the "sociogenic" part plays no role in a judgement that trans is bad or should be discouraged. Claiming it is a "mental illness" is what that relies on, which is honestly an uninformative term itself - "doing X" is only a mental illness if X is bad, and you still need to determine that.
On your second point, I got halfway through a literature review before being distracted and losing progress, but there wasn't really convincing evidence the desistance rate was 80% - it just seemed all over the place.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
I mean, banning sex and porn is of little consequence; whereas banning ideas is of larger consequence.
This is when a progressive would bring up sex workers, sexual repression, etc.
However, banning ideas is how we arrive at a communist/authoritarian regime
"First they came for the pornographers, then the disabled, then the jews" or something.
Which is why we value free speech
It's useful to know about all sorts of things out there. Images are information too, being able to understand why porn is what it is personally is useful in understanding its effects and importance, whether good or bad.
Not that censorship is evil because of that - but the same applies to politics. Censorship may have benefits that, locally, outweigh the negatives, as well as the slippery slopes and principles etc. Would you object to censorship during wartime, on grounds of any of preventing spies / preventing leaks of important war information (this might include stuff like 'how much the local factory is producing) / keeping morale up / explicit propaganda? The US has engaged in this heavily in the past, depsite the 1st amendment.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
accepts abuse as a form of care
That's cool but what abuse specifically?
We're in a sixth grade social science class. The teacher is covering a history of the liberation movements of the 60s, and is describing how they bravely fought for gender exploration, which is good and everyone should consider their gender and here's some resources and links and support communities, join the school LGBTQ alliance discord, try out identities like clothing see which ones you like that are better, three years later sally is steve and john is jane. Okay. That isn't a major path to children transitioning, but let's just say it is, for the hypothetical.
So - what was the grooming? Was it the 'here's the discord, here's the links, here's the resources'? Okay. If grooming is 'preparing a child for abuse' - where was the abuse at the hands of the teacher?
A groomer assumes a role of a trust and care in a child's life and convinces them that abuse is good for them.
Is the teacher obtaining sexual gratification from ... the abuse? What abuse?
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Here's a bunch of claims - the percentage of teachers who introduce trans stuff in their classrooms that go on to sexually abuse children is similar to the percentage of teachers who don't mention trans stuff at all and then go on to sexually abuse children. >95% of teachers who introduce children to transgender material do not do so with the intent of sexually abusing them, in any form. >90% of children who transition were not introduced to 'trans' by a teacher or other school official, nor did said teacher or school official play a primary/causal role in the child's transition.
Which do you disagree with? What evidence is there for any of them? And - if they are all accurate - how does 'trans grooming' make sense as a claim leveled against most instances of trans stuff in school?
Again this is entirely orthogonal to 'should children transition', or 'should adults transition'. Gender/sex are a constellation of traits arranged around finding a suitable mate to have children with, so transitioning genders is like painting a rock like an apple and eating it. It's pointless in every case. But grooming is not, at all, involved.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Please tell me: do you believe my art teacher telling me I should come to school in women's underwear to get in touch with my true self qualifies as grooming
To be clear - are you claiming this physically happened to you? If so, I'd appreciate if you elaborated a bit, gave context, etc, although it makes sense if you don't want to.
I know a lot of trans people, many of whom transitioned in high school, and at least 80% of them weren't encouraged at all by their school / parents to be trans, and despite knowing a lot of personal details of several I've never heard of anything like that happening, so it's not really representative of the median 'trans kid'.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
Right, and if you have 350 democratic congresspeople in your basement, "If the left imagines they can govern by force and without the consent of the opposition, why should the right not adopt a similar stance" might mean something.
But this is a question of 'was it cool or not for desantis to charge a few people with meaningless crimes', that isn't 'crushing' the left or 'governing by force', it's just a random minor issue. Same for the gun thing, a few people go to prison for dumb reasons, people can't own cool guns, that sucks, but doesn't really have any long-term impact. The right isn't "on the chopping block", legally, if a few gun owners go to prison sometimes - i mean, is the left "on the chopping block" because people go to prison for weed and LSD sometimes? It sucks, but it's quite minor, hardly a pogrom or a work camp.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
"Those other guys are jumping off of bridges. Why shouldn't I be able to do that too?"
Because the point of 'accepting claims', in this context, is to actually figure out if abortion is good or bad, what relevance that has to law, and use that knowledge and the way one comes to it in other areas as well. "Abortion is domestic violence" doesn't mean anything other than "i don't like abortion for some other reason", and throwing terrible justifications at each other is pointless. Believing it makes you dumber, and less able to figure out the right approach to abortion, and anything else. What about children transitioning? Domestic violence! AI art? Theft from the WORKING CLASS. Banning affirmative action is LITERALLY jim crow. TheMotte isn't a TV ad for a state senate race, and the latter shouldn't even exist.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
because analogies often work as an attempt to explain a position, but not as an attempt to persuade
Huh? How are these different? If you listen to political speeches or debates, both often attempts to persuade, there are tons of analogies.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
But you're just using the way in which domestic violence is "very bad", which is something about how women are vulnerable and get really hurt, but that doesn't apply at all to abortion. Also, murder is worse than domestic violence, and abortion is domestic violence 'only because' aortion is murder, so how can this help?
Yelling at a child when they're about to put a fork in an electrical outlet and you're 100 feet away from them is literally hurting a child's feelings. But - it isn't ... bad.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
a lack of respect for education
I don't think jews have any more respect for education, marriage, rule of law, or unselfish cooperation (in fact, the stereotype, although not that accurate, is that they're selfish), yet they are nobel prize winners or accomplished mathematicians at 10x the rate of whites or asians.
This ... doesn't really touch on 'whether or not they could do it'.
In mine, money is not the sole driver of decision making, or even necessarily the biggest one
"not the sole driver" brings to mind 99%, maybe 90%. "Not necessarily the biggest one" immediately brings us below 49.9%. Which?
That’s because it is not the abstract rational profit-maximizing making these decisions, but actual, real people
Actual, real people who are very skilled at, and work very hard at, profit-maximizing - as in, specifically, understanding how the company makes money and making decisions to increase profit. Vaguely recall bezos mentioning how important understanding the details of the financials of your company, and having a good account of everything that happens, is to a successful startup.
Moreover, these people often don’t even stand to lose or gain the actual figure that their decisions result in
Executives often have compensation plans that directly hinge on stock price, though? A common poorly-understood-complaint is "executives have bonuses based on stock price, leading them to optimize for stock price at the expense of social well being / long term growth", which seems to contrast with that.
less strong than you suggest
Less strong than 'total universal law' ... sure, but how much so? Enough to be 'not even the biggest driver'?
Would people actually do that? I’ll say this: if was in a position where I’m in control of significant amount of resources of a wealthy corporation, and I can use it to nudge it to achieve my own political/social goals with small risk to my own career, and with damage to company’s bottom line, I would have totally done it.
But would you have specifically made the cast of a TV-show all white when the market research showed having it be 50% hispanic and 50% black would get the most views because the viewers want diversity? It's very plausible that an exec who deeply believes in 'wokeness' would still not do that, in particular.
Would SJW-aligned execs, unlike me, stick to the moral principles of the gods of capitalism, and only care for the bottom line? Obviously not.
We've totally avoided things like 'how common is this', or the specific contingency that could lead here, in favor of broad, general statements that don't connect to much. There's no way to tell from the above that "obviously" the "SJW-aligned execs" (and SJW really isn't the right term here) would push diversity because they believe in it.
(Also, wouldn't the people 'pushing diversity' here be, like, casting directors or writers, who you'd expect to be more 'woke' and be directly involved in this, and have less exposure to stock price or w/e?)
Like, the above style of argument really isn't gonna prove much. The only way to really find out what the causes are of woke casting or woke storytelling is gonna be reading accounts from people involved, whether they're the woke(?) writers/actors/execs themselves - who will often just proudly state that they're hiring more black people because representation is critical for underprivileged black youth or something - or someone who was there and thought it was ridiculous blogging after the fact.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
"From wikipedia" should lose you any argument.
Wikipedia is in almost all contexts a better source, in practice, than any random news website or blog. It is especially a great way to get broad context on a topic or issue, which is precisely what OP doesn't have! And in this case it is accurate. Nevertheless, it's confirmed with "primary sources" from alternativeright.com, and elsewhere from /r/altright. Sure, it's morally biased against the right, but that doesn't prevent it from having detailed and mostly accurate articles on it.
Also, "alternative right" is not "alt right" for the same reason that "Afro-American" is not "African-American"--"these two phrases are almost the same so they mean the same thing" is not how the culture war works.
Sure, but richard spencer, when he was still emphatically alt-right, used both, and was using alt-right to describe a "movement" in 2011. That objection doesn't make sense in relation to the way people used the term. I've talked to a lot of far-right people over the past decade, and have seen 'alt-right' used to describe their own white nationalist/fascist/extreme right movement many times, and used to describe their own 'maga / conservative who dislikes bush movement' not many at all.
cuwurious_strag_CA
1yr ago
so you've got nothing
just "It’s a common belief among early-reading experts that roughly forty per cent of children can learn to read fluently without much direct instruction. “Those are the people who grow up to say, ‘I don’t remember how I learned to read; I just did it,’ ” Leah Wasserman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist in Brooklyn, told me. “But about sixty per cent need some level of explicit instruction, and those kids are not going to do well with Teachers College"
I think they are. An unstructured version of it
sure, but 'whole word' style also has portions of an unstructured version of phonics! just showing single-syllable words together with their pronunciation is enough for that. And that's enough for a particularly smart kid to learn from.
Clearly "i have a dream" and "girls can freaking do everything" are more wholesome than "racism = prejudice + power". Marxism, however, isn't when you suggest a particular group of people are bad, or that a particular group have to be fought against, or that one particular group is harming another particular group. It isn't even when you do that in a left-wing way. Was the french revolution culturally marxist?
So, what specifically about "racismprejudicepower" and "patriarchy" are more like marxist / class conflict than a generic mix of "progressive" and "not wholesome"?
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