drmanhattan16
No bio...
User ID: 640
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
I don't want to convince you your vote isn't meaningless, but I sense a free lunch here. Would you be willing to vote the way I ask, since you are indifferent to what the actual result of the election is?
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
Even taking your example, there is no clear indication that voting is a good solution. An unpopular argument is just as likely, if not moreso, to get downvoted than one that is maximally annoying.
But again, you don't have to engage. There is no limit on the bits available in the site. No one is getting their comments deleted if some people choose to post in bad faith the way you describe.
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
Why don't you like the upvote/downvote systems?
I hate that people use them as a means of enforcing what opinions are considered good or bad. I have very rarely downvoted, only doing so if I think a user is not actually trying to contribute to the thread, even if their opinions are unacceptably vile. Letting people indulge their desire to indicate a position's popularity is bad, doubly so for a platform meant to move us past shady thinking.
But a need to engage less is not actually an argument against voting.
It's an argument against fast forms of engagement, which you agree that voting is.
Just because you have ceased to cater to / platform / respond to someone, does not mean that person has ceased to exist.
No doubt. The question is whether a a person should be catered or responded to.
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
I also think votes, and especially visible vote scores can be a bit of a pressure valve. There are sometimes people that just feel the need to express in some way "I don't like your post/views". One way for them to do this is to downvote. Another way for them to do this is to leave a short comment to the same effect.
Why would I or anyone else who doesn't like the upvote/downvote system care about indulging this feeling? If you feel like you disagree with someone but can't explain why, move on. Don't engage. Instead, go do something else. No one is going to hold your participation or lack thereof against you. Not any of us, anyways.
God knows most people would benefit from engaging with the culture war less.
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
I don't follow... there has to be commonality for domination to work.
The commonality would just be colocation, right? I can't impact the people of China unless I live there. Not easily, anyways.
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
Of writers that could be plausibly described as outside of progressive monoculture (or at least outside of the ethos that formed theSchism, you and I (and I guess DuplexFields?) seem the only current significant overlap between TheSchism and TheMotte, and I'm marginal.
Ah, well, I'm pretty marginal as well. I don't post much in either place.
it doesn't really matter if you and Numbers never had similar discussions on the schism by accident, or by plan.
Funny thing is that I can see where that conversation seemed to have come tantalizing close to getting at the important question. I'd be interested to see what Numbers thinks of the Palestinian struggle, as I think FC's post talking about violence could almost perfectly be applied to the their efforts to secure a nation for themselves, but now the left's sympathies align more with this group than they would for your average white American Christian right-winger.
But it's not really even his positions that annoy me at times. It's the way in which he can't seem to contain his style into something which is professional and sterile.
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
There can be subcultures, or countries that contain different cultures by region, but these days there usually is a common culture uniting the entire country. It's also not something based solely on negotiation, and can be quite oppressive. Progressives are usually the first to point this out with things like homophobia, strict gender roles, etc.
It's hardly common if it's oppressing certain groups, right? That's a sign one group's beliefs are dominating other groups.
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
Maybe there's supposed to be a difference between "country" and "culture", but no matter how I slice it, it sounds at most like the same thing with extra steps.
Compare it to individual houses in a neighborhood. A family's rules reign supreme in their own home, no one can demand they do something. But outside that house, they don't hold that power and have to negotiate if they want anything done.
The issue is the misuse of "country" because it implies a certain level of being able to make moral demands of others. We don't live in such an age. If a man from Kansas approached one from New York, the idea that the former could demand the latter change their behavior or views to align with a different morality would be considered absurd by most people.
drmanhattan16
1mo ago
But it's hard to read this conversation and not see my (and I guess drmanhattan16 's?) participation in TheSchism (and TW's twitter sphere) as part of the problem.
Sorry, what? I'm not clear on why I was referenced.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
The appropriate analogy would be "don't tell a trans person you don't think they're the gender they claim to be", not "don't tell people their evaluation of your sex doesn't match what you say it is".
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
I think you're getting at an important point. People don't like to think that others are doing things to them mentally. We make a compromise - don't make your thoughts other people's problems. If you want to masturbate to a classmate, you can't be stopped, just don't tell them you did that.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
Just a minor point, but it is unclear to me how Hanania distinguishes social progressivism from woke. In particular, I think deBoer's definition matches what is meant by "woke" much better:
- Academic rhetoric
- Focused on the immaterial.
- Structural criticisms followed by individual prescriptions.
- Treating emotions as political problems i.e. Failure to Cope under Capitalism
- Fatalistic (declaring that only systemic solutions can save us, but no such change is ever possible)
- Thinking that politics is solved
- Oppression is virtue
It seems to me like deBoer is at least picking up on a very important set of attributes shared by the online woke, and that serious socially progressive people are not a perfect match for this. One can, for instance, be like Ezra Klein, who may have his own issues, but doesn't come off in the same way.
Or perhaps I'm just mistaken, and wokeness is the black sheep of the socially progressive family in Hanania's argument - an embarrassment that is disliked by its own peers, but still to be defended from outsiders.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
The argument is that this is how they gain provenance. Since people are suspicious of new accounts, gaining karma and age by commenting is the solution. The bots don't care who they are copying, only that there is someone to copy.
Secondly, the fact that a person can go into another's history doesn't mean they will, and it doesn't mean that you'll be able to pick out a pattern. What if an account just belongs to someone who is both deadset on the products they like and genuinely provides them as support. No one is out here saying "Product X rules!", the examples on HackerNews literally involved "talking" about the issue and what is supposedly "good" to use.
drmanhattan16
2mo ago
The posters on HackerNews, ever blinkered, theorize that this is some sort of effort to farm karma in order to promote products. That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts.
Your rebuttal makes no sense. The argument is that these accounts are pretending to be people to sway people's decisions on the products they buy. The commercial value of an account doesn't factor into it.
drmanhattan16
3mo ago
Another point to consider - for all the talk of Flowerman and his ilk, where is the proof that he was the reason for the outcome? All we have is that Flowerman was explicit about wanting to propagandize ordinary Americans and that Americans today generally display far less in-group bias/ethnocentrism. The article sets out against the notion that Jews aren't a fifth column, but it doesn't make any convincing case that they are.
Jews have the notion of "never again", but they're not the only ones who have bones to pick with American bigotry. You don't need a Jewish conspiracy to eliminate in-group biases in the dominant culture when that culture did harm to others, but it seems quite a few people really want the Jews to be consciously involved in these attacks against the dominant culture.
drmanhattan16
3mo ago
Do we need an explanation beyond "people throw all the buzzwords at whatever they see"? Incel is a popular progressive insult, and people love using insults even if they don't really fit.
drmanhattan16
3mo ago
drmanhattan16
3mo ago
Yeah, but can birds shoot fireballs at each other?
drmanhattan16
3mo ago
They wont get "unfair" utility by spreading their opinion more than before, and the argument would be one where both sides arent particularly enjoying prolonging.
The problem is that we'd have to discuss the facts on the ground, and any anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers would inherently get to promote their view that they don't think Jews are by default as trustworthy as others. For some, their goal is just to spread doubt and get the talking points out, not to actually reconsider their views on the Jews or anything related.
drmanhattan16
3mo ago
but their narrative isn’t popular except in small corners and it comes with no social benefit
Humans are largely interested in the status games they partake of, not the ones they don't. It doesn't matter if it's only popular in their small corners if they don't care about status outside it. Except to the extent they have to be a part of that broader society, of course.
Your typical anti-white twitter poster isn’t going through old books and articles and tomes to revise how some moment in white history was fabricated.
The people on the fringe of society have to do more work to make their points palatable to the public, that doesn't mean they can't be motivated primarily or solely by hatred.
drmanhattan16
3mo ago
But it's not going to go anywhere. No one is going to back down on the credibility of their sources, especially if the inferential distance is too large.
drmanhattan16
3mo ago
I think that's the defensible stance, in the sense that it doesn't indicate anti-Semitic beliefs. But "Jews have assigned the Holocaust a unique position in Western history" is a far weaker stance to take, imo, that most revisionists don't seem to hold. If they just hated how the history was distorted, I think there would be fewer revisionists overall - there's simply less of an axe to grind.
I think SS and the revisionists do genuinely hate the Jews. Not in the childish sense of "look at this bitch breathing", but in the sense that they think it's acceptable to declare a heuristic like "Jew? Morally suspect, opinion discarded".
I do seem to notice a correlation between Holocaust denial and a strong interest in Jews?
You would expect this in all places which allow the topic, not just here, because a natural question as part of digging into the "Holocaust conspiracy" is why it exists. For that, the answer (Edit: given by revisionists) is Jews as well. At the very least, I know SS has talked about Elie Wiesel in the past, who is a Holocaust survivor. Wiesel is also an activist who has been tireless in promoting the Holocaust as an act unique in its depth of immorality. From Wikipedia:
In 1982, at the request of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Wiesel agreed to resign from his position as chairman of a planned international conference on the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Wiesel then worked with the Foreign Ministry in its attempts to get the conference either canceled or to remove all discussion of the Armenian genocide from it, and to those ends he provided the Foreign Ministry with internal documents on the conference's planning and lobbied fellow academics to not attend the conference.
Or, we can talk about the supposed 11 million killed in the Holocaust - that number is actually a fabrication by a Jewish Nazi hunter named Simon Wiesenthal. From the Jewish Virtual Library:
Five million is frequently cited as the number of non-Jews killed by the Nazis. The figure is inaccurate and was apparently an invention of famed Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal. According to historian Deborah Lipstadt, he began to refer to “eleven million victims” of the Holocaust, six million Jews and five million non-Jews in the 1970s. Wiesenthal later admitted making up the figure to promote interest in the Holocaust among non-Jews. Lipstadt, says “he chose five million because it was almost, but not quite, as large as six million.”
None of this would matter if Jews didn't disproportionately occupy positions of wealth, status, and power. None of this would matter if the Holocaust wasn't seared into our moral memory. But since both have happened, it should not surprise anyone that anyone interested in Holocaust denial is basically guaranteed to also talk about how Jews control non-Jews at the detriment of the latter.
Edit: To be clear, I don't agree with the revisionist position, I am only explaining why you would naturally see people go from revisionism to focused on the Jews.
drmanhattan16
3mo ago
As you point out, even the most righteous among the nations involved in WW2, the US, saw it fit to intern ethnic minority civilians. Minorities were everywhere looked at with suspicion.
This was after Japan had declared war on the US. Germany, by contrast, was not going to fight Israel, given that the latter didn't exist at the time. What threat did the various targeted minorities pose to the German people that the Germans did not invite unto themselves by invading the nations where those people lived?
Straight Democrat in all possible cases.
More options
Context Copy link