Whomever ZHPL is, his writing reads like a crazy political grifter. There was a lot of text, but what was all that text even trying to say? I feel like he barely even tried to tie thought threads together. For example, he went from "in 1968, leftism was taking over the world", then in the next sentence said that almost a full decade later, French intellectuals baned age of consent. Am I supposed to think something about this? Am I supposed to think that one event led to the other? Can he even try to convince me of this instead of just assuming I already agree? 9 years later, people in France did something. Okay. Maybe there's a connection I'm not seeing. If so, prove it.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
The opposition left I believe will become less engaged. How do you motivate the troops if you spend 8 years calling him the Antichrist and then the American people reject that and vote him in anyway. They would be a defeated people.
Wow, you're a lot more optimistic than I am! I anticipate that we will revert right back to everyone calling him (and actually thinking) he's the Antichrist, and the left will simply use the fact that he was reelected as proof that we're a white supremecist nation, that Trump has corrupted various institutions through dirty dealing, that Russia is still meddling in our elections, and what else.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
She is also portrayed as a much more antagonistic character in this movie than in the books.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
I guess when I said
Is there an explanation for Reagan?
I meant to be asking why so many leftists seem to have this vitriolic hatred for Reagan to this day, to see if there's an explanation besides just "they'll have vitriolic hatred for any Republican who's in power".
So are you saying that the left to this day hate Reagan because he actually had sway over the populace, and he managed to shift the country right?
haroldbkny
2mo ago
The court has sought to lower the political temperature as a primary goal
Do you mean the current Supreme Court? I don't follow much SCOTUS news in general, but I thought that people felt that this court was doing the opposite of that. They had two landmark rulings within the past two years that both pissed off leftists, hard: Dobbs struct down Roe in 2022, and last year they overruled affirmative action.
Could you clarify? I am likely just not understanding what you mean by political vs partisan, or by political temperature.
Speaking of Rugrats, that's also the majority of my education on Hanukkah. Never did get the origin of the potato pancakes thing, since potatos are not a crop I'd generally associate with Iron Age Israel. Something to do with a prohibition on leavened bread?
That's because potato pancakes are not an Iron Age Israel thing. The only significance to potato pancakes is that they're fried in copious amounts of oil. Jews are basically willing to eat anything fried for Hanukah in order to celebrate, because the Hanukah miracle was that supposedly the oil necessary for keeping the lamps lit to purify their temple lasted for 8 days when there was only enough for one day. Potato pancakes came out of eastern European traditions, from countries like Poland and Germany where potato pancakes were already consumed as a local food, and the local Jews there adopted it as their Hanukah tradition. But Jews elsewhere eat donuts, fritters of all types, fried cheese cakes, fried pumpkin cakes etc. Indian Jews even eat gulab jamun to celebrate.
The prohibition on leavened bread is an entirely separate holiday, Passover (which as OP notes is actually a much more important holiday to Jews than Hanukah). Leavened bread is fine for Jews to eat at Hanukah.
The recent obesity post on the Motte got me and my (progressive) wife talking about the fat acceptance movement. Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "That's not what it means to me, and it doesn't matter if there are hatred-filled people in the fat acceptance movement, because I've personally gotten good ideas from the fat acceptance movement. I've taken away the concepts that we shouldn't cast moral judgements on people. And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly. And also standards of beauty change over different times and places". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.
This idea of laundering credibility is nothing new to me, I've been thinking about it in one form or another ever since I had my anti-progressive awakening over a decade ago. I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys. In a normal motte and bailey, as Scott describes it, it's a single person retreating to the motte, but harvesting the bailey. But in a "memetic motte and bailey", there are many people out in the bailey who believe the bailey, and there are a few credentialed or credible people in the motte who probably believe the motte. And those people provide the deflection for those in the bailey.
I call this memetic because this system seems to arrive naturally and be self-perpetuating, without anyone being quite aware of the problem. If questioned at all, people are easily able to say (and seem to truly believe), "those crazy bailey people don't actually represent the movement. You can't claim a movement is hateful or worthless just because of a few fringe crazies". And they point to well-credentialed professors and the like, who take more academic and reasonable stances, as the actual carriers of feminism, etc. Meanwhile the supposedly "false", hatred-filled, bailey feminism sweeps through the hearts and minds of every other progressive, and captures the institutions that actually matter and enforce policies.
I've seen other people engaged with the culture war, who dance around the idea of "laundering credibility" in one form or another, but I'm not certain I've seen it called out as such, and I don't think I see it focused on nearly as much as I think it should be. In fact, I remember one time when people either here or on ASX had gotten mad at me for "misusing" the term motte and bailey to mean this memetic-version. But if you ask me, this version is much more prevalent, insidious, and difficult to deal with than the standard single-person motte and bailey. It truly is a memetic force. It's self-perpetuating. It spreads because it doesn't even register as a thing to those who benefit from it. They by and large don't seem to even notice the discrepancy. And it's very difficult to stop, by those who want to stop it. Even those who don't benefit from it and can sense that something is wrong may be entirely bemused by the tactic, enough to make them be unable to actually speak up and properly fight against it. I've never really known how one can deal with it, but I've always felt that the first step is to notice it when it's happening and call it out as sophistry on a grand scale.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
For me, for example, leftist seething is a plus. I enjoy it. I don't care about national unity. It is not one of my preferences. I like the political tensions and the rage. For me it's a plus of Trump. I like right-wing seething too
If that's the case, is this really the best forum for you to be participating in? It sounds like your values and the values of this forum are fundamentally at odds.
Infantile seething is not just a leftist thing.
No arguments from me here. But for whatever reason, I expect more from the left, and the fact that they've devolved in this way from previously having the moral high ground (in my previous estimation), taking everyone around me, and no one around me seems to be willing to acknowledge this, really drives me nuts.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Wet-market origin has been discredited at this point - COVID was almost certainly leaked from a lab doing Gain-of-Function research.
Can you cite proof of this? I wouldn't mind being able to prove this to some people I know.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
If you take too much minoxidil orally, you grow hair everywhere that hair can grow.
Applied topically, it works just as well for beards as bald patches on the scalp. Check out /r/Minoxbeards , I can personally vouch for it, and my brother who was a stickler to the routine had even more startling results from a worse start.
I mean, I definitely know that rogaine will do that, which is why bald people are usually careful to not let it drip onto their foreheads. But I didn't know that anyone actually deliberately puts it on their face to grow beards, that it would have desirable effects.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
I'm tall, charming, with a beard that's far less scraggly after some (poorly adhered to) minoxidil, in a promising career (hahahaha),
Do people use minoxidil to grow hair on their face? I've never heard of that before.
so please skip the kind of blue pills (psychiatric pills) you'd feed the dearly departed Skookum and the like.
Uhh, I hesitate to ask what this means. Do you mean departed like he's not on the Motte, or do you mean departed like he died while attempting to do the Scag (or whatever that wilderness thing was called that he was doing)?
Is this really worth paying attention to any more than the last 17 times Trump was supposedly nailed for some criminal activity, and half the country said "got'im!" The last time was just like 2 months ago, and I haven't heard anything about it since then! This is so exhausting. I'll pay attention to this and study up on it once it actually seems different than any previous instance of him being brought under charges.
haroldbkny
4mo ago
I read Dune maybe 6 years ago. You know, I'm always surprised that I didn't see more progressives trying to cancel Dune immediately before or since the film release, for the books clearly stating that Baron Harkonnen is a gay pedophile who wants to have sex with Paul. That seems like the sort of thing that they'd be against, because it's "punching down" or something. Even I think it's a little annoying in the book, since it's like a "puppy kicking" trope, to get you to clearly see Baron Harkonnen as a bad guy.
I don't disagree with what you wrote at all. In fact, I wholeheartedly champion basically everything you said. My first exposure to that kind of feminist sophistry first got me totally tongue-tied and I didn't know how to fight back against it, but I knew that they were doing something wrong. Then when I saw people like Scott calling out this sort of thing as a motte and bailey in posts like Social Justice and Words Words Words, Another Brick in the Motte, and Untitled, I was able to recognize exactly where the sophistry was, and I grew to hate feminists for their abuse of logic, and getting large swaths of society to fall in line, because they make fallacious arguments that aren't super easy to spot and refute as such. After all, the way to win a debate with a 2 minute speaker limit is to make arguments that take 2 minutes and 10 seconds to refute.
But all of this was pointed out by tons of MGTOWs, MRAs, and other anti-feminists, along with the more scrupled people in the rationalist movement like Scott back in 2015. I'm sure that 99.99% of people posting on the Motte already know that patriarchy theory is one of the biggest divisive arguments of the past decade, and I'm sure that 95% of Mottezians would agree with you that it is pure sophistry, and one of the more infamous and abused motte and bailey arguments. This is all to say that I think that everything you said is old news, so I'm wondering, why did you bring it up? Is there some greater context surrounding your post that would be relevant to it, that would cast it in a new light, to spark debate amongst the Motte?
Sorry, I don't want to be too hard on you as a first time poster. I'm far from the arbiter of what's insightful and what's old on the Motte, and it's not like I've never said anything that was obvious to others before. It's just that people on the Motte are always (rightfully) wary of us becoming an echo chamber, and I worry about that, too. So I'd rather focus on new things that we have lots to say about as opposed to retread ground.
Perhaps most importantly... is there any possibility at all that the phenomenon isn't blatantly deliberate agenda-pushing?
I think probably many of the examples you gave are an example of agenda pushing. I haven't seen Elysium or A Man Called Otto, but based on your description, they probably are. Especially A Man Called Otto, because Hollywood is saturated with agenda pushing these days.
But I didn't think Gran Torino was leftist agenda pushing. It was just a tale of a man who finds at the end of his life that he doesn't really like his own selfish family, and that he can make new ties and help the immigrants he previously resented. The reason I don't think this is agenda pushing is:
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In the movie, the main people he's saving the immigrant family from is other immigrants. He doesn't portray all southeast Asian people as flawless but needing help, only the family he grows to like.
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He helps the boy by teaching him to be a stereotypically American man. This involves fixing houses, standing up for yourself, and making friends with car-people by talking about how you've been metaphorically anally raped by previous mechanics (it's been a 15 years since I saw this, but if I remember correctly, he literally taught the kid to say that he's been "bent over and fucked" on previous deals or something)
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There's a lot of Christian symbolism, like Clint Eastwood dying with his arms out in a cross, if I remember correctly.
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Isn't Clint Eastwood conservative or libertarian?
haroldbkny
5mo ago
This study shows that people who have never been married are at higher risk for car accidents: https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/10/1/33
This study shows that people who are more angry are at higher risk for accidents: https://www.apa.org/monitor/jun05/anger
I don't think most people would be in favor of the government telling you you have to be married to drive. I don't think most people would be okay with the government putting microphones in your home to hear if you shout too much, and revoking your license if you do.
I probably wouldn't have written it for narcolepsy, but that's my point, isn't it? There's no reason why sleep apnea should be considered grounds for license revocation, because it's super common, almost everyone has it sometimes, even if they're not diagnosed, and there's no reason to think that it poses a particular risk to driving. Where is the data that shows this policy is necessary, that untreated sleep apnea is a risk to driving and treated sleep apnea is not? Where are the droves of citizens dying because they were hit by drivers who have sleep apnea? If the state decided to take it upon themselves to declare this is necessary, what else will they declare it for?
haroldbkny
8mo ago
I don't even think you need implicit bias to account for this! It's quite overt. I remember seeing some video from one of the big MGTOW/anti-feminist guys back in like 2014 when I was first being awakened to anti-wokeness. In it, he talks about how he was a psychologist, I think, and he used to give seminars on gender relations or something many years prior. He'd go to a chalkboard and write "women are..." and people would complete the sentence. Overwhelmingly, he'd get the crowd all chiming in with "hard-working", "caring", "empathetic", "smart", "strong", and every other positive affirmation you could get, and he'd write it down. Then he'd write "men are..." and people would chime in with "pigs", "assholes", "stupid", "lazy", etc. And then he'd ask the crowd, "so what does this show you about the true nature of sexism?". And then everyone in the seminars would hate him.
Finally, you noticeably did not threaten the original poster with a ban, despite the open egregiousness there.
if "next person who makes a top-level post with a sentiment amounting to 'DAE leftists are whiny bitches?' eats a ban" (and actually following up on it).
What open egregiousness? I admitted I probably could have phrased some things better, but "leftist whiny bitches" is clearly not the sum totality of my post, and I was honestly not trying to be provocative. I actually want to discuss whether the currents/counter-currents situation leaves any actual options for non-leftists, and I think that merits discussion.
FWIW, I agree that it doesn't make sense to mod @KnotGodel's question.
haroldbkny
1yr ago
I live in a very very progressive part of the world, and I went to a small local craft market event today. Near the event, there was a 65ish year old woman waving around a GOP tote bag at cars and people passing by. Everyone was ignoring her, but I went to talk to her.
It started out just fine. I told her (in a friendly way) that she's unlikely to change any minds here, and she replied that that she's just trying to show people that there are others out there who have had enough of the progressive orthodoxy, citing CRT, transgenderism, etc. She felt like maybe this might just convince some young people to even question whether there's another viewpoint out there, or convince those who are hiding their views to speak up more. I definitely respected and agreed with that.
Then, her stream of consciousness-style insane ramblings started coming out. She went on for like 7 minutes without pausing, about so many topics I couldn't even keep track, jumping from one to the other. I recall her mentioning that leftists want to harvest and sell fetus organs, and somehow she started talking about slavery and pre-civil war America, waving a book around trying to show me underlined passages trying to liken the practice of slavery to what progressives are doing today, maybe implying that leftists want to return to pre-civil war America in some way. It was pretty hard to manage to get away.
This comes in the wake of being at my wife's family event where her crazy uncle kept bringing up conservative talking points apropos of nothing, shoehorning them into conversations which everyone tried politely to ignore, and was a total conversation killer. I'm usually only used to leftists doing that.
These experiences were pretty disheartening to me. I spend so much time here on The Motte that I end up feeling like people who are anti-progressive are probably more thoughtful and less crazy than progressives and more in touch with reality. But that's probably not true. I guess a lot of conservatives really are in their own echo chambers just as much as leftists are. Probably a good number of them really take seriously the conspiracy-style theories of talking head personalities in the style of Glenn Beck and Alex Jones. The true disconnect on both sides, from each other and probably also from reality and the true values of most people, is a very sad state of affairs.
I truly believe that the way we tend to talk about things on the Motte and in rationalist-adjacent spaces makes sense, and seems like far more logical discourse than I can find anywhere else. But of course I would, I'm part of this specific world. Any leftist would say the same about their progressive reddit subs, and most republicans would say that about the comments section in the Daily Wire. Is there any evidence that we're not just rambling buffoons in our own echo chamber, just like I'd find on either end of the spectrum?
haroldbkny
2mo ago
4 years of Biden has not particularly enshrined leftist values into law, as far as I'm aware? Some of the massive infrastructure spending was earmarked towards renewable energy, I guess, but that's not exactly super-radicalized social justice leftism. As far as I can tell, the law has moved to the right significantly during Biden's term, because of Republicans owning the Supreme Court and most state legislatures.
Honestly, I think that the way to make things move right without backlash is to give in on the tiny culture war sticking points while persuading people on the underlying conservative norms.
It sounds like part of what you're saying is that undercurrents are more powerful for change than the currents themselves. This is very interesting, and if true, speaks to some sort of profoundly strange with our world or our culture. I feel like this could be worthy of someone writing some kind of political science thesis about this. I'd love to know more about why that's the case, has it always been the case, are there nuances, what things work better for undercurrents vs overcurrents, is it because of our unprecedented online culture, and what this means for how future political movements should be trying to accomplish their ends.
A lot of people will happily fall back into those values without thinking about it, if you just stop doing things that look explicitly bigoted or unjust or cruel in ways that get them mad and turn them against you.
Well, this is probably my libertarian, mottezian, contrarian-style behavior coming out, but I can't stand the fact that you're probably right about this, that optics rule our world more than truth.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
Are you certain? How many people do you know who have died who can attest to this?
haroldbkny
6mo ago
I don't think I could really say much better than what @Goodguy has said in response to you. Go talk to him.
But I'll say one more thing, less directed to you than to all of the Mottezians who just loooove to spend all their time all day thinking about how much the left is full of pedophiles who can't wait to start molesting kids:
Do you know how irritating it is to have to defend a group of people whom you despise, against people who also despise those people but despise them for stupid reasons? People who want to think the left is full of pedophiles and therefore should be hated for that reason are watering down actual arguments against leftists. There's plenty of reasons to be against the left. Your efforts are better spent on those causes, and will do more to hinder leftism than this pedophilia bent.
haroldbkny
6mo ago
Sooo. What are your plans for surviving the YouTube ad-pocalypse? In case you don't know, YouTube seems to be cracking down on ad-blockers, steadily ramping up their level of restrictiveness over the past 4 or so months, and ramping up even faster the last 3 weeks. Adblock Plus no longer seems to work for me on Chrome, but does work on Firefox. It'll probably be different for everyone as they dial it up for more and more customers, but it'll likely keep getting more restrictive as time goes on.
I'm guessing this has to do with the same tech trend that caused the layoffs this past year. Budgets are tighter, bubbles are popping, and sources of revenue are being more exploited. But I do wonder if this particular one will work out for Google or not.
I for one plan on leaving the platform if I ever am completely unable to make it work without ads. I think there are many others who feel the same way. This may (I hope) make things worse for content creators, especially those who rely on their own sponsorships for revenue, and will drive them towards other less restrictive platforms.
It's not like I think it's immoral or wrong for Google to pull this, but it does bother me. YouTube has been around for so long, it's life a part of my life. It's my TV, it's the way I learn and become better at most things, and for many many people, it's their livelihood. My wife randomly said to me last week as I was teaching myself some drumstick fundamentals (the kind of fundamentals with deep intricacies that you can't see easily, and need an in-depth video to go into), "how did anyone ever learn anything before YouTube?" After having been around for so long, and being so ingrained, it feels weird for YouTube to suddenly switch up how it works. I'm someone who likes to skip around videos and go back and forth a lot. When ads are present on YouTube, I cannot stand how you'll skip to a section of a video, even without having watched much actual content in the video yet, and suddenly have to watch a giant string of ads. Having to watch ads like that will ruin my usage of the platform.
I also wonder if it's technically possible for YouTube to completely crack down on all ad-blockers, but I don't know enough about how their APIs work. But since so much of it it's happening client-side, I think they'd have to control the client to have complete control. This might be why youtube no longer works on Chrome when I have adblock plus, but it still works on Firefox for me.
I think you are right that "the default" is a big divide. In fact, I feel like it's been a scissor statement I've witnessed directly in my life.
I think Scott has written before something like "if you want to understand conservatives, pretend that there's going to be a zombie apocalypse tomorrow. If you want to understand leftists, pretend everything is going to be stable for the rest of time". I've spoken with both leftists and people I know who have anti-leftist leanings about this notion of the default, and it really scissors right between them, with each group being unable to fathom that anyone can disagree with them. The leftists generally come at it from a perspective of "well, everything would be stable forever, and we would always have enough resources for everyone to have everything they need, if only the billionaires shared their wealth (that incidentally they only got through exploiting the poor)". And the conservatives come at it with "there is barely anything holding keeping us from a risk societal collapse already". Which one of them is more right? I really can't say, and I don't really know how to argue with either of them. Perhaps it's simply an axiomatic belief.
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