haroldbkny
1d ago
find whatever horrifying racist nonsense Democrat-associated activists say in their group chats
How do you mean this? 1. As a Chinese robber fallacy thing, like surely there are some racist Democrats out there. Or that 2. Democrats are doing their soft racism thing of belittling minority groups? Or that 3. Democrats in private are just as racist as Republicans are in private. Or 4. Democrats say racist jokes in private, but don't mean them? Because to be honest, as someone very much adjacent to and in those Democrat group chats. I don't think 3 is likely, and 4 is far less likely then it used to be 15 years ago. There is too much self policing, infighting, virtue signaling, effectively causing leftists to get brownie points for calling each other out on such things all the time.
haroldbkny
9d ago
Maybe. I remember some talk here about how the attempt won Trump the election, but I remember that being short lived, maybe a week or a weekend. I distinctly remember in this forum people being very fatalistic about Harris's victory up until the night of the election.
haroldbkny
9d ago
It's hard to remember because for some reason there really was a major loss of memory once Trump was elected. I'm not blaming anyone, and I'm not being sarcastic; it was true. I remember the day before, almost everyone in the Motte lamenting that Harris was going to win, and the day after everyone taking about how Harris sucked and Trump's win was inevitable, and conservatives were in such a strong position in the culture war. I'm not sure how it happened like this, and I don't think it was exclusive to the Motte, either, but I'm not certain about that. But it's a really strange phenomenon.
I think that sometimes, the very same qualities which make someone a good vice president also make someone a lackluster president.
That might be true, and is certainly true that the VP often doesn't become president. But then, why do they always seem to run for president if they're such a bad choice? Why does the party often choose them in the primaries? Just since the 80s we've had 5 out of 8 VPs run in the general election!
Walter Mondale - 1984
George H.W. Bush - 1988
Al Gore - 2000
Joe Biden - 2020
Kamala Harris - 2024
Quayle and Pence also ran but lost in the primaries.
I think she's actually 100% correct here, and also it's silly to try to frame it as if she's being closed minded or bigoted or anything.
This is true. It's also true that what you say matters zilch to the left. Harris is a spent hen. She has served, and failed at, her purpose. The only way she can provide further value is for her to be eaten, and the left has always found their own people to be very tasty. This is just an opportunity for greater purity spiraling and virtue signaling, to show how they need even more progressive people, because it's the current year, goshdarnit!
Note: I'm not saying this shift to cannabilism for her in this situation because she lost her value is a conscious choice. I believe it is likely something which happens because the powers that be have less incentive to guard her from those that would want to cannabilize everyone all the time.
As a classically liberal centrist, that really pissed me off when he got cancelled. I'm someone who cares about truth, and people's ability to tell the truth without punishment, and I don't think he should be punished for casually remarking that the terrorists weren't cowards. But the thing is, I don't think the left was rallying behind him at that time, though maybe I was too young to remember. I feel like that's an issue that aligned more with centrist/libertarian values than either left or right.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
That's how my wife describes her knowledge of him as well, didn't know him, did know Turning Point. I personally had never heard of Turning Point, myself.
That's nice that you can admit that sort of thing. For what it's worth, I can admit that every time I have to act pro trans against my will in small or large ways, I usually am surprised that it doesn't feel as bad or hurtful to me or my pride as much as I thought it would. At the very least I feel like it's definitely worth it in order to have a job.
it still leaves a ton of latitude for trans people to seek out their version of human flourishing as best they can
The pro trans argument regarding the small things usually comes to "if you don't do these things than you're denying that trans people are people". That's such a silly phrasing that they've chosen, and I'm always surprised that more non leftists don't call it out. Since when is it a given that getting to choose your own gender is a defining aspect of being a person?
I gotta say, I had never even heard of Kirk before the shooting. Maybe this is because I deliberately try not to engage in politics anymore (except on the Motte), don't know. It's completely possible I'm years out of date on this stuff. To be honest, I still don't know much about him at all.
Now I'm seeing all of my leftist friends rattle off lists of why Kirk was basically in bed with Hitler. It makes me wonder if they'd heard as little about him as I had, and are simply regurgitating the talking points they heard other leftists say after his death, essentially as a mechanism for virtue signaling.
People do these things because they believe they will be popular with those around them.
To make my position clear, I think this in completely absolutely no way justifies political violence against the left. But the (from my point of view) typical leftist can be incredibly vicious even when the person who was killed wasn't someone who advocated that gun deaths are worth it if it meant protecting the second amendment.
And probably most people (including the typical leftist) feels weird about this on some level, but there's varying levels, like "I probably shouldn't say this, but my friends will get a kick out of it", "I probably shouldn't say this, but other people are doing it so I guess it's okay", "I probably shouldn't say this, but he did have it coming", etc.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
I was tickled pink to find that the Motte just went through it's fourth birthday, apparently,
Nitpick: third birthday, if you're referring to this site. We launched in September 2022. And the original Reddit forum was many years before that.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Not really, maybe sometimes with regard to individual incidents, and sometimes those do result in me changing my mind on small things. But I've mostly come to terms with stuff by now.
I agree with you because I am just like everything you described. But I have to ask the question: are we being too cautious? Once bitten twice shy. We have been in the trenches in the most awkward of warfare, and I know I've lost friends and opportunities from being too vocally centrist. I hate getting yelled at and lectured to.... So I'd rather just not start it anymore. So I keep my damn mouth shut.
But truthfully I don't think it's the case that we are being too cautious, not yet. But I must raise this question because there may come a day when society does, or could, accept centrists again, but it won't happen if centrists don't feel free to let our middle-of-the-road freak fly. If people don't start speaking up, others who agree will stay suppressed themselves, due to lack of common knowledge of centrist acceptance.
So basically, I think we can say that the woke conditioning of the past 15 years was massively successful. Even when things are starting to get better, we can't go back to feeling better and acting like we used to. We've been trained to act like the woke, even though we are not, and this makes it all the harder to change society to non woke.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
To be clearer about my fears about social justice mobs; I'm less concerned about people actually getting killed by them than I am about them changing social norms that make people's actual lives actually worse.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Look, it happened a long time ago. I specifically don't memorize every thing Trump's ever been accused of, or why the accusations were false. I don't want to devote all my mental energy to Trump, one way or the other. All I knew was that I'd seen that journalist argument before, and I knew it didn't hold water in some way back then, and that made want to illustrate exactly why none of these accusations actually tarnish Trump's name, why people like me check out. Because so many previous accusations don't hold water, and we have epistemic learned helplessness.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
I'm not fully sure what you're saying, but it sounds like you're downplaying my skepticism, as if it were caused by this one example. Like I said, it's not just one example. It's every example of something people said about Trump, from the earliest ones I can remember where everyone was calling him racist and kept telling me how he was calling all Mexicans rapists. That sure sounded bad, until I looked into it and saw that's not what he said at all, on several levels.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
That's interesting. Can you cite historical examples, from various time periods over the past century? What specific tactics are we talking about?
haroldbkny
1mo ago
confected
A-
I love it, but I see most people actually refer to it as Partygate
Haha, my wife and I were just talking yesterday about how we haven't seen em-dashes in LLM output for the past couple months, so they probably retrained the models to not use them. But also that still no one is going to ever use em-dashes anymore for fear of being called an LLM.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Haha yes, that's fair. I really don't remember the details, I just remember that when I looked into the details 7 or whatever years ago, it was another straw on my personal "Believe Trump's Critics" camel's back.
I'm not engaging in standard Trump apologetics. I'm trying to tell you why he doesn't lose the social credit, at least to someone like me. It's because I can't trust anyone when they say these things about him, because everything for the past 10 years has been an exaggerated character attack, even the things that don't remotely deserve it. Time and time again I hear "Trump is Hitler for having done x", and then I look at x and I see that if you squint at it the right way you can see that, or not. Repeat for 10 years (or even 1 year), and I get my own form of epistemic learned helplessness.
So fine, the mechanism by which Trump is punished is dead. Because leftists killed it.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
mocked a disabled journalist
This is the sort of thing that makes me not take arguments like this seriously. It's been a long time since this supposed incident, but I recall it being pretty conclusive for anyone who spent more than thirty seconds listening to the outrage bait of the day, that he wasn't trying to mock a disabled journalist, and it was just the press once again seizing on an opportunity to claim Trump was the worst person ever. I don't recall the details, but it seemed clear (I thought at the time) that he was just doing one of his normal mannerisms. It's crying wolf and it makes me not take other claims seriously.
Well, that statement of mine is purposely simplistic, to kind of try to get at the point.
First, this is closer to what I actually believe (or naturally am inclined to jump to): I'd expand that statement to a belief in a general state of equilibrium when it comes to abusing the power of the government (especially by the Right), such that if actors go too far, then there will be a reaction against those actors whether by checks and balances in the law or by other means (though I'm glad that checks and balances do exist to help along the equilibrium, unlike in the social justice mob case). I definitely don't believe in the automatic axiomatic morality or infallibility of written laws.
Second, I know that overall my general high level belief in this equilibrium is a simplistic belief that probably doesn't hold true all of the time. This is just like my wife's simplistic belief that the power of social justice mobs will never go too far, because she believes in an equilibrium; that if they push the societal norms too far the societal backlash will correct it. Neither of us trusts the other's belief in the equilibrium, but we maintain analogous simplistic beliefs ourselves.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Honestly, though, you pretty much answer your own question in your opening paragraph;
Well, I can say I've paid about as much attention to Trump as I have to every other president, including Biden - which is not much. But it's taken significantly more effort to afford Trump the same level of indifference as I have for Biden and other presidents, and that's been true since 2015. I see that as indicative that information I shouldn't trust is being pushed my way, which reinforces my tendency to tune it out.
However, it's the fact that the Republican half of the government (and at least a third of the population) is either doing nothing to stop it, or even actively cheer it on, that really causes me to despair over the situation.
Your response hasn't given any consideration to the mirror image aspect of my original post. I encourage you to try to put aside your preconceptions and consider how the other side might have felt looking at the BLM situation of 2020-2021, and the power that mob mentality held at the time. Can you sympathize with someone else's fear of the lack of checks on that power, the same way you worry that the checks and balances in government won't be enough to stop Trump? Can you see how someone on the other side would have had similar reservations about those in power at the time doing nothing to curb that power, and to the contrary actually cheering it on?
I'm not asking you to agree that those concerns were valid or that the situations are equivalent - I'm asking whether you can see the structural similarity in how both sides experience fear when they perceive threats from power sources they believe lack adequate restraints. If you can only acknowledge that the other side had feelings while maintaining that your fears are categorically different or more legitimate, then you're missing the point about how these dynamics work. Your response kind of proves the point about us trusting different institutional mechanisms without engaging with it.
Ah yeah, I left that one off my list, but that makes sense. Leftists do say that sort of thing all the time in private, and it would be kinda damning if that were seen more, but not as much as the gerrymandered racism.
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