Coincidentally, I have also been thinking about communism a lot lately, namely, its impossibility, and how it is treated in public discourse. I guess I'll just add on to your thinking on it.
As far as I can tell, Karl Marx knew that a classless, stateless society would get rolled by a central state immediately if capitalism still existed. So, the plan was to seize the state and implement socialism, and wait for every other society in the world to dissolve their states at once. Anyone who is really thinking could tell you that that would never happen, especially looking at the pathetic state of any genuinely central government behemoths of socialist states at the time. And yet, all kinds of Marxists, probably except for the anarchist movement, want to stack the bodies to create this ideology that will never work and is unfalsifiable, and will end up stacking even more bodies, accidentally and intentionally.
There are any number of posts on /r/LateStageCapitalism where they express their utter disdain for liberals. Every post on /r/TheRightCantMeme has an automod message that says that the subreddit is a far left one, and that liberals can fuck off. But liberals, for the most part, don't even seem to know of the existence of these people. Most of them seem to think there are no enemies to the left of them, or if there are any, it's just a handful of crazy college kids. The largest criticism I've seen is "nice going you berniebros, you got Trump elected", but nothing besides. It's a far cry from how the right wing tends to exist in this country, where they are all very cripplingly aware that there are enemies to the right of them that must be disavowed when discovered.
More than anything, it's the biggest slap in the face that accusations of communism or marxism are laughed off, when the share of open Marxists has seemingly increased exponentially in the last couple of decades.
I am trying to find a post from either here or the subreddit about the Russian revolution, and specific horrific details of the Red Terror. Details included pouring molten metal down the throats of priests. I'm guessing it was on reddit, because I can't find it using the search here, and reddit's search doesn't give me as many options as this one does. I think either gattsuru or FCfromSSC wrote it. Edit: I am pretty sure this comic by Existential Comics made a feature in the post, and it was juxtaposed against the actual horrific details of the revolution.
oats_son
3mo ago
I'm not sure that it's very equivalent. Homosexuality was considered a behavior, not an inherent part of the self, for a long time. Same goes for engaging in furry activities like going to conventions and buying fursuits and jerking off to erotic furry artwork. You can even be a private furry wanker and no one would know unless they cohabited with you or raided your phone. Catholicism is a set of behaviors stemming from a set of beliefs about the afterlife that are not so easily modified and come with greater demands from above. There is no greater purpose to furry art or gay sex than self-pleasure, but there definitely is for Catholicism and other religions.
If someone wanted to explicitly exclude Catholics from their new non-liberal society, it would be bad, but perhaps justifiable, depending on conditions. Most non-liberals would want to exclude Muslims, anyway, and maybe the non-liberal versions of different sects of Christianity go back to holy wars. That's bad, of course, and it comes with the territory of losing our liberalism.
oats_son
3mo ago
I don't really care if you hate gay furries. Frankly, they have an easy out of not engaging in homosexual activity and not buying fursuits or going to furry conventions. What triggered my thought of "wow, this guy is extremely unempathetic" is when you dodged my questions about what happens to all the other liberals who post in this forum to 1) bash the gay furry in two comments, 2) say that this forum sucks, and 3) say that you literally only care about your immediate family, and no one else.
You still haven't really outlined your ideal society even still; would you be okay with your family ascending to royalty and everyone else being a miserable serf? For me, it's easy to say that Marxists and neo-Nazis and other radicals who want to kill people and wield the state should be suppressed, but that standard would still include the progressives and the dissident right, and that's mostly the same position we're in now. Where is the wiggle room on how much you can deviate in your ideal society? Is reading about political philosophy for 8 hours a day okay?
oats_son
3mo ago
Wait, I thought genital herpes was really common and basically mostly benign. What's the deal with genital herpes?? Any input would be appreciated.
oats_son
3mo ago
His motivated reasoning justifying transgenderism arguments is mostly what I think of, but to be honest, I have a limited amount of exposure to Scott Alexander. I found Scott Alexander through this forum (which I in turn found through rdrama.net), not the other way around as I assume was true for many here. Until recently, it was the consensus that he stopped being the firebrand he was in the 2010s, and I found what I saw of his new stuff significantly less interesting than the original Slate Star Codex blogs that were linked here, so I wasn't particularly motivated to disprove the consensus. I prefer the monthly AAQCs to his new stuff.
oats_son
3mo ago
I think you're basically right. His voting preferences are indistinguishable from something like an anarchist voter just trying to push the Overton window left. I think he is deceiving himself when he says he's a centrist and believes he has a better chance of tinkering with the Democratic Party to make it into what he wants than he does any other alternative. He's pretty clearly blue at heart.
Given his priorities lately on hammering the left about how it handles education and how it's handled the FAA hiring scandal, it aligns with his stated goals and makes him not the ideologue that I think he is perceived as here, but he has serious blind spots, like Scott Alexander, but perhaps less severe.
oats_son
3mo ago
I do check his Twitter. In fact, he's just about the only main reason I visit the site, because I value what he has to say. If you can link it, I would appreciate it, though I don't think it's the whole story, since he clearly supports Jesse Singal and thought it was a mark against Bluesky that they were trying to kick him off.
oats_son
3mo ago
This lack of empathy is not what I think the ideal person should have, nor is the victim complex. I suppose this is one example of someone whose values I do not share.
oats_son
3mo ago
"Who cares" is not the response I was looking for. This problem extends a lot farther than Trace, obviously. Do you think China fosters the type of environment that makes this type of forum possible? For how niche it is, for how many types of people post here, for how many ideas can be represented here, this website itself and everyone in it is a product of liberalism. Do you care what happens to it? Do you care what happens to everyone who uses it? Do you care what happens to yourself?
oats_son
3mo ago
I did read Tolerance Is Not A Moral Precept last time you linked it in reply to me. That's actually what set off some of this disturbed line of thinking for me. I'll read the other blog post later. Yes, your past posts are quite illustrative to me, but I was hoping someone else would swing by and change my mind. I don't think it will happen.
How do you cope?
oats_son
3mo ago
As a fundamentalist Christian that slowly deteriorated into an agnostic, son of a right wing libertarian that later turned into a radical fascist, who still tends to think with conservative values, I am a product of liberalism. I do not share values with many people, given that I am agnostic and yet still right wing, and yet still holding disdain for a lot of the rhetoric thrown around by the current administration. If liberalism goes away, what will happen to me? If liberalism goes away, what will happen to gay furry skeptic centrists like TracingWoodgrains?
oats_son
3mo ago
But Germany is one of the parties that I mentioned in the post as being failures of liberalism. The parliamentary system collapsed. The other parties weren't willing to work with the AfD, finding them too detestable. Am I reading the situation correctly? The government will pick itself back up, but the problems of having fundamental disagreements within the country will continue, and get even worse.
This is kind of related to the thinking I've had on Marxism lately... I don't think the Founding Fathers properly understood that having people in the country that are opposed to the principles of the country are extremely corrosive to the country. Like the rationalists, they thought that the marketplace of ideas would win out, and that free argument would expose the wrong headed ways of thinking, just like exposure to sunlight kills germs. But they turned out to be totally wrong. People aren't rational.
oats_son
3mo ago
Is liberalism dying?
I see frequently brought up on this forum that Mitt Romney was a perfectly respectable Mormon conservative that was unjustly torn apart by the Left. In response to this, the Right elected a political outsider that is frequently brazenly offensive and antagonistic to the Left, as well as many (most?) establishment institutions. I am seeing the idea "this is a good thing, because if the Left are our enemies and won't budge from their positions that are explicitly against us, we need to treat them as such", probably expressed in other words.
This frightens me, as it seems to be a failure of liberalism, in this country and potentially other Western liberal democratic countries. Similar to the fate of this forum, where civil discussion was tried and then found to be mostly useless, leading to the expulsion of the forum to an offsite and the quitting of center left moderates like TracingWoodgrains and Yassine Meskhout, the political discourse has devolved into radicals that bitterly resist the other side. Moderates like Trace seem to be rare among the politically engaged, leaving types like Trump and AOC. They fight over a huge pool of people who don't really care much about politics and vote based on the vibe at the moment, who are fed rhetoric that is created by increasingly frustrated think-tanks and other political thinkers. Compromise seems to not be something talked about anymore, and instead, liberalism has been relegated to simply voting for your side and against the other side. To me, this is pretty clearly unsustainable, since the two sides seem to have a coin flip of winning each election and then upon winning, proceed to dismantle everything the previous side did.
We see this in a number of other Western liberal democratic countries. Germany and France both had a collapse of their governments recently due to an unwillingness between the parties to work together and make compromises. Similar states that seem to be on the brink of exhaustion include South Korea and Canada, though I'm told things are not nearly as divisive in Japan. China, though having its own set of problems, seems to not have issues with political division stemming from liberalism, since it's not liberal at all.
I am seeing these happenings and becoming increasingly convinced that liberalism is on its way out. Progressivism and the dissident right both seem to be totally opposed to the principles. This is a bad thing to me and a cause of some hopelessness, since America produced a great deal of good things during its heyday, and even still is doing awesome things. It is predominantly America's technology companies settling the frontier, and recently they've struck gold with AI, proper chatbots, unlike the Cleverbots of old.
Is liberalism dying? If it is, is that a good thing or a bad thing to you? If it's a bad thing, what do you propose should be done to stop the bleeding?
oats_son
3mo ago
What is wrong about the academic understanding of human taxonomy? Is there something false within the out-of-Africa theory?
oats_son
3mo ago
I have never seen someone in the wild recommend this author. It's so odd to me that nobody's heard of him around me, because his Flashman series is iconic, and I still find myself thinking of his Quartered Safe Out Here anecdotes (like the one you mentioned, his friend getting cut in half by machine gun friendly fire in the middle of the night, or the one where he randomly stumbled on a Japanese soldier and surprised each other and he unshouldered his rifle and shot him first).
oats_son
3mo ago
no one actually holds the opinion that Elon did a nazi salute
Sadly, I am pretty confident that they do actually believe it. I started this thread after an argument I had with my left leaning friends, and they were incredulous I didn't see it for what they thought it was. "I'm not sure what else you need to see at this point," was something said a couple times.
I can't say I don't understand your perspective. But when you are continually insincere, it makes it difficult to tell which actions were actually supposed to be sincere or not. There was a conversation in one of the non-culture-war threads about his Path of Exile 2 claims, and I think it was @cjet79 was holding the possibility that he was trolling people on purpose in that circumstance as well. In that case, I was pretty confident he wasn't trolling. After the last few days, I still think he wasn't trolling in the case of Path of Exile 2 since he deleted some of the tweets that he made at Asmongold on the subject, and trolls don't tend to do that, but I'm no longer as confident. How am I supposed to stick up for someone that purposely complicates my sticking up for him?
I also share something with the left, in that I really no longer like Hitler-staff-name puns or anything making light of that stuff. My dad is a genuine neo-Nazi in most any respect you can think of, and he loves jokes like that.
oats_son
3mo ago
It's not proof that the accusations are true. It's proof that even if it was accidental at the time, there is not even an attempt to say it was accidental. The mockery is embracing the move. He's not a secret nazi, but I despise the obvious trolling going on here.
oats_son
3mo ago
They already have, and while I do like to sneer, I probably wouldn't view this forum if I thought that that was a productive thing to do. I also don't really like making jokes that extremists enjoy.
oats_son
3mo ago
I just saw this tweet he made, and yeah, you're right. I actually seriously regret defending him if he's going to turn around after my unwarranted good will for him and use the language of people that I hate, acknowledging that it was intentional. Absolutely disgusting.
I still don't think he's a neo-nazi, for reasons already said. But I hate this shit. He must hate the left so much that he would purposely use rhetoric that pisses them off. Quickest I've ever been wrong, and I hate it when I'm wrong and /r/politics is right.
oats_son
3mo ago
Yeah. I get it. Rhetoric getting increasingly underhanded, and rationalism tried and found impossible/useless, leading to everyone going to their secluded corners of the internet.
But if the marketplace of ideas is truly an antiquated concept, it's only a matter of time until its corpse starts to obviously reek. I don't think that going mad with political war every 4 years and winning half the time is sustainable. I don't know that it's going to lead to literal civil war, but there doesn't seem to be some mechanism for it getting better.
oats_son
3mo ago
This tweet, in response to a Charles Weber post calling people saying "Hitler was right" cowards and arguing they should say it to Jews' faces.
Okay.
Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.
I'm deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don't exactly like them too much.
You want truth said to your face, there it is.
Which, actually, it's a bit of a non-sequitur/deflection. Who mentioned anything about minorities? Jew Man just doesn't like Hitler was right jokes, redpilling him about how he ruins white relations is not appropriate. You gotta pick your battles when Motteposting about identity group relations at large like this.
“This Post from @breakingbaht has been withheld in Germany, France, Ireland based on local law(s). Learn more”
Dude, your laws are crazy. I am sorry you have to live with that.
For some reason, I am reminded of the porn bans that redditors like to argue against. They say that it's not feasible to ban porn for under 18s. I would have expected their high ideological rigor to similarly oppose these dumbass speech banning laws that can be bypassed with a simple archive.is link. I suppose some of them do, but it needs to be more. Maybe they just don't know the extent of it in Europe.
Yes, I suppose it could be due to that kind of motivated reasoned mental mapping of where "left" and "right" are. You see this with the right wing in the exact same way: some righties say that actually the Nazi Party was socialist, see, it's in the name, Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party! To me, it reads as a cope (our side is just, and those other guys that got it wrong weren't actually our guys), but even if it was true, it is just proving horseshoe theory correct.
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