popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
1yr ago
The viability of standardized tests, colorblind policy, and merit-based immigration vetting all depend on either their outcomes being race-neutral, or HBD being at least tacitly accepted. The strong belief that all racial groups are equal, combined with the demonstrated fact that they are not, means you have to give up or distort standardized tests and merit-based immigraiton vetting, and discard colorblind policies.
This is what's frustrating about talking to "roll the clock back twenty years" temperamental liberals. Let's say you manage to return to a norm of colorblindness and implement effective tests for merit in immigration, education, and criminal justice, all while keeping HBD a studiously quiet truth only known to geneticists and a few internet edgelords.
What is your answer when the black professional class all but evaporates? Or when the AP math and science classes at your local inner city school are entirely asian and white? Or when the black arrest rate increases after a 'fair' new colorblind policing reform?
The answer is that your fancy meritocratic tools get torn down and replaced with racial quotas again.
You're saying christianity forces us to believe dogmatic, but positivistically void claims like "the bread becomes flesh in an abstract manner". Progressivism, meanwhile, forces us to believe Jamaicans and Jews are equally fast at sprinting.
I guess that's true if you compare catholicism to wokeism, which is a fundamentalist branch of progressivism. But, as always, I'm not sure I agree with NRx that extreme blank slatism and communism were inevitable extrapolations of liberalism; that as soon Jefferson penned "all men are created equal", CRT and HAES were a matter of time. I think, if backed into a corner, progressives can reduce their claims to abstract, unfalsifiable ones, just as christians did.
Catholics believe man was created in God's image — this idea is safe, because scientists will never capture God in a dragnet for analysis. In the same way, early, non-fundamentalist liberals believed all men housed an ineffable equal dignity — this idea is also safe, because the human-rights-granting organ apparently can't be found via autopsy.
Evolution and HBD imply that catholics and liberals are wrong. But it's merely in the way that seeing a man living in a slum implies that he's poor; without seeing his bank account, one can come up with any number of excuses why he's actually a billionaire who chooses to live in a shack.
The Rotating Triple Crown is mainly an attempt to design a rule of succession that solves the problem of the stupid eldest son. One reason why a king might lack iron-clad legitmacy is that he took the crown as part of an ad hoc modification to the succession rules when the legitimate eldest son is seen as unacceptably stupid
[....]
There are three Royal Lineages: Red, White, and Blue. The first king is drawn from the Red line. The second king is drawn from the White line. The third is Blue. And then it cycles: 4th is Red. 5th White. 6th Blue. And then a Red king takes the throne, the Seventh King of the Rotating Kindom and Third King of the Red line. And so on.
The descendents of the Blue King meet to choose a new King from among the White princes. When, in the fullness of time, the White King dies, the descendents of the Red King will meet to choose a new King from among the Blue Princes. The cycle continues with the each King succeeded by a prince of the next colour chosen by a conclave of KingMakers, all of the previous colour
The non-regnant elector sons would inevitably represent warring factions within the palace, property-holders, and nobility. They would choose a candidate who's least threatening to the interest of their faction, and extract concessions from that candidate in exchange for the crown. Meanwhile, factions left out in the cold would then #resist the #notmymonarch heir with their influence for the rest of that king's reign.
Some Roman Emperors who were raised by the consensus of different factions within the Roman state, like Claudius, got around this obstructionism by replacing the entire administrative bureaucracy with e.g. freedmen who were personally loyal to them. But this is hard, and it alienates a lot of important people, so it's probably no accident Claudius was poisoned and his favored successor killed to make way for Nero.
This is the fundamental source of instability in a monarchy, not the stupidity of the chosen heir or whether his genetic pedigree is solid. "The benefit of monarchy is one guy can do whatever he wants" is a huge misapprehension of history; to the extent that the king has power, a sword always hangs by a thread over the throne.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Italo Calvino Novels. Put If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and Invisible Cities aside because they're so weird I'm only 90% sure they're not complete nonsense. Baron in the Trees and Cloven Viscount are both about the collapse of pre-industrial society, told through a 18th century baron who climbs into the trees and never comes down, and a 17th century viscount who is split on half on the battlefield between his good side and evil side, and proceeds to govern his county well and be history's greatest monster, respectively.
If you're sour against postmodernists — and who could blame you — I'm still in awe of Mother of Learning which I read last August and September. Though what's special about that premise only unfolds over the course of the first two books; it starts as just 'timeloop magic school'. (And it's a shame the prose isn't better.)
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I'm curious as to what makes you so passionate about this issue. I have to admit it's just not that interesting to me. It just feels like Daily Show level dunking on the proles.
The equivalent might be multiple effort posts trying to argue against flat earthers, Nation of Islam, Bush did 9/11, or astrology.
A lot of Motters seem at least mildly sympathetic to fake vote counts in 2020. (The election being 'stolen' is a much squishier topic, but let's limit things to fake ballot-casting or vote-tallying.) Given my other belief that posters seem unusually insightful on other topics, this makes an important discrepancy. Is there really something to it? Or are these posters hyper-irrational and I've misjudged them all this time?
If a large chunk of The Motte started signaling interest in flat earth, 9/11 truth, astrology etc, I would be more interested in investigating those claims, too, either to credit those claims or to discredit The Motte.
I'm somewhat less impressed with Hoppean "kings have low time preference" argument now
The weakness of that argument is that a king with iron-clad legitimacy has low time preference, which is rare. Modern dynasties like the Stuarts and Bourbons kicked the can down the road for literal decades on obvious financial problems, even worse than our entitlements crisis, leading to civil war, because their power actually rested on the support of internal power brokers. Pissing those guys off (eg by amending the tax system) would topple the regime. This was also true for Roman emperors, who gave naked unsustainable bribes to the military for this reason.
If anything, I would say the average democracy affords its chief executive more freedom of action. Elections grant a special popular mandate to each new leader, thus the "First 100 Days" trope for American presidents. Though this advantage may be atrophying in western democracies where fewer people accept elections as granting legitimacy.
That's an interesting read, thanks. Though it sounds like TikTok is tweaking the algorithm to appeal to content creators rather than to manipulate users per se.
Cory Doctorow is an interesting cat. I remember him from the failed hamartiology of 'free culture' back in the day, so maybe I never had a good read of the man. So many of his hobby horses tag him as gray tribe, but when he talks normal politics he's as blue as lapis lazuli.
There's a bit of a motte and bailey with algorithms. People grandstanding against social media conflate algorithms intentionally tweaked to manipulate users with algorithms that simply give users what they want. TikTok, as far as I can tell, largely does the second. Google Search, on the other hand, extensively does the first. However, the sort of people who complain about 'algorithms' tend to approve of Google's goals in information curating.
To be clear, both types of 'algorithm' might be bad, in the same way cocaine might be bad whether a user snorts it on their own or an unsavory corporation slips it into their carbonated beverages. But banning the former is a harder sell given the moral justification for our current civilization is still technically supposed to be liberalism.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I'm asking for recommendations on anti-feminist arguments
Haven’t been there in a long time, but /r/mensrights was always decent.
I'd describe the position of /r/mensrights as "the publicly stated doctrine of feminism should be applied, not the de facto version which gives new rents and social license to women only". For example, I recall many posts about how society stigmatizes men for emotionality and liking children, and that a fair society should treat men just like women in this regard. Also many blank slatist posts implying women commit sexual violence just as much as men, and that society just ignores female rape. So MRAs aren't rejecting feminism as an ideology; they're embracing its rhetorical frame.
A true anti-feminist position should reject the premise that men and women be treated the same, legally or culturally.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. [...]
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
To maybe point out the obvious, a TFR below 2 doesn't hit uniformly across a population. If Lebanon, Israel, or the US for that matter are magically reconfigured into ethnostates and their borders sealed tomorrow, those countries will not have the same genotype in a hundred years with half the population. The type of person who succeeds and breeds in the modern environment is of an unusual temperament, and their characteristics will sweep the board and change the character of the country.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
By the by, this guy is rapidly approaching mid-10s Scott-tier for me. Scratches almost the same itch. Almost every time he releases a podcast essay, I end up re-listening a few times, and it lingers in my mind for weeks. (The interview podcasts are less interesting.) I recommend "The Frontier Was Always Closed (To you)", "How the Taliban Won", and his review of Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.
It's a shame he's not anywhere near as prolific.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I do at least give Christie credit for taking Trump on directly.
The purpose of his candidacy seems to be parlaying a spot on the debate platform into clout in anti-Trump circles. He hasn't been in office for six years, he's disgraced because of Bridgegate, and his career as a Republican looks moribund. Most of the people in the debate using kid gloves with Trump are probably angling for an appointment down the road. That's not a concern for Christie, whose incentives run the other way.
Billions of people around the world would kill to be in a situation where they are an American citizen making $16 an hour and owing $100k.
Happiness is a function of relative status, not absolute economic utility.
For the billions around the world, $16/hour in an unglamorous job would increase their status relative to their neighbors. For an American, $16/hour in an unglamorous job feels perilously low status compared to one's (fictional, learned from advertisements and social media) neighbors. You criticize them harshly as wanting special privileges, but in their mind they are mainly seeking to clear to a respectability threshold.
The problem underlying a great many problems in society — education, purchasing decisions, family formation — is the dangerous gap between the popular perception of average and the reality of average.
Is Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten not created, coeternal with the Father, who died for the forgiveness of sins and will return in glory to bring life to the world?
If the answer is yes, then you stay within Christianity, and no amount of church heresy about sexuality can change that.
Likewise: is Muhammad the final prophet of God, and the Qur'an the true word of God, directly dictated to the prophet by the archangel Gabriel?
If the answer is yes, then you should become a Muslim, no matter how good or bad Christians or Muslims might be on the subject of sexuality.
......
But the core claims matter.
This perspective always strikes as odd from an outsider's perspective. To me, the divinity of Jesus or the prophethood of Muhammad are clearly the legitimization methods, not the essence, of their respective religions. "You should believe X because Y." Imagine an alternate universe where Muhammad taught Catholic doctrine on grace and God's kingdom, preached radical forgiveness and against material wealth; while Jesus related the Quran to his disciples, who subsequently waged Ghazwah against polytheists to protect the faith and bring fellow monotheists under a protection/patronage system. I would still pattern match the first as Christianity and the second as Islam despite the "core claims" being reversed.
Of course, the moment one becomes cynical enough to meta-reason past these legitimization claims and choose a belief set on its own merits, one has ceased to be religious in any appreciable way, and might as well just make up one's own beliefs.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
The statement isn't about the staffer not understanding why he's getting criticized. This is a classic case of a person in the midst of a scandal putting up the bat signal for their in-group, screaming that the out-group is attacking them just for being a member of the in-group. (See: Zoe Quinn in GamerGate). People do it all the time because it works.
You have an unintentional bait-and-switch in your comment, I think. Very clearly the latter "has fervent ideas for changing the social fabric" but they are not treated as "a logical extension of progressivism".
I'm aware of the seeming contradiction, and considered including a "What about the Nazis, why don't they get considered progressive?" paragraph, but I thought it would be going too much into the weeds of political taxonomy.
To summarize, I view people like Mencius Moldbug as progressive heretics rather than conservatives. Their ideas for changing society are such that they cannot be integrated into the progressive gestalt, so they try to pitch their platform under the only other tent instead. Progressives are more than happy to generalize everyone under that tent as the same. And the progressive heretics (like libertarians, neoreactionaries, or neocon New American Century types) will structure their radical message to play to the base of conservative voters. Said voters will of course be aghast when a libertarian pretending to be a conservative tries to implement open borders, or when a neoreactionary pretending to be a conservative lets slip he thinks the constitution is stupid and the US should be reconfigured into a no-voice only-exit-rights monarchy. Or posts something like this, revealing he has absolutely no reverence for tradition and an Openness factor that is off-the-charts for a "conservative".
Certainly you can disagree. But I think the average Democrat voter is much closer to the platform of their party than the average Republican voter. Because, again, conservatives don't care enough to take command of their own party.
The Neutral vs. Conservative problem, as I understand it, has an entirely different genesis. It arises from the fact that creating a specifically right-leaning version of something that already exists is a project that is only going to attract rightists, and the result will be much more obviously skewed than the original.
I think it's because, when the left takes over an institution, conservatives don't care enough to stop them. Then, when an alternate new institution is created, normal conservatives don't care enough to join, leaving only the extreme fringe of people who say, think the Holocaust is fake, which is not a typical US conservative position.
There is a true need for an alternate Wikipedia at this point. Future generations will see Wikipedia like we see Herodotus's "Histories" - flawed but ultimately the core upon which historical knowledge is built.
This slams into Neutral vs. Conservative problem. Much ink has been spilt trying to model the core value that splits progressives from conservatives, but I'll piggyback on Richard Hanania and say the central difference is pretty banal — the left has causes they really care about advancing, while the right would mildly prefer to not be pushed off their spot, please. Any time a new faction has fervent ideas for changing the social fabric, they get automatically slotted into the left coalition, and the political theory bloggers have to do midnight brainstorming on how this group's ideas are a logical extension of progressivism.
The conservative right definitionally cannot summon the passion to create a rival Wikipedia. Arguably, the conservative right cannot even summon the passion to have its own political party. Here in the US, the GOP has repeatedly been parasitized by some passionate heretic progressive faction, like libertarians or then neocons or most recently the NRx inspired alt-right. These groups do not reflect the values of the baptist truck driver or stodgy civil engineer dad who wants lower taxes, but they have passion, so they out-ground-game mere conservatives.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Where is KulakRevolt famous? A Google search turns up very little.
One-tiny-part-of-the-internet famous. He runs a twitter account with readership in line with a second tier NRx/DR figure. (One quarter the followers of BronzeAgePervert, half that of Steve Sailer, slightly more then FistedByFoucault or Whatifalthist.) He mostly posts threads about how the civil rights act destroyed America.
"Famous" is overselling it, but he's glowed up from being a regular on the motte. Spending time here is likely a waste for him in terms of reach.
My understanding is that the Roman Republic's early rise to power was based in part on their willingness to assimilate other Italian powers into a new political concept rather than just attempting to utterly crush, enslave, subjugate, and kill them.
Kinda but not really. Look up the Social War. Rome tried to keep Italy as subject vassals with no political representation well past the point it became politically non-viable. They did allow regional autonomy, but viewed conquered populations as their natural lessers, and kept it that way until they had been hegemon over the Mediterranean for over fifty years (The Punic Wars and Macedonian Wars ended in the 140s BC, the Social War in 87 BC).
They were relatively tolerant, but they conquered most of the known world and kept it as their footstool for a couple generations on an ethnic nationalism model (for citizens of the city of Rome, specifically).
The transition to civic nationalism followed in degrees over the next few centuries.
I would say that the Roman Empire could only be founded on ethnic nationalism. Over the course of centuries, it survived by slowly granting priviliges/power to ambitious and competent outsiders, starting with the Latins, then the Italians, then to provincials, ramping up with Trajan and peaking with the Illyrian emperors, and ultimately ceding it to barbarians like Stilicho or Alaric. So the seemly mutually exclusive ideas "civic nationalism worked for Roman Empire" and "the decline and fall of the Roman Empire tracks with the loss of its Roman character" can actually coexist.
Imagine the state capacity of Rome like the material of the balloon, and its prosperity as helium. As state capacity contracts, the balloon must release air, otherwise it will pop. It is a "bad thing" for Rome to be leaking power, of course, but necessary for survival. You can only leak power so long until there's no empire left, though.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
A frequent contrast is drawn between the Hyper-Athlete QB (Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen) who combines arm strength, running speed, strength, creativity to make crazy plays out of structure; and the System QB (Kirk Cousins, Brock Purdy), a savvy game manager who follows the playbook... Just as Josh Allen puts himself in terrible positions then pulls a rabbit out of his hat because he's such an outlier athlete, the smart guy will put himself in a position where he needs to process a lot because he ignores the rules
Very bold of you to assume these quarterback analogies will make any sense to anyone on The Motte. Consider rewriting using HPMOR characters.
I think what's going on here with the trope of an "idealistic, trusting, gullible" simpleton and your knuckleheaded distrustful simpleton is that he's the same man, before and after getting taken for a ride. Real stupid people are not like Lennie, jumping into water when you tell them to, then forgetting about it, and being glad you saved them from drowning. There is a switch from total trust to total distrust. The boomercon who had a child's faith in US foreign policy in 2003 believes the US government is populated by satanist pedophiles in 2023.
The reason old fiction has so many trusting yokels that we don't see IRL anymore is that the world changed. The simpleton gets scammed early and often in the modern world, and updates his heuristic accordingly.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
That made him an active proponent of an otherwise often faceless machine, but also means that people's desires to anthromorphize broader collectives had an easy target to pin collective actions and policies onto, which has the effect of re-allocating responsibility away from less subtle actors in more flattering ways.
It's a bit like Klaus Schwab and the alt-right. People see big institutions doing bad things, and some sinister-looking guy gets up to the podium and says "Yes, it's me, I'm the bad guy. Look at my important title, I'm responsible." If you're willing to wear that mantle, outsiders will gladly heap superhuman agency on you.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
A lot of my knowledge of Napoleon comes from Wikipedia dives embarked upon during my read of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
Great book, really brings to period to life. But Susanna Clarke obviously knows nothing about the military side of things.
Eventually, though, the odds caught up to him.
His life beggars belief.
It happens a lot with these Alexander/Caesar/Hitler/Gustavus Adolphus/Tom Brady figures. They win so much and so hard they see themselves as infallible and end up embarrassing themselves on a low-odds gamble, like playing football at 45 or invading Russia.
So how do you feel about Napoleon's legacy?
Morally, Napoleon strikes me as what Spengler characterized as a Caesar: no strong ideology, ambitious, a pragmatically minded autocrat who sweeps into command of an exhausted society. Men like that do not fight for a cause; viewing them in "good" or "evil" terms is a mistake. Had Napoleon not foolishly killed the Duke of Enghien and invited another coalition against France, the right would view him with the vague favorability they do with Salazar or Franco, because he set a house in order after a decade of chaos. His concordat with the pope, rehabilitation of the emigres, and rationalized law code were just what the doctor ordered for France.
Politically, Napoleon is fascinating to me. He successfully defrocked something that looks suspiciously what the online right calls the Cathedral. People who see only the vague outline of history sometimes say that Napoleon tamed the French revolution after its Jacobin excesses. This is incorrect. After the Thermidorian Reaction, France endured a relatively bloodless period under an oligarchy masquerading as a republic, which historians call the French Directory. The Directors held to the ideological center of the French revolution, using press censorship, anarcho-tyranny, and election fixing to ward off their strong left and right flanks. Napoleon staged a coup with the help of a few Directorate insiders who thought him their pawn. After Napoleon got rid of those 'friends', no one stood up for them.
Provoking another war with Europe afterwards was a dreadful mistake. If not for that, he'd get good marks in my book, but he did do it.
My favorite model of politics is that, at least in the west, our primary axis of political division splits people who benefit status-wise from transnational managerialism (AKA the Globalist American Empire, GAE) and those who don't. That supporter class, which we can call the 'blue coalition', consists of people with cushy bureacratic jobs they got due to credentialism (blue tribe proper), unemployables who could never be respectable in any system, and migrants who would be in a favela without transnational open borders. The opposer class, which we can call the 'red coalition', consists of everyone else.
So blue-tribe-hates-red-tribe and red-tribe-hates-blue tribe is a cipher for class antagonism, much like the guelphs and ghibellines, the optimates and populares, the federalists and anti-federalists, and a million other disputes that seem impenentrable to the modern eye because the contours of their society's class landscape didn't come down to us in detail.
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