popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
3d ago
I'm interested in reactions here since one of my own sons will be 16 in less than a year. The world was very different in many ways when I was that age, and now certain advice I'd give ("Spend more time with your dad asking him questions. Help him more working on the car.") I couldn't give my own son without sounding like an idiot.
Unfortunately, giving advice means nudging someone towards some Aristotelian golden mean. Be more social or more introspective, more self-disciplined or more self-forgiving, more cautious or more adventurous. They're mutually exclusive. Advice is not generalizable because people are different. We humans, being narcissists, spread the seeds of wisdom that worked in our alkaline soil to the acidic of others.
Perhaps the one universal good advice might be reverse any advice you hear.
popocatepetl
17d ago
"Communism" in the sense of "enslave rural populations to produce grain at gunpoint, and then use that wealth to centrally plan heavy industrial development" does indeed work. For a while at least.
The core thrusts of this article strike me as "galaxy-brain takes", in the sense of throwing Occam's Razor to the curb and going with the most dramatic rather than the most plausible interpretation.
A wise sage on /r/themotte once said that @KulakRevolt is always wrong, but he's always wrong in a fascinating way that's rewarding to puzzle apart.
You read a lot into normies' discomfort and inability to watch the movie for any length of time, but the straightforward explanation there is that the unapologetic racism of the narration is extremely far outside the Overton window and this is just a standard human reaction to having well-internalized language taboos violated in front of them.
Yes, it was more dehumanizing narration than the sight of a man pooping on the beach that made me turn off the video before the title card.
If a kind fairy made you absolute ruler of your country, what batshit crazy out of left field ideas would you implement?
Strict sumptuary laws. Outside of special occasions, everyone wears clothes that specifically indicate their job in rough categories.
A pet theory of mine is that "capitalism" in the informal sense came to exist when conspicuous consumption became the only means of status signaling. The first two estates (clergy and nobility) got gutted, so bourgeois success became the ruler of social distinction: everyone jumped on a hamster wheel of ever increasing productivity/entrepreneurship to buy the next stage of luxury good, not because they wanted the luxury, but to distinguish themselves from the lower classes. This created an economic boom. However, the excess wealth has increasingly been funneled into a meaningless hedonic treadmill, with humans throwing out all other social goods in favor of keeping up with the Joneses. The destructive dual income household, for example, results from it being the only way to maintain "middle status" in society.
We didn't change that much. The jump from being a thread in /r/slatestarcodex to being /r/themotte was much sharper. /r/themotte started from the beginning as "the portion of the community that was willing to platform HBD", which was what the other side most strongly objected to, so using pro-HBD sentiment as evidence of how we changed seems lacking to me.
I mean, even Scott was a racist all along, he just being esoteric about it.
I anticipated there would be a lot of rebuttals
The position "whites suffered as a response to the civil rights revolution" is an unimpeachable fact that even people on the pro-CRL side agree with, just with a positive valence. Justice for the robbed implies stripping goods from the robber. Why should you expect a rebuttal? Perhaps the word "suffering" implies sympathy for those injured? But even mass murderers and child molesters suffer.
and that the solution obviously can't be segregation.
I'd certainly contest that this is obvious. You seem to be asserting this on moral rather than empirical grounds. Even morally, the weak form of segregation is "allow people to self-select their own communities as they like", which is a proposition most people agree is moral unless you specifically rephase it in the race context.
EDIT: While we're here, "don't let black people watch your kids" is an uncharitable rewording of @RandomRanger's post. He says it's bad to send your children to a mostly American black school/community, which is quite compatible with "letting black people watch your kids" in the case of a black acquaintance, peer, or credentialed teacher/pastor/nanny. The point is that a large group will tend to the population average, not that every member of that group is the average ― this is a standard anti-racist motte and bailey.
Because it's almost never worth it to be the hero to enforce low level rule breakers. Ah, some "teens" are acting obnoxious on public transit? What are you gonna do, speak up? What if they stab you? What if some activist records you, edits the video to make you seem suspect, and gets you fired? In what universe can the rational incentives ever be right for an individual who's not a superhero to intervene? The problem is that once everyone acts rationally, the low level rule breakers take over public spaces, and everyone is worse off.
You touch on the answer just below this, but it's a cousin phenomenon to Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs: social policies that are harmless in high-IQ high-SES bubbles but disastrous when broadcast to wider society. Our elite-set public morality frowns on small rule enforcement. For those with six figure incomes and degrees from top forty universities, chances are you do antisocial things so rarely, and your peers do antisocial things so rarely, that whenever someone confronts someone about a small rule, the confronter is a petty tyrant looking for an excuse to hurt others. The enforcer of small rules becomes a much hated figure — a Mrs. Dubose yelling at children for saying 'hey' rather than 'good afternoon' or a Mr. Neck pulling rank on free-thinking kids he doesn't like, bigot that he is. To the high-IQ high-SES bubble theatre kid who grows up to write popular media, such small-minded harassment is what 'rule enforcement' is.
Shuttled from private school to Harvard to cushy marketing gigs, they never experience the zoo that unregulated low-IQ low-SES spaces become. A few might donate a year to Teach For America, and then tell horror stories to their friends, only to shut up when they sense their 'friends' don't approve of this line of thinking.
A year or two ago there was an execrable ad on TV about a black young woman paying for college by running a beauty salon in a library. She clacks nails on a desk, and the furious, nasty-looking (and, of course, white) librarian hisses SHHHH at her. A reaction shot, if I recall, shows library patrons recoiling in disapproval at this fascist imposition on a girlboss running her business. The librarian is depicted as pure villain.
Break this down. The ad takes place in a library, a space specifically delineated for quiet study. Distraction-free is the rule. The librarian is an authority figure; she has prerogative to enforce rules, and is enforcing one that benefits every library patron except our young entrepreneur. And she's "bad" because... why, exactly? Because she's enforcing small rules. That's it.
High-IQ high-SES bubbles, where members have been filtered for agreeability and conscientiousness since birth, function without the librarian. Other spaces cannot. But the people in those bubbles set the tone at the top, and they teach proper (read: destructive) values of permissiveness to the lower orders. Thus the world we see around us.
Isn't that why we're all here on this site though? My opinion of leftism is fairly set in stone, we're many years past the point where further "examples" could change my mind one way or the other.
Personally, I'm here because I like reading fresh ideas, or fresh reframings of old ideas — "insight porn" as it were. Fresh ideas do not usually come from leftists, because it seems to me that one of leftism's greatest underlying personality traits, at least in our time, is conformity to group doctrine. (Perhaps this is correct doctrine, but it's not fresh. I can, almost without fail, predict not only a leftist's position on an issue, but exactly how they'll frame the argument.) Neither do fresh ideas come from offline conservatives, who are usually quite incurious and have stopped their ears to any new idea they did not learn by twenty.
Compared to leftist spaces or conservative spaces, online rightist spaces (as The Motte de facto is) are rent with interesting controversy. I suspect that's because there are many ways to be a heretic, but only one way to be catholic. The austrian economist and the populist, the fascist and the burkean, the vitalist and the christian, the hoppean and the neoreactionary, the sexual degeneracy watchdog and men-should-marry-teenagers poster: are able to discuss politely at present, but they're bound purely by the friend-enemy distinction, and their 'side' would burst into a million fragments the moment it sniffed political relevance.
That said, some people in the leftist coalition do have fresh ideas. It's extremely unlikely they'll change my opinion on the fundamental correctness of leftism, but that's not really the point for me. If you can make me re-frame an old opinion with your hot take, that's great.
The difference between flyovercountry crackheads/american fatties and the videographical apocalypse in that 4chan video is the lack of shit all over the place and rats. I am visually viscerally disgusted on a level unable to be put into words far more than the racist words spoken by the ai.
But the question is: how do we know said crackheads wouldn't do the same in Delhi? I don't know any cities where dirt poor whites live in Indian concentrations without welfare support. It could be that some ethnicities have more "ingrained cleanliness" than others, but american fatties benefit from abundant free bathrooms connected to a sewer system; poor Indians do not.
My priors are that if you artificially gave San Antonio third world infrastructure and wealth, the inhabitations would still clean their surroundings better than what you see in this film. But there's no test case to know for sure.
Do you think Google's attempts at ideological sculpting are effective, neutral, or counter-productive? Why are they doing this?
Search for any social topic or event that a conservative cares about, and Google will list progressive news sources and fact checkers denying its validity or, if this is impossible, condemning political weaponization of the facts. Google's information sculpting seemed to reached its apex mid-2022, when PM of Hungary Viktor Orban made a speech with inflammatory takes on European history and EU policy, and Google would not give a link to the speech. Trying all sorts of keywords, one could find page after page of thinkpieces with two-word scare quotes about what a horrible Nazi speech Orban had made, but it was impossible to read what he actually said. (Yandex gave an English transcript as the second result.)
Putting aside the morality or fairness of this: Do you think Google's efforts prevent people from being radicalized? Do they increase political capital for the establishment left? The recent Gemini AI debacle shows a hilarious tin ear for the company; no one could fail to see the tight ideological corset around the image generation squeezing the AI's intestines out its throat. And personally — though I am not normal — the information sculpting I get from search results doesn't make me accept the sources as presented; it just makes me angry.
The three broad explanations I see for Google's approach are:
- It makes you angry, but ninety percent of searchers don't notice. The sculpting works.
- It's very stupid, but a culture of fear inside the company prevents anyone from dialing back. The sculpting is counterproductive.
- The purpose of propaganda is not convincing people but demoralizing them, etc. The sculpting works.
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
popocatepetl
1mo ago
An NSA analyst who was in debt sold the secrets of this multi-billion dollar program to the Soviets for a $5000 payment. (The analyst received a total of $35k for other secrets as well.) The analyst wasn't even recruited by the Soviets, he sought them out because he was in debt.
"Pelton was tried and convicted of espionage in 1986 and sentenced to three concurrent life sentences plus ten years. He was also fined $100." Real life continues to beat comedy skits.
"The Pajeet, breeds out of control like a plague of rats. Often defecating out in the open with no regard for its native habitat, the Pajeet spreads across the face of the earth like a cancerous tumor consuming all in its path while the world watches on in disgust and horror. With almost 1.4 billion Pajeets and rising our mother earth buckles under the terrible strain, whilst these creatures rapidly multiply in their own filth, with seemingly no end in sight.”
I've been thinking about Christianity lately. Christians (at least the modern ones) struggle with the question of subhumans. They prefer to thrust the question completely out of mind. "That couldn't happen. There could be no such thing!" is their comforting bromide and thought-killer. Understandably, Christians are afraid to put themselves in the position of judging whether a fellow person could be subhuman. But the unwillingness to entertain a hypothetical reflects a kind of cowardice: you are so afraid of being bad, you won't meditate on what makes the good.
Let me elide the question of whether Pajeets, or a subset of them, qualify. I don't know. This movie is selective. Nevertheless, it is certainly possible to imagine the breeding and education of an organism devoid of the divine spark. If you're not a Christian, it's even easier to imagine the creation of an organism without the virtues a materialist uses to define "human". Such a beast is, if C.S. Lewis is to be believed, what God casts into hell after the corruption of pride eats it completely. To materialists, it's some level of sophistication between "ape" and "moth".
If we are to preserve Christian morality, being Christian or no, we must come to terms with God's treatment of the Canaanites, the Hittites, Sodom, and Gomorrah. Subhumans in other words. He killed them. Ostensibly these people had fallen into extreme depravity of human sacrifice, mass rape, etc., and after many generations, these patterns of sin soaked into their very nature. God saved the righteous, but he commanded his people to kill the first two, and he personally rained fire on the others. I've heard protestants claim that this was "old morality" which the New Testament overturned, but this seems exceptionally weak reasoning to me. It endorses morality as something God arbitrarily decides, which Christians deny in every other context.
So there exists a threshold beneath which a "human" does fall below human dignity and should be treated as a beast. At least if you believe in sky daddy™. If you don't, it's an interesting parable to consider for whatever you consider the "source" of morality.
Another possible answer to the question of subhumans is stewardship. My bae Kevin Dolan did a long meditation on this idea, so I won't repeat it. This answer says: the subhumans have value in God's eyes, as we mere humans have value. But that value does not imply the necessity of equality, or the abolition of stewards and bondsmen. Hierarchical relations are perfectly in line with this Christian morality, unlike "modern" post-Christian morality which holds that the divine spark in everyone implies the abolition of rulers and ruled.
I don't have a conclusion, but these are things I've been thinking about.
popocatepetl
23d ago
This is exactly right. I think that if an adult has consensual sex with a teenager, that's not OK (with various edge cases as we know from statutory rape laws). I think if anyone talks a 9 year old into having sex with them, we should lock them up and throw away the fucking key.
There's an annoying chilling effect when it comes to the sex crimes where any attempt to differentiate between degrees of wrongness is seen as moral endorsement.
I think, clearly, lying to a woman at the bar that you're a millionaire to get in her pants is bad. Stringing a girlfriend along with vague future prospects of marriage when you have no intention of marrying her is bad. And dragging her into an alleyway and forcibly penetrating her is bad.
All these subvert the woman's free will to have sex with her when she would otherwise refuse. But they're very different crimes. Lumping them all together under one word and treating them all the same is stupid.
This seems to be one of those essays temporarily-embarrassed-democrats kicked out of the coalition write. Assertions that he didn't leave the party, true principles of the party were betrayed; nervous jabs at the outgroup to remind everyone he's not one of them; and a weird, paradoxical refusal to admit that the outgroup's prediction of your party's nature turned out to be right. I spent a few minutes trying to understand what he meant by "MAGA-fied Republicans" as some sharp deviation away from pre-2016 republicans on social policy, as if Trump weren't basically a 90s democrat, but I think those remarks are better understood in that light.
The triangle is a projection of Silver's psyche, where even though he's no longer a progressive, he's still not a dirty red triber. He can't psychologically bring himself to admit that, if either party can be said to represent classical liberalism at this point, it is the republicans.
It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it. I don't want it to be true...I don't want it to be true. It's so unfair
A common, characteristic-of-our-time response is "Why should you care? You're an individual. If the portion of your tribe doesn't apply to you, what does it skin off your back?" This is @BurdensomeCount's answer. I think that's fine, but it only works for certain people. The reality is most people do care about their tribe. We're not atomized. The heat map of our moral concern goes from family, to self, to tribe, to confession/creed, to human. We care about tribal welfare only one degree less than ourselves. So it is with you.
So. Let's talk about me. While this may be a luxurious piggyback on your own problem, I'm also dour on my tribe recently. My tribe is a superset of the puritans in Albion's Seed — it doesn't include all 'whites', but neither is it just white americans who descended from those guys with buckles on their hats. It is the group on whom the terrible weight of God's judgement presses. I am talking about blood rather than confession to be clear; this feeling can and has been channeled to a million creeds. How do I know who's in my tribe, then? I just do.
My tribe is currently willing itself to subjugation. They want the destruction of our history, the destruction of our communities, and they're eager for genetic replacement: I don't think we're actually willing ourselves to extinction, as anti-progressives (usually cavalier or borderer white) accuse us. Rather, our tribe wants to place ourselves, we horrible fiends, under a yoke of penance to the fargroup. In practice, this might lead to tribal extinction, but that's just my prediction.
On the dissident right, there are attempts to blame this on (((a certain group of people))). And while it may be that jews are exploiting their curious situation as whites-allowed-to-be-racist to the hilt, on the whole, this explanation is just an offramp. The hard truth is puritan-adjacent whites have a will to self-destruction, and this is probably fundamental to who we are. It's not going away.
I could pray for God (or more effectively CRISPR) to remove this trait from my tribe. (This is what @campfireSmoresEaten just suggested.) But that would be genociding us beyond the wildest dreams of the activist holding an "Abolish Whiteness" sign. We are the people under God's weight. What's worse, the narcissism and greed one centimeter underneath that facade is also who we are.
For you: it may be your tribe's doom is to be a lekking species, wild, stupid, violent, and feral, and that you as a non-central member must watch them destroy themselves. Any attempt you might make to "fix" this problem would also be genocide.
A few thoughts on how to cope:
- Aim for better rather than perfect. Lots of people have noticed that black communities used to be more functional. At the very least, they had two parent households and much lower crime. What were the features of this world, and how can you get closer to it?
- Look for optimism in history. Your tribe exists for a game-theoretic reason. While it may be maladapted and flailing here, it thrives elsewhere. In this sense, doomerism is a counsel of hope; when the current system either eats itself alive or revolutionizes, there will be another chance for your tribe to flourish.
- Focus your mind on eternal or "spiritual" matters. I'm not a christian but this is what they mean when they talk about fallen man and the love of God.
So others have written the obvious reactions to this poll (including pointing out that the stats are massaged). But to go a bit lateral: a common take I hear from the dissident right is that the West declined into tyranny as the franchise expanded. I often see tweet threads from @KulakRevolt implying that the cause of modern ills is that people without a fixed interest in the system started getting a say in its regulation. In other words, they side with the Grandees in the Putney Debates.
What the hell happened to European civilization? Getting rid of Aristocracy was a fatal mistake. Whether its democracy or communism the landless have no business in the governance of the land. (link)
This idea sounds plausible on its own, but it co-exists in the DR with a ravenous hatred of "elites" and "globalists". How does that make any sense? For all its faults, this poll does expose a fundamental truth: ideas like racial/gender quotas and open borders are coming from the top of society, the "aristocrats", not the middle. If you were to limit the franchise to the modern equivalent of the Second Estate, a far-left social and economic planning program would be implemented by Thursday.
Was JP ever really a TRP influencer? My sense was that, when he had his brief moment of being a Person, he was just a vaguely conservativish ersatz dad figure not really associated with the broader manosphere,
Jordan Peterson was the closest thing to sensible moderate answer to TRP. When it comes to posture towards women and society, he told young men to be strong, honorable, responsible, and honest; while the TRP told them to be strong, crafty, mercenary, and cynical. Of course, very online progressives hated him, though IMO they never gave a coherent answer for why.
The fact Peterson had a mental break, became a drug addict, lost his daughter to Tate, and was cancelled from his job is a good, if anecdotal, rebuttal of his approach to modern problems. The boomer advice memes write themselves.
I never liked JP too much. He has the valuable academic skill of sounding erudite, but when you dissect what he's actually saying, full of literary allusions and digressions, it often doesn't amount to much. The anti-Scott.
I think my problem with the hobbit mindset is that Hobbiton will not be left alone. Hanania seems to have a deep-seated disdain for mundane domesticity and, as the Zoomers say, "vibing". I just don't believe the hobbits will be allowed to vibe. If the ring doesn't get to Mordor, the Shire will be perfected by Sauron; if it does, the Shire will still be scoured. The hobbits' complacency only allows Saruman to sweep in and turn it into a police state virtually unopposed — and I don't believe for a second Tolkien didn't have an allegory in mind when he was writing that.
Does anyone here actually "believe" Plato/Aristotle's theory of forms, material/formal/efficient/final causes, and hylemorphism? Or is at all basically nonsense, dreamed up for a want of robust physical science, with 'ball', 'sphere', 'man', 'dog' being just human oversimplifications for matter arrangements?
Many of us would strongly prefer Rat Park be true. The moment I heard that explanation I adopted it as my default view of addiction — the idea is too good to check. And it's one of those rare too-goods-to-check that transcends political faction. Are you a bleeding heart progressive? Rat Park morally pardons the downtrodden. A small government libertarian? Rat Park makes drug repression and imprisoning people for bodily choices unnecessary and barbaric. A political extremist of any variety? Rat Park condemns our current society as dystopic and in need of correction.
Sadly, it seems I (Party B) must admit that true bodily autonomy does actually create a class of useless junkies, who must either be supported or left to die in the street. It's a hard pill to swallow.
popocatepetl
24d ago
“Cleaning the dryer lint after you dry your clothes is the socially responsible thing to do.”
Yes, but kinda no. Some morality stems from pure social equilibrium. Not tipping your waiter is bad purely because society expects tips and has built that assumption into their wages, unlike for mailmen or call center employees. Not cleaning lint is likewise bad, but purely because others expect you to, and if you don't, you're free-riding on the people who do post-clean. A hypothetical society where the equilibrium is that everyone cleans the lint before use has an equal amount of work for everyone and no free-rider problem.
This is why it's good to fight bad equilibria while they're in the process of forming. I always just take the free coffee when someone starts a stupid "Pay It Forward" chain. If it ever does entrench as a social norm, though, I will have to submit.
popocatepetl
17d ago
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
One of my handful of 10/10s. Absolute aesthetic perfection. Kundera's other pretty-good book is Immortality, which also explores the self as an experience versus the self as others project values onto. But this is the novel he lived his life to write, so the rest of his work ends up disappointing.
What are great graphic novels I should read? I read some manga as a tween, but never got really into it
Berserk. Koe no Katachi if you feel like a good cry.
popocatepetl
2mo 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.
popocatepetl
20d ago
The quality is just down overall, regardless of topic. Perhaps there are less offensive drive by posters but who cares?
This is the big change. When I go back to 2020 /r/themotte threads, I revel in all the glorious paragraphs and long good-faith back-and-forths.
A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is.
Then we may as well say that a law that restricts shoplifting is an "anti-thief" law regardless of how good the law is
Shoplifting laws are definitely anti-thief laws. (andthatsagoodthing.jpeg) Lawmakers do not want people to act as thieves in the context of the shop; in Texas, lawmakers do not want men acting as female ('being trans') in the context of sports.
The reason that anti-trans laws are controversial is that the "underlying principle" you speak of is not agreed upon in society. Two sides cannot agree on whether a biological male entering a female space is a 'thief' taking what he is not due, or a female taking what belongs to her.
I'm denigrating the culture of people who have different traditions around the concept of property ownership!
I think it's fair to say laws against stuffing iphones in your pants are, in fact, denigrating the values of people who would do that if it were legal. Likewise, I understand that, to a MtF, I really am pissing on their sacred values when I block the door to the women's restroom. That the shoplifter and the MtF are in the wrong is an entirely separate question from whether I am opposing them; I am opposing them. I am making an anti-thief/anti-trans action.
That was an infuriating listen. The loop was (1) Ymeskhout or Tracing raises some point about the alt right or white nationalism, (2) Walt agrees there's some truth there, but nuance and background is needed, (3) Walt bolts down a tangent rabbit hole that has nothing to do with the substantive point, (4) Midway through, before he can wrap around to the prompt, Tracing gets mad about something in his tangent and challenges him on it. Return to (1).
The least fruitful bailey episode yet. Kudos for both sides being willing to sit down with each other, but man.
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