BANNED USER: Egregiously obnoxious and antagonistic despite multiple warnings, no mitigating factors
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
Just Another Alt-MSNBC Guy. Find me at Substack: https://alexanderturok.substack.com/
User ID: 3346
Banned by: @self_made_human
In the last roundup about embryo selection, guy with Greek letters in his flair ThomasdelVasto said the following (emphasis added):
Now I personally have religious reasons to oppose this sort of intervention, but even if you don't, it's not hard to imagine the insane societal consequences of allowing free for all designer babies. As one hyperbolic comment on the slate star subreddit says:
Yet another reason for people to not have kids. This shit is so socially erosive. "Want a baby? Do you want a prole baby, made the old fashioned way? You don't know what you're going to get! It's like a loot box, could be pure crap. You should PAY US to make a cool designer baby, with a 34% increased chance of the ultra-rare and coveted phenotype High Functioning Autist. If you have a loot box baby, they're going to get crushed by Ultra-Rare HFA Baby" Nuke it from orbit.
While this comment is pretty over the top, I still think there's a strong point here! Gattaca was a cautionary tale, not a user's manual. Then again, I suppose the general zeitgeist considers the prole class to be so whipped, and coddled with bread and circuses, that our materialistic transhumanist tech overlords can simply do whatever they want, even if it will end up condemning "natural-born" people to permanent servitude.
Much of right-wing thought is just people looking for "right-wing" language to express low-class envy and grievance. AOC-ism with extra steps. There's long been an element of that in the American Right, and there's nothing wrong with it provided it's based on actual complaints. (Working-class people were entirely justified in their anger at those judges who ordered their kids bussed into the ghetto while sending their own kids to private schools.) But ever since the first Trump campaign, prole resentment has become arguably the defining characteristic of the Right in America. It's the glue that binds together the vulgar, secular, working-class Trumpian Right and the traditional Religious Right. The tattoo-covered WWE fan doesn't want to listen to a sermon from the Southern preacher but recognizes him as a fellow member of the broad ingroup of low-class Americans who share a common inferiority complex toward urbanites with lots of education and money. While not every Right-winger shares this attitude, there's a near-universal refusal to acknowledge or condemn it. Elon Musk is almost a caricature of the "materialistic transhumanist tech overlord," but you won't see him defending himself against such attacks. (You might say this is because he's unaware of them, which might be true of some Silicon Valley Tech Rightists, but isn't true of Musk, considering how much time he spends on Twitter.)
P.S. To preempt the accusation that I ignored ThomasdelVasto's point, I reject the whole theory that poor, low-IQ people are harmed by competition with rich, high-IQ people. People are willing to risk dying in the desert to move from low-IQ to high-IQ countries because high-IQ has massive positive externalities.
P.P.S. I know I might get banned for this post. I was drawn to the forum because I'm a long-time Scott Alexander fan, from back when "right-wing SSCer" meant "secular guy who talks about embryo selection and national IQ," not "guy who thinks we need to go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government and that eugenics is evil." For me, unlike many of you, the former wasn't just a gateway drug to the latter, so I'm "left-wing" now. You can follow me on Substack and Twitter.
P.P.P.S. The mottezien is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a cuck, nazi, bigot, fascist, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a resentful prole and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back, calls you egregiously obnoxious, and then bans you from the forum.
ETA:
I'd encourage you to question why so many post-rationalists, like myself, who were deeply involved in the SSC rationalist movement as you were, become Christian or at least religious.
Because they want to do a medieval LARP and don't care about the truth? It's not like they discovered some flaw in science and that's why they changed their minds.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
6d ago
Back in 2021, Reuters published the following about the Ghislaine Maxwell trial:
Shawn, now 38, recalled traveling to Epstein's house with Carolyn for the first time with a girl named Virginia Roberts and Roberts' boyfriend after Roberts told Carolyn the pair could make money by giving "a guy a massage."
"She was excited to make money," said Shawn, who has not been accused of wrongdoing in the case.
He added that he and Roberts' boyfriend saw Roberts and Carolyn go into Epstein's home, waited for them for more than an hour, and saw them leave the home with hundred dollar bills.
{snip}
Shawn's account of that first trip largely matched up with Carolyn's version. After that first trip, Shawn said he drove Carolyn to Epstein's home every two weeks, and that Carolyn would leave with hundred dollar bills. They would use the cash to buy drugs, Shawn said, echoing his former girlfriend's statement on the stand on Tuesday.
{snip}He said he also drove two other girls he was dating at the time, Amanda and Melissa, to Epstein's home.
{snip}He said he sometimes received calls from Epstein employees seeking to schedule a massage appointment for Epstein with Carolyn{snip}
"not accused of wrongdoing," LOL, when the guy's a f***ing pimp. The Online Right could use this to dunk on the dishonest mainstream media and in defense of high-minded Western ideals like telling the truth and not putting much stock in the testimony of admitted drug-using pimps and hookers. Instead, the Online Right has gone in a very different direction, being convinced that it would severely disrupt the status quo if they could prove the Epstein murder/pedo ring conspiracy is true. ActuallyATleilaxuGhola asserts that the only reason people would doubt that Epstein was murdered is a desire to avoid a backlash against the status quo or Jews:
I really think that, if Epstein were not apparently connected to intelligence, powerful people in government, and were not Jewish, nearly zero people would argue that he killed himself. There are simply too many "coincidences." But there are people who like the political status quo (or at least despise the upstarts trying to disrupt the status quo), and there are other people who perceive the emphasis on Epstein's Jewishness/Mossad connections as dangerous to themselves (I have sympathy for this second group).
I think it's the "Epstein was murdered" people who are engaging in motivated reasoning, since the evidence for the conspiracy is very weak. Instead of another perhaps pointless argument about the evidence, let's look at the underlying assumption that "exposure" of the supposed conspiracy would "disrupt the status quo." Would that actually happen?
Suppose the Clintons, New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Prince Andrew, Jean-Luc Brunel, a few Democratic Senators and governors and a bunch of celebrities go to prison for "pedophilia."(more on that later) Throw in some top FBI/CIA people responsible for the Epstein murder.
Here's what won't happen. They will not go to white separatists, revolutionary communists, trad Catholics, and the Nation of Islam and say "your hands are clean, now it's your turn to exercise power." Governors will appoint replacements for Senators. Minor actors will receive major actors' roles. The bank's vice president will replace the imprisoned CEO. Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg, who were too unimportant at the time to be associated with Epstein, will still be there. It might even benefit the Democrats by clearing out the gerontocrats.
You may say that, over the long term, voters will be more open to anti-establishment voices. I wouldn't be so sure. Won't take long for the establishment to come up with its equivalent of "the Soviet Union failed because it wasn't communist enough." They'll point out that the vast majority of the accused/convicted individuals are men, so we need more control of male sexuality. Most of the Epstein victims were 16 or 17. "Pedo ring" people don't talk about this fact, gambling that fear of being called a pedophile will dissuade people from bringing it up. But if you want there to be a "reckoning" over this, it's unavoidable. If it's your position that attraction to 16-17 yo girls is "pedophilia" and there's a national emergency of "pedophiles" in positions of power, why not just bar heterosexual men from positions of power? After all, most are "pedophiles" by that definition. Indeed, the establishment might use the necessity of preventing further pedo rings as justification for Patriot Act-style restrictions on civil liberties. You might not fall for that, but what about the average 55-year-old woman who gets all her news from the MSM?
Thankfully the pedo rings don't in fact exist. Hopefully Rightists will grow more comfortable in saying so. Epstein conspiracism is not only wrong on the facts, it's a pointless political dead-end.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
21d ago
So obviously (well you didn't link the tweet because of course not) the author of the tweet meant that, not meant any actual agreement with the libs. I can't see any other way to interpret this statement at all.
Your interpretation is not correct.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
21d ago
Some months ago, someone on Twitter said the following:
The decentralization of the internet liberated heterodox info to the public but Libs are right: there is enormous danger of misinformation and disinformation.
That's the kind of middle-of-the-road statement that, two or three years ago, I would have associated with Right-wing rationalists. People called out the media and the establishment when it was wrong while also being open and honest about the Right's flaws. While that tendency still exists in places like DSL and here, I've found it's becoming rarer and rarer, with those espousing it increasingly likely to be told they aren't welcome. This parallels a wider tendency in American politics: the rise of the so-called "Tech Right." People like Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Shaun Maguire. Richard Hanania initially hoped they would infuse the Right with needed level-headedness, after all, such people were urban, socially moderate, and didn't have chips on their shoulders about class. This has largely not happened. You could hardly imagine Musk, Andreessen, or Maguire saying anything like the above statement. Their attitude parallels that of the Right as a whole - "misinformation" is just a left-wing smear and there's no downside at all to every random person with a two-digit IQ having a social media megaphone. Musk did push back on the tariffs, (perhaps because his business interests were being harmed) but you could never imagine him saying "libs are right" about anything. Even when he's broken with Trump, he hasn't reflected on the barren epistemological environment that led to Liberation Day, instead doubling down on conspiratorial Epstein stuff. To get a reasonable, moderate perspective, you have to follow the kind of people who march around with tiki torches and scream "Jews will not replace us!" That's not much of an exaggeration; the statement that libs were right about misinformation came from Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville goon march.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
21d ago
@AlexanderTurok writing that MAGA people are classless retards non-elite human capital who are too dumb to go to {snip} get a job
I've never made such a claim, rather I've consistently cited the fact that the unemployment rate is close to zero. Reading comprehension.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
21d ago
She's appealing to the Supreme Court to throw her conviction out. She may well be innocent, or at least not as guilty as the crime she's been convicted of.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
Like, yes, but also no? Mostly no. First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist. There's nothing inherently, fundamentally, deeply different about human groups.
Why do you believe this to be true?
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
When the working class get turfed out of their working-class jobs, they don't smoothly transition into managerial or knowledge-economy jobs. Their communities died and once independent and hard-working people all slid into the welfare-and-fentanyl pit of despair.
Once more confirmation you people think whites are an inferior race incapable of competing with Guatemalans. I have a much more positive view of white people.
There is no feasible way for the entire working class to move up into the managerial class for all the immigrants you seem to think are more suitable for these jobs. They are the losers of a world of open borders. They're not economic deadweight, they're your countrymen, for God's sake!
They don't exist, as the unemployment rate confirms.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
See the original comment, since we're talking about adopting out of foster care here:
The factoid that I always try to bring up concerning homelessness in the US is that, depending on the source you cite, between ~30% and 50% of every homeless adult spent time in the foster care system.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
What about the everyday immigrants who do nothing all day, and get housed in private hotels, paid for by the government? Or the ones setting up grooming gangs that the police and social workers run cover for?
That's not something that happens in America.
Yeah, we should be doing that ourselves.
Poverty fetish again.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
They control an entire congressional district
This is an utterly ridiculous statement that can be debunked in 30 seconds of Googling. Ilham Omar's district is 17.1% Black, which will include some pre-65 "native" Blacks as well as Somalis. She was sent to Congress by white liberals. There's an important theme here, a lot of what the anti-immigrant Right habitually blames on immigrants is actually done by white liberals.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
In his book Shadows of the Rising Sun, he detailed how he lived and worked in Japan as an adult, so he presumably went back at some point.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
I agree our society is too credentialist. The issue is not "they're bad because they went to a third-rate university" so much as "they're bad because they have an inferiority complex around having went to third rate university, and that's where the fetishization of manual labor comes from."
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
it’ll be all your fault when we come out brown on the other side
Lots of white nationalists are brown in more than one way...
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
should be done by legal citizens at whatever rate is necessary to be paid to incentivize it, and not by imported slaves
This seems to imply that employers have infinite resources to pay whatever rate is necessary to incentivize citizens to do it. In reality it may simply not get done.
imported slaves
Voluntary workers are not slaves. But I supposed I could yes-chag.jpg it. They're slaves, so what? The government should put the interests of American citizens first.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
I have respect for the value of work. I do not agree with this notion that digging.a ditch with a shovel is "nobler" than digging a ditch with machinery, which is itself more noble than writing software for the ditch-digging machine. That's poverty fetishism and third worldism.
For an orderly and stable society to function, the scholar-gentry of the Empire had to give a level of respect to the masses who fed and clothed everyone.
Conservatives and the far-right never seem to have this respect when the person who picked their fruit or sewed their underwear is an immigrant or a foreigner.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
If you're a restaurant, why would you take the risk of hiring and training someone for only 2-3 months of labor, individuals that could be lazy or awkward or fickle or more risk oriented on account of them being teenagers, when you can hire older immigrants instead?
Higher IQ, ability to speak English fluently, lack of third-world habbits.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
In 2025, it's a near impossibility to support oneself at age 18 entirely independently
It's easier than it's ever been in history.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
I do think America's gender wars will get worse before they get better, but keep in mind that much of South Korea's gender dysfunction is due to sex-selective abortion two decades ago.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
I'm curious overall - do you not see a benefit to being in touch with the working class whatsoever?
To a small extent, sure.
The issue I see here is that conservatism is increasingly the ideology of uneducated people and those who went to third-rate universities. Instead of thinking about how to acquire power, or attract EHC who have power, they're smoking copium about how noble manual labor is.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
My post says nothing negative about low-class people. I'm taking issue with lower-middle-class conservative policy wonks who fetishize manual labor. As to being a one-trick pony, I've written much else, see:
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22d ago
Now, frankly I have no idea how he does want these necessary but awful (by his lights) jobs to be done, and would very much appreciate hearing that directly from him. I would also, honestly, really like him to make a top level post where he lays out his own, explicit, positive ideas about how he wants the economy and culture to work.
Over the short term, by people who have no better option, which is how they're done in any society. Over the long term, economic and technological growth will allow more and more of those jobs to be eliminated.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
23d ago
Wait, you're telling me a criminal destroyed evidence?
Sounds pretty normal actually.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
23d ago
Anyway, my bigger concern in the US is actually having a healthcare crisis with my child and becoming destitute,
How do you envision that happening?
I think low fertility is a real problem but like 70% of it is just resentful losers looking for the one thing they can say to feel superior to more successful people.
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