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Notes -
The California model.
I just got back from a brief trip to California that didn't include the parts where the violent drug zombies live. It was a lovely vacation. California is absolutely beautiful.
Let me introduce the secrets to California's success.
Be blessed with the most amazing geography and weather anywhere in the U.S. and maybe the world
Be the center of the world tech and entertainment industries
Make a deal that baby boomers get to live out their natural lives in splendor and grace while a complete population replacement happens beneath them
As a wealthy tourist, it was all very nice. Whereas the coast of Florida is loaded with aggressive traffic and people, the coast of California is dotted with pleasant beach communities. All the houses cost like $3 million dollars so no one can afford to live there. Despite the best weather and scenery on the planet, the population is going DOWN. People are friendly and nice. The restaurants are full of white retirees, still paying $1000 in annual property tax on their $4 million house they bought for $200,000 in 1981. 95% of the workers are Hispanic. I have no idea where they actually live. But the quality of service was very high and prices were reasonable (at least compared to Seattle).
A quick 5 minute drive from Santa Cruz and you're in a beautiful redwood forest. No houses or people here. Just a beautiful state park with miles of trails. I saw a school group with an earnest white teacher explaining tree rings to a group of about 20 young students. 100% of the students were Hispanic.
People are actually leaving this state, the state that has everything, that was dealt a hand of aces. Productive citizens are taxed at eye-popping rates to prop up the seniors and the underclass. It works for now. It seems kind of similar to what's happening in Europe and where the rest of the U.S. is headed as well.
In any case, I had a wonderful time. I highly recommend California as a tourist destination.
I'm guessing this is South Bay or thereabouts. The Dumbarton bridge marks the beginning of Asian (south and east) tech town. Indians and Chinese tech workers are eating up the area from Palo Alto to San Jose back up tp Fremont. But that is silicon valley proper, so it's hardly surprising.
The rest of California and the Bay Area is not infested with Indian and Chinese tech workers taking over.
Wow, does sideswiping an entire group of people as an "infestation" not count as being overly antagonistic here?
Backseat modding does.
You guys are allowed to mod however you want---it's your website. It's just dishonest to pretend to be a neutral "place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases" when there's a pretty clear bias in which groups you're allowed to use this kind of antagonistic language against and which you aren't.
Whatever you guys might claim to be, this seems to be a place where it's ok to call an immigrant group an infestation but not to say that the antebellum south was an execrable culture.
You have either fundamentally misunderstood or are fundamentally misrepresenting the thread you linked. You are in fact allowed to say that the antebellum south was an execrable culture, and many people have said here it many times before. You can in fact argue that Confederate statues should be torn down, and you can even argue that people who think otherwise are bad; many people have argued that here many times before. You do in fact have to be careful about how you talk about any group here, and quite a few anti-woke people have in fact been banned for failing to do so properly. The objection in that thread, as described to you repeatedly at the time, was that you were conflating people to object to the destruction of Confederate memorials with slave owners.
I think the antebellum south was an execrable culture, and holding the history constant to the start of the Civil War, I prefer our actual history where their society was destroyed through mass violence to counterfactuals where it might have been allowed to fade away peacefully, continuing to perpetrate evil throughout its decline. Further, I think that destroying Confederate monuments is both stupid and evil here and now. I'd be happy to discuss either opinion with you as time permits, as either side of either opinion fit comfortably within the rules here.
I never conflated these two groups in that entire conversation and repeatedly tried to explain that I didn't. From the very first post, I tried to be very clear that I was only talking about the antebellum south:
This is in fact the main issue. If you try to argue many points on this forum, you get pattern-matched and rounded-off to a very different point that is actually objectionable. You can take however many pains you want to say that you are just talking about the antebellum south, and even the moderation team thinks that you are somehow also talking about the modern south. Like how are you supposed to interpret the group that's being teabagged by melting down a statue as something other than the group led by the person the statue represented?
In the case here, a similar effect creates huge blindspots when applying the guideline:
How is "infested with Indian and Chinese tech workers taking over" at all being careful while talking about a group? Pointing this out, however, gets conflated with other crying wolf about racism, so this rule about not casually and unjustifiably sideswiping large groups of people doesn't really get applied properly.
Reading the conversation, it looks to me like you did in fact conflate the two groups.
"the outgroup" in this comment is pretty clearly referring to contemporary people, not the Confederate slavers. The context of the entire comment is about people in the present day.
Your reply:
(bolding mine.) He's talking about one thing, you respond with a line that makes it seem like he's talking about something else. That doesn't make for good discussion. Especially when you follow it up with:
I find it doubtful that you were actually confused by what he meant by "moderate". If you want to argue that such people aren't actually moderate, you can present an argument. You offer a declaration, framed uncharitably. This is building consensus, and it also makes for bad discussion.
You seem to have a habit of writing posts in a way optimized, intentionally or not, for maximizing heat and not light. You also seem to have a pattern of conversation centering on moral outrage that people might possibly disagree with you. If you are actually interested in discussing why someone might not want confederate statues destroyed, or why they should want them destroyed, that's something we can do here. It would help to start from the assumption that people might reasonably disagree with you.
It's not, and he has in fact been warned. On the other hand, at least it's not an uncharitably-framed argument over definitions of words. The person you're complaining about is pretty clearly a racist, and they aren't hiding it or being weaselly about it. That's actually preferable to the alternative, which is why we have the "speak plainly" rule, and, as I understand it, is one of the reasons we tolerate significant amounts of vitriol toward parties who are not actually present in the discussion.
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