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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35355 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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Today I got a response to an old comment in which I'd argued

I'd credit [the positivity of leftist hobby spaces] not to an evangelist reward cycle, but to evaporative cooling. Leftist spaces are less likely to make people feel uncomfortable enough to leave.

...

A subset of the right wing has staked out "being allowed to use slurs" as their Gadsden flag. That circle is near-completely contained within the circle of users who value "owning the libs." As long as this is true, sane moderation is going to have a left-wing bias. To some degree, this must go out the window in extremist left spaces. I'm not going to claim ChapoTrapHouse was a bastion of reasoned debate. It's the hobbyist Discords and niche interests that live and breathe on niceness, community and civilization.

@desolation objected, noting that leftist activism is fully willing to make people uncomfortable:

Have we forgotten the whole phenomenon of "you can't be racist/sexist/whatever against [disfavoured group]" and every mainstream outlet defending using doxing and slurs against targets so long as they're in a disfavoured group?

In the interest of further discussion, I'm moving my response to the main thread.

I'll stand by the first statement, and emphasize that it refers to hobby-spaces-leaning-left, not extremists. I'm not sure what led you to this month-old post, but it was in response to a theory that "Leftists (especially LGBT-focused) congregate in highly socialized communities where every small action toward The Cause is socially reinforced." The OP had constructed a rather elaborate model of left-affiliated communities which portrayed them as hugboxing evangelists. In addition to being rather uncharitable, this overlooks an alternate theory: if a space is reasonably nice, will it end up full of leftists?

As for the second, yes and no. Yes, quoting Kendi or otherwise engaging in that flavor of anti-*ism is more socially acceptable than just being *ist. That's exactly why it drives away fewer users. It's both harder to deploy (and thus more rare) and less likely to offend leftists, centrists, or even most right-wingers.

If a community bans slurs, they will exclude some free speech absolutists. So long as there are more of those on the right, that will select for leftists. Banning slurs is a much more popular mod policy than banning "you can't be racist against X," probably because slurs are cheap and easy to deploy anywhere. Case study: Xbox Live. Would banning any discussion of critical race theory have had any impact on the population of 13yo gamers? What about banning the word "retard"? Apply the same conclusion to Discord, and we have a mechanism by which a neutral community adopts some "left-wing" norms merely by picking the rules with the most relevance. Repeat over months or years, banning the few who get really upset about censorship, and we end up with a left-leaning community which gets along smoothly.

Maybe every once in a while someone in that community gets away with...I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs? "Colonizer?" Maybe someone says that and right-wingers feel unwanted, or doxxing threats make them feel unsafe. It's also possible that the community enters a purity spiral and implodes. But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.

Honestly, I don't see where mainstream publications come into this at all. The comments section for NYT op-eds is by no means a tight-knit hobbyist community. And while the media's stance on doxxing ranges from sympathetic to enthusiastic, I'm skeptical that such outlets have endorsed using slurs.

At least for me this is confounded by demographics. Any “reasonably nice” hobby I am involved with is overwhelmingly made up of college-educated whites and jews. That alone tells you what the slant of the place will be outside of explicitly contrarian spaces like TheMotte

Define “reasonably nice”. It seems like this is a euphemism for blue tribe approved and college educated oriented, in which case obvious selection effects are both obvious and don’t have much to do with niceness.

On the other hand, wealthy blue collar hobbies- guns/hunting, stacking silver, souping up cars, barbecue, etc- are also notorious for being nice to newcomers, and the selection effects are obvious there too. There’s fewer journalists learning to process their own game animals, so it doesn’t show up in the discourse as much, but that’s certainly a community which has very similar effects while pointing in a different direction, politically.

and we end up with a left-leaning community which gets along smoothly.

Left-leaning communities are also notorious for engaging in circular firing squads over being insufficiently pious.

They're also notorious for ham-fisted censorship drives over pet causes that cause mass exodus of users. Remember gamergate ? Well most of the people who were pissed with moderation re: the BPD slut who shall not be named weren't right-leaning. It was mostly random gamers, centrist or left leaning.

Really, they're well known for being very ban happy. Consider e.g. Resetera, one of the left-leaning gaming forums.

re: the BPD slut who shall not be named

Yeah, look. One of the advantages of moving here is that we no longer have to use "***" or "who-shall-not-be-named" evasions, so if you want to talk about someone, just talk about them, by name, rather than flinging epithets.

Insulting public figures is permissible to a point, but just calling someone a "BPD slut" is not a quality contribution to the discourse. If you think Zoe Quinn's alleged BPD or sluttiness is pertinent, go ahead and talk about it, but not just because you think this is a place where throwing random put-downs at your enemies is cool.

It's also not in the interest of clarity. I wouldn't have known who "the BPD slut" is supposed to be - I'd have to (look up Gamergate and) take a guess from context. If a name is used instead, I either know who is being referred to or can easily look it up.

As far as I'm aware, the whole affair blew up because of her BPD & slutty behavior. World would never have learned the allegations that she had sex with people reviewing games had she not cheated on and lied to her boyfriend. Clarification: and because of the excessive nature of the cheating, he got so angry he wrote a very long very salty exposé he posted online, where it still is, which set off the whole scandal.

Anyone with a brain knew gaming journalism was dirty - I've read similar complaints in late 1990s, but it was usually boring stuff related to advertising income, access that few cared about, etc.

This salacious interlude and the coordinated censorship blew the arrangement up for good. Now as I understand gaming journalists are mostly irrelevant, and various amateur reviewers or streamers matter far more.

EDIT:

clarification added

I think this is actually a fairly powerful theory for explaining the situation in random hobby groups, especially ones that otherwise ban political discussions.

I'll stand by the first statement, and emphasize that it refers to hobby-spaces-leaning-left, not extremists.

Then it's not really a meaningful statement, because what you're emphasising is a transitionary state lasting from about 2 weeks to 2 months, before it ends up being run solely by and for leftist extremists.

an alternate theory: if a space is reasonably nice, will it end up full of leftists?

It will end up full of leftist entryists seeking to co-opt it and turn it into a leftist extremist space, if that's what you mean (it probably isn't.) Overly permissive and nice groups simply don't have the antibodies necessary to reject leftist appropriation efforts, which is why they're natural targets for them. Most notably, "nerd culture" saw this happen to it, because nerds, being outcasts themselves, were very reluctant to "become bad guys" by banishing anybody, and look where it's got them: shoved out of their own communities and hobbies that they grew from the ground up, and replaced by plasticky faux-nerds with only the basest knowledge of the hobbies who are there to skim influence and money off the communities they parasitise.

Repeat over months or years, banning the few who get really upset about censorship, and we end up with a left-leaning community which gets along smoothly.

Again, the point in time at which you're choosing to look is not the end of the evolution of the community. More leftists get added to the staff over time, and they start enforcing "no slurs" extremely selectively to weed out the people they hate (non-leftists). This completes the degeneration of the community into an extremist leftist enclave where far leftists can openly call for the doxxing and death of anyone even suspected of being right-wing without consequence, but saying "tranny" gets you immediately banned. (See: twitter, reddit)

But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.

It's not rare at all. If it can happen to a knitting forum it can happen anywhere, and it will, because leftists are always on the lookout for things to subvert. Because extreme leftists fundamentally cannot create, only destroy. They can't meme and have to steal right-wing memes, they can't come up with original concepts for movies and shows and must resort to perverting existing IPs, and they can't create successful communities, only subvert them. And they never have any kind of actual plan for what happens after their fanciful revolution fantasy, that's always someone else's problem -- they're just in it for the burning down and looting of the existing order. Remember the "what will your job be in the leftist utopia" thread where not one person said labourer? No creation. Only destruction.

No, it is definitely possible for a space to avoid the extremists. I have seen ones last years. The keys to success seem like 1) starting out “apolitical” but left-friendly, and 2) having an actual point to the community. Yes, the moment an admin starts getting political it’s in trouble. Yes, if brigaders make a concerted effort to get on staff they can cause damage. No, that’s not guaranteed.

It’s certainly not some magical property of leftists that makes them looting parasites. I don’t know what fantasy land you’re living in where only your ingroup actually builds anything. I’m sure Ayn Rand would be proud.

I have seen ones last years.

Such as? Are you very sure they avoided extremists, or could it be that you were blind to them because you don't see them as extreme due to being one of them? Are you entirely sure you're not standing in the middle of Trafalgar Square and wondering why you can't see London?

It’s certainly not some magical property of leftists that makes them looting parasites.

I'd like just one example of right-wingers taking over a community and, say, instituting rules that say you must refer to everyone as their birth sex or be banned, then, please.

There’s one in particular I can think of, yeah. It’s studiously dedicated to an indie game and enforces a reasonably strict no-politics rule.

It’s very international, with a strong Singaporean contingent. It’s also very gay, to a level which would probably offend more sensitive right-wingers. Neither of these things precludes the mods banning anyone who wants to monologue about politics, left or right. The best example I saw was someone determined to post “America will nevertheless be tried for war crimes!!1!” But usually bans are reserved for trolls. So I’d call it affably leftist, not militant.

The biggest crisis faced by this server occurred when a certain YouTuber reviewed the game. This resulted in a tide of meme spammers making edgy Holocaust jokes.

Your request for evidence is complicated by the free-speech absolutists, who as much more likely to stick around a right wing space. And of course the old school sensibility of “there are no women on the Internet” makes such an unverifiable rule unlikely. I’d be willingly to bet that you could find neutral-turned-right spaces in gun or survival culture, or perhaps on alternate history fiction boards.

I'll just work on the assumption you're in the furry inflation vore fetish community, since he hasn't reviewed many other indie games lately and it'd fit for the gay thing https://youtube.com/watch?v=VqasJcCUAA8

Noooooooo comment, lol.

What about Caves of Qud?

He'd already said it wasn't that in another thread. The part I'm still wondering about is the Singaporean element.

furry inflation vore fetish community

See I read this and I just thought "wait, Pyrocynical made a game?"

Jfc I can't even tell what that is but I want it to get off my lawn. God damn zoomers.

I’d be willingly to bet that you could find neutral-turned-right spaces in gun or survival culture, or perhaps on alternate history fiction boards.

Okay, but I don't want you to make a bet, I want you to actually find the examples of right-wing entryism triumphant resulting in purges of the left in these communities.

We can point to plenty examples of the reverse! It is not enough for you to merely posit the existence of a counter.

I recall visiting a Russian chan-slash-web-culture wiki recently and seeing the Russian-Ukrainian war covered almost exclusively from a hard pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian stance. That's in a space which I recall as rather irreverent to the powers that be.

I'm skeptical that the Russian chans were neutral or left to begin with, but I have no insight into Russian internet culture, so who can say? I was thinking more the western world, though. The relevant chunks.

It's a mistake to view Russian politics through the binary lens of Dems and Reps in the first place. However, the official position of the state is culturally to the right of the West, and that of most dissidents is to the left of the state. Of course, there are also the "50 Putins" types, particularly visible today, who are pissed that Ukraine isn't nuclear ashes/barren wasteland within Russian borders yet.

Crucially, support for the state was supposed to be rare on chans.

More comments

That does remind me, what about the Russian gachimuchi community/ies?

What about them? If you're asking whether they were right-entried or not - I'm not involved enough and they're too ironic to say from the outside. I don't recall anything blatant like "femboy fascism" though.

Was the "certain YouTuber" Sseth? I remember there was some drama around Caves of Qud when he released a video about it.

Yup. The Ssethtide. Different game, though; I actually haven't played Qud.

Dude is hilarious.

Ssethtide was SS13, wasn't it?

Yeah, that's one thing, I think there was also some alledged brigading of the CoQ Discord, or at least some sort of freakout there.

Yes, the moment an admin starts getting political it’s in trouble.

This point is underemphasized. The left--including the center-left--has by now "no enemies to the left" as a default setting. Once you combine that with "the personal is the political," the spiral to the left is inevitable, if on a variable timetable.

I used to run something more or less equivalent to a hobbyist group with the rules "no politics," "no racism," and "don't be an asshat." I know for a fact that the political leanings of the other leadership was everything from hard left to hard right, but we were able to stick to a firm "get your political discussion kicks elsewhere." I have zero faith that I'd be able to repeat the experience, because of the number of times I've heard "it's not political, it's just being a decent person."

As for slurs, it doesn't have to be a specific word or phrase. I've heard "white dude" be used with every bit of the venom and contempt that a Klansman might use the n-word. Didn't get moderated.

Even with the caveat "extreme leftists," this is a little too much boo outgroup. Where's your evidence that "extreme leftists" are just inherently less creative, more destructive, and fundamentally devoted to "subverting" things than "extreme rightists"? It's fine to complain about leftists and "converged" organizations, but do not get too comfortable talking about your outgroup as if it's a given that they are all alien invaders. This is still a place for testing shady thinking and talking as if you want everyone to be included, not for kicking up your feet and shit-talking about how your outgroup is just the worst.

Here's a citation from goofy mail prank man:

"Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principles, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.

But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred."

What's the point of being a leftist? Change society? Don't you already have the power within yourself to behave with humility and charity to help those you perceive as oppressed?

Isn't the need to change others the expression of a will to power as explained above?

Isn't the need to change others the expression of a will to power as explained above?

You can write a post expanding on that idea if you like. What you can't do is describe your outgroup in a hostile and uncharitable way as if we all accept as a given that "Yes, they are like that" even if "they" would not agree with your characterization.

Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.

It’s important to remember that the internet is a machine that takes the most hostile and unlikeable things that anybody in our outgroup has done and delivers them to our eyeballs on a daily basis.

So people on the left get a feed of angry Trumpers and religious wackos doing regrettable things in public, meanwhile you are being fed angry protesters and the most extreme things that people in your outgroup have done or said.

leftists are always on the lookout for things to subvert. Because extreme leftists fundamentally cannot create, only destroy

Oh come on this is ridiculous. While leftist entryism seems to be a real phenomenon, blanket stating that leftists are just fundamentally evil like this requires a little justification

I thought I did.

Leftists are not capable of harnessing meme magic, for whatever reason. Most left wing memes are repackaged right wing ones ("snowflake", "NPC", "the right can't meme") or painfully unfunny wall of text screeds. That the left can't meme is an incredibly common sentiment, and I've yet to really see anyone refute it decisively. There is no, say, leftist equivalent of Stonetoss, that I know of.

Leftist-dominated media studios (Amazon, Netflix, most of Hollywood) have been engaged in the cultural vandalism of making politically-distorted remakes and sequels that nobody asked for since, well, the Ghostbusters reboot. Star Wars, Rings of Power, Wheel of Time, and so on and so forth. Not one has been even close to the originals. Almost all result in their IP being shuttered into dormancy after their run. Doctor Who has done a spectacular swan dive into the toilet and now looks like its future is uncertain -- more widely, people are refusing to pay the BBC license fee at ever increasing rates each year. The new Saints Row surgically excised all the humour from the game and replaced it with complaining about student loans and look where that's gotten. Where they make any wholly original IP content at all, it swiftly fails or never reaches market. (Crunchyroll's High Guardian Spice as an example.)

As far as communities; SomethingAwful faded from a titan of the internet to internet hugbox after the leftist takeover, antiwork was outed as a clown show on national TV, CHAZ descended into warlordism almost immediately and had a murder rate per capita higher than the deepest darkest shithole you can think of. Kiwifarms documented the insanity of a community called the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch. San Francisco has an app dedicated to reporting actual human excrement on its public pathways. Every communist nation ever has collapsed like an inexpertly made souffle. Purity spiralling is incredibly well known as a characteristic of leftist-dominated communities.

There are plenty of failing or failed right-wing communities, of course, but the difference between the two is that usually the right-wing ones are destroyed by leftist interference (kiwifarms being the obvious example, every sub that's been constricted and banned by reddit on the marching orders of AHS). By comparison leftist communities almost always implode from within, though maybe this is a consequence of nobody being willing to take down websites and subreddits because right-wingers get upset over them.

I see plenty of leftist memes in my media bubble. Especially on reddit, look at the rise of antiwork or /r/collapse etc etc. Just because you don't see them often or find them funny doesn't mean they don't exist.

This is not really an argument, this is just a list of things you dislike.

It's funny to me when people say that the left can't meme. In one sense I get it: the edginess and nihilism that characterises imageboard meme culture is mostly not compatible enough with progressivism for them to create something like the soyjak. And yet, consider that the 'tolerance of tolerance paradox' went from being an obscure philosophical musing to an almost globally enforced rule of the internet in less than a decade. In memetic warfare terms, that's a victory on the scale of desert storm. A similar argument applies to 'stating ones pronouns' and 'the power plus prejudice definition of racism'. These might not be memes in the same way soyjak is a meme, but they are memetic ideas nonetheless and they have won big time.

P.S. There are a few good leftist memes in a format recognisable to the average reactionary shitposter. 'le pol face' is probably the best example.

P.P.S. All souffles collapse, even expertly made ones.

Maybe it's a difference in the type of meme: the right is oddly good at the kind of meme that compresses information/a message into an easy-to-grasp image, the left is oddly good at changing the informational environment itself.

The left can't meme, but it can take over. That's more useful.

(irony intended. the left meme much better than the right, they're just not funny)

'globally enforced rule'

Indeed. Leftist memes are enforced at gun point or delete button point.

Stating one's pronouns is literally supported by a billion dollar DEI industry.

Racism = power + prejudice is not in application otherwise the media wouldn't be so careful handling some cases of racial conflicts.

Isn't racism now understood to be “A collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas”??

And yet, consider that the 'tolerance of tolerance paradox' went from being an obscure philosophical musing to an almost globally enforced rule of the internet in less than a decade.

I hate that that's an actual, real, example, and that it's an even better example of progressive "meme magic" than you seem to have laid out.

Consider the initial, Popperian formulation of the Paradox of Tolerance:

Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. ... But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. ...

This is a milquetoast, classically liberal statement; tolerance in this sense is to literally tolerate other people, no matter how contrary to good taste (or hateful, or fascist, or communist...) they are. It is to tolerate dissent.

This has been morphed to something like:

A tolerant society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant individuals must not be tolerated.

It does not take any more than a cursory reading to appreciate that Popperian tolerance(1) and progressive tolerance(2) are essentially different words, and that the progressive version of the "paradox" in fact has no paradox in it, merely a word game where tolerance(2) is implicitly equated with tolerance(1).

(Consider:

A tolerant(2) society welcomes all #ATTRIBUTES. Intolerant(2) individuals do not welcome certain #ATTRIBUTES, and thus spoil the society. Therefore intolerant(2) individuals must not be tolerated(1).

If I did not make it clear.)

That the nonsensical lack-of-paradox "paradox" is now the mainstream interpretation is at once disheartening and also an excellent example of successful progressive "meme power" in the Dawkinsean sense of the word.

There is no, say, leftist equivalent of Stonetoss, that I know of.

My impression of xkcd the last few years is basically this. And, like stonetoss, the comics that are low-effort outgroup dunks tend to suck. More generally, I think that partisan media, and generally media that prioritizes sending a message over being good, just tends to suck a bit.

The xkcd Free Speech comic [1] from April 2014 was very influential and memetic - as much so as any Stonetonss comic - on Reddit and Reddit-adjacent parts of the internet back when those websites were much more pro-free-speech than they are today.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1357/

That's the problem there, IMO: XKCD is a lot more fun when it's just being nerdy. It trying to be anything like Stonetoss is like throwing a vintage CJ Wrangler into a drag race.

I mean stonetoss being stonetoss isn't exactly funnier - here's the most recent one where it's just a low-effort dunk, vs this one, which is a bit funnier (though still low effort and not that funny).

On reflection I'd endorse both "the left can't meme" and "the right can't meme". Though is also possible that it's "nobody can meme in a way that people who don't spend all their time immersed in the same culture find funny".

I agree it's a bit too much, but they don't have to be evil to destroy everything. I think many of them have good (if unexamined) intentions, at least at a surface level. I think they still tend to fundamentally destroy things, rather than make them better.

In addition to being rather uncharitable, this overlooks an alternate theory: if a space is reasonably nice, will it end up full of leftists?

Being charitable to one side means being uncharitable to their opponents: were you charitable to non-wokes instead, you wouldn't place so much emphasis in your argumentation on slurs, but on poltical disagreements. It was the latter which led to the banishment of /r/themotte.

I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs?

White? Man? Both are by leftists only employed the same way a 4channer uses "Jew".

TheMotte wasn't banished; it was a self-imposed exile in response to an increasingly opaque, arbitrary, and hostile environment. Perhaps a distinction without a difference, but my impression is that it had one or two years left in it before the coup de grace.

In practice, yes indeed. Add to that list: Cis? Oppressor? Privileged? Stale pale and male?

I think you're making an analysis of Libertarian Left spaces and applying it to Authoritarian Left spaces as well. These lib left hobby spaces have sane moderation which needs constant upkeep to keep out the extremists of either side from ruining it. Auth left spaces tend to just ban everyone until either nobody is left or there is no longer any diversity of thought.

As I wrote, I was thinking of a particular hobby Discord. I wouldn’t describe them as libleft but “sane moderation” is exactly what I had in mind. The crux was supposed to be that so long long as free speech absolutism is right-coded, sane moderation is going to hit more right-wingers. It’s not that the left wing is saintly, just that including “don’t use slurs” as a party plank will preempt a bunch of bans.

Most of the responses are interested in talking about hard authleft spaces. I’m not sure if I wasn’t clear or if that’s just more fun.

I guess I don't really associate sane moderation with either the "I wanna say slurs" end of right-wing or the "only 1 opinion allowed ever" end of the left-wing. I generally see good moderation in more IDW style spaces that allow debate on stuff but also don't allow N-bombs. These spaces contain both right and left wing people often. (See here, SSC, ModeratePolitics, etc.)

One of the more successful bits of left-wing/Blue-Tribe propaganda has been to convince a whole generation coastal urbanites that right wing = white guys that just want to be able to use the word "nigger" with out catching side-eye and/or a punch to the nose.

Both sides are inclined to ban. I think Cernovich has blocked more people on twitter than anyone, second maybe to nnTaleb even though they are on opposite sides of the wokeness spectrum. I think it's an ego or control thing more than a political one. It depends who is doing the moderating.

To the extent this is true, I think we're forced to conclude that "controlling personalities" are isomorphic to "normal human personalities". Radical individualism doesn't seem to have a very large or consistent constituency.

An analysis of a social phenomena can’t quite be charitable or uncharitable, only accurate or inaccurate. “Charitable” refers to the interpretation of another’s argument or beliefs. Eg, Moldbug’s stuff is pretty out there, but calling his analysis “uncharitable” doesn’t make much sense.

In my opinion, the OP was dripping with condescension. It was taken for granted that leftist spaces sucked on all aspects except ideological cohesion.

Anything from an uncreative tweet, a poorly conceived thought, an unlikely empowering experience, whatever is usually met with pats on the back snaps (sensory issues!) and good boys persons.

Analyzing a social phenomenon is one thing. Analyzing a strawman...that’s what I consider uncharitable.

A strawman? That passage was describing half of one of the most common abusive tactics in existence. You pump someone up with over the top displays of love and affection, and then you make them feel worthless for minor errors. This way you can convince them that they are worthless and only redeemed by your love. It is stock in trade for some leftist communities and organisations, because those leftist communities and organisations have been taken over by abusers. There have been several examples already in this thread, and if I remember correctly there were more in the original thread. This is no strawman, and it's not that leftist spaces just suck - they weren't always like this! But they have been co-opted by bad actors relying on the concept of no enemies to the left.

Personally I think it is a natural consequence of the leftist claim that domestic violence is a woman centric problem requiring a feminist lens to resolve, excusing abusers if they don't fit the patriarchal model, which allows them to flourish and inspires others to assume their tactics to get ahead.

Now that you can call a strawman, because I can't prove it, I don't think anyone will be able to for at least another decade - anyone who even breathes in that direction in the past decade gets run out of the industry like they were caught fucking chickens. But if you get an advocate drunk and ask them about it, you'll hear horror stories that will make Miranda Priestly look like Leslie Knope.

Yeah, I’m calling that passage a strawman. The whole OP was theorizing how leftist communities—not just extremist ones—were “quasi-lovebombing.” That’s a call to view seemingly positive interactions as the sort of abusive tactics you describe. It was also paired with lamentations about how right-wingers were too good at facing reality:

In contrast, Right-oriented spaces are less keen on compliments and engage in more stressful catastrophization. They consume too much news and complain too much about the news.

The corollary is left unstated.

I think that broad brush demands better evidence than “one time I watched a contrapoints video and it felt parasocial,” which was all the OP offered.

For what it’s worth, your interpretation of feminist frameworks as exploitable doesn’t scan as a strawman at all. It might be taboo, but that’s not because it’s implausible.

That passage indicates that low quality engagement is praised, not that all engagement is low quality

The following sentence is

While this oversaturation leads to an over-sensitivity, not to mention some bad behaviors and creations, it also means that the online community forms strong bonds and is only associated with positive emotions.

It’s an assertion of low quality, papered over with a segue into the main point. Surely everyone can think of a time that someone got a hug instead of legitimate criticism, so the author moves on to arguing why it gives the left a structural advantage.

Anything from an uncreative tweet, a poorly conceived thought, an unlikely empowering experience, whatever is usually met with pats on the back snaps (sensory issues!) and good boys persons.

Analyzing a social phenomenon is one thing. Analyzing a strawman.

Is the quoted part supposed to be a strawman? As a leftist who used to hang out in a lot of leftist spaces, I find that to be a fairly accurate description of them the vast majority of the time. The only parts I would object to are the last parts about "snaps" and "good persons," since those specific phenomena accurately characterize only the most extreme versions of such spaces, but the thrust of the message seems 100% on point. It also happens to be one of the main reasons why I stopped hanging out in as many such spaces as much.

Do you really never notice any of the things people are pointing out to you in this thread? I've always assumed anyone saying they've never seen it is blatantly gaslighting, but is it actually possible to just have impervious blinders for it?

I think you did a better job articulating my point than I did.

It’s not that the left wing is somehow more friendly, it’s that free speech absolutism is the most visible and low-effort way to get banned.

My perspective on 4chan is very skewed, because I pretty much only use the /tg/ board, which has a much lower post volume than the other boards, has tighter moderation (by 4chan standards). What it has is CRITICISM. Everywhere else on the internet, people either shill, hugbox, or bait controversy. On /tg/, they nitpick. It's a relentlessly negative place, and an excellent one in which to hone your writing craft.

Maybe every once in a while someone in that community gets away with...I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs? "Colonizer?" Maybe someone says that and right-wingers feel unwanted, or doxxing threats make them feel unsafe. It's also possible that the community enters a purity spiral and implodes. But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.

Fundy, incel, handmaid, uncle tom, oreo, are all slurs that are by and large directed from liberal social groups to conservative ones. "Insurrectionist" is acquiring that valency. There's also the explicitly political insults- GQP, republicunts, trumptard, etc- which seem broadly tolerated in a lot of spaces that would not allow the same variety of insults with a different valency.

Left-leaning spaces do not equally apply slur, the definition of slur is set in a way that's favourable to left-leaning etc etc.

Sorry, it's just a bit rich to hear that left-leaning spaces are intrinsically nicer after the last three years of people in hobby spaces treating me as subhuman, whether for disagreeing with lockdowns or for not taking whatever injections my government demands of me. Many of these supposedly left-leaning hobbyist spaces are casually, pervasively hateful in a way that only doesn't get recognised as hate because hate gets defined in whatever way is most useful to them at the time. There is real, serious hate and threat of violence in wanting someone locked down. There is real, serious hate and threat of violence in demanding that unvaccinated people be stabbed by needles. (this is why I am relatively supportive towards anti-lockdown people who e.g. shout abuse and threats at legislators - don't dish out what you can't take) And to bring the further-left into this as well, there is real, serious hate in demanding that others live under socialist or communist regimes. Supporting the Soviet Union is as racist towards Ukrainians as supporting the Nazis is towards Jews. It's so pervasive that even people on my side often recognise these things as wrong yet completely overlook the whole hatred angle of it!

Many of these supposedly left-leaning hobbyist spaces are casually, pervasively hateful in a way that only doesn't get recognised as hate because hate gets defined in whatever way is most useful to them at the time.

Man, don't I know it. I've fallen out of every single online hobbyist space I had in the 2000s and early 2010s. None of them are recognizable to me anymore, and every single one of them is permanently hostile enemy territory. The exception is the chans, but even they're different nowadays. For the worse.

FWIW I don't really see this effect in the sports clubs I'm in (granted these are more posh sports like tennis, golf, etc.)

The spaces here are a pretty healthy mix of left and right, both politically and culturally. You get the random misogynistic comment (a more charitable person would call it hyper-masculine) and the random deranged leftist comment (extreme liberal) in pretty equal amounts. Maybe I just haven't noticed the people who are offended enough to leave but everyone mostly just wants to play the sport and then have a couple beers after.

I am not sure how big the contingent of "wants to use slurs" is. Certainly I do not encounter people in my right-leaning spaces wanting to use the n-word. I guess I can think of a few if I try really hard, but I mostly think of examples of them being told to control themselves. Even the f-slur gets exasperated sighs.

Or maybe you are being expansive in your use of slurs. You can get quite a bit of power by declaring other people's arguments off-limits and you can do that by calling them slurs. Twitter banned the "NPC" meme because it was dehumanizing, and reddit banned the word "groomer."

RPG.net is very good at making people uncomfortable, because say the wrong thing and you are dead, and "lol just do not say wrong things" is hard when today's wrong thing was a normal thing five years ago. Was ResetEra running "smoothly" on their old server?

I don’t think it has to be very big. That subset gets to be very loud.

It only takes one “KKKILL_ALL_*******” or fedposter to make a lot of people nope out. Not dealing with that, going to hang out somewhere with fewer witches, etc.

Meanwhile, Twitter and Reddit and the like end up cultivating that image of non-witchiness as they attempt to catch the fleeing users. That means alienating the free speech absolutists, but not the garden-variety authoritarians.

Yeah, but those people shouldn't do that. KKKILL_ALL_blahblah doesn't actually do anything, or affect anyone, it really is just text, and one can just laugh or ignore it. It genuinely doesn't matter!

And... it isn't about a generic, reasonable sense of how harmful something is, there's clearly a larger, disproportionate factor - reddit banned /r/waterniggas for the soft n-word, and /r/legoyoda for vaguely racist memes, but still has /r/opiates, /r/cocaine, /r/heroin, /r/meth, etc. And - this isn't even entirely left-coded, /r/ageplaypenpals got taken down despite being entirely fictional because p*do stuff is considered to be terrible while something like /r/rapekink, despite describing things like likely-fictional (although "All stories here must be actual events told by the person with the victim's perspective" is in the sidebar) "rape-bait".

I think the drugs vs rape/pedo stuff makes sense.

People on those drug forums at least teach each other harm reduction techniques and are usually positive and supportive for those who say they want to quit.

If you click on any of the subreddits, I'm not seeing any harm reduction.

Bear in mind - all of these should be unsuspended. But the a very similar argument, and honestly a more convincing one, goes for the roleplay-fetish subreddits ("it gives them an outlet for their fetish that doesn't harm anyone"). (weird fetish subreddits are also supportive of people who say they want to stop doing the fetish, they are extremely big on consent.)

Ok, now do "punch the Nazis" in a social context where it's clear that Republicans are basically Nazis. Or when the discussion is whether "punch the Nazis" is even an adequate response, since killing the vermin is obviously morally superior.

I think this is a product of the fundamental difference in how the trad right and mainstream republicans view political violence in contrast to how democrats and the bulk of the so-called dissident right/intellectual dark web view it. IE Violence as a switch, vs violence as a continuum.

If you're the sort of person who views violence as a switch, "punching the Nazis" is eminently stupid and frankly cowardly. We don't don't "punch" Nazis where I'm from, we shoot 'em. We murder the bastards and then use their still-warm guts to grease the treads of our tanks the way the lord and George S Patton intended.

If you're the sort of person who views violence as a continuum the above is absurd, and sectarian violence just part of a balanced and complete breakfast.

I think this is a product of the fundamental difference in how the trad right and mainstream republicans view political violence in contrast to how democrats and the bulk of the so-called dissident right/intellectual dark web view it. IE Violence as a switch, vs violence as a continuum.

I can understand some of your beef with contrarians / the dissident right / the IDW, but... I beg your pardon, what now? Did I miss some Jordan Peterson video where he encourages people to get into fistfights with the woke? Is there some hidden Evergreen College footage, where Brett Weinstein is slapping students around? What on Earth are you talking about?

You can't tell me you haven't realized "punch a Nazi" is not literally about punching Nazis. That's just the catchy slogan. The essence of the message is "kill disliked right-wingers".

The continuum theory of violence is cute, but false. The lack of overt calls to murder are merely for plausible deniability. Everyone who unironically posts punch a Nazi is also cool with the Nazi getting righteous comeuppance from a brick to the skull.

Most people are perfectly comfortable with the thought of their political enemies being murdered. What people are not comfortable with is being seen for what they are.

The switch is welded in the off position, or if not, it's close enough. Which means the people who view violence as a continuum uses threats, intimidation, and lesser violence to simply win while the other side is waiting for a red line to be crossed to throw the switch. It never will be, until the "violence as a switch" side has been whittled down to five guys in a broken pickup truck with a single-shot BB gun.

In the specific conversation I was witnessing (left to far left), the "punch vs. kill Nazis" wasn't so much dial vs. switch as it was taking the "punch a Nazi" meme and upgrading it 50-Stalins style.

I think one of the other aspects of dial-style is that it claims to tolerate sliding through multiple dimensions "better." I'm sure you're familiar with the hot vs. crazy graph? Imagine the same concept, but where one aspect is "level of violence" and the other is "badness of target." You can afford to be looser in your application of "Nazi" if all you're doing is, you know, just a punch.

It's the whole "your speech is violence, but my violence is speech" thing. Who, whom all the way down. I honestly don't know how you even have a conversation when the idea of neutral standards, applied regardless of actor, is one of the things under contention.

I honestly don't know how you even have a conversation when the idea of neutral standards, applied regardless of actor, is one of the things under contention.

You realize all talks are for recreational purposes, not means of resolving conflicts or furthering peace between tribes, and otherwise embrace conflict theory.

It only takes one “KKKILL_ALL_*******” or fedposter to make a lot of people nope out. Not dealing with that, going to hang out somewhere with fewer witches, etc.

Am I the only one who remembers when it was trending on Twitter, to seemingly no problem what so ever, to cheer all the old white men dying after the last census? To signal, crassly, how truly enthusiastic you were, and how much better you thought the world was, with more dead white people?

Left leaning spaces, if you take for granted that Twitter and Reddit are left leaning, absolutely support "KILL ALL ******" posts, so long as you are talking about Republicans, or suspected Republicans. If you don't nope out of that just as hard as when you see someone "just asking questions" about the "Jewish Question", it's because you take it totally for granted.

Yeah, that’s fucked up.

I suppose I can’t prove it, but I don’t use Twitter, and my reddit account just posts on /r/rational these days.

#KillAllMen started nearly a decade ago and had quite some staying power too, didn't it? I still see it once in a (long) while.

I think that you make a good point and that it is under appreciated by the average Mottizen.

In my experience the sort of reflexive contrarian that complains about "left wing censorship" getting them banned from reddit for using [insert racial slur] is just as likely to get banded from ARfcom or the old Limbaugh Forums for the exact same reason.

Just look at HermanCainAwards. Leftist space celebrating the deaths of conservatives and it hasn't even been quarantined as far as I can tell. Or all the death wishes and threats of violence on Politics, a default sub.

I think "free speech absolutists" are noticeably different from "right-wing posters," even if they feel some common ground these days.

That’s where the evaporative cooling comes in. Trimming off the few most vocal is liable to shift the norms and to discourage others.

So long as the few most vocal are either principled libertarians or lost channers, moderation is going to have a pseudo-leftwards bias.

Here on Motte we’ve seen similar effects. Certain high-profile commenters get banned for being inflammatory, and then a few others announce dissatisfaction, followed by flouncing or suicide-by-mod. I want to say the reasoning is usually “Mod X is a partisan hack.” @HlynkaCG, I’m struggling to remember names, have you got anything?

Certain high-profile commenters get banned for being inflammatory

Where inflammatory is best understood as "in violation of implicitly leftist values".

Implicitly leftist in the same way as tankies regard "having stuff" as an implicitly bourgeois value, maybe.

When you filter against abrasive personalities, you are filtering for leftists, who are on the whole higher in agreeableness.

For this community, that’s a bit complicated, given the more classically-liberal principles involved.

This community descends from a cult of personality based around a neurotic progressive who disliked a bit of the left's excesses (as they threatened him personally and he's highly neurotic), but outside of those personal threats was enthusiastically on board with the entire far-left culture.

So much so he deliberately invested the whole of his private and personal life into those far-left environments!

Of course the values this community enshrines are implicitly leftist. They're less left than they could maximally be, but nevertheless still enshrine leftist ideas.

Perhaps you ought to clarify what you mean by "leftist" and "rightist" then.

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How would this community look and even work if it adopted different values? Are you implying there is a workable and desirable alternative, and one that has no taint of leftism? Or are you merely issuing a complaint with no further implications?

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Where inflammatory is best understood as "in violation of implicitly leftist values".

I doubt that.

Anecdotally, for all the complaints about moderation targeting the right, the sort of "libertarians or lost channers" who make those sorts of complaints seem to have an even rougher time in explicitly conservative/right-wing spaces.

Well Zontargs', flounce over the "True, Kind, Neccesary" rule that lead him and many of our other more "abrassive" regulars to leave and form /r/CultureWarRound up is probably the most notable instance. And I suspect that the memory of that event is what leads to a lot of the older libertarian types to characterize the Motte's moderation as left wing.

I'm not sure how far into the "inside baseball" of the mod team it's appropriate for me to delve, but we did have a few High profile flouncers that I was sorry to see and that lead to some heated discussions in mod chat. Yodacrist, IprayIam and McJunker, being the ones that stick in my mind.

We also had a few serial flouncers IE users who'd show up and post for about a month before stirring up a bunch of drama over some percieved slight, post a long winded rant about how they were leaving because the mods were strangling the discourse only to show up a couple weeks later with a new account and repeat the process.

Disagreements with Zorba and Trace over how to handle this later category was perhaps one of the issues that lead to my leaving the mod team.

If you are saying that the reason ResetEra or RPGNet became totally insane is that evaporative cooling drove away everyone not-insane, I agree.

But I do not think you are saying that. I think you are saying "right-wing people really really want to say nigger and then when people get banned for saying that the whole left-wing march starts."

Any place useful, regardless of polarity, needs to keep out

  • fed posters

  • glowies

  • fucking idiots who are genuinely "on our side"

and barrels of ink will be spilled saying, in way more words, "our side has no bad people, they are all plants from the other side, and, man, speaking of the other side, let me tell you about them, did you see their claim that the only people posting hate on their forums are outside wreckers?"

Anyway. All that ink is irrelevant because as far as the place is concerned all three of those groups are identical and the antibodies to keep out one keeps out the others.

What’s a “glowie”?

An FBI plant.

They may or may not exist, but getting rid of people who might-just-as-well-be-glowies is an important skill for any group.

So as far as I can tell, fedposters are plants who plant incriminating "evidence" in fora, while glowies are plants that try to coax the same from the real posters? Is there a strict distinction between the two?

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https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/glowie-glowposting

My favourite

I do like that Mokou glowposting reaction picture.

On a completely unrelated note I wonder if anyone feels the same way I do about the Chinese net in that it‘s very heavy on the sarcasm and quite aggressive in tone; it is quite a bit different from older Chinese. (Though I suppose it is the same for any language that makes its way to the internet…)

So I don’t know if those two forums were hit by evaporative cooling or by hostile admin takeover. Couldn’t say. I’ve been thinking about smaller, hobbyist servers. The sort that start out with a “no politics” rule.

There is some subset of users which wants to use slurs. Maybe they’re edgy teenagers, maybe principled free-speech crusaders. They are more likely to lean right.

As long as banning members of that subset disproportionately hits the right, the window gets to slide left, even if the subset is really small. No ideology needed—though it certainly shortcuts the process.

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I am not sure how big the contingent of "wants to use slurs" is.

What is the traffic ranking for 4chan?

For every person on 4chan who uses slurs as a tactical normie-filter there's three people who just enjoy being shocking and hateful.

No, 4channers use slurs because a combination of 'intending to piss people off because it's funny' and 'actually disliking trans/gay/black people'. ("based?") The ratio between the two probably has changed over its history. But it isn't to keep out speech policers!

4chan only hates gay tranny nigs because 4chan is self-loathing.

How would we know

Because I know a bunch of long-time 4channers personally?

As a counter point, I offer the regular posting of gore, which is usually upped whenever there is a perceived "raid" from outsiders going on

Again, in that case the point of the gore is to piss off the outsiders, not to 'prevent them from censoring us'

and I would guess that even among channers, most people do not like looking at gore.

probably, but most channers don't post gore most of the time, whereas they constantly use slurs.

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Well, you did said it was akin to rdrama's banners, which are consciously chosen. But even if we accept that 4chan slur-users are unwitting or subconscious implementers of an anti-normie immune system, their conscious actions are obviously those of people who enjoy using slurs, so they fall into the contingent originally described in the comment above.

I don't think this is really an important difference.

Couldn't American white southerners (circa 1850) say their culture is about enslaving black people? Abolitionists wouldn't go, "huh you're right I didn't notice that. We wouldn't want to culturally genocide you, so carry on!" they just say: your culture is not worth preserving. Maybe more realistically, abolitionists would say: You can keep your southern food and your southern hospitality, but you don't need to keep slaves.

To the extent that 4chan's culture is dependent on saying mean words, why would "it's a defense mechanism!" convince anyone? Also, what exactly is "that culture" and can it be separated from saying mean words?

  • If it can be separated, then this is what a lot of people are asking for

  • It it can't be separated, then 4chan has enemies

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You reminded me of KF which I should have needed reminding of.

I'd just like to register that it is very annoying for a non-native speaker when Americans refer to the "X-word" or the "Y-Slur".

Trust me, it's annoying for plenty of native speakers, too. I made a sacred vow that every time I see "the n-word" I raise my hands to the sky and scream nigger at the top of my lungs to balance the scales of the universe.

Your sacred vow does include waivers in case someone attempts to DDOS you? Hypothetically, of course.

I'm a non-native English speaker as well, though I might as well be due to immigrating at a very early age, and I second this and will go even stronger: it doesn't matter if there are impressionable children around, because they don't need to be protected from encountering the pain of seeing a specific set of characters in a specific order. Letters placed or syllables pronounced in some specific order are not magical spells, and it is bad for adults to behave as if they were in front of impressionable children.

The reason to avoid swearing around impressionable children isn't that they "need to be protected from encountering the pain of seeing a specific set of characters in a specific order", but that they are impressionable, liable to attempt to copy you and get the impression that things you do are a good idea to do in other contexts.

Edit: which is not to say that the entire Internet should be sanitized into child-friendliness.

Indeed, I have sat in that chair, I have had this conversation

Sure, but impressions can go in many directions. Using terms like "n-word" or "f-slur" when "nigger" or "faggot" would be more appropriate can give impressionable children the false impression that these words (and possibly, slurs in the general sense) actually have magical properties that make uttering them cause harm or whatever.

They do in fact have magical properties, though. They aren't just words, they are taboo in the most primitive sense possible, and there is no reason to believe this will change in the forseeable future. You might adhere strongly to the "words are just words" ideology, but the norms that ideology built lasted a bare handful of decades, and now they are gone. "they're just words" is, perhaps, minimally true, but "they will mess your life up if you use them" is maximally true and in a very immediate, concrete way.

If it is the case that such words really do have magical properties, then using them in front of impressionable children will demonstrate the magic - i.e. someone will mess your life up for using them - and children would notice that and learn of those magical properties. If using them doesn't result in such messing up happening, then it would demonstrate that, No, those words don't have magical properties, and there are contexts when they can be used without people messing you up. Impressionable children wouldn't necessarily pick up on those contexts, but I posit that (1) information about taboos around slurs is so plentiful anyway that watching/reading some adult use them has minimal impact and (2) children get much more leeway in breaking such taboos due to their natural lack of experience and maturity and learning the right contexts when to use such terms through experience and experimentation is part of growing up.

This is beginning to sound like the makings of a good South Park episode.

The problem is, some -- too many -- do treat them that way, and have banished the use/mention distinction. It's like the Jehovah scene in Monty Python. So rather than risk crazy people trying to ruin your life, people avoid the words.

I prefer to take it further, and talk about either Voldemort or "the letter-after-m word". Well, actually I generally prefer not to talk about it at all, since there are too many rabid, crazy people out there. (yet here I am, oops)

I'm actually struggling to think of anti-racist slurs? "Colonizer?" Maybe someone says that and right-wingers feel unwanted, or doxxing threats make them feel unsafe. It's also possible that the community enters a purity spiral and implodes. But this is rare, because we're talking about boring hobby groups, not activists.

I'm... not sure this is a good model. This is from a little over a year ago, and it's not exactly slowed down.

Since, the RPGNet forum has a new header, proudly informing everyone that "With abortion and birth control rights threatened both around the world and particularly in the United States, RPGnet believes that reproductive rights are human rights. We're committed to that, and will sanction posts supporting anti-human-rights positions." A quick look through the rules forum shows examples like this. The person who ran a Minecraft server I contributed personalized code for wrote, casually, about how proud they were to have personally punched a Prop 8 funder. I've got a lot of sympathy for the Quilt side of that culture war, but it's not like it's hard to find loads of conversations in the Quilt Discord hunting for even a sniff of 'right-wing' alignment and shutting down conversations or people they see as doing so. There's been a 'fun' battle in a STEM outreach organization I volunteer for, less about the LGBT and pronouns pins (fine), and more about any team where the mentors show too much discomfort with them (understandable if not great), and what needs to be done to move students (little paranoid) and resources (problem!) around that.

Now, people have a right to not be perfectly accepting and making everyone feel safe, competing access needs, yada yada. But it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and self-identifies as a duck.

But at a deeper level, I think the inability to even think of anti-racist slurs is... kinda showing a big blind spot. Even for that specific example! Karens (and their distaff Kevins), MAGAtards, so on, are all 'about' racism. Do you think "Nazi" is a real specific term describing an ideology, or a boo-light? How about "reactionary", whether on twitter or coming from the President of the United States? And that's ignoring the complex ones, like 'alt-right' or 'white supremacist/nationalist' (which sometimes actually means that, rarely even by self-identification, but just as often means 'somewhere to the right of President Obama in 2014).

And it's not like those are special. Outside of race, "gun nut" was reclaimed, but want to know a place where you can call people groomers on Twitter? These aren't slurs in the sense that a lot of the progressive movement cares, and I've had long debates with TraceWoodgrains about the bounds of it... but that's kinda the point.

Since, the RPGNet forum has a new header, proudly informing everyone that "With abortion and birth control rights threatened both around the world and particularly in the United States, RPGnet believes that reproductive rights are human rights. We're committed to that, and will sanction posts supporting anti-human-rights positions." A quick look through the rules forum shows examples like this.

Jeezus. I stopped posting on RPGNet years ago, but since then they seem to have reached Atheism+ levels of wokeness. BGG seems to be heading in the same direction, unfortunately.

I think your broader point is somewhat true (there are lots of insulting things you can say about right-wingers that are obviously insults and obviously moderated less severely or not at all on most platforms), but I also have trouble thinking of leftist slurs that are slurs per se. The closest is probably the much-overused "Nazi," but beyond that, what is there? "Magtard" and various insulting variations on "Republican"?

In my time with college-educated 20somethings, they call a LOT of things "white."

Wingnut, Trumpkin, Domestic Terrorist, y'allQaeda, bigot, racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, white supremacist, fascist, klansman, abuser, rapist, anti-semite, fuckboy, pissbaby, incel, bible-thumper, inbred, hick, redneck, gun nut, ghoul, vampire, bloodsucker... The list is considerable.

Naively, one might imagine that "slur" means something along the lines of "name that humiliates, demeans, or shames those it's applied to". After a few minutes of thought, though, I don't think that's actually how it works.

Various terms for races that I'm sure we're all regretably familiar with frame ethnicity in a negative light. People are in fact those races, but these terms are slurs because they assume "...and that's a bad thing". One might argue that claiming people are bad for being a race is obviously objectionable, but of course Gammon, Mayo, Whitey, cracker etc are generally acceptable in what passes for polite company online, and terms like oreo or banana show up as well. "White male" often comes with a "fucking" attached. This is just sorta the way things are, no one here is under the impression that it can be changed.

What about terms relating to actions or choices? Maybe it's a slur if it's aimed at immutable identity, versus one's actual choices? Well, no, I don't think so. "bitch", "slut", "whore" are all slurs, and generally unacceptable to use in polite company, at least toward a woman, despite describing someone who engages in specific behaviors. On the other hand, "racist", "sexist", "bigot", "homophobe", are all entirely acceptable, while also describing someone who engages in specific behaviors, even when those terms are quite a stretch. If one refers to a woman who publicly sells their body as a "whore", that is unacceptable. But it is entirely permissible to refer to someone as a "racist" for any and every reason, or even no perceptable reason at all. And of course, one of these words comes freighted with serious consequences for those so labeled, and it isn't the one that refers to farming equipment in the vernacular.

It seems to me that most of the words we generally think of as slurs are things Reds frame as bad while blues think are neutral or good, whereas most of the names Blues call Reds are terms Blues think of as bad, with Reds' opinions not really being relevant to the judgement. I can't think of any exceptions that would disprove this model.

It's not even that certain words are okay and other words are not, based on Blues' collective judgement. It's that certain words are okay based on who they're applied to, based on Blues' collective judgement. It's not hard to find cases of even the hard-R being dropped by blues toward percieved Reds, even African-American ones, without the slur alarm getting triggered. [Upon reflection, @Amadan is correct and this claim is unsupportable.]

Given the above, of course Blue spaces don't have a slur problem. When Blues use words to demean, shame, or humiliate, it's not a slur as judged by definitions our society actually appears to use in practice. The same goes for "threat", "harassment", and the rest of the no-no word terms.

[EDIT] - To be clear, this is a factual claim. Counter-examples are welcome, and I'd be happy to hear even anecdotal evidence to the contrary.

The left-wing slurs you cite strike me as falling into three categories:

  • Generic slurs that happen to be applied to right-wing targets (e.g. MAGAtard), probably do have a decent chance of being banned.

  • Extremely weak, unlikely to seriously offend most people (e.g. cracker, vampire). Might get you banned under very strict mods.

  • Things that basically everyone agrees exist and are bad in some sense, the debate is over the boundaries. (E.g. racist, fascist, Nazi, abuser). Hard to ban, although you could perhaps ban applying them to other users via a Wikipedia-style "assume good faith" policy (I assume that's the case here, in fact.)

Things that basically everyone agrees exist and are bad in some sense, the debate is over the boundaries. (E.g. racist, fascist, Nazi, abuser). Hard to ban, although you could perhaps ban applying them to other users via a Wikipedia-style "assume good faith" policy (I assume that's the case here, in fact.)

Grooming being wrong is a widespread position, yet the word "groomer" got banned on reddit. So it appears to me that even such words aren't actually hard to ban.

the word "groomer" got banned on reddit.

I hadn't heard about this ... apparently it didn't, no.

I see your points, but I don't think you convinced me on this:

Naively, one might imagine that "slur" means something along the lines of "name that humiliates, demeans, or shames those it's applied to". After a few minutes of thought, though, I don't think that's actually how it works.

I do think that's more or less how it works. Most of your examples are not so much slurs as "generic insults that blues can get away with calling reds but reds can't get away with calling blues." I do not disagree that this illustrates that most platforms are unfair to reds, but other than a few, like "y'allQaeda"and maybe I'll give you "Bible-thumper," none of them look like "words implying that being Red is inherently bad."

"Bigot, racist, sexist, transphobe," etc. - sure, in some people's minds that's synonymous with "conservative," but there is no shortage of leftist circular firing squads where they accuse each other of these things too. (See: J.K. Rowling.) We discuss those a lot here.

You said:

It's not even that certain words are okay and other words are not, based on Blues' collective judgement. It's that certain words are okay based on who they're applied to, based on Blues' collective judgement. It's not hard to find cases of even the hard-R being dropped by blues toward percieved Reds, even African-American ones, without the slur alarm getting triggered.

And again, I don't disagree there are examples of this and you can make convincing "who whom" arguments, but this doesn't mean leftists don't really consider the hard-R a slur. Most leftists would castigate other leftists calling Herman Cain or Clarence Thomas the hard-R. Some isolated cases of liberals dropping racial slurs on black conservatives and not being cancelled are not compelling evidence to me that slurs are inherently not slurs if directed at the "right" people. You're pointing out examples of hypocrisy and "who whom," which are plentiful, but not examples of "leftist slurs" per se.

I appreciated your response, fwiw.

Evidence for this claim?

This strikes me as low-effort, obnoxious, and insincere, but I'll give it more of a response than it deserves. Absent a poll in which leftists are asked to respond to the question "Is it okay to use racial slurs against black conservatives?", I will rely on my experience with leftists and my prediction as to what would happen if you go on a leftist forum and start calling black conservatives niggers. If you would like to test this, I will pre-register my bet that it will result in you being banned.

My comment was indeed sincere, however it was rooted in a misunderstanding about what "hard-R" referred to, which your reply clears up. Thanks for that, and I expect you're correct.

I won't deign to answer your charges of "low-effort" and "obnoxious."

Well, if you misunderstood what I meant, perhaps you were justified in asking for evidence. (What did you think "hard-R" referred to?)

I read you initially as demanding I provide evidence that leftists actually think "nigger" is a bad word. Which did indeed seem like some sort of very dumb and low-effort attempt at a gotcha.

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was rooted in a misunderstanding about what "hard-R" referred to

Perhaps you were confusing it for the "R-word" or "R-slur," aka "retard/retarded?" I've noticed that there's a wide range in how taboo this slur is even in leftist circles. Where I grew up, the "R-word" would be only 1 level below the "hard-R" in terms of offensiveness, but I've noticed that in other environments with similar levels of leftism, it's used pretty freely without anyone noticing. E.g. I was shocked when I first noticed how much people used it on Twitch of all places, given how strict Twitch tends to be with authoritarian-left language policing.

Calling them niggers, specifically, probably a problem. Calling them Uncle Toms, which is conveying the exact same sort of viciousness...

Leftists are okay with slurs, they're not okay with nigger. Nigger is a magic spell in the US. It should be in D&D as a Power Word.

Calling them niggers, specifically, probably a problem. Calling them Uncle Toms, which is conveying the exact same sort of viciousness...

We are getting into the weeds with the taxonomy of slurs, but it seems to be relevant.

"Nigger" is an insult because the meaning is basically "Black person, which is inherently a bad thing." "Uncle Tom" means a black person who is a traitor to his own people by collaborating with his oppressors.

Leftists do not think being black is inherently a bad thing. They do think that betraying your own people and siding with your oppressors is a bad thing. So one is a slur, and most leftists would agree it's a slur no matter who uses it (because you're saying it's shameful/insulting to be black). The other is a charge of being a morally bad person.

I am not debating whether either term is ever used "viciously" and/or inappropriately. Certainly many insults are unfair and inaccurate, and calling any black conservative an Uncle Tom certainly falls into that category. But they aren't the same kind of insult.

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Upon further reflection, I can recall some isolated cases of leftists getting away with the hard-R, but those cases are in fact isolated and quite rare, even for extremely prominant targets. I think it was probably a bad example on my part.

Can you provide evidence of leftists employing such terms without consequences, especially online/in print?

I do not disagree that this illustrates that most platforms are unfair to reds, but other than a few, like "y'allQaeda"and maybe I'll give you "Bible-thumper," none of them look like "words implying that being Red is inherently bad."

Yeah, there's definately complexity here, and not just in the specifics but in the general. @MugaSofer below is gesturing at a sort of taxonomic breakdown, which I thought about attempting but didn't have the energy for; leaving aside the political angle, that's where I think the meat of the general question could be found.

"Bigot, racist, sexist, transphobe," etc. - sure, in some people's minds that's synonymous with "conservative," but there is no shortage of leftist circular firing squads where they accuse each other of these things too. (See: J.K. Rowling.) We discuss those a lot here.

I think these are the central example of actual blue slurs. And yeah, they get used on Blues as well, the same as "bundle-of-sticks" might get used on reds by other reds. It's all various forms of "bad person", "disgusting person", right? The thing is, social judgement and social enforcement are pretty clearly necessary if people are going to live together, so I'm pessimistic that the core form is ever going to go away. "bitch" got embargoed pretty thoroughly in its original context; "Karen" seems to cover like 90% of the same territory.

And again, I don't disagree there are examples of this and you can make convincing "who whom" arguments, but this doesn't mean leftists don't really consider the hard-R a slur.

In the cold light of morning, I think you're entirely correct here. This argument relied on "can a thing possibly happen", and presented it as evidence of a norm. Further, the cases I could think of involved it being spoken, and I can't think of a single case where it was used in print or online. The hard-R has so much taboo mojo that it's going to be used by someone somewhere sooner or later, and some percentage of those uses are not going to be immediately struck by lightning, but that's pretty much the opposite of a norm. I was wrong.

My list wasn't exhaustive; we can quibble over the "redness" of each individual insult. But mostly they seem no more politically aligned than calling someone a "retard."

I'm also puzzled by "ghoul, vampire, and bloodsucker." Is that really a thing conservatives notice liberals calling them? I'm not questioning whether anyone has ever done this, but just the idea that these are known to be blue insults for reds.

I noticed ghoul thrown around a lot on /r/stupidpol towards, well, pretty much any 'neoliberal' boogeyman they don't like, but especially targeted towards the old right wing flavors like Kissinger and Cheney. This is pure anecdote, but I have yet to notice vampire and bloodsucker.

There was a small thing about that's been around since at least the Affordable Care Act. Ghoul's the one that's persisted most, I think. Of course, that turns back into the "inherently bad" -- you could at least write a steelman that they were about criticizing conservative policies, rather than conservatives qua people.

I think there's a pretty sizable number of things along that realm, once you're attuned to noticing them. Their very nature as not politically-aligned makes it harder to notice when they're pointed a specific direction, but that doesn't make it less common.

That said, I think a lot of this distinction is more attuned to Blue Tribe preferences than to generalized ones. Not just in the sense that socons and even non-socons see many of the covered examples (controversially, being gay; less controversially, being queer) as something you do rather than something you are, or that both actual racists and not were often making that Chris Rock Skit as a serious argument, or that the Blue Tribe has put significant effort (for, tbf, reasons not entirely under their control) to define or frame their desired focuses as innate and immutable.

But there's a far more serious matter of it not being especially clear why anyone should find one to be acceptable, and the other an abomination. Why is abuse of parenthesis worse than prolonged mockery of 'magic underpants'? What part of the many bannable terms for correctly calling someone gay in offensive intents are worse than incorrectly calling someone a cousin-humper? Why, given how bad racism and sexism are, are false claims a person is or is motivated by them harmless, no matter how ill-founded or plain false? Why are one of these things a "name that humiliates, demeans, or shames those it's applied to", and the other not?

((I mean, the practical answer is probably that there's been enough organizations with enough power to make these things not mere social faux pas, but potentially a source of legal liability should an employee do it even off-hours and off-premises, or a business not react to it promptly when done by a customer, while the other direction there's... uh, people claiming TERF is a slur, and no one believing it.))

I feel the need to point out something in regards to RPG.net for those not in the know; RPG.net is a big deal. (Atleast, it used to be when I still browsed it). It's the forum where active professionals(writers, publishers, artists, ect, ect) go to post and discuss matters. It's some place where you could feasibly post and gain the notice of professionals in the publishing industry, a way to get your foot in the door.

So when you see a place like this being overwhelmingly blue tribe-aligned, it creates a severe gate-keeping effect as a byproduct.

I've seen some editors remark on the political alignment of their internal studio staff, with a surprisingly broad selection... from over twenty years ago. I doubt it's that way now.

I attended Albuquerque’s biggest and oldest SF convention, Bubonicon, in 2016, almost the platonic ideal of a grey tribe space. It was just before the election of Trump, and one of the writers on a panel said something violent toward Trump voters, and the room erupted in the most vicious roar I’ve ever heard in person.

I’ve never felt so in danger for my life.

I participate or participated in many online video game communities. What you are describing as niceness = left wing is probably as far from the truth as I can imagine. The only area where is could plausibly be true is commenting on weirdness or grossness. It seems that leftists typically embrace weirdness like over the top piercings and tattoos or fat-embracing etc more than those on the right, and so you do get left wing moderation by banning negative comments about people's appearance, delinquent drug use, cheating on partners, fathering/mothering multiple bastards, etc. Basically, if you ban criticism of weird or bad life choices, yes that results in a leftist shift. But that doesn't get you even 10% to where most of the forums end up drifting.

Where it inevitably ends up is with banning people for anodyne right of center opinions that leftists categorize as "attacks". Illustratively, I was once banned from a Warcraft III forum for "homophobia" aka saying orgies spread STDs. On city-related forum, there was a mass ban of "racists" which was people who had participated in a thread about getting their gaming systems and laptops stolen in home invasions. Not some targeted ban of slur-users, a ban for everyone who was not a mod that participated in the discussion. This is not "niceness" its hounding out dissent because open discussion refutes their worldview.

I don’t really disagree. 2rafa may have phrased it better below.

it’s because if you’re in a right-ish forum with libertarian moderation any thread, even one about video games or the latest fantasy show or whatever is liable to turn into a sea of unnecessary racial slurs, homophobic baiting or just petty interpersonal attacks in which people are called slurs for Jews or gays or whatever for not agreeing with their respondent.

In other words, it’s not that leftists have any particular claim to niceness, it’s that they’re more likely to avoid copping a ban for this specific low-hanging fruit. Repeat that for a few months and the only people left are the ones who wouldn’t use slurs to start.

Sure but that's not left coded or right coded, that's reflexive-contrarian-from-a-privileged-background coded

Wait, which part?

a sea of unnecessary racial slurs, homophobic baiting or just petty interpersonal attacks

just sounds like Xbox Live.

just sounds like Xbox Live.

That's kind of my point the use of slurs isn't left coded or right coded so much as it's spergy teenage edgelord coded.

Repeat that for a few months and the only people left are the ones who wouldn’t use slurs to start.

But they consistently will go much further than that. TheMotte may or may not ban slurs, but even if it did it would not drift drastically leftward. To make the Motte into /r/politics you start banning ideas, facts, and questions.

I actually think it would cause a drift!

A strict policy on certain words would hit right-wingers harder, both because of the direction of any euphemism treadmills and because, as @gattsuru put it, there's more plausible deniability on the left's equivalents.

It would also push out any principled free-speech absolutists, who are overwhelmingly right-wing. This group matters a lot more for the Motte than most communities.

The end result would be evaporative cooling, even if no specific idea was ever banned. I think that's more likely to happen in hobby spaces than hostile takeovers and explicit ideological censorship. The latter makes for a better narrative, which is why we can think of so many examples.

there's more plausible deniability on the left's equivalents.

Meh, there's just more special pleading accepted by NYT.

Something like that.

I’d say the kind of censorship which is useful for functioning online communities is more compatible with the left wing than the right. Ideologically, maybe, but mostly because citing free speech is almost exclusively right-coded.

TheMotte may or may not ban slurs explicitly, but the sort of person who would use a slur to insult another poster tends to catch a ban for other reasons pretty quickly. There is a minimum IQ threshold to understand why writing this sentence (complete with r-word) is less bad than calling out the retards who use spaces instead of tabs to their faces. The nice thing about this place is that 100% of the regulars meet it.

Disclaimer: I don't insist on tabs, but my employer does, and I am smart enough not to argue.

the retards who use spaces instead of tabs to their faces.

Hey, we're reading too, you know! I should totally report this. /s

Disclaimer: I prefer a usage-determined mix (basically the clang-format UseTab: ForIndentation behavior), but until everybody's auto-formatting is smart enough to understand "tabs are for program flow indentation, spaces after the same number of tabs are for alignment of statements wrapped onto subsequent lines", using spaces alone seems to be the safest way for a big project to not require constant formatting fixes or look scrambled when moved between different authors' editors with different tab sizes. Plus, even when everybody's on board with a mix, you can still end up with different line wrap locations from different tab size preferences.

Yeah, left leaning communities do not ban slurs. They only ban the slurs against their patron groups.

I think the saddest, for me personally at least, community that went hard and hatefully left has been the Penny Arcade forums. Officially, there is a rule. The only insult you are allowed to use is "silly goose". In practice? That only applies in one direction.

They have rules against hateful content. But people openly saying a lot of white people need to be murdered in a revolution don't get moderated. Suggesting that Kyle Rittenhouse, in their Rittenhouse trial thread, was correctly found innocent? You get banned for hateful content.

It was not always this way. I'm not sure when the moderation began moderating hard left. I think it might have started after the Dickwolves controversy, and as a sign of good faith they brought on some "friendlier" moderators to "educate" the community.

Many discords I'm on for hobbies have a "no politics" rule, to keep things friendly and inclusive. In practice this means no bringing up conservative politics. Everyone is free to root for Biden, and complain about Republican politicians, talk about how enthusiastic they are for liberal or progressive policies, etc. It only becomes "politics" when someone disagrees, and then they get banned.

Is there a summary of that anywhere? I seem to have missed it. Was it something in the SciFi community?

*Thanks y'all, that was a wild ride.

Loose summary:

In 2010 Penny-Arcade made an irreverent strip mentioning rape that offended some proto-SJW's who thought it was insensitive to 'rape survivors'.

According to one such offendee:

"Whether or not the strip was offensive isn't really relevant at this point: More than the comic itself, what made the most impact was how Penny Arcade responded to the readers -- including rape survivors -- who said it upset them. First, they mocked their critics with a series of posts and a flippant non-apology. In a subsequent "make a strip" demonstration at PAX Prime, Krahulik further needled the issue by drawing a dickwolf, and Penny Arcade even monetized the discomfort over the rape joke by making and selling "Team Dickwolves" shirts and pennants."

Then some notable members of gaming community spoke out against PA and received a lot of insults and alleged death threats. The drama continued with one of the early designers for the PA website publicly cutting ties.

Mike Krahulic apologised and removed dickwolves merch from their store. Then later recanted and said at a later PAX Q&A panel that he regretted backing down and removing the merch. The week after PAX he clarified his comments.. I think it roughly died down after this point.

tldr; Comic used rape as a joke, feminists got upset on behalf of rape survivors. Drama ensued.

Many discords I'm on for hobbies have a "no politics" rule, to keep things friendly and inclusive. In practice this means no bringing up conservative politics. Everyone is free to root for Biden, and complain about Republican politicians, talk about how enthusiastic they are for liberal or progressive policies, etc. It only becomes "politics" when someone disagrees, and then they get banned.

To bolster this point, I'd add that I've been on the receiving end of this in a Discord server I was a big part of. The topic of the server was not related to politics, in fact they had a no-politics rule and yet woke politics ran rampant in the server every day - I remember reading so many endorsements of woke talking points in the server, to the point where some of their members were basically endorsing sentiments like "I hate men" and calling it helpful and "consciousness-raising".

I was the only one who repeatedly called for all political discussion to be halted. Eventually I got tired of trying to enforce a rule that just got ignored and laid out my disagreements with their points during one of these discussions (very politely, I might add). What happened then is that after I had a user respond to me, a mod ended up halting the discussion and stated that it was getting too political despite their complete willingness to let every political discussion in line with their beliefs stand. Then later on I was banned because I'd supposedly expressed "harmful things", and after I was banned and couldn't defend myself someone else still on that server told me that many of the users decided to shit-talk me in there. Including somebody I had considered a friend.

The idea that leftist communities exude anything akin to "positivity" is in my opinion ridiculous.

Can anybody explain the Polish perspective on the Ukraine war?

I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.

My understanding is that most of the tsunami of African or Middle-Eastern immigrants of the 2000s would rather go to Western Europe or Scandinavia for better welfare or economic prospects.

Still, Poland used to get in trouble with the EU for not wanting to take in a certain amount of them.

Moreover, Poland has also faced reprimand from the same union for their policies toward non-heterosexuals.

Why did Poland even join the EU? Did they really need the money so badly at the time?

Now it seems that Poland is going toward ever more alignment with the EU and US.

Are they really so scared of Russia that they would drink the corn syrup and give up on whatever is left of their culture/sovereignty/demographics?

Is anybody of relevance in Poland even attempting to contradict the pro-Western turn?

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I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.

This assumes as axiomatic that we all agree with white nationalism, which is consensus building.

I can see how it might read as consensus building, but if it is, surely so is suggesting that thinking the European country of Poland should look like the memetic concept of Europe as depicted in the media (clean, safe and full of Europeans) - is white nationalism.

The trick isn’t saying a European country should look like one, the trick is implying the cleanness of the country is due to the whiteness of its residents.

Arguments on The Motte shouldn’t be bundled to the point where coherent discussion of the OP of a thread requires agreement with smuggled premises. That way lies the chaos and LARPing of 4chan/pol/.

While I may not be able to produce clean data to establish my hunch, the dramatic increase in immigration of the 2010s in Western Europe came with a lot of unsanitary conditions and street violence.

I'm not implying that white = clean, as it's Western Europeans who welcomed that uncleanliness, and there are many varied people that are very much capable of cleanliness, for example Singaporeans.

Based on the observation on the ground that (the surveyed areas of) Poland is a very clean country, I'm guessing that the Polish people generally enjoys keeping their environment clean.

The cleanliness is a result of a lack of a certain type of population, which is abundant in Western Europe due to EU policies.

This has me questioning why the Polish government is suddenly so strongly supportive of EU policies, despite what seems like a natural, intrinsic cleanliness of its people.

But Russia is very dirty, much dirtier than most EU countries. That explains why Poland is so much against Russia and prefer to be aligned with the EU :)

Hasn't Paris been infamous for it's unique odeur d'urine for something like a century?

I had visited Paris several times and didn't notice it. Probably true but the importance of many things are often exaggerated. While driving through Europe overall France seemed clean and orderly. Belgium was the worse and Poland indeed was clean and nice. But the climate and geography can also play certain role. Possibly that many immigrants coming from the countries without forests, have different aesthetic preferences that they don't care so much about beautiful things like Polish people do.

Funny that in Latvia since we got independence from the Soviet Union, when people rejuvenate their flats, they often call it euro repair (eiroremonts). It annoys me because what it has to do with Europe? But somehow people there associate nice things with Europe and old and ugly things with the Soviet culture.

I'm not implying that white = clean,

No, but you are saying that certain groups are unclean ("The cleanliness is a result of a lack of a certain type of population"). Which in itself is fine with me -- I am pretty close to a free speech absolutist, and am on record as advocating that social media entities be barred from engaging in censorship that would not be permitted were it done by the govt in the US -- but I have no idea what group you are talking about. Turks in Germany? Africans in France? South Asians in Great Britain? All of the above? Immigrants in general? Why don't you just come out and say what you mean?

And, btw, when those same supposedly clean Eastern Europeans came to the US in the early 20th Century, people complained about how dirty their neighborhoods were. So, perhaps you are simply confusing the effects of high population density with the effects of the presence of whatever group you are talking about? I don't know, because, again, you don't give enough information for others to assess your claim.

Not necessarily. I understand that many Western Euros don't actually like clean and safe cities that much. Otherwise they wouldn't be so tolerant of all these immigrants...

Clearly there is something, perhaps 'Prussian' in Poland, that makes them enjoy their cleanliness, and their peace.

Why then get ever tighter with the aforementioned Western Euros + Americans who do not?

White nationalism seems foolish at this point as there are so many internal divisions within the species. Indeed most of the enemies of the continued survival of a certain type of European are European themselves.

As I see it, the future of that species is with an unification across borders. While TikTok and other online propaganda apparatuses are rapidly conquering masses across the planet, the resistance is becoming more and more diverse itself. Anybody with an ounce of interest in traditional culture and living can join, with regional differences fading as the enemy is global and common. The biggest obstacle being language, but this should resolve itself soon enough.

  • -15

Not necessarily. I understand that many Western Euros don't actually like clean and safe cities that much. Otherwise they wouldn't be so tolerant of all these immigrants...

This is assuming a lot without presenting any evidence beyond your assumptions. How many Western Euros do you think would agree with you that they "don't actually like clean and safe cities that much"? You may make the argument that "tolerance of immigrants results in unclean, unsafe cities," but you may not weakman your outgroup by asserting that "tolerance of immigration means they do not like clean, safe cities" unless you have some evidence as to this glimpse into their true motivations.

If you want to agenda-post, speak plainly without the dark hinting.

There is a trade-off to these EU policies that most Western European countries apply.

If they are on the receiving end of the migrants from Subsaharian Africa or the Middle-East whose countries were ravaged by their dearest allied CIA-controlled MIC, due to their generous social systems, then they incur significant cost in cleaning and peacekeeping in the areas where they are most concentrated.

I'm thinking of UK, France, Germany, Scandinavia.

While a large amount of Western Europeans despise the effects of these immigrants on their immediate living conditions, they still somehow end up voting 'in majority' for their causes.

'Voting wrong' seems to be worse than uncleanliness and relative lower safety.

Similarly in the US, a lot of people seemingly just let their own neighborhood get burned down by arsonists around 2020. Not much of a fire-preventing spirit them city-folks!

In general, if your views could be proven wrong by a five-minute conversation with a normal person or three, you should wonder first if it's true in the first place. Have you talked to anyone about this, or are these assumptions made of what you've been told by fellow extremely online nerds?

I haven't really held any conversation with Poles but my views on Western Europeans come from personal experience with them.

In terms of evidence, one can look at the mountains of litter left behind by hip and wealthy Western Euros after music festivals or spring breakers in Spain, or the valuation of so-called 'street art' (for example Banksy).

Anti-police movements also have their supporters in Western Europe, while police forces in the UK have been found to protect sex traffickers for fear of racism (racism is worse than sex trafficking for a certain subset of Weuros).

I haven't been to any music festivals in Poland, but I've been to the ones in Serbia. Whiter crowd than Western Europe, no different behavior. You're genuinely barking up the wrong tree.

Serbia, for that matter, has an amount of graffiti penned down I've not seen in any city where I live(the Netherlands). It's not even close. Not the very tiniest bit.

Certainly policing isn't something that makes the Eastern Europeans look good, either. Eastern European police officers take the job to wear a uniform, look cool, harass epople they don't like, and draw a salary from bribes as much as they do payment depending on where you're at.

I'll say it again: you're barking up the wrong tree. Any of the flaws you attribute to us Weuros - I don't mind the term - could be applied to Easterners, aside from the general charge of being vaguely anti-immigration.

In very slight defense of the claim, though not of how it was made, I remember at least one instance of a very normie Western Euro telling me (in the context of them preferring dirty, unsafe, hip Berlin to clean, safe and obnoxiously square Munich) almost in those words back in 2009 or so that they don't actually like clean and safe cities that much. As a Western Euro myself, I can actually empathise with the sentiment, though I did like Munich more (because I didn't actually find it that square, and I found Berlin's hipness to be a bit shallow when it came down to it).

Clearly there is something, perhaps 'Prussian' in Poland, that makes them enjoy their cleanliness, and their peace.

Come on now, this is well into the territory of suspicion. Poland isn’t that clean and orderly. Poles visiting Germany, always remark about the famous Ordnung muss sein, and I too agree with them.

I think it depends of the areas of Germany. I was in the formerly Prussian part of Poland and their commie blocks looked safe and clean.

Then I went to Western Germany (Hesse) and while Germany is quite ordered compared to some other Weuro counterpart, I could still tell that the commie blocks looked more sinister, degraded, with graffiti. It could just be that I saw the good part of one country vs the bad part of another. I do recall Bavaria being very neat a decade ago, but I also understand that importing millions of impoverished people from alien cultures has a cost.

I would not be surprised if Germany was neglecting some of its people while accommodating the foreigners.

Do you think western European cities are particularly dirty of unsafe? I live in a western European city and I've been to central European cities, albeit not specifically in Poland, and I didn't really notice a difference in cleanliness nor did I feel more or less safe to be honest. To test my impression from my own travels, I've looked at google street view at a couple of random places in Warsaw and Berlin and I can't really tell a difference between the cleanliness to be honest.

If you look at e.g. homicide rates there also isn't an obvious difference between Poland and western EU countries. Almost all of Europe has a very low homicide rate and whatever fluctuations there are within Europe do not line up with immigration. So I'm also very doubtful that western EU is significantly less safe compared to Poland.

The biggest difference is probably between more Mediterranean countries vs Germanic ones.

Here's some people discussing it

Which country is cleaner than which is not central to my argument, I simply noticed that Poland seemed unsoiled by the dirtiness brought by the most recent waves of boatpeople.

Migrant camps have sprung up over the last decades in French, Italian, UK cities etc. I think Germany simply spent a lot of money to house them instead.

Regarding safety, I'm mostly talking about petty crime. Street vendors selling counterfeit products, pickpockets, muggers, and then more violent stuff, rape gangs UK, mass molestation events Cologne.

I don't think so. OP is expressing his opinion on what Western Europe should look like, not saying "we all agree Western Europe should be like this".

The stated purpose of this community is for defending ideas. That is to say, users are expected to present earnestly held views, along with a reasoned case explaining why they believe them to be true. The OP has instead chosen to reel off a sequence of searingly controversial opinions—an explicit defense of white nationalism, as well as an implied condemnation of homosexuality—with markedly little effort to avoid polemical and ideologically weighted language ('tsunami of ... immigrants', 'drink the corn syrup'). To the extent that they prompt discussion, they do so by posing questions which invite only those respondents who agree with their stances on race and sexuality.

As a result of this framing, the implied terrain for debate is not 'is it important that Poland be a white ethnostate?' or 'is it right for Poles to oppose homosexuality', but rather 'given that Poland is relatively successfully defending itself against non-whites and gay rights, why would they undermine this by allying with America and the EU?'. It's frustrating and dull to unpick this sort of pre-discursive stage-setting, which is why most people who disagree with white nationalism or anti-homosexuality will simply roll their eyes and pass over comments like OP's. Thus, the entire thread is doomed to become an ideologically homogeneous round-table discussion that may raise some interesting points about the realpolitik of national alliances, but that—ironically for a culture war thread—will scarcely tackle the contentious underlying issues.

This is why consenus-building is disallowed. I'm happy to lay my cards on the table: it won't come as a surprise that I don't personally like white nationalism. Yet I value the fact that the Motte does not censor such viewpoints. It is critical, though, that when one presents controversial ideas, one does so according to the principles of the community, since laxity in this regard will induce an echo-chamber before you can say 'globohomo'.

See, if you had said "this is a weak argument" and asked OP to justify their position that'd be one thing. I can respect that. But you're grasping at the straw of "consensus building" when there's nothing in OP's post that is actual consensus building. Dropping a hot take without argument isn't consensus building, it's just... a hot take without argument. Which is actually against the rules! But come on man, if you're going to accuse someone of breaking the rules then at least cite the appropriate rule.

Laying out an array of controversial opinions and then inviting other people to discuss questions which are only coherent if one a priori regards those opinions as true is absolutely a form of consensus-building. It's not as explicit as saying 'we all agree that...', but it's equivalently powerful, because it still essentially obliges the subsequent discussion thread to conform ideologically to the root comment, lest the whole debate lose its consistency. The question 'Did Poland really need money so badly that it had to join the EU?', and any responses to it, are trivially incoherent unless you assume that the EU is an inherently malignant entity.

In fact, this form of consensus building is more potent than the syntactically explicit form ('we all agree that...'), since though it is equally able to enforce conformity among respondents, one cannot as easily demonstrate with a quotation the manner in which debate is being ring-fenced.

Did Poland really need money so badly that it had to join the EU?', and any responses to it, are trivially incoherent unless you assume that the EU is an inherently malignant entity.

Well I was always perplexed by Poland joining the EU because they are consistently among the black sheep with Hungary who oppose a lot of what the EU members collectively stand for.

I'm legitimately asking what was the original idea behind Poland joining the EU which implicitly and formally comes with a certain set of requirements, among which giving up some of your sovereignty, when in the 2000s Poland has been rejecting a lot of these requirements

So, rephrasing, did Poland really need money that badly that they had to join the EU, despite knowing that they would down the line not want to fulfill some of the requirements, like not going against EU rules created by countries that are much more pro-immigration and anti-Christian-family than them?

The short answer is yes. Poland was dirt poor and no longer wanted to be a European backwater. Twenty years ago European progressivism was a tiny unimportant worry compared to what it is today, and to this day even Polish Varsovians are regularly surprised by how different the West is to their expectations.

Sad. I can see how this is yet another consequence of the industrial revolution, a disaster for the human race.

The EU's advanced bureaucracy can be seen as a more advanced version of the technology used to manage the USSR and before that the Russian Empire/Polish-LithuaniaC/HRE etc...

Technology just doesn't go away. Can't put the dating apps back in the hat.

I think you're reading a whole lot of things that just aren't there in the text. For example, this:

The question 'Did Poland really need money so badly that it had to join the EU?', and any responses to it, are trivially incoherent unless you assume that the EU is an inherently malignant entity.

This isn't remotely true. What the discussion presupposes is not that the EU is inherently malignant, but that joining the EU is undesirable for Poland. There is an implicit claim, but you've (wittingly or unwittingly) rephrased the claim in a much stronger way and set it up as a strawman.

And further, even if one disagrees with the premise (which is fair), that doesn't render subsequent discussion incoherent. One can respond to such a question by saying "you seem to believe that joining the EU would be bad for Poland, but I don't think it is in fact bad for them", and go from there. That's a perfectly coherent discussion to have. So no, it isn't really trivially incoherent to have such a discussion if you don't agree the EU is evil.

What the discussion presupposes is not that the EU is inherently malignant, but that joining the EU is undesirable for Poland

I disagree. The clear subtext of the original comment is that the EU is inherently malignant.

One can respond to such a question by saying "you seem to believe that joining the EU would be bad for Poland, but I don't think it is in fact bad for them", and go from there.

Yes, just as one can say: 'actually, we don't all agree that xyz' in response to explicit-style consensus building. The problem is that to do so cuts against the grain of the discourse, requires sticking a shovel into the ground instead of simply building constructively, and so is more arduous and less likely to be well received even if done in good faith.

See, now you're moving the goalposts. Before you said "it isn't coherent to have the discussion if you don't agree". Now you're saying it's harder to have that discussion. Those are two very different things, and the latter doesn't support your original argument for why the OP counts as consensus building.

And to be honest, your claim here is pretty silly. Yes, of course it's harder to have a discussion where you don't agree about the premises. But it's still worthwhile, and indeed is kind of the point of this board. If you personally don't want to, that's definitely your right. But it's not a problem for most of the people here in general.

But that’s not the point of his post. If he had to establish white nationalism was desirable first he would never be able to get to the questions he wanted to ask. I do agree that he could have probably gotten to his questions without revealing his personal preferences to such an extent though

Are they really so scared of Russia that they would drink the corn syrup and give up on whatever is left of their culture/sovereignty/demographics?

Scared isn't the right word. They know that Russia is the number one existential risk to their independence and have a long history of generational greavences against Russia. They've seen Russian aggression chip pieces away from other eastern European countries and want no part of it.

All this adds up to absolutely salivating to inflict harm, any harm, on Russia. Afraid isn't the word I'd use; baying for Russian blood more like.

I went to Poland and it looked like what Western Europe should look like. The urban areas were clean and seemingly safe. Indeed the people living there are mostly European or Slavic.

Large part of that, at least in common narrative, is due to emigration of problematic people out of the country (as economic migrants). Ofc it wouldn't happen if we were not part of the EU. Because then immigration from Poland would be treated as, IDK, Mexicans in the US. Personally, if we were to somehow exit the EU (which is ~impossible given popular support for staying; if government fucked up that badly they'd probably rapidly lose power), I'd run away from the country.

It's really interesting how the relative position within a given group matters sometimes more than membership to the group.

The Polish people seem to be getting a lot more out of the EU than the Germans.

But who knows maybe I'm missing the big picture.

Btw Mexicans aren't really a problem in the US anymore, aside from being majority of the population in many areas.

The new invaders are from farther South, supposedly because anybody who wanted to move out of Mexico already did...

You act like the West is a monolith of support for wokism, but there's no reason a country couldn't be a conservative, Western, capitalistic democracy where the voters simply reject the excesses of the left. History and economics shows this is one of the best setups a country can have, actually.

The EU makes it difficult to be conservative, due to their rules superseding national rules.

They can literally force unpopular changes on the locals due to their grandparents' government choosing to join the EU.

Additionally, whether the changes are intended or not, exposure to a broader market means that other countries gain access to your own market, and the EU by design prevents fine-tuning of internal market mechanisms to for example protect the local labor from foreign truckers, factory workers, farmers etc.

It's not an on-off button you can play with to get wealth out of. Once you're in your people's destiny is tied in to the EU's peoples' destinies.

For a small country like Poland the choice is to align with a block like EU or Russia or China or US or say a hypothetical confederation of Eastern Europeans countries... Either way, the choice matters for your people's future, and the Poles picked the atheist, gay pride block.

Yes I agree with this. There’s a reason Brexxit failed. Trade is inversely related to distance. You just can’t hit economies of scale (being about to produce at scale to buy expensive machine etc) without being in these broader trade zones.

Where the whole thing is falling apart is when the EU people also want to be cultural dictators.

Now this gets complicated because a currency union needs a fiscal union which means the EU needs some budgetary control over members etc. And if you have free movement you get brain drain.

EU individually with a lot of trade frictions isn’t a viable Geographic economic unit. Too small of market individually.

Are they really so scared of Russia that they would drink the corn syrup and give up on whatever is left of their culture/sovereignty/demographics?

Yes. Poland only ever exists as a sovereign nation when there are Western powers around strong enough to keep Russia and Germany in check. They were Napoleon's lapdog back in the day, they were the UK's lapdog during the inter-war years, and they're America's lapdog now.

Why did Poland even join the EU? Did they really need the money so badly at the time?

From what I've gathered from my Polish acquaintances and co-workers* the answer is pretty straight forward, they don't see themselves as "Eastern", they see themselves as "Western" a significant component their national myth is of Poles as the bulwark, standing strong against the tide (Polish spearmen held back the Golden Horde, Polish Hussars broke the siege of Vienna, and so on). More pointedly Poland got royally fucked over by a Russian German alliance in World-War one, and again in World War Two. Accordingly their towards both Russia and Germany today is essentially one of "Never Again". From the Polish perspective joining NATO defangs the German threat while pissing off their ancient rivals/enemies, the Muskovites, as far as they're concerned it's all win. Sure the duplicitous Germans and and effete Belgians can whinge about immigration policy but what are they actually gonna do, Poland is part of the Schengen Zone baby and they've been pulling the DeSantis trick of sending unwanted immigrants to the hometowns of politicians who promote immigration for years now.

As for the Ukraine war in particular, Kiev has long been an ally of Krakow and Moscow has long been a rival/enemy. Pieprzic Rossia, Slava Ukraini.

* Note most of those acquaintances and co-workers are in the Polish military/defense industry which probably colors things a bit.

I think it's interesting that Poland sees Ukraine as a friend. Didn't Ukraine basically carve the western part of their country out of former Polish territory (killing the Poles that lived on it)? Or is this more of a conscious choice to ignore the various ethnic purification projects that formed the current map of Europe, because they know that it would be dangerous to reopen that topic?

There is a conscious effort to set aside the appetite for regular gestures of remorse from Ukrainian side, for practical reasons. A mix of seeing Ukraine as a weak, confused country we can siphon for valuable people, an ally we can create a power block with to rival Germans / Russians, a fear of appearing self interested, or far worse, angering our great and generous ally overseas.

(Online) people bringing it up since the war started are shunned. Before, it was frequently brought up.

The Soviet Union decided it was keeping what is now western Ukraine rather than giving it back to Poland after WW2, but that’s not modern day Ukraine’s fault.

Partially a conscious choice to drop all outstanding border controversies with Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus to avoid driving them into Russia’s arms - the approach was developed in the exile press during the Soviet period, and benefited from the discrediting of the interwar extreme nationalist approach by the events of WW2. They also wanted to maintain established borders to avoid reopening the question of the territories “recovered” from Germany (West Germany had earlier refused to make a final, binding agreement to respect the new borders pending a future reunification with East Germany during a period when more of the refugees from Prussia, Silesia, and Hinterpommern were both alive and unreconciled to the expulsion). Poland has already been compensated for the loss of ethnically mixed Galicia-Volhynia (main site of the Ukrainians anti-Polish massacres) and other parts of the Kresy with the newly-monoethnically-Polish German acquisitions, so it’s not like they need the area for anything.

a significant component their national myth is of Poles as the bulwark, standing strong against the tide (Polish spearmen held back the Golden Horde, Polish Hussars broke the siege of Vienna, and so on).

Sometimes to a cringe-inducing degree. See Christ of Europe

Thank you for answering the question!

From the Polish perspective joining NATO defangs the German threat while pissing off their ancient rivals/enemies, the Muskovites, as far as they're concerned it's all win.

Seems a little bit careless. The Eternal Germ will not let them get away with it.

Sure the duplicitous Germans and and effete Belgians can whinge about immigration policy but what are they actually gonna do, Poland is part of the Schengen Zone baby and they've been pulling the DeSantis trick of sending unwanted immigrants to the hometowns of politicians who promote immigration for years now.

But now they're submerged in Ukrainian immigrants. It's not the end of it either.

It seems to me that their only saving grace is their unique language, for now.

Once they have the Americans 'helping out' with the Russian threat and the Germans 'advising' and the British 'training' they'll find out that their younger generations only want to speak English.

+if/when NATO finally takes out Russia, I imagine Poland would be in the runner-up for the next 'disturbingly native-looking' country in what remains of Europe then.

If anything, Russia is a good distraction from their little DeSantis tricks, it's not in their best long-term interest to have the Ukraine wedge take out the bear.

But now they're submerged in Ukrainian immigrants. It's not the end of it either.

"Refugees", almost entirely female and children, with a very legitimate and widely accepted claim, whose male relatives are fighting right across the border until they return. I am not very sympathetic to Ukraine personally but I can't comprehend how someone can't understand why Europeans are generally quite supportive of this refugee wave.

Also to mention one aspect which is often hushed (or unknown to Americans maybe), Ukrainian women have long been the number one source of white female prostitutes around the continent and beyond. In my native language of Turkish, the word Ukrainian is practically synonymous with prostitute. Until 10-20 years ago it was Russians who filled the same niche and the phrase "going to the Russian" was universally understood to visit a prostitute.

I am not writing this to be insulting but it is worthwhile to realize that this is one of the big reasons why the images of millions of poor Ukrainian women flocking to their countries is often not perceived as something threatening by the locals.

Your comment reminds me how in the recent Polish poll (that I can't find now), Polish women were slightly less supportive of the Ukrainian refugees compare to men. Sounds like they don't want more competition

But now they're submerged in Ukrainian immigrants. It's not the end of it either.

We've been swamped with immigrants from Ukraine for a while now. What changed is that now we're swarmed with refugees as well, for what the distinction is worth. The crowd crossing the border fits the common image of what a refugee wave should look like - there is plenty of evidence, and I made a point of going through the central train station of Kraków a few times week during the first month or two just to see for myself.

Arrivals are not particularly controversial, though the various welfare they receive is, for example.

But now they're submerged in Ukrainian immigrants.

Sheltering the women and children of your ally while the men fight your hated enemy is the least one can do as a good ally.

But now they're submerged in Ukrainian immigrants. It's not the end of it either.

Not immigrants; refugees. There is a difference, and the Ukrainian new-arrivals to Poland are legitimately refugees.

The context is comprehensively different from Merkel's third-world invasion. From my reading, the biggest difference is that support for Ukrainian refugees is massively popular in Poland--not just right-to-left along a generic political axis, but importantly, top-to-bottom from the Polish elite to the grassroots.

The new arrivals are, indeed, refugees, but even before the war, Poland was actually swamped by “temporary” workers from Ukraine. But that’s not the point: the difference between Ukrainians in Poland vs Africans in Germany or Sweden is not so much based on legal status, but rather cultural similarity. If US today got mass immigration from English Canadians, who just happened to speak as incomprehensibly as rural Scottsmen, but quickly learn local dialect, it wouldn’t be seen as that big of a deal, compared to mass immigration from Latin America. This is closer to the today’s relationship between Poles and Ukrainians, despite recent history of genocide of Poles perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists (unlike with Blacks in US, in Europe grudges are not so persistently held, especially if they happen to become very inconvenient due to changing political realities).

The issue I see with it is that they're building an infrastructure and customs to welcome and accommodate refugees. This attracts a certain type of people that will not leave once the current Ukraine crisis is over.

It's a slippery slope.

What if Turkey has a civil war, or even Germany, which is starting to look a lot like Turkey, demographically-speaking, aren't they too 'neighbors' etc?

The current wave of refugees is women with children, which is much different than single young males from Africa. If they end up staying, then given cultural similarity, that’s a win too, considering the dire state of demographics in developed world. Germany will not have civil war, and if Turkey has one, Poland simply will not admit any of them, as it did not admit the big wave of Middle East refugees a few years ago, or the ones trying to illegally crossing through Belarus.

What you seem to be missing is that the current government of Poland, as much as they screw around with the rule of law and principles of republican government, they are not hostile to their average constituents, in a way that, say, US government often is. This reduces the downside risk.

They are not hostile to their constituents but deepening the ties to governments that are.

The power imbalance between Poland and US is not in Poland's favor, they will not be able to keep protecting their people.

I think the Polish people is underestimating the risk of staying in the same failing boat as the EU / US.

You keep repeating the same point, and keep failing to look at the other side of that line: of what things look like for pro-Russian countries. They're doing worse. Much worse. The Poles know this, the Ukrainians know this, just-about everyone who isn't an internet contrarian knows this. Why do you insist all of these people are wrong?

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I agree--I think that cultural similarity is one of the big factors that contributes to the widespread popularity of welcoming the Ukrainian refugees. A shared concern over an expansionist Russia and simple human compassion for a neighbor's plight are the others that occur to me offhand.

in Europe grudges are not so persistently held, especially if they happen to become very inconvenient due to changing political realities

Not least because a typical European country has historical reason to have a grudge against most of their neighbours. Acting on all of those would obviously be a huge negative when it comes to economic and other prosperity.

Poland does not like taking in economic refugees, and the fact that they are taking in Ukrainian refugees so readily is a measure of how much they dislike the entire concept of "Russia invades someone."

Russia has demonstrated that if it had the capacity, it would be an existential threat to all of Eastern Europe. It’s thus in most of those nations self interest to make it damn sure that Russia cannot achieve that capacity in the future.

+if/when NATO finally takes out Russia, I imagine Poland would be in the runner-up for the next 'disturbingly native-looking' country in what remains of Europe then.

Do you believe that a primary goal of the EU/NATO is to fill all European countries with non-White immigrants? Do you actually think the EU/NATO strongly object to the fact that the population of Russia is mostly ethnic Russians, and that the population of Poland is almost entirely ethnic Poles?

What's a primary goal and what's a secondary goal? A primary goal of the EU is, charitably, to keep Europeans in the manner to which they have grown accustomed, i.e. to maintain their welfare states in an age of falling fertility rates and dwindling tax bases. They have decided that the optimal way to do this to usher in an endless number of migrants from Africa and the Middle East, and have repeatedly made statements to that effect. To the extent that any European country - Hungary, say, or Poland - objects that they do not want to take in large African populations, the EU has indicated that it will cajole, threaten and twist arms until it gets what it wants. After all, such objections are an obstacle to the goal of maintaining a particular economic state, and thus an undermining of the EU project at large. Given these facts, is it fair to say that the EU is at odds with the continued existence of European countries as majority-European states, as they want migrants in numbers large enough to affect demographic pyramids?

EU is not taking in an "endless number of migrants from Africa and the Middle East". The total number of migrants to EU in 2020 was 1,9 million, a small trickle compared to the total EU population. Out of this, ca 600 00 are asylum seekers. If EU was actually intent on ushering in an "endless number of migrants", this would be an incredibly weak effort, considering how many Africans and Middle Easterns are actually willing to move; it would also be strange for EU to run a whole agency (and keep giving it more and more funds, and turn a blind eye to its migrant pushbacks) to coordinate ways to keep unauthorized migrants, mainly from these areas, out.

EU countries do, indeed, wish to utilize migration to save the welfare state, but when it comes to first residence permits EU issues for employment/education purposes, far and away the biggest group, already in 2021, were the Ukrainians. That indicates who EU wants to work, currently, and it's not hard to imagine that there's a number of Eurocrats currently seeing the Ukrainian refugee flows to Europe as a major boon, presenting an employable and uncontroversial constituency for further work. EU does, at times, weakly try to get Eastern European countries to take in more refugees, mainly as a form of "burden sharing" to take the load off the Western countries, but as one can see from their demographics, these efforts are not really an example of "cajoling, threatening and twisting arms", since that sort of a thing would presumably actually get results.

EU migration policy can mostly be understood through three mandates: getting a modicum of labor-based migration (often from other, non-EU European countries, though that's a diminishing category) and then trying to balance the quest to maintain some sort of a de jure refugee/asylum system, since that is an important part of EU's self-image/external image as the bulwark of the international system and its underlying human rights treaties, and the quest to de facto ensure there's not too many asylum seekers and refugees, let alone illegal immigrants, since that would be destabilizing. The push/pull created by the conflict of the last two mandates then makes the whole immigration policy rather an unwieldy contraption, not really something that most mainstream EU forces are willing to discuss.

I'd also like to add the huge amounts of money, plus various political concessions, given to Turkey in exchange for keeping the migrants at bay.

Yes, and the general way how many seem to believe that EU's migration policies are basically those few confused months in 2015 (or rather a certain interpretation of those months) essentially representing the entire EU migration policy until then and since then, instead of looking at all the things EU has done, both diplomatically and legislatively, to try to make sure that those months aren't repeated again.

You're leaving out the most culture war relevant part of the story, how this policy came to be. The turkey deal only happened after the crisis.

On one side, you have the blank statists, who thought it would be a good idea (they weren't confused) to import millions of MENA people . On the other, the far right and eastern europeans, who warned that they were unassimilable . As the evidence poured in, and the blank statists started losing elections, they changed course, and the state of affairs you describe is the result. Sadly yet predictably, Pol(and) was right again.

Well the EU/NATO are not exactly sentient entities, they are just vehicles, even technologies welded by the actual powers-that-be. While the rulers of NATO are not exactly the rulers of the EU, I believe the rulers of the EU to be vassals of the rulers of NATO.

Given that there is only dozens of extremely powerful people that are tied to all these entities, it's not surprising that the same billionaires who own the media companies that ultimately decide elections in Western countries are very close to the center of power.

I do believe that ethnically-homogeneous European countries are an obstacle to these people, and they actually let us know by transparently publishing it in the Guardian, NYT, HuffingtonPost, etc.

Also the population of Russia is a mix of ethnicities, 'ethnic Russian' would cover quite a varied array of phenotypes. It's hard to tell what exactly their issue with Russia is, but fighting a war to the last Ukrainian is definitely a good way to clean up some of these pesky homogeneous East-Europeans.

I do believe that ethnically-homogeneous European countries are an obstacle to these people, and they actually let us know by transparently publishing it in the Guardian, NYT, HuffingtonPost, etc.

Can you provide an example where they say they have a problem with the ethnic homogeneity of Poland?

Also the population of Russia is a mix of ethnicities, 'ethnic Russian' would cover quite a varied array of phenotypes.

It is true that many ethnic groups live in Russia, but ethnic Russians make up 81% of the country's population and they are relatively homogeneous. Chechens, Kalmyks, etc. are not ethnic Russians; they are part of the remaining 19%, which is the "mix of ethnicities" with "a varied array of phenotypes".

It's hard to tell what exactly their issue with Russia is

The obvious answer is "they're invading a neighbouring country for no reason and murdering civilians". The cynical answer is "Russia is a historical political and military rival and they're taking this opportunity to weaken them". You seem to have skipped both and gone straight to the batshit-crazy answer of "they hate Russians because they're White".

Can you provide an example where they say they have a problem with the ethnic homogeneity of Poland?

I haven't seen this, best I could find was this one where they insist on the racial homogeneity and call people that value it 'extreme nationalists'

The blood-drenched harrowing of the war, followed by post-war border shifts and ethnic cleansing, created a racially pure Poland for the first time in history — fulfilling the dreams of earlier generations of extreme nationalists.

This is the type of piece they are pushing against white people in the US, the country the Poles are making the choice of allying themselves with instead of Russians :

How whiteness poses the greatest threat to US democracy

I don't see why they would not similarly attack Poland in the future, to the tune of 'Poland took the money of multicultural democracies to defend itself from evil nationalist Russia, but they still refuse to accept multiculturalism'

The obvious answer is "they're invading a neighbouring country for no reason and murdering civilians".

The US do the same to countries they are not even neighbors of, and defend their allies engaged in the same practices, in Yemen notably.

What is so special about the borders of Ukraine that needs to be defended at all cost?

Plus Russia actually has a reason in protecting the Russian minorities

in the East shelled by the Ukrainian government since 2014.

While I understand due to historical reasons why this is not a popular sentiment in Poland, I think it would be better for the Polish people to get annexed by Russia -which I do not see as likely- than to spend another 50 years under EU/US dominion.

There is already a case study with the FRG vs GDR, with the Soviet-dominated side faring better in preserving original German culture and demographics, as demonstrated by this map of mosques

The continued existence of the Polish people is at stake, but I understand that that is not what most people are immediately concerned with.

I do find it amusing that some leaders of Poland explicitly said that they do not want to turn into Brussels (from 1st link):

Błaszczak warned that EU pressure on Poland to accept refugees “is a straight road to a social catastrophe, with the result that in a few years Warsaw could look like Brussels.”

It seems that they made the same connection as I do, regarding at least migrants and safety, but they apparently don't think leaning further into EU/NATO is compromising that position, or that position is not taking priority over the perceived Russian threat.

Can you provide an example where they say they have a problem with the ethnic homogeneity of Poland?

Here's an oldie but goodie

Huh, 20 years ago? I thought it'd be something new, looking at the title: "The Unbearable Whiteness of Being Polish".

Also "By: authors", lol.

Everyone here is white. They are not ostentatiously white the way, say, Swedes are;

Most obviously, there aren’t many Africans, Arabs, or Asians. The rest of Europe seems a wonderfully Technicolor place these days—the metro in Paris, Rome, and London could almost be mistaken for the subway in New York. Heterogeneity is a tonic; it adds the energy of unexpected combinations—the woman in chador chatting with the blonde woman in jogging gear on the tube. Ah, cosmopolitanism! But alas, Poland is merely Polish, an experiment in ethnic deprivation; the unbearable whiteness of being.

Speaking of cosmopolitanism—Stalin’s favorite euphemism for Jewishness—there aren’t many Jews here, either. There used to be three million, but the Nazis took care of that. Forty percent of Warsaw was Jewish; the deficit now seems overpowering, they fill the empty spaces in the streets. And not just the Jews: Thousands upon thousands of Polish Catholics were killed at Auschwitz, thousands more were worked to death in Siberia; the officer class of the Polish army was slaughtered by the Nazis and the Soviets. Poland was the charnel house of the 20th century.

This doesn't even seem accusatory at least until this point. "Authors" seem to just really, really fetishize 'diversity'.

The economy stopped growing, as market economies will sometimes do. Unemployment stands at more than 18 percent. In the parliamentary election of 2000, the center did not hold. The former Communists, who had gained power posing as social democrats, remained in control, but the center-right opposition—largely composed of Solidarity remnants—collapsed. Two rather unique populist parties suddenly materialized as significant forces. One was the League of Polish Families, a party of Catholic nationalist extremists (which received 9 percent of the vote); the other was called Self-Defense, a frightening mixture of nationalism and socialism led by a bully named Andrzej Lepper (it received 10 percent, but its strength has nearly doubled in recent public opinion polls). By contrast, Freedom Union—the party of the former Solidarity intellectuals—received only 3 percent and has disappeared from the Polish parliament, the Sejm.

And so, the Polish jitters. Pessimists abound in Warsaw and around the country. There is a war between the government and the still-strict central bank over monetary policy. Lepper is making news every day, usually involving scuffles with the police (last Thursday, he tried to stop imported grain from entering Poland by rail) or with his fellow parliamentarians (he was removed from the hall after a scuffle last Friday). It is likely that the former Communists, led now by prime minister Leszek Miller, will attempt to move left, sloppily, in an attempt to ease the pain, outflank the populists, and keep their apparatchiks prosperous.

“Poland is becoming more and more like Latin America,” says Jaroslaw Kaczynski , leader of the Law and Justice party, a reformist center-right political remnant of Solidarity. “People succeed here not because they’re talented, but because they know the right people. There is a Polish saying: Thousands gain, millions lose. This is an oversimplification, but we do pay an enormous corruption tax, and no one seems interested in reform. So we have an economic crisis that threatens to become a political crisis—my fear is that unless the economy improves, the populist parties will become very strong.”

And now he rules, thanks to blatant populism.

Huh, 20 years ago? I thought it'd be something new

You looked at something explicitly described as an "oldie", and thought it was new? Why?

This doesn't even seem accusatory at least until this point. "Authors" seem to just really, really fetishize 'diversity'.

I don't think having a problem with homogeneity requires for the tone to be accusatory.

And now he rules, thanks to blatant populism.

I'm sorry, I'm physically incapable of pretending media's boogeymen are uniquely bad, or that there is something wrong with populism.

When people in Europe think about the EU, they don't think about immigration or gay marriage or whatever, or even Russia (well, these days they might, but still, it's NATO that is more relevant as an actor here). They think about trade. Behind all other stuff, EU is still primarily a trade pact, and what it represents to your average European is wealth and stability. Of course both of these are extremely important to Eastern Europeans, for reasons that probably don't need explaining. It is impossible to understand the popularity of EU without this frame; it's particularly impossible if one insists on looking at European politics through American culture-war framings.

Whatever attempts there have been from EU to get Poland to be more socially liberal have obviously been failures, thus far. (It's worth remembering that the whole spat EU has with Poland is not EU saying "you need to take in more gays and immigrants and have abortions", it's been about EU being concerned with PiS court-packing and other challenges to rule of law.)

Regarding Russia, it's also worth noting that Poland is not "going toward more alignment with EU and US", Poland is significantly more anti-Russian than EU and US and Polish politicians have many times demanded these parties to take more aggressive action against Russia and to protect Ukraine, going as far as to flirt with direct intervention in ways that EU and US have refrained from doing.

This, of course, does not just come from nowhere. Throughout the war, social media has been replete with constant Russian TV clips going around in social media on how they hate Poland, in particular, and blame Poland, in particular, for brainwashing all the Ukrainians to believe Russia is not their friend, and how Russia needs to conduct a SMO against Poland as soon as possible. And there seems to be an even longer history of anti-Polish hostility from Russia (quoting from a Google-translated Finnish blog post):

A certain Central European state has constantly taken center stage in the Kremlin's calculations as the main opponent of the country, and the policy pursued by Russia in its immediate periphery would ultimately be easy to explain through this tension alone. In Vladimir Putin's eyes, one of the countries standing in the way of Russian hegemony stands out above all others: Poland.

The essay published by the Russian president in July 2021 on the historical connection between Russians and Ukrainians has been quoted widely, and is a telling example of Putin's understanding of history. The essay is a straightforward narrative about the destinies of Eastern Europe spanning half a millennium. Few readers paid attention to how, in connection with each historical turning point he presented, Putin specifically named Poland not only as Russia's main opponent in the Ukrainian region, but also as an incomparably worse oppressor of Ukrainians than Russia.

Putin's essay tells how history took a fatal turn already when, as a result of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, Ukraine ended up in the sphere of influence of Catholic Christendom, which broke the connection of the Eastern Slavic peoples. This was followed by the revolt of the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky; the struggle for freedom, in which the Ukrainian people sought help against Poland from their brother-in-law, the Tsar of Russia. The divisions of Poland meant for Putin the return of the "old Russian lands" to their true state unity, and in the 19th century Ukrainian cultural identity naturally developed as a "Little Russian" part of the empire; the tsarist regime's censorship measures, on the other hand, were only a reaction to the efforts of Polish nationalists in Ukraine. After the collapse of the Empire, the Poles suppressed the independence of the Western Ukrainians and used the "People's Republic of Ukraine" founded by Symon Petlyura only as an intermediary in their fight against the Bolsheviks. In the period between the world wars, the Polish-administered western regions of Ukraine were oppressed. According to Putin, the current rapprochement between Ukraine and the EU countries is still underpinned by an "old Polish and Austrian project" — a reference to the cooperation between Polish independence activists and the Habsburg dual monarchy — whose purpose was to create an artificial "anti-Russia" out of Ukraine.

Rhetorical attacks against Poland have become a regular part of Putin's arsenal since the annexation of Crimea. In December 2019 , Putin accused the government of interwar Poland of colluding with the Nazis and named Poland complicit in starting World War II . A month later, the Holocaust commemoration held in Jerusalem turned into a new stage in the historical war between Moscow and Warsaw with Putin's speech . In June 2020, the ruler of the Kremlin continued on the same topic, declaring that the wartime suffering of occupied Poland was the fault of the country's own government. In Russian foreign policy, history has been turned into a weapon, and in this respect, the front of the hybrid war had been turned towards Poland long before the asylum seeker crisis at the turn of last year on the border of Belarus. The nationalist, right-wing populist government that has been in power in Warsaw since 2015, which, like the Kremlin, has enacted its own historical laws , has been a favorite target for Putin.

It is clear that the struggle for domination of Eastern Europe is defined in the Kremlin as a struggle primarily against Poland. Among the new EU and NATO countries after the collapse of communism, Poland is in a class of its own; For ten years, Poland's economic growth has exceeded all expectations , the recovery of the country's economy from the corona crisis has been fast , the country's armed forces are the fifth largest in the European Union , and from the beginning Poland has pursued an active neighborhood policy specifically in the direction of Ukraine, also using the means of economic cooperation.

Poland's eastern policy has a long history. The "Eastern Borderlands", Kresy Wschodnie , were once part of Polish nationalist nostalgia; the regions from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea appeared as a lost, beautiful Arcadia, the scene of the great days of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The background of Poland's current neighborhood policy is more recent, and its starting point was the views expressed in the Kultura magazine by two émigré journalists during the Cold War, Jerzy Giedroyc and Juliusz Mieroszewski . "The Giedroyc-Mieroszewski Doctrine"required Poland's unreserved support for the independence of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, rejection of the big brother and great power attitude, agreement on historical pain points, and the joining of all countries to United Europe. After the collapse of the Communist Bloc, the Polish government practically adapted its Eastern policy to the Kultura magazine and tried to pave Ukraine's way to Western institutions. Although today's Poland has become more authoritarian and anti-EU than before , the country's commitment to Ukraine has not wavered.

Poland's neighborhood policy has been yet another "geopolitical" threat factor for the Russians, and as such a particularly painful one. It is no surprise that in the eyes of Vladimir Putin, Poland's rise to a new regional power factor and active politics in the neighboring regions are defined in the light of five hundred years of history. In this interpretation, the Warsaw elite is once again expanding its sphere of interest at the expense of Russia; Poles are at the forefront of challenging Russian supremacy in Ukraine; Poland actually threatens to question once again the entire Russian national birth myth dating back to the days of Kievan Rus; and at the same time, Poland, specifically Poland, is bringing Western weapons close to Russia's heartlands, whether it's NATO's missile shield or arms deliveries to the Ukrainian army.

It is also clear to Putin that, of all his opponents, Poland is the one that won't give up, and Poland is the only one of the EU countries that is ready to defend Ukraine, even on its own . Moscow's foreign policy has achieved results in a few countries of the former Eastern Bloc, above all in Hungary, but on the Polish side the contradictions are completely irreconcilable for historical reasons. Russia's goals in Ukraine therefore require action in relation to Poland and the isolation of Poland from its allies, in which case Russia could take the measure of its opponent alone — according to Pushkin, "only among the Slavs". Until now, the government in Warsaw has messed up its relationship with the EU itself — although one can ask how much the Union has benefited Poland against Russia, especially considering Germany's energy policy needs, in the end — but as a NATO country, Poland's shares are on a good course.

While I agree that the EU framed itself as a trade-focused entity, things have shifted since then, as georgioz explained.

Didn't the EU just enact trade sanctions against Russia with a great negative impact on the cost of energy for its members?

I don't know what the current energy situation is like in Poland, but this demonstrates that being part of that trade-group is not always helping the Polish economy.

While Putin's views of history come with their own bias/inconsistencies/falsehoods perhaps, but at least his vision takes into account history.

What is the EU's views of history?

'Before there were empires and it was bad because they were European and Christian, but now there is no more empire -disregard that we are deeply aligned with the American empire and forcing rules on our 'member' states and giving a hard time to members trying to leave- so things are gonna be great now! Wealth, diversity and gayness for everybody!'

Didn't the EU just enact trade sanctions against Russia with a great negative impact on the cost of energy for its members?

Yes.

I don't know what the current energy situation is like in Poland, but this demonstrates that being part of that trade-group is not always helping the Polish economy.

The Poles are the nation most in favor of sanctions, and would love for them to be stricter. Arguing that it's bad for Poland when the Poles (with broad popular support) disagree with you is peak tier ivory tower thinking.

While Putin's views of history come with their own bias/inconsistencies/falsehoods perhaps, but at least his vision takes into account history.

This is a meaningless sentence.

What is the EU's views of history?

Putin is one man, and the EU is one of the most disjointed and inconsistent autonomous political entities in the world. If it has a version of history, it isn't the stupid caricature you're talking about. Instead, it'd look like the following:

'Before, Europe routinely tore itself to shreds, from the dark ages all the way to 1945. Today, we recognise this was a terrible thing, full of death and pain and destruction; we never want to go back to that, and we will be better off for unifying under the blue flag with golden stars, whatever that ends up looking like.'

So far, the EU has managed to do this. Between Yugoslavia, Armenia, Georgia, and now Ukraine, I'd argue that the unprecedented peace of the past seventy years inside the EU has been a resounding success, and no amount of wrongheaded bitching about immigrants or gays from ornery foreign rightists is going to convince me that such a peace as we have isn't worth it.

From the Russian side, I can attest to having been fed a trickle of memes since childhood that cast them in a role of a sort of mild ancestral enemy, more specifically something like a vindictive envious distant relative who is stalking you and perpetually scheming to get their comeuppance if you are down on your luck. (Similarly-flavoured trope is that of the nasty relatives who appear out of nowhere to try to cheat the children out of the family inheritance after the reclusive patriarch died. Think wildbow's Pact.)

A particular one I remember is the story of the False Dmitrys, when Russia was thrown into crisis by Ivan the Terrible's dynasty dying out without leaving a male heir. The last heir, one Dmitry, died under unclear circumstances, and rule passed to a regent (Godunov) that at least some early modern historiography chose to interpret as "best thing to happen to Russia in a while, but tragically sabotaged at every turn due to lack of royal pedigree". Royalists coped with stories that Dmitry actually survived (in that version, typically a cowardly assassination attempt by the low-born Godunov). These stories were picked up and answered by a series of pretenders claiming to actually be the surviving Dmitry, who supposedly actually fled to Poland and secured the gracious backing of the local nobility. Each of the pretenders strutted into Russia as what was basically a Polish-backed civil war faction to try and seize the throne (at least the first one briefly succeeded), adding internal strife to what was already a difficult period involving famines and external wars (including one against Poland). This, it was made clear to me, was something that the Poles would just naturally do, because they could not possibly let a chance to make Russians suffer go by unused.

(Some details may be wrong; I'm ultimately very uneducated regarding Russian history and am just trying to recount what stuck from informal cultural programming.)

This is a more or less accurate summary of the Dmitriads. One of the more darkly amusing sequence of events in world history (set in motion by Ivan the Terrible randomly murdering his only non-retarded son). Highly recommend reading about the whole episode in detail for anyone into history for the entertainment value.

A lot of what we now regard as the Russian sphere of influence used to be the Polish sphere of influence, including much of Ukraine, until the dwindling of Polish imperial power led to the loss of these territories to the Russian Empire, and the occupation and gradual irrelevance of Poland. Poland exists as the bumpkin cousin of the great European empires, never counted among the likes of Britain, France, Austria, Spain or Russia, and the Tsars in St. Petersburg were a major part of why - even before the Soviet era, Russia played the role of humiliator in the Polish psyche, the rocks against which Poland's great power ambitions ran aground. There's unlikely to be any Polish-Russian rapprochement for a long time.

Ok that makes a lot of sense.

Yet it would be apropos, considering that they are both seemingly nationalist countries in the same area with common interests, and facing an existential risk at this point.

It's even somewhat ironic that they would go to such great length for the integrity of Ukraine's borders, when Ukrainian nationalists themselves would love to claim a slice of Poland.

Who would say no to a slice of Poland?

Who would say no to a slice of Poland?

Rather famously, the British in 1939. And angry Brits can express this quite vigorously at time - roughly what you would expect from a soccer riot commanded by Sandhurst-trained officers.

Ukrainian nationalists themselves would love to claim a slice of Poland.

Would they? My understanding is that all the areas that were disputed between Poland and Ukraine were ultimately transferred to Ukraine after World War II, and Ukrainian nationalists are now satisfied in that regard.

My understanding is that most of the tsunami of African or Middle-Eastern immigrants of the 2000s would rather go to Western Europe or Scandinavia for better welfare or economic prospects.

You underestimate how recent the whole woke/proimmigration bent is. In late 90ies when EU negotiated expansion with new members, the negotiations were tough. As part of the acceptance criteria there were temporary periods where free movement of labor from eastern members were suspended for years exactly for fear of mass economic immigration from east to west.

Back in the day there was also strong debate about what EU is: is it Europe of nations and just pact of economic convenience, or is it European superstate with its own army and foreign policy and so forth? The overall makeup of EU institutions was skewed to the former with deeply rooted principles of subsidiarity and voting system with multiple veto possibilities. It was before Treaty of Lisbon of 2007 that amends 1992 Maastricht Treaty and which brings more power to EU structures compared to member nations.

So one can say that EU left some member countries as opposed to member countries somehow not realizing where they entered.

You underestimate how recent the whole woke/proimmigration bent is.

Not towards African or Middle-Eastern immigrants.

Are you aware of when the EU thought the Poles should take some of those in?

Yes, but that's not the point. My argument is that the whole woke/proimmigration bent is certainly not new a) in Western Europe b) towards African or Middle-Eastern immigrants.

It's also worth noting that one of the reasons why there are occasional attempts from EU to get the Eastern European countries to take in more refugees is that then the Western European countries wouldn't have to host those refugees themselves.

Meh. I just think such attempts were fundamentally dishonest and merely meant as a culture war bone thrown to Eastern European liberal opposition groups and their Western pals to chew on, and an excuse to complain about Eastern European barbarian badwhites.

And we can rightly assume such attempts were dishonest, because it's rather obvious to anyone that if, say, Poland or Latvia accepted a large group of African migrants, most of them would just want to move on and cross the border into Germany. And who'd try stopping them? Certainly not the local authorities, and very probably not the German border guards either.

I just think such attempts were fundamentally dishonest

That's a fair view to have. What would it take to convince you otherwise?

What would it take to convince you otherwise?

Any tangible sign on the part of Western European EU member states of a willingness to control the outer borders of the EU and to curb the influx of refugees to their own soil.

It seems to be the paradox of EU 'democracy'. While no individual EU state is individually strongly pro-African immigration, the collective response of the EU is to take them in. With some caveats, as they have developed some measures of containment with North-Africa.

This emergent property of the EU was not hard to predict, but of course the bureaucrats in charge are strangely sympathetic to the corporations that benefit from economic integration and industry relocation.

If this continues on this trajectory, Europeans as a people will not survive the EU, having survived the USSR and all kind of monarchies and fascist dictatorships previously.

You are unaware, perhaps, that Poland and Russia have a bit of a history?

They do, but so do Germany and Poland, or even USA and Poland, let's not forget the Lend-Lease that helped the USSR conquer Poland in the first place.

Why are the Poles so afraid of Russia?

Or are they afraid that they will lose their sovereignty and be forced to do horrible things, like welcoming people they do not like and allowing disgusting acts to be carried out on their countrymen?

Are they afraid that the Russians will replace the Polish population with an indistinguishable mix of ethnicities and cultures that have no bearing to the original Polish people and culture?

How do you figure that Lend-Lease helped the USSR conquer Poland? Your own link says that it was passed in March of 1941. The invasion of Poland was completed by October of 1939.

As others have noted, your grasp of the relevant history and politics seems a little shaky.

Without the lend-lease, USSR logistics would have potentially collapsed before reaching Germany, and the USSR would not have been able to keep their annexed territories way beyond 1939, which is where a lot of the modern grudge comes from.

Presumably he's not talking about Lend-Lease enabling the 1939 invasions (plural; Hitler got half and Stalin got half) to happen, but rather enabling the invaded lands' retention afterwards. (Wikipedia says the parts incorporated into the USSR had something like 10M people, and of course the parts dominated by the USSR had everybody else) Without Lend-Lease we might easily imagine a world in which the USSR was too weak to be in any shape to race the other Allies to Berlin (or at least too weak to be able to afford a pause along the way waiting for Poles to get slaughtered, and too weak to object if we decided afterwards to let Poland return to the status quo ante bellum (because that's the natural Schelling point to discourage wars of conquest) rather than to the Potsdam agreement borders (because we were sick of war and because FDR was an idiot who played his hunch).

I'm not endorsing that theory, though. Alternate history is tricky, wishful thinking is easy. I don't see any reason why the good "USSR too weak without support, Poland freed half a century earlier" outcome would necessarily be much more likely than e.g. the atrocious "USSR way too weak without support, Nazis lock down Poland for years or decades longer and expel or kill tens of millions of Poles" outcome.

Either way, it's hard to argue that any of the major protagonists had the interest of the Polish people at heart while deciding its fate.

While Russia can be said to have somewhat recovered from its world-dominating communist fantasies, if anything the USA's foreign policy has only gotten worse.

While they had some semblance of justification to nuke Japan or firebomb Germany, hardly any moral observer can support the most recent US military interventions, which seemingly have to do with past allies turning into dictators or vice versa, and major US officials boldly reminiscing their history of coup d'etats.

The Poles seem to think being under the American umbrella beats being under the Russian umbrella. Today, I can look at Serbia, at Armenia, at Kazakhstan, at Kyrgyzystan, at Belarus, at Ukraine, and see how the Poles have a point.

Why should they prefer being under Moscow's sway moreso than being under that of Washington/Brussel?

I'm not too familiar with the situation in all these countries. As far as I know, Serbia is relatively peaceful.

Ukraine is not exactly under the Russian umbrella, they are literally getting billions of dollars in supplies from the US to fight a war to the last Ukrainian.

After 50 years under Moscow, the Polish people still exists.

Aside from Ukraine and Israel, the US (or EU) are not really protecting the integrity of any country's borders, not even theirs, and that's one of the main expectations for a defense body.

Considering that they also flood their allied countries with consumerist and anti-natalist propaganda, they are a real risk for their allied country's people, at least from a demographic point of view.

The Poles find your arguments unconvincing, and are the most ardently anti-Russian people in the EU. I don't blame them. The Ukrainians might agree, and are fighting a war because they very clearly think people like you are wrong.

Mind you, the arguments you then bring forward are drivel too. Demographics in Russia and its sphere of influence are worse than the west's. You talk about propaganda without thinking for even a moment of what sorts of propaganda is blared from the other side. You talk about organisations protecting its borders that literally can't - the US because it is on the other side of the Atlantic, the EU because it doesn't have the people.

None of these things are oit-there facts particularly tough to find out about. They only require you to look beyond the part of the world that is extremely online. I don't know why you keep insisting on things that (large) nations of people nigh-unanimously agree on are wrong without stopping to listen to them and see what they are talking about.

Do you mean to imply that US foreign policy is more of a threat to Poland than is Russian foreign policy.

Germany and Russia have history of long periods of peace and mutual economic development with burts of wars or proxy wars as they inevitably clash for geopolitical reasons only to make peace again for economic reasons.

Poland has history of being subjugated by both, although economic background is similar. This makes Poles much more cautious and paranoid.

Between this post and others, I don't think your model of how Europeans think and feel is a good one, east or west, nor do I think you quite understand what the EU does or even can do with its member states. Stefferi's post up there would be a good start for you to read; in short, immigration isn't as big a deal as you imply it is, and the EU has little influence on any particular nation's handling of it anyway.

and the EU has little influence on any particular nation's handling of it anyway.

This isn't as the ECHR, of which one must accept the authority of to join the EU, has significantly impeded the capability of countries to prevent illegal immigration.

If the ECHR had battalions, I might in fact agree. In practice, it doesn't, and countries that flout it see no consequences.

One doesn't need an army if words suffice. Which in this case they do; countries act accordingly and change laws after ECHR deems them incompatible with its interpretation of the convention.

Can you provide evidence to the contrary, that is, ECHR ruling against a state, which decides to ignore the judgement and doesn't make claimant whole?

I don't get that last part. Claimant whole? I don't know how to parse that.

Probably "make the claimant whole". Read claimant as plaintiff/complaining party. Make whole as in do something to resolve the complaining parties issues to their/the courts satisfaction. It doesn't make much sense here since the assumption would be that a state would ignore the judgement for the purpose of not acting in the ways the complaining party would want to make them whole.

More comments

First of all, the ECHR is not related to the EU; it is part of the Council of Europe, which includes all European countries except Belarus and Russia, the latter having been expelled this year due to the invasion.

Quoting Wikipedia:

The court lacks enforcement powers. Some states have ignored ECtHR verdicts and continued practices judged to be human rights violations. (...)

The number of non-implemented judgements rose from 2,624 in 2001 to 9,944 at the end of 2016, 48% of which had gone without implementation five years or more. In 2016, all but one of the 47 member countries of the Council of Europe had not implemented at least one ECtHR verdict in a timely fashion, although most non-implemented verdicts concern a few countries: Italy (2,219), Russia (1,540), Turkey (1,342), and Ukraine (1,172).

The article has a few examples of non-implemented judgments.

Well not really, I would say that the situation is not as simple as that. Sometimes countries can take measures against illegal immigration with the unspoken consent of western Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pushbacks_in_Greece

https://twitter.com/ECHR_CEDH/status/1544958198125404161

https://ecre.org/greece-systematic-pushbacks-continue-by-sea-and-land-as-meps-demand-eu-action-deaths-up-proportionate-to-arrivals-number-of-people-in-reception-system-reduced-by-half-mitarachi-still-not/


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