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a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition experiences a mass movement around a figure
fear of immigrants and immigration
contempt for journalists and journalism
violence
but when the people said: this is fascism
there were always those who said, no it isn't!
if it were fascism, he would be glorifying war!
he's the anti-war candidate!
now
he's been elected to deploy the military domestically
and he indicates he will expand the borders using the military
this is fascism
... duh.
@FCfromSSC already warned you downthread, but you're still filling up the mod queue with reports on your posts, so consider this me underlining what FC said and highlighting a few more things.
Your username is suggestive and seems calculated to provoke, but that's fine - if someone was genuinely a member of the "antifa" movement or sympathetic to them, they would be as welcome to post here as anyone else (and it would be interesting to have their perspective). I don't know if you are sincere or trolling, but either way, you need to understand a couple of things: first, you're going to encounter a lot of hostility. We (mods) factor that in, so when you're being reported just for posting leftist opinions, we aren't generally swayed by that. However, you are following into an unfortunately familiar pattern that many hardcore lefties do when "arriving" here. (I put "arriving" in quotes because you created this account today, and you're clearly not new here, and I have a pretty good suspicion about who you are.) And that is being preemptively rude, condescending, and belligerent, with an attitude of "I am here to set you fascists straight."
Not only is that not going to be received well (or generate any decent discussion), it's against the rules requiring everyone to interact with charity and good faith. No matter how much you don't want to because you think of yourself as doing battle against the forces of
evilfascismwokeismJewsthe mods.This is all condescending, belligerent, and just reads as bad faith.
I see no reason to let you continue to participate with a newly rolled alt if you are going to do so in bad faith. So if you continue in this manner, I'm going to move to go straight to permaban rather than letting you progress through the usual tedious cycle of increasingly longer bans just so you can come back every few weeks to play again.
I wish that you would recognize the reason “leftists” come in hot “arriving” here is because, I believe, you allow a hilarious amount of boo-outgrouping from “the other side” on here without the same vigor. One of the “quality contributions” literally goes on about how leftists don’t care about raped children, and somewhere down that line someone declares proudly that prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies. Exactly where is the charity and good faith in declaring such things? Would I really be received with such neutral attention if I said such things about other outgroups? I think the answer is no. Therefore, I hazard most leftists look at your “be charitable” rule and laugh at it because they think you seem to define “chartiable” as “don’t say bad things about conservatives at all but feel free to dunk leftists” and therefore disregard the etiquette since to them you are disregarding it as well.
I don't know what to tell you - we mod people for "boo outgrouping" every day. Yes, this is generally not a friendly environment for those on the left (and don't I know it, as someone nominally on the left), but the exact degree to which we calibrate how much we let people badmouth their ideological opponents is never going to satisfy everyone. Too much moderation and we're suppressing basically any degree of heat or emotion; not enough and the people being talked about feel like it's open season on them. We have had these arguments (and internal mod discussions) since the reddit days, and whenever someone proposes a "solution" that will achieve perfect balance, it turns out that solution maps precisely to "moderate exactly to the degree that would make this place conform to my preferred state."
Also, bluntly, I think you are wrong about causes. Leftists who come in hot are mostly not new posters but people arriving with a grudge because we exist and haven't changed the rules to their liking. Or someone who got linked here, takes a quick gander, is shocked and appalled at what we allow to be posted, and decides some corrective mocking is necessary.
I'm not sure exactly which post you are referring to, but I know another recent post that asserted that got modded.
That one was borderline, and got some pushback from a mod (albeit without modhat on). My own opinion is that the claim was not entirely offbase factually (my understanding is that the only reason prep is needed is because gay men don't wish to refrain from activities that spread AIDS), but reducing it down to "gay orgies" was rather inflammatory. Was it a particularly nice thing to say? No. Was it a defensible claim to make, even if it hurts feelings? With a bit more effort, yes.
It depends on what you said. If you just come in calling everyone who voted for Trump a fascist, no. If you made an argument that Trump is a fascist, you'd probably be downvoted a lot, unfortunately, but you would not be modded if you were civil about it. What else is it you want to say that you think you wouldn't be allowed to say here? There is a difference between "The mods will let you say it" and "Many people will argue with you, perhaps not very nicely, and downvote you."
Then they are wrong and they don't actually look at our mod log.
This is incorrect. Every week I mod multiple people for "dunking on leftists" (and predictably get bitching and downvotes for it).
I am claiming if I make an argument that Trump is a fascist, I agree, I’ll be downvoted (but like idc), and yes, I won’t be modded if I keep it civil, but also virtually all of the replies will be so riddled with logical fallacies, not to mention subtle boo outgrouping, that not only do I have no desire to continue debating in good faith but I’m at risk of losing my cool in a sea of what seems to me to be absolutely laughable debating bizarrely not getting modded and then definitely getting myself modded. I’m also claiming that my reaction is likely a common reaction most other leftists are having and therefore is the explanation for why the leftist population is nonexistent here without the other explanation being “the mods are secretly fucking elephants and flipping off liberals while they do it.”
Edit: to address directly your question of “What else is it you want to say that you think you wouldn't be allowed to say here?”, I believe it is, “I literally can’t argue with this trashy argument because it doesn’t even fit the definition of the argument. Do you even know how to have a conversation, random_Motte_user, much less want to? Like how am I expected to work with this? Mods where are you guys isn’t this supposed to be a debate club? Why are all the users absolutely shit at debating.” Or something less inflammatory.
You're right, a lot of people argue with fallacious logic and straw men. We have a few rules against things like weakmanning and boo-outgroup, but generally speaking we don't mod on the quality of someone's arguments, let alone whether we think they are factually correct (or even truthful). That's the whole point of this place; moderating on tone, not content. I realize a lot of people dislike "You can make ridiculous and absurd claims as long as you're polite about it," but yes, that's how it works. That's where the "test your shady thinking" part of the Motte comes from. People can make ridiculous and absurd claims, and hopefully someone else will call them out on it.
I sympathize-I really do-that being in a distinct minority means you will get a lot of shit flung at you, and if you respond in a heated fashion you risk getting modded yourself. All I can say is that I think that lefties have gotten entirely too comfortable with everywhere else on the Internet being for them, and what you want is pretty close to demanding that we be like everywhere else, where you won't have to read people being mean to your opinions.
You could say that (maybe not calling everyone shit at debating). You can certainly tell someone you think their argument is bad. Like, you have gone off on how you think "Prep is to enable gay orgies" is a bad argument (and you even had mods agreeing with you!). You wrote a thoughtful post about why you think that argument is wrong.
If you interpret what I’m suggesting as “pretty close to demanding that we be like everywhere else, where you won't have to read people being mean to your opinions”, then I don’t know what to tell you. I feel I have said repeatedly the problem is not that right-wingers are saying mean things about left-wingers, it’s that bad debate etiquette is so pervasive here that it’s impossible to have a discussion.
Like kinda right now. I am scratching my brain on how, despite what I interpret as carefully wording my response to be as clear as possible about my opinions, you walked away with “justawoman doesn’t like reading mean things about her political beliefs like all the other leftists online”. I literally do not care if I get downvoted a lot, I don’t care if I get vitriol thrown at me, and can you show me which part of my responses implied I don’t want to read mean opinions?
To reiterate my position once more; I do not care if I read bad opinions here. But if I can’t debate the bad opinions because my opponent won’t respond to what I am saying, then yeah, something needs to change because none of us can test our shady thinking on here if we aren’t actually doing debate.
Yeah, but you still haven't told me what concretely you think we should do, other than be stricter. Maybe "@justawoman doesn't want to read mean things about her political beliefs" is not fair, but all your examples are basically people making bad arguments - and many of them are bad arguments! - which you want us to mod. We don't mod people for making bad arguments here! We mod people for making rude/uncharitable arguments or being insulting.
If your opponent won't respond to what you're saying, what do you want us to do about it? And again, I disagree with you, because from what I have seen, some of your opponents might go off on tangents about how much leftists suck, but most of your opponents are responding to what you're saying. Here, @07mk responded to your complaint about posts claiming leftists don't care about child rape. Here and downthread people steelman the "Prep is for gay orgies" argument. Are they good arguments, or arguments you agree with? Maybe not. And your response to @7mk was basically "I think your argument is bad, ergo the Motte sucks." What do you want us, as mods, to do about this?
You are not the first person to write about how you think the Motte has gone downhill (or was always bad) and that the problem is the users and we don't enforce quality standards enough. Some people have a long list of rules they think should be enforced that would prevent people from bad-posting. They all tend to be some combination of (a) a lot more work for the mods, who would basically be delegated as editors and proofreaders for all posts, and (b) banning more posters who fail to meet the complainant's quality standards. Which effectively does boil down to "bad people who make arguments I don't like."
I can certainly envision ways we could implement this. Back on reddit, when the discourse had been turning particularly sour and low-quality for a while, we would institute periodic "reigns of terror" wherein we would become far more trigger-happy about banning people for low-effort and disparaging comments. It's not clear to me if these were particularly effective long-term; short-term, people mostly buttoned up a bit and toned down their vitriol, but of course we got all the usual whining about how we banned Suzy but we didn't ban Jane. We probably could decide we're going to start getting much harsher about modding dunks and cheap shots and low effort comments, and the result would be to force people to write longer posts with more effort, but it would also suppress a lot of discourse. Would it be for the better, or would it drive more people off-site? We already get a lot of complaining that moderation is driven by word-count, or that too much moderation makes everyone afraid to post and thus kills conversations.
So what concretely do you want us to do that isn't demanding a shitload more work from us and also isn't heavily biased towards making the Motte exactly the place you would like it to be, but not necessarily what everyone else wants it to be?
I replied downthread the proposed solution and went into detail. I genuinely am asking if you have read it? The one about statistics and me collecting a data pool? I feel like it has answers already to these questions on it, and no! It's not going ban crazy, and it's not using up all your energy to proof-read.
Otherwise, concretely, I want you guys to be able to identify the debate fallacies going on and tell the users who are utilizing them to knock it off so that legitimate debate can be had and you're not driving off the leftists that you want. In your first example with 07mk, is a great one; no, I think he did not respond to what I said. I first posited a) their claim about leftists' attitude on child rape couldn't be substantiated with just anecdotal evidence and b) did they have any evidence other than anecdotal. Neither of those points were addressed in their response. To me, appropriate mod action would be something along the lines of "07mk, you cannot expect justawoman to continue the conversation if you don't continue it appropriately. Please respond to her two claims a) Do you think such a claim can be substantive on anecdotal evidence and b) do you have evidence other than anecdotal, then move on to the next claim." I said in my response earlier I would be happy to document these things privately so that I had data to back my claims and also to point out these general trends and condense them into a sentence or two so that the small mod team here has concrete examples to look out for.
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"User driven moderation" or whatever you call it was a bad idea and a very good way to overmoderate any users in the minority. The only thing that makes sense is rules-based moderation...
Perhaps. But here's my take: first of all, we mostly do use rules-based moderation, but it mostly doesn't satisfy the complainers (because they think we are applying the rules unequally). To the degree that "Moderation is very much driven by user sentiment, I think you are taking that too literally. It does not mean that we moderate according to who gets upvoted or downvoted, nor does it mean anyone who gets reported gets modded. It's right there in that section in that part of the rules:
Now, it is a known problem we've commented on before that someone who's really unpopular (or just posting unpopular opinions) gets reported a lot, and even though we are aware of this and try to factor it in, anyone who's both unpopular and getting reported a lot is probably having lots of arguments and thus sooner or later is probably going to say something uncivil and is more likely to be noticed doing it. Other than using our best judgment and talking amongst ourselves when we see this kind of thing happening, I do not know what a better alternative would be, because inherently we rely mostly on user reports to draw our attention to bad behavior. We don't get paid enough to be responsible for reading every single post and not letting anything slip our notice.
I'm not saying you're not trying, but honestly it's not just a minor problem. If the goal was really to engage with people you don't agree with, this website is a failure. I only come here when I want to know what a specific part of the right thinks.
A good starting point would be to drastically improve the quality of the so-called quality contributions. They should be held to the highest standard, so people can go there and see what's expected of them. What I got from doing that is that your message should be long, written in good english and be right wing. That will garantee you a place there with a 50% probability. Following the rules in their letter and spirit is obviously optionnal.
It's not just a minor problem, no, but I don't think it's solvable.
You're not completely wrong here (I personally don't like that AAQCs are mostly determined by who gets a lot of AAQC "applause" from other members, and a long-winded but superficially polite polemic about how My Enemies Are Scum or Those People Are An Existential Threat will always get tons), but the alternative requires the mods being much more personally and directly involved in deciding what we consider to be a quality post. Is that what you are asking for? And are you sure our selections would be more satisfactory?
Yes, I am interested in what you consider to be quality posts.
Maybe you could have two different sections of quality contributions; ones that got a lot of AAQCs (and didn't break any rules and weren't too egregious, like how you choose them now), and a separate "Mod's Choice" section. In particular, there's a lot of awesome life advice I see in Wellness Wednesdays, and I remember being disappointed one didn't make it. But I've never been one to nominate them myself much, anyway.
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YES. You guys are the mods! You set the tone of the entire site! You guys should have a personal standard of what is quality post and measure it against the popular post.
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A first step is to just do a posteriori control, you eliminate the post that don't follow the rules strictly. However my feeling is that not much quality contributions would remain.
And the user driven evaluation could be more rules-based, instead of voting on a scale bad/good you could ask whether it's charitable, whether you agree or oppose the content, whether it is nice.
I have other ideas if you are interested, like categories for quality contribution: best left/right wing contribution...
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That is also why I come to this website, mostly to find out what the far-but-smart part of the right thinks. I have to say I would quite like it if smart parts of the left would come here and participate more often though – I feel that the essence of the moderation approach could potentially make for more interesting and productively adversarial debate if more ideologically diverse voices joined in. It's not always enjoyable to be a lone outspoken voice in this environment however, so I think something special may be required to get past that participation hurdle and get larger numbers of left contributors involved.
An idea would be to start an opposition day every week, a thread to specifically highlight topics or opinions that are not in the website consensus. There would still be an overwhelming crowd to harass you, but perhaps you would feel less alone.
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The really funny part is banning people for describing the exact perspective of this user in terms he would agree with himself, re.
There needs to be some discussion about this. I'd be happy with a rule requiring all claims of "this is what leftists believe" to be backed up by quotes. But there needs to be some way to say "look, they openly say they have no intention of communicating with you, let alone coexisting with you" without breaking the rules, especially when literally everyone involved on all sides agrees it's true.
If you want to have a good faith discussion of this, I will be happy to discuss it with you. I just have low expectations because all previous attempts have resulted in you accusing us of running cover for leftists, being hypocrites, etc.
The key point you are missing is that what one person says is not representative of an entire group, and that's why we have an entire paragraph in the rules about being specific about who you're talking about:
So when you say "look, they openly say they have no intention of communicating with you, let alone coexisting with you" - who is they? Because it's certainly not "leftists." It is definitely some leftists. Every bad thing you have ever said about leftists - everything you've ever been modded for for saying about leftists - if you said "There exist leftists who say and think this," I would agree with you. And if you said "That person who's posting is openly saying he has no intention of communicating with us," you would not be modded for that.
But when you take that person as an example and say "He's a leftist, therefore he proves that leftists are blahblahblah..." I mean, do you even see the distinction I am making here, or am I talking to air? You think we're ignoring the behavior of individual bad actors, when those bad actors usually get modded. But because those bad actors exist, you want us to treat every leftist as being the same, and then get mad that we don't ban leftists on sight.
And if someone comes rolling in with "Right-wingers are a bunch of racist, sexist, anti-semitic homophobes" - well, some people in this forum wear all those labels proudly! And yet it is clearly not true of all rightists, such generalizations are clearly intended to be derogatory, and we would mod someone who said that. And you'd be angry at us if we didn't mod someone for saying that.
I don't know why it is so hard for you to distinguish between "What this jerk says" and "This jerk is speaking for everyone who votes like him and thus they can all be treated as interchangeable."
https://www.themotte.org/post/1229/quality-contributions-report-for-october-2024/267191?context=8#context
Literally a quote from naraburns two months ago saying you guys do affirmative action moderation for leftists already. If you know me as well as you claim, you know nothing offends me more than "it's not happening and it's a good thing it is, you're crazy for noticing" tactics.
That's the level of good faith I expect from discussions about moderation here, which I suppose means I'm breaking my rule of not engaging with manipulation attempts
Just to add to @Amadan's take on this, it's hard for me to take you very seriously in a discussion about "good faith" when you link to that comment I made, without also referencing my direct reply to you in that thread where I elaborated:
(Emphasis added.) Your refusal to engage in open, honest, charitable discussion of these nuances is a far, far cry from us engaging in "manipulation attempts." When you ask a question and get an answer, then pop up months later writing as though you never read or understood that answer, like... I don't know what more I can possibly say to you about it.
I mean, your answer was "it depends on what you mean," and you confirmed that you do go out of your way to give extra leeway to "heterodox" posters who get "hot under the collar," which obviously seems to include posters like "antifa" and the kind of rude behavior that results from hot-under-the-collarness.
I don't think you're manipulative, and don't have a problem extending mod charity to real minority posters rather than ones that show up to troll and bait; notice it wasn't me complaining about your moderation in that thread--it was 4bpp, and I only jumped in to ask that question because other mods had denied it before.
Most of that is that you moderate without the snarky comments amadan uses to bait out behavior he can ban people for
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I think @naraburns and I disagree on this issue, but it depends on what you mean by "affirmative action moderation for leftists." Personally, I have never (consciously) modded leftists differently than rightists. The thought has never crossed my mind "This person is a leftie, therefore I should go easier on him." The closest I might come to agreeing with this take is that leftists are observably downvoted and reported en masse, and so when I see someone is being dogpiled and everything he posts gets reported for left-leaning wrongthink, I am more likely to disregard all but the most egregious reports.
(It may surprise you to learn that this applies to some of our fringe right-posters too, such as @SecureSignals, who is reported constantly but only modded on a tiny fraction of the reports he draws.)
Well, you are very close to doing what you were warned not to do very recently, which is attacking the mods and accusing them of bad faith.You could have posted the above link and asked me "Don't you think this counts as running cover for leftists?" And I would have answered you reasonably and in good faith (as I did above). Instead you jumped straight to "You're a liar, hah caught you, you manipulator!" So now you got an answer, but you have also annoyed me and eroded the tiny sliver of charity I have left to extend to you.
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I’m at the laundromat for context as to why I haven’t responded to other comments yet, since my main mode of using this site is lurking on my phone in-between things. Anyway, just to clarify, I am verily not a man. I’m just a woman.
Additionally, I try to be clear about putting subjective opinions as “I think” or “I believe” in the spirit of debate. Yes, I still believe not only subjectively but objectively social conservatism should be rejected by civilized society. But since I don’t have nor want to find the evidence suitable for making such a claim that “it’s not just my opinion, objectively social conservatism is social cancer and everyone here who believes it has drunk the Koolaid” here, and therefore can’t, I try to keep everything within the realm of what I personally think. It is just my opinion.
That is to say, a long winded way of saying I can’t represent all of leftism, anymore than I think you represent all of, uh, I dunno. Everything else? I don’t know you sincerely. I’ve lurked on here for years since reddit times and I only remember Walterodim because of the cheeky Witcher reference and Amadan because of the big red color on their name.
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I think you missed the other possibility: that many people who come out hot are trolls deliberately trying to rile people up. I’ve seen people clearly trying to do this with both left and right wing personae. We have a strange overlap with rdrama, after all. I don’t get it, but some people love that kind of thing.
I don’t doubt some are sincere, but I doubt most ever intend to engage on any level other than useless mockery and I would argue that engaging with them as though they have pro social intentions is a waste of everyone’s time and feeds the trolls, like trying to deter violent assaults with a counseling session. There are new posters who have the ability to make a good argument but just need a little guidance in following the rules, but posters like OP clearly aren’t that.
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In my experience, most of our moderation is chiding right-wing people for frothing about left-wingers. There are a lot more of the former.
I will admit I declined to moderate the prep comment partly because I wanted to argue with it. Perhaps that was a mistake.
In the spirit of discussion I’ll have to bite the bullet that I just am not going to say everything I want to say on my phone; I sincerely don’t believe the moderators here are intentionally letting right-wingers boo outgroup leftists and then whistling when it gets pointed out. I believe instead there is a bias problem going on and rather it’s not being recognized. I think the problem is not even specifically “right wingers are booing left winger”, it’s that in a forum trying to be a debate club, there is a lot of just bad debate happening. There is, in my opinion, way too many declarative statements about broad populations without the evidence to back it up or even visible rigorous debate. When someone says “prep is for gay orgies”, there isn’t the expected, “what is your bailey behind that motte, do you actually think all gay people demanded that drug specifically for orgies” in responses. It’s just a bunch of people also going “yes I agree, leftists can’t comprehend civilization properly” and “well, you can’t expect Democrats to know how to tell the truth”. And it happens really, really subtlety.
I swear, if there was an equally healthy population of leftists on here, you’d have the same problem. I’ve seen ya’ll mods say too many times over too many years you’re not trying to unfairly mod to believe it’s just a nothing statement.
Okay. I agree there are a lot of shitty comments, and we don't get them all.
I'll ask you the same thing I ask @SteveKirk. He never answers (except with some version of "ban people who say things I don't like") and I don't expect you to either.
What solution do you propose?
I don't say that, I say "ban people who are literally only here to disrupt discussion of any topic they consider 'problematic'."
But yes, a bunch of trolls organized by impassionata pouring out of the woodwork all at once? I suggest being liberal with the banhammer, because you're being raided.
We do that. I just did that. And that's not all you ask for; come on. This isn't our first rodeo.
Can you point at this "bunch of trolls"? @justawoman has been around for a while, and I don't think she's a troll. Coincidentally, right now we also have a bunch of alts being spun up by the guy who who was literally only here to disrupt discussion because he hates us, but he's on the right - why is he not setting off your troll alarms?
We really are open to suggestions about how to do things better, but we are pretty much stuck in the same old pattern: If everyone thinks we suck, then we're probably being fair. We aren't psychic and this isn't a job we get paid for, we're just trying really hard to provide a platform for open discussion even between people who hate each other (and us).
Justawoman and a few others showed up after not posting for a year, right as impassionata made a trolling alt, and instantly jumped into the "discussion" to call for stricter moderation against evil fascist right wingers? That's obviously not a coincidence.
Also I actually had to look through your post history to find the right wing guy you banned, because if it's the one I found you instantly deleted his posts and banned him to prevent discussion, so I didn't ever get to find out about him. I only found it because you left a typical snarky comment ban message! That's how different your reaction is, and if you'd done the same to "antifa" everything would be great!
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I have finally been elevated from troll status? Don’t say more senpai, you’ll make me blush uwu
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It’s terribly frustrating that the far more rich response I had typed while at the laundromat got deleted because my stupid timer went off. I’m going to try to think out loud for a second.
I think it can sound corny, but I want to follow the lessons I learned in my high school statistics class because I think they can apply here to answer your what I think is a critical question.
Since I’m making an objective claim about a general trend, I need the data to prove it, right? Charts that don’t have data behind them are literally air. The claim is that I think the moderators on this site are unintentionally allowing debate fallacies which is driving away the spirit of debate here and therefore the leftists. Ok. One data point I have is that I think therefore I am and I’m really, really liberal (blood bleeds blue and I feel a spiritual connection to donkeys). However, literal one data point for one data pool is also the makings of a useless chart.
Therefore, I would be happy to include in my lurking routine for this site privately copying comments on my note app I believe need to be modded but aren’t being modded and how I think they should be modded but aren’t. I can do this for months so that I have an appropriately large data pool.
What to do with the data? Bear with me, but what follows is an X and Y axis yadda yadda. If my claim is that certain types of debate fallacies are not being appropriately squashed and therefore facilitating an unwelcome environment due to the large conservative majority, I should be able to a) define what those fallacies are b) sort the comments I collected into said fallacies by highlighting which parts I think demonstrate them c) count the number of fallacies and d) declare the amount to be demonstrative of an unconscious bias.
Alright, so hypothetically I’ve proven my claim with valid evidence. What’s next? From my experience on heavily moderated Discords, the most effective way to stop trends in conversations is to know what you are looking for, tell the commenter to stop, and repeat until most regulars know if you do x you’ll hear y, so that the majority of offenders are newbies unfamiliar with the vibes. If I’ve done my math correctly, I should be able to condense the data into like one or two sentences and be like “look out for that”.
After that, I can privately send you and other mods the whole thing. It is the best objective method I can think of at the moment to prove my claim, and also a way to condense a complex solution. Look it’s also hard because I think everyone’s a special snowflake and deserves unique consideration blah blah blah but also I think there’s, what, two mods? I think ya’ll don’t have enough bureaucracy to do that. The question of “how to moderate a community” is one that will never have an answer but should still be asked. All things considered, I do appreciate the effort and think there is genuine charity in the mods’ efforts.
Edit: And no I don’t think banning will work because you will drive away otherwise potentially valuable contributors who just aren’t familiar with the rules and vibes. I think what will work instead is clear, consistent and concise moderation: “please don’t do x, read the sign please”. It’s exhausting as a moderator to give a lot of chances for repeat offense before resorting to banning but I believe eventually the community will self-moderate.
Edit edit for brevity and a little humor to lighten the air: Or, you know, as a liberal, like, raise your taxes and get some more bureaucratic administration to reinforce your in-need-of-redefining environmental regulations, Orange Man Bad, yo.
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I don't find either of your examples to be anywhere near the level of dunking or the vitriol that's displayed by antifa here. Wording meaningful claims about truth in a way that's meant to sound controversial isn't good, but it's a whole other world away from content-less naked loosely connected declarations that amount to booing the outgroup. Like, the question of whether or not leftists care about child rape isn't pleasant, nor is it nice, but it's a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as No given the political issue being discussed (as a leftist myself, I'm perfectly okay with saying that when I was a younger, more naive leftist, I genuinely didn't care about child rape or other potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration, such as lower wages or suicide bombings; such things were the cost I would gladly have me and my fellow citizens pay for giving more poor people the opportunity to thrive in a first world nation like the USA. My opinion on that has changed since; I think I've gained greater empathy than I used to have for certain groups of people). And characterizing a drug as for aiding gay men in going to orgies isn't nice, but IIRC that was just one off-hand line in a comment that otherwise had some meaningful thing to say about different ways different drugs are covered by insurance. There's actually meat to the bones, along with all that shit.
The comment here by antifa, and IME the occasional leftists who come in "hot" here, are basically pure shit with perhaps some bones and ligaments there. That difference matters to people who care about the meat on the bones, i.e. the actual content of the arguments, but that difference matters little to people who care primarily about getting their views lauded and their outgroup's views booed. This is one reason why, even as a leftist, I find the quality of conversation and discussion here, where it's predominantly populated by people well to the right of the most right-leaning person I might meet IRL. Who cares if they'll drop in little - or big - digs at me and my ingroup here and there or all the time? Their actual substantive criticisms are actually interesting and valuable and the wording and the digs don't affect the level of charity or quality of arguments.
Okay see this is what I am trying to illustrate as bad debating. The question of “whether or not leftists care about child rape” isn't a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as “No.” solely because of your anecdotal experience of not caring about certain potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration when you identified as a liberal. Anecdotal evidence isn’t enough to make declarations like that, because, uh, I’m so liberal I sat under the Democrat tent on election day and advertised Harris yardsigns and I care about child rape lmao. Does my experience trump yours? Does yours trump mine? Like how am I supposed to argue with that? That’s why I believe in the spirit of debate anecdotal evidence holds little weight compared to objective evidence and I would like to see if you have other data pools to prove that “leftists don’t care about child rape” otherwise…I dunno what to tell you other than we’re not debating anymore lol.
No one who says "[x] do/don't care about [y]" mean that "literally every individual within the group [x] do/don't care about [y]." This is common sense and shouldn't need to be explicitly stated in a discussion like this. In this situation, the question is relating to how "policies that leftists prioritize/champion have predictable outcomes on child rape such that their level of caring about it is necessarily below others and below some meaningful threshold in order to prioritize such policies." And, again, as a leftist who used to champion such policies, I was by no means unusual as someone who openly said that, if allowing in poor people that Republicans dislike into our country also means that some of those poor people will do things like rape more children in the USA, then so be it. But more common were people who would outright deny that such policies would lead to bad outcomes without doing the very very hard work of actually checking with multiple adversarial sources that disagree heavily with oneself, which is the ultimate form of not caring about those bad outcomes, i.e. child rape in this case. I am perfectly comfortable saying that those leftists would absolutely, 100%, honestly, in good faith believe they care about it, but their lack of curiosity in actually checking if their beliefs about reality are correct shows that their belief about what they care about is incorrect.
Okay, but we’re trying to debate and your response was “I think that leftists don’t care about child rape because of my anecdotal experience of being a leftist” and I responded with “anecdotal evidence isn’t enough, do you have evidence outside of that”, and not only have you not responded to my claim about anecdotal evidence you have not responded about providing said evidence. I’m not saying you need to agree to those points or some type of action or whatever, but you have to acknowledge those points so we can move on to the next point of debate or we are literally talking over eachother.
This is, again, illustrating the problem with the Motte. It is not that you’re a right winger insulting me a left-winger; you’re being a bad debater. Part of the rules of this site are “speak clearly”, so yes, you DO have to clarify that when you say “leftists don’t care about child rape”, you SHOULD say “policies that leftists champion lead to child rape and so on” or that “leftists believe in stopping child rape but don’t take action”.
It is sincerely a gigantic waste of time for everyone if we can’t agree on debate rules and you keep making me feel like you’re not even reading what I’m saying until I quit the conversation, which I am really close to doing. If you cannot provide evidence outside of anecdotal evidence for your claim so we can properly debate it or even just respond to my request for such I’m going to assume you’re not interested in a conversation.
No. One of the rules of this place is to be charitable, and I believe that an obvious charitable reading of “leftists don’t care about child rape” is something akin to “policies that leftists champion lead to child rape and so on.” I would agree that wording it this way is not nice, and certainly something that I would prefer to see less of in this space, but it's a world away from the type of crap that the likes of antifa posted.
If we're having a debate here, it's certainly not about whether or not leftists care about child rape. Commentary on the truth-value of that was something I put in a parenthetical to point out that the answer of "No" is one that I agree with. You don't have to agree with it, and I don't care if you do.
My actual point, the point surrounding whatever debate we're having, is that this is a perfectly reasonable question to ask and to answer with a "No" given the topic at hand. It's not a particularly productive question, nor is it a nice question (though personally, I'd say it's a productive question for a leftist - or really anyone - to ask himself, based on my own personal experience as a leftist who did, but not productive for someone to ask about others). But given the topic and underlying reality at hand, it's a question that makes sense both to wonder about and to answer with "No."
Okay, well I think you're wrong in thinking that the charity rule means posting baileys (leftists don't care about child rape) instead of mottes (policies that leftists champion lead to child rape) is acceptable. This site is...literally called the Motte. "It's obvious this is what I'm saying" is literally the shady thinking we are trying to avoid. It's the exact same poor debating as what antifa is doing.
I mean, this debate started because you said "I don't find either of your examples to be anywhere near the level of dunking or the vitriol that's displayed by antifa here because the question of whether or not leftists care about child rape isn't pleasant, nor is it nice, but it's a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as "No." because when I was a younger, more naive leftist, I genuinely didn't care about child rape or other potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration." therefore the comment here by antifa, and IME the occasional leftists who come in "hot" here, are basically pure shit with perhaps some bones and ligaments there, whereas the comments left by right-wingers are not."
I responded with, "I don't think you can answer "do leftists care about child rape" with your own anecdotal evidence, because anecdotal evidence is bad on its own. Do you agree that anecdotal evidence is bad on its own, and do you have other evidence that "leftists don't care about child rape" other than anecdotal?"
You responded with "I'm not saying every leftist doesn't care about child rape, I'm saying leftists would absolutely, 100%, honestly, in good faith believe they care about it, but their lack of curiosity in actually checking if their beliefs about reality are correct shows that their belief about what they care about is incorrect. And, additionally, my anecdotal evidence stands because I was no means being an unusual leftist as someone who openly said that, if allowing in poor people that Republicans dislike into our country also means that some of those poor people will do things like rape more children in the USA, then so be it."
I responded with, "Okay, but why are you not saying what you think then? There is a world of difference between "leftists don't care about child rape" and "leftists are unwilling to look at the true ramifications of their policies and therefore don't actually care about the results". Additionally, you haven't responded to my claim anecdotal evidence on its own isn't valid, much less my question if you have any other evidence than that, you just repeated your anecdote, which I assume means you think that type of data is valid and you don't have that evidence, but then can you say that out loud so we can move on?"
And now it seems you don't know what we are debating about, as you said "whatever debate we're having". This is what I mean. I believe your bad debating habits have derailed the conversation. Your actual point was not "saying leftists don't care about child rape is valid", it was "I don't find either of your examples to be anywhere near the level of dunking or the vitriol that's displayed by antifa here." I think my examples do support my claim which wasn't and isn't even that there is too much vitrol and dunking on leftists but that debate fallacies were derailing conversations and driving away leftists because the mods have an unrecognized bias towards these debate fallacies.
This is where I would like some type of mod action that is similar to debate moderators, in which a clear direction of, "07mk, you are talking about this, and justawoman, you are talking about that. Respond to eachother so this debate can be productive instead of a bunch of hot air."
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In this sentence you don't even try to prove you have been charitable, you are just asking others to be charitable with you. Basically "I don't really follow the rules, but I think no one can tell it because it would also break the rules".
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Especially on the Internet, "common sense" isn't so common that relying on it to avoid conflict is wise.
I will quote the literal text of the rules here:
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I think you have to admit that you're an extremely unusual leftist though. I would think most people on the left side of the spectrum would find it more plausible that it's the right wing who don't actually care about child rape and just find it to be an extremely convenient cudgel in debate and drumming up passions. If they really cared they'd act very differently and choose very different leaders.
Sure, that's what many/most people on the left side of the spectrum would find more plausible. Whether or not right-wingers care about child rape has little to do with whether or not left-wingers do, though. Maybe they both don't. Maybe left-wingers don't care to a lesser extent than right-wingers, and that's a W that we should put on our mantle.
In any case, what left-wingers find to be plausible about what right-wingers care about doesn't seem likely to have much truth value except by coincidence, similarly to what right-wingers find to be plausible about what left-wingers care about. It's because I'm a leftist who, from within leftist spheres both experienced and observed directly the explicitly non-caring about child-rape with respect to immigration (and more recently male access to female locker rooms in schools) through a lack of curiosity about negative consequences of one's preferred policies that I'm willing to carry water for this claim made by a right-winger about left-winger beliefs.
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You think this is an uncharitable take? What is the PREP take wherein an incredibly expensive drug/set of drugs is spammed by a group of people when its easily replaced by safe sex practices?
It is uncharitable, because that is not what it is exclusively used for. I know this because my roommate has HIV. He got it because his boyfriend at the time has AIDS and didn’t know it because he didn’t get regularly tested and lied that he did. You can get HIV by coming into contact with the blood or sexual fluids of someone who has HIV or AIDS and isn’t taking the ART drug that arrests the development of HIV. Using a condom isn’t very safe, because it only takes a trace amount of said fluids to infect you, unless you are actively taking prep. When my roommate went for his monthly testing, he came back positive and was devastated.
Now he has to drive to the city every month to take a medication for HIV, known as ART, and if he doesn’t take it perfectly, his body can develop a resistance to ART and then he is dead. I, as his roommate who shares laundry machines and dishes with him, am sure glad that regardless of his employment status, he will still have access to those meds, so that the only thing I have to worry about is him being honest in him taking them on time.
Therefore, in practicing safe sex, any current or future sexual partner of his should also be taking PREP as a final preventative measure. I’m glad that there exists silver linings for him in that he has options for his sexual partners, but before he got his current boyfriend who agreed to take PREP, many of his potential hookups weren’t taking PREP and, like, it’s not very sexy telling a cute dude at the club that “oh by the way I have HIV so if you’re not comfortable with that we’re going to have to wait a couple of weeks for the PREP to kick in”. Kinda a boner killer.
So, my roommate practiced safe sex as best as he could, and because of the lies of someone else, he got a lifelong disease that will kill him if he doesn’t take his meds every day at exactly the same time, and thankfully doesn’t have to worry that if he loses his job his boyfriend won’t be able to afford the drugs that allow him to have a sexual life with his loved one, on top of the life saving drug he takes. Does he belong in the same camp as people who spam PREP to have orgies? I confidently state no, and therefore find statements such as “PREP is just a drug used for orgies, why don’t they practice safe sex?” uncharitable.
Edit: an additional and critical counterargument; gay people are not the only people who can contract AIDS and HIV.
Having sex with someone who lied to you and with someone you just met wherein an honest conversation is a "boner killer" is not practicing safe sex
I agree, having sex with someone who lied to you isn't practicing safe sex. But then, does the argument "prep is a drug for gay people to attend orgies because they keep having sex with people who lie to them" valid from my example? No. Firstly, because it's anecdotal, and secondly, the anecdotal evidence already contradicts your claim that prep can "easily be replaced by safe sex practices". Do you believe my roommate is responsible for his boyfriend lying about getting tested? Because I don't think so.
I don't know what you're trying to say with the second part there. Exactly how is "having sex with someone who thinks talking about HIV is a boner killer" not practicing safe sex? Unless you're trying to say, "your roommate not telling people at the club he hooks up with he has HIV because it's a boner killer isn't practicing safe sex", in which I would agree that isn't practicing safe sex, but...that's not what I said my roommate was doing. I said the prospect of getting rejected repeatedly by potential hookups who do not want to have conversations about taking PREP was adversely affecting his mental health and that he was, in fact, practicing safe sex by not going to a place where the proper thing to do is explain his medical status.
You are describing various forms of promiscuity including having sex with people he has just met at a club. That's not a safe sex practice. 10x+ so for someone who knows how prevalent life altering STDs are in his preferred partners, and now in his own body.
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Outside of Africa they're somewhere around 95% of people that take PrEP, though.
It is not exclusively for gay people, and it's not exclusively for orgies, but I don't think you'd appreciate it any more if they had hedged with a description that covers 95% of Western usage.
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They aren't, but because it spreads far more easily from penetrator to penetratee (making women largely dead ends) the most-at-risk population is "people who get fucked by men who got fucked by other men" (i.e. gay/bi men and women who fuck bi men). "GRID" is pointing at something real even if it somewhat overgeneralises.
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I’m pretty empathetic to the job the mods have to do and won’t defend user antifa, but I tend to agree strongly with what you have to say here. For a place that claims to optimize for “light, not heat”, things such feel like an echo chamber in here too often.
I also don’t think it’s a problem that can be solved by any level of moderation. For example, this post from last week’s Culture War thread felt like the kind of low-effort strawman I am used to seeing on Twitter, yet it received a lot of upvotes and was not criticized by other users.
I think we should do more to hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard of discussion, no matter what political slant is being invoked. Mods can only referee here, they can’t make the plays.
It is a low effort post that could be dinged for consensus building, but is it really a strawman?
It's a skeptical (Motte-friendly) yet accurate description of what the article relays about environmentalism of the era. It is pretty much a bare link, but not every post needs 8 paragraphs. I would have appreciated a high effort counter-narrative posted here or elsewhere. The closest thing is an almost too charitable "that's how science works, stupid." This is Dr. Near, the same researcher in the article, quote tweeting. That seems to be a narrow interpretation when, in the article, opponents are quoted as saying:
If you have a different or better idea for a top-level you can do that. It seems more typical to leave the lazy post up if it generates good enough discussion. Once the thread is scrolling it's hard to justify nuking everything when mods can't be sure if someone else will make the effort post to replace it. Put the effort post under the lazy one. The only reliable way to get ahead of this is for You to make the effort post.
I took it as a strawman because the term experts was doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think you may have better characterized the correct criticisms of the post.
I have no skin in the particular game of that top-level post and not much to contribute to the discussion, but I reserve my right to criticize. On the subject of effort posts, I hope you will instead visit my recent top level post in Transnational Thursday though!
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It is intimately refreshing to read what you're saying because I agree wholeheartedly, except that it can't be solved by moderation. I believe moderation can solve it by setting the trend. If we can all agree what "not responding to eachother" looks like, or "debate fallacies", or "poor standard of discussion", which I think we can do, then we can start calling each-other out on it and only resort to mods for reinforcement/clarification. I swear on my pinky toe the same problem would be here if there was a healthy leftist population.
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You're a real sweetheart, you know that?
Thank you. And you're banned. Good-bye, Impassionata. And I deleted your long post which was the last straw and removed all doubt.
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it will always be surprising to me that the people on the Internet who experienced the New Atheism movement, which is to say, they had firsthand experience with the dangers of authoritarian religion, were so consistently and persistently blind to the fascism.
I think there was something in their genes that made them unable to perceive social cues.
and they distrusted the people who warned of the fascism because those people were rude
and they didn't like hearing the things they said because they were weak
they retreated to holes online where they could ignore the rude people and perform their own rudeness
truly, a tragedy
Fascism is a word that has an actual meaning. I understand that outside the motte it has become a snarl word which basically just means "political ideology I don't like" but I was under the impression that people here actually try to use the word properly. Donald Trump isn't a fascist - though I have no doubt that if he fails to do what his base want him to do his replacement most likely will be. He's already had four years to be in power, and none of the calamities that your crowd promised were on the way ever actually showed up. If you want to look at the actual actions committed by people in government Trump represents the only break from the Beltway consensus in living memory, and that consensus is responsible for so much more evil and destruction than anything Trump has done. Can you actually look at the long history of military interventions undertaken by the US since the defeat of Hitler and tell me that Trump represents some brand new evil that deserves a revolution to overthrow? How exactly is building a wall with Mexico some grand act of fascism but dropping agent orange on Vietnam or using depleted uranium rounds in Iraq to help establish a hardline Islamic theocracy is just business as usual?
But on top of that, if you're actually serious about opposing people using the military to expand their borders and impose second-class citizen status on a bunch of poor people of the wrong ethnicity, why aren't you talking about Israel? They build walls, they set up apartheid, they kill children in terror attacks, invade foreign states, ask the US to invade others and supplied military equipment to all sorts of distasteful regimes. You still get to attack Donald Trump when you do to boot!
It has a meaning which does at times resonate quite a bit with Trump though, I’d argue that although he doesn’t fully meet the definition there is a reason it keeps getting applied to him specifically. For example,
Fascists often:
Dismantle the systems of democracy. Trump didn’t do this, I don’t think you can call him a full fascist at this point, but he has tendencies on this point. For many people, including his former vice president, he’s the first US president to try to break the system of transfer of power. Whatever you believe about that situation, he said from the beginning that he’ll consider the electoral process rigged if he loses. And once he did, he loudly and consistently employed a whole host of means to try break the system, trying to get governors to “find votes”, to put up alternative electors, to halt the system of certification, etc. He got his followers so riled up about this that they formed a mob and broke into the US capitol building. These are all definitely tendencies toward the dismantle democracy aspect of fascism, and if you were in a country where someone did try these things, you might pre-emptively call that person a fascist.
Promote ethnonationalism and typically delineate a group of people as an enemy. Trump often takes steps in this directions and then pulls back. Actual ethnonationalists often have a love hate relationship with the guy because he’ll use promising rhetoric and then say something else which is pro x or y ethnicity and which pisses those guys off. But in the end he was elected on the central promise to conduct the greatest mass deportations in American history, and those vibes certainly match what would be expected for historical fascists to say as well.
Use authoritarian state force on internal minority groups. I don’t think he’s done this, kudos. Other people often think he has, “children in cages”, etc. But fascism tends to be crueler than this and less within previously established norms. There are obviously fears around this happening during the mass deportations, but that remains to be seen.
Crush dissent violently. This is often part of the dismantle democracy thing. I don’t think Trump has done this and this would be the biggest American norm to violate in order for a fascist to emerge. I do believe that Trump the man himself has these tendencies that could have emerged in a different context (consider his rhetoric in quotes such as his praise of China’s strength during the Tiananmen massacre, and lamenting that were not strong like that). There are many similar quotes that could be mined to paint a case that he sometimes has somewhat of a fixation on this type of “strength”.
Idealize the military and often use military force in expansionist ways. Trump has sometimes idealized the military in ways that previous American norms have not, e.g. calling for the US to begin doing military parades in the style of China or N Korea. But up until this point he has not shown much tendency to launch any sort of military adventure, much to his credit. (And of course to your point about previous presidents, much to their demerit). Recently he’s been making people edgy on this point, yesterday saying that he would use economic and perhaps military force to annex various territories around the world. Knowing Trump, this is likely his typical “start with the most extreme statement” bluster. But I think it can be pretty clear to understand why for people who think he does have certain fascist tendencies to become concerned when he suddenly starts talking about expansion or annexing territories. We’ll see if he actually is serious about using economic force to try and annex other territories. If so he fits the point about territorial expansionism. If he broke with norms so extremely to threaten Panama with the military in order to take territory from them that would obviously be extremely fascist coded behavior. The whole thing, in the end, shows hints of him breaking with norms that liberal democracies have had in the postwar era. Like in the Helsinki accords, to which the US is signatory; they respect each others sovereignty, they respect territorial boundaries, they do not threaten one another for territory, etc. Breaking these norms is definitely fascist coded, and we’ll see if he continues down that path or if it’s just another passing Trumpism to sit back and enjoy.
Drink water.
Which is to say, that characterizing something that fascists do, even correctly, does that make thing a distinguisher of fascism.
Well there’s not a great definition of fascism, but I do think it’s a valid category that we shouldn’t do away with, nonetheless.
Me too. It should be reserved for believers of "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
It should be permissible to use it to say "this movement will lead to a totalitarian state being imposed in which minorities are exterminated in camps."
You, and other leftists, are allowed to make the argument that Trump will impose a totalitarian state in which minorities are exterminated in camps.
You haven't.
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That’s fair.
And do note, I never said Trump was a fascist.
But I get why he gets pattern matched as one.
You might look at what the commenter I responded to said.. “trumps replacement very well could be a fascist.”
You could look at breaking norms in a somewhat fascist coded way while having a cult of personality associated with you as a danger even if the subject himself isn’t likely to declare himself generalissimo.
But to talk about why that might represent a sort of danger you’d need to invoke fascism.
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Do things that have been done in every other system including liberal democracy?
Liberal democracies tend not to do things like for example:
Crush a protest against the leader with authoritarian force, dismantle the system of democratic choice.
If you read my statement, I said that Trump didn’t do either of these things.
But he often does show tendencies toward these things, causing people to pattern match him to them.
Of course, if you are someone who is concerned about fascism, it’s important to pattern match potential fascists before they become actual fascists, so for those people it can be considered a worthwhile exercise.
Point of order: Trudeau and others pretty clearly did the first (crushing the trucker protests) albeit with financial force not physically. I can’t remember if other European countries used water cannons etc.
And moves like Germany constantly flirting with banning the AfD and France’s cordon sanitaire seem like moving in the direction of dismantling democracy, along with the attempted jailing of Trump and the general tendency of lock policy away behind non-democratic quangos, rights and treaties feel quite a lot like dismantling the system of democratic choice.
Growing up, everyone was making a lot of pro-liberalism arguments that basically boil down to the double-edged sword. “If you impinge the liberties of others, what happens when they get into power?” And it feels like in the past decade people have been increasingly willing to test that.
Financial force first, then physical force (trampling them with horses, how Canadian).
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this is factually incorrect, but more importantly, it's stupid
this is obviously a deflection
you're afraid, aren't you? you're afraid that you missed the fascism
Just a quick tip. The mods very literally and explicitly police on tone here. It’s an intentional, foundational part of the rules.
You can argue for virtually any viewpoint that you want, as long as you’re polite and charitable about it.
I’d really like you to stay because we have a shortage of leftists here, but if you don’t moderate your tone, you’re likely to get banned in short order. So please try to be a bit more level-headed in your posts. (Accusing someone of “being afraid they missed the fascism”, being seen as a generally impolite and uncharitable thing to accuse someone of, must be supported with substantial argumentation, rather than simply offered as a one-liner).
Any thoughts on how to get leftists back that aren't sockpuppets of trolls plaguing Scott Alexander spinoffs for 10+ years now?
Going with Amadanb's belief this was an Imp, so not the kind of leftists we actually want.
No, I don’t have any thoughts!
I’ve written some posts in the past detailing the reasons why leftists tend to self-select out of spaces like this. I don’t think it’s a problem that can be fixed unfortunately.
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Nobody is afraid that they "missed the fascism", except possibly you because your brain is fried from huffing too much politics. Any "fascism" that is so subtle that you can fail to notice it while it's taking place in the cultural center of the world in the midst of a global political media circus (i.e. the election) is no fascism at all.
Fascism is not a mystic totem which once invoked will trigger Armageddon. If it's too subtle to notice, it's also too subtle to affect anyone's life in any way. If it's too subtle to affect anyone's life then it doesn't matter, no matter what scary words you use to describe it. If we can live in a fascist dystopia without noticing or being affected by it, then maybe the problem is that the word "fascist" is being used too lightly.
His comment was bad, but please don't respond in kind.
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Factually incorrect? News to me. I was told there'd be a wall, mass deportations, crackdowns on civil liberties and the manifestation of Gilead into reality. I guess I actually did miss the fascism, because I didn't see any of that shit - have you got a source for any of this that's more rigorous than your arse?
I'm pointing out that every single thing you're threatening is on the way due to Trump IS ALREADY HERE. Why should I believe your stated motivations when you're supporting and condoning people who are far worse according to your own standards?
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My understanding is that the impact of that has been vastly overstated, usually by the same sorts of people who think the radiation from being near a nuclear power plant is worse than the radiation from being near a coal plant.
I think the acceptable number of birth defects caused by the use of your weapon systems in an unprovoked war of aggression against another state is zero, and the depleted uranium rounds used in Iraq have handily surpassed this number.
Uncleared minefields (and UXO in general, though to a much smaller degree) tend to produce injuries similar to congenital birth defects, up to and including the sorts of defects incompatible with life, like missing limbs or heads. They can be found wherever wars are fought.
DU by contrast is merely toxic, much like lead and TNT are.
I believe there are international efforts to ban the use of minefields that linger and cause problems after the war, and cluster munitions frequently cause similar issues.
This does not change my position that the acceptable number of mutilated and dead children caused by your advanced weapon systems is zero. I'm opposed to minefields, depleted uranium, the use of white phosphorus in civilian areas, the use of chemical/biological weapons etc.
Call me when a country whose military actually fights wars commits to that in any meaningful way. They haven't (and won't) for obvious reasons; the ultimate problem with mines is that they're both extremely useful, and extremely cost-effective. You can make them on 3D printers, and the Ukrainians are doing exactly that. That treaty did them a whole lot of good, clearly.
Cluster munitions are the same way (and again, relevant military powers all retain them for that reason)- they're great for exploding the slightly-older-children when they come out to repair the areas (typically runways) we drop them on. Of course, they're not as cute, so they're fair game, naturally.
If you're not willing to shell your own position and kill your own soldiers [that haven't even been born yet, in this case], you are not willing to win. Hamas is willing to win (that's why they position their forces in schools). The Ukrainians and Russians are also willing to win (that's why the Ukrainians are mining their own territory even though they pinky-swore not to do that).
I advocate for a reduction in the use of fossil fuels despite the fact that major companies and nations will continue to exploit them for energy. At the same time, when I say that eating the seed corn is a bad idea I'm not saying that it won't fill your stomach. I also agree that landmines work and are effective - I haven't claimed otherwise. I'd also be ok with efforts to ensure that they naturally degrade and expire over the course of a year or two in place of a total ban. The fact that bad things happen in the world is not actually a good argument against the claim that people should do their best to prevent bad things from happening.
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The radiological hazard of depleted uranium is overstated; U-238 decays very slowly, and is sometimes (due to its density) used as shielding for more rapidly-decaying nuclides.
However, it poses a chemical hazard, as uranium is chemically toxic in a similar way to other heavy metals.
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Leftists do talk plenty about Israel, I observe, when they're not in "those devious jews amirite" company (for obvious reasons). Themotte is closer to being such company than not.
In order to have a discussion on why Israel is wrong from the leftist world model (questions of universal human rights), you first have to have an agreement on the idea that human rights are universal (as opposed to only your ingroup's).
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Cool.
This is a discussion forum. So far you've made two posts back to back of short, declarative sentences. Declarations are not discussion. If you'd like to discuss something, it would help if you would put some effort into presenting the topic you would like to discuss, ideally by framing a question and elaborating a bit on why you think it's salient.
Alternatively, if you are not really interested in discussion but are only here to preach to an audience, then I'm afraid this is not the place for you. This presumes of course that we have not already seen above all the engagement you intended, in which case... problem solved, I suppose?
Here's a discussion question for you: how is it that the people here were so resistant to the idea that Trumpism was fascist?
And that's an entirely reasonable question. The answer I'd give is because most of us have spent several years discussing the "Trump is a fascist" thesis, and have concluded that it is garbage. A big part of that is that we used to have a lot more people who were willing to make the "Trump is a fascist" argument on specific grounds and under specific predictions, had their predictions falsified by subsequent events and subsequently went away. I've personally been considering a retrospective about the debates I had on Jan 6th-7th 2020 and the surrounding months, based on the grind of subsequent revelations.
Many of us, myself included, have a high tolerance for repetition and are more than happy for another round of the debate, if that's actually a debate you're interested in. I'm confident the facts are on my side, as they were the last several times I went round on it. Certainly your abbreviated position statements do not seem terribly revelatory. Just for starters, I'm greatly amused by
given the facts readily available.
Likewise,
is most amusing. When humans act contemptibly, contempt is the appropriate response. the title of "journalist" is not a magic talisman against this obvious reality, and the modern journalist class is a trash disaster that beggars the concept of satire. Not all Journalists, of course. Just most of them.
And likewise
but, shit, not like this or this, right? presumably this time it's a bad deployment of the military domestically? ...To speak plainly, the US Military has been "deployed domestically" for a variety of purposes, legitimate and not. Using the US military to assist with a large-scale breakdown in law enforcement is an entirely legitimate action of the President, has numerous examples in the past, and would not be necessary were it not for the chronic, lawless intransigence of the progressive coalition.
I'm confident that the US military won't be used by Trump to expand the borders of the United States of America, and that people worrying about it are wasting their time. I mean, just for starters, integrating Canada into the US would vastly increase the odds that Trump dies in prison, so he personally has every reason to avoid such an eventuality. It seems to me that he's running his mouth in a deliberate attempt to humiliate the Canadian government, which seems to me to be a reasonable action given the shit they've been pulling lately. Ditto for the UK, and Europe generally. Live by the multinational globalist coalition, die by the multinational globalist coalition; the Canadian, UK and European governments have taken an interest in the political process of my country, so I think we're justified in taking an interest right back.
First reddit link is a nice hat, was it supposed to be the 101st airborne bayoneting southerners?
Fixed, thanks. And apparently that image address consistently redirects. most odd.
Every reddit post has an id associated with it. The id consist of a short alphanumeric, case-agnostic string. The post associated with the string "media" is that /r/funny image post of Lady Gaga as you see by checking where redd.it/media leads. I assume it is some quirck of themotte that it interprets a link of the form https://old.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2FIMAGECODE.SUFFIX as pointing to the reddit post with the id "media".
interesting! thanks for the insight!
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I've looked this up before and it has something to do with the Old Reddit Redirect addon.
https://old.reddit.com/r/bugs/comments/15p1ctt/why_does_clicking_any_image_on_reddit_open_the/
https://old.reddit.com/r/RESissues/comments/1bitxq1/stupid_question_why_do_i_get_routed_to_the_nice/
Second link has a suggested userscript patch.
[ping @FCfromSSC @SteveKirk ]
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I've given up trying to hotlink reddit images, which is annoying since they're often in the top of image search results.
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“Rude” is a funny euphemism for totally psychopathic here
so your correction is that because some leftists were total psychopaths that makes it better that you failed to notice the fascism and were rude to leftists? wow
Are mods on vacation? Who is this 4 comment troll
They've already been warned. I suspect they've self-deported in any case.
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Hey @antifa, Did you forget to switch to your sock-puppet account before replying to yourself?
no I just had another thought obviously
Did you, though?
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You are, of course, referring to how they they turned on their heel and started mocking the very idea of freedom of speech, organizing campaigns to get people fired from their jobs for wrongthink, and collaborating with the corporate surveillance state, right? Right??
But if for some reason you're referring to the sentiment against immigrants turning sour, it's a simple question of getting mugged by reality. When the big wave of Syrian refugees first hit in 2015, I was cheering for them. Even when cars started driving into crowds, and things were going boom, I figured it's just a tiny minority of assholes. It wasn't until Cologne happened that I had the sinking feeling that people who were talking about incompatible cultures may have had a point.
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Donald J. Trump is incontestably not a Palingenetic Ultra-Nationalist.
If your definition of Fascism can't distinguish Franco from Falangists, it's fundamentally unserious. If it can't even explain the Spanish Civil War, how isn't it just an empty smear?
It is as silly as calling FDR a communist because he nationalized industries and seized private property.
Can you elaborate on this?
For clarity I don’t think Trump is actually a fascist but below I say he often rhymes with one.
I’m looking up this terminology and I think it still fits.
Palingenesis being a word meaning rebirth. The palingenetic myth as I understand it seems to be about a rebirth of strength, vitality, and greatness from a society which is seen as decadent.
That all sounds like classic MAGA to me.
Again I don’t think Trump is a true fascist so I’m just curious how you use the palingenetic ultranationalist definition to disqualify him.
Not attacking your position just trying to understand it. But this definition makes me more concerned about Donald Trump, not less.
I think one might put it like "Trump isn't Hitler, but if there was an American Hitler, he'd probably look like a more racist and fascist Trump". Trump's not a palingenetic ultranationalist, but he's a somewhat palingenetic nationalist ("somewhat" mostly meaning that there's less need for palingenesis in America, which is arguably still in the height of its national power). Just crank his various attributes up to eleven, and you get an American variation of fascism - naturally different from German and Italian versions due to the considerable national peculiarities of base American nationalism, just as Italian and German fascisms differed from each other due to the national pecularities of base German/Italian nationalisms.
I agree with you overall, but I think it’s pretty central to the American right’s worldview that the nation is currently deeply decadent and that a palingenetic movement is sorely needed.
I’m not a fan of palingenetic nationalism as a definition of fascism because the American right are nearly all palingenetic nationalists and I don’t think that they’re all fascists.
Maybe the difference is that they’d need to be palingenetic extremists who value the rebirth over the tradition of democracy. That’s a good definition perhaps.
The American right is not consistently palingenetic- lots of American right wingers want to go back to the fifties, sure, but the libertarian right definitely doesn’t and there are plenty of hardcore isolationists and secessionists on the actually far right, and there’s always been an ‘America is awesome right now’ current.
That’s fair, but similar to socialists, I honestly rarely see actual libertarians outside of Internet forums. They just don’t seem to have much voice in American politics.
Maybe America will have a Milei figure to come along to shake things up at some point.
Edit: like the right often wants to reduce government spending, sure. But for example, it gets done in a DOGE fashion where figures such as Elon and Vivek are both very rhetorically palingenetic. The mind virus is destroying western civilization and we need to save it so we can go to the stars! In fact the more I think about it, an expansionist United States with Elon style techno-saviorism at the helm is a pretty credible model for the emergence of a 21st century American fascism. We’re gonna be great, we just need to destroy the woke mind virus, secure Greenland and the canal, master AGI, make a few cryptos go to the moon so that the peons are happy, and then get to the stars ourselves. The woke will try to interfere, but at a certain point might makes right and it’s our destiny and mission to shut them out of the political process.
Honestly this wouldn’t surprise me to see, lol.
Yes, actual libertarians are underrepresented among the republican base. Your median conservative hardliner is some kind of fifties revivalist, at least for a generous definition of fifties revivalist.
But there's plenty of far right wingers who are not that. The secessionists and hardcore isolationists aren't. The 'Murica, fuck yeah' ultra-patriots aren't- they think America is already awesome, democrats just need to stop harshing the vibe.
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Should be noted that the Trump movement is currently at a new situation with the strong influx of Musk and other tech right types, who are really not palingenetic at all in their thought, and are strongly future-oriented.
“We have to destroy the woke mind virus so we can save western civilization and eventually get to the stars”
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Fascism is palingenetic ultranationalism plus totalitarianism. One of the things that has a lot of Trump critics sweating is that Trumpism is exactly that sort of reactionary populist movement and Trump personally makes lots of authoritarian noises. Combine that with Trump's lack of inhibition or scruples and the uncritical devotion of many of his followers and it's easy to see why someone might start throwing around the f-word. Is it fascist? No. Is it fascish? Yeah, kinda.
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He's not "ultra" because he's not a totalitarian, and he doesn't structure his political action according to cyclical history that can be forced to happen through will.
He stops short of it so you can say things directionally, but that's true of literally every single effective politician. Fascism is a specific thing, it's not when people with nostalgia do things.
You can be a totalitarian without being a fascist (Stalin who believed in linear history) and you can be a palingenetic nationalist without being a fascist (Evola who did not believe in mass politics).
Trump is a nationalist businessman with mild autocratic tendencies. A common archetype of US ruler. The biggest myth surrounding him is actually that he's anything special or novel (relatively speaking) when you can throw a stone in US history and hit ten guys like that.
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Of course he's an ultra-nationalist. Don't be a moron.
Of course he's a 'revolutionary' the whole point is that his supporters want him to rebirth the federal government.
You're a moron and it should be permissible to say so or we're wasting the gift of honest discussion on the Internet under assumed names.
Palingenesis implies a much more specific view of history than the mere belief in renewal. Trump may actually believe that he can bring back good days through the power of will, that also wouldn't be enough since it's also true of most progressives.
And Trump is a nationalist, not an ultranationalist. He hasn't advocated dissolving all spheres of life into a total incarnation of the nation.
We can say things, I just think it's boring to rehash Eco's lame attempt as polsci for the millionth time when anybody who actually takes the matter seriously knows it's vague nonsense with no explanatory power over even straightforward examples of military dictatorship.
Are we to believe Turkey has been a Fascist state for all of the modern period and none of its contemporaries noticed? Was Charles de Gaulle a fascist? Was Cromwell? Maybe even Washington? They all fit broad enough a definition.
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Franco's ruling party called itself Falange Española Tradicionalista and incorporated the OG Falangists. The young Franco was a royalist and not a Falangist, but I don't think the distinction between "a former royalist who ends up leading a Falangist political party" and "Falangists" is a particularly significant one. If Franco was still a non-Falange royalist after taking power he would have restored the monarchy before he was on his deathbed.
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There are broader arguments here, but I want to pick at a couple of the smaller bits:
This condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to be referred to as "fascism" in any meaningful sense. Nazism was more occult than religious, Pinochetism doesn't have much relation to religion, Oswald Mosley wasn't interested in Anglican authoritarianism.
To be more direct, the United States doesn't really have much of a fundamentalist religious tradition - it's a religiously pluralist country where the largest single religion is Catholicism, and it's a squishy strain at that.
The American right broadly and Trumpists more narrowly are just not very violent at all. The central example of right-wing violence during the Trump era is a single riot where the only deaths were one of the rioters and a couple geezers that got too excited and had heart attacks. This wasn't nothing, I didn't like it because I don't like riots, but the political violence in the United States has been primarily racialized (BLM riots and associated violence) or Islamist (various acts of terrorism) for decades.
A primary motivation of January 6th protesters was the belief that the election was stolen by the other party, which is a decidedly anti-fascist motivation. Many of them were interested in more safeguards for the democratic process, like voter ID and a ban on election machines. This is in stark contrast to BLM, where the whole idea of American democracy and rule of law was thrown out in favor of an emotional narrative centered on an oppressed people — a textbook example of how fascists get into power. You may argue that Trump was being fascistic when he accused his opponents of election manipulation, but then the very fact he had to cloak his intention in the language of democracy is a testament to the absence of a fascistic undercurrent in the American Right. Which, in my opinion, is unfortunate, because there are a lot of good arguments for the introduction of fascistic aesthetics, prosocial values, and meritocracy to America. Isn’t China being fascist when they make the State beautiful and promote Han civic values and ban immoral entertainment and curtail the power of billionaires? How about El Salvador? Okay, it’s not exactly going poorly for them.
Were people riled up because of the sanctity of democracy?
I’m not sure that was the core motivation.
I think the modern new American right is one of the movements which is developing an anti-democratic undercurrent.
It’s not mainstream, but you start to see it pop up more and more. Your comment itself is bordering on being a testament to that.
I think people were riled up because they felt their voice within a democracy was being suppressed via extra-judicial means (e.g. Twitter files and similar machinations within its orbit; aggressive legal persecution of Trump; debanking and deplatforming of voices or platforms that served their ends)
Whether this is a truly accurate representation of reality may beg whether the movement is truly democratic or not, but the motivation to have a political movement fairly represented within a democracy is unquestionably pro-democracy, no?
Depends on the political movement.
Fascism is pretty often born out of democracy.
I’m not at all saying that this is Trump/MAGA.
But objectively, an anti-democratic movement could easily come to power on claims of shenanigans in an election, whether valid or not.
Alternatively, a simpler explanation is that Trump/MAGA doesn't care about the reality of the election and attempted to take power on January 6th anyway.
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Are you referring to the Diet-Coke Hall Putsch?
There was also the Charlottesville Massacre. (Kind of book-ends it....)
I’d have gone with “PBR Hall Putsch,” personally.
Beer Hall Pudge
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Is "Charlottesville Massacre" meant sincerely?
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We definitely have a tradition of fundamentalist religions, even though no single fundamentalist tradition holds sway. The theological differences between Baptists and Pentecostals and Methodists haven’t kept them from converging on various policy positions. They get the Catholics on board surprisingly often, too.
Other than that, you’re correct. The MAGA wing is positively gentlemanly compared to the kind of mass protests we had over Civil Rights policy, let alone the labor battles of the early 20th century.
Yeah, this is a good and correct point. I waffled a bit about how I wanted to phrase it, because we certainly do have fundamentalists and not just a few of them. My objection is that phrasing it as "a fundamentalist religious tradition" suggests to me that this is a uniting force that is a key element of the current Trumpist movement. While some fundamentalists are part of that movement, they aren't exactly steering the ship - JD Vance is Catholic, Musk isn't religious, Vivek is (I think) Hindu, and the Cabinet nominees are a mishmash of different religions and constituencies. So, what I mean to say is not that the United States lacks fundamentalist religions, but that it isn't a fundamentalist nation and the Trump coalition does not emphasize fundamentalism. I unironically think integralist Catholics have more political sway with this administration than young Earth creationists.
Integralist Catholics are creationists, albeit often old earth.
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Trump and Tom Cotton performed hypothetical violence by suggesting sending in troops/national guard, quite fascist. Direct and tacit support for lawlessness and chaos on the streets though? Nope.
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Incorrect.
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So, if all the really bad things about fascism are not the ones that we are doing, what exactly is bad about fascism?
Ah expanding borders by invading foreign countries is not bad?
Not particularly, no. Every human group in existence today owes its continued existence to the fact that its predecessors took land and resources from other groups. It’s by far the best and most morally and pragmatically legitimate reason to wage war.
Now, I’m perfectly happy to discuss whether or not other, more recently-emergent models of geopolitical coexistence have effectively obviated the underlying logic of wars of expansion. Maybe it’s genuinely no longer necessary to do so in order to secure prosperity and security for one’s people! Maybe the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. But clearly many very intelligent people are still dubious of that assertion, and see it as mere self-serving posturing by the victors of the last great territory-redistributing war(s).
It’s very easy to say “fighting wars to obtain territory is wrong” when you’re the United States, surrounded on both coasts by massive oceans, who defeated the last worthy competitor to any of its contiguous territory 150 years ago. When you’re one of the countries who lost a very substantial amount of territory and resources, though, it’s pretty understandable to be affronted by the assertion that it’s no longer acceptable to try and get any of that territory back.
Just like you have rapists, thiefs and/or murderers among your ancestors (because everybody does), however murder and rape are still evil.
It's not about models of geopolitical co existence, they are just a result of modern democracy and the abolition of slavery. It makes no sense for the US to invade Canada, because what do you do with Canadian citizens? You can give them voting rights, but then it would be a merge more than an invasion; you can give them no rights, but then it creates a class of sub-citizens (it looks pretty unconstitutionnal); you can kill them all, but if you don't think it's bad then I don't know what will be (don't bother me with "we do none of the bad things the fascists did" if you don't believe there are bad things).
That is a good thing that we were speaking about the US invading territories, then...
The question is very concrete and clear: is it bad for Donald Trump and Elon Musk to threaten to invade several countries which until now considered themselves as US allies?
I reject the premise: neither Trump nor Musk is seriously proposing a full-scale military takeover of any U.S. neighbors. Contingent on them actually doing so, I would judge it to be a bad idea for reasons completely unrelated to fascism.
Oh I don't think they do it seriously either, but the discussion started on the premise that it did.
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It’s also true that almost all groups have at one point or another enslaved other peoples to our own benefit at some point historically.
But now in the modern world, we ideally don’t accept that behavior anymore, and we celebrate when slavers get their teeth kicked in. (You might be able to point to some modern slavers who seem to be getting a free pass, but I think it’s hard to doubt that modern people generally would celebrate to see them get their comeuppance and their enterprise dismantled).
Similarly, people who wage wars of conquest in the modern world, they often get ganged up on and it’s a modern value to celebrate at them getting their teeth kicked in.
Sometimes it’s hard, e.g. they have nuclear weapons or something. But boy, modern people often love to slap people who wage wars of conquest and that’s a pretty cool and adaptive recent novelty in human geopolitical behavior.
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That depends a lot on who is doing the invading and who is being invaded, doesn't it?
I thought the context was pretty clear though.
This kind of context swapping is done by bad faith people who might actually be fascists.
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He was already president for 4 years and nothing happened.
I do not agree that Trump is a fascist, but I always found the argument of "nothing happened last time" to be super weak. Trump himself repeats that he had people in his administration constantly get in his way and prevent him from doing what he wanted to do. This is something both Trump loyalists and #resist people both agree on.
Not that I disagree, but I think the argument is more like "last time you all screamed he was orange Hitler, and nothing happened. Why should we believe you this time?"
There's a current amongst the left that makes the most recent right wing candidate out to be literally the biggest threat to democracy ever. After a while, it becomes obvious that there isn't any information value from these statements.
"Nothing happened" is obviously false, given January 6th and the events leading up to it.
Trump made a serious effort to stay in office despite losing the 2020 election, including (definitely) assembling a riotous mob outside the Capitol in order to intimidate Pence and Congress and (based on poorly-corroborated eyewitness testimony, but not seriously challenged) meeting retired generals in the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of a military autogolpe. That isn't nothing.
The people who said that Trump was a threat to democracy were right, even though American democracy was in fact able to brush off the threat.
Out of curiosity, where would you say the appropriate place to protest would have been? There was behaviour during the election that seemed very suspicious to the layperson (the water main breaking causing poll watchers to be sent home, which was followed by votes continuing to be tallied). The attempts to get the legal system to address it seemed to be brushed off (and I'm saying 'seemed', not 'were', because you don't have to be right to protest, you just need to believe something was wrong). The people absolutely believed that the election has been stolen, and showed up for what was actually an extremely peaceful protest, especially compared to the BLM protests earlier in the year.
We've seen similar protests from left-wing sources occupying state buildings to prevent votes (unfortunately, not being American, I can't recall the specific state; I believe it was some sort of trans bathroom bill that caused a Texan legislature to have to reconvene later, but I'm open to corrections if someone can find it). The same people who complain about Trump being a unique threat to democracy are silent on those protests.
There really isn't any set of events that could've led to the January 6 protests having Trump installed in office, short of convincing everyone that the vote had been stolen (in which case, yes, they would've been right to overturn it).
Given that the Constitution requires States to choose their electors and Congress to count the votes of the electors chosen by the States, the appropriate place to protest a choice of electors which does not reflect the popular vote would whatever the usual and customary place for large-scale protest is in the relevant State capital. Given US norms (which are not substantially different to other advanced democracies) I wouldn't have said that protesting on the Capitol lawn was inappropriate, but doing so while openly armed, carrying signs saying "Hang Mike Pence" and erecting a gallows crosses a line even if the building wasn't stormed. (FWIW, I would consider open-carrying at a political process to be per se a threat against government officials and therefore prosecutable, but I am aware that American gun culture sees things differently).
The ignorance of Trump's supporters is relevant to their culpability, but not his. Given his access to information, if Trump believed the things he was saying about how he won the election then he is sufficiently delusional that Pence should have invoked the 25th.
Eastman wrote a memo telling Pence how to install Trump. I don't know what would have happened if Pence had followed the instructions in the memo and declared Trump elected, but it wouldn't have been good whoever ended up being inaugurated. There were at least five obvious ways that the January 6 protests could have "worked" in the sense of using political violence to cause an unnecessary constitutional crisis, although only the first two seem plausible to me:
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Effectively nothing happened on Jan 6th, though. There was a riot and it accomplished nothing.
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So do you agree or disagree with the base level argument "nothing happened"? Note that "They tried to make things happen, but they weren't successful" is not in disagreement with "nothing happened."
Yes, nothing happened.
However, "nothing happened because they didn't try to make something happen" and "They tried to make things happen, but they weren't successful" is a useful distinction to make when trying to predict the future.
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Fascism has an actual definition- a militaristic totalitarian state based around palingenetic ultra nationalism. This is not maga; there’s no deep history lore to justify blood and soil. There’s no actual totalitarianism, either, and Trump’s supporters mostly have attachment to institutions which would be disempowered or repressed by totalitarianism.
On balance I think it did
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"It turns out cheap cotton was the most expensive product in the history of the earth" to quote Nick Land.
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"Make America Great Again" sounds pretty palingenetic and nationalist to be fair. And threatening to invade foreign countries is quite militaristic and nationalistic, I'd say.
I agree, however, that there is no totalitarianism in the US right now.
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In support of this, I here submit Neema Parvini's "MAGA as Fulfillment of the Kali Yuga":
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This is not a definition of fascism I've ever heard of, and would reject entirely. This "definition" looks suspiciously like Umberto Eco's 14 points; a blatant attempt at rigging the debate so we all can agree that "fascism" only refers to evil right-wing movements and had nothing whatsoever to do with Leftist movements of the time, and absolutely no relation at all to Socialism, that's just a right-wing talking point (pay no attention to the documented history showing membership of fascists in socialist movements)
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You military recruiters have gotten really clever, but we're still not going to join.
We all know how this works now: you sign up because of the recruiting video about jumping out of a helicopter with a flaming sword to deport giant Mexican dragons, and then you end up marooned in some desert for two years jerking off under a Humvee for $9.50/hr
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I see you're a sockpuppet. I don't know if you're a venting lefty or a trolling righty or some other kind of bait, but there's something I've never seen talked about, and it's worth talking about. This topic is endless tragedy and comedy, tragic where the real villain of the 20th century, communism, wasn't vanquished, and comic where we explore the history of the word "fascism."
Other commenters here have already observed how "fascism" and "fascist" have become meaningless pejoratives, and that's what's funny: fascism has always been a meaningless pejorative. You can cite dictionaries but if you look at the original critiques by Marxists, be it Clara Zetkin or Trotsky or Georgi Dimitrov, you'd see it was meaningless when they wrote and spoke about it. It meant nothing. Well — almost nothing.
Zetkin:
Trotsky:
Dimitrov:
I actually laughed the first time I read Trotsky's full critique because it really is just "Fascism is when the fascists get in there and fascist all over the place."
When you pare away the rhetoric you see exactly what they're doing: Our righteous freedom fighters, their fanatical terrorists.
"Nuh-uh, you're the ones exploited by powerful people who hide the truth and want to take away all your rights!"
They hated their opposition because they were a proletarian revolt who wanted to fix the existing system instead of overthrowing it and implementing communism. That's it, that's literally all it has ever been, commies mad that people saw through their horseshit but recognized the power in banding together. What else would communists do but wordswordswords slander them as having dishonest motives? And dishonest motives, oh boy. Look at every communist government in the last 100 years. "Not true communism" yeah maybe, but the purpose of a system is what it does, and every communist party that has ever risen to firmly control a country has behaved in exactly the same way. Tyranny and genocide.
What's happened since Trotsky et al. is not what I would call classic leftist behavior so much as the inclination that begets leftism as a method of obtaining political power: control of language. I do feel this is an important distinction, because where I view leftism poorly is almost entirely on the ones who manipulate language to equivocate and ultimately deceive, not those of their voters who believe they're doing good and want to out of genuine altruistic impulse. Unfortunately the people who reach high power from the left frequently use those techniques. There are minor exceptions in parts of Europe but it's not the case in the major leftist establishments of the US, the UK, France, and Germany, and they influence their comrades elsewhere. They manipulate terms, they equivocate and deceive. Like "fascism." They've had a century to define it around Nazi villainy, and then they adjust and readjust the definition so it can always be used to slander their opposition. The changing definition also probably continuously adds to the social inertia against anyone who might stand up and say "Hey, wait a second, the original definition was what?"
It's taken on socioreligious power, it's analogous to religious conviction. For me to tell someone "That's not fascism" or especially "You don't know what fascism is" is like saying "Good is bad, bad is good." It's a fundamental difference in paradigm, so such a statement has negative weight. It's meaningless.
There are governments who called themselves fascist and that would mean something here if the relationship between communism and fascism were discussed honestly, but it's never been honest. Fascist persists as an insult because communists persist, entrenched in power, and being masters of manipulative language, had means after obvious motive to downplay the horrors of communism and play up the horrors of nazism (both bad, the former orders of magnitude and uniquely worse). And we're humans and we can't help but calling our enemies the worst names we know. From Truman likening Dewey to fascists to generations of kids matriculating under communist professors who see fascism in everything and it repeats and repeats and repeats.
It's about to stop.
If I called one of my irreligious friends a reprobate sinner they'd laugh. They'd think I was joking, the word has no meaning for them. That's happening again. We're in the cultural singularity and culture is progressing very fast indeed. In at most 10 years, fascism and racism and sexism and every other -ism and -ist and -phobe, having finished the sprint from "No we're not/You're the real fascists" to "If it's bad, so be it" to "u forgot the gigachad" will then move into pure mockery, just as I would face if I went to proselytize in ratheism by condemning their lives of sin.
I'd like to believe there's value still in arguing this, and maybe things change just right in the coming years and we can have a real discussion, but that's the best case for this idea, approaching it on its angle and in good faith. I'm not approaching this idea on its angle, but I do mean this in good faith. Every last bit of power is being wrung from those words, its a score of levers about to snap off their fulcrums, and all the people who hold to these need to understand this and be prepared for when those words they use to frame their very sense of politics and the world become meaningless.
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Richard Hanania interviewed Jared Taylor.
Jared Taylor, founder of white nationalist publication American Renaissance, was recently reinstated on Twitter/X after a years-long (and, under the Elon Musk “free speech” era, increasingly controversial) ban. Many have hoped that, as Dissident Right and race realist ideas are beginning to break into semi-mainstream online discourse, some of the old-guard figures like Taylor may enjoy a long-overdue rehabilitation in the public eye. (Something like this has recently taken place for Steve Sailer, who, after decades of being the commentator whom all the serious thinkers read but never publicly acknowledged, recently undertook a lucrative book tour and has finally been published by several mainstream conservative publications.) While Taylor was once a semi-regular fixture on serious news programs, and his speeches at American Renaissance conference were even occasionally broadcast on C-SPAN, his banishment over the past decade has been comprehensive; if he is, at this late stage of his life, able to make some money and get his name out there, it would be a well-deserved culmination of an honorable life. Taylor’s work has been formative in my intellectual development, and I consider him a formidable thinker as well as a true gentleman.
That being said, I think his conversation with Hanania (who promoted the interview as a debate) unfortunately revealed how the world has, in some sense, passed Taylor by. Part of this is simply that he is old and has lost a step cognitively. In his prime, back when he was often asked to appear on mainstream news segments, Taylor was known as a sharp, charismatic, and erudite debater; at his advanced age, he can now be outmaneuvered by more agile thinkers — and, whatever you think about Richard Hanania (who, in his now-disavowed younger days as a white identitarian commentator, wrote several pieces for American Renaissance), he clearly has a keen mind. More importantly, though, Taylor’s model of the world does not appear to have adequately adapted to observed reality.
One of the central pillars of Taylor’s racial worldview is that human beings naturally seek to cluster among others to whom they are similar. For Taylor, the “white flight” of the 1960’s and 70’s, in which white families fled urban areas for the growing suburbs in response to the growing presence of blacks, is an archetypal example of humans naturally and subconsciously coordinating to segregate themselves into racial affinity groups. Writing and speaking in the 1990s and 2000s, when Mexican immigration to the U.S. (both legal and illegal) was at a tidal surge, Taylor predicted that this would set off a fresh white flight, in which white Americans would flee states with growing Hispanic populations. The looming confrontation between whites and Latinos, in which whites would be forced to put up a mighty fight to prevent themselves from being replaced and politically outvoted by drunken and crime-prone illegals clamoring for Latin American socialism, was a central theme of white nationalist discussion at this time. “Demographics are Destiny!”
However, as Hanania deftly points out, the intervening years have been… less than kind to these predictions. Though left-wing agitation by a certain section of the Latino population did have some impact on politics in the early part of this century — I distinctly remember a segment of the Mexican and Mexican-American segment of the student body at my high school staging a full-fledged walk-out in 2006 in protest of the failed “Sensenbrenner Bill” (H.R. 4437) which would have curtailed illegal immigration — the long-term political realignment among Latinos in this country has been a surprise to both political parties. Famously, Trump’s 2024 campaign achieved considerable success among Hispanic men.
Additionally, while white identitarians were correct to predict an exodus of conservative whites from racially-diverse liberal states, they probably did not anticipate that such whites would flee not to Whitopias such as Idaho and Montana, but rather to racially-diverse conservative states. The racial demographics of Florida and Texas are hardly more favorable to racially-conscious whites than California’s or New York’s! As Hanania points out, it seems like the revealed preference of many white Americans is to move to places with plenty of Hispanics (and a decent number of blacks, provided they’re well-policed) as long as the economic prospects and the political environment seem headed in a positive direction. White Americans seem to have no problem whatsoever living alongside Asian immigrants, who generally make excellent neighbors, friends, and classmates.
(Taylor’s stance on race relations between whites and Asians has never been coherent, which is particularly surprising since he was famously born and raised in Japan as the child of two American missionaries. He acknowledges the many great things about Asian culture and the various metric on which Asians are on par with, or even superior to, whites, yet when asked why it would be a bad thing for whites and Asians to intermarry and their countries become more integrated, he retreats to some wishy-washy petty nationalist “Well, I just think white people should stay white and Asians should stay Asian because I believe in real diversity.” This has never been persuasive, and Hanania rightly skewers him for it.) Ultimately, Taylor’s predictions of mass racial strife and whites fleeing to the hinterlands to form whites-only communities just have not panned out. As Hanania says: There are plenty of extremely white places in America, and almost nobody is moving to any of them.
This particular section of the interview (beginning around the 55-minute mark) has also produced controversy among Taylor’s ostensible allies. Hanania brings up West Virginia and asks why, if living among other whites is the highest instinctive concern for most white people, why are so few people moving there? And, furthermore, what sort of white person would want to move there, knowing how poor and dysfunctional the local whites are? Who would prefer living among fentanyl-addicted hillbilly whites rather than living among educated and productive Asians and Hispanics? Taylor expresses agreement with Hanania, and indulges in some accurate criticism of the white people he witnessed while visiting the capital city of West Virginia.
This has caused many on the online right to turn on Taylor, as discussed by Scott Greer. (Many of the responses to Greer’s tweet perfectly encapsulate the phenomenon pointed to in his article.) The criticism of Taylor’s remarks strikes me as identical to a phenomenon many have observed in black culture. When blacks congregate among themselves in places like churches, a frequent topic of discussions and sermons is frank self-criticism of the failings of the black community. “Black men, we need to do better! Work harder, be better fathers! There’s too many young black men out there acting a fool, killing each other over nothing, leaving our communities shattered.” All true, all healthy, all necessary, and maybe at some point the introspection will lead to material changes. However, when blacks (or, at least, black activists and “community leaders”) are talking to white people, suddenly they’re a united front: “All our problems are your fault.” Any criticism of even the worst aspects of underclass black culture is suddenly forbidden, as it might give succor to the enemies of black political advocacy. Black commentators who break this taboo (Glenn Loury, Thomas Sowell, etc.) are savaged as traitors and dancing monkeys by the very same blacks who, among their own, will acknowledge the truth behind that very same criticism.
Apparently we now have a vocal contingent of aspiring “white community leaders” who similarly cannot brook any public criticism of the worst elements of white trash culture, lest it empower “the enemies of our people.” This is pathetic, insecure, dishonest behavior. Whatever one might say about Jared Taylor, he has never been afraid to publicly air out the neuroses and failings of his own people; his brand of upstanding, intellectually honest discourse appears fundamentally unsuited for an increasingly propagandistic “siege mentality” discourse on the modern racially-aware right.
I have many problems with Richard Hanania, but seeing the army of pro-Taylor trolls spamming the comments section of the debate with petty insults about his appearance rather than even attempting to engage with the substance of his arguments, I have to concede that the new contours of the debate have squeezed out principled but overly-old-fashioned men like Jared Taylor, and will require the torch to be passed to high-character individuals who can thread the needle between the increasingly low-brow Chud Populism of right-wing Twitter, and the respectable but vacuous thought leaders of the dying Boomer right.
As others mentioned in this sub-thread, racial identity is an important consideration but by no means is it the only factor supporting one’s quality of life. Economic prosperity counts for a lot as well. A rising economic tide is enough to cover a multitude of sins. But when that tide recedes, racial preferences remain.
For example, George Floyd wasn’t the only black man to have died in police custody. Nor was his death the only one recorded and sensationalized in the media. But the reaction to his death was so much larger—why? Because the COVID economy crushed people and they wanted a reason to vent their frustrations. The unemployment rate was something like 10 percent at the time, and people were locked in their homes and going stir crazy.
Is it though? It seems to me that this is one of the key points of disagreement between the intellectual/journalist class and the wider MAGA coalition. If you watch Trump and Co. opposition to immigration is almost always framed in either economic terms (jobs) or security (criminals 'waltzing' across the border unchecked), the preoccupation with racial identity is pretty much exclusive to PMCs and the specific subset of minority grifters who prey upon them.
You cannot honestly be attempting to claim that racial identity is not important to most black Americans of all socioeconomic classes.
I can.
More specifically I contest the words "most" and "all".
Oh boy.
I mean, this really is the central DR3tard article of faith. “Egghead white communists taught blacks to care about race. If it weren’t for them, black people would all be good old-fashioned American individualists.” It’s delusional. Sure, many middle-class blacks don’t go around screaming about race all the time. But I guarantee you most of them were raised, by their family members and not just by white liberal teachers, that their race and heritage are important. They’ve gotten “the talk” about how police can present a potential threat, and how they need to take extra care to put their best foot forward around white people, so as to not feed into stereotypes. When they see a news story about a black guy who got himself killed by police, there’s a little part of them that says, “That could have been me.”
You and guys like you are always smugly going on about how “PMC liberals” — your ever-present outgroup, whose machinations are directly responsible for every last bad thing in the world — don’t know what everyday, salt-of-the-earth black people are like, so they have to rely on the accounts of grifters pushing an agenda. (An agenda taught to them by, of course, PMC whites.)
But no, this is nonsense. We can see what black people are like and what they value not only by speaking directly to them — something which I’ve done thousands of times in my life — but also by observing their voting patterns, their choices of entertainment, the ways in which they choose to spend their private lives largely in the company of other black folks. They go to black churches, listen to black music (whether that’s hip-hop, or gospel, or Motown, or jazz), and watch black movies. They have a distinct culture, which tracks almost one-to-one with race, and they don’t see anything wrong with that. They’re not doing this for “identity politics”, or to get gibs from da white man, or because scheming communist white people are pulling their strings. It doesn’t mean they can’t productively interact with white people; many of them have white friends, or at least white coworkers. But they know who their people are, and their inner lives are directed primarily toward the betterment of their larger community. This is healthy and normal. It’s not a pathological behavior, and it’s not something “the PMC” taught them.
No matter how much you might sneer at it, DR3 (ie "Democrats are the real Racists") remains objectivly true.
Who is the real retard then?
What dr3 is saying is that paternalist racially conscious identity politics performed by the democrats is more racist than any republican, even the deep south caricature everyone imagines when you say racist. They dress it up in fancy language and performative compassion, but don't actually give a shit what happens to the community or what the people there think or want.
It is one hundred percent correct, but unlike its brother 'what if the positions were reversed' is a poor argument for right wingers because it assumes the progressive framing is correct.
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Assuming they’re racist against nonwhites, yes.
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You didn’t even refute anything I said. Do you have specific evidence — even if it’s just anecdotal! — to demonstrate that what I’m saying is untrue?
My evidence is that of my own eyes.
I live in a decent sized southern city, and as fantastical as this may sound to the average mottizen such as yourself, black people are out there, right now, wearing clothes, driving cars, and running buisinesses as if they were human beings. While the streets are clean, and reasonably well maintained, and homelessness is rare.
Who are you to tell me that they aren't?
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"I'll see your DR3, and raise you a DR4".
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They aren’t responsible for literally everything that happens. But what they have is a set of objectively harmful luxury beliefs (for example identity politics), are insulated by their money from the consequences of those beliefs, and because they have much more time to be politically active, and have more money to throw to NGOs that say things they like to hear, they have an outsized influence on politics. It’s the “make middle class women clap” phenomenon that’s been going on for decades. Political leaders listen to them, artists listen to them, etc. because they have time and disposable income.
I don’t think they invented blacks or Hispanics caring about race. They’re minorities, and banding together to solve problems is simply how problems get solved when you don’t compromise the majority of your area. Hispanics do the same. The big difference is that until recently whites were a big enough majority in America and Western Europe that whites didn’t feel the need to do the same thing. Christians didn’t feel the need to band together before because they had a supermajority in elections and therefore their issues were dealt with. The reason so many here don’t like PMC liberals is that the issues that are brought up by whites and Christians are issues that PMCs oppose as backward and uncouth and so on, and they’re thus funding and working for groups that oppose white identity politics.
Do they ever
MacKenzie Scott, Bezos ex wife, used the gigantic Amazon divorce money she got to spend 16 BILLION dollars on hundreds of NGOs
These billionaires divorces are worse than Soros
Well yeah. It’s how politics works for the most part. For rich people it’s a sport and they have tons of free time and money to spend bankrolling things that they can brag about at dinner parties. And for the most part that’s all they care about. Palestinians are a popular cause because the Israelis on TV mostly look like Europeans, and the Palestinians are brown. Besides, saying Islam has a violence problem makes them feel bad.
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Jobs and border security are topics safely within the Overton Window, yet correlated to racial identity politics fairly well. Politicians are allowed to talk about them while maintaining plausible deniability about being white identitarians. That’s the upside to civic nationalism, if you subscribe to the idea that Americanism is closely associated with European/white heritage.
How many of those criminals waltzing across the border are ethnic Swedes, Poles, or Irish?
And yet we see Hispanics breaking for Trump (allegedly against thier interests) and white identitarians breaking for Harris (again allegedly against thier interests), the rationalist who is deeply invested in identity politics might have trouble understanding what is going on, but to anyone else the the simplest explanation is the ovious.
The Democrats claim that no one cares about crime or the economy, just race is further evidence that democrats do not care about crime or the economy, they only care about race.
Don’t believe every claim you read. A post-election survey by the Associated Press shows that Trump won 55% of the white vote in 2020 versus 56% in 2024. He improved with Latinos (35% in 2020 to 43% in 2024) and blacks (8% in 2020 to 16% in 2024), but these remain small segments of the voting population compared to whites. Do the numbers suggest a racial reckoning for Democrats? Hardly—they just failed to turn out the non-white vote. In 2020, whites were 74% of the voting population; in 2024 whites increased to 75%. This in a country where the white population is declining in both percentage and real terms.
Trump won in 2024 for the same reason he won in 2016: the Democrats picked a terrible candidate who failed to inspire non-white voter turnout. The Democrats have a long-term formula for electoral success, they just have to get their heads out of their asses and pick someone personally likable. I am amazed at how hard this has been for them.
This is a racial reckoning for Democrats. A racial reckoning isn't when the racial block converts in-majority to the other side, but when it can no longer be counted upon as a racial block.
Due to the structure of the Democratic coalition and its distribution across various electoral units, Democratic victory across the national electoral landscape requires not just a preponderance of 'minority' voters, but a consistently high preponderance. Those voters are what make 'favorable' gerrymanders favorable in the first place by having narrow coalition majorities in as many districts as possible. Due to how a First Past the Post system works, if a coalition goes from a hypothetical 52% to 49% output- a swing of just 1% protest voting and 1% switching sides- a coalition goes from winning the electoral contest 100% of the time to 0% of the time.
This is why Harris 'only' getting around 80% of the black vote, and Trump doubling from 8 to 16% of the black vote was such a disaster for the Democrats' nation-wide results. The Democratic coalition in the modern urban-based PMC-centered format is/was dependent on 90%-ish alignment to maintain the degree of reach they did have outside urban centers. Worse than a nearly 10% drop from African American support levels earlier in the century, the crossover of voters is double the impact in a binary first-past-the-pos setup. Every drop below that is a 1% equivalent needed from elsewhere, and every crossover is 2% equivalent needed from elsewhere to make up for not only the lost vote, but the additional vote to the other party.
Moreover, voter consistency of a block hinges on the block never voting otherwise. The biggest predictors of how someone will vote is how their parents and family vote, and the biggest predictor of how that someone votes is how many times they've crossed party lines before. The first cross-over is both the hardest and the most significant, as the voter who has crossed over even one time before is far more likely to do so again, and the voters who are known to cross over are among the biggest influencers to get their families to cross over as well, until you have a critical mass of people who are no longer 'reliable' voters for the party. This is how voting blocks / electoral walls crumble.
The issue for the Democrats, going back to the coalition structure, is that the urban-based PMC-core model was the development of the Obama-era party, and the party coalition expectations were based off of his coalition. Except Obama's black and minority support was the exception, being exceptionally high, not the norm, or the level of expected support to baseline from. And as the normalization of Black voters defecting continues, the future reliability of the ethnic blocks is going to decrease, not increase.
As long as the Democratic party coalition continues to baseline off the expectation of Obama-era levels of support- and dismiss failure to meet it as a failure of turn-out as opposed to a transition in the degree of party loyalty of the ethnic voting blocks- they are going to continue to face the racial reckoning as the racial groups they reckon will overwhelmingly support them, won't.
I think it’s less a racial reckoning and more about them being pretty much outed as caring mostly about the concerns of the laptop class and their pet causes than actually running the country.
They don’t care that crime and drug use in cities is horrible. They care that nobody mentions it, and that they don’t put too many minorities in prison. This hurts poor blacks quite a bit because they don’t have the wealth to leave and go to lower crime areas. Working class jobs are a bit harder to come by because we’re importing millions of working class Mexicans and Hispanics willing to work for McDonald’s wages doing construction and restaurants and trash pickup. If you’re in that class, especially for blacks who have less education and fewer opportunities, this is a bad thing. But saying that is racist. And when people can’t get legit jobs and earn their money, crime looks attractive, especially if the authorities have outright stated they don’t want to prosecute crimes.
Environmental stuff, in abstract, I think is okay. The problem is that it’s basically being done on the backs of poor people. Costs are higher because we refuse to dig up the oil and coal reserves we have. We put huge roadblocks to development and manufacturing, often in the form of regulations. This might be okay for the elites who don’t care how much anything costs, but if you’re counting pennies, yeah the fact that your gas costs $5 a gallon matters. Tge fact that regulations have doubled tge cost of food matters.
People know that pattern by now. They watch Americans suffer, especially poorer ones, knowing that help is not on the way. At least not for natives. And that’s what hurts democrats. If you’re not needing something that the elites see as important, or you’re in the wrong social class, you aren’t getting help. Poor people in North Carolina are still sleeping in tents hoping to not lose their land. Immigrants in New York get fully funded EBT cards and free housing. And it’s not super surprising that people are turning away from the party of neoliberalism and lazy identity politics is losing support.
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This more than "suggests" a reckoning this "is" the reckoning. The Democrats' electoral strategy for the last 30+ years has depended on keeping Blacks and Latinos on the Democrats plantation and this is why the people pushing Identity politic the hardest are all woke PMCs from Democrat controlled cities and/or Canada.
The nature of FPTP elections means that even a small shift in the effectiveness of a tactic can have big effects on the end result and these are not small shifts.
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After reading (post-Floyd) about Arthur McDuffie, who was beaten to death by Miami police on December 16, 1979 despite having committed no crime, I would have expected that to spark nationwide rage. There were serious riots in Miami's black neighborhoods, but the cause failed to catch on nationwide.
I have to conclude this is because newspapers and TV stations outside Miami didn't cover it (but the black papers must have?!), so I guess social media made all the difference.
The OCR isn't great but yes, it was covered by multiple black and at least one "alternative anti-war" papers in North Carolina. Unclear if there was any rage associated or just reporting.
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Assuming that you've accurately represented Hanania's viewpoint here, he doesn't appear to fully understand the situation. On a county level, people move towards whiteness and away from blackness.
Sure, South Carolina has a lot of black people. But conservatives moving from California to South Carolina aren't going to be anywhere near them. They will be in a nice safe street somewhere else.
But even on a state level, Idaho is the second fastest growing state since 2010 after Mormon (and lily white) Utah.
At the same time, Taylor is still wrong. Because it's not about "being near your own people". It's about being near white people. Black and Hispanic people also migrate towards white areas. High trust societies rock.
I don’t think this is true. It is about getting away from blacks, but most whites appear to have few if any qualms about moving to places like the Bay Area which have heavily Latino and Asian populations, but few blacks.
Not really. Palo Alto gained almost no residents from 2010 to 2020 and is 48% non Hispanic white. Dublin is one of the fastest growing cities in the state and is 28 percent non Hispanic white.
They don't. That's what I'm telling you. Palo Alto, comparatively white, is practically not growing. Almost nobody is moving there. Dublin, comparatively nonwhite, is among the fastest growing cities in the state.
My argument is that your claim has no correspondence to reality and contradicts the data. Do you have any evidence for your claim?
Your claim:
This is a claim about where people move to. The cities growing fastest (i.e. the cities that have the most people moving into them) are rather nonwhite. How does this not, at least to a first approximation, disprove your claim? Perhaps you can argue that all the growth seen in e.g. Dublin and Emeryville is Asians, but you haven't shown that.
So again, do you have any evidence that white people tend to move to white towns? Or is your argument not actually supported by evidence of where people are moving?
https://belonging.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/bayarea_whites_2017_0-0.png
Doesn't really look like that to me. Looks to me that white people avoid the very shittiest parts of the bay, which makes sense since white people have the resources to do this more often than Hispanics or blacks. White people also more frequently live in old money towns like Atherton, but that's clearly not due to whites overwhelmingly moving there, for the simple reason that nobody is overwhelmingly moving to Atherton. And finally white people are more likely to live in rural areas, but again, hardly anyone is moving there.
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It is very low non-white Hispanic and black through, which is probably what he means. (10% and 3% respectively iirc! There goes 47% of all the murders!)
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53% Asian in Dublin? That's crazy, I don't remember it being anything like that much.
It's even 42-42 white-Asian in Pleasanton too. Guess I was in a bit of a racial bubble.
When was the last time you visited Dublin? There's been a lot of Asians in the tri valley area for some time, and the trends have continued.
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Exactly. Here's a great blog article on the subject: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/fleeing-opportunity
Diversity has killed growth because talented people are leaving the most productive areas. Throughout most of history, the opposite was true, with young dreamers coming to Rome, Paris, London, or New York to make their fortune. They still do, of course, but in much smaller numbers.
How bad is it? California has lost millions of citizens to domestic migration despite having by far the best climate and great economic opportunities. Imagine how bad things would be if they didn't have beaches, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley.
It's not all bad news though. Cities are IQ shedders, so in the long run, it's probably better if our best people leave the cities. Bad for economic growth, but good for demographics.
Racial diversity is not even close to the primary reason why most people flee California. The extremely high cost of living, the massive homeless problem, the crumbling infrastructure, the punishing taxation, the piss-poor governance — all of these are far more salient than the number of Mexicans. (And California has a far lower black percentage than nearly any of the states — Texas, Florida, Virginia, North Carolina — to which Californians are mostly fleeing.)
Again, people are not moving to the black areas of those states.
You’re aware that black people can move around outside “their neighborhoods”, right? The neighborhood where I live isn’t heavily black in terms of the people who occupy houses here, but there are plenty of black people when I go to the grocery store, or to various public places. If a school district practices busing or has magnet schools, my children can have black students in their classes, even if we don’t live in a “black area”. Thus, the black percentage of the population is still relevant even if you feel like you can just move to “a white area”.
Yes, of course. People living in majority black neighborhoods move out a lot. It's a good idea for them to do so.
But majority black areas still exist, even if they bleed residents every year. Also, new majority black areas are constantly created as other groups leave.
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Most blacks in Texas live in the same major cities everyone else does, and these are the ones people are moving to.
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Cost of living increases are directly related to more migrants and illegal immigrants providing competition for many of the individual costs that go into living (food, energy, housing).
Directly related to the above as well. If the cost of living and competition/pressure on wages wasn't artificially pumped up by immigration, the homeless situation wouldn't be so bad.
i.e. infrastructure that can't support the inflated number of people it is expected to support - once again you can blame migration.
And a lot of that is due to illegal immigration as well.
Directly enabled by immigration. There's no viable right wing path to victory, so there's nothing that cleans out dead weight on the left side of politics. When you don't even have to try to win elections, the selection pressures for leadership consist entirely of pleasing donors and party insiders - as opposed to solving the problems your citizens are facing.
You're right when you say that racial diversity isn't the cause - but you're not really giving a complete picture, either. The costs of massive immigration, which is one of the manifestations of the drive for racial diversity, are all directly related to the list of reasons you gave for people fleeing. You're looking at people fleeing from a burning house and saying "They're not running from the fire, they're running from the heat and the smoke! Look, they're even taking shelter in a building with a fireplace, so it clearly isn't the fire that's making them run."
Texas has very similar demographics and high immigration inflows, with at the very least fewer of these problems than California does. Poor governance is the main reason.
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Conservative Muslims in Europe, for example, prove Hanania's point that people move for economic reasons and not just purely identarian ones,sure.
But do these groups mainly move to live amongst white people or do they live amongst their own? You can have all of the benefits of a Western society while making it more like yours if you can have your own neighborhood/community embedded in a high development country.
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I think it's not so much about being near white people, it's about being near people who create thriving economies and do little violent crime or property crime. Few people of any race want to live around methed-out white gangsters in a backwater town. And then the secondary consideration is being around your own race. So, for example, a white person will probably on average prefer to live around affluent peaceful white people than around affluent peaceful Asian people, (of course there are many exceptions - some people of every race enjoy living around people of a foreign culture and so on. I just mean on average), but would rather live around affluent peaceful Asian people than around violent white people in a place with a really bad economy.
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I haven't followed Taylor's work too closely, but it's wrong to characterize the entire Dissident Right as predicting that whites will flee to rural white communities. I don't want to live in a rural white commune in Idaho, I want to live in a world-class city! The fact that non-whites migrate to the most desirable places to live is not really a rebuttal to "demographics are destiny." And white flight to the suburbs is evidence of that fact- it's a compromise: they want access to a world class city but they don't want to live around blacks.
And if you don't call the past 10 years racial strife, I'm not sure exactly what it would take for you to admit this has happened. Take something like white representation in Ivy League 25 years ago compared to today. That is a reckoning. If Taylor predicted White people would flee all the cities to form rural communes (I can't verify that, I'll take your word for it), then you can register that as a false prediction, but the "White Nationalist" prediction I've heard is it will cause civilizational decline and urban decay. If White Nationalists predicted urban decay would you say their prediction was correct?
Richard Hanania's entire schtick is trolling with insults about how low-status it is to be a white identarian, including ample insults about appearance. Turnabout is fair play.
Hanania’s stance, which I basically agree with, is that the real strife isn’t “everyone against white people”, but rather “blacks against everyone else”. If the oppositional culture of black was taken out of the equation, whether by crushing Indian Schools style cultural reprogramming, eugenics, or geographic/political separation, white people would have almost no difficulty living with a substantial number of immigrants from other races. Latinos certainly took time and significant effort to integrate, and obviously the country needs to get a handle on the number of Latinos to make sure they don’t become a majority population too quickly, but having lived in a heavily Latino city my entire life, I can honestly say that they have not been a significant source of any strife or discomfort to me. Asian immigrants to America have done wonderfully, and there should not be any meaningful effort to stop them from coming here. (Again, proportions matter — I wouldn’t want America to accept 4 million Chinese immigrants next year — but pretending like Asians are a significant contributor to racial division in this country is simply dishonest.) The problem, overwhelmingly, is blacks and the fallout from the eternal question of how to deal with them. Applying a model of race relations designed for black-white conflict to other races is simply missing the point. It’s a distraction.
There are places in the world from which developed countries should want a very small number of immigrants. The United States has, thus far, managed to do a spectacular job of avoiding receiving very many immigrants from those places. Europe has done a much worse job of this, and has suffered the consequences. As I’ve said before, if Europe had let in a million Vietnamese instead of a million Syrians, the continent simply would not be facing any serious problems with multiculturalism. Jared Taylor’s model is, like yours, over-focused on whites vs. non-whites, while it should instead be trying as hard as possible to muster Asians and Latinos in a coalition against blacks and Arabs.
You're still thinking in terms of racial coalitions, and Hanania does not or at least he pretends he does not.
You think racial coalitions only matter when it comes to the Black Question, but they can be tossed aside when it comes to every single other political and cultural question? Nonsense. You can say you want them to be your ally against the blacks until the cows come home, but they are going to act in their own interests. Racial coalitions are everywhere.
Blacks are not even the most threatening minority because they don't really have the agency to achieve political and cultural power like, say, Indians coming and replacing the highest levels of our most important institutions. You don't think that would be a problem?
But why not? You just say "proportions matter." But can you explain why accepting 4 million Chinese immigrants next year would be a problem, but at the same time "Asian immigrants to America have done wonderfully, and there should not be any meaningful effort to stop them from coming here". Would you be OK with American demographics becoming vast majority Chinese if it were just spread out over 80 years and associated with economic growth?
Arab Americans also have a higher median income and level of education compared to Latinos. They do well in America. Why not let the Arabs in?
Nigerians also do well in America. I've never had a bad interaction with a Nigerian, only good ones. Why not let them all in?
You haven't sufficiently explained why Latinos are good in America but Arabs are bad in America. If you are measuring "do well" by economic output then you're just in Bryan Caplan Open Borders land like Hanania. Or is your position "Open borders for everyone except Africans"?
Overall, you seem stuck in evaluating immigration impact based on crime and terrorism. If a group doesn't commit a ton of crime then it's OK to mass migrate to Europe and the United States? Feel free to dispute that if I'm not fairly characterizing your argument.
This is one of my least favorite tactics of yours, wherein you pretend not to understand that it’s more difficult to culturally integrate a large number of people than it is to integrate a small number of people. If 4 million Chinese people arrived in the U.S. over the course of one year, this would introduce very serious logistical issues for the places accepting them. Masses of children entering the school system without any English proficiency. The likelihood of insular ethnic enclaves, of the type that still exist today in parts of New York City. (I’ve been to the Chinatown in Flushing myself, and it really is like stepping into some random street market in China.) Whereas a smaller number, spread out over a longer period of time, would introduce considerably smaller issues.
Because that’s an extremely small selection of the total Arab population. Ditto for the Nigerians who have immigrated to the U.S. thus far. The story of Arab and African immigration to Europe shows what happens when you accept a totally un-selected mass of random citizens from these places. I have no problem living among intelligent English-speaking Igbo Nigerians, provided they are not provided with an outlet to politically prosecute grievances against white civilization. (And, to be clear, most do not appear to wish to do so.)
I never made that assertion, I was asking you to elaborate on how you reconciled that statement with "there should not be any meaningful effort to stop them from coming here." You say cultural integration, but you acknowledge the reality of racial coalitions, you just seem to think they are only meaningful for the Black Question and not other cultural or political questions.
Jared Taylor's position is that racial coalitions would be impactful in many other ways and would compete with whites politically and culturally. I can say his prediction on that front has 100% come true. It's still early for Indians, but Taylor's point about all the wealthiest Indian philanthropists donating predominately to Indian causes would be a meaningful leading indicator that the racial coalitions won't respect your desire to only acknowledge them for the Black Question. There is also a huge amount of anecdotal evidence of nepotism from Indians in Silicon Valley culture. You just seem fixated on black crime without regard for how racial coalitions express themselves in all of our other cultural institutions.
Equally or more important than the question of racial coalitions is the question of ethnogenesis. You claim that eugenics is the most important question of the day, but you don't see the risk in haphazardly introducing admixture from all over the world into European society? You are certain that a mixture of everyone is going to be better than a European?
I agree with you that the issue of integrating Indians is presenting some interesting difficulties. You and I probably agree that in many ways this issue is isomorphic to the integration of Jews into gentile countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, I see the story of Jewish integration as basically a qualified success story, whereas you clearly see it as a disaster and as an ill portent for how the Indian situation will pan out. Probably the biggest difference between the two scenarios is that there is just such an incredibly large number of Indians waiting to emigrate, and the prospect of successfully assimilating the kinds of numbers we’re potentially talking about is dire. We simply cannot let the nascent Indian lobby succeed at forcing our countries to let in an endless number of them. If the stream can be cut to a trickle, though, I think the story of Indian immigration to the West will be seen as a success in sixty years.
I don’t know how many more ways I can make it clear that I do not want haphazard immigration from all over the world. No, I do not want billions of Sub-Saharans, or Gulf Arabs, or Venezuelans, or Melanesians. I do believe that the optimal genetic admixture of people in the future will be some combination of European, East Asian, Jewish, and a small but non-negligible amount of Amerindian. You might think this would be a mystery-meat catastrophe, but I think it would be a healthy and vital blending of the best each of these elements would offer.
What's your take on the Hapa ethnogenesis? Early results don't seem great. They seem to have a lot of issues, it's not clear human admixture works in the "best of both worlds" way like me all may wish.
I look at Hapas, imagine a little bit of Jewish admixture (very little, not enough to go around, more likely Jews are subsumed as well) plus Amerindian admixture, plus Indian admixture, imagine them replacing Europeans in America and Europe. I don't know man, seems like a pretty bad ending to the European race to me and I don't think Civilization would be better for it.
Very few Jewish-Chinese Hapas exist beyond the first gen; I personally know quite a few and they’re all first generation. You would need at least 2-3 generations to be able to discern what wasn’t just an identity crisis in my opinion.
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What specific issues do you have in mind? Certainly some seem to deal with an angst about being torn between two different cultures; that’s to be understood, as currently European and East Asian cultures are still sufficiently divergent enough that I can imagine it being quite difficult to seamlessly navigate between both worlds. However, those cultural gaps are already on their way to closing, as Asian countries continue to Westernize. (And as Western countries increasingly integrate aspects of Asian culture.) I see the cultural difficulties hapas face as basically temporary and contingent. Are you pointing to more material genetic issues?
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Hapas seem fine if they assimilate to a consistent culture. Getting stuck between two is bad for them.
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I'll give my two cents, as I am a product of it. Those of us above a certain age are disproportionately likely to be from broken families (relative to non-mixed families of the same social class) and to have parents who are deeply weird in some way e.g. dad is autistic, a sexpat, or an abusive soldier, mom is a former sex worker or couldn't find a husband in her home country and snagged a white guy to have kids with at age 40, etc. This is not a good recipe for creating successful and well-adjusted individuals, but doesn't necessarily reflect what the results would be if you randomly paired off the populations of say Germany and South Korea.
The younger couples I see around me seem more normal, as most met at school or through some tech job in California, and the gender ratios are less skewed i.e. more pairings of Asian men and White women. It's too soon to tell for sure, but I imagine a nation of their descendants would look like a cross between Finland and Japan: a clean, orderly place capable of making substantial contributions to science, technology, and literature, but with a smaller fraction of truly brilliant, one-of-a-kind individuals. There's a certain type of genius I've seen in a few individuals of European, Jewish, or Indian descent that I have never seen in East Asians.
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I'm going to take a different tack than @Hoffmeister25, and say "modern Mainland Chinese are a considerably-bigger threat than other East Asians and to some extent even legacy Chinese". Specifically, the PRC actually does maintain a degree of control over its diaspora, particularly those educated there (its internal propaganda is far more effective than its external) and those with
hostagesclose family members there, which poses an obvious NatSec risk in the not-so-unlikely event of crisis; "don't import a large, organised enemy force" is like Rule 1 of immigration policy.More options
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Minor point- the Hispanics that do well in the US seem to be mostly Mexicans, Cubans and certain other carribean groups, and the upper crust and upper middle classes from elsewhere in Latin America. Centracos(most of the people coming to the border now) do much worse, possibly as badly as blacks.
Yeah, it's frustrating that people, including Hoffmeister who I feel ought to know better, don't property account for European admixture in Latinos when they get defensive of Latino immigration to America and treat it as a monolith.
Kind of like how Hollywood makes Ana de Armas the character who is the stand-in for Hispanic migration to the United States in the film Knives Out. Not this Guatemalan guy.
I don’t know why you think I see all Latin American peoples as a monolith. I live in San Diego, which is very heavily Mexican, but we have communities of other nationalities and I have interacted with them. I’m well aware that Mexican mestizos and brown Dominicans are very different sorts of people on average. The difference is that thus far, America simply has not had to deal with very large numbers of non-Mexican Latinos. I’m as hawkish as you are about keeping it that way.
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Oh for sure, that’s what I meant when I said America has so far done a good job of keeping out masses of people from populations which will be way harder to integrate. Centracos and Venezuelans will be a very different breed (literally) of Latinos.
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There is no reason to criticize West Virginia if you want white people to advocate for their group interest. Jared was rebuffed for doing so by people who understand how group dynamics work. Strategic “divide and conquer” is a well-known tactic used to prevent group cohesion; anything which draws a wedge between white people or highlights differences will ultimately reduce the strength and chance of group advocacy. If the primary problem at hand is an absence of group advocacy, then there are about 10,000 items on the checklist before we reach “discuss West Virginia’s IQ”. Progressives know this all too well, which is why they refuse to highlight that black people disproportionately target Asians in violence. This is why Jared corrected himself in a later tweet —
Consider that the IQ difference between West Virginia and Massachusetts (the highest IQ state) is only 7.1, which is less than the IQ difference between Akita and Okinawa in Japan, at 11 points. If Japan were in conflict with another group, and their primary aim was victory, what do you think their leaders would discuss in the newspapers? “We are all Japanese, we are one nation, one group” etc. This is how things work, because most people are not giga-online debaters with dozens of cognitive nooks and crannies to compartmentalize different concerns. Most people can only hand a few simple takeaways from an entire category of information. You can call this pathetic, but what’s pathetic is failing to understand how things are actually effected in the real world, and then being destroyed because of hubris and ignorance. Do you want to be right on the internet or do you want to change the world? People have made their decision.
Anyway, I don’t find the criticism of Jared’s belief compelling, because you’re looking at states and not neighborhoods. That’s a category error. When white liberals move to a state with more Mexicans, their neighborhoods are likely to have a similar racial makeup as before, and same when they move to suburbs. So I bet they still prefer to live among other white people, per Jared’s claim. And their friend groups are often homogenous. But at the same time, I think Jared’s point is kind of immaterial: the question is what white people would prefer without the vast amount of propaganda about in-group / our-group preferences that they receive through education and media.
[edit] One more point. According to Cremieux,
So the difference between the Ashk IQ and the Sephardi is a whopping 12 points. Ashk and Mizrahi is 25(!). This is significantly greater than the difference between WV whites (~98 when you take black out of WV total) and the average white American IQ (100-103). How often do you hear advocates of the Jewish people talk about this? Almost never, and especially not since the war started — instead only songs about One People. This is very advantageous for a group, obviously.
You can talk about dubious IQ studies you read about in online articles all you want. As someone who has had to deal with them professionally for over 20 years at this point, everyone in West Virginia is fucking retarded. Okay, not everyone, but a high enough proportion that in order to accomplish anything you have to start from that assumption or else you're bound to be incredibly frustrated. My first encounter with this was when I was in college, and got a summer job delivering ice to convenience stores and the like. We were based out of Pittsburgh, but the college kids all got the shitty routes, drivine to far-flung rural areas and the 'hood. There was one week when they put me on service duty, which basically consisted of me taking a minivan around to our sites with an air compressor and blowing dust out of the mechanicals of the boxes and cleaning them up a bit. To avoid any confusion of why a guy in an ice uniform was there poking around the box and not delivering ice, I'd stop inside to tell the clerk what I was doing.
I started with the urban routes and worked my way outward. I never had any difficulty explaining that I was just there to clean the box out to anyone of any ethnicity. Some people would tell me they were low and ask if a delivery was forthcoming or if I could call someone to come out (I don't know and no), but no one was ever confused by my presence. Then, at the end of the week, I hit West Virginia.
"Just so you know, I'm not delivering any ice today. I'm just going to clean the box out with compressed air and make sure everything is working okay."
"Heh?"
"I'm not delivering ice, just cleaning the box."
"Heh?"
(repeat ad nauseum)
I understand that convenience store clerk isn't the most intellectually demanding position and that some places will hire people of limited cognitive capacity to do this work; if it happened once or twice I wouldn't have thought much of it. But it happened at every place I went to in West Virginia. One guy was confused why I was there because he'd already gotten a delivery earlier that day. It got to the point where I stopped telling anyone what I was doing because they were too dim to understand. Then I crossed the river into Ohio and went in as an experiment and everything was suddenly normal again.
After becoming a lawyer, I was told that if I got licensed in West Virginia it would increase my prospects, so I did. I assumed this was because, since Pittsburgh is close to West Virginia, companies in Northern WV or the Panhandle would use Pittsburgh firms. I soon came to realize that all West Virginia companies of a certain size, or foreign companies operating in the state, use Pittsburgh firms for their WV work. When these companies are sued it's common for hearings and the like to be held in Morgantown or Wheeling so the lawyers don't have to drive to Charleston or wherever. During the oil and gas boom most of the legal work was given to Pittsburgh firms. Even ones that opened satellite offices in West Virginia were almost exclusively staffed by people originally from Pittsburgh, excepting maybe one or two locals (usually higher-ups who got sick of having to drive to Pittsburgh).
Now that I have to depose a lot of people from West Virginia, but none of them know anything. I mean anything. Trying to get basic personal information is like pulling teeth. They remember their name, dob, address, wife's name, and maybe their kid's names and ages, if you're lucky. They'll know that their parents are dead, but won't be able to tell you when they died. And I mean that; it's pretty common that they can't even narrow it down to the decade. One guy said he thought his father died in the 1980s; I pulled the obituary and he died in 2016. "Well, I know it was a while ago" was his response. One guy was on disability but he didn't know what for. West Virginia judges are more or less forced to have lax evidentiary standards for the simple reason that if they didn't, no one could provide enough evidence to maintain any kind of lawsuit. I struggle to describe it properly, because it's literally ineffable how utterly moronic these people are compared to those of similar socioeconomic standing in Pennsylvania.
This sounds like someone should be checking their pipes for lead.
I’m not really sure how exaggerated the story is. I’ve been through WV a few times. It was fine. I wouldn’t want to live there but it wasn’t full of morons wherein nothing worked.
In my experience, economic and tourism centers are just fine. It seems to me like OP is interacting with a pretty low tier if it is literally everyone who can't function.
I mean, restaurants exist throughout WV. Some of what OP is saying would make operating a restaursnt just completely impossible.
Well, he is a lawyer. It's possible he's dealing with a low stratum of society, or that West Virginia whites are simply hostile to lawyers for cultural reasons- I've seen it before.
The poster also has posted some (unintentionally) facts about himself that make him come across as smug. I recall the story where he and his friends made fun of a girl (to this day) because she was horrified at the idea that OP routinely committed crime (he doesn’t but he was fucking with her because culturally she was from the wrong set of people in the Burgh).
Maybe people picked up on his smugness and fucked with him but he didn’t realize he was the being trolled and just thought “these guys are idiots.”
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Yeah which leads me to believe the simplistic explanation is that OP is exaggerating. Not saying the clerks weren’t dumb but…I think he is exaggerating
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Also check for parasites; hookworm has been known to have adverse effects on cognition....
IIRC hookworm has been eradicated in the US for long enough that people interacting with lawyers under their own power shouldn’t have been affected, and West Virginia wasn’t the last holdout anyways.
I believe the last holdout of white IQ’s suppressed by poor environment was further south, along the gulf coast and Mississippi River, and that DDT suppressing malaria was the main improvement.
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Now apply the same reasoning to 'white people' wrt 'black people'.
Yeah, if Black Americans were caught up in self-criticism and failed to promote their in-group then it would reduce their political power. What am I missing?
"White" and "Black" could be a divide encouraged by those who want to conquer America.
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Okinawans are not ethnically Japanese. Different people, history, culture, language, phenotypes. Conquered fairly recently.
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One man's Divide and Conquer is another man's Join and Prosper.
That's the very nature of political coalition formation.
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I wrote a top level post earlier this week about- well, I don’t know that it was about this, but it was adjacent- white people not minding Mexican neighbors. People are fine with it.
Race issues, intractable ones, in the US seem specific to blacks, and perhaps specific to AADOS blacks, vs everyone else. Yes subcontinentals are widely disliked elsewhere in the Anglosphere but we don’t have enough of them for it to be a big issue here.
I suspect that if we imported unselected Arabs or whatever, then there would be serious race issues between them and everyone else. But we don’t have those either. American ‘race issues’ are code for ‘blacks and non-blacks not getting along’.
Central Americans? Asians? Mexicans are no longer the majority of illegal immigrants.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/
It's the most common in the sense that it's the single biggest, but it accounts for about a third of illegal immigrants. The lion's share are not Mexicans.
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Centracos and Haitians?
There will not be mass deportations. I’m pretty confident in that. And I’m also pretty confident that if all the illegals had been Mexicans(most aren’t these days), immigration would not be a top political issue.
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I’m not sure it’s strictly a race issue. Arabs are mostly Muslims and Islam has a whole host of really bad ideas embedded in the religion. Even if we don’t allow random Arabs in, conversion is a problem as well because the religion is predicated upon Islam supremacy and imposition of Islamic laws and social structures on any society it encounters. They wouldn’t just impose a Mosque of England and you could live perfectly comfortably practicing your own religion without fear or having to follow the rules. Islam simply cannot accept other beliefs as equal to their own.
Mexicans are okay people, and generally seem to be taking up labor jobs, which I think is why Trump did so well among black men who might be competing for those labor jobs. Whites don’t care so much unless they’re in the trades because they aren’t around them as much.
It seems like Sunni Shiite and Christian Arabs are three different ethnic groups; Christian Arabs make good immigrants and the other two don't. To what extent this is driven by ethnicity/culture vs religion is an open question. I certainly think religion plays a role.
Considering that the main difference between Sunni and Shiites one one hand and Christians on the other is religion, I’m not seeing much of an open question here.
Almost none of these people are converts, and their parents weren’t either. A significant plurality of Arab Christians don’t have grandparents who speak Arabic(they spoke Aramaic instead), the consanguinity rates are much lower, these populations are basically different castes in the same country.
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The one thing he keeps bringing up that I think actually lands, and it's not surprising he started with it because of that, is the unilateral disarmament that is whites not having an affinity group despite every other racial group having one. I don't really know how that point could realistically be discharged though - It's too easy to compare to naziism. Considering the makeup of likely people who would first advocate for and join such a party the comparison would probably not even be unfair.
edit: I should say my preference would be to abolish all the affinity groups, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
This is just misunderstanding how and why these advocacy groups work. WN talk as if minorities are "stronger" than whites collectively due to this advocacy, and that current racial politics are caused by their "winning". This is not how things work outside Zimbabwe et al. Its pretty clear Blacks cant actually threaten the US government if you think about it for a bit. These organisations exist because liberalism thinks they should, and they are given concessions because it thinks they should """win""". A white organisation mirroring them is pointless, because its not the internal structure that makes them work. If you could convice mainstream whites that it would be ok to have one, you have already convinced them on the way there to stop this theater, and then it wouldnt be necessary anymore to have one.
I totally disagree. Affinity groups around tribes or causes is how electoral politics work. Labor organizes around unions, Christians organize around various advocacy organizations, AIPAC, various trade groups, environmental organizations, you name it, all of them are to one degree or another affinity groups. What doesn’t work is individual political actors or very small groups, because without a large bloc, and especially a large bloc with big bags of cash, it’s not really possible to get modern politicians to bother.
I find the opposition to such an idea to be one of the best propaganda wins in recent history. You almost can’t actually have the conversation with people who don’t already agree to the proposition. Everyone else stops up their ears at the mere mention of the idea of a white advocacy group. I’m not proposing that they push segregation or anything of the sort, I’m not looking to disenfranchise people. But even the suggestion that there be a white group with a seat at the table when the ideas of DEI and affirmative action and even other policies around affordability are discussed. It’s like a cognitive kill switch to bring up the idea that they are allowed to have ancestral pride, advocate for their interests, and promote their culture just like everyone else. They might on the margins be okay with Irish groups marching on St. Patty’s, or Germans forming cultural heritage groups to drink beer and eat sausages.
@hydroacetylene because I think your objection is similar.
Why do you think white people vote for the left? On the "tribal power" model, it would have to be something like "Theyre being freeriders in the common white cause, and prioritising their other interests". Does that seem true? It looks to me that they dont just accept minority demands, they way you would give your allies their due. No, they generally consider it a positive to support these demands even at their own expense - not necessarily if that expense gets very large, but still. Dem primary candidates outwoking each other is for whites, the black machine voters gave us Biden.
Politics is never just interest blocks smashing against each other, not until you collapse all the way, at which point its war and diplomacy, rather than politics. Without a shared Nomos there is no polity, but only something like Realist international relations, which US domestic politics is visibly not.
I agree, and it can be valuable to talk about this - what I disagree with is your model of what happens when that changes. You seem to think that theres some stage where theres a politically viable white movement that competes with the other ethnic movements, and sometimes one wins and sometimes the other, and I think you actually win before it gets there. "Stop listening to the black movement" is an easier ask than "start listening to the white movement".
They’re on the left because they value other coalitions they are in. I’m not suggesting that a person can only be in one group, I can be in the NRA and the Labor bloc at the same time. I don’t think you aren’t doing coalition based politics just because a person might be part of several. It’s just that for a bock to win on an issue you have to get enough potential members of that bloc to make that their top issue.
If you are in the NRA and the Labor block and you vote Dem, I would expect that you at least dislike the Dem policies on guns. But white liberals dont dislike Dem policies on race. Why not?
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There is no such thing as ‘white people’ as a monophyletic group. In the US there’s a blue tribe, which voted for the left, and there’s several groups which vote for the right and are called ‘red tribe’ by the motte despite being different groups. The red and blue tribes hate each other more than either of them hate or are hated by minorities, Serb and Bosnian style. Our politics is just Balkans tribalism, like he says, but almost everyone is wrong about what the tribes are.
This would make sense if the "anti-white" policies of the left were actually only anti-red-tribe, and didnt harm blue tribers.
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No, organized black advocacy is definitely a big part of liberalism's political strength. The black political machine is just a huge part of democrat's competitiveness in swing states and it's no accident that the african american wing of the party tends to get its way.
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If your point is just that the groups themselves are epiphenominal to the desire to help minorities and it's instead sympathy for minorities that causes open advocacy for racial discrimination in favor of them that also creates the groups that are purely symbolic then sure. I guess what I object to is whatever egregore allows open unidirectional advocacy against my and my family's interests on the basis of or skin color.
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Right, one of Taylor’s main goals in creating American Renaissance was to try and be the focal point of a movement of racially-conscious whites with impeccable optics: erudite, genteel, conservative-coded. No Roman salutes, no street brawls, no white-trash dysfunction, no scary pagan LARPing, etc. Early American Renaissance conferences featured several Jewish speakers, and Taylor has never made the Jewish Question a topic of his advocacy. However, American Renaissance and its surrounding movement had a separate problem, which is that — due mainly to the proud Southern heritage and pro-Confederate sympathies of Taylor and its other early figures like Sam Dickson and Sam Francis — it struck many as having a distinct odor of that other epochal white identitarian movement, the Ku Klux Klan.
Now, to be clear, Taylor himself is squeaky-clean: Yale-educated, a successful businessman, multilingual, an unimpeachable family life, and not a whiff of violence or disreputable behavior. The immediate circle he cultivated was respectable, denouncing anything resembling racial terrorism. He believed he could create a genuine intellectual movement, like the early Progressives, winning people over to his cause through reasoned argumentation and leading by example. This didn’t save him from being labeled a white supremacist, a hate-monger, and all other manner of opprobrious terms by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center. The most genteel figure imaginable was still basically a Klansman and an evil cult leader in the eyes of those people.
Nowadays, many of the leading lights on the so-called Dissident Right — which is largely an outgrowth of the intellectual current Jared Taylor helped create and nurture — do indeed have more of the disreputable and optically-unfortunate tendencies which more strongly trigger respectable people’s Nazi Alarms. It’s unfortunate that honorable men such as Taylor couldn’t do more to mainstream their cause back when it still could have avoided these failure modes. It’s encouraging, though, to see that many of their most dire predictions appear not to have come true to the extent they feared.
My initial reaction to this quokka-esque faith in reasoned discourse was “lol, lmao even”
But then I realized that Taylor is the product of a different time, a time when public intellectuals really did have some cachet and, even if they weren’t household names per se, they still had some power to set the conversation and shift people’s opinions through logos. The Mont Pellerin Society, for example, was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Reagan/Thatcherite revolution of the 1980s.
I wonder if Taylor will embrace the new meta, or if he will cling to the antiquated ideals of the Ivy League debating society to the bitter end.
Jared Taylor is 73; a man that old does not change his mind.
It is death that causes the lack of change. Will X lead to consequence Y or Z? Elon predicts Y. The years tick by. In twenty years time X will have caused either Y or Z. It is becoming easier to predict with each passing year. Eventually every-one will agree how it turned out.
When will Elon change his mind? If he is old enough to die before the twenty years are up, he won't bother. He isn't going to live to see it and will not be personally embarrassed.
If instead he gets wonder rejuvenation treatment, and fifty years more life, the future becomes more real. He starts to care about where trends are leading because he anticipates seeing the eventual outcome. If Y is starting to look like a bad bet, Elon will change his mind.
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rather beside the point but does Hanania look particularly ghoulish in this video? Almost seems like he's wearing eyeshadow/liner
because he's not white. looking good on video typically requires fully European phenotype , although blacks pull it off too. Jews look the worst. that is what I have observed at least. whites tend to have a more angular or square face and solid lower jaw which looks better on video. But jews make up for it by being articulate, high verbal IQ.
Hanania has a relatively European phenotype, just a strange one. If you look up Palestinian Christians (ie. his people) they’re relatively phenotypically diverse but many could pass as Sicilians. Jews are also diverse, even discounting half-gentiles like Chalamet and Johansson, Paul Rudd is 100% ashkenazi and widely considered a handsome actor (for his age etc but also in general).
Press X to doubt. He's like at least 50% Italian by SOME kind of proxy.
That's just what being an ashkenazi is: Some sort of combination between Levantine and Italian.
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In the sense that the most widely-accepted theory is that all Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Jewish-Roman intermarriage in the first few centuries CE, sure.
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He's considered handsome for a comedic actor.
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Hanania is white. He's an ugly effeminate white, but he is white. Nobody looks at him and thinks he's brown.
Generally speaking Levantine Christians like Hanania look relatively European. The oddities of Hanania’s appearance are related to just having a weird and slightly sinister face, which is something that can happen to anyone of any tribe.
Well yes. Some of my best friends are Maronite or Melkite, and they just look Greek. Levantine Christians have been considered white for ages and ages.
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How do you square this with how many Hollywood celebrities (particularly actresses), whose job it is to look good on video, are Jewish? Some of the most attractive and telegenic women in the world are Ashkenazi.
I posit it's easier for jewish women . the difference is not as great between gentile vs. Jewish women
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His skin also looks unusually smooth.
Presuming this is more how he looks normally: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YnvZto0do5o
I'd guess that he had particularly bad bags under his eyes that day and is either using a beauty filter to try to cover them up or he had a friend apply some studio makeup.
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If any of you has seen Winter's Bone, the all-white Missouri community it depicts gives off a definite vibe of hostility towards outsiders (whatever their race). I personally would be too intimidated to set foot there.
And this is besides the place having few or no jobs.
A friend of mine who is an accountant got sick of living in the Portland area and moved to rural Kentucky where he was able to buy a lot of land. He's been there for two years and can't find any clients in his new state. He's a good networker, but they do not trust outsiders (and, according to him, are largely too dumb to understand what he does). It's friendly but he's not one of them. He gets a majority of his new clients from our referrals in the purpler Portland suburbs and comes out twice a year for in-person meetings.
People who are dirt poor tend not to have any need for accountants. (Or if they do, they can't afford them and have to make do)
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Having been to rural Kentucky, it is genuinely very dire. I’ve never seen that kind of visible poverty before. I’m talking little burnt-out shacks in the hills where people clearly live. The people I met there struck me as markedly stunted. I’m sure there are plenty of capable people interspersed throughout this population — and I’m sure there are plenty who were born in such circumstances but got the hell out because they were too good for that life — but overall there just doesn’t seem to be any significant amount of human capital left in the region.
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Have you considered that people with all their money in their checking account aren't going to generate work for accountants?
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You're telling me a fictional movie made by Hollywood elites made you think poor white communities hate you? Damn I wonder how that could have happened.
To be fair the book the movie is based upon is much the same in this regard and is written by a white ex Marine, high school dropout from the Ozarks in Missouri. Whether it is accurate or not I do not know but those elements don't come from Hollywood. It's similar to Vance's Hillbilly Elegy in that regard, in that it is written about a group by someone from the group. Though a fictional story in this case.
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Yes, but that place was hostile towards its own members too. Maybe LESS hostile, but it's not as though young J.Law was treated nicely.
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Well, there's a natural modus tollens to consider when looking at the modus ponens there. It was expected that Latin-American immigrants would not stop voting in Latin-American politics after they came to the US. Now they're voting for Trump. Did they actually stop? Or is Trump actually more similar to Latin-American socialism than we expected?
It's kind of a matter of internet dissident lore how leftists cling to their mythos of being the anti-elite underdog and champion of the small and oppressed, even as their creed becomes the faith of rich and noble Brahmins yearning to defend their privilege. Perhaps more attention is due to how this is reflected on the other side - are rightists clinging to a mythos of being the noble elites of word and deed seeking to protect their rightfully earned place at the helm, but actually becoming the ideology of bombastic People's Tribunes promising to bring down the enemy elite and distribute gibs to their socioethnic clients? With some squinting, is the promise of Trump (imagined and played up by fans), distributor of free tendies, rewarder of loyals, crystalizer of traitors, not quite similar to that of a Perón, Bolsonaro or even (with identification filed off) Evo Morales?
Latin America isn't all socialists, Milei is a latin american. Latin America is populist, clownish and doesn't have as much long term thinking.
As soon as Milei stops the bleeding a bit they'll go back to voting for socialists again.
That's what truly unfortunate about it all. Argentina had the world's best performing stock market (in USD terms) last year. However I still wouldn't think it safe to invest there on a longer time horizon than 2 years. In a way it's like a longer half life 3x leveraged ETF: excellent for making money in the short term if things go well but woe unto he who leaves his money in there over time.
(Aside: this is yet another example showing why it is better for humanity if the common man has his ability to influence the world restricted)
I mean, UPRO has outperformed SPY going on decades now...
That's only because SPX has been getting artificially juiced and prevented by the FED from falling since the financial crisis (note that UPRO was inaugurated in 2009 so all graphs for it start after then). Of course the leveraged strategy overperforms when there's a big force preventing the underlying from naturally correcting. I don't think the Argentinian market has a similarly strong backer for it, and anyways if the Argentinian equivalent of the fed tried to do something like this their economy would shit the bed and then interest rate you'd need to pay to afford 3x leverage would likely wipe out any gains (not to even factor in currency depreciation since presumably you care about USD performance rather than in pesos).
Sounds like a frustrated bear excuse, my guy. If the government’s holding the line, it’d be stupid not to leverage. It makes no difference whether it is naturally a good strategy, or if the government is artificially propping it up. It has been working for 16 years, so you can’t use it as an example of a strategy that’s likely to fail on a 2 year timeframe.
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Latin America has a couple of really good leaders right now. I’m long on El Salvador and Argentina.
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Trump as a caudillo is not a new comparison- it's just usually been democrats making it. Charismatic leader promising to set things right by rule through force of personality is kinda true.
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To be fair, political parties are clinging to images of themselves that are most likely to get themselves power. They don’t exactly have a loyalty to “the people” except in the sense that in a democratic system, the legitimacy of a government is supposedly conferred by plebiscite. But I don’t think any politician really spends so much as ten minutes a day worrying about the welfare of the people in his own country. They care about winning elections, they care about pushing agendas important to their bloc. But I don’t imagine either one of them care very much about what narrative wins them power. I expect the democrats to drop the blue collar thing pretty soon, not because they’re going to change their mind, but because it’s seen by the general public as false. Nobody sees the democrats as in the corner of the common man. The democrats represent the PMC and fashionable identity politics causes (the kind that the PMC likes, rather than things that make life better for minorities). They represent the manicured hand of the upper classes who only see plebeians through the lenses of Noblesse Obliges. The right represents the blue collar workers.
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It was never possible to avoid them, there are large swaths of the country (eg the Rural south, Texas, portions of California) where the "minority" population has been there as long if not longer than the "white". Hanania is just another member of the PMC raging at his percieved loss of privilege.
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Time machines aren’t real, and nobody has the option to return to 1950’s California. That ship sailed and is not coming back. All I can do is look toward the future, try and game out how different trend could possibly develop, and do my small part to try and make sure the better outcomes are realized rather than the worse ones.
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CA in the 50's.
Have you seen the newspaper advertisements for the post-war new build ranch style homes in the new / first suburbs?
It was short lived though, you can see the degeneracy and decay begin to set as depicted in Dragnet.
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Hanania did help bring it on himself by intentionally riling up the Chuds during the H1B visa kerfuffle.
The comments on that reddit post are not as one-sided as I expected, looks like this issue splits redditors differently than the other wedge issues.
When someone namefags they declare themselves a traitor to anons everywhere. If they were formerly one of them then they have betrayed their philosophy, their community and themselves. It is natural for those who remain in that community to attack them with everything they have. Calling it crab bucket behaviour inspired by envy is misunderstanding the game board.
As you mention, Hanania trolls all the time, and he especially trolls white nationalists. I don't see how turnabout isn't fair play.
I actually changed my mind about the crab bucket bit and edited that out before I saw your response to it. I wrote it before I spent some more time reading Hanania's timeline and losing the will to disapprove of the people attacking him.
I forgive him for namefagging because he didn't start doing it until he was outed by a journalist and made unemployable. Namefagging is his only way to make a living now, he has no choice. He could have been a right wing youtuber if he wanted, but instead he decided to picks fights with his former comrades for twitter-clout.
JD Vance did the same thing in 2016 and he was forgiven. So it's never too late to repent, I guess.
Ah it's all good, I just wanted to emphasise the trolling aspect - Hanania has fun with it, and while I'm sure there are a couple of trolls just losing their shit I think most of his responders are also having fun with it - they're playing the game from the opposite angle.
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The more I read of Hanania over time, the more respect I lose.
His opinions are all over the map and impossible to pin down. He's right about the gribblers and maga conservatives being and embracing stupidity, of course. But pinning himself in the neoliberal camp as a kind of anti-maga race realist zionist(?) is getting old fast.
More specifically, it's the smug eternal dunking that's been getting insufferable
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Assuming that Blacks are inferior to whites and whites are equal to Asiatics, still doesn't get you to supporting infinite Asiatic migration to white countries and infinite white immigration to Asiatic ones. When the next war errupts with an Asiatic country, the coethnics of that Asiatic country US will again face brutal persecution, which would be lacking if they were white.
And because Asiatics are perceived to be intellectual equals to whites, their future persecution is all the more likely: if Japanese-Americans were as smart as mere rats, like Americans depicted them as, they wouldn't credibly be considered a threat. But because the enemy is both weak and strong and Americans in their heart of hearts knew Japanese Americans were at least their intectual equal, Americans knew they posed a threat, if they weren't loyal.
Likewise supporting infinite white immigration into Asiatic countries makes you no better than open border types who consider all socities with functioning credit cards to be equal: immigration even of equal quality populations breeds distrust and disrupts the assabiyah. The few white Americans in Japan, despite your claims that their IQ is equal to that of natives, act in the same manner as immigrants to white countries do: refuse to learn the language, write smear pieces alleging persecution or spread deceits inteding to besmirch the reputation of the host country. See Debito Arudou, Jake Adelestein, David Atkinson, neither showing the amount of respect to the country which opened its doors to them, I assume you would demand from immigrants show to the US.
If white nationalists want to be seen as something to conservationists, who can care about pandas without hating snub nosed monkeys, they should refrain from promoting dissolution of non-white peoples. Admixing South Koreans to some subgroups of US whites could increase their average IQ, but it would decrease diversity, and a principled white nationalist who cares about diversity would oppose it, just as he would oppose any attempt to destroy as a nation any ethnicity, no matter how low its average IQ.
Afford Asiatic peoples the same rights you, Hoffmeister25, have in the past said Black people also deserve: the right to their own states and with their own immigration policies.
I see no reason to believe that this is true. (And, to be clear, the supposed “brutal persecution” of Japanese-Americans during World War 2 was actually nothing of the sort.)
I made it explicit in my post that I do not support “infinite immigration” of anyone to anywhere. Immigration numbers should be controlled and manageable, to limit cultural disruption and strains on education, the job market, and public accommodations.
I don’t care about diversity in that sense. I want the world to become more interconnected and culturally-homogenous over time; I just want the culture the world converges on to be advanced, Eurasian in character rather than some oppositional Third World miasma, and to value the things I value. I’d be perfectly happy if in 300 years nobody speaks Korean any longer, as long as that means that people with Korean ancestry have been successfully amalgamated into a thriving, technologically-advanced, proud world culture. This will mean a flattening and merging of white cultures as well; I don’t care if anyone is still speaking Dutch in 300 years either. This process of cultural blending between the peoples of Eurasia and the Americas needs to take place gradually and not by force or coercion, but I do believe it will take place.
At the risk of drawing booing, hissing and throwing of rocks I will confess that I'm super woke in this regard, and actually do care about diversity. Humanity transformed into stirred gruel of averaged out geno, pheno and culture types sounds very unappealing to my sensibilities, even if despite the numerical supermajority of Indians and Africans they somehow fail to dominate this gestalt.
Let the hundred flowers bloom, I say. The only realistic obstacle to what modern left winger would perceive as consummate planetary diversity is ironically the rejection of diversity on the local scale through self segregation and political borders - unfashionable as it is today. Interesting how through seemingly subtle tweaking of what diversity means we can arrive at dramatically different policies.
I'm aware that, to an extent, homogenization is natural in a world made smaller through technological means. With any luck, space colonization will prove a lasting obstacle to this.
Idle curiosity: how many languages do you speak fluently?
Just English. I used to be conversational in Spanish, albeit at nowhere near a high enough level to discourse intellectually in it; my Spanish has atrophied significantly from disuse, though.
I do expect that English will probably be the global lingua franca if the homogenization I’m expecting becomes a reality; while I love the English language very much (duh, I speak it, it feels like home to me, of course I think it’s the best) I also welcome language reforms (especially spelling reforms) in order to make it a truly suitable global (and later interstellar) human language.
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Couldn't Taylor have replied that Idaho is growing incredibly fast, and it was always considered one of the white bastion states?
If the DR have trouble criticizing white people degeneracy, I have to wonder if they've actually read the most general level foundational media. Even reading the Turner Diaries beyond the day of the rope memes would show what the real racists thought about white people using drugs, getting fat and watching TV.
Is there any of Taylor's work you'd point to as an introduction? I only ever saw the famous Japanese TV interview (subs > dubs), and I have to admit that excessive Moldbug exposure poisoned my attitude to amren more than I should have allowed it to.
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