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Notes -
You say 'this forum, as a splinter faction of the rationalist movement skews wealthy, secular, cosmopolitan, college-educated, and frankly Democrat' but also 'there is a lot of talk here on the motte about progressives controlling the narrative' and 'ostensible right wingers lamenting the progressives' omnipresence and inevitable victory'.
What if this forum just isn't terribly Democratic, even though it might be wealthy, secular, cosmopolitan and well-educated? That's why people complain so much about progressives. They're not just ostensible rightists, they're rightists. Just look at this week - we have:
Criticism of male circumcision
Criticism of Fetterman, a dem candidate as well as Biden somewhat
Criticism of reducing meritocracy in special forces
Fairly anodyne Canadian demographic predictions
Mild criticism of some drama in minecraft modding where leftists are turfing out a vaguely rightist/anti-left modder
Mild comparison between Griner and Jan 6 as political prisoners
Mild suggestion that some/many gays would be happier in a heterosexual lifestyle
Anodyne post about AI
FcFromSSC suplexing rationalism and Scott's mistake theory, to great applause
Discussion of weaponization of the FBI against the left in the past and the right today
Discussion of Kanye's cancellation, with the comments going into what probably would be called anti-semitism by the people who are calling Kanye anti-semitic.
Now I'm distilling long posts into short summaries, so a great deal of nuance is lost. But I think we can conclude that this forum is not Democratic. There's nothing clearly pro-Democratic that I can see at the top level.
This forum is an offshoot of rationalism but it's a pretty distant offshoot. Yud-Scott-motte and now motte.org... And let's not forget there were a fair few rightists back at the start on lesswrong, the whole hbd and neoreaction crowd had some presence there.
In the spirit of Tulsi Gabbard leaving the Democratic Party because her pro-meritocracy, anti-war, vaguely anti-PC views weren't really tolerated there, I think we should admit that this isn't an anti-PC Democratic forum, a forum for observing the culture war from an ivory tower, or a 'gray tribe' forum (how could it be given the level of anti-crypto sentiment, given gray tribe per Scott is supposed to be nerdy, tech-savvy libertarians). I think this is a rightist forum. Maybe that's too close to consensus building, I don't know. Is it wrong to observe a tendency?
Fundamentally, the motte is for two things:
Gawking at/criticizing the latest thing the wokes did. Wondering whatever will the non-wokes do in their guerrilla war.
Peacocking elaborate or strangely alluring normie-repellent beliefs.
Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s just what the forum is for.
It’s cool, we’re all here because we’re female peacocks. No hate <3
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No, but I think you're wrong. If you need a pithy and somewhat dismissive summary of TheMotte's political inclinations, it's "Anti-Woke." Not by design or mission, but that's pretty much where most of us are. "Rightist" is definitely a subset of "anti-Woke," but it is only a subset.
There are exceptions, there are definitely hard-right people here, and not a lot of hard-leftists, but this place is only "rightist" according to the woke definition of rightist, which defines anyone in opposition to them as rightist, if not fascist.
Does anti-woke also neatly cover lockdown/vaccine skepticism? I think that the most accurate characterization of themotte's politics is Contrarian.
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I find this kind of consensus building more obnoxious than the kind where people are overtly culture warring. Stop trying to put me/us in a box with a neat label. It's my deepest political wish for both the steaming piles of refuse mascuradaing as political parties in the US to fail and be completely discredited. Attempting to classify me as Democrat or Republican based on which you model as most disliking the establishment is a waste of time. Democrats are the ones credibly trying to shut places like this down and thus my dislike for them is at the forefront, when Republicans are in power and try to shut this place down for republican coded reasons suddenly we'll all be modeled as nakedly democrat shills.
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I wouldn't be so sure. There are definitely some right-wing people on the Motte, but I've always had the feeling that the Motte is more "anti-woke" than it is truly "right-wing."
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I agree. As far as I can see we are at present predominantly right-wing. It's the thousand witches scenario many expected.
This place needs disagreement to work, so this situation isn't healthy.
I'd like to say my thanks to any leftists, centrists and contracontrarians who stick around us anyways; the Motte needs them and given current trends needs a few more of them.
Agree and I'd possibly like to see a second upvote/downvote button that people could use to indicate "well-argued" or something like that. Even if I disagree with their points I hate seeing our resident lefties get downvoted to 0 and dogpiled every time they make a post. I would like to think that would help, but there's also the future where it becomes an I disagree even more button...
The irony of your comment being downvoted, lol
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I think it might help to have only the positive variant of the "good argument even though I disagree" button. Or maybe just a "this is a Quality Contribution" button with a public counter.
One issue with reducing AAQC to a button is that button will likely get pushed much more often than people currently go through the "report-->AAQC" process, which would add a bunch more content to the mod stack for filtering into the AAQC report.
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Isn't that what upvote is supposed to mean already? Votes are supposed to mean "adds/subtracts from the conversation" not "agree/disagree".
In practice it’s more of a popularity marker. I think Southkraut’s version of the idea is better thought out
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Agree and I thought this was the big issue with leaving Reddit. Recruitment of non in-group people versus evil corp control.
Recruitment in general seems to be a problem. Unsurprisingly, I suppose - everyone had seen that coming. What worries me is that, to my knowledge, we still don't have any solution for it.
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I think spending time in a legitimately republican space, like, oh I don't know, Gab for an online example, will cure you of the notion that The Motte is regular conservatives. I don't know whether this is a libertarian space anymore, either. Personally I have my heart reflexively beating libertarian but the blood runs slow, so to speak. Everyone everywhere is more of a conflict theorist since 2020, and I have been awed and dismayed by the power of collective action.
The motte isn’t a place for regular conservatives, it’s a place for conservatives who are almost dysfunctionally highly cerebral
(Not an insult, that’s what makes it interesting to me)
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I wasn't saying this place is a Republican forum or a conservative forum, merely that it wasn't Democratic and was rightist. You can be right-wing without being conservative. My reply was to a post saying that this place sort of was Democratic.
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Yeah. I will grant there aren't many progressives in there, and there were already precious few on the subreddit.
Uncharitably, I'd ascribe that to most progressive beliefs and arguments simply not holding up to basic scrutiny outside of a forum where they can generate the appearance of consensus through sheer numbers. The bog-standard "crime and poverty are due to oppression/discrimination/environmental factors alone" progressive position collapses into an absolute shambles when it runs into the hard data around genetic effects et. al., EVEN if we decide to leave race out of it entirely. Once that crashes down, they have very little else to hide behind when challenged on a particular progressive policy's failure.
More charitably, it would be extremely frustrating to have to define your exact position and how it differs from the normies and weirdos and extremists that most people hear your belief system from over and over again when you interact with a crowd of people who don't share your priors. There's enough 'flavors' of lefties that one lefty could come in with a particular take and get rejected because they read like a standard progressive when they in fact have more nuance or have a different basis for said belief.
I hope that this forum isn't now the one with the implicit consensus due to overwhelming numbers.
But I've gotten sufficient pushback on some of my zanier takes that I don't think we're an echo chamber just yet.
At least you realize you're being uncharitable. I like reading this forum in part to try to understand how the right thinks about their ideas/policies; I'm pretty sure "The Cruelty Was Never the Point" despite how often the left is unable to come up with a reason for a policy they oppose and conclude their outgroup must be evil science-deniers, there's just no other explanation. Pretty sure "evil science-denier" is unlikely to ever be a useful way to model a person/group.
I do want to drop in with what I understand of the left's point of view on things sometimes, but often there's just such a large inferential gap that I don't think I'm up to the task. And the inferential gap goes the other way, too, of course: sometimes when having in-person political discussions I try to steelman the right's POV based on arguments I read here and often have trouble not having it reduced by my conversation partner to "but the right is wrong about $FACT" (similar to your comment about how the left is obviously wrong about racism if you look at the facts).
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We've done an epic's of navel gazing on this. I don't think what you're saying is true, or "truer" than a similar narrative you'd see on /r/politics about conservatives just not liking science.
The two competing theories common here are (a) It's group dynamics. People with relatively mainstream beliefs are less motivated to hang out here, more likely to leave due to evaporative cooling; and people do not bother discussing what mainstream beliefs they have here, because they have other places (b) modern leftism has become highly correlated with a brand of social justice ethics which does not countenance debating or platforming nazis, and people who subscribe to it are repelled by The Motte's basic constitution.
Do we have any out-and-out Nazis/White Nationalists?
I grant there are racists and fascists, but I don't think I've read anyone with either ironic or unironic 'gas the jews' positions.
Nazis no (at least not openly declared), but white nationalists, yes.
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My position is something close to White Nationalism, and I’ve been open about that since joining the community. I know that there are others here who hold similar views, although I don’t know how many of them openly identify with that term or that cluster of identifiers.
It seems like you might be setting the bar for “out-and-out Nazis/White Nationalists” very unreasonably high, if “gas the Jews” is the cutoff point. I don’t know a single person, even in the most “extreme” White Nationalist spaces I frequent, who would advocate a repeat of the Holocaust. Obviously that’s not what qualifies someone as a White Nationalist.
When you say 'repeat the holocaust,' do you mean the literal methods by which the extermination of Jews was enacted?
or do you mean you also wouldn't support a systemic and sustained effort to remove persons of Jewish heritage from any position of authority, power, influence, or wealth and to exile them completely from your country?
Because I'm capable of distinguishing between "Nazis," "White Supremacists," and "White Nationalists" to the extent a person only holds some views but not others.
A white nationalist who supports allowing white persons to have a nation in which they are allowed to exist and to exclude other races and defend themselves from enemies (kinda like Israel) is different from a White Supremacists who ALSO believes in the inherent inferiority of other races is different from a Nazi who believes all that AND that Whites/Aryans should rule over all other races.
So I just wanna know if and how your pro-white positions are coextensive with anti-semite positions.
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It's probably worth noting that the people who make a habit of publicly sneering at rationalism have been accusing Yud-Scott-motte and now motte.org of being rightists, or at least crytpo-rightists, for years. The "rationalists" are furthermore in many ways the cultural inheritors of the cypherpunks--the community is overwhelmingly IT-adjacent by profession, or was last time we checked. The cypherpunk culture, in turn, was heavily libertarian, which is not the same as "rightist" even though libertarians in U.S. politics tend to get lumped in with Republicans more often than Democrats. The meme of libertarians who want gay marijuana farmers defending their private crops with automatic weapons is a much better description of the "tendencies" I see in this space than "rightist."
By curating a space where people can test their ideas in a broad Overton window, I do think we tend to encourage the discussion of political heresies, and since our U.S. cultural institutions are dominated by the left and/or the extreme left, the discussions here tend to be about things the left and/or extreme left would prefer to taboo--for the simple reason that other things can be discussed elsewhere, but many of these things can not. And I've gotten many great responses to my Fetterman thread that are clearly not pro-Republican, and I've gotten clear leftist pushback on the "groomer" discussion, too. That's a long way from what I see on genuinely "rightist" spaces.
Would a good metric be: how do people react to new accounts with no credibility posting shitty hard rightist takes, how do people respond to new accounts with no credibility posting shitty hard leftist takes?
The rightist takes tend to get "Nice try sneerclub." They get viewed as trolls trying to bait mottizens into saying something regrettable. "Yeah sure two day old account, you were just wondering about the holocaust/trans kids/armed rebellion against the state in favor of Christian Nationalism."
The leftist takes tends to just get downvoted to oblivion.
I'm not sure if you're saying that means anything, and I'm not sure it actually means anything either.
We're not going to see too many fake-left trolls because the right doesn't gain anything from saying "that forum is infested with leftists"--if they wanted to find a forum infested with leftists there are so many places they could go and they won't need to fake anything to do it. Also, regardless of whether they're sincere or not, the right has to support free speech right now, so they're probably not going to try to shut down a forum for being leftist.
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As one of the few dyed-in-the-wool, practicing rightists on here (in that I have multiple kids and had my first in my mid 20s, come from a red tribe family, have been a practicing orthodox Catholic since a young age, never considered myself a leftist or "liberal" even in high school or college, etc) I don't think this place is "right-wing" in the way that normies would usually use the word. I know this because in the past I've gotten into tedious arguments with people about whether god exists, or why the family is important, the intrinsic value of human life, the existence of only two sexes/genders etc, all issues that most normal right-wing folks (i.e. not Twitter monarchists or whatever) would just consider self evident or settled. That would happen if everyone here were run of the mill right wingers.
There's a large majority of anti-progressives here that includes libertarians/Grey tribe people, transhumanists, and disillusioned leftists who just want to go back to "tits and beer" leftism. They all have way more in common with each other than they do with me in that they think that a lot of recent "progress" is good but there are just some problematic bits that have recently popped up, and they especially dislike the rise of the evangical Woke religion since it is an exclusive faith that refuses to make common cause with heretics. That's why there's so much bitching about woke stuff.
I can accept just about any progressive result, so long as I'm still allowed to speak freely saying why I disagree with it (if I even do). I am okay with higher taxes. I am okay with gay marriage. I am okay with trans people using the bathrooms that they want to. I am okay with... a lot of things! But when there does happen to be something I'm not okay with, it is a requirement that I be able to say so clearly.
The modern left has lost this, and so they've lost me. I don't know what I "should" call myself, given that I align with lots of progressive goals and am not bothered by many others, but the talk about speech creating unsafety or harm and therefore needing to be blocked HAS to go. An inability to talk about something is an inability to take a step back if you're wrong, and that can't be allowed to stand. We must be able to realize when we are wrong and correct course, or else we can become permanently wrong and never fix our problems.
Letting people say stupid and wrong and even hateful things is the price we pay for the ability to change ourselves for the better, because obviously the powerful will immediately abuse any system that silences people (even if ostensibly for good reason) to silence those who challenge them - and they can do that even if no real harm or hate was there, because they are the powerful and can bend the rules to their whims.
This is so completely blindingly obvious to me that I am baffled every time a progressive friend of mine says we need to deplatform so-and-so. And every time I try to explain, they refuse to entertain the possibility of abuse. "No, no, we will only censor the bad people, don't you get it?" No, I think you are the one who doesn't get it.
So I get off the train. I'll vote for measures and policies that do progressive things, but I won't vote for leaders who don't understand the value of free speech - lately, that means I don't vote for very many on the left. Maybe that means I can't count myself as a leftist anymore, but I certainly don't think it makes me a rightist.
The best way I've heard to frame it is Pluralist vs. Authoritarian. South of Center vs. North of Center is the other way I'd put the same thing...it's entirely different than left vs. right. Generally speaking, this place is mostly South of Center, with a few North of Center people around.
But yeah, I largely agree with you, and I'm against the anti-Pluralism that's floating around, left center and right. That's largely because I'm a policy wonk, and I think the details matter and I think because of that it's essential that we can actually discuss and disagree about the issues, and not break everything down into a power-based binary.
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It is a "gray tribe" forum, in the sense that the "gray tribe" has never been nothing but blue tribe members who don't like (many) blue tribe policies.
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Also to note: I can't remember the entire demographic profile of the old place, but there are quite a few people here (myself included) who are neither American nor resident in the US, and whose political allegiances hence can't be cleanly mapped onto a Democrat-Republican axis.
I'm not even American but as long as you're in the Anglosphere or West generally it sort of works.
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