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Notes -
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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