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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36204 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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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:

  1. Criticism of male circumcision

  2. Criticism of Fetterman, a dem candidate as well as Biden somewhat

  3. Criticism of reducing meritocracy in special forces

  4. Fairly anodyne Canadian demographic predictions

  5. Mild criticism of some drama in minecraft modding where leftists are turfing out a vaguely rightist/anti-left modder

  6. Mild comparison between Griner and Jan 6 as political prisoners

  7. Mild suggestion that some/many gays would be happier in a heterosexual lifestyle

  8. Anodyne post about AI

  9. FcFromSSC suplexing rationalism and Scott's mistake theory, to great applause

  10. Discussion of weaponization of the FBI against the left in the past and the right today

  11. 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?

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...

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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