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I am a longtime lurker on the site and wanted to pose a question to those that commonly post on the evils of wokeism. I have noticed that many posts seem to point to an increasingly nebulous boogeyman--one that could really use to be defined.
What is woke? What do you define as woke? Is there a difference between one that is socially conscious and someone who is woke?
"Woke" applies to an individual or work for whom all of the following hold:
The first category is to exclude those who are socially conscious of issues that aren't just a scheme to enrich themselves, which is a key feature of woke thought, and covers the standard "diversity over meritocracy" complaint. Compare stealing offense; they take that which isn't being given to them because it improves their social standing to do so (this is bullying/political strategy 101).
The second category serves to indict so-called "reverse" discrimination as discrimination- the "I can't be sexist, I only hire women" thing (which is usually used as an excuse for unevenhanded treatment when those who interpret the law are unwilling or unable to address it, typically because of the above). Again, if this occurs but isn't intended as nakedly self-enriching at the same time, it's more morally neutral than it is when perpetrated with intent; seeking eradication denies opportunity for education (hardened hearts and all that).
The third category must exist for free speech reasons; after all, are you truly free to possess selfish, illiberal views if you at no point are allowed to voice them? Steven Universe [for instance] thus cannot truly be considered a "woke show" even though it (and its creators) arguably satisfy (1) and (2), because it's done well and actually has something to say; compare how Lolita generally escapes the "child pornography" category.
The same principles we used to be granted offense to, and punish, obscenity serve to similarly convict wokeism and its practitioners- intentional, anti-social, and without any other mitigating merit. (Which is why I borrowed the Miller test for this definition.)
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First, see who uses the word Woke. It is used by anti-Woke types to categorize practices and beliefs employed by upper class residents and aspirants to effect resource transfer from social actors that are not themselves sufficiently engaged in these practices and beliefs.
Said practices and beliefs are:
What results is that one party can declare themselves whole and distinct from another, define its own outcomes for itself and who is responsible for it, and demand the responsible party be the one to change in order to redress the disparity. Principally, it gives license to a a party to declare its own aggrievement and thus its place in the queue for restitution.
No one actually calls themselves Woke since 2022, but instead there still is an assertion that the above principles are inalienable states of reality. Go to MSNBC, Slate, Salon, and see how it is constantly asserted that whites are responsible for the poor state of blacks, even when whites do not claim any ownership or do anything to effect black failure. And wokeness, by being definitionally nebulous, allowed everyone to label themselves as such when trendy and shed it when not.
The defitional warfare employed by anti-Woke vs the 'woke' is precisely because the 'woke' party has shed its names multiple times as the logical incongruities of the various principles get associated with a concrete term, exposing the inability of the stated principles to mesh together in reality even without active actions by the opposition these principles define themselves against. Woke was previously Social Justice, which was previously Political Correctness. Given that being Woke has fallen out of favor so rapidly all the practitioners are now claiming they never advocated woke policies, yet in observed reality there is endless proof of the presence of DEI corporate policies, thinkpieces about lesbians being transphobic for not giving blowjobs etc from the early 2010still early 2020s.
Wokism is externalizing responsibility by fiat, and appropriating high valence moral principles to effect desired outcomes. What ends up happening is not that everything turns out to truly be racism), but that racism becomes so nebulously redefined that it does not matter anymore. If everything is racist, nothing is racist. Woke crybullying started reaching a stop when everything was being declared fascist, and more practitioners started realizing people were getting increasingly alright with being called as such.
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I think there are many possible definitions that are equally good, because the term really represents a cluster of beliefs that are strongly correlated (in the sense that a big fraction of the people who believe in any one of them believe in any given other one). One possible definition that is perfectly serviceable is: the belief that
(1) there are various ways to partition society into groups of people, including but not necessary limited to "race" (as understood by Americans: "white, black, Asian, Hispanic, ..."), sex and/or gender (male, female, self-identifications that are taken by those who hold them to be of the same type such as nonbinary, ...) and sexual orientation, and the groups under each of these partitionings can be ranked by a quantity denoted as privilege (so you can identify the more and less privileged race, gender etc.), and
(2) there are certain important outcomes (income, incarceration or lack there of, occupation of high-status professions, representation in high-status media...), such that it is (a) it is normally the case that more privileged groups attain them at higher rates than the less privileged ones, (b) morally bad when/that this is the case, and (c) when this happens, the responsibility/guilt, and hence the burden of redress (by reparations, punishment or active redistribution of the object of the outcomes), lies with the respective most privileged groups.
Optional but extremely typical components include, firstly, that (2a) must not inform (1) - the ranking by privilege is predetermined and fixed (e.g. in particular white>Asian) and outcome orderings that disagree with it are considered irrelevant non-examples rather than counterexamples, and secondly the notion of "intersectionality", which basically says that you should intersect the partitions to assign blame and responsibility more narrowly (with the notorious intersection of "cis white males" at the top, and "trans women, particularly trans women of color" at the bottom).
I think this does a reasonable job of capturing the core, or at least a necessary assumption, of any belief or policy that is commonly labelled as "woke"; to the extent there are things that get labelled as woke without an obvious connection (ex: COVID policy, environmentalism), it is because they have high correlation with the above beliefs. This is not unusual: for a mirror image, consider for example how rejecting modernist government buildings is taken to be "right-wing" or even "fascist" (In fact I dare any progressive to define "fascism"!), or similar assessment about opposition to vaccines.
The load-bearing part of the definition lies in the deontological moral judgement and imposition of obligation of (2bc) more than it lies in the categorisation of society in (1) and (2a) that you could perhaps call being "socially conscious" if you are sympathetic to it. Modern American alt-righters largely agree with the typical Democrat on (1~2a), and thus would arguably be equally "woke" if "woke" were about the "consciousness" part of it. You would not even be woke if you thought that black people are never depicted in a positive way in movies and were tremendously sad about this, but felt that it is immoral to compel or pressure white people to change anything about that. Someone who spends all day seething about the Pakistani rape gangs of Rotherham is, by all accounts, using a similar group analysis, and highly concerned with social issues that arise between the very same groups, but under a normal analysis they would not be "woke", as the moral obligation they want to impose is not on the group that they consider to do well on "important outcomes". (One may in fact count as woke if the beef is actually about making access to underage sex slaves more equitable.)
Given how frequently this question gets asked, I want to lob a question back at you: What gave you the impression that "woke" is nebulous or not readily defined, or that it has a meaning that is hard to distinguish from "socially conscious"?
Edit: Thinking some more about the correlate beliefs such as environmentalism, the easiest common thread to identify is probably something like a general sense that the more fortunate are morally obliged to make sacrifices for the less fortunate - affluent first-world industrialists should sacrifice for poor third-worlders who have to live off the land and are exposed to the weather, and healthy young people should sacrifice for the sick and elderly. This looks like a classical leftist sentiment; and because classical leftism has been so thoroughly taken over by the woke, it is unfortunate that the distinction between the two has become blurred in the eyes of its opposition. You can still identify distinct elements that makes some components of environmentalism, COVID policy and so on appear more "woke" than others, which is whenever the calculus of fortune and obligation is applied more at the level of (1)-like groups than at the individual, and whenever some kind of outcome score-keeping takes precedence over straight up redistribution. Carbon taxes, which hamper industry to fill social programme coffers, seem less "woke" than plastic straw bans, where the main feature seems to be to bring inconvenience to first-worlders in some vaguely climate-related way.
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Woke is just the omni-cause. Woke people are people who were informed of how at least one part of the standard patriotic narrative of liberalism is wrong and then devote themselves to cynically opposing every other aspect of the standard liberal narrative. If the standard liberal narrative is that America is a great place where any plucky upstarts can make a name for themselves through hard work and grit they believe the inverse must be true. America is a place where entrenched powers make it impossible for an under class of minorities - be they racial, sexual or religious - to succeed through violent suppression. They believe the west is rotten to the core and reflectively believe any criticism of it. The null hypothesis for every question is that the liberalism is a failed lie and anyone who opposes it must have a good reason.
Racial Justice activists are woke because they believe America has committed original sin against minorities and the stain of slavery and racism pervades every aspect of American institutions. They don't really even believe in progress, acknowledging past progress would be a concession to the patriotic liberal narrative so they insist that things are as bad now as they were under Jim Crow. If given a free hand to adopt any policy they want they'd find anything they built equally poisoned.
Anti-Rich rhetoric is woke because it is against the liberal idea that free enterprise is positive sum. Woke people believe every billionaire is a policy failure because they genuinely believe that to get that right you must be stealing from others.
Degrowthers are woke because they believe the liberalism must be destroying the planet. They don't want to use liberal solutions like carbon tax or deregulating nuclear because that would be allowing liberalism to try to solve the problem. Instead they oppose these liberal solutions and advocate for unworkable policies. They're more interested in using climate change as a bludgeon against liberalism than working on actual solutions.
These things are all joined by a disillusionment with the liberal order and reliably each of these and many other woke beliefs are found in the same people not as some kind of coincidence but because all those people have the same burning intuition that they were betrayed by the liberal promises they grew up hearing.
Maybe to people who live fully immersed in these illiberal mindsets it's like water to a fish but to people outside of the milieu it is very very obvious within a few seconds of talking to a woke person exactly which side they will take on any new subject that pits western liberalism against literally anything else. That a memetic clusters exists here is beyond doubt, what you call it is fairly irrelevant.
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One of the problems is that some people just seem to use "woke" as a synonym for "authoritarian" or "illiberal" - usually authoritarian and illiberal leftism (chiefly forms that aren't Soviet communism), but in case of people talking about "woke right" it's obvious that they're liberal types who first got frightened of authoritarian tendencies in leftist communities, moved sharply to the right and then noted similar authoritarian and illiberal strains in their new right-wing communities.
Of course the problem here is that liberalism is taken as something of a given when the vast majority of people ever living in the world during the history of humanity have believed in authoritarian ideologies, it takes genuine work to make people truly believe in things like "you should let people speak even if they're wrong" or "people have the right to advance religious ideals even if you think they are rank heresy or mere superstition" or "innocent until proven guilty even if they really really seem shifty in an obviously guilty way" or a dozen other basic things underpinning liberal democracy.
When it comes to "woke" itself beyond the whole authoritarianism thing, it's really a combination of multiple things and ideologies, within the US chiefly progressive African-American nationalism (and other ethnic minority nationalisms usually deriving from the ideological work already done by progressive African-American nationalists, with "progressive" separating this ideological straing from non-progressive African-American nationalisms variously advanced by Marcus Garvey, NOI/Black Hebrewites/other cults or these days by black manosphere types like Tariq Nasheed), second- and third-wave feminism, and to some degree the sexual revolution and the related groups.
The whole "intersectionalism" things is an attempt to tie these, particularly progressive African-American nationalism and feminism, together to a coherent combination, but since there still is friction related to the importances of various causes, the coalition is straining all the time and wokeness doesn't seem to have that much staying power, as shown by the developments after Trump's election.
I think they have a coherence by, as you say, deriving from the same ideological work. How would you think this is only among the ethnic movements? And while there are questions of priorities, committed activists for one are still generally positive about the others. Thats more than you can say about the "dissident right", and noone seems to have much of a problem acknowleding that as a thing that exists.
Every movement looks more coherent from the outside than from the inside.
But yes, there is some coherence, but it's still not enough to make it a fully coherent ideology.
edit: I think that actually one of the biggest friction points is not as much ideological as aesthetic and rhetorical - progressive African-American nationalism was traditionally a fairly masculine movement (fiery mustacchioed preachers, Black Panthers with their leather jackets, "the only position of women in the movement is prone" etc.), and feminism obviously chafes with that, not only directly but also generally leading to a more feminine aesthetic and rhetoric being adopted - which in turn makes young men, in particular, disaffected, leading them to manosphere guys or recently even Trumpism.
I'm trying to figure this one out, do they have something against missionary position? Is missionary the white man's sex position?
Laying on your back is supine, prone is how you shoot a rifle at a distant target.
Are they saying they want their women to be sexually available or crawling around with rifles?
Or is this a proto-Mixalot saying that he likes women to have butts so large that they have to sleep prone because laying on their back would be too uncomfortable?
It's a somewhat famous quote by Stokely Carmichael.
It's just a way to say "The role of the women is to satisfy men's sexual urges and nothing more", not more complicated than that.
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I think you're missing an explanation: whoever wrote that just didn't understand that "prone" is not the term for lying on your back. It's kind of like how people commonly (but incorrectly) use "biweekly" to mean "twice per week".
Anecdotally, off the top of my head I can only recall one word in my language for [prone|supine], and I don't remember which one it is.
Prone gets used 20x as often as supine, at least in English.
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I checked because you mentioned it and I had biweekly and semiweekly reversed in my head even though biannual and semiannual follow the same pattern and were saved correctly in my memory. I feel like a public school teacher may have done this to me.
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I'm not sure there were many people calling it that. In fact a large part of it's criticism consisted of pointing out it's incoherence and inner tensions.
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I think "wokism" is about as real as "the hippies" or "the dissident right", a bit more so from the institutional connections. I think this is sufficient for most complaints about wokeness.
But why would that be a conflict? Oh no, this terrible point of friction, weve adopted two styles that were literally made for each other. You just have the guys rioting and the (white) women shrieking at the monsters who dare stop them.
It seems like wokeness isn’t super popular among African American men- if they’re running left they’re going to prefer things like NOI or the black Hebrew Israelites. Conversely African American women are mostly woke.
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In this context, and being a believer in the concept of "ideologies are born to facilitate political struggles", wokism for me is the synthesis of black nationalism, third worldism and feminism that was created to improve the electoral odds and power of the Democratic Party, and then was wielded by the US Empire as an imperial ideology in order to make it easier to control the satellite states.
If we follow this definition of wokism, it is clear that it will lose importance the moment it will not be useful anymore to the US Empire (so never, for now)
It's more complicated than that. Progressive African-American nationalism, due to its status of as the main political expression of the largest minority of the most powerful country of the world (and an expression, moreover, that is well-suited for coalition building and forming a template for others), has had enormous cachet globally generally, with minorities all around the world considering their struggle to be equivalent to that of the African-Americans (including white minorities. Progressive African-American leaders, like Dubois and MLK, have been aware of the effect of publicizing repression against the movement on America's soft power and have utilized that to their advantage, so that American policies have at least as much had to do with navigating this threat as with any conscious imperial ideological designs.
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The "woke right" doesn't exist. It doesn't make sense. It's incoherent. It's an enemy anti-concept designed to derail the conversation.
The left noticed how useful it was for the right to be able to name their political project and has been fighting tooth and nail to destroy the word "woke", whether by endless isolated demands for rigor asking for a perfect definition (as in the OP) or by embracing, extending, and extinguishing the term into uselessness (as in "woke right").
Don't fall for it.
There is something to the concept of the "woke right". To simplify, they accept all the woke theories, but just switch the morality on its head - sometimes trying to even to flip the narrative of oppression. Yes, men did form patriarchy to oppress women and it was is a good thing - just look how shit the world looks like when they rule now. We should go back and repeal the 19th. Yes white supremacy is the boogeyman that woke activists describe. And we can become powerful again and rule the world, even woke people envy that power and want to take it for themselves. Why give them that?
This was always the problem with any victim-victimized ideology, especially if it wins the culture war: why assume that people will sympathize with victims? It is just slave morality, embrace the narrative and reclaim the power from the rabble.
This makes sense, provided you believe yourself to not be the rabble.
Slave morality won because people did the math and figured out that there are a lot more slaves than masters.
Joke's on you. I'm consider myself part of the rabble, and will probably always be part of the rabble, but I consider the current system promising me a share of power to be nothing but lies, so if a would-be aristocrat can make credible promise of restoring sanity, I'm more than happy to bend the knee.
The post above, however, discards "sympathizing with victims" as "just slave morality". In the scenario where you bend the knee in exchange for sanity, you're still sympathizing with at least one victim: yourself. Master morality as proposed by the post above ("reclaim the power from the rabble") leaves nothing for the rabble, and even the comfort of sanity is not guaranteed or promised.
Yeah, but I'm not the master, so that's allowed.
It doesn't leave any power for the rabble, which is absolutely fine, because like I said the claim I have any right now is a lie.
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See, this is the point of many of these ideologies that divide people into the groups and believe in some divine struggle. They need to portrait the enemy as very powerful and almost impossible force to counter, which puts them squarely into the victim category. But at the same time they need to provide some alternative and make their side of the conflict as powerful enough to overcome that adversity. It reminds me of the old joke:
It is 1935 and Kohn and Goldberg are taking a tram in Berlin. And Kohn sees that Goldberg is reading the latest issue of Der Angriff
Kohn: Hey, why are you reading that Nazi slop?
Goldberg: We are hounded all the time, our businesses are confiscated and I feel all powerless. This is the only place where I can read how Jews are awesome and how they actually control everything. It keeps my spirits high.
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Everyone I've seen using the term "woke right" has belonged to the right-oriented anti-woke group themselves.
It makes plenty enough sense if one just interprets "woke" to mean authoritarianism. There certainly are plenty of authoritarian right-wingers.
I've only heard it from zionist republicans as a way to refer to anti-zionist right wingers without having to talk about what they believe that makes them woke (that Israel is committing genocide in Palestine).
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I'd pick a few nits over authoritarianism being to focal point, while there are some authoritarians under the "woke-right" umbrella, being authoritarian seems neither necessary nor sufficient to be "woke right". "Illiberal" seems like it's hitting the nail on the head, as it's a label I would answer to, and something I could fully understand the anti-woke liberals turning on me over, since I am, after all, opposing their core values.
However what's driving me insane about the deployment of the label is either it's laziness, or if you want to be more cynical, it's deliberate use to obscure the nature of the conflict. "Woke Right" implies something like "these right-wingers are substantially the same as the left-wingers we've just finished fighting", and so there's no need to investigate what they want and where are they coming from. My contention is that we're not, that we have criticisms that the liberals have no good answer for, and I'd further say that the liberals know this. It can be easily observed in the approach to debate between various factions. Back when it was the woke left vs. the liberals, the liberals were itching for a debate, while the woke left employed various methods of avoiding it, or even trying to delegitimatize the very idea of debate. Now that it's liberals vs the "woke right", it's the "woke right" itching for a debate, while the liberals are trying to avoid, or delegitimize it. In fact from where I sit, it feels like avoiding and delegitimizing debate is the very purpose of using the "woke right" label.
Per Josh Neal, this is an old tactic going back at least to Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics:
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There's more from Neal on this in his appearance on the J. Burden show. And I'm also reminded of a bit from this decades-old blog post about Gandhi:
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That's not what happened. We've been on a years, if not decades, long loop of Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand, until progressives started using "woke" in a self a descriptive manner, when they were feeling particularly strong. Their opponents pounced, as they say, figuring they won't be able to wriggle out of a term they unironically used themselves, which they tried to do anyway.
Now that the liberals feel they were mostly done with progressives they're trying to redirect some of the anti-woke momentum against the illiberal right.
I don't think this is what happened either. I don't see "woke" as being particularly different in kind compared to its predecessors like "SJW," "identity politics," "political correctness," or "CRT." These were all used unironically to describe oneself and one's in-group, often in a way meant to invoke pride - I both partook in and observed this happening all the time within progressive leftist circles about 10-20 years ago. Even "political correctness," which was a derogatory term in most of the 90s, was being reclaimed during the late 2000s/early 2010s as simply what any decent human just considers as "correct."
Thing is, as Shakespeare might put it, shit by any other name will stink just as foul, and so people figured out that the ideological projects described by these mostly innocuous-sounding terms were actually quite foul, and so these terms became foul, necessitating the shift to a different label. What sets "woke" apart, I think, is that it was the term in use when shit really hit the fan in the mainstream, when the naked power and demands of the "woke" were too large and too extreme for a large part of the mainstream to accept everything just on vibes, but rather compelled people to look under the hood and properly connect all the dots. So it's become difficult, if not impossible, for the SJWs, idpol-types, PC-types of yesteryear to slide into some other, as-of-yet untarnished label. It's sort of happening with "DEI" becoming "BRIDGE," but, I mean, those same 3 letters are still in the latter, and I think the overall awareness of these types of politics is just too high for the sleight of hand to work nearly as well this time.
The term "woke right" seems to be trying to get at a subset of rightwingers who follow a similar sort of resentment- and identity-based thinking when it comes to society as the "woke." And I can why people like James Lindsay - who's the person responsible for like 95% of the usage of the phrase "woke right" that I've seen in the wild - would want to do this; there are few things rightists hate more than "woke," and it's not unreasonable to believe that the dangers of right-wing identity politics could be a blind spot for many anti-woke rightists. But in terms of the meaning of the term, it just seems unnecessary, since it's just describing plain old racism.
The "woke" way of thinking involves justifying discrimination against individuals of race X and in favor of individuals of race Y because, in the past, society was structured to favor race X over race Y, and modern society still suffers from downstream effects of such structures such that individuals of race X today are advantaged over individuals of race Y. This is equivalent to the stereotypical classical racist rationale that, due to a difference in the grace of God/genes/essence/intelligence/etc. race X is intrinsically inferior to race Y, it's just a version that's been adapted not just to be palatable but to be delicious to people who want to consider themselves non-racist.
So whatever cluster of people the "woke right" is describing, it just seems to me to be describing classical racists among the right-wing, just using a label that's meant to provoke a greater disgust response (interesting that, again, since a rose by any other name smells just a sweet, it seems that "racist" has become a less nasty thing to be associated with than "woke").
"CRT" post-dated the use of "woke" and "SJW" and "identity politics" always were terms of derision from what I remember. The only one that could plausibly contradict what I said is "political correctness", maybe was used self-descriptively back in 90's, but that was before my time. The rest of what you said fits perfectly well with what I think happened to these terms.
That's the motte. The bailey is that any right-winger who departs from liberalism in any significant way is "woke right". You think collective identity is important, but don't build your politics around resentment? Woke right. You think the separation of church and state is an unworkable utopian idea that will lead to the birth of quasi-religions like wokeness? Woke right. You think that sometimes society does have a right to get between a man and his means of self-gratification, even though any particular instance affects only the individual in question? Woke right.
Like I said in the other comment, I wouldn't even mind people like Lindsay criticizing these beliefs, it's normal and good for liberals to attack threats to liberalism. The problem is he's doing it in a fundamentally dishonest manner.
Yes, I remember it being used as a self-deprecating joke by liberals like my parents in the '80s and '90s. I think it was used seriously among Maoists before that. The joke form carried the message "Of course we're not so illiberal as the old Maoists who would've used this sincerely."
I was very young at the very tail of that era, but in retrospect I notice people used it to launder the old-maoist policing through a layer of irony. Middle class UK academics in education were my only real exposure though.
I remember a lot of conversations that went like
It defuses the conversation passive-aggressively, reducing the whole thing to a joke-but-for-real though, and forestalls A from following up with "I'm serious though what's with all the fucking Pakis, are we really ok with where this is going?"
In 2014ish millennials did exactly the same thing with playing Cards Against Humanity and joking about how "tumblr's gonna get you for that," then a few years later the exact same people dropped the mask and switched to open confrontation once they felt powerful enough.
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I'd say "CRT" came into the mainstream around the same time as "woke," but either way you're right it's not a predecessor. It also has other problems of comparison, in that it's an actual academic "theory" that has been around since at least the 1960s. I should have either excluded this from the list or expanded on the comparison. I see the phenomenon as being very similar, in that "CRT" is a label that was coined by its proponents and true believers that, once it made contact with the mainstream, very quickly took on a negative valence due to the underlying thing that the label was describing.
My guess is that you remember correctly, and your memory is reflective of the types of people you saw speaking, i.e. I'm guessing you weren't always surrounded by progressive leftists. I wasn't in the room when a progressive leftist uttered the phrase, "I am a social justice warrior" for the first time or anything, but I remember long before these terms entered anywhere close to the mainstream, they were simply ways people among my milieu described themselves and their politics, which was just having basic human decency and empathy. Like the other examples, once these terms became more well known, the general populace, reasonably, associated the terms with the underlying people and things that they were pointing at, and as a result the terms rapidly became derisive.
A safer bet would be that I remember wrong. I rarely vouch for my memory, and this was all a long time ago.
I started off libertarian, and there always was a healthy 50/50-ish woke/chud split. I spent the majority of the GamerGate drama on the feminist side.
"Social Justice" may have been the self a descriptive term that progressives used, but "Social Justice Warrior" was always derisive.
The precise timelines on this thing is hard to nail down, obviously, but my memory is quite different. Leading up to that affair of reproductively viable worker ants (as a feminist, I didn't take a side, mainly just cringing at the utter nonsense spouted by fellow feminists like Sarkeesian. I did try to speak out against both falsely claiming and catastrophizing online death/rape threats, malicious Photoshopping and the like, but I quickly learned that well-meaning constructive criticism for the purpose of strengthening the movement is something SocJus considers evil when directed at themselves), there were plenty of people within my social group, including myself, who proudly called ourselves SJWs, because social justice is such an obviously and uniformly good ideology in the face of the pernicious social evils that permeate the world that behaving like warriors fighting for its favor is something anyone should be proud of. Some of it was performatively trying to fight against the (inevitably successful) attempts by outsiders to make it a term of denigration, and so perhaps my memory of the timeline is what's faulty.
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Even Wikipedia admits that
(after describing it as a "perjorative term and internet meme" in the first sentence, naturally)
A quick Google Books search by date (yeah, I know, but searching web pages by date is a lot more error-prone) also shows a positive use by the author of Doonesbury, a positive use describing a deceased activist, and a positive use in a book describing conflicts between different ideas of social justice, and only in 2015 does the perjorative use case appear in print.
And ... doesn't this make sense? "Social justice" is still used as a positive phrase by progressives. "Warrior" is much more mixed to the left, but it's not an utterly negative term there (e.g. the first two Wikipedia diambiguation hits are Native American groups), and it's a positive term in general: the Golden State Warriors were never in any danger of getting cancelled, the Wounded Warriors Project wasn't mocking its beneficiaries, and if you keep scrolling down that Wiki page you'll see dozens of proud self-applications of the word.
Personally, I thought the phrase SJW was pretty apt, because "applying attitudes extreme enough for war to social justice problems" isn't too far off from what the "No Justice, No Peace" crowd would admit to but is also a good summary of what I think was wrong with the movement. But IMHO the most typical right-wing perjorative use wasn't criticising extremism, it was just sarcastic about the juxtaposition of a violent-sounding name with the heavily keyboard-based "activism" it gets used to describe, so I can't say I'm upset that its use went out of fashion.
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I'm not going to bother answering @Ancient_Anemone's question since naraburns has given a good one and asked the questions I'd want to. To answer before they actually substantiate their own claims would be to expend an asymmetric amount of effort, which is very common in this particular debate.
So I'll ask a question of my own to the board while I have the chance, since it doesn't seem worthy of a top level post: it seems like "SJW" disappeared when it became low-status like "woke" seems to be now. The very people who once proudly used it as a self-descriptor simply abandoned it. Why do we think that didn't happen with "woke", and instead there's an insistence that the term (when used by enemies) doesn't refer to anything?
I assumed that it has something to do with "woke" being very old and thus dear to progressives, but "social justice" is apparently very old too. Maybe because you can still claim "social justice" without the now-cringe "warrior" element while you'd have to abandon "woke" entirely? Maybe it's because "woke" is associated with black people and standpoint epistemology makes it easier to claim the anti-woke are ignorant? Is it really just that "woke" is more facially vague?
"SJW" was never used all that much, and was mostly used in online and nerdy discourse. Nerds are much worse at playing the social games of verbal politics, and their strategy of reclaiming the term backfired.
And I think it also has to do with social justice discourse spreading much wider than the original, core movement, and gaining ground among people who weren't familiar with the core activists. These ideas were introduced to them as just decent things decent people are doing, there's no politics here, this is just about being a good person, and when they were questioned they found it confusing and impolite, and white-collar professionals hate nothing more than impolite things. This attitude got back-filled in to the activists themselves, because it was useful, and then became the official line against any accusations of woke politics. Then "woke" became something Republicans in the Senate ask judicial nominees, which just bewildered and offended the elite professional jurists who thought they were above such trivialities.
I also don't think "woke" was ever really used as a descriptor for the movement, it was more of a meme, like "it's hard to be woke in a sleeping society" or something by someone vaguely affiliated with the social justice movement. So for normie liberals who got interested in woke politics, it rather sounded like the opposite-side verison of civil rights groups getting very angry about Pepe the frog memes and calling Pepe a white supremacist symbol, because some people on 4chan used Pepe in racist memes. So everyone on the left side of the fence sees the "woke" descriptor as eminently silly, even though they refuse to give anyone a better one.
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My working, internal definition of woke is "the popularised form of Cultural Marxism, particularly its contemporary related and descendent theories and ideologies, including Intersectional Feminism, Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory."
Key features of woke include:
A key part of my definition that I emphasise is the fact it's a "popularised" form. That is to say, it is the less consistent and coherent form of a political ideology, adopted by the general population, rather than the form adopted by academics, political activists, political philosophers or others who might hold specific and more consistent form of those beliefs. In fact, I would say this is actually part of the tactic that makes woke subversive - the decoupling of the name of the popularised form of a political ideology from the name of its academic or philosophical origins. This is unusual and serves to obfuscate the philosophical origins of woke (quite successfully, I might add).
For example, there is both the popular and academic understanding of 'liberal' or 'conservative'. The average 'liberal' may very well not have the exact same beliefs as either John Locke or John Rawls, but we can recognise and it's generally understood as all belonging to the same philosophical traditions. When someone asks you to describe who are liberals, you can clearly point to and name all these things. No one would seriously suggest liberalism doesn't exist in the public because the average (social) liberal doesn't believe the exact same things as John Rawls. But this is exactly what when people who are defending wokeism by saying others can't define or point to people who are woke. Because woke is strictly a popular form and not pure, academic form which people can name and describe.
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I have previously defined it here as briefly as possible, "Identity based progressivism, usually recent aggressive illiberal status seeking strains."
So, it would entirely depend on what you mean by socially conscious. If that entails identity based progressivism, they'd need to have a very unusual personality and probably a different strand of progressivism.
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Although I don't really disagree with most of what's written here, I do think a lot of it comes from intuition rather than reliable empiricism. If you look at what studies actually find, Wokeness is the informal term used to describe people who favor antiracism and transgenderism.
If you don't mind independent research carried out by random posters on TheMotte, then I can also tell you the woke tend to agree on a cluster of issues that are:
But if I'm also allowed to speculate with everybody else, I'd say what makes the woke so terrifying is that they have an uncompromising moral vision that no one is really allowed to attack. "Fairness is good, racism is bad" is a blank check America has spent the last several decades writing the woke that allows them to drive civilization to complete bankruptcy. (Where "bankruptcy" here is a metaphor for whatever you think it is, including, heck, not having any money.)
I think this is a very insightful post. In particular, the research you conducted and the use of the Nolan Chart to define different political values and where they fall in the grid. If I am understanding you correctly, if one is left of center, tender minded/idealistic, but libertarian, in they would not be defined as woke, correct?
I would argue that the financial bankruptcy is thanks to modern monetary policy and the Triffin Dilemna, but I digress. We can agree that fairness is good and racism is bad, but the devil is in the details, no?
I had to think about this hypothetical person for a moment.
Although arguably a tender-minded leftist who is also libertarian is as far as 70.53 degrees off from the woke by basic trigonometry, this is only true if you presume each axis is of equal importance. In practice the left-right axis is far more salient than the others, which will diminish this person's ideological separation from the woke crowd enough that they'd likely fit in pretty well. Currently wokeness isn't a fringe movement - it's captured a large degree of public support, and has enough power to have (for example) made it standard procedure for us to have to fill in the "What pronouns does your child use?" blank in the doctor's office at Small Town Red Tribe USA. In practice this hypothetical person is likely to support the woke package, they'll just balk at some of the details, such as shutting down people's right to speak.
Ultimately going to say "No, I don't really think of this person as woke," but it's more because I think it's OK for Canadians to get mad when you call them American, and because despite my anti-wokeness, I'm also rather woke-adjacent. If I were a Trump/Musk/Whatever supporter on the other side of the map, I'd still dislike and oppose the hell out of this person (and probably me as well).
I think the woke make a good case against fairness and in favor of racism, in just the same way that the real live National Socialists of the 1940s made a very good case against the principles of German fascism. Looking from one to the other, I can't help but think maybe none of those principles matter, or all of them matter, and really most people are too quick to think they know things when Socrates has been telling us all along he's the wisest because he knows nothing.
I appreciate this response. The reason why I asked is because that hypothetical person is more or less me. I've been a libertarian most of my adult life, but have found myself drifting leftward the last 8 or so years, as the culture war has picked up. Accelerating this has been overt social conservatives, like Dave Smith have been masquerading as libertarian (something about Hoppeian sunset towns does not sit will with me and is at odds with libertarianism, you know?). I think having equality and similar results between racial groups is a good ideal, but believe that meritocracy is important and do not agree with many of the means to achieve this put forward by progressives. It seemingly does not matter, as I now am considered woke by some family members, despite them not being able to define "woke" in a coherent way. I think you are correct, it does seem in today's zeitgeist, social alignment seems to be more important than economic alignment.
What specific mechanism do you think the "woke" make in favor of racism specifically? Is it their lack of ability to actually solve for their main issue, or is it something else? What has been proposed by people like Ibram X. Kendi is genuine racism itself, and does not even shy away from calling it as such. For example, the only antidote to racism is racism, the only antidote to discrimination is yet more discrimination...
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My short definition is "a posture of extreme or exaggerated deference to identitarian sensibilities, or to the imagined shape thereof".
Wokeness is more of an attitude or posture than it is a list of doctrines that must be accepted. That posture is one of identifying supposedly marginalised or oppressed voices, and then assigning those voices epistemological and ethical priority over other voices. Wokeness is then what happens when you self-present on this basis.
I note explicitly that wokeness does not require actually listening to or acting consistently with the preferences of a supposedly marginalised group. It is the presentation of acting as if one is doing that. The classic example is 'Latinx'. This makes it more clear that wokeness tends to be a manner that privileged or educated people adopt in order to be seen by other privileged people. You don't say 'Latinx' to actually help or engage with Latino people, but rather in order to performatively display your sensitivity to Latinos. Latinos themselves are not the audience, and so their actual feelings can be ignored.
I think this element is helpful with regard to your last question - the difference between social consciousness and wokeness. Social consciousness is actually being aware of the feelings, concerns, and cultural norms of a particular social group. Wokeness is the performance of that awareness for the sake of intra-elite competition. Thus to pick a concrete example, a white person who goes to a majority-black church and understands their local culture, is accepted among them as a friend, etc., is likely socially conscious as to issues in the black church, but may not be woke; meanwhile a white person who goes to an all-white church but has a BLM sticker on their car and tweets about structural racism is likely woke, but probably not that socially conscious.
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In modern parlance its an ironic reappropriation of a word, now used to describe a hostile intolerance to differing arguments for a more fair, just, and prosperous society, all while cowering behind the words original meaning.
For example take Ana Kasparian revealing that she was sexually assaulted by a homeless person. Brain-rotted wokies tore her to pieces for disparaging homeless people, and called her racist for some unknown reason. One of her collogues quit because Ana wanted to be called a woman, not a birthing person. Or the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah Jones, a Pulitzer winning piece of historical revisionism. Noticing its factual errors and/or flaws reasoning got you branded as a racist Nazi by the woke. Or the coverage surrounding the shooting of Jacob Blake, who was under arrest yet tired to flee in a vehicle with children before attempting to stab an officer before being shot. If you so much as pointed out what the video showed, you were called a racist. Its worth noting that Blakes shooting precipitated the attempts to burn down sections of Kenosha WI for some reason, where Kyle Rittenhouse shot 3 people on video, the lone survivor of whom said in court that Rittenhouse did not so much as aim at him until he pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse - who was obviously a white supremacist despite shooting only white people.
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Woke is intesectionality. I may be cheating a bit in that people who came up with that term aren't among the most brief and clear writers, but at list euphemism treadmill didn't advance far enough for it to not be a term of self-identification anymore.
Yes, and the answer is pretty obvious if you first ask your self "what is socially conscious"? Is it possible to be socially conscious and think black people aren't being arrested more due to discrimination, or the system being set against them? Is it possible to be socially conscious that women don't go into tech as much as men because they don't enjoy the subject matter of the field as much, rather than because they're being discriminated against, or because the system is set against them? Is it possible to be socially conscious and think that trans women aren't women, and it's a bad idea to send them into women's sports, changing rooms, prisons, and domestic abuse shelters? If the answer to these questions was "yes", then you have you example of a difference between being socially conscious and being woke. If the answer was "no" then you have smuggled an ideology into the term "socially conscious", and that ideology is Woke.
Do you mind if I turn the whole thing on you, and ask you to elaborate on this claim? What do you think gets unfairly branded as "woke"? Can you show that it got to the point that no one knows what "woke" originally meant anymore? If it's increasingly a nebulous boogieman, would you say there was once a point it was not nebulous and not a boogieman?
This is an excellent distinction between the two and a fair appraisal. How do you explain the field of sociology consistently turning out socially conscious, but leftist graduates at a rate much, much higher than other fields of study?
No, I am happy to oblige. Considering that the term woke is now being used to describe civil rights era executive orders, I do think that this term has had a significant meaning creep since the early 2010's. In essence, when it was seldomly used as a self-descriptor for elements of the progressive left it had a much more firm meaning, as opposed to now, when right wing media uses it to describe just about anything from beer to green energy. Fox News alone has ~50 articles written in the last week about the topic. Almost all use in the last month of the word when broadening the search to all news sources brings up hundreds of results, almost all of them from right wing news sources or describing actions by the right.
Much the same way I would explain why a particular country ended up owning a particular plot of land some centuries ago. Maybe it was conquest, maybe it was a political marriage, or maybe it was some court intrigue. A fascinating question for those interested in history, no doubt, but little more. It can cast little light on whether or not the theories in question are an accurate description of reality.
Why? The laws in question seem to fit quite well into what various "intersectional" theories would prescribe, and so it seems fair to call them woke.
Have you ever talked to someone who holds an intersectional worldview? Your example immediately brought to mind a quote from the World Economic Forum conference that I covered a while back, where one of the participants says the following:
@aqouta mentions the Omnicause, and while it may be another derisive name for the phenomenon we're discussing, it's a handy keyword to search for examples of how the very same people will jump from climate change, to queer acceptance to free Palestine. In other words the critics are entirely right to point to everything from beer to green energy, because woke people themselves believe their cause is about all those things.
I see where you're coming from. Way back when, there was a small cottage industry in academia, writing tomes upon tomes about "neoliberalism", but the darnedest thing was no one could ever point me to a person calling themselves a "neoliberal". This was frustrating, because as an aspiring freethinker, I didn't want to just hear about why an idea was bad from it's critics, I also wanted to hear why it could be good from it's proponents, and make up my own mind.
So I get it, a spooky term for a nebulous concept is a red flag. However, when investigating these things I think it's important to ask why there are no people who want to apply a given term to themselves. In case of "woke" this is because it's just another iteration of a decades-long trend of a particular brand of progressive doing their best to prevent a label sticking to their movement and ideology, so they can avoid criticism. From cultural Marxism to Political Correctness, Critical Theory, DEI, and Social Justice, all the way to the aforementioned Intersectionality, and culminating in Freddie de Boer's, who's hardly a right-winger himself, rant - Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.
We can again contrast that with "neoliberalism", which started off as a boogeyman, but which ended up being a self-descriptive term, when people got fed up of lefties beating up on a strawman, and founded /r/neoliberal. I don't have sources for this, but I heard the very same thing happened with the term "capitalism" which was Marx' very own nebulous boogeyman, but at some point liberals got fed up with him, and decided to adopt the term as their own.
If "woke" really was a term right-wingers invented out of thin air, that didn't describe anything real, I'd expect it to follow the same trajectory as "neoliberalism" or "capitalism". But the trajectory of abandonment observable in other terms like "cultural Marxism", "DEI", or "Social Justice" shows the term is pointing at something real that certain people do actually believe in, but don't want to answer for.
Is civil rights woke now? It was called civil rights by virtually the entire political spectrum for over 40 years, until now some on the right use the word "woke" to describe it and other measures they feel are beneath the DEI umbrella. "Woke" was not in the prose of anyone in the 1960's.
I have talked to several people who have an intersectional worldview and have a close friend who would fall squarely into that camp. In my opinion, intersectionality's usefulness varies, and the danger on the left is that it is the only lens some are willing and/or capable of using.
At the end of the day, it is a lens that one can put on and take off, which combined with other lenses, can paint a more complete picture of a situation, or demonstrate the role of identity groups in a social phenomenon. This generally is at the expense of individual experience, however, and one has to be careful that it is not used as weapon to silence others. When it is the only lens used, comments like the one you shared become the norm and every singe social interaction across the globe becomes the oppressed/oppressor narrative, disregarding all other factors.
Pragmatically, the reason why intersectionality has been a rallying cry on the left this century is without it, it is a collection of moderate to small sized special interests when can be easily overruled. In a group, they are formidable and can vie for power through plurality. The right in my opinion, does not have this level of fracturing in its base.
The number of people that would identify with that movement, or those that support it but don't identify with it that apply it to everything is a minority, albeit an incredibly vocal one, interestingly, the right magnifies those voices as a rallying cry for their agenda. Climate change in particular is also a dubious one, as it actually has a decent amount of support on the right. There was an 81 member Conservative Climate Caucus in the congressional session that just ended. That is just over 37% of all republicans elected to that chamber. So while I agree that climate change is a progressive goal, it has a sizable amount of support on the right.
Anyway, I digress, but appreciate the dialogue. I think the thing I am coming away with is that if a label is used more by the opposition than the group or initiatives it describes, it is more likely to have its meaning become nebulous over time. Especially if the word/words are short or need some sort of additional explanation of what it is. The more specific the terminology is, or if the term is adopted by those it is being used to describe, it does not seem to happen nearly as much.
I'm sorry, when did we start talking about civil rights, and stop talking about civil rights era executive orders? The only one your own article even talks about is Affirmative Action, which, from what I understand, was seen as an aberration by people who put it there, and was ultimately only justified by it's supposedly temporary nature. Yes, Affirmative Action absolutely is woke, and I have no idea how you pretend to be surprised by it.
How can this possibly be relevant? "Woke" is a label for a concept, and Affirmative Action is well within the bounds of that concept.
Right, so the argument by implication, that there's something ridiculous about "woke" being about everything from beer to green energy, and that it's indicative of the word having no meaning, is thus refuted.
Correct, and no one said otherwise. In fact, one of the core criticism of the movement is that the voice and power they are given is completely disproportional to their popularity, which is marginal.
Their voices, measured by the changes they are able to push through corporations and government, is already massive. The right is merely pointing out that those changes are happening, and a part of a particular movement program. They're not magnifying anything, they're shining light on it, which said movement hates as it prefers to operate in darkness (as seen by regular shedding of labels it came up with to describe itself).
For my part, I'm rather frustrated by the dialogue. I feel like my points are being ignored, and occasionally twisted into something I never said. As to your conclusion, it's strange that this is the one you chose to go with, when your own framing of the examples above contradict it. Even if Cultural Marxism wasn't "really" Marxism, the term was invented by people calling themselves Cultural Marxists. If self-description was keeping the meaning coherent, than the shoe not fitting could not have happened (although, in my opinion, it does absolutely fit, the similarities are glaring, and people ignoring them are being pedantic). Likewise, just because you weren't there, or don't recall, anyone on the left disagreeing with being called a Social Justice Warrior, doesn't mean it didn't happen. The 2015-2017 era Internet fora were full of the exact same conversations that you just started, except the term "woke" was substituted for "Social Justice Warrior".
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Here's a thread on the subject from last week, with a bunch of people offering their own answers to that question.
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Wokeism is blank slatism plus bioleninism.
Blank slatism in that it holds that everyone is identical but for incidental influences such as education, nutrition, and upbringing. There's no real fundamental psychological difference between any two people which can't be attributed to such influences. Racial differences are purely cosmetic and women are only weaker than men because society has taught them to be -- which leads to the next part.
Bioleninism in that, having 'established' that everyone is basically the same, anyone doing better than anyone else must be injustice. The only way it can happen under this rubric is that someone either got lucky through no fault of their own, in which case they'd better share, or else they got a leg up by taking advantage of someone else, in which case they'd better be punished.
The terminology 'woke' indicates that the woke person is now 'awake' to the universality of oppressor/oppressee dynamics and the necessity of Doing Something About It.
Wokism is a totalizing, corrosive ideology which cannot rest until all hierarchies have been leveled.
Thank you for this definition. So in your mind it is the necessity of doing something about it/coercing others that delineates wokeness from other definitions under the umbrella of social justice, or do you see it as something they all share.
I guess a more clear way to ask this is (borrowing from @narabums definition), is left wing identitarianism divorced from coercion/coerced action still woke?
No; I don't see it as pertinent at all. Wokeism comes down to a political preference which, like any other political preference, may or may not be forced upon others. Coercion is neither unique nor integral to wokism and I'm not sure where I might have implied otherwise.
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When you put it like that, it really does sound remarkably similar to the real-life experience of communism. Got some money? Or any sort of useful property? Here's some thugs coming to confiscate it "for the people."
It's not a coincidence.
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All but one, it's own (a.k.a the progressive), which makes it not unusual.
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In light of the stupid Elon hand gesture thing that still won’t die, let me offer a slightly different definition based on something I was just thinking about. A lot of what separates “woke” from run of the mill identity politics and/or ingroup-outgroup bias is the imposition of rules on the outgroup. This is where it takes on a somewhat religious tone ( slogans like “silence is violence” are analogous to the “convert or die” sentiment of the Muslim conquests or early crusades ).
What makes woke particularly insufferable is the rule creation mechanism. It doesn’t come from a canonical text, but rather, it’s an ever growing list of words or actions that were previously done by bad people. Racial slurs? – can’t say those, bad people used them a long time ago. Black facepaint? - can’t use that. Bad people did it a long time ago. Raising your straight arm at an angle above 90 degrees from the resting position? - can’t do that. You guessed it, because bad people did that a long time ago. Hell, you can’t even make the okay sign in some circles anymore because bad people did it on the internet. In addition, the rules are different depending on how “bad” your particular group is seen as being.
So, back to the Elon hand gesture. He’s not allowed to make it apparently. Why? Because it was done by the Nazis. It doesn’t matter that that is barely still in living memory. It doesn’t matter that none of his other actions are particularly Nazi-like. It doesn’t matter that it is a salute that comes naturally to humans and has been practiced by countless groups over the millennia. No, the gesture is verboten, now and forever. And unless you are constantly policing your actions and keeping up with the latest blacklists, you too will at some point do something that will mark you as an apostate.
"It's impossible to keep up with all the latest blacklists" being used as a justification for "actually the Nazi salute is fine" has got to be one of the most textbook examples of motte and bailey.
Heh. While I do think the raised-arm salute should be decriminalized (it really is a crime in Germany) because it's just plain silly to have laws against basic gestures like this, I do agree that it's a bit disingenious to pretend that it would be widely-acceptable in western society if only it weren't for the woke.
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In what way? What is the motte, and what is the bailey here?
The Nazi salute was, notably, not unique to the Nazis. They have no particular historical claim to inventing it, or monopoly on it at the time, or exclusivity on the meaning of 'arm outstretched, slightly elevated'- hence the many defenses of Democrat politicians being photographed in a similar outstretch being 'well, you need to look at the video for context to see otherwise,' which is not coincidentally very similar to the context of if you add what Musk was saying to the context of the image (or video) of him. Context can remove the Nazi criteria.
It would seem to me that what makes a Nazi salute a Nazi salute is if it is done for, in alignment with, or in the context of Nazi activities. If it is not done in a Nazi format, it is not a Nazi salute, just a salute (or gesture), the sort of which 'well, you just need to look at the context to see otherwise' is a valid defense.
'You just need context to see this isn't Nazi' does not seem to be the defendable motte, but the more expansive bailey- and one strong enough to not require a retreat to 'actually the Nazi salute is just fine,' which is less defensible, and thus not a motte.
Instead, the motte-and-bailey seems to be more in the accusation side of things- where 'that is a Nazi salute' is the expansive claim, which is forced to retreat into a more defensible 'well, maybe it's not actually Nazi, but it looks bad so should be condemned regardless.'
Which, coincidentally, is a very similar argument structure to the 'the OK sign is a white supremacist gesture' craze of a few years ago.
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During the arguments over same-sex marriage in the aughts, the common metaphor was 'telling me that I may not eat cake because you happen to be on a diet'.
Many fundamentalist soi-disant Christians phrased that mechanism as "Abstain from every appearance of evil", which apparently meant
along with avoiding
(Stuff Fundies Like, March 2009)
Wire-rimmed or frameless (Jebs) are Republican coded now, leftists wear thick plastic frames (Maddows).
Unless they're round, John Lennons can be wire-rim without being right wing.
Remember to always carry both kinds for whenever you need to
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Those kind of fundies were a small minority of Christians who believed women in pants to be sinful being portrayed in the worst possible light by an ex member.
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Emphasis added.
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Let me steelman the common progressive snarkcasm: 'it's when brown and gay people have jobs'.
Okay. Let's accept it at its premise. You start to notice things, when BIPOCs and LGBTQs are in positions of power. How they nepotistically hire across their own communities while demanding you open up yours. How well-connected they are in terms of shutting down dissent. How curiously over-represented they are in positions of forum moderation and-
Look, no one would say that a o'l boys network didn't exist just because they didn't write down the NO GIRLS ALLOWED charter. For the same reason, you can't say that there isn't a 'woke' social network that exists to further the interest of its class. It's not conspiratorial to point organizations that actively promote and advocate for it as a movement. They actually exist. It's written into their charters, their codes of conduct.
The word gaslighting has been severely abused by narcissists in the past decade, but if anything is that, this is it.
I don't think this is actually true. A lot of wokeness, maybe most of it, consists of people who aren't BIPOC or LGBTQ white-knighting people who are.
I know. I don't personally believe in that definition, which is why I steelmanned it.
But it's revealing that even this common deflection falls apart if you even spend a moment thinking about it. Adding allyship to this interaction includes those white knights.
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Naraburns probably said it the best, including how this question of "define woke" is often used as a trolling technique to derail discussion. In fact these rhetorical techniques are often very useful to certain strains of woke, as naraburns said woke stems from so called Critical Theory, which functions best when it is well - criticizing - as opposed to explaining. So using some form of rhetorical judo in discussions is used quite often to have opponents on back foot and in defense, where they are the ones asking questions and criticizing all answers. While at the same time they do not subject their own terms to the same scrutiny.
Two can play the same game of gish gallop: define racism, define systemic racism, define whiteness, define white supremacy, define heteronormativity, define gender etc. We can also play the same game with much older terms such as: define capitalism, define socialism, define communism, define neoliberalism. All of these can and were used as "boogeymen", however they continue to be used and they capture something.
Might also be useful to apply it to more general terms. Define Problematic. Define Toxic.
Exactly, the world problematic itself has a special meaning at least in Foucaultian analysis, which is also often used in "woke" - you take something and "problematicize" it - analyze it for power relation stemming from ideology. It is very similar to this critical approach, something like:
This can be used for anything. Hiking is problematic and racist. Gyms are sexist nests of manspreading and mansplaining etc.
This is a very fair critique, as there is always an asymmetric amount of effort put for by those looking to define a term versus one providing a critique. That being said, how does one ensure that a discussion is not two people talking past one another without defining terms?
This effort discrepancy isn't lost on me, in next week's thread I will put forward a definition of fascism for you and others to critique in the spirit of fairness and to continue the dialogue.
If I may suggest, instead of defining fascism - which is quite a contentious concept, try defining neoliberalism. The history of the term - unlike woke - is actually an exonym and yet it is used all the time.
I appreciate your suggestion and defined neoliberal in this week's culture war thread.
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We discuss this almost every week. Every time we do someone posts this article from Freddie Doboer.
No one's done it yet so let me be the first.
You wouldn't also happen to have any questions about race and IQ would you?
Are you sure you didn't mean this article?
Though I find it amusing that both seemed to have been taken down because Freddie didn't like how people took them, so... take that for what it's worth?
Doesn't matter in the former case, the remaining title and subtitle are enough.
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shortcut since he removed it: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
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For our benefit, please provide an example of where you think the word "woke" was used as a "nebulous boogeyman" and explain how you think that nebulousness reflected an "increase" from previous use cases.
Because it seems to me that "define woke" is a question posed (mostly by trolls) all the time around here. I've never actually seen this community struggle, even a tiny bit, with what is or is not "woke."
"Woke" is a convenient handle for left wing identitarianism, broadly construed. It is often in tension with left wing materialism, so e.g. Marxists are often anti-woke leftists.
This can be confusing because "woke" is predominantly what was once called "cultural Marxism" (e.g.)--before that phrase got memory-holed into an "anti-Semitic conspiracy theory." Cultural Marxism, in turn, is the application of "critical theory" and redistributionist tendencies to "social capital" instead of monetary capital. This is one reason Marxists are often at odds with wokists; Marxism is a modernist and materialist philosophy, while wokism is postmodern and sociological. Classical Marxists will tell you that cultural Marxism is not even Marxism at all... but they still typically vote for the same people and policies.
One way in which "woke" may be somewhat evolved beyond cultural Marxism is that it seems to have incorporated a decentralized ethos impossible prior to the advent of social media; what counts as "woke" today can change rapidly depending on what is trending and who is getting cancelled. While "purity spirals" are evidenced in e.g. classical Marxist circles, "woke" (plus tech) seems to take this to unprecedented levels.
How would you define "socially conscious?" I am definitely conscious of the social issues that consume wokist thought, and yet it would clearly be a mistake to identify me as "woke," because I am not a left wing identitarian. Most people who are obsessed with issues of race or gender, and who regard those differences as central to all political questions, are left wing identitarians, but some are right wing identitarians, and those are not "woke" either--that's the "alt right"--or, better, the "identitarian right."
I wouldn't mind too terribly if the word "woke" went away, but in my experience the only people who would benefit from having it go away, and who really want it to go away, are left wing identitarians, and "left wing identitarian" is admittedly something of a mouthful.
I appreciate your thoughtful response. As others have mentioned, a similar, but less pointed question came up last week, and several of the responses seemed to be incredibly open ended, as these discussions tend to go, (ex communism is when the government does stuff I don't particularly care for). That is my primary intention for asking this question more directly. To answer your question of some instances of this occurring previously here, here are a few quotes from last week's thread:
Here is the next one:
One poster even had the self-awareness to state the following:
The left wing identitarianism and the definition you provided is good and concrete, as I am more interested in what wokeness is, rather than what wokeness does. Once we get into the latter, I feel that we get caught up into identity politics in a way that is not that dissimilar to the thing that that is being derided in the first place. After all, in a banal sense, wokeness is to the right what capitalism is to the left: the source of bad things and an object of scorn.
To me, wokism or calling things woke is a catch all term that someone right of center calls a social activity or value that someone left of center espouses. For instance, I don't think I have ever heard in person or seen online someone left of center that uses it to describe an action or an ideology. When the term is used, it does the following things in the process:
I would define socially conscious as the ability to identify differences in race/ethnicity, class, religion, etc, in addition to individual differences. Generally in the last 20+ years, that generally results in moving toward left wing ideology. The field of sociology being probably the most prescient example. How many right of center sociologists do you know?
It does sometimes get used that way, but I don't know why you would elect to espouse the least clear and useful version of the word as the archetype of the concept. Most people, right or left, are kind of stupid, and when they say political things they are mostly just signalling virtue by parroting something they heard somewhere. Children use words they can't define, sometimes properly, sometimes not; this does not actually muddy the underlying concepts.
So I can't figure out why you're in one breath complaining about people using the word in vague or merely pejorative ways, and in the next breath saying that, to you, that actually is what "woke" means. Any time you see the word in the wild, just substitute "left wing identitarianism" and it should be pretty easy to see whether the person speaking is using the word meaningfully, or just as an empty sneer. In the examples you pulled for me, I don't see any use of the word "woke" as a "nebulous bogeyman." The first two are pretty clear and direct criticisms of left wing identitarianism and the political activities of left wing identitarians. The third is just one person admitting that they aren't sure what "woke" means, precisely, but they can see what it has accomplished.
Then you haven't been paying attention (or maybe you're just late to the party). "#StayWoke" was a pretty early example of hashtag activism, circa 2012. The Wikipedia entry on "Woke" has a 2018 picture of former U.S. Representative Marcia Fudge holding a shirt that says "Stay Woke: Vote." The term itself originated back in the mid-20th century and was very much tied to the identity politics of black Americans, and its circuitous path to "viral hashtag meme" generalized rapidly to leftist identity politics generally. None of this is mysterious, and every news article out there complaining about the vagueness of "woke" ignores the well-established history of the meme in an attempt to muddy the waters of discourse, exactly as the political left has always done with words that capture its essence and expose its ridiculousness.
If that is your definition, then no, "woke" does not mean "socially conscious." To be "woke" requires a particular political attitude toward those differences; the ability to identify them is not sufficient, for the reasons I already outlined. Specifically, the identitarian right is definitely able to identify such differences, and is definitely not "woke."
I defined it that way, simply because that is the way it is most commonly used. The most common usage of any idea would be by definition archetypal, would it not? But yes, that usage would be "dumbing down" any sort of academic understanding of the word being used.
That is why I appreciate your definition of "left wing identitarianism" as a suitable replacement for "woke". It is much more descriptive and is less likely to be misused, mainly because multi word descriptors are harder to massage into extraneous meanings.
Those are good examples, but I can provide hundreds if not thousands of counter examples where it is folks right of center using the term to describe progressive or anti-racist ideas, policies, goals or activities. Furthermore, if we look in the last 5 years or so, this is almost exclusively the case. If there has been a muddying of the waters of the term since the mid-20th century or even 2018 to now, would that not be by the folks who are constantly referencing, writing and talking about it and not those who have nearly ceased using the term?
Fair. I think you have made a good point here.
I don't think so. In your previous comment you suggested two examples of people using "woke" as a mere sneer, when in fact those were both perfectly coherent criticisms of left wing identitarianism.
I suspect you might, and yet so far you have failed to even provide one clear example. In particular, I would be interested to see an example of someone using the word "woke" to describe something, anything, that is not at all plausibly left wing identitarianism. Like, someone taking a bite of pistachio ice cream and then saying, "ugh, disgusting, this ice cream is so woke." That would be pure pejorative, and is probably too much to ask, but so far the closest you've gotten is an example, not of someone using the term as a pure pejorative, but using it to describe left wing identitarianism without apparently knowing a better phrase than "woke" to describe it.
The term hasn't been particularly muddied in the last 5 years, it has just been used to accurately describe the ridiculous policies that result from left wing identitarianism. The absurd response (your response, here!) has been to try to argue that it doesn't mean anything in particular at all, and that it is just an empty smear. But it's not; it's a word that left wing identitarians used to describe themselves, and so it became a pejorative because left wing identitarianism is (it seems to me, and many others) objectively terrible.
It's like... imagine you meet someone who wishes to restore Germany to nationalistic glory, in part by stripping Jews of citizenship, socializing the German economy, et cetera. And you say... "damn, fella, you sound like a Nazi!" And he responds, "oh, get out of here with your nebulous bogeyman terms. People just use 'Nazi' as an empty smear. Sure, maybe it was once used to describe certain political beliefs, but in the last fifty years, the most common usage has just been to tar your political opponents."
I don't know about you, but I feel like the appropriate response would be, "well, true, I would like to see fewer people using the word 'Nazi' as an empty smear. But it does have an actual meaning, and expelling Jews from Germany is kind of a key aspect of that. In fact, it seems like you don't want me to call you what you are because you know that this will probably help some people realize that they do not like your policies and do not wish to vote for you."
To be frank: I think your engagement on this issue is disingenuous. I think you are very much like a Nazi who is complaining about people misusing the word Nazi. Yes, there is a motte here: the word "Nazi" definitely gets used as a nebulous bogeyman! And yet when actual Nazis use that argument, I think it is reasonable to be very suspicious of their true motivations! Because the bailey is that it's more difficult to criticize a political coalition that is constantly shifting its identity in an attempt to evade accountability and criticism.
So it is with "woke." Are there problems with how the word gets used? Sure, that's reasonable. Does that mean that all or even most use of the word "woke" is just empty rhetoric? I have seen (and you have provided) no actual evidence of that.
Federal Reserve Fox Business host Charles Payne criticized the “woke Fed” for failing to raise interest rates to curb inflation. [Fox News, Your World with Neil Cavuto, 1/14/22]
Silicon Valley Bank Asman claimed the Silicon Valley Bank failure “was caused by adherence to woke beliefs and policies. The woke belief that you can just print money without consequence.” [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 3/13/23]
Kym Worthy During a report on a man accused of setting his girlfriend on fire, Shimkus mentioned that “the woke Democrat DA in Wayne County Kym Worthy” wanted a higher bond despite her support for bail reform. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/24/22]
There are many more in that source along that are used as as primarily a "sneer". Give me an example of it being used as a "sneer" before 2010--which I think you are going to have a lot harder time doing. Why? Because the definition has had significant "creep" since then, which is my point. What is more common us the use of the word as primarily a sneer, but a smaller amount of truth to deride that person, object, idea, or company. We even have beer companies self-styling as "anti-woke"
Furthermore, we have the labeling of green energy as "woke energy" when there is an 81 member Conservative Climate Caucus in the House of Representatives. How do you reconcile the two?
Wouldn't a political coalition be shifting for other reasons than just to evade accountability, but to adjust based on criticism, lack of performance or encountering unintended circumstances? I think
Now you have evidence of that. All use cases? No, certainly not. But its primary use today (January 2025) is to tar and feather others, before finding out more about what is being described. It is shorthand for something, someone or some entity that deserves our ridicule and opposition. In some cases, maybe that is warranted. Increasingly in others, maybe not. And this last bit in your response is an excellent demonstration of what I am talking about, and it looks like the person getting the pejorative treatment is me.
Thanks for those examples. I think they are okay. Certainly they are better than your examples from this space. What I would say I see happening in the "woke Fed" example is wokism getting generalized to leftism-writ-large, rather than applying to leftist identitarianism. It's guilt-by-association, basically. Not really a "nebulous bogeyman" but certainly a sloppy use.
The "woke Democrat DA" I would need to know more about. Leftist identitarianism often has a lot to say about criminal justice through a racial lens; was this such a case? I don't know. Certainly this could also be a sloppy case.
I think you're maybe underestimating the rapid timeline on the pejoration process. Circa 2010 it was "social justice warriors," not "woke." Before that, I'm not sure... "cultural Marxism" probably, though my memory is that was more of a 1990s thing, driven in large measure by Pat Buchanan. I think maybe the first decade of the 2000s was sufficiently focused on "Islamophobia" and "Islamofascism" that maybe we didn't have a dominant shorthand meme for leftist identitarianism then? (Right now, "DEI" seems to be rising to the top as the preferred nomenclature of leftist identitarians, which is why it, too, has become something centrists and rightists mock. Once it was just called "affirmative action," and that became a bit of a sneer, too. New viral memes meet cultural immune systems every day!)
I don't really get why you're so fixated on this. I've granted that it gets used as a sneer, sometimes. But you're insisting the sneer is the "real" or "primary" definition or use, and as far as I can tell that simply isn't true. "Woke" means "leftist identitarianism" and sometimes overgeneralizes to "leftism" and rarely overgeneralizes to simply "bad." What's surprising about that? We could say similar things about "Nazi" ("German national socialist" overgeneralizes to "fascist/racist/authoritarian" overgeneralizes to "bad") or any of a host of other political identifiers.
This is just false--especially here on the Motte. The primary use of "woke" today is to describe leftist identitarians in a single syllable. Personally, I don't blame anyone for feeling bad if they are leftist identitarians; on my view, they should feel bad, and should repent! So sure, right wingers and centrists and Marxists all probably say "woke" with a sneer, but that's because they find leftist identitarianism genuinely awful.
Look, you are a "new" account that fits the MO of certain ban evaders and known trolls. You show up saying you're a "long time lurker" and immediately pick a super common topic of discussion, on which the Motte has a much, much better handle than the wider world of so-called journalists writing on the topic. Then you steadfastly insist that the stupidest possible interpretation of "woke" is the "real" one, which is exactly the position woke people are taking right now, because the word has become an effective way to limit their political power--in the face of multiple well-considered explanations for why you're mistaken.
If you are not yourself a leftist identitarian, then I don't know why you would take that position--unless you are trying to make a particularly pedantic argument about language, in which case I would expect you to bite the bullet and also argue that "Nazi" and "alt right" and "Communist" and "Neoliberal" and the like are all just meaningless slurs, given their common deployments, despite the possibility that they once had analytic content. But you don't appear to have found that angle interesting.
Conversely, if you are a leftist identitarian, then several people have given you very clear answers to your question which defuse your complaints entirely; you would be better off learning from those responses, I think, than stubbornly sticking to the current dogma as promulgated by MSNBCNN.
I think you are being overly charitable here by calling it writ-large. The Fed and/or monetary policy has never been a part of the Social Justice movement, DEI or left wing itentitarianism. The purpose of the use of the word "woke" is to cause the audience to write off the Fed's actions and to spur anger and outrage. Despite the fact the fed has been a bipartisan neokeynesian entity since the end of Bretton-Woods. So it is being used as pejorative in a use case that doesn't match a single definition that has been provided on this thread. Which is my point--there was a time when the word meant something, but now it is used . In an earlier post, you mentioned the word Nazi being used in the same way. And I absolutely agree. In fact, when it is used today, it is most likely not being used to describe a literal Nazi.
Fair, but the term "social justice warriors" never saw the meaning creep that "woke" has seen. In my opinion, SJW is a pretty apt description of the movement. Cultural marxism also saw some meaning creep, but it did not get the traction in broader culture that "woke" did. Is this because it has more than two syllables and is more specific? I think that is likely.
We could, and if you made that case I would completely agree with you. The word Nazi is overgeneralized to the point that its most common use today is "someone I don't like on the internet". Is that the official definition of the word? No it is not, there are incredibly few nazis today, and even those few on the far right in western countries largely do not fit the bill. But that is its most common use case and that is the point I am making with "woke". In your words, it is rapidly developing so it has not quite lost its luster yet, but we are closer to that point than we are to the start of it.
Fair, and I expected some grief since I picked "the" hot button topic as my first post and asked for definitions to start with instead of leading with my own. Hopefully my willingness to converse on this and other topics over time will build trust. I appreciate the dialogue on this, as I learn much more when I am in the fray versus others. In full transparency, I am somewhere between a libertarian (this is been my political ideology most of my adult life, but I have been drifting a bit as of late) and a progressive (which I share many social goals with, but disagree on means). I got accused of being "woke" over the holidays by some right leaning family members and figured y'all would better be able to define what that meant. And you (and others), provided some excellent and useful definitions, which I appreciate.
I'll define fascism in next week's culture war thread to continue the dialogue.
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We’ve had several posters trying to get people to define woke in the past couple weeks — is this just the current meme again? It seems like there’s been a large increase in trolls and insincere posters as well.
I can't speak for others, but the motivation for me was the constant use of the word "woke" in legacy media and with the incoming administration, with an ever broadening definition of the term. I also heard the word come up quite a bit over the holidays from right leaning family members who had trouble defining what it was other than it was something they didn't care for and wanted gone.
Admittedly, I am somewhere in the no mans land between libertarianism and progressivism, but don't have right leaning friends or family that are particularly thoughtful when it comes to culture war topics. I knew I could get a few good definitions here from those who are a bit more intellectual and y'all delivered. I appreciate the thoughtful responses and the efforts put into them.
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Paul Graham released an essay "The Origins of Wokeness" a few weeks ago. If you're not familiar, he's one of the co-founders of Y-Combinator and a key person in kicking off the post 2005 tech startup scene. His early 2000s essays were sort of proto-rationalist.
https://www.paulgraham.com/woke.html
He's strongly anti Trump and a prominent figure in the tech scene. I'd guess that essay got enough exposure in the leftwing tech scene that people who were used to saying "woke is just being a good person" suddenly found that they needed better arguments.
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There is no greater troll than baiting out earnest replies on The Motte. Plus, if you ever stop replying to low effort bait posts this can be taken as a sure sign that justice has prevailed. Proof positive that The Motte will crumble under the weight of its many contradictions. Its depravity proven too much to bear for the wicked souls trapped within its walls.
While this small act of sabotage may appear to be a minor disturbance it lays the groundwork for a more virtuous future. Only afterward, comrade, can the real work of the revolution commence.
The point of the motte is to promote interesting conversation. If a troll post manages to be interesting enough to lead to a good conversation, I would say it made a contribution, even if unintentionally.
Thinking someone got the best of us by creating conversation in a place designed to create conversation is odd, a thought that could only occur to someone who thinks in-depth intellectual conversations is unfun. But in fact they are fun, and a troll running with glee about how he "really got us" by giving us a chance to do what we love is like a guy who hands out Harris/Walz fliers and thinks he's campaigning for Trump.
The motte isn't a springboard for political action, just a discussion space. If trolls think they're distracting us from "real politics" by making us talk to each other, I'm just reminded of -- and I rarely use this term -- losers like KulakRevolt, who think they're going to start a race war from their basement. We're not trying to change the world, just trying to change our minds through exposure to new ideas.
I don't like trolls because of their insincerity, but they certainly do serve a purpose sometimes. If they're pathogens, maybe we can think of them as part of the site microbiome.
This is vacuous. I could believe that trolls never lead to good conversation and I'd still have to assent to this statement!
Trolls lead to bad conversations, except quokkas here tend not to understand that. A conversation can be free of obscenities and obvious insults and still not be "good". I could go onto many forums and post "Star Wars is better than Star Trek" and get 100 responses. That would not be making a contribution.
We probably should gather a couple of responses to "what is woke", put them in a FAQ, and require that all posts about this must specifically acknowledge where they disagree with the FAQ. Otherwise, ban them.
Hard pass. That's how you get 'do the homework, scum' style dickwaving on reddit. Nobody has to engage with OP unless they want to, and sometimes it's enlightening to rediscuss settled subjects. Individual posters may not have thought about it before.
If we were getting hundreds of trolls a day and they were obviously killing the site, it would be different. Thankfully we're not there yet and can still (mostly) afford to keep this place a quokka reservation.
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Are you in favor of the Bare Links Repository?
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I agree in theory but there's nothing left to be learned from the 500th round of "what is woke? Also, everyone that calls other people woke is evil, an idiot, or both."
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I figured a lot of people who previously felt extremely secure and sure of themselves have had that upturned by the election of Trump, and now feel defensive, and if they aren't social media users (or don't want to taint their feed) they need to go somewhere they can talk to the other tribe, and there aren't a lot of those left these days.
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Seems to be. I assume that the leftist prospiracy is working to muddy the waters on "woke" because it has become a useful cudgel for rightists, which is a pattern that has been repeated for a while now.
I haven't noticed this, myself, but I haven't been able to spend as much time here lately as I used to.
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About the hype around nuclear power generation among conservatives. Sorry, I do not have a well articulated text to defend here, this is more of probe into the subject, since I feel I am probably missing some fundamental logic here.
It seems to me the support for nuclear energy is a sort of pet cause for conservatives. Not because of the wonders of the technology, but for what it signals.
Given the financial cost of this type of energy source compared to other low emission energy sources, I am yet to find a defense of Nuclear as a feasible strategy for lowering CO2 emissions that comes across as based, good faith argument by someone with true concern about the issue, rather than an attempt at subverting the discussion around energy transition.
Or are there people who truly believe that nuclear energy is a part of energy transition strategy so meaningful it is worth joining forces with those raise the flag as a form of subversion? Any reading recommendation of up to date, nuanced, good faith arguments for nuclear energy?
It's a while since I read The Whole Earth Discipline, it was published in 2009 so I'm not sure whether that counts as properly up to date, but the author Stewart Brand is Bay Area hippie royalty and the book is vocally pro nuclear as well as pro genetic modification and pro urbanism.
An official annotated online version is available at https://discipline.longnow.org/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/Contents.html
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In 2025, I see the good-faith conservative pro-nuclear stance as mostly a reminiscent stance on "what could have been". It would have been absolutely viable, it would have been the better decision. Noah Smith describes the sentiment well in his introduction here.
But in 2015, this wasn't clear at all, yet. There is a long history of even experts catastrophically underestimating the exponential growth of solar and battery industrial capacity (that first graph is powerful). So in today's discussions, there's always the chance that conservatives are comparing 2015 nuclear against 2015 solar + batteries. This is a much easier proposition to defend.
But yeah, last year the US installed over 40 GW nameplate capacity of new solar. We won't ever be below that in the next 5 years, either. Grid-scale storage of this much solar might also shortly be a non-issue, since forecasts are that the world economy will produce at least 8 TWh of new lithium batteries this year. That's several hundred percent over demand, and it's hard to describe how insane that development is. That's enough batteries to put a 50kWh battery into every single new vehicle built in 2025. Since we're not doing that, batteries will get cheap enough for grid-scale storage.
Even with conservative estimates for the capacity factor of those new panels, that's the equivalent of at least 7 new reactors completed, each year. I don't think there's any case where we relax regulation sufficiently and then plan, develop (if we want to do any of the cool - small modular, thorium, ect. - things pro-nuke people want) and finance that many new reactors per year, even if we grant a 10 year lead time.
Seems to reinforce my impression that people who insist in this are either acting in bad faith, or echoing those who are.
I'm out for the serious actors who defend expanding nuclear programs, have palpable knowledge, and concern for climate change - if there is anyone who fits this description.
I'm not sure it's all bad faith and malice. I don't want to downplay the amount of uncertainty with the geopolitics and economics of renewables and storage, and the facts still change quickly.
For one, the vast majority of production capabilities (solar, wind, batteries) is in China, of course. (Trade) war would put all developer timelines in peril. Also, it's not so sure how energy pricing on a grid heavy on renewables and storage will shake out. Sweden stopped building several large wind projects because of their economics: if it's windy, all the wind parks ruin the spot market for each other and don't make money. Is it's not windy, they don't make money. Storage could change that, but of course installing to much storage to quickly could result in the same thing...
So in a way, nuclear is a classic conservative position. We know almost everything about how a nuke-heavy grid would look like. The geopolitics are far safer. We know exactly how much over budget each rector would land.
And I also believe it's important to dream big. Maybe the trump admin deregulates nuclear in a big way. Maybe some republican states move in concert, and also deregulate and unify their remaining regulations. Maybe there's a subsidies project on the scale of what other countries have been pumping into renewables. Maybe there's a Manhattan project 2.
And while I'm a firm believer in solar+batteries, I would welcome it. We really could use all hands on deck when we Electrify Everything^TM...
I don't know any highly technical pro-nuke experts, but construction physics has the analysis on the regulatory landscape
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I'm not opposed to solar, but it takes up considerably more space than an equivalent nuclear plant, and is worse for the environment.
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Solar+storage+nuclear are all complementary technologies.
As I understand, grid-scale storage allows nuclear to operate at a high load factor by soaking up extra overnight production when demand is super low.
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While people do overstate the difference, solar nameplate and grid-scale storage nameplate and practically usable values are not identical. I'm pleasantly surprised by the growth of solar, as someone who was genuinely very pessimistic in the late 00s, but there's still a number of limitations to the technology.
On the flip side, a ton of the financial limitations to nuclear power are regulatory, and often regulations established by people who explicitly want to smother nuclear power completely. It'll require some uptooling to bring down costs, but there's a massive amount of low-hanging fruit. I like the SMRs for a variety of technical reasons, but even 300-800 MW plants are really not the sort of thing that should take decades to construct, and that time component is what absolutely murders the financial model.
Now, there are limits to the technology -- just as solar can't beat nuclear for baseload capacity, nuclear's near-uniquely bad for peaking power. I don't think nuclear can or should displace most renewables, and I'd be surprised if they all together can completely displace LNG peaker plants in the next couple decades. But there are reasons beyond politics to argue for them both.
And, of course, just as Biology is Mutable argued, just because the problem is political doesn't mean it's solvable. It may be that there's no way to get those anti-nuke nuts out from regulations, or the only way to do so is extraordinarily costly.
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These figures are only possible because China massively over invested in production. They're all losing money hand over fist right now, and we're getting cheap overproduced EV cells because of it. I talked about my new bargain basement solar UPS in the last fff thread for an example of the fire sale deals you can get.
And even with those deals (6 cents/Wh!) my batteries for a 1 day backup were still 3x more expensive than the solar.
But this isn't sustainable long term, even assuming relations with China don't deteriorate the way everyone seems to be planning. And it's certainly not sustainable on the backs of the laughable US solar industry, which is a mix of subsidy farmers and outright scammers.
Storage might solve the daily duck curve, which is more than I expected to ever be possible, but there's no way to meet seasonal demand with batteries; in most of the US winter energy use more than doubles while solar produces 1/10th of what it does in summer, because the sun just isn't here (Europe could solve this one by colonizing the Sahara, admittedly). There's no way to make solar scale with those numbers, especially when you're trying to make that winter energy demand double or triple again with electric heating mandates.
I want to run the math on North-South and East-West HVDC transmission that all the greens handwave as a solution, but just don't have the figures to make a useful guess. But as seen in the northeast they won't let us build power lines either, so it's a moot point.
I've heard that wind energy is an effective complement to solar; when solar is weak wind is strong. Can wind energy make up for the solar energy shortfall during the Winter?
No, that was something the German greens picked up as propaganda. Wind is just incredibly intermittent. Where I live it will go still for a week at a time. It survives because of massive per-mhw subsidies that pay a flat rate even if nobody wants to buy the power produced (currently $27.5/MWh, but only for union-built projects, thank you "inflation reduction act" lol).
Btw, that green "biomass" line on the first chart is literally wood chips imported from the US and Canada. Nobody ever talks about this, but I find it hilarious that Germany replaced the power of the atom with wood fires for base load, to "reduce carbon emissions".
In a lot of places the meh wind areas do see a slight increase during winter, but the best ones come from summer diurnal winds blowing through passes.. So a propagandist can quote the 16mph figure to give a low price, then quote the winter increase to excuse variability.
Similar trick with quoting on-shore costs together with off-shore production.
(For reference any site under 9mph is rated "unacceptable" and anything under 13mph is "meh", so none of those other sites could be developed. Any wind below the turbine cut-in speed of ~6-9mph is wasted, and they only produce rated power at like 15-20mph)
In both Europe and the US, wind stops producing at all during those cold still days in winter, when heating demand is at peak.
Hilariously in Washington wind also vanishes during heat waves, because the ocean air is no longer cold & high pressure enough to flow up the Columbia gorge to the low pressure interior. So all wind energy does is get paid to make energy when nobody wants it and screw up energy markets with "you must buy renewables first" mandates.
Fascinating. Is off-shore wind any better? Furthermore, is it plausible, or even feasible, to get around renewable energy intermittency by using hydrogen or other means of chemical energy storage? If, as you say. wind energy produces energy when it isn't needed, it seems potentially lucrative to buy that low price energy, transform it into a chemical, then sell high when the wind isn't blowing. This would also mitigate the energy efficiency blow you eat when converting to chemical energy, because you'd be using cheap excess energy in the first place.
Plausible? Sure. Feasible? Not really. It's one of those things that is technically do able, but so inefficient it begs the question of why other than ideology.
All 'we'll store on green energy when it's on for use when it stops' schemes fundamentally require (a) excess capacity when the weather is 'on' (or else there is nothing to store), and (b) so much excess capacity that the energy-ecology 'savings' of the green production aren't outweighed by the energy/ecological costs of the energy storage infrastructure.
Consider your chemical storage premise. Your wind power / solar power / whatever power has to be so much savings that it can not only cover the utility of the off-cycle power load, but also the ecological costs of the storage system. If this is chemical, this means all the ecological costs of producing the chemicals, moving the chemicals on-site, storing the chemicals, utilizing the chemicals, dealing with the chemical byproducts, and all the human personnel / infrastructure upkeep associated with running the site.
And if this does pan out... it's useful for precisely one geographic location, and all the green energy infrastructure inputs (rare earths, etc.) that could have been used elsewhere, aren't, because you're building over-capacity for the storage system.
By contrast, you could just... have a single power planet capable of meeting baseload power, and then let the same green-material inputs be used elswhere.
And this doesn't get into the questions like 'how can I get the most efficient use of my limited green tech input materials.'
There is far more energy demand than there is green energy supply, and in any combination of 'clean' and 'dirty' fuels, your ecological maximization isn't 'how do I get a specific city green,' but 'how do I minimize the total amount of dirty outputs.' It turns out, this is often best done by... targeting the least efficient dirty-fuel economies first, not the most.
As a general rule, bigger / more capital-intense generator plants are more efficient per volume of fossil fuel than smaller / cheaper engines. XYZ gallons of fuel in a generator plan will produce more energy, and at less greenhouse gas, than XYZ gallons of fuel distributed to cars. Since electric power grid charged vehicles are still getting their power from the generator plant regardless, you'd rather fuel-generators / battery cars than battery-generators / fuel cars.
Now consider that your chemical-storage thought is really just an awkward battery, and the feasibility should be clearer. Could it be done? Sure. Would it be better for the environment than not? Probably not, given that the 'not' isn't 'nothing is done' but the alternatives that could be done.
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Perhaps the "fundamental logic" at issue is geography.
Think about the viability of solar power for providing electricity to power air-conditioning in Arizona. Peak generation is around noon. The air is still heating up, so I guess that peak demand is around 2 or 3 pm. A bit of a mismatch. Curing that only needs two or three hours of storage. Overprovisioning might be cheaper than storage, there is still plenty of sunshine at 3 pm. The occasional cloudy days reduce the output of solar power plants, but those days are cooler reducing the power needed. It looks to me that this will work well and cheaply, and contribute to people saying that solar power is economically viable.
But I live in Scotland. Long days and some sun shine in summer. Short days and thick dark clouds in winter. The demand for power is for space heating, not air conditioning, and is in winter. I pay attention when I see reports of exciting new technologies for grid scale energy storage, but it all seems to be half day storage; keep the electricity on over night. The resource - summer sunshine - is six months out of synchronization with the requirement. Solar power, to generate electricity to run heat pumps to keep homes warm in Scotland is beyond the reach of current technology. Suitable grid scale storage doesn't exist, and huge overprovisioning would be fabulously expensive.
I favor nuclear power for Scotland. And people in Arizona should make their own choice based on how things really are in Arizona.
The anti-nuclear power argument seems to be "solar is cheap, therefore no nuclear". Prod a bit and it seems to be just missing the geographical factor. Putting geography in unsympathetically and it becomes "solar in cheap in certain circumstances, therefore no-one may have nuclear, and people in the wrong circumstance must freeze to death in winter."
Another contender for "fundamental logic" is that many technologies have an early dangerous stage.
The medieval cathedral builders had collapses. Ship stability wasn't properly understood leading to capsizes, even of giant prestige warships. Steam engines were indirectly dangerous because their high pressure boilers would explode. Railway trains had lots of disasters before signalling got sorted out. There is also an interesting technology progression with making braking systems fail safe, with the fail safe version of vacuum breaking getting displaced by Westinghouse's fail safe version of air brakes. The Tay Bridge disaster isn't really a railway story, it is about structural engineers not knowing about wind loading. Civil aviation started off really dangerous and is now very safe.
So it is odd to give up on nuclear power when you can look at the details of accidents, such as Chernobyl, and say: we don't build them like that any more, we are past the dangerous stage. We also understand key parts of the sociology. Nuclear power was cloakatively about providing electricity to civilians, but really about creating plutonium for nuclear weapons, so corners were cut on safety in the rush to Armageddon. Today we know about gotchas such as Wigner Energy and this time around is 100% about providing electrical power. I think that the safety issues really are in the past.
Overprovisioning solar power for peak demand is cost prohibitive in Texas, and you need storage anyways because of night time. Needless to say, overprovisioning for almost everwhere else is not going to happen.
Overpaneling is actually pretty cost-effective right now, even for home users. Until bidens tariffs hit this year, Chinese panels were just that cheap. The actual panels are a small fraction of system costs at this point, with the mounts, wiring, charger/inverter, and especially batteries being far more expensive. If you can rig up cheap ground mounts it makes sense to overpanel almost everywhere now.
I'm planning to expand to about 1200W of panel in a 3s2p for a tiny 30A charge controller for example. That's anywhere from 3x to 1.5x overpaneled depending on 12 vs 24V battery setup.
People are doing neat stuff with parallel east-west strings sharing hardware, min-maxing DC transmission wiring to reduce system costs, finding cheap DC dump loads for clipped power, HV batteries, etc.
It doesn't solve the seasonal issue of course, but it's definitely economical, and making hr-scale battery systems even more viable.
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OK I'll bite. There is a huge difference in used land area used when compared between the same amount of power generated between wind power when compared with nuclear power. Because when you calculate in the Capacity Factor (and actually look further down on the actual combined capacity of wind compared with nuclear you see the difference is 3x). I'll give you the initial number 1000 MW of power from a nuclear power plant and the average size of wind power plant of 3 MW. How many turbines do you need to get the same amount of power when you have the Capacity Factor in the calculation? I'm not going to run the numbers for you! You need to calculate them yourself to understand the argument. You need educate yourself on how much forests are cut to avoid wind shear on the turbine blades, to have maintenance roads and so on. And how that deforestation affects the fauna around the turbines. There are cost calculations on the displacements of humans but seldomly I see a monetary value associated with the environmental costs of displacement of wildlife. I crunched the numbers and I think that the environmental costs of just the land use with what I know about wind power made me pro nuclear.
I am not defending that solar, hydro or wind power have always the lowest environmental impact, everywhere.
But environmental impact is hardly the only factor we look at when developing powerplants, and cost is often the main factor.
“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” - Oscar Wilde.
No but the question here is that you are explicitly looking for an good faith argument for justifying Nuclear Energy even if it costs more, without specific political valence added to it. My argument is that we shouldn't sacrifice the environment to save the climate, even if nuclear costs more. You need almost a thousand average size windturbines to replace a single average nuclear power plant if you calculate it with the Capacity Factor. And then you start looking at the lifespan of the wind power vs nuclear power it isn't looking that nice either.
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I think the fundamental logic is also that we (broadly we, humans) get better at the things we do more of. So looking at nuclear in the US right now is not really looking at its potential had we stayed the course in 1970 rather than taking a left turn towards fossil fuels.
We can also look at France and their experience scaling expertise. They are one of the few countries actually lowering their CO2 footprint despite continuing to export energy to Germany.
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Have you done any research on this yourself? Are you familiar with, e.g., the very low cost of nuclear energy in South Korea?
I'm pro-nuclear, but I don't exactly have an essay written up on as to why – it's an aggregation of various things I've read over the years. But if you do a quick Google you'll find sources like this one (I haven't read it, but I've skimmed it and I think it covers the points you are interested in).
Obviously, if nuclear isn't financially acceptable in cost, I am interested in hearing about it. But my priors, based on osmosis, is that that cost is at least partially artificially inflated, and that there are a lot of hidden environmental costs to "clean" energy methods like solar.
One of the things the article I linked notes to is that wind and solar (which take up tremendous amounts of space) are heavily subsidized, whereas nuclear energy (at least in the US) is burdened by overregulation. In South Korea, nuclear is cheaper than wind and solar.
Check out the article I linked, maybe do some research yourself, and report back :)
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Is it possible to look at the state of Germany and think the other side of the issue is correct? It seems so simple there's no reason to discuss it, except as a distraction from the obvious example of terrible "green" energy policy.
I just don't feel the need to argue at this point. Just cut green subsidies and purchase mandates, and run cover for a NuclearX to solve the problem.
I'm not even particularly pro-nuclear, because solar-gas-hydro might very well be cheaper. I'm just fed up with green manipulation, dog piling, excuse-making, and histrionic crusading. And I'm especially sick of arguments that go "prove X to my satisfaction, haha you didn't satisfy me I win again"
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I think what you are missing is that there are parallel developments which call into question whether the high price is actually inherent to the technology in the way we've been led to believe. The most direct parallel here is space launch. Not very long ago, the price per kilogram to orbit was high enough to make satellites prohibitively expensive for anyone but nation states and extremely well-capitalized corporations. Human spaceflight was all but unthinkable for anyone except national astronautics programs. The conventional wisdom was that this is just the nature of the problem: rockets are expensive and expendable, development requires decades of engineering, and there are no real major technological advancements achievable without new fundamental breakthroughs.
But this turned out not to be the case! SpaceX entered the market and proved that using iterations of well-known designs, hiring the right people and compensating them properly, and leadership pushing hard at schedules and milestones while also driving on costs, you actually could dramatically lower the cost to orbit beyond what anyone thought possible, while still being profitable!
So with this context, there's lots of reasons to be skeptical that the cost and feasibility barriers cited for nuclear power are real. As with liquid-fueled rockets, this is a reasonably well-developed and very well-understood technology. The bulk inputs are concrete and steel, inexpensive things we know how to build with. We don't need fundamental breakthroughs. What we need are industry leaders with the drive to engineer better reactors designed for safety and mass production and for the NRC to streamline the permitting process to something with clear, reasonable requirements. Unlike with rockets, we unfortunately also need reform in the building permitting processes that are also used to block or delay every other major infrastructure project, but I don't think that's an impossible dream.
So, your interlocutors may well believe that the cost factor, as real as it is today, not be inherent to the technology, and that we have everything we need to unlock the capability to manufacture and deploy nuclear power facilities as quickly and cheaply as combustion turbines, if only the right combination of leadership and policy falls into place.
I do not think this is the reasoning behind it. I personally believe that nuclear fusion may render all other power sources obsolete in our lifetime, but I do not think more nuclear powerplants with out current tecnology in the foreseeable future.
As far as I know and until I see sources that convice me otherwise, they are too costly, and that gets in the way of more cost-efficient green power generation - and even of nuclear research, depending on how you allocate the budget.
I am yet to see in the general debate someone trying to defend nuclear energy with the argument of accelerating technology development
Would it be fair to say, then, that if it could be demonstrated that the costs are not inherent to the technology, then you would support (or at least not oppose) nuclear power installation?
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The electrical grid needs baseload power. In this graph green represents wind production in Sweden each day. A serverhall or steel mill has a fairly constant consumption rate. During During various Dunkelflautes the wind power production has dropped to low single digit percentages of installed capacity.
Some countries like Norway and Iceland are blessed with boundless cheap baseload power from hydro and geothermal. The rest of us need to create it. Nuclear is reliable, not dependent on weather and provides a stable and green electrical grid. There wasn't a single hour in which Germany's electrical grid was greener than France's last year. France bet on nuclear, Germany on fossil fuels with wind when the weather is good.
Too much focus is spent on electricity production and not enough on the grid. A nuclear powerplant 50 km from a city requires a 50 km cable that is operating at an average of 90-95% capacity. Windpower requires multiple power lines that can be a thousand km long to connect the city to various different wind parks, where it might be windy at different times. This is not green, cheap or efficient.
I understand solar and wind have their shortcomings when in comes to production stability, and that they may have hidden costs. But that it is long stretch from there to concluding nuclear power is generally a worthy complement to them, with aims at minimizing emissions.
As clean and safe and whatever else it may be, there is no way around the price. It consistently ranks among the most costly sources. And budget being the tightest constraint, I cannot imagine it being an important part of the strategy for energy transition - maybe some minor and localized cases, but not more than that.
For a curious layman like me, it is hard to tell serious speech from the noise. But just pointing out that something has a problem does not sell well that nuclear is the best solution.
Nuclear isn't that expensive. France managed to build a majority nuclear grid that has been safe and stable for decades while maintaining sensible electrical prices. The price comes from building one of a kind reactors by companies with little experience while contending with insane levels of regulation.
If you know of a source that demonstrates that and contrasts with alternatives, I would be interested in reading
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As another commenter asked, are you calculating the insane and targeted regulatory burdens as part of this price? Most nuclear plants that have gone up have undergone extreme lawfare designed to put them out of business. Without all of that, do you suppose the cost might go down?
Absolutely that is an important factor for understanding how nuclear weighs against alternatives. I cannot say where we should draw the line between lawfare and necessary checks and rightful disputes, nor can I say what the actual political cost it is to have nuclear powerplants. But would be very interested in reading a source that makes a good case for nuclear power using uo to date data, and its nvironmental and economic effect under different scenarios
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Transmission is under-discussed because most people handwave it, yeah. Our electric co-op is trying to make everyone move to electric heat while already hitting the limits of the undersea cable. So they want to spend another x-million to replace that to meet the peak of winter demand, which means it will be used at 20% capacity the rest of the year.
That's an awful lot of expensive copper just sitting in the ocean not earning its keep. Greens always say "oh we'll just build more X" without ever considering the capital costs, then ban copper mining.
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If you want good-faith engagements, it would probably help not to poison the well by categorically dismissing all previous (but ambiguous) engagements as bad-faith and aligned with a general political tribe.
Particularly when you base it on a conclusion as a settled point (relative financial cost) without even making a position on the elements that make it a disputed premise. (I.E., what the relative costs are by what metric, what you believe the relative costs would be if you remove imposed regulatory burdens from one side and regulatory subsidies/requirements on the alternatives, what the relative costs of the political advocacy/opposition dynamics were reversed, etc.).
The crux of pro-nuclear arguments is that the technology provably exists and does not require assumptions of future technological breakthroughs, many of the more often cited relative costs are either imposed (regulatory over-engineering requirements no other power sector has to fail) or selective (concerns over nuclear-related costs in excess to equivalent welfare risks from others), that nuclear is effective baseload power (which is needed for sustained industrial economics at scale) rather than intermittent (which functionally requires additional baseload generation regardless for load-balancing, see Germany), and that many of the premises of 'low emission' energy sources just smuggle away the relative costs (such as not considering the extraction / processing / recycling / end-of-lifecycle costs) or have never been feasible requirements for the goals they were meant to support (i.e. the required amounts of rare earth minerals to supported estimates being magnitudes beyond actual rare earth mineral production) in ways that are both highly grift-able and grifted (see carbon credit markets relations to organized crime).
I do not mean to disqualify the argument. It does seem productive to me, however, to observe the correlated occurrence of seemingly contradicting positions within a group - a lesser regard for climate change, but defending nuclear power - and be extra cautious about potential interests in disguise inside the discussion.
The aspects you brought up are absolutely pertinent to investigate in order to establish a good judgement about the role nuclear should have in the energy transition, but ones that I seldom hear in the public debate. That's why I am out for good sources.
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Put it on top of the Dissident Upset: Not Enough People Radicalized pile, Bob.
More seriously, the tone of this sounds like things have gone down hill. The one chance to tear down the machine is slipping through our fingers. My question for people familiar with his work: can someone can share a piece of his that is optimistic? Not generally optimistic. I mean a forward-looking optimism within the constraints of his beliefs that explains his reasons for being so.
If the listed impediments are previously predicted realities, that sucks. This appears to be a massive period for transition for what defines the American right. To tap out of it is to surrender. I wouldn't say that the average X DR user will have fair representation of their beliefs in society or its political systems anytime soon. Probably not, but, I don't know, seems like a time where Curtis Yarvin gets an NYT interview indicates a period where influence matters. A time where influence matters the most. If that demands pessimism, then raise a white flag and surrender. You may receive better terms than resisting.
That's what politics is for most people interested in politics. A soap opera. The modal antifa protestor is more interested in playing the role of revolutionary than becoming a revolutionary. Which is why they'll show up to riot, yet don't bomb too many government buildings or carry out reprisals against civilians.
Yes. You should plan your politics accordingly, aim to change minds via other avenues, or compete in the mainstream.
Power structures don't want 30 million sheeples awoken from a slumber to become politically engaged radicals. Not yours, not anyone. The SA gets defanged and sidelined for perfectly suitable reasons. Power creates a unique position to disappoint those most loyal to it.
There's an argument that the left's resurgence via progressive identity politics was Stalin's last necktie. By 2010 the left's corpse was begging to be cut open and adorned by progressives. Its credibility used in a seamless transformation. That it was made to wear skirts was silly.
It's easy to be cynical about it now, but in a past life the Tea Party was also once considered a threat to the existing power structures of American conservatives. Not as acute a threat. The disparity between it and the contemporary status quo was not nearly as wide, but co-opted and eaten all the same. The system will eat and accommodate all it can manage. That which can't be accommodated will be iced out. The DR has plenty of ideas that can't be accommodated with pluralistic realities.
An aside, anecdotally it seems like "conservative" is falling off. "The right" seems to be more popular these days.
A prominent user here once took a lot of heat for some such event. I don't remember what spurred this response, but I do remember the invective deployed against him. Paraphrased it went something like: "Your writing is nothing but gay navel gazing."
I could accept I'm in some kind of mood, too dumb, or too different to appreciate it, but that's a bit how I feel about this. Gay navel gazing dissent. If all dissident does is complain about how fake and gay the country, its people, and its systems are-- fine. But, then why should I read its essays? Can't I just have read Moldbug, some of his derivatives infrequently, absorb the gist, and call it a day? Why not?
I would say that you are too hostile to appreciate it and too entitled to people like AA appealing to you. Of course there is room for more dissident right wing writers with valuable things to say than just Moldbug. That statement tells me you simply don't like the dissident right and want it to go away. It is just not for you and it changing sufficiently will end up changing its character in a self destructive manner..
What is my solution to you not appreciating writers like Pavini? There isn't one, not everything has to appeal to everyone. You are welcome not to read him, but I don't think you have been engaging charitably with the merits.
You could make more of an effort to engage with him on his merits by putting yourself in the shoes of actual right wingers who want right wing objectives. Pavini is making actually a valid point. The mainstream right and its cheerleaders have consistently overpromised and not only under delivered but at times delivered in line with left wing objectives. Same with zionists who the republicans have always pandered towards.
AA has also made a video about reasons to be cautiously optimistic about Trump that speaks more positively about some of Trump admin's moves. Both the skepticism and appreciation of some initial steps forward are warranted.
He tries without 100% success to push for analysis from a realist perspective and also to do so while being right wing.
At the end of the day, your reaction illustrates that a certain shared moral priors and friendliness is necessary to explore issue on their merits. Else you get nowhere since you are side tracked by those who are against you even trying to oppose the establishment. I actually have seen more discussion on the merits of such issues by right wingers who are more willing to disagree with each other to an extend rather than having a completely intolerant approach.
I find the right to be a more intellectual space where issues are explored more while liberals are more about promoting conformism and trying to dismiss issues from a politically correct standpoint. So personally, on some level I engage with some dissident right wingers because I find them more intellectually stimulating and entertaining than liberals which I find much less intellectual and more interested in winning by sidelining important issues. Therefore more boring.
I must admit that unfortunately these tactics have had some success. But if one is interested in the question of how power is organized you can study liberals who are more successfully machiavellian, but you can not listen to them because a greater share of their rhetoric is about obscuring what is useful to them politically to obscure for the purposes of getting their way. Which is why it is boring since someone who wants to obscure an issue and get others to shut up about it, will not say what is interesting and true.
If it is who I think he is, Julius Bronson, now Joseph Bronski, he has got some small online success through creating a right wing substack and appealing to right wing voices. He has also not been engaging with as much defensive rhetoric which is easier to do when you don't have to deal with liberals attacking you which is done in part because they are liberals who dislike authentic right wingers. Like Kulak, leaving the motte lead to greater success and a more pleasant response. Sure, there can be elements of behavior of right wingers that are bad, more so for some people, but also liberals love to create constantly discussions about the horrible psychology of the enemy they hate that somehow such issues become much less prominent without the liberals around. There we see discussions that are more about the issues.
Of course there can be blind spots between communities that share certain ideological priors and are more friendly with each other but I do think there is something to a liberal hostility to the realist school of thought that the right is friendlier with and can more easily combine with being right wing. Not always, there is the cheerleading not realistic version to the right too. While the liberal tribe ironically exercises more so the kind of behavior of machiavelianism analyzred by realists than the right, but also to an extend have bought their own propaganda. Therefore, despite any possible ideological blindspots on the right, I don't see liberals succeed in focusing on any just mistakes, but rather are more uncharitable and motivated by a more total intolerance. And there is the great interest to find an excuse to dismiss issues by negatively describing their right wing oppositions. Which makes it hard to explore such issues at all.
This leads also to platforms dominated by the left and liberals to have a mentality that leads to more struggle sessions with each other.
Add to the more pleasant experience for right wingers when trying to engage with right wingers, and I think the end point of the extreme critique of different variants of rhetoric like "nothing but gay navel gazing", is for liberals to be deliberately excluded by right wingers who seek communities with other people on the right.
At the right (excluding those figures who aren't right wing at all), there is some ideological diversity and some hostitilities among factions as well but I find the typical liberal perspective on the right to be of a more fanatically intolerant. Akin to a religion zealot against apostates or enemy religious tribes. I guess a rare atypical liberal like Michael Tracy who doesn't really fit with mainstream liberals, can provide value on blindspots and is one of the people I like to read at times.
This sentiment of wanting to explore unpopular truths but genuinely do so, not just pretend to, is fundamental to any writer of value. And so even outside the right there are people who do so but even they step on some pieties and dogmas of mainstream liberalism. Keeping with the theme that there are shills even among the right, so beyond just right versus non right, I do think there is a value in some authentic truth tellers who share an appreciation for the act of trying to ascertain the unpopular truth. Including when criticising Trump or right wing totems. Especially when trying to explore genuine corrupt behavior by the powerful. So this can to an extend cross some ideological boundaries. Whitney Webb isn't really a strict right winger but I prefer to read her over many more openly claiming right wingers. The intercept's Lee Fang is someone else who I enjoy reading at times. Worthy writers are interested in revealing how things really are, rather than trying to cover things up and obscure reality. So even beyond the right, there is some discussion among people that cross ideological boundaries, but I guess there is still a common element. Which is people willing to criticize the regime on its various problems and corruptions.
Thanks. He linked to some other videos in the above piece as well. I prefer my dose in wordcel form, but maybe will view some one day.
I would like for it to spend less time on what it perceives as unfortunate truths that I was reading about a decade ago. So much has changed! Despite the changes many interests, nature of power, and fundamental aspects of our systems have not. There's no new mechanism to work around the Unfortunate Realities. Unless I have the wrong impression, much of what I do read from this sphere explains why you probably can't work around them. "90%" of the nominal followers, along with the leaders they look to, are committed to slop production instead of the advancement of interests.
The whole shebang begins to look more like an art collective than anything else. For Pavini, I have no idea if this is fair. I will try to read more of his links recommended in this thread below. Since you mentioned him, then Kulak for sure is a candidate for the title of artist more than advocate or organizer. He can find success in performing in other venues, because of the ecosystem that Pavini identifies as problematic. Tens of thousands of hobbitses clamoring for more doom posts, more black pills, and more performance. Everyone wants to feed from their own slop trough. That appears to be a major motivation of this lamentation.
Tangential, but if the dissenters must remain independent of the system they criticize to remain credible then must they not participate? Philosophy dudes can correct me, but this seems elementary. Of course not. This would be self-defeating for any serious attempt to advance interests if those interests include practical changes and engagement. One can retain sufficient autonomy inside or beside a system to be credible, so long as those judging him can agree. For conflict theorists, realists, ruffians, outlaws and purists in this milieu this looks like a continual sticking point.
Regarding friendliness: I don't agree this is a fair characterization. It's not the lack of friendliness that triggers me. I am not easily shocked from most writing and definitely not by the dissident's manifesto. My critique was that it is redundant, tired, or even unproductive. My interests don't restrict myself to read only nice, friendly writers. I'm friendly, and I'm boring. Being non-friendly and critical can be authentic. It's not a prerequisite to honesty though. It's a style, choice, or result of feelings, not a measure of authenticity. Of Kulak's writing that I have appreciated (I have read and appreciated plenty of it, though less in past couple years) not much of it can be called friendly. Cocytarchy was fun, although a novel sort of topic. Some of his critical, unfriendly writing appears inauthentic to me. That's the rub.
I may be wrong to pump out 6 paragraphs to cry about an essay from an author I'm not near familiar enough to pattern match. But I recognize what appear to be thousands of hobbitses learning to pattern-match aesthetics to truth or authenticity. Which creates problems that Pavini, after I've criticized for being Not Entertaining Enough, also recognizes?
I disagree that liberals are constitutionally incapable of grokking the vibes or are exceptional in how they engage with other beliefs. I agree honest dissent is necessary and good. I agree I am more likely to disregard dissent I don't like. I judge this minority viewpoint to expend too much gas spinning its tires in the mud. The pomo intersectional people might call this a privileged assessment given its place in the pyramid.
Important issues have remained important for more than a decade. Highlighting things that remain relevant is good. Sure there are unproductive elements in how the dissident right approaches power but your critique is too total and leads nowhere and instead leads us to avoid the substance of specific issues and gets us sidetracked.
After being hostile to him, are you using AA for your attack on the dissident right?
Yes, I think people who want to change a system should participate in it. There is a tension between being integrated into the system and losing your purpose, or not participating.
AA does seem to be someone who doesn't want to be an activist and to to act as more of a scholar.
Not sure about what thread you were referring. I wasn't recommending anyone. I was just saying that leaving the motte and dealing with right wingers lead to them being more successful, getting more appreciation and far less hate and their ideas were explored more commonly in good faith and in an intellectual manner. Even when people disagreed with their ideas. And it was good personally for these right wingers to filter liberals whose rhetoric tends to be anti intellectual dismissals in general, or just trying to damage their reputation.
Yes Kulak has an element of over the top exaggeration that can be criticized. But he also brings valid points.
What you say about all it being black pills, slop, is just uncharitable inaccurate exaggerated overly dismissive assertion. You use Pavini here against the disident.
To quote Pavini much of rhetoric is bulshit, bulshit, bulshit, therefore we rule. Some of your rhetoric here isn't even wrong you are just making assertions after assertions that are overly dismissive without saying much that is concrete.
Yes, much of the rhetoric promoted by people isn't the same as concrete action but might be influencing politics. Just like the existence of plenty of liberals promoting their agenda is influencing the world.
This statement:
I think this is happening.
If you contrast your criticisms with Pavini's, he criticizes specific sub groups in a manner that makes much more sense. That politicians listen to donors and powerful groups like zionists over voters and people engaged on twitter. He also posted something more optimistic after Trump doing some more promising things than expected and how there is some room for cautious optimism. Even his criticisms of slop is not just a line that is thrown there but makes sense in the context of what AA has been pushing. I don't necessarily agree with how far he pushes it though.
Nobody died and made Pavini infallible anyway. But he makes a point that makes sense and some claims that might be more questionable and your rhetoric about blackpillers, about refusal to participate in politics, slop, gas spinning its tiers in the mud, doesn't make sense. Rather you seem to be trying to overly dismiss the right here.
I am just saying that a minimum of friendly intentions is a prerequisite for intellectual honesty. There can exist some fair minded people who can be relatively on firm ground even when dealing with people they are hostile too. And this can exist even among people who aren't aligned of course but much less likely with some ideological groups. Liberals tend to be lacking this minimum when dealing with right wingers..
Honestly, you can like or dislike what you like. I am not going to try to convince you that this dude or the other dude, has X article that you will enjoy reading since what you like is going to be based on your preferences.
Pavini still made a valid point about the fact that there hasn't been a good track record for those who have been trusting the plan with the pro zionist establishment right.
What do you mean when you refer to hobbitses?
Trump might be better than other likely alternatives on the right, which could have tangible power and the online right might had some influence and so Pavini's claims might had been too strong. So the associations with aesthetics in this case might have some more validity than the usual politician that right wingers align with. Trump still would be more loyal to a base that have expectations on him, rather than merely blindly following.
Or under Trump they give some small victories but the warnings about Trump and tech oligarchs are true and they continue the path of the surveillance state through private public partnership of the state, intelligence services and private collaborating organizations like Palantir, and the big silicon valley corporations.
My critique is not meant to be total. We would need to accept that the value of the DR is limited to irascibility. I don't think this is true. My question was, in the context of this post being shared, is why should I read this type of post?
You mention Zionists twice, but they're not mentioned in the linked piece at all. When I read it, I assumed interests of Jews to be a part of, but not the totality, his model for the "system [that] has successfully neutered and tamed what was once something that alarmed them." Maybe that's obvious missing context due to not being a reader. If he considers Zionist synonymous for the elite, the Cathedral, and all else that oppresses him that's good to know.
I don't feel very hostile, but if I were then what's the problem using his impression of the ecosystem he is apart of? It is common to use or express hostility under the cover of truth telling-- truthful or not. This very piece could be described as hostile. I repeated throughout I am not that familiar and used him as a proxy. I don't think I'm asking dissidents to stop dissenting or to give up their beliefs. Although I don't agree with many of them. I am attacking a category of writing that prioritizes style over substance in an Angry Screed. Dissidents have a penchant for it though not a monopoly. Dissidents write plenty of interesting stuff.
Hostility is a good word to attach to my intolerance. Hostility has been overused and lost its affect. Hostility is normal. We should expect hostility to come naturally to the disaffected dissident. It can used in be a true reflection, a contrived narrative, or a rote, slop-producing process. Who is to say which is which? De gustibus.
Overly nice, pleasant dissident. There's an unfilled niche.
We may differ on what 'friendly intentions' means and to what degree people engage honestly. In support of your case, I think something like the recent NYT interview with Yarvin is an example. Lomez over Nathan Robinson, and so on. I don't think the DR, in its popular form represented by frogmen and anime gurus, is without sin when it comes to intellectual honesty.
I have severe suspicion of the suggestion that one can more honestly engage with ideas by bowing out of spaces with resistance. More easily and more lucrative, yes. Better to find comfort of like-minded individuals and build on your beliefs without those silly distractions? This sounds preposterous to me with a reference to The Motte. Sharing a space with like-minded people can be easier for development of consensus, making friends, and leisure. It can easily be worse for honestly engaging with ideas, especially those you don't share. I highly recommend everyone adopts some form of this suspicion lest they be misled.
Practically speaking if one wants to get paid to write they need to limit how much and where they write for free. I hope everyone on the right does not need to leave The Motte to engage honestly with their ideas or build upon them.
My understanding of this analogy: elves are elites of the regime, and hobbits are used as a general stand-in for people, proles, non-sentient useful idiots, populist agents of change, or useless hedonists. Whatever else you need people to be in a sentence. I remembered Dark elves as some counter-elite. The analogy can describe a populist surge, or it can describe middling, politically engaged plebs that need to get out of the way so the Real Men can do work.
I like it. De gustibus.
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I skimmed John Artcot's "Factions of the Rightosphere" and found it riddled with basic factual errors and ommissions large enough to drive an national election through. That this "Academic Agent" character believes it to be "exhaustive and well researched" immediately casts everything else that they (and by extension you) have said into doubt.
Is there a factions of the rightosphere article you find accurate? Because sometimes I get lost and end up wandering into a fight between Mexican Catholic integralists and their most hated enemy: Mexican-american born-again dominionists.
Hard to say, the bits about NRX, and HBD seem reasonably accurate as far as i can tell but several other cases of which i have direct knowledge include basic errors such as describing "y" as preceding "x" when the inverse is the case. The real killers however are the ommissions.
For example, the bit on "the manosphere" makes no mention of ROK, Bachelor Pad Economics, or MGTOW, (ie the most influential voices/platforms within that space) and instead just quotes Curtis Yarvin and some random feminists describing how the manosphere is not worth engaging with.
By the same token, any taxonomy of "the online right" that ommits arfcom/guntube, the Petersonian new-stoics, the Jocko-types, the Bundy-bros, the HEMA crowd, the trad cons, the crunchy libs/homesteaders, and the various Limbaugh and Brietbart succesors that comprise the pajama/moronosphere is ommitting something like 95% of online right-wing activity by volume.
In other words, if you eliminate all the sincere right wingers who are online from your definition of the "online right" its only natural that only grifters will remain.
Your list is really more red tribe and less RW.
That the OP's supposedly "exhaustive and well researched" list completely ignores most of the red and libertarian aligned internet is one of those "ommissions large enough to drive a national election through" i was talking about.
Voters are not ideological; barely sentient really.
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You must've skipped the intro in order to have written this. He goes over why he doesn't include stuff like that in it. Heres the relevant section to most of what you say. TL;DR He thinks they're crypto liberals.
Even after reading the intro, the list remains niether "exhaustive" nor "well researched".
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I've never heard of this guy. Does he at least bring receipts? Who is a paid shill?
Manhattan Institute, for example. He's very much against Israelis. Really admires Tony Blair. Calls him 'the Dark Lord' and says his political acumen and ability to exercise power is pretty much unparallelled in the modern west.
Anyway, he predicted that this faction of the US 'right', the 'techno-zionists' is likely to win over globalist technocrats(WEF etc) and third-world lunatics (Soros etc). He believes US under this new leadership will challenge China and build a new regime, the one he dubs 'the Rufo Reich'..
I don't think he's wrong much, this is the likeliest outcome although of course it's doubtful US can stand against Chinese and it all comes down to how implementations of AI change politics. I don't believe he pays much attention to AI even though it can change everything.
Sad.
Does he cite many examples of this allegedly unparalleled ability and political acumen?
Look at his career. Look at budget or influence of TBI.
Yes, and?
TBI looks to be fairly ordinary globohomo think tank. If he's unparalleled how do Clinton, Soros and Obama have similar or larger foundations?
On the surface. They're massively profitable apparently..
AA has a video on it.
Blair is an arch grifter, but so are the Clintons, both made hundreds of millions after leaving office. Blair’s prime ambition in life was to become the first President of the EU (this is arrested by many who were around him) and he failed in it, or even establishing that role.
..but grift is the essence of democratic politics.
I was saying he was great at them.
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It’s almost like the people benefitting from the great American empire can adapt themselves to whatever the state ideology of the great American empire happens to be, as long as it’s compatible with the GAE.
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Yeah there's a large strain of thought on the far-right that AI is basically a meme concocted by soyboy WEF types, that it's massively overhyped and if anything might just end up hurting the email-class. Of course it's not unique to them, lots of smart people in the current era saw GPT 3.5 and went 'this is what AI is, ok, moving on' and think it's a bubble.
It is quite literally true that AI is going to be mostly bad for low skill white collar workers and barely affect wrench turners.
Right now AI writes better than you. Check for yourself. Go talk to deepseek-r1 and cue him with Dasein's posts or something complex..
Same model has 93 or 96th percentile on code forces. The context window is 100 kb..
It's all aligning to a lot of people getting replaced.
Chinese are training robots to replace wrench turners using same algos that trained the LLMs..
It's not quite so simple. The 'real' context windows length (i.e. the part of the context that meaningfully affects output) for all models I've tested is approximately 10k tokens. They no longer spaz out and start producing 'gggggggggggg' if you give them a longer context, but for the vast majority of tasks* the rest of those tokens are wasted. As a consequence, they aren't good for any tasks where there is a meaningful amount of information that is relevant to producing the final output.
Fixing this is tricky from a data standpoint, because there isn't a lot of data that is long-form and where all the context for what is written is present in the data. Take the code I wrote yesterday: part of the way I used reason strategy is because of discussions with colleagues in Slack re: specific business objectives, and that information doesn't exist in the codebase. So training on my codebase doesn't necessarily make you able to determine the relationship between that code and the associated business context. You might be able to do clever things with self-play like have the model generate potential business contexts and feed those back into the training data, but that's still mostly hypothetical.
As for replacing wrench turners, that's a lot harder right now. Physics is hard. Hardware is hard. Mapping a constantly changing relationship between sensor inputs, robot dynamics, environment and output is very hard and very far from solved.
*Excluding artificial tasks like needle in the haystack problems.
It's not being solved, it's being learned.
That’s what I mean. I have literally done this. It is very very hard even for a toy problem in a structured environment, which is why nobody uses it in the field. That could change: I’ve seen embedding generators for robot actions, for example. But no clear breakthroughs yet.
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Wrench turners are not safe, see lights-out factories.
"Oh but I install HVAC outside in an unplanned physical world"
Humanoid robots are training in simulation. They're coming. High skill white collar workers? They're coming.
There has been automation taking away human jobs, but it rarely looks anything like humanoid robots- it looks like agricultural combines, power looms, other notably not man-shaped things. I’m not saying it won’t happen, I’m saying that, by precedent, it’s not time to start worrying about my job until someone comes up with a better idea than ‘humanoid robots’.
Unless you plan to retire in 5 yrs or live in the EU, worry.
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The core argument they seem to be making is that, having narrowed the definition of "online right" sufficiently to exclude anyone who might have voted for a republican in the last election, they can now prove that the right is poweless to resist the left.
Please ignore the fact that prominent movers and shakers within the online right from 10 - 15 years ago are now occupying positions of real concrete power.
Like who?
Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, and JD Vance to name a few. Plus the fact that Eugene Volokh and the rest of his buddies at the Federalist Society have already gotten to pick three Supreme Court Justices and will likely get to pick another two (if not more) before the end of the decade.
The right also seems more inclined to use that power, having slowly learned the lesson, I think, that institutions are not inherently neutral and that if they're not on your side they are probably on someone else's.
Which I think might make those SCOTUS picks and executive branch positions weightier than they did a few years ago. Sure, Reagan was a very dynamic leader, but he didn't revolutionize society the way that LBJ did. And now Trump's first (well technically probably like 2717th given how many pardons and other EOs he signed) move in office is to yank an EO that survived Reagan, two Bushes, and even Nixon.
I agree.
We explicitly discourage one-line "I agree" posts. I get that you wanted to "close out" the conversation with an acknowledgement, but if you've got nothing really more to say, an upvote is sufficient.
I think that's a pretty terrible idea.
If you're having a back-and-forth with another member, responding with just "I agree" shows that you agree with their last point, but have nothing to add.
Not responding at all and just upvoting conveys nothing to the person you are communicating with, and it just looks like you're ignoring the response (or similar). Just upvoting would only be sufficient if votes were not anonymous (which I have seen on some forums) which is not the case here on the Motte.
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I feel like it's the opposite. The "online right" has become so big that it's not just one movement anymore. There's lots of people with lots of different views, who don't agree on much except that the left is bad.
Given this is AA we're talking about, that's the same thing to him. Disorganized masses lose to organized minority, and that means the elite can just move around the online right by offering them not-the-left with them still on top.
I think and the op need to define what you mean by the "online right" then because if we are not talking about the set of right-wingers who are online, who are we talking about?
Much of the disagreement in this thread is indeed down to who that actually means. AA clearly restricts the set to radicals and would probably place the leftward limit to some natlibs/paleolibertarians (say anybody to the right of his buddy Carl Benjamin). Others would go as far as to include people like Joe Rogan.
If you are correct and his model of "the right" really is restricted solely to hard-core radicals and left-leaning libertarians, how much of the Right is there left to model?
If you contort your definitions hard enough you can make any statement true, but doing so is not the path to insight.
Is that contorted? It's only in countries that artificially create big tent parties like the United States that this isn't an identifiable ideological tradition. And remember, AA is a Brit.
I think "anything right of natlibs" is a more ideologically coherent definition of the right wing than "people who vote for the GOP".
I would argue that any definition of "right wing" that excludes the vast majority of current and historically acknowledged right wing thinkers and movements but somehow manages to include neo-Leninists is thoroughly "contorted".
I guess the original definition is contorted then.
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It's impossible to understand where Parvini is coming from if you don't know his meta political position.
The swaths of successes of the right right now and the enthusiasm we see isn't a victory in his eyes because it's just a trick by the elite to pivot the system back to more liberal leanings with Trump.
Parvini is a true radical who wants the system and the established elite gone, so he's long bet that Trump's return would herald "the woke being put away" and "back to fresh prince".
This article is him complaining that this process he was railing against is proceeding as he had foreseen and the whole of the right is stupidly falling for it.
People are still basking in the glow of symbolic wins so him taking the position that nothing ever happens and demanding people stop falling for every piece of meat thrown at them by Musk is controversial.
I think it's too early to tell if any of this is right. Trump will run into the wall of the deep state at some point and we'll see if he can maneuver better than he did last time. But he may be more successful than sad elitist doomer AA give him credit for.
In any case the criticism of stupidly falling for whatever is popular instead of building strategic discipline is I think legitimate. And always unpopular with radical youths who care more about excitement than victory.
Cthulhu has been swimming left, to borrow the Nrx term, for centuries, probably since the renaissance. Why a prosperous modern America where most people live better lives than almost all other humans to have ever lived would suddenly be THE civilization to reverse that is unclear.
If Trump and his advisers (Miller, Rufo etc) succeed beyond their wildest dreams we’re going back to like 1990s colorblindness with some 2010s woke characteristics (e.g. hard to see gay rights reversal when Bessent is married to a man etc). Probably not even that.
A fertility crisis would be a black swan event that could cause a reversal. The bubonic plague had a pretty big impact on labor value and social order, and that was only a 30% population reduction.
Uh, only among orientals(and not all of them) does 30% population reduction on a noticeable timeframe look likely at all.
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On the other hand, the fall of the Soviet Union.
…represented an economic and political transition more than a root-and-branch cultural one of the type many DR X posters want.
On the other hand the Stan’s and Azerbaijan seem to have seen an actual cultural transition. Granted the DR does not want to live in Uzbekistan but, you know- Uzbekistan Azerbaijan and Galicia are examples of their ideological transformation.
Galicia?
Western Ukraine- the part that voted for svoboda, provides the lions share of Ukrainian nationalism, has a TFR of 2, and is currently banning its ethnic rivals in Ukraine(including both their language and religion).
Same brilliant gang of thinkers who thought they could succeed where Hitler and Napoleon failed and beat Russia on their home turf?
It's going very,very well for them.
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Ohhh, I was very confused as to what was supposed to be happening to the northern Spanish province that limits with Portugal.
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IMHO Cthulhu swimming left is an oversimplification, especially given the general vagueness of the term "left". But accepting the premise, I'd say that the end of the Soviet Union doesn't necessarily contradict the overall trend so much as it highlights how utterly dysfunctional that particular implementation of leftism was. Functioning Socialism has never been tried!
In my view, Cthulhu swims towards concentrating and increasing power. Where leftism helps that goal, leftism it is. Where leftism sabotages itself so badly that it no longer helps the growth of concentrated power, Cthulhu sidesteps.
It's going to be circular reasoning from here on out, but what other kind is there. The transition from feudalism and monarchism to liberal, democratic capitalism was not because Cthulhu actually hates concentrating power, but because feudal societies were less efficient at generating power overall. This temporary liberalisation and individualization unleashed a great deal of economic and technological power, and Cthulhu is slowly working towards getting all that under control. Relent for a few centuries so that you can reap a greater bounty once the technology including social technology is far enough along to put all that power under the control of a more centralized will, again.
And the soviet union, like the dictatorships of the mid-20th century, was just plain bad tech. It was bad social technology. It didn't work well enough at generating power, even if it was better than its competitors and centralizing and controlling it, at face value. Cthulhu found out that reining in the individual via deracination, atomization and technological uniformization while maintaining just enough individualist liberty to keep up appearances allows him to extract far more power from them than from an overt collectivization.
I think this is close, but what Cthulhu wants is power without accountability. The biggest problem with feudalism was that the ruled classes knew who had power and if that power didn’t produce a good life for them, it was simply a matter of removing those bad rulers and putting someone better in charge. With modern administrations, the real power sits in agencies where the official government requires an agency to exist and follow procedures but the agency has the power to rule, the official government is there mostly as a whipping boy. You can rage against your elected representatives all you want, Cthulhu is happy enough to let you do so, because those guys are not Cthulhu. And that lack of accountability means longevity for Cthulhu, so long as the people don’t completely upend society or some outside force doesn’t overthrow it.
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This is the crux of it. “The regime” acting sane and governing well (or at least incrementally better) is actually an L because governing well is better for the regime in the long run and helps maintain its stability. He would probably insist the regime wanted Caesar and Pompey was a jobber.
governing well seems to be a W for everyone who has to actually live under the regime and maybe the best we can hope for. i guess revolutionaries and accelerationists want to turn everything to shit so they can create their utopias but i feel like decent governance can inspire more decent governance.
Well it depends how much you trust the existing elite to do right by you. Parvini is in the "we must remove them by any means necessary" camp at this point, and I don't think it's as unreasonable as it sounds if you consider their ultimate ends to be evil.
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I’m not sure if the premise is reasonable enough to even consider. The richest man in the world just spammed Twitter with stats about the Rotherham gangs, and weeks later threw a “Roman salute” at the inauguration. DEI is being dismantled. Major social media posts that mention Israel are inundated with Israel-critical commentary. January 6th protesters were unilaterally pardoned. Deportations are occurring. Fertility concerns are mainstream. How can I take —
seriously as a premise? They’ve never been less degraded. “Moneyed interests” have been phenomenal for the “online right”. And it’s never been easier to get your thoughts disseminated, you can just post on substack and gain a following. Factions are also just how reality works, nothing wierd about that.
My own fear regarding the right is that the Zoomers are not sufficiently radicalized. They are the brainzlop generation raised on even more addicting media and games, having rap shoved down their throat like never before. They are true nihilists, not going down rabbit holes online. They haven’t received the
sacred textsthe infographics and documentaries. But I really have no idea if this intuition is correct, because I’m not in their social ecosystems, which afaik are fractured discord spaces rather than an image board or something. Maybe they’re doing fine actually.The zoomers in the US are less than half white. Israel posts on social media have been responded to with hardcore anti-Israel replies for 20+ years, the only thing that slightly varies is who is criticizing who. Musk’s salute was a weird autistic thing and Bibi came out swinging by saying he’s a huge friend of Israel, as did the ADL. There’s no plan to deport more than a few hundred thousand illegal criminals and do more border pushback, NOBODY has a serious plan to build the infrastructure to deport 13+ million illegal migrants including those in the US for 10/20/30/40 years. The Rotherham posting did nothing because Labour has a large, unassailable majority in the British parliament until 2029. Fertility concerns are mainstream in every developed countries from Norway to Korea to Canada, but given that even highly aggressive plans like Hungary’s have been only very very modestly successful and they’re still well below replacement it seems unlikely anything’s going to happen in the US soon (especially because any viable plan will likely be very costly). So again, dr x types don’t seem to be winning much yet.
It would also benefit icky people.
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Your points mostly boil down to, “things aren’t good because things aren’t absolutely perfect”, but for a variety of important reasons this is not the correct mindset to have. Things are 10x, 100x better for the “online right”. They are in the ear of Musk and the President, they aren’t cancelled online, their points are regurgitated to the masses on Twitter and Tucker and podcasts. The trajectory is all anyone should care about, and not just in politics but as a general principle. If we are playing a skill-based longterm resource acquisition game, and I just took the controller from my retarded younger brother, I don’t particularly care if my opponent has obtained 70% of the resources, because in just a few turns I’ve acquired 25% more than before, and this is iterative and compounds. The “online right” is gaining permanent resource acquisitions, from which they can generate and regenerate more units, after being frozen and isolated in their Valley Forge moment. New Overton Windows are broken daily.
Now, if you are rightwing and want the acquisition to continue, you need “morale”, a concept studied to death in business and sports and war and child prodigies. What maximizes right wing morale? Obviously not what you posted or the weird OP post. Morale is maximized when reasonably high expectations of individual output are maximally reinforced, when the variety of evolutionary output modifiers are aligned to a collective interest. Essentially, is every milestone to the correct desired result fully celebrated and appreciated? This requires recognizing improvements. Just like if you’re trying to raise a child prodigy, you celebrate his performance of twinkle twinkle just as hard as you celebrate his double thirds etude at 16. So, yes, deporting more illegals is just as important to celebrate as deporting all of them. This is how morale works. (And actually this is still an issue with the Right, I don’t think they’ve grasped that they can utilize morale at a population level to further accomplish cultural goals).
Now to nitpick,
What I’ve seen is that they have never been criticized as much as today, outside of astroturf factories like front page Reddit. Tucker having Sachs on to talk about Israel controlling our foreign policy is also highly significant as a development.
This posting was for us, not them. You’re not going to persuade me that hundreds of millions of Americans reading about the mass rape of British by Pakistani Muslims isn’t significant lol
Genuinely I feel that this is a solved problem. We know it has to do with how we raise girls and how we mete out status. This can be overcorrected in a generation, and if the Right is smart, they will correct it only amongst themselves.
Yeah I don’t think it’s significant because hostility toward Muslim immigration and dislike of Pakistan is likely extremely common amongst Americans who saw those tweets and has been since at least 2001. Speaking of related events we can look at the way that the ‘Muslim ban’ went in 2017, or indeed the fact that even that excluded Pakistan.
Or, as many have suggested, it’s some limited meat for the base (much of it, see the birthright citizenship thing, will be held up in the courts or stopped outright) before two years of business as usual, the likely losing of the house and then an excuse for two more years of nothing before someone else is elected.
A few years ago all they had to look forward to was being cancelled from the internet, debanked, and left to post on 4chan while eating beans out of a can bought with pennies from a sock.
Things are looking up.
This conversation
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I don’t think you grasp the importance of martyr stories and in-group trauma. There’s a reason that Israel laser-focused on children killed, even going so far as to make up or exaggerate aspects of the event. Martyr stories propel morale. This is an important ingredient for advocacy groups. Disliking Pakistan != mass violent rape of thousands hidden by liberal authorities. Not even close to the same thing. I’m sure Israelis also had a negative view of Gazans before this. Jews have actually perfected the martyr motif, although I think Christians mastered it and then were blinded to its power.
This is a meaningless buzzword, I’ve never understood it. The base is the majority of voters whose will the President obeys? That’s just democracy. “Throws meat to the base” is the msnbc way to describe the entire nature of democracy. It’s a propaganda term of art, not a serious way to describe things. The CEO throws meat to the base of shareholder, yes, this is capitalism. The boyfriend throws meat to the girlfriend by getting her flowers on Valentine’s Day as expected in a reciprocal relationship. The boy throws meat to his familial base by complimenting his mother’s cooking. It’s all very silly. It’s just “doing the social role”, but described in a way to make your opponent’s actions dehumanizing, and it’s artfully manufactured — me, a stalwart proponent of fulfilling the will of the people, my opponent, an ugly butcher throwing a carcass of meat to the debased dogs.
Sure it’s possible things don’t improve, but the cultural conditions are already an improvement.
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Uh, do you think the U.S. as a whole is going to start raising its daughters to marry young to someone minimally acceptable and start churning out babies with career and education as an afterthought? Nevermind that we lack the social technology to actually do this.
Yes, just like the Hasids. It’s comically feasible, and you’ve hit the nail on the head that
and this is exactly what must be developed, and this isn’t even difficult in theory, just will take a while to implement at a population-wide level.
Americans can start raising their daughters to believe that formal education is a timesink and getting married and having babies is their true vocation, with career as an afterthought. As in they literally have that option right now. There are people doing it. Just not very many of them.
So outline how the mass of people is going to change their minds?
Simple practical outline:
• Develop a collection of media which portrays motherhood as valuable, fun, morally good, compassionate, and interesting. Organized by ages, starting at media to replace CocoMelon, through books for teens, including artwork and songs.
• Write basic explanations on how our low fertility is related to childhood media and our low esteem for mothers. Disseminate.
• Collaborate with religious and independent schools to require this media as part of a reading plan for girls.
• Determine a way to incorporate social media into the families and groups which are on board with the plan, because this amplifies value internalization.
• Fund more of the aforementioned media (of all types).
No! Because it's not well-known that fertility is downstream from how girls are raised and how women are valued. And also, were this known to some inquisitive families, there's no simple process to implement that wisdom to ensure the relevant acculturation. Right now, you and I as adults cannot decide by will to have the cultural interests of a Spartan, right? We will never love warfare and raiding as much as a Spartan. And we can't suddenly decide to be National Masters in chess; what will take a child 8 years may take us 30. We can hardly will ourselves to develop an interest in chess as adults. The same applies when we are talking about rearing mothers. It needs to begin young and continue into adulthood.
There are people right now raising their daughters to prefer marriage and motherhood over education and career. Do you deny this? I know some of them and the older daughters don’t seem in a hurry to leave for the world of student loans. As always, you can just do things.
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I would be interested to see a social experiment where group A does as you suggest, and group B commits to pay men more in relation to women, gets the men to dress well, work out more at, gives them more slack in their jobs so that even the ambitious ones have time to socialize, organizes dances and parties with light drinking for mid twenties men with actual jobs, not just college students, give extremely low social status to men who abandon their children, and other things along those lines. Ban the apps!
I would bet a small amount on the latter being more effective.
It's coming from both sides. Women who spend their childhoods longing for children have about average success at it. Most women want to have children with their husband when they have one who's supportive of that, it's just taking an unreasonably long time.
An interesting three I saw: https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1hvotgr/should_i_have_children/
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Academic Agent always comes across to me as a meta-grifter whose grift is to claim that everyone else on the right is dumb and/or grifting (see also that skinwalker Hanania). A grifter for hobbits with a slightly higher IQ. Okay, cool story bro. Don't worry, I'll remember to like and subscribe to your Substack so that I can read your exclusive paywalled articles about how everyone else is a money grubbing shill. On what grounds does this guy expect me to take him more seriously than the rest of the online political commentators?
Also @TheOneWhoFarts, do you have an opinion about this article? Your post is just a summary.
"Boycott shills and only engage with those who volunteer their time and efforts for free", surely? (Hmm… Is this whole thing just an effort to lure more people to the Motte?)
Uncharitably, Spencer's business is being a CNN jobber they can invite to get the scary Nazi take on things, and that opinion makes it more likely to get invited.
Charitably, he's an accelerationist and the left needs to be in as much power as possible before he becomes "the right".
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Spencer would tell you not to do anything to paint a target on yourself accelerate the collapse by furthering the more insane parts of the left so you can be the reasonable alternative to the communists when the Reichstag burns.
AA would tell you to get cozy with powerful tech executives to form an influential cabal that can influence policy and replace the existing elite with people of your ideology.
Fuentes would tell you to ridicule the left online as hard as possible to capture the youth and dominate the cultural arena as the progressives successfully did.
Regardless of how much of a fake grifter fed these people are, they all have identifiable plans for their political ideology to succeed.
No, Spencer's much-vaunted "liberal turn" is just a misunderstanding of the fact he isn't an accelerationist and doesn't want to see prevailing institutions collapse. He wants to take them over using crypsis and esoteric group-signaling using the same tactics he perceives have been used by Jews.
He wants the institutions to survive, so the next Christian-successor spiritual movement is ready to take the helm and reorient them in the same way they were taken over and reoriented against us.
Actually, his change toward this position is a result of the failures of political organizing. He has changed his approach significantly since the rise and fall of the Alt Right.
Right now his effort includes studying the aforementioned topic, in particular the Hebrew Bible as the ultimate keystone for understanding how esoteric, cryptic spiritual movements cohere races of people together and direct their behavior. And also how this practice extends to other forms of fictional art creation like film or comic books.
He has a book coming out on the theory he's been calling "Racial Esoteric Moralization", should be interesting. I do think he's correct that there has to be some sort of post-Christian Religion that organizes the behavior and identity of these disparate Right-Wing factions.
I tried to read about Racial Esoteric Moralization just now, but both places I tried to read about it (https://theapolloniantransmission.com/rem/ and https://politicaltheology.substack.com/p/once-more-between-rome-and-judea) just seemed like largely impenetrable babble, to be honest. A bunch of combing through ancient texts to find what the authors probably already wanted to see there. If you think that it is worth knowing about, I would appreciate if you could write a summary of it. I'm not saying this in a snarky way, it's just that both of the essays I just tried to read about REM made me feel such a combination of boredom and a sense of "this seems like a highly online right-wing version of astrology mixed with rehashes of Nietzsche insights" that I couldn't force myself to go through reading the entireties.
Yeah I've picked up on it from various Podcasts on movies and Bible Studies. They are doing a Podcast series on Genesis right now where they go through every single verse, but I think it's behind a paywall. They are close to releasing a book that will essentially be a debut for the theory. I'll probably read it and write a review when it comes out.
But in the meantime, Grok did a pretty stellar job providing a fair summary IMO:
One more followup:
The 4-word summary would be that "Myth influences racial formation."
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REM theory is only unfalsifiable insofar as all critical literary analysis is unfalsifiable. I agree Mark sometimes goes too far speculating on certain nuances, but the big picture items- Hebrew stores like Tower of Babel, Jacob and Esau, David and Goliath, esoterically depicting racial conflict and elevating a Jewish type is very obviously true and insightful. In the most important cases- i.e. Jacob and Esau representing a sibling rivalry between Jew and Aryan, this has always been acknowledged by the Rabbis who relate Esau to the progenitor of Edom, and therefore Rome and Rome's successor Europe. That's just an example for how REM aligns with the interpretation of the Rabbis in a very important case, maybe the most important case.
That analysis applied to modern filmography, i.e. Steven Spielberg is also only as "unfalsifiable" as all film criticism. But Spielberg films are unequivocally an example of REM theory generalizing to modern forms of art depiction, in which the Jewish identities of the art-creators is imbued in their mythological signals, which in turn influences the behavior of mass audiences of people.
The essence of REM Theory that Yahweh is a metaphor and synonym for Jews as a race is unequivocally true. Understanding that leads to a much deeper interpretation of these biblical stories, in particular understanding the stories in which Yahweh comes into conflict with Civilization (i.e. Tower of Babel).
The conclusion that the Hebrew Bible has influenced the creation of races of people, and therefore race-creation is downstream from myth-creation, is so obviously true that we should be shocked that nobody has made this observation before in the way REM has. Have to give it credit where due.
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Is this all the crusader and Shia LaBeouf as Padre Pio memes on Telegram, or something more?
Shia LaBeouf actually literally became a based tradcath under the influence of Mel Gibson. I don’t know whether he still is but last I’d heard he was a regular at St Vitus(FSSP parish in LA).
Yes. I've seen reporting he's being mentored by Mel Gibson. It's a nice redemption story.
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Never saw that one coming
There's actually a lot of parallel between Spencer's theory and the e/acc actually, in particular how Culture is a complex interaction between memes and genes. e/acc seems to stop short of (at least exoterically) recognizing this as consequential and vital for Race Formation, whereas that's Spencer's primary concern. For example, how a piece of literary fiction like the Hebrew Bible can mold races of people over thousands of years.
On the other hand, e/acc is correct about the upheaval of AI and Spencer like most of the DR is basically blind to the fact that it is going to change everything.
I would say I think the truth is in between e/acc and Spencer. Spencer + AI Realism, or e/acc + Racial Esoteric Moralization.
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I'm not objecting to his being a patsy. I'm objecting to his not having a plan/ideology.
Yeah he sucks at it and any successes of WNats are frankly not his own, but this is the forum where we try to not to handwave people as retards and instead consider their failure, isn't it?
I don't think we should gloat about how much of a lolcow Fuentes is either, for instance, and just consider whether his views have merit.
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AA likes to feud with people for spectacle, but I don't think that's a fair characterization.
He has people he respects even in disagreement like Quinones or MacIntyre. He's just never had a second of patience for the likes of Fuentes and the wigger right, or the antiwoke liberals to his immediate left who focus on trans issues and the like but don't buy into any actual political radicalism and just want things back to the 1999 normal .
Of course anything that has to do with ecelebs has a quantum of cultishness and drama that seems inescapable. But as far as having a reliable political position I think AA is relatively predictable: he's a snob elitist intellectual radical. A common archetype in politics really.
As someone who disagrees with him on some stuff and listens to his videos regularly, this is IMO a fair characterisation.
Calling him a grifter is wrong. He sells some online courses*, but he mostly analyzes politics from a particular perspective. He isn't obviously or even covertly shilling for anyone. I believe he provides a valuable service there. Ofc he's not infallible, and he doesn't understand tech much, but that's yet not a huge downside.
He has many informative videos that are bang on. E.g. "Boomer Truth Regime" Elite Theory, analysis of Western Elites Power lies with organised minorities.
He's also not opposed to having some fun. He plays/reviews video games and long organised a twitter 'tournament' judging the sexiest women .. Amusingly, despite hundreds of challengers, it was almost always won by Jennifer Connelly(if she was in the running).. Kept providing amusing sports-like comments for it..
*these might even be good. I was fairly impressed with his book, the 'Populist Delusion'. Well argued, well researched, doesn't waffle around. Good for informing normies, it starts out softly. There's no attempt at edgelording or anything like that either.
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The post doesn't, like, say anything? I went in expecting to see some argument that some nameable factions, groups, or at least twitter usernames hold some incorrect views, in ways related to nameable outside influences. Instead he just say that the current right are mouthpieces, and have been neutered, by interests. It's all fake. All a psyop to suppress the real right wing. Whatever that is. He links a few substacks, none of which appear to address this.
It's the kind of thing anyone can agree with. All the other guys are captured, and that's why they disagree with me. And in exactly the same sense it's uninformative and useless. Even if this was true, you couldn't do anything with it, without naming what tendencies are bad and who's funding who. 375 likes is a lot for substack though!
Also, if you're gonna ban evade, can you at least make more interesting posts?
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