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Did America's heyday have anything to do with liberalism? When do you think the "heyday" of America even was, and why do you think liberalism was it's defining feature, so much so that it gets to own all that greatness?
I don't know man. I used to think we had things figured out in the 90's. If you're going to give any particular era to "liberalism", whatever that means, the 90's would probably qualify. Culture seemed to have definitively move away from a conception of The United States as a white Christian nation, and towards a multicultural melting pot. When I think back on my public school education, probably 50% of our assigned reading were polemics about racism, and the importance of not being mean or prejudging the blacks. It felt like we were getting more color blind in the 90's. Bill Clinton had his "Sister Souljah" moment calling out anti-white racism.
I now question whether any of that was sustainable. I question whether the 90's were just the brief period between when the radicals had pushed the overton to a fairly neutral feeling middle, and then further off a fucking cliff. Maybe liberalism was always doomed, merely a stalking horse used by radicals to destroy the "heyday" you romanticize. A lot of those 90's liberals have had a fuck of a mask off moment of late. The ones that seemed sincere have defected to MAGA. Or at the very least realize MAGA is the lesser of two evils compared to the DEI race essentialist.
As a fundamentalist Christian that slowly deteriorated into an agnostic, son of a right wing libertarian that later turned into a radical fascist, who still tends to think with conservative values, I am a product of liberalism. I do not share values with many people, given that I am agnostic and yet still right wing, and yet still holding disdain for a lot of the rhetoric thrown around by the current administration. If liberalism goes away, what will happen to me? If liberalism goes away, what will happen to gay furry skeptic centrists like TracingWoodgrains?
Have you checked out TW's twitter lately? He's all in on "we freaked the normies out going too hot and fast on the trans kids thing, we need to be more subtle next time." He's not aiming for liberalism, more like "wokeism with a human face, run by enlightened lawyers in policy think tanks rather than HR ladies"
I'm not logged in on this phone, but if you haven't been following him I can get you the choice quotes
This is, like most of your straw men about your enemies, written in bad faith and not at all accurate. I follow TW and he's posted nothing that could be fairly characterized in that manner. He's consistently liberal and partisan in the sense that he's anti-Trump and, more broadly, anti-GOP. He's never made a secret of that. But the idea that Jesse Singal's former assistant has ever been carrying water for trans activists is absurd on its face. The idea that the guy who broke the DEI FAA story, which has been retweeted by Elon himself and which gets Trace regularly called a Nazi, is "woke" is ridiculous.
You constantly prove you have no theory of the mind for people unlike yourself.
The hate Trace gets for being a liberal gay furry has always been kind of amusing to me. Instead of believing he is what he has always said he is, you need to invent hidden motives and masks to conceal his nefarious true agenda, when his true agenda is out there in the open. And ironically you show yourself as suffering from the same derangement and lack of theory of mind that his leftist crticics calling him a Nazi and a racist do.
Hard as this is for you to believe, people usually actually believe what they say they believe. Especially when they're arguing on the Internet, where there is little value or purpose in pretending to have beliefs or intentions different from your real ones. The only exceptions are people like, say, some of our Joo-posters, who are more or less honest about what they think of Jews but are not forthright about what they actually want to do to Jews.
Notice that KulakRevolt didn't go full mask-off while he was still on the Motte; once he got some traction on Substack and Twitter, he found the grift was more profitable when you stake out an extreme position and appeal to temporarily embarrassed basement-dwelling warlords. It's actual extremists (or grifters cosplaying as extremists) who hide what they really want to say here.
Trace, on the other hand, was never grifting. Much like Yassine, you can hate what he says, but he's saying the same things he always did.
You are unable to make these distinctions and so you are constantly constructing, and even fabricating, things the people you hate haven't actually said, done, or even hinted at.
I agree with your criticism of Steve, but come on, Trace isn't what he always said he is. Trivially, he's not a "Lee Kuan Yew liberal" in any sense that doesn't make the label deceptive. His grievences with this forum also can't be taken at face value.
I don't know how much of a "Lee Kuan Yew" liberal he is, only knowing a little about Lee Kuan Yew, but if he ever called himself that (I don't recall), in what way is it deceptive?
What he says he is nowadays is a center leftist who favors the Democrats and dislikes Trump, but he also dislikes woke extremists. He's a gay furry with lingering Mormon sensibilities despite having left the church. That all seems very accurate to me.
I wish he had not left the forum the way he did, but I understand his grievances. Years later, he's still getting flack and being accused of being an entryist or something for starting the Schism. Now, I think the Schism was a bad idea and didn't like it at the time (and said so), but he was always pretty honest about his intent. I don't think it was a secret plot to destroy the Motte.
Calling him partisan just seems pointless and obvious. @FCfromSSC is a partisan too (and the proximal cause of TW creating the Schism). Like TW, FC is quite honest about his partisanship. People are still butthurt that Trace went off because of all the civil war fedposting that FC and a few others were doing at the time. (I think even FC admits he was not in a good headspace at the time.) But FC is popular here (I like him too, despite being much closer to Trace in my beliefs than FC) , and honestly, folks like @SteveAgain like fedposting. So Trace got endless shit and finally left.
I wish he hadn't and I wish he was less bitter, but I see no dishonesty or grift in his game, and he's certainly not, as Steve implies, telling his followers that actually the only problem with trans extremism is that it scared the normies.
I mean, just do a search on his profile, it comes up quite a lot (1, 2, 3), and I don't know how you want to invoke his name without either implying authoritarian measures, or being deceptive... and I'm pretty sure Trace is not about to start advocating for the execution of drug dealers.
Yes. I don't care about him starting The Schizm (it was no worse an act than the spinoff of /r/CWR, and no more successful for that matter), nor do I care about him being a partisan (aren't we all?). What bothers me is that I feel like I've been played for a fool by taking his complaints seriously. Originally I understood his grievances were about being mistreated, "muh miserable scolds and ankle-biters", and as far as complaints go it's pretty valid. People got pretty jaded here, there's a background radiation of hostility to anyone with his views, fair enough I wouldn't want to hang out in an environment like that either, if the roles were reversed. So when someone raises an objection like that I try to hear them out, and see if there's a way individual users could do something to make posting here more tolerable (funnily enough I never seem to get much of an answer for the latter, or there's a clear implication of "no - get rid of the background radiation, or bust").
So now some time has passed and I mulled over some of the conversations with him, and my only conclusion is that the mistreatment was at most an excuse, and the grievance was actually about the ideological distance. "Oh noes, you guys didn't like my LOTT hoax (please forget that the B&R audience had pretty much the same reaction to it)", or "oh noes, FC doesn't want to live in the same country as me". When I do the role-reverso on that one I come up empty. If I could politely listen to him as he unironically defended surrogacy, I'm sure he can handle hot takes like "I don't want to share a political jurisdiction with people opposed to my core values".
"Porque no los dos?", you might ask, his issue might both the ideological distance and the mistreatment. Sure, and I'll even grant that the background environment here absolutely is an issue, the problem is that given who he picked to found his "better" alternative to the Motte, we know he doesn't really care about people with other viewpoints being mistreated. This leaves us only with the second complaint, which, as far as I'm concerned, leaves us with nothing. Now maybe it's all a big misunderstanding and I'm a big dum-dum for not noticing what the core of the issue was about, but like I said I feel like an idiot for taking the bait.
I know Trace personally and he is in fact in favor of executing drug dealers. Your inability to understand his politics makes me skeptical of your ability to psychoanalyze him.
Welcome back. That's a name I haven't seen in a long time.
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