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The current state of online politics discourse seems pretty dire to me. Here are forums I'm aware of:
TheMotte - often a bit too "assume that social conservatism is correct" and wordily show-offy for my taste, but it's a good forum, you can speak your mind without being banned.
X.com - engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters, engagement bait grifters... and the occasional rare actual worthwhile discussion.
/r/moderatepolitics - good, very surprisingly good for average Reddit censorship norms, but a bit slow.
/r/politicaldiscussion - used to be decent like 5 years ago but now has been overrun by typical Reddit TDS ("Drumpf will end all elections", etc...)
4chan /pol/ - basically useless, 95% literally mentally ill people, trolls, and maybe bots. Might as well engage with flat Earthers about astrophysics as engage with these people about politics.
Astral Codex Ten comments - can be interesting sometimes, but isn't mainly politics focused and the politics discussion seems to be be dominated by the same few people.
rDrama.net - is usually directionally right about politics, in my view, by the simple expedient of assuming that anyone who is very demonstratively committed to a given political ideology is likely worthy of ridicule, but of course not a forum for discussing policy in any depth, most of the time, and also unsurprisingly given the origin of the site, is as focused on trolling as on political analysis, lol.
/r/politics - TDS central, orange man bad 24/7.
/r/centrist - seems ok, but pretty TDS leaning.
/r/stupidpol, /r/redscarepod, etc... Dirtbag left, good for criticizing the establishment but also they tend to be Hamas apologists etc... basically mostly people who are still at the I hate America so anyone who fights America must be awesome stage.
debatepolitics.com - people yelling at each other, very slight step up from 4chan /pol/.
Like, there have to be some good forums I've missed, right? Billions of people are online, including hundreds of millions of Anglophones (I largely have no idea what the state of non-Anglophone political discussion is like). Is it really possible that only like 0.00001% of them are capable of having relatively moderate and rational (not that I've always been) political discussion?
I've been searching for good politics discussion forums for years. You'd think there would be more. What the fuck is going on?
Covid massively accelerated tribalism and polarisation in the offline and online worlds, and internet communities are no longer capable of existing without expelling dissidents to maintain coherence (and to lighten the workload on the tireless internet custodian who is paid very handsomely for his services.)
I can't even say I'm terribly sad about this. I would like for things to come to their inevitable conclusion sooner rather than later.
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I would think the answer is be pretty obvious. Language models have struck a death blow to anonymous online forums and now they're bleeding out. Even before LLMs, once people with political agendas or merch to sell realized they could use cheap content sources to manipulate opinions, the writing was on the wall. But now, as the marginal cost of posting content anonymously approaches 0, and the ability to differentiate between humans and bots disappears, this form of media will die.
I think the trend is probably more towards things like private discord servers where at least some degree of familiarity with the other posters is a requirement. Or at the very least, things linked directly to your identity. Maybe there's some space out there for options that require payment in order to participate (substack comments sort of fit this model). But generally, anonymous online posting is on its way out; another strange relic of innovative human communication going the way of the carrier pigeon and the messages in a bottle. Still, 30 years was a pretty good run. I'm glad I got to be in on it.
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Can this die now? TDS has largely been vindicated over the past four and half years, and especially the past 100 days.
The term is overused but it's useful to have a shorthand for the particular effect Trump has on some people. It's worth distinguishing criticism of Trump from TDS. "Tariffs are mostly bad, or at least have been applied poorly" is a reasonable take, not TDS. Handmaid's Tale posters are TDS, always have been always will be, though useful to identify people who can be wholesale ignored.
Similarly someone should've coined ODS to distinguish "Obama is a good candidate" from the messianic wackadoo stuff.
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No it hasn't. Trump has caused market instability, forced Israel and Palestine into a ceasefire, and deported a handful of people against court order. Hardly Sulla's march on Rome.
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Well, I would say yes and no. Trump and Trumpism are bad in many ways as far as I am concerned, but what I mean by TDS is the sort of reflexive emotional attitude where a person is willing to believe pretty much any anti-Trump talking point just because they fervently hate Trump/rightism. For example, I am not a right-winger and I dislike a lot of Trump is doing, but I do not have TDS, because I don't automatically believe that Trump's actions are automatically bad/evil all of the time, and I don't believe that he is literally taking orders from Putin, etc.
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So Ukraine has been handed over to Putin in exchange for a few hotels to be named later and the US has invaded Denmark and Canada?
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In diverse low-trust spaces conflict theory and it's associated strategies (defect, defect, defect) simply wins, or at least loses less. I feel like we've discussed the whys on this place for a full decade at this point, but basically you have to at least have a space in which people agree on fundamentals like good faith discussion before you can have moderate and rational discussion. Zero point in wasting your breath trying to convince someone that isn't actually open to being convinced. Add some dead internet theory in: corporations, state actors, random universities in switzerland with access to LLMs, manipulating votes and discussion and anonymous open internet forums are basically the worst possible place to find mistake theorist type discussion.
The motte is sheltered a bit by it's obscurity and it's adherence to strict mean girls, minus the social clique formation, inspired rules. Where conflict that is indirect, hidden under a veil of verbosity and mostly about group status seeking (QCAs) is preferenced. Though this is really still a conflict theory space, just with faux mistake theory employed to mask aggression and maintain status.
If you want good discussion it's best to just make some friends that like politics, pretty much even the most brain wormed internet troll will communicate in your preferred mistake theorist style with people they trust. Or you could try to find some closed communities where access is invite only, maybe on discord or something. You should only go to open forums when you want to verbally punch someone in the face and be punched in the face.
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Politics has replaced religion as a foundational cornerstone of personal morality and identity, and people really don't like having those questioned. Seriously; just look at the polling about whether you'd be comfortable dating someone with different politics/religion and the two concepts have flipped over the last half century.
I recently dined together with a bunch of old sports buddies, and it was...karmic, I suppose, for an ex-leftist myself, to be surrounded by a bunch of people who all share the same kind of rabid, unquestioning and almost militant casual leftism and discuss it around you under the assumption that nobody they associate with could ever be of a conflicting opinion. I agreed with what I could bring myself to agree with, politely disagreed on a few details here and there, and overall accepted that this was not the venue to start any kind of adversarial debate. It was, in the end, just people coming together over shared views. But it saddened me that we, having known each other for years and getting along great in general, were not above using politics to delineate ingroup/outgroup in a nominally apolitical gathering of friends and fellow sports enjoyers. It saddened me that, no matter how much I value these friendships and prize them far above each one's views and opinions, the sentiment would hardly be reciprocated if I "revealed my power level", so to speak.
Sucks to suck, I guess. Anyone who seriously wants to be a social creature must go with the flow, obviously.
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Humans broadly don't want to hear political opinions that differ greatly from theirs. It's just not in our nature.
Themotte is genuinely the best I've seen by a long shot, even though it has tons of flaws.
Humans don't even want political opinions that differ greatly from ours to exist. In a democracy those opinions might spread to the median voter and then be imposed on us against our will, and even in an oligarchy or autocracy there's always the chance that they will persuade the leaders or inspire a revolt against the leaders and then be imposed on us against our will. The use of language to navigate intratribal factionalism is probably older than homo sapiens. It's really hard to treat a question dispassionately as an intellectual issue, rather than as a signifier of loyalties, when everything we think and feel screams that there might be too much at stake.
Consider LessWrong, possibly the most concentrated population of
high-functioning autistsintelligent high-decoupling people on the internet, people deliberately trying to learn how to better discuss issues rationally in an unbiased fashion, the sort of "hey, I see what the problem is" people that normies joke about: their main conclusion about politics was that anybody who wanted to apply their intellect to any other issue should talk about politics as little as possible in the process.If you want to apply your intellect to politics, though, where do you go? Well, here I am, I guess? I wish the place was more popular among thoughtful left-wing participants, and maybe there's some way to improve that, but in the meantime I'd rather be somewhere that often repels people with opposing views than somewhere that often expels them.
I think a more subtle issue (though I hesitate to call it a problem) here is that we also select for a particular subset of right-wing participants. Obviously anyone who's a Witch on one issue or another has reason to come to a place like this they won't be expelled from, but also there's a bit of strain between @Goodguy's claims of "assume that social conservatism is correct" and "wordily show-offy". At least 5 years ago, the modal Motte survey respondant was "ambivalent about religion, seeing it as a weak force for good", but that's reflective of a very peculiarly modern type of "conservative". At least in the US (also a modal Motte user characteristic in that survey), the modal social conservative is instead one of the 40% of Americans who would agree that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so". I know there are a number of faithful theists here, but in all the random discussions I've seen of anthropology and human genetics and so on I've never seen anyone jump in with the "no, it wasn't a parable, the first humans were created from clay 6kya" rebuttal that's a plurality belief among Americans. I'm not really interested in rehashing (from my perspective) that debate, but I hope that people are here who would be on the other side and are simply avoiding bringing it up for similar reasons, because that's still a huge and politically important mass of people, whom we can't avoid talking about, and whom I'd therefore like to occasionally be talking to.
My sense is that most theists here tend towards an old earth, and if not, they stay quiet.
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Young earth creationists by and large do not jump into discussions of human genetics or the rise of civilization with 'but all humans are descended from the sons of Noah who lived a few thousand years ago' unless complete schizos. It's just not what they do. Most of young earth creationism as an institution is dedicated to epicycles to bridge the findings of archeology, genetics, etc with what the bible says, not to apologetics.
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The wording on that is kind of ambiguous. One could perfectly well read it as, “God brought about civilised man (through his control of natural processes) about 10,000 years ago when the first civilisations started appearing” and I would agree despite definitely not being a creationist.
Not really. That would be option 1.
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Wouldn't their alternative option of "Humans have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process" have been a better fit for your position?
What is the meaningful distinction between "this simulation was set up according to deterministic laws and then allowed to run for a trillion years to generate the current state" versus "this simulation instantiated the current state by simulating a trillion years of deterministic evolution in two seconds"?
If your reasoning accepts that we are not living in the base reality, as both Materialism and Theism appear to do, then a lot of the old arguments seem to lose their meaning. If one observes how these arguments evolved, this should not be surprising: both the theists and the atheists very clearly expected and even demanded a clockwork universe. Both were wrong.
In general? Hard to say; possibly none. But I'd also think both would fit pretty well into the "developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process" category, especially if the answer is "none". If there's no distinction between a Creator spending millions of years of time on hominids versus a Creator spending millions of years of simulation-time on hominids, and if the former would clearly qualify for that poll response, then Q.E.D.
In a philosophy where there is a duality between brains which obey material laws and immortal souls which are above them, though, wouldn't the simulation case be weird? The hundreds of thousands of people who just started existing mid-adulthood have a full life's worth of memories of things that never happened? If you're facing away from your kid when you start existing, you feel love for someone you've never really met?
Regardless, although I love a Simulationist thought experiment as much as the next nerd, but the "in their present form" answerers are probably not picturing a Great Programmer here, and when you get into specifics then there are meaningful distinctions. The deterministic-laws-running case led to a state where, by 8000BC, large human subpopulations were on every continent; the in-their-present-form case, to about half of people who answered that, the story of a single pair of humans molded from the dust of the ground in the Garden of Eden is literally true.
I admit I'm surprised that fraction isn't higher. 20% of Americans are people who, despite thinking that there's a bunch of non-literal stuff in the Bible (presumably more than just the stories explicitly defined as parables), don't think the non-literal parts might include the bit about humanity being 6000ish years old?
The converse situation is even weirder, though. 6% of Americans don't identify as Christians and yet think the Christian Bible is "the actual word of God, to be taken literally"? Are they old-fashioned (mythical?) Satanists who believe in God but don't worship him? Are they Gnostics who think the Biblical God is real but is actually not the Supreme Being? I'm not aware of a ton of other options here. Maybe I just expect too much consistency from polling results in general.
This is probably just noise, lizardman's constant.
But there is a segment of evangelicals who don't identify with the "Christian" label, as silly as it may sound. When I was growing up, the cool thing to be was "a Christ follower" not "a Christian." The best steelman for the phrase is that it stresses the humility of the speaker and not their moral authority -- but a more realistic interpretation is that it served as a means of trying to escape stigma against Christianity in a world increasingly neutral, if not hostile, towards the Christian faith. "I'm not like those judgmental Christians."
In the seeker-sensitive movement, there was a big shift towards that kind of instrumental humility, where everyone's seen as -- to give you a direct sermon quote, no I'm not kidding -- "just trying to figure out this whole Jesus thing." Essentially the main source of growth for many, if not most, non-denominational megachurches is from people with some level of Christian belief but who had negative experiences in smaller churches in the past. Distancing from the "Christian" term serves as a signal of "we're not like those judgy people who gave you dirty looks for being divorced or having a shoulder tattoo." In other words -- it's memetically fit, in a certain context.
This group is also thoroughly evangelical, though unreflectively, without reference to the alternatives. If you tell them many Presbyterians don't believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God or that Episcopal bishops have openly doubted the resurrection of Christ, they struggle to believe you (I've done it). The idea that following Jesus is separable from Biblical inspiration wouldn't even strike them as possible, just like the practice of infant Baptism is a bizarre medieval Catholic innovation and not also the practice of many Protestant churches. In this culture "I'm a Christ follower not a Christian" can feel as subversive as 18th-century Deism, though my own experience is that the internet has taken a sledgehammer to that sort of monoculture and most with doubts or institutional grievances run straight for atheism.
In particular, the "Jesus was just a heckin' good guy who wanted everyone to love each other, he would have been a big fan of gay marriage" seems to be the apostatized, post-Obergefell evolution of the original concept. And many evangelicals even from traditional backgrounds are very suceptible to it, because they often have no grounding in the broader historical and theological place of their tradition and thus have no antibodies to counterarguments. Especially ones that appeal to concerns about "holier than thou" attitudes and Christian judgmentalism (because the Gospel is reduced to non-judgment instead of right-judgment).
There are also the "all the churches are money laundering fronts who spend all their money on fancy sound systems, my church is my household" prepper dad energy folks, at the very epicenter of Scots-Irish obstinance and skepticism of authority. These people feel a firm connection to Christian culture (though mostly in a reactionary way) and would affirm Biblical inspiration if you asked them, though they couldn't give you a verse any longer than a bumper sticker. Yes, this is incoherent.
It's a fairly small group, and the general tenor of American Christianity in recent years is toward greater traditionalism -- I know southern baptists who are endorsing structured liturgical prayer -- but if someone told me "the Bible is the literal Word of God, but I'm not like those Christians," well, this is what pops into my head.
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The simulation theory is unfalsifiable - due to the way we model brains we know memories can be altered and the emotions attached to them too (thank fuck for propafol) and they have even been able to implant a false sense of fear in mice by reactivating specific neurons activated in response to a shock without the shock, which implies our memories are mere playthings for a sufficiently advanced being. Once you accept that premise everything else falls into place.
It's a great irony that an atheist materialist would be more susceptible to that argument than a theist, due to the theist's believing we are more than just flesh and neurons.
I have to say though, I am now more interested in those 6% of people who I assume must be insanely depressed. Or just insane.
Maybe Lizardman's constant is less constant than thought.
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Same.
I do wish we had more lefty commenters, but it really does seem like ardent lefties have to discard a lot of fundamental, fairly obvious facts about baseline reality to maintain their ideological commitments.
Its definitely the one place where the average response doesn't drastically misinterpret a person's post and respond to the persons' hallucinated point rather than the plain words they said.
That's what drives me away from other forums, meanwhile here I don't have to constantly say "No, that is not what I meant, please read the words I actually wrote and I'll happily explain myself further if needed."
Interesting.
Your mileage may vary. I am routinely imputed views I don't hold. This forum is roughly equivalent to an above average political subreddit, just with the ideological inflection reversed.
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I think the righties do this too here. I think the most blatant example was responses to my effort post defending ASOIAF and George R. R. Martin. Many responses were from people who hadn't read the books very carefully, and even more egregiously, from people who hadn't read my post carefully at all.
I think the kind of effect that we see here is due to the fact the kinds of topics that we like to debate on this form are usually ones in which the right is clear-pilled (immigration, economics) much more so than the left. There are other issues that I think the right is weaker on (car-brain, media literacy, veganism, etc.) that don't get as much attention on this forum.
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This is a common assertion for people to make about their ideological opponents. People on the left constantly make the same claim about people on the right. And the intellectuals on the left and right both do so with detailed receipts about why their own side is working with facts and their ideological opponents are basing their ideology on lies.
It turns out it is possible for groups to make mirror-image accusations of each other, yet one group is substantially correct and the other almost-wholly wrong.
Occam’s Razor, however, would suggest that when observing two groups whose accusations mirrors one another that either (a) both are correct, or (b) both are wrong.
Bringing in Occam's Razor is totally unhelpful--is it "simpler" to say that both sides are right, both are wrong, or one is right and one is wrong? The question is virtually meaningless at this level; it's unclear what "simple" even means in this context.
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Occam's Razor makes no such suggestion.
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It’s also possible, and I’d argue likely, that both are correct. Partisans from every corner regularly discard inconvenient facts.
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slightly offtopic - I was writing a response to this video (which I don't recommend watching), but the response can be succintly summarized as:
That video is infuriating because he almost gets it. He describes the rake in excruciating detail, elucidates exactly why and how people step on that rake, and then, with great pomp and ceremony but zero self-awareness, proceeds to step on the rake himself.
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Its probably a top 3 pet peeve of internet discourse for me.
Its the "So you hate Waffles?" issue.
People will aggressively impute thoughts and motives to the speaker and then draw conclusions about their words that wildly diverge from the simplest interpretation of the sentences.
Then attack them on that basis, which instantly derails any communication that might have been possible.
I spent a LONG time learning how to write as directly and clearly as possible (within the constraints of the English language) and it still happens to me.
That said, in day-to-day communications, reading between the lines or recognizing when someone IS motivated to manipulate you is a useful skill, so its not like its 'wrong' to try to parse someone's words like that.
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The Motte is more balanced than you think. There are people who are a little bit more liberal here at least in some ways, such as myself and /u/Hoffmeister. That being said I'm not woke by any means, but I have a lot of sympathy with postmodernism, and have little patience for the trad LARPing that some of the less well-thought-out posters here seem to embody, although I generally find this is one of the highest quality places on the internet to actually find good arguments from both sides.
I genuinely have no idea what sort of Motte user this refers to. I'd like to ask for examples, but I don't want to start a shitstorm. I see tons of trad LARPers on Twitter so I think I know the type you're references. We have had indeed had some "trad" edgelords on here in the past, but the most trad/socialcons here these days seem to actually be in committed monogamous relationships, have several children, and regularly attend some form of Christian religious service. One can of course quibble over the line between LARPing and authentic living, but that's a general problem in the 21st century, not one that's limited to trad right-wingers.
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This seems like a contradiction; trad-LARPing in the digital age is insanely post-modern and Baudrillardian.
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Seconded. On most topics, I (grey tribe, generally mistrustful of both government and big business) find my point of view represented by some poster. Sure, we have a lot of fringe people who probably have had few other places to voice their opinion before Musk took over Twitter, and there are few wokes who are willing to engage with what they see as a cesspool of racists.
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I am… perplexed as to why I was chosen as your representative of liberalism. I’m on record saying that the obsessive focus on the inalienable rights of the individual is the cancer at the heart of American society. You’re absolutely correct that I’m not a “social conservative”, but I also favor a more authoritarian approach to government/policing than I think almost anyone else on this forum does. (I’m also one of this forum’s leading proponents of “racism is good, actually”.)
I just remember being impressed by your analysis of the right’s problem with didactic media in response to my ASOIAF post. Sorry if I labeled you as something you’re not: I really probably meant something like critical of the right rather than “liberal” per see when I thought of you.
Don't feel too bad, I (incorrectly) referenced @Hoffmeister25 a progressive in a post from a few years ago. I think his criticisms of his right-wing fellow travelers are just memorable and incisive.
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Ah yes, that’s fair. I’m a fairly ardent critic of mainstream Christian conservatives, and of the “conservative mindset” generally. I’d just say that I’m some third thing rather than a “liberal”.
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Challenge accepted.
How authoritarian dare you dream?
I mean look, I’m not interested in approaching this as a challenge. I want to avoid the temptation toward “vice signaling” so common on the right, so I’m not going to try and show off how “based” I am. If it turns out that you’re more authoritarian than I am, I have zero problem with that.
I wish to enshrine the principle that our justice/carceral system is, first and foremost, about punishment and about making an example of criminals. Rehabilitation is a pipe dream for the vast majority of felons in this country; there are bad people in this world, and they weren’t made bad by society. The death penalty has always been a salutary means not only of removing such people permanently from society, but also of making a public spectacle to impress upon potential future criminals the humiliating death that awaits them. We should expand the death penalty to be applicable to a far broader spectrum of crimes (including property crimes) than those for which it’s currently on offer. The method of execution should be public — I favor hangings, although I’m open to other methods which are similarly visually evocative without being overly torturous. The condemned should experience terror and humiliation — ideally visually obvious to onlookers — during the lead-up to the execution, but not too much actual prolonged physical suffering during the execution itself.
We should also stress the extremely low probability of a false conviction in the age of ubiquitous video surveillance, DNA, and advanced forensics. The entire “presumption of innocence” upon which our current system of jurisprudence rests is, in many ways, a relic of a bygone era. What does it mean to “presume the innocence” of a man caught on camera committing a criminal act, using a gun on which we can find his (scientifically verifiable) fingerprints and unique DNA? The massive amount of appeals, legal loopholes, and protections afforded to criminals in this country is a travesty. I would instead favor an inquisitorial model of criminal justice, with little or no room for the “jury trial” as a method of ascertaining guilt.
If I thought we could actually administer it in America, I would also favor the reintroduction of public corporal punishment (caning, etc.) as an alternative to incarceration and fines for certain crimes. The problem, of course, is that the optics of (mostly) young black men being publicly whipped would be intolerable to a plurality of white Americans. The ghost of slavery still haunts the American consciousness to a great degree, preventing us from being able to embrace a healthy punitive approach to crime. We can do prisons because they lock these men away from the view of squeamish right-thinking white people, but if they were to be corporally punished right out in the open it would be psychologically unbearable for too great a portion of the populace to bear.
I would also love it if we could reach a point where we could carry out an easing-out and eventual abolishment of nearly all personal firearm ownership. This is impossible and intolerable under current conditions in this country, due to the continued existence of a massive criminal underclass. If we could get that problem under control, though, the only ideological dragon left to slay would be the vestigial delusion of an armed populace “as a check against tyranny”, and frankly I think that paper tiger would be easy for a future government to slay. The simple example set by the obviously-not-tyrannical societies which are thriving in our world without widespread individual firearm ownership are simply too visible to most people. Japan is not a tyranny, nor are its citizens suffering under the yoke of oppression because they can’t own guns. Clownish sputtering about “COVID tyranny” aside, nobody can make any credible argument that the citizens of Australia live in a dystopian state of oppression.
I also favor a full redemption of eugenics as a means of improving the human capital of this country, although I’m ambivalent about the extent to which this could, or should, be achieved via coercive measures. I have no special attachment to “bodily autonomy” or “sexual freedom” as important philosophical considerations, but I’m cognizant of the limits of feasibility when it comes to applying those sorts of measures to a modern populace marinated so throughly in feminism, egalitarianism, and dystopian media like GATTACA and Brave New World. Eugenics is still fiercely opposed on both the mainstream right and left, and I don’t want to get over my skis in terms of over-committing to a wildly unpopular proposal.
I think I agree with 2/5, think 1/5 is the ideal but tricky to actually implement, and actually disagree with 2/5 (though not fully in either case).
The one that's tricky is inquisitors; the problem is setting up a highly-trustworthy and highly-politically-neutral oversight body to make sure that inquisitors don't, y'know, get captured by the party in power and lock up the opposition. The difficulty of this is the motivation for jury trials, although this purpose has been largely vitiated by various schemes on the part of the government and legal apparatus (there's a whole battery of ways that judges and lawyers cut down on nullification, ranging from strikes to barring mentions to jury instructions).
The ones I disagree with are guns (I think it's wired into the male brain to like weapons; I think US gun culture is maybe a step too far, and I think handguns are a worse value proposition than all other small arms and even a lot of higher-end stuff, but I do generally support the ability of random interested people to be able to hunt game or shoot targets for its own sake) and the executions (I'm mostly on board with the Galactic Milieu policy where, upon sufficiently demonstrating that you're irredeemable, you get a choice of life without parole/["death of personality" if available]/execution, as I'm generally on team "prevention and deterrence" rather than "punishment and deterrence"; definitely prefer bullet to the head over lethal injection as method, though).
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Hispanic cultures used the garrote, which seems very comparable to the Anglo method of hanging. Firing squads are appropriate for military personnel.
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On that point, hanging is a lot more fraught as a method of execution than you probably think it is. Short-drop hanging is obviously not the way to go: the most fortunate of such condemned lose consciousness in 8-10 seconds from compression of the carotid arteries obstructing bloodflow to the brain (possibly along with the carotid nerve reflex causing decreased heart rate/blood pressure, but this is heavily disputed), though this period is still undoubtedly agonizing. From historical accounts of short-drop hangings, it can be assumed that many of the condemned experienced insufficient cerebral ischemia and suffered terribly for significantly longer.
Long drop hanging, meanwhile, has long been thought of as the humane form of hanging. As practiced by the British after the 1888 creation of the Official Table of Drops, the process involved weighing the prisoner and evaluating the thickness/muscularity of their neck to set the drop they'd get. As the condemned reached the end of the rope, the tightening of the knot would jerk the head backwards with sufficient force to break the C2 vertebra, sending the broken fragment forwards and severing the spinal cord for instantaneous death.
Setting aside the issue with presuming that severing the spinal cord produces instant brain death/unconsciousness (wouldn't it just paralyze them?), some investigative studies suggest that the actual cause of death in long-drop hanging is far more variable than previously assumed. In [this] study, among the 34 examined vertebrae of British prisoners executed between 1882 and 1945, only seven were found with cervical fractures, with only three of those being the classic "hangman's fracture". Contemporary autopsies reported far more fractures than had been found in the study, and the fractures that did occur showed no relation to sex, height, or length of drop. A later autopsy of a 1993 hanging using the British method [here] suggested that the quick loss of consciousness observed after the drop was caused by massive cerebral hemorrhaging from torn vertebral arteries, as the spinal cord was again undamaged.
Even using the most rigorously designed protocols, hanging is an inconsistent and occasionally quite cruel method of death. My preferred method would be Soviet-style shooting, but if you really want executions to be a spectacle while solving the problem of undue suffering, you ought to cut the hangman's knot with the headsman's blade.
It'd be at least a second or two before the brain deoxygenated enough to cause unconsciousness, surely? I was with you up until that point.
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Your point about hanging is well-taken. I’m trying to optimize for a method that the American public could actually stomach. Hanging has a long and lindy history in Anglophone countries — although, much like my concerns about the optics of caning, hanging does of course suffer from the association with lynching, regardless of how long the practice existed both before and after the era of Lynch Law. Hanging can also be performed in a public square, using an apparatus which can be reused many times, and which can execute multiple individuals simultaneously. It is violent enough to make a point, but, at least in its long-drop form, not too gruesome to witness.
Current “medicalized” execution methods such as lethal injection are too sterile and do not carry any of the desired psychological effects, neither on the condemned nor on onlookers. The gas chamber is similarly medicalized, cannot be carried out before the eyes of the public, and of course suffers from an even more taboo optical association: that of the Holocaust.
The guillotine is far too gruesome and traumatic; watching someone get decapitated and bleed out from their neck stump is simply too much for most modern people to stomach. It also suffers from an inescapable and unacceptable association with the subversive, anarchic, populist aesthetics of the French Revolution.
As for the firing squad or other forms of execution by firearm, I feel they suffer from three major drawbacks: firstly, like the guillotine, they are simply very visually violent and not something a lot of psychologically-healthy Americans would wish to watch; secondly, it is the method of execution which, barring the old-fashioned execution by axe, might be the most traumatizing for the individual(s) tasked with carrying out the execution; thirdly, since my fervent hope is that in the long run America loses its fixation with guns, a method of execution by the state which prominently features firearms sends the wrong message.
I’m sure some enterprising inventor can (and hopefully will) develop a method of execution which more wholly satisfies the criteria I’m looking for. A method which requires the condemned to, directly before the eyes of the public, come to grips with the enormity of the consequences for his crimes, and to experience both the visible terror and the humiliating stripping of social status which are appropriate for the circumstances. I’m sensitive to avoid methods which overly select for sadism in the executioner(s), and those which risk inculcating such sadism over time. Methods like hanging which involve an apparatus, rather than a direct violent action by an individual, are preferable for that reason among others.
Public execution is already wayyy outside the realm of consideration for modern Westerners; if it should be reinstated, I'd prefer that we go the whole nine yards, as it were. Also, have you seen the comments on gore sites? Asides from stupid teenagers, I'd wager that ~everyone who frequents those sites to see anything more graphic than bodycam footage are somehow mentally disturbed.
Besides, the broader objection I have is towards the instrumental value of your formulation. When there's just not that much crime that deserves capital punishment compared to how it was in the past (at least among the blue-blood races), you don't really need to drive the point home in that way; it seems like your ought doesn't follow from the is. I'm curious: what crimes do you think deserve the death penalty (and while we're on topic, which deserve caning)?
I mean, that’s the thing: in the American context, both execution and caning would be wildly disproportionately applied to the “non-blue-blood races”. I obviously have no objection to hanging or caning a white felon; the demographic disparities are, at least in the short term, simply the reality.
When it comes to non-violent crimes, it’s more about the habitual aspect of crime. If someone commits shoplifting, I’m perfectly happy to see them caned once and then everyone can move on. If someone has committed shoplifting 47 times, this person is very obviously an intolerable burden and incapable of being rehabilitated. Career criminals are what I’m trying to focus on.
There are, however, certain non-violent crimes which I’d be perfectly willing to have someone very severely harmed for: scammers, for example. People who steal not from large impersonal entities, but from vulnerable individuals. A very close family member of mine lost his entire life savings to a scammer, who exploited his naïvety and conscientiousness. I myself had a phone stolen because a guy begged to use it to call his mother, then ran from me the second I handed it to him. These people are irredeemably sociopathic and must be culled. Generally any crimes which demonstrate a depraved mind must be dealt with through making it onerous or impossible for this person to reproduce.
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I will note that in the EEA everyone was basically fine with gore. It's the modern, intermediated society where the vast majority of people don't have to kill animals that is unnatural.
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Why not guillotine?
(That would be the practical implementation, but the syllepsis works better this way. (Also, the image of a hooded executioner with a massive axe fits the demand for spectacle better than a mere scaffold with a blade.))
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It's a running joke with my wife and I.
Is eugenics is still fiercely opposed on both the mainstream right and left? What's with the embryo screening then?
I won't claim to be more authoritarian, and am pleased to know there are others at least as authoritarian.
If only MHGA, was more pronaunceable. Would you expand the death penalty to public corruption? I'd would have rather seen Judge Michael Conahan hanged than pardoned.
I’m a bit conflicted when it comes to corruption committed by obviously intelligent, competent individuals whose talents can clearly still be put to good use. On the one hand, the crimes of powerful individuals can usually impact a much larger number of people than the crimes of low-level street criminals; in that sense, punishing the powerful is extremely important not only because of the gravity of their crimes, but also the punitive/restorative value to the public of seeing them laid low. On the other hand, Michael Conahan has abilities that can be put to good use, as a sort of intellectual chain-gang labor. I’d be wary about wasting him by executing him. Ultimately I think I’d come down on the side of execution, though.
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Countries without American racial politics also eschew judicial corporal punishment of adults. Although a number of backward former British colonies still have caning on the books, Singapore appears to be the only non-Islamic country that actually does it on a regular basis. For whatever reason, the taboo against judicial corporal punishment is stronger than the taboo against the death penalty.
If I had to guess, it would be some combination of:
Or, indeed, the guy getting the caning.
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Yeah I'm a libertarian Atheist, I don't feel like this place always sides with social conservatism.
It can probably fairly and correctly be called anti-woke and anti-immigration. But those aren't only positions of social conservatives.
The motte will always appear more socially conservative than the media on some issues because it is willing to look at what actually happened in eg red state maternal mortality cases and not simply hallucinate a scenario. But the motte is not pro-traditional values on the whole.
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There's /r/libsofreddit and /r/conservative, Reddit's token right-wing echochambers.
/r/politicalcompassmemes has more ideological diversity and /r/shitpoliticssays is worth a look.
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Politics is innately partisan and ugly. It's all about control of power and wealth. If I get a pension, you don't get a free education or he has to work harder and pay more taxes. It's mostly zero-sum.
Nah, that kind of bickering about how big each slice of cake should be is policy discussions, and mostly boring, not ugly. Most of the "good" culture war topics (Dobbs, immigrants, LGBT, gun rights, free speech issues, climate change, Gaza) which are really toxic are not about "how should we divide money between interest groups?" It is always that there are conflicting underlying principles by the different participants.
I don't agree with this -- the culture war is absolutely about dividing power between interest groups. At its very core! I think you saw the reference to pensions and got sidetracked by economic theory, which currently mostly resides in the "boring policy discussions" category because opposition to liberal free trade has few major proponents among the elite.
But think about Dobbs -- like RandomRanger says, it's ultimately about power. In the feminist formulation -- what they actually say themselves -- abortion is about "a woman's power to control her own body." Stripping away the philosophy of it, the conservative viewpoint is that the state has the power to stop abortions. The interest groups are "women who don't want to bear a child" and "children who are not yet born."
Immigration? Of course that's about the division of power between interest groups! What should a native's labor be worth -- that's about relative power and status. What should the language people speak be -- that's about the power of different linguistic groups, and particularly of monolinguals vs multilinguals. Should there be a pathway to citizenship? Voting rights? That's literally about dividing power between interest groups, between constituencies!
LGBT? Again, division of power between interest groups. Should the religious baker have to bake the gay wedding cake? What are the relative powers of the LGB and the T -- should lesbians be required to accomodate transwomen?
Gun rights? Division of power between interest groups. What is the relative importance of people's desire to own a gun and people's desire not to live in a society that has many guns? How do random acts of mass gun violence -- sometimes perpetrated by people with little to no background that would impede their ability to legally buy a gun -- affect this calculation? What are the rights of mentally ill people to self defense? What are the rights of society to corral others' right to self defense for its own safety?
Freedom of speech? You mean the issue where the deciding factor for most people is "my friends can speak all they want and my enemies should keep their dirty mouths shut?" The issue where the right says "criticism of Israel is antisemitism" and the left says "criticism of immigration is racism"? Where "hate speech" is offensive and defamatory statements made against racial groups -- except white people, because they deserve it? (And don't exist, by the way: "white people have no culture." This is not hate speech.)
Climate change? The issue where a leading activist said, to a crowd of older politicians, "You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words?" Where the young activists feel energized because they believe baby boomers stole a healthy planet from them to lower gas prices? Where the rich jet-setters can fly all over the world announcing the Green Gospel but vacations for the hoi polloi are ecological sins? That's not about the division of power between interest groups?
Gaza? Really? The issue where if you support one side you're calling for Shoah 2.0, and if you support the other you want to firebomb children? The issue that's about, quite literally, two interest groups who both want to live on the same territory? The issue where both sides of the conflict engage in war crimes that endanger or hide behind civilians, but both sides of the debate plug their ears to the horror of the whole thing because My Side Is Oppressed? Isn't that the interest-group-power-struggle par excellence?
I know you're sincere in what you say. And I admire the focus on conflicting principles -- there are indeed a lot of those. But your thesis about the culture war strikes me as precisely wrong. The culture war default, and its cause, is conflict theory. Maybe it's not always about money. But it's definitely about power.
To reply to both you and @RandomRanger, I concede that CW about power. What I was arguing was that it is not primarily about the allocation of resources, money.
I would still argue that the term zero-sum has all the wrong connotations. It vaguely implies rational actors competing over finite resources to maximize some utility function, like me bidding on a coconut you are selling.
In most cases, CW is not like this. The energy spent on fighting the bathroom wars is wildly out of proportion of the actual importance of that issue over the natural state of affairs (if you can somewhat pass and behave normally, you are fine, if you can't pass and/or spy on people, you get treated as a sex pest). The point of fighting the CW is not to achieve a grand strategic victory for your side, but to be seen by your peers fighting the CW. It is mostly performative.
Often, the behavior displayed is not about scoring a win for your side at the expense of the other side (zero sum), but purely on punishing the other side (negative sum). Getting someone for some tweet by doxxing them is a classic CW past-time, after all.
Consider abortion. Depending on whose side holds the majority, some states might allow all abortions up to birth, and some might ban all abortions. I propose that this is a lot worse in satisfying the aggregate preference of the Americans than a compromise solution based on a term limit.
Israel/Palestine is theoretically zero sum (only one side can control a given square meter of land, after all), but in practice it is vastly negative for both sides.
If the point of the CW was to achieve strategic victories for your side, e.g. a power struggle, then one would expect that it would be mostly fought over stuff which actually mattered, and money would be a central angle. People would try to build broad coalitions which would gain them small policy victories. This is not what we are seeing. Instead, we see an outsized focus on small but very emotionally charged theaters, and a trend to prefer the humiliation of members of the other side to actual policy victories.
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Immigration is absolutely about power and wealth. People in Britain are working for years so that low-skilled or unemployed migrants can enjoy state accommodation in hotels or social housing.
The example I gave was money but other things have the same basis in zero-sum conflict of interests. Either whites can go around killing blacks with legal impunity or the other way around or some balance in between. Whites get affirmative action, or blacks get it, or Indians get it, or low-castes get it, or whoever... My free speech is free speech, yours is hate speech or obscene... Climate change is about the balance of power between industry and bureaucrats/academics, about state power vs personal power, subsidies for renewables vs economic efficiency...
Gaza is zero-sum. Who gets it? Israel or Palestine? The Israelis find all these principles about why they should win and their enemies should lose, vis versa with the Palestinians. There are exceptions on both sides but the general trend is that the justifications come after the desire. There's a bigger exception in whites generally giving up huge advantages with regard to race but that's a special case that requires intense media/education work to build and maintain.
Power >>> principles. Many women want the power to abort their children and that will for power trumps one of the strongest principles we can think of, as seen in abortion rates. Since the 1970s they've aborted more children than men have killed in all wars IIRC.
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Certain key beliefs our society is based on are Noble Lies, and can't be sustained in an open, high quality, debate environment, leaving the believers only with the option of having a closed debate environment.
The establishment is likely also making sure that no open discussion takes place, because the wrong information coming out at the wrong time is often a direct threat to their power and their goals.
My pet theory is also that the whole system is designed towards us consuming. We consume more when we are unhappy. We are force fed belief that the next shipment is the solution to our happiness, while we have a gadgets that is having us comparing our lives with impossible standards constantly nudged in our feeds by algorithms, pointing towards the next solution to make us happy. And then that cycle is hijacked by the powerful to shape our politics that is only in their own interest.
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I think if you focus on old-school forums you will miss out on where a lot of discussion is happening these days, namely Twitter/X, Substack comment threads, and private Discord servers. The first two in particular host a growing collection of in some cases relatively influential Motte alumni that you could follow or whose networks you could poke around in to curate your own feed. If you don't like any of those guys, then it may take a little longer to get the recommendations you want, but the algorithm is a hell of a thing and will get the job done eventually.
As to your more fundamental point, I don't see how this moment in particular is much different from any since the creation of the internet (I wasn't around for them, but maybe early reddit and some previous iteration of 4chan were really that great?). It takes a very particular sort of high IQ, high-decoupling, politically-interested wordcel to be a successful rules-following contributor here and I think it's to be expected that there are less than a dozen places online where such individuals congregate in sufficient numbers to be noticeable.
It takes a particular kind of owner of the space as well. The temptations of money beckon on all sides in this day and age.
/r/FemaleDatingStrategy became a popular subreddit around what amounted to a feminized version of PUA. The head mods chose to move off of Reddit to a new proprietary website where they focus more on their podcasts, merch, patreon content, etc. I stopped hearing about FDS about the point at which they moved sites, but for the mods it has gone from unpaid Janny work to profitable side hustle. The move undoubtedly throttled audience growth, but it turned the audience they had into paying customers.
The temptation to cash in, at the expense of the growth of the forum or of the original mission of the forum or of the original members of the forum, is great. You need an owner of the forum who doesn't want to cash in, who is content to stay small, who doesn't want to get invited to the good parties and have prestige over it.
This impacts political forums the most, but it hits everything from sports to fashion to philosophy. We're lucky here that the goal seems to be a permanent member's club, where we all hang out to chat, but even then we've seen former power users alter their posting (and their politics) to try to hustle a living on the internet of beefs.
Kulak and Trace are the only ones I’ve seen cash out so far. Are there more I’m missing?
Yassine?
We had a former lawyer who went on the podcast route as well, IIRC
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I'm subscribed to Noahpinion because he seems like he knows what he's talking about economics-wise, though I 100% disagree with his stance on immigration (since he completely ignores cultural issues (On that front, Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation strikes me as just plain common sense.)) and American exceptionalism.
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I think in the past, I overestimated what fraction of people are high-decoupling. I have always been a high decoupler since I was a kid, so maybe it's just hard for me to understand not being a high decoupler.
Also, I haven't explored Discord at all so far, I probably should. Am open to suggestions about how to get into some interesting Discords.
Likewise.
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Makes sense abstractly, but please provise more pragmatic details :)
Unless you intend to gatekeep, which I wouldn't blame you for given that gatekeeping seems kind of necessary to avoid having your forum overrun by low value contributors.
If that's how you mean it, then I get it lol.
Similar to how the best way to use Reddit is to find actually smart people and then follow their entire post histories.
I used to do that, but my mistake was thinking SlateStarCodex must have been some MMO people were playing like Eve Online or something, so I skipped past those posts, and ended up finding the motte group way later than I should have.
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Thanks, that makes sense to me.
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The credible/non-credible forums can be alright. /r/noncrediblediplomacy , /r/crediblediplomacy, /r/noncredibledefense, /r/credibledefense
NCD was pretty good before the Russian/Ukrainian invasion because it was people who were smart about defense/geopolitics shitposting about defense/geopolitics. Then the population of the sub exploded and now it's overrun with neoliberal normies who wouldn't know an F-105 from an F-4.
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You should consider formatting your post to be a list to make it easier to read.To actually answer you question, you might check out Data Secret Lox, which is another part of the rationalist and rat adjacent diaspora, with its own group of regulars.
EDIT: Removed formatting point.
Sorry, just formatted. Thanks for the recommendation!
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