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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?
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 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.
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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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