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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27979 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore. It makes sense. The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China. The unemployment rate is only low because these people are so dispirited that they've given up looking for work. We need to drastically remake our economy to help these unfortunates, who are incapable of helping themselves. This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans. They see whites like people have long seen the American Indians, a "noble" race who ought to "own" the country but who are ill-equipped to deal with the evils of modernity that more advanced peoples have introduced like liquor or fentanyl.[1] But where this worldview makes some sense in the case of the Indians, it is utterly nonsensical to apply it to whites, who all the statistics show have higher incomes, higher IQs, higher educational attainment, and lower unemployment. Even opioid overdose deaths, initially a "white" issue, are now highest for blacks and American Indians, as with most social problems. (Whites do die at higher rates than Hispanics or Asians.) Labor force participation rates have indeed declined, mostly because there are more students and retirees. 89.2% of men aged 25-54 are in the labor force, a figure that is likely higher for whites, and the 11% who aren't include students, prisoners, stay-at-home dads, and those who can't work because of legit disabilities.

The Online Right has often been compared to the woke left. The woke black looks at his race, disproportionately poor, uneducated, and working low-skill jobs, and demands affirmative action so that more blacks can work in medicine, law, business, and politics. The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain. Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?

Now, you may be asking, "what about the real unemployed drug addicts?" For one, this is a disproportionately non-white group. One study found that blacks are 3.5 times more likely to ever be homeless in their lifetimes than whites, while Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely. Still, while not as common as some of you think, they do exist. Tariffs aren't going to help them. Law enforcement, drug treatment, mental health care, and legalizing SROs might, though the real issue is that these people need to help themselves. If I believed, as many of you profess to, that my race was at risk of going extinct, I wouldn't be centering my politics around helping the least capable members of said race who refuse to help themselves. Don't you have bigger problems? It's not like you should feel any "political" loyalty to them, Trump's working-class base work, homeless people rarely vote.

  1. The "heritage American" label reminds me of this. Like white people are Ford model-Ts, outmoded machines that nevertheless have aesthetic and historical significance.
  • -29

Genuine applause for taking one for the team. I protest your ban as unjust silencing for stating true facts about the world, with your only crime being that your blade was too sharp and well honed. I stand with you in solidarity. Omnes pro uno.

  • -17

Pretty much, except it’s neither silencing nor unjust.

You and Turok are welcome to state your true facts in a suitably polite, cooperative fashion.

... while right-wing posters get to regularly accuse people on this forum of being delusional, claim outgroup politicians are "foreign agents", claim that anyone who holds specific positions is "too dumb to vote", etc. without even getting warned most of the time.

Could you link specific instances or mention the worst users who are regularly doing this?

See my post here.

Your first two links are both thoroughly articulated arguments in defense of specific positions. They broke no rules. Every one else is free to marshal arguments against them - as I see that you did, terribly, for the first. The second still got a mod warning. The third one is perhaps more openly insulting (if you fall into the exaggerated position it's attacking), but it has always been the case that statements prefaced with "I think" and the like get a lot more leeway. And oh, there you are downthread, completely missing the point of that comment.

Meanwhile, the routine criticism of Turok is that he never actually stakes a position in the first place, but just engages in borderline incoherent, miserable performance art.

If there's not a rule against attacking your opponent as "living in denial" separate from the actual arguments, there should be. It adds nothing to the conversation but heat.

The second one didn't receive a mod warning. There's a mod warning a different user downthread, but nothing to the post claiming the outgroup politician is a foreign agent.

Turok is clearly arguing against a line of though that, will not predominant, mostly certainly exists on the fringes of the Republican party. I don't understand how you think what he's doing is "performance art".

Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.

I mean we won huge battles in the fight against affirmative action and knocked the woke racial identarians off their game in a lot of areas. It being discussed less fits squarely in the hypothesis that most of us HBD people weren't actually white nationalists but simply what we've been telling you we are, people who prefer race blindness if they're allowed to have it. Yes, white nationalists continue to exist and they will continue to make white nationalist noises, not really sure why that should matter when discussing HBD.

Congratulations! You’ve advanced from lazy, uncharitable snarling at your enemies to. Uh. Marginally higher-effort snarling at the same people.

It doesn’t look like you are arguing to understand anything. It looks more like you’re picking fights. This is an immense pain in the ass and against various rules.

One week ban.

Terrible ban. We get stuff posted here of a similar level of snarling, but pointed at the left, and it regularly doesn't catch these types of bans.

Which of his statements was actually even worthy of the ban here?

I answered you already downthread, but since you've spun into multiple sub-arguments with different people about your grievances with various posters, how we handled Darwin (unfairly, disproportionately, and with great bias, according to you), and alleged personal attacks against you that we have refused to mod, I have a few points to make in addition to those I made here.

First, regarding Darwin aka @guesswho.

Have you noticed, perchance, that @guesswho is not banned? During his last pass, he earned a bunch of warnings, one tempban, and an AAQC. Hardly indicative of unfair treatment, for all that many of our users (and, being honest, half the mods) hated him.

I didn't hate him. I found him annoying and disingenuous, but I agree with you that to some degree, the hatred of Darwin was excessive and ideologically motivated (he was one of the most persistent and antagonistic leftist posters willing to argue a leftist position down to the ground).

But you know what? I also totally understand why he drove so many people absolutely bugfuck crazy. Because that was more or less his entire reason d'être. He had mastered the art of poking people in the eye until they'd rage back at him. I don't think he was a literal troll - i.e., someone engaging in a performance just to piss people off, without really believing the things he argued. I think he really believed the things he argued but I think he argued for the joy of it, the joy of "conquering" his enemies (i.e., driving them bugfuck crazy with his tactics) and he wasn't particularly interested in, you know, accuracy or sincerity or ingenuousness. "Owning the righties" was his game and he played it with prejudice.

You know who drove him away?

Me.

The thread you were already linked to, about J.K. fucking Rowling. Here you go again. The one where I finally lost it with him. But I "lost it," not by going bugfuck crazy, but by deciding I was going to nail his feet to the ground, pound on each and every one of his arguments, and drill him until he either stood and delivered or ran.

Guess what he did?

Been a year, and we're still waiting for him to get to it "in his queue."

But he's still not banned! He can starting posting again whenever he wants. And while I'm sure if he did, a lot of people (including me) might say "So, about that JK Rowling thread?" - most likely he'd waffle and dismiss it, and go back to his old ways forthwith.

Your thesis that "Darwin was ganged up on and mistreated just because he was a leftist" is mostly bullshit. Sorry.

(@Tree's claim that we bent and made up rules just to go after Darwin is thus 100% bullshit.)

Now about all these other threads you point to as examples of us "Letting righties be mean and not modding them."

@gattsuru has a ton of AAQCs. That gives him a very long leash. This is by design and it's not secret - people who generate a ton of quality comments get away with more. That said, every comment you've linked to as an example of personal attacks? Being aggressive in interrogating you is not a "personal attack." I say this as somone who has been the target of @gattsuru's interrogations more than once and who can hardly be considered a fan of him or his tactics. He's a dedicated hater and I'm on his hatelist. No bias here. Worth noting that at one point we pretty much did issue a "Stop using this particular tactic" rule regarding throwing walls of links to every single past conversation every time someone he hated posted something, because it was obnoxious and degrading to the discourse (and we got some flack and resentment over it). And I mention this, not to continue to persecute @gattsuru (hey buddy, at least I guess we can have civilized conversations about which SF authors suck) but because you think we make up or bend rules just to prosecute our ideological biases, when in fact, if we bend or make up rules at all, it's because someone is being particularly and uniquely obnoxious (a point I already made about @AlexanderTurok) and it's not ideological bias at all, we do it to people who are being particularly obnoxious.

You (and @Tree, and a couple of other people) hammer this argument that we are absolutely seeing for the very first time (that was sarcasm), that the Motte picks on leftists and they get unfairly dogpiled until they get banned, and meanwhile we let MAGAs get away with anything. We've been hearing it since the Motte began. You've all read my "if I had a nickel..." speech about a dozen times now. Because yes, kids, the righties, especially certain categories of righties (the ones who really like talking about Jews, bitches, and fucking children - that's a gerund, not an adjective) insist that we're all ZOG-converged tools or something. Or, from the saner but still angry right wing, that we let leftists in general get away with more. That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned even as the mod queue is being flooded with people demanding we ban them. We especially hear it when we ban a rightie for, you know, being particularly and especially obnoxious, whatever his particular hobby horse (even if it's just "hating leftists").

The point of this long screed (besides letting me get some mod frustration off my chest - man, does it get annoying hearing the same tired accusations over and over and fucking over again)? Make a new argument. But not really- you don't have one. None of this is new. Instead- accept that this is how moderation works here, it's by design, and you can nudge us incrementally towards being harsher or laxer with the general feedback that is the overall pattern of complaints and reports, but playing "Why did you mod Johnny and not Suzy?" for the hundredth time is not going to move us. Insisting "You take sides (against my side)" for the hundredth time is not going to move us.

You're wrong. You are observably, factually, and empirically wrong. I say this because I see the mod queue. I say this because I have a pretty good memory of the Motte and its moderation going all the way back to before I became a mod (I wonder if even @naraburns remembers that I was once on the "You're cruising for a banning" list). I say this because I am part of the mod discussions we have. I say this because I have a pretty good mental model of my fellow mods, and of our most prominent posters. Not flawless, I am not perfect and I can sometimes misunderstand people (and I am saying nothing here about the quality of my own arguments - there's a reason my handful of AAQCs are mostly for writing about hobbydrama-type posts), but I have a reputation for having the best spidey sense when it comes to alts and trolls. I could tell you stories, many more stories. A lot of the misapprehension people have about modding is because you really don't see... the stuff you never see. Not your fault.

But a lot of it is because you're just wrong.

@AlexanderTurok got banned because he has been regularly and intentionally obnoxious for weeks now and he's already been warned. Not because we hate his opinions. Not because he's a leftist. (Or a rightist or a whatever-he-calls-himself playing the part of a leftist who claims not to be one.) The one-week ban, specifically, was @netstack's call. I might have only warned him. Or I might have given him three days. Another mod might have actually let it go. We didn't actually discuss this one internally (we do not discuss every ban). But it didn't happen because of ideological biases or unfairness or the Motte hating lefty posters. (A particularly ironic accusation to throw at @netstack, who is the only mod arguably more lefty than me.) It happened because Turok likes to rattle cages and frame arguments in a maximally uncharitable and inflammatory way calculated to be ragebait. He thinks this is entertaining, and if he keeps it up, his next ban will be longer.

That we practice "leftist affirmative action" and the Darwins and the AlexanderTuroks (whether or not he claims/admits to being on the left) go way too long without being banned

To be fair, I don't think Alexander is particularly left or right (I think he's probably somewhere in the spectrum of liberal to centre-right). What he is, is extremely hung up on class and status. He's obsessed with what he deems to be low-class/underclass behaviour (especially around women's sexuality as baby mamas) and hence why he always brings it back to abortion as the social climbing panacea (keep the underclass from breeding more underclass, keep aspirant working class to lower middle class types from falling back down the ladder by not letting them become single teen moms). He wants marriage and family and the rest of it, but on the proper timeline of "get educated, get a job, get married and have the appropriate number of kids, avoid sleeping around as a teen, avoid sleeping around like a ho in general, and if you do get pregnant without planning it, get an abortion so you don't ruin your life and more importantly your social status as nascent middle class". Thus his grudge with the pro-life right, because we want the sluts to keep their bastards who will then leech off the state for life (putting words into his mouth there, but that's the impression I strongly get of how he feels about it). If we were truly responsible right-wingers holding conservative values, we'd be all for discreet abortion to maintain decorum and enforce social conformity around correct behaviour.

I believe that he wants everyone, eventually, to end up as what we currently regard as the peak of society: high-ranking engineers, accountants, screenwriters, what have you. In short, he wants everybody, or at least as many people as possible, to climb the ladder and become Elite Human Capital (in his eyes). He would like the entirety of America to one day look like Manhattan, and feels that his political enemies want the entirety of America to one day look like Bumfuck, Alabama (or Brazil).

Where he and I differ is probably that I don't think this is possible or desirable - lots of non-EHC jobs need to be done, it's best for them to be done locally, and you cannot convert non-borderline-EHC into EHC, although you can certainly wreck EHC with drugs or bad political systems.

I certainly get that impression from him, and I also (where I may well be doing him a disservice since I know Sweet Fanny Adams about his background) get the impression that he's on a lower rung of the ladder, aspiring to a higher rung, and resenting the hell out of the fact that he may be confused with the low-lifes one rung below him.

That's the reason I made the Hyacinth Bucket comparison: Hyacinth plainly comes from a background that is working class/teetering on the edge of lower middle class. She made it firmly into lower middle class territory, then clawed her way by sheer force of will into middle middle class land (and is dragging Richard along with her) and aspires, rather pathetically, to the upper middle class reaches that will always be barred to her. She's terrified of her lower middle class roots being discovered and held against her, in the company she now aspires to, or even worse - to be identified by them as such after all her work to climb out of that level.

I don’t think this is true, but I suppose it’s rather hard to prove.

There’s no particular statement that crossed the line, but if I had to point to the biggest red flag, I’d blame the scare quotes.

Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

But he's not accusing anyone specifically of believing the things he's pillorying? He's not claiming all Republicans believe what he said. At worst, maybe you could say his mention of the "Online Right" was overbroad, but the way he capitalized it meant it was different than "anyone online who is right wing". Is the issue that you think no single Republican thinks these things? If that's the case I'm 100% certain you're incorrect.

I don't understand how the use of quotation marks in general would be worthy of a ban, or what you mean by "scare quotes". E.g. writing HBD as "HBD" probably just means he thinks it's a euphemism that he doesn't really agree with, but he's using it here for the sake of clarity as that's what it's often referred to. None of his other use of quotation marks seem bad either.

This seems like a ban based on vibes alone. Here's a post from a year ago that came from a right-wing that IMO is far worse, and yet it didn't get a ban or even a warning. Here's another post that I also think is pretty bad, but is actually classified as an AAQC!

But he's not accusing anyone specifically of believing the things he's pillorying? He's not claiming all Republicans believe what he said. At worst, maybe you could say his mention of the "Online Right" was overbroad, but the way he capitalized it meant it was different than "anyone online who is right wing". Is the issue that you think no single Republican thinks these things? If that's the case I'm 100% certain you're incorrect.

At least to me, the problem is that it's very unclear who he means, where he gets these ideas from, and how to even productively engage with all this. KMC's post is very specific, he cites specific things that a certain person has said and then makes conclusions that at least reasonably follow from those. Even if you disagree, you can argue quite well with that. Gattsuru is especially careful to link a lot so again, this makes it easy for me to check everything up and engage at specific points.

Turok's post here claims there is a "new narrative on the online right" (from whom? where?), which is mostly the near-opposite of the things I usually hear from broadly self-identifying rightists (as far as I can see, they usually argue that immigrants suck due to crime and welfare, and that if the native populations then has to do the shitty jobs themselves, so be it). Likewise, in the last paragraph, he directly addresses the reader, claims that "many here" believe certain things (again who? in which post?) and admonishes them.

For me, there is not much except to say that while I agree that it sounds stupid, I've not particularly heard of this new narrative, and that the positions he ascribes to "many here" is actually somewhat rare (though certainly not zero, so much I agree with). And most of his post nowadays are like this. Just undirected sneering about people he dislikes. If anything, it would be better if he cited the specific people saying these things.

This seems like a ban based on vibes alone.

Another way of saying vibes" is "tone." Yes, we moderate based on vibes. It's not quite that fuzzy- we try to follow the rubrics we've developed over the years- but yes, when someone is being an obnoxious trolling shitstirrer, and has been posting obnoxious trolling shitstirring threads for a while that so far have been just barely this side of acceptable discourse, eventually we're going to say "Enough, knock it off." @AlexanderTurok has been there for a while, and he's been warned repeatedly. He just got a 1-day slap on the wrist, and so promptly writes a post absolutely dripping with sneering condescension.

Here's a post from a year ago that came from a right-wing that IMO is far worse, and yet it didn't get a ban or even a warning. Here's another post that I also think is pretty bad, but is actually classified as an AAQC!

You know what my least favorite category of bitching about modding is?

"Waaah, you modded Johnny but you didn't mod Suzy, obviously you love Suzy more!"

Playing this kind of game is never productive. Every one of us mods has explained, many times, that while we try to be more or less consistent, we do indeed mod based on "vibes" to some extent, and a lot of those vibes are "How obnoxious is this particular person being right now?" "How annoying has this particular person been recently?" and "Does this particular person have a long record of AAQCs, or a long record of being warned to knock it off?" There is also a lot of subjectivity in whether a particular word or phrase strikes this mod on this day as being over the line.

(Also worth noting that sometimes someone is filling the mod queue with reports, and he'll eventually get banned for one of them. Unless you're absolutely sure that the person you're complaining about didn't get a ban around the same time for some other post, don't assume that whatever post you're linking to is an example of "Mods thoughts this was okay.")

"Waaah, you modded Johnny but you didn't mod Suzy, obviously you love Suzy more!"

Pretty clear violation of the rule cited by netstack two posts upthread. One week ban.

I also disagree with the ban, but I do understand the frustration.

We have a history on TheMotte of people who show up and intone in a solemn voice, "I'd like to play a game..." At which point they begin constructing an elaborate series of arguments and hypotheticals that are high on word count but light on content, the aims of which are never entirely clear. And when people point out that it seems like they're being evasive about their own genuine beliefs, and they're not being entirely forthcoming about their intentions, they respond with "oh don't mind me, I'm but a humble explorer of political thought-space, my only aim here is to educate..."

For obvious reasons, interacting with these people is very obnoxious, and their threads generate more heat than light. So tolerance for these characters is low. And Turok, while not one of the more extreme examples, does pattern match to this sort of archetype.

Here’s an idea: Just fucking take it. Argue whatever the hypothetical is. Or don’t. But don’t censor. You are among friends here, right-winger. You don’t need to use the mods to crush your political opposition. You have your numbers, your downvotes (Turok is consistently downvoted even for neutral comments, which btw already censors him). This burning hatred for any left-of center commenter is embarassing.

  • -13

Legit question, how does getting downvoted censor him? The sorting method on here is by newest, not by top rated.

new accounts and accounts with low net upvotes are autofiltered, and have to be manually fished out of the filter by the mods. I think Turok has gotten enough upvotes to get him out of the autofilter ghetto. Calling this "censorship" is a stretch; it delays discussion until the posts are approved, but we approve anything that isn't obviously spam or egregiously rule-breaking; it just takes a couple hours for a mod to get around to it.

Downvoting can get people stuck in a filter making his posts invisible until the mods manually approve them. OTOH it's also possible to permanently get out of it with enough upvotes (and there was a "charity drive" to do so, where I did my part by upvoting like 5 pages of his posts).

This burning hatred for any left-of center commenter is embarassing.

Unfortunate feedback loop gets generated that the most obnoxiously combative are most likely to stick around, until you get Turoks that everyone hates and provide no positive comments, and after that point anyone even vaguely associated gets tarred with the same brush.

Extremely difficult to undo at this stage.

Let’s say there was a flipped left-wing version of the motte, same policies and everything. Most commenters downvoting/arguing for the ban of seemingly “antagonistic, bad faith” left-wingers like Turok and Darwin would not survive there.

Why wouldn't they survive? Would they succumb to the temptation to be vitriolic and disingenuous too easily, too?

ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr comes to mind. While he gets a little hot under the collar sometimes, certainly I won't cast the first stone for someone getting frustrated, he's never been such a slimeball as Darwin or seethingly hateful as Turok. I think it's quite easy to avoid the particular issues those two represent; it's that the kinds of leftist-progressive types that aren't exceedingly combative don't enjoy playing defense all the time.

The Schism exists back on reddit, the policies are only slightly stricter than here, it's derived from the same Scott-reading social milieu, and it has all of ten regular commenters, in a good month. It has one regular troll now on a yearly cycle of suspensions. Whatever makes The Motte appealing to most of the people here doesn't seem to exist to the left of the motte.

Whatever makes The Motte appealing to most of the people here doesn't seem to exist to the left of the motte.

I think it's the arguing! When you have a site that is all "so we do all agree that purple is better than brown" on some topic, then there's not much left to discuss about purple and brown, so there's not much point in hanging around for the fiftieth post on how great purple is. I think TheSchism was a charitable project and even a good idea, but I also think it was mostly Trace's pet project and now that he seems to be busier elsewhere then there's not as much input and not as much drive to get people engaged and recruited.

I said that I disagreed with the ban (suspension, really, not even a ban).

I have repeatedly argued for "affirmative action" for left-of-center posters here. I think they should explicitly be given more leeway before mods dole out punishments, because their viewpoints are underrepresented.

Personally if I was a mod I'd take a pretty hands-off approach. Permabans essentially never, suspensions only rarely. And I would not have suspended Turok for anything he's posted so far.

I think 1) left wing posters should be given more leash but also 2) Turok’s seething 2005 leftist contempt has used it up.

Seething contempt is fine if it’s expressed politely, which Turok has done imo.

I think his problem is that he doesn't and won't come out and say explicitly what the hell it is that he really believes, his own 95 Theses if you will. This makes it very difficult to argue with him, since anything he may have posted that you want to dig into, he comes back with "that's not what I think so you're wrong".

I don't mind a bit of the ould sneering contempt, I can dish that out myself, but I do want to know what precisely the sneering is about.

Personally if I was a mod I'd take a pretty hands-off approach. Permabans essentially never, suspensions only rarely.

Amen to that. I wanted to express that I do not "understand the frustration". This isn't a therapy session, your feelings aren't valid.

  • -10

Well feelings are always important. They aren't always "valid", if "valid" means, they should be unconditionally affirmed, or that a person's interpretation of their own feelings is always correct. But they're certainly always important -- as symptoms, as signposts, as signifiers. There's no accurate model of any interpersonal interaction that excludes feelings.

I'm not saying what you're saying doesn't exist, but I haven't really noticed it that much on this site. Maybe my radar just isn't attuned to that sort of thing. Can you point me to some examples you think demonstrate that? The best example I could think of this is Curtis Yarvin whose prose is meandering and often difficult to parse, but he doesn't post publicly on this site that I know of.

I don't see how Turok would really pattern-match to that sort of problem in this specific post.

Mostly trolls whose names I've forgotten. That guy who keeps making alt accounts here to post WN articles and then delete them is kinda like that.

Apparently darwin was kinda like that, although I never interacted with darwin personally.

He's a nazi who pretends to be inoffensive braindead left and gets banned for ban evasion, he's nothing like Turok.

People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.

The guy who deletes his posts was weird but I don't really think he fits this mold either. His posts were mostly short -- I don't recall him really gesturing at anything particularly bad, but maybe I'm misremembering.

  • -16

Nah, Darwin drove me nuts because he explicitly stated that sometimes he just posted something that he didn't believe simply in order to start a row (and as Amadan pointed out, that often got people banned for responding). How do you have any kind of productive discussion if the other party is "ha ha, you honestly thought I was serious about that? man, what a maroon!"

People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.

It seems to me that people hated Darwin because he worked tirelessly to lower the quality of discussion in the forum. He did this through a pattern of behavior that was so unique that it made his alts recognizable to people who'd actually tried to argue with him in the past.

The discussion linked above has a number of examples and detailed analysis about his iconic method of argumentation and how or how not to approach it, but the TL;DR is that he routinely presented arguments that he would routinely present arguments through implication and indirection, and then refuse to respond to engagement since he was only presenting an argument, not his argument, thus granting himself license to ignore any counter-arguments or evidence that went against what appeared to be his claims. As a rule, he argued to win, treated the space as a battlefield to be won, refused to speak plainly and absolutely would not extend charity or good faith to those arguing with him. He was also one of the best rules-lawyers I have encountered, and was an absolute artist for riding the line. I learned much from him, and believe others should have as well.

Unfortunately, his personal style of absolute certainty and total inability to admit doubt or error interacted poorly with reality, and he fatally beclowned himself somewhere around the Floyd era.

People, usually Blues, occasionally bring him up as an example of the quality posters we've lost. I challenge those posters to present some examples of his quality posting. We have in fact lost a lot of high-quality Blues over the years. Darwin was not one of them.

People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.

All your complaints just lost 90% of their credibility with this one sentence.

Do you have an actual point here?

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I was there, and he was definitely banned for his political opinions. It's obvious because :

  • he was the most progressive commenter

  • he was a capable debater

  • he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.

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People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.

Hard disagree. Darwin had a particular style of bad faith in the way he argued his left-wing positions that made left-wing arguments appear dishonest and manipulative, and that's why I personally was glad he didn't come to this site and stopped interacting with GuessWho once GuessWho revealed that he was Darwin2500 from Reddit.

Darwin had a particular style of bad faith

appear dishonest and manipulative

Do you have a clear example of this? Because every time I saw people get into heated arguments with him and accused him of "bad faith" or being "manipulative", it was mostly just the two sides not understanding each others' positions. I didn't follow him super closely so maybe there are some clear counterexamples, but I have a somewhat strong bias towards the null hypothesis that people just didn't like him because they disagreed with him, so they claimed he was "bad faith". Every time someone has accused me of being bad faith on this site, it's been exactly that: a stronger, somewhat more intellectual way of saying "I disagree with you".

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We get stuff posted here of a similar level of snarling, but pointed at the left, and it regularly doesn't catch these types of bans.

If I ask you for examples, are you going to point desperate ones by different posters that happened to get away with it, or ones coming from the same posters in a consistent fashion?

The statement "happened to get away with it" seems like it's doing a lot of work here. My entire point is the right-leaning posters seem to "get away with it" quite regularly in ways that functionally give them a different set of rules.

And my argument is that they're not functionally the same. Any right-winger acting like him would be instabanned, he was actually given a lot of leeway.

You're trying to claim that all the instances of different people occasionally being assholes somehow add up, if they come from the same ideological background.

Any right-winger acting like him would be instabanned

Extremely not true. I've had many discussions with MAGA folks here that degenerate to them doing little more than making a series of personal attacks, I report it, and then nothing happens. Making personal attacks against other people here is far worse than vaguely shaking one's fist at broad political movements, which was what AlexanderTurok did here. Again, I ask as to what exactly was the banworthy part of his post? What specific sentences were the issue that if uttered by right-leaning people ought to similarly catch a warning or a ban in the moderators' eyes?

Extremely not true. I've had many discussions with MAGA folks here that degenerate to them doing little more than making a series of personal attacks, I report it, and then nothing happens. Making personal attacks against other people here is far worse than vaguely shaking one's fist at broad political movements,

I actually agree with you about personal attacks being worse, even as a singular instance, so I'm willing to agree the mods could've dropped the ball there. It doesn't make what I say untrue, though, let alone "extremely". You'd have to find an example of a specific person being able to do that over over for this argument to work.

Again, I ask as to what exactly was the banworthy part of his post? What specific sentences were the issue that if uttered by right-leaning people ought to similarly catch a warning or a ban in the moderators' eyes?

What are you talking about? Moderation never worked on a "specific sentences get you banned" basis, it was always about whether the post as whole, or even the posting history as a whole, is breaking the rules.

I have a laundry list of bad interactions with MAGA aligned people on this forum, but I can't really supply evidence of any specific poster being bad over and over again since I typically just block them if they're sufficiently bad even once. The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue, and not just one or two bad apples that slip through the cracks.

Moderation never worked on a "specific sentences get you banned" basis, it was always about whether the post as whole

This type of vibes-based moderation is just a glaring invitation for mods to be arbitrary. At the very least there should be a sentence or two that should be close-enough to breaking the rules that it can be cited as the issue, and then the rest of the post's tone can be used as context for whether to pull the trigger. Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.

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Eh, I understand why you had to do it. But man I wish we had more liberals/libertarians posting here. Mister Turok is pretty salty but still. A boy can dream.

I'm suddenly struggling to find a proper term to describe posters like Turok - I understand that, presumably, there's a plethora of posters on the Motte that would identify as left-leaning that don't act in the way Turok and others like him do, but I can't quite find a good way to describe them.

Anyways, the point I'm trying to make - in my experience, posters like him tend to flame out badly when they interact with forums that are neutral and/or lightly-conservative-leaning. It's far from a Motte-only problem.

I would have preferred to keep him to make the whole "Elite Human Capital" thing ridiculous by his presence, but at this point it's something of a dead horse.

I never quite got that. What is "Elite Human Capital" about?

In short terms (based on my experience), I'd say something like "Blue Tribers who like the movie Idiocracy for being 'so true,'" or "racist Progressives who've figured out they hate Red Tribe 'fellow whites' more than they do blacks or browns."

The first time I ever encountered the term, it was in a Substack essay by a "former white nationalist" who pretty much fit that second description — the moment he got out of his diverse, coastal, urban, Blue Tribe bubble into the >90% white "flyover country" and met his "fellow whites" of the Red Tribe, suddenly he wasn't a "white nationalist" anymore. The essay also went on about how "progressive" his politics were, how they were solidly in the tradition of past progressives like Galton and Sanger, and how eugenics are really the most progressive thing (I'd say he's not wrong about that), and that his "project" to "fix" our politics is about reclaiming "solidly Anglo" progressive eugenics from it's "unfair" association with Nazi Germany. (Meanwhile, I noted that his list of past pro-eugenics "Anglo" progressives that started with Galton included the rather non-Anglo Wernher von Braun.)

Basically, this is one of the places where I agreed with Hlynka, that there's a lot of these sorts who are supposedly on the "far-right." (My primary disagreement with him was always that he held being a "principled loser" as the essence of "the Right," and thus pronounced all atheists — and anyone else who disbelieves in "a future state of rewards and punishments" after death — as automatically and inherently Leftists, and thus The Enemy.)

It seems to be code for ‘the aesthetics of 2000’s democrats’.

Some people are better than others. Elite Human Capital is just the stock at the top of the hierarchy.

That seems to be the face-value meaning of the term, but I have a feeling that there's a meme on the Motte that goes by the "Elite Human Capital" name.

It gets thrown around by goblinoids like Richard Hanania to explain why they viscerally hate regular people and instead offer unlimited, unjustified consideration for people with proper credentials, in spite of their decades of total incompetence and failure. It's a sad effort by the untalented to ingratiate themselves into the popular kids table, even as the popular kids are having their lives fall apart.

Exampli gratia and exemplar.

The basic idea is that you need intelligent high-agency people to win / get anything done, and so movements should try to appeal to such people rather than alienate them.

I don't even think the basic idea is wrong per-se, but the people putting it forward tend to insist, in a childish Joffrey Baratheoneque way, that they are the Elite Human Capital that needs to be appealed to, and so you must do their bidding, They also seem unaware that even if they were accepted as such, it would come with it's share of duties and responsibilities to their followers. I'd also quibble about the appeal / alienate thing, because the EHCs are very anxious about their status, and can be arm-twisted to do your movement's bidding.

This is it right here. If you have to tell people that you're "elite human capital," you ain't elite human capital.

But man I wish we had more liberals/libertarians posting here.

Sure, but most of us aren't filtering that through 7000 levels of irony and then getting butthurt about it being perceived as pointlessly-hostile nonsense.

The problem is that [too much acknowledgement of] HBD is just as destructive to classical liberalism as it is to progressivism for reasons that should be obvious- once you start treating HBD as prescriptive rather than descriptive then there's no reason to be anything but a hardcore turbo-trad. If your political philosophy suggests society should maximize its "gain" from realizing HBD is true and immediately go full Apartheid, then you prevent those with [the characteristic that predicts poor performance] but perform well anyway from properly developing[1].
This is OK for traditionalist societies in which one Knows Their Place(tm)[2], but there's only one way to compromise such that differences are sanded down over time, and that's by giving them more freedom then their characteristics suggest in the chance that, when members of that group beat the average, we enable both a eugenic effect and more effective suggestion that the HBD-disadvantaged group better assimilates. (Whether those things have worked is an exercise for the reader- I assert that they have, that what is left at the bottom probably can't be fixed, and that it is unfortunate that they look that way but our ruthless market system will pay them what they're worth backstopped by our infinite greed above all other moral principles.)

Since the entire conceit of liberalism is that good performers who are worthy of unrestricted freedom shouldn't be held back by bad performers who are not[3] (and those negative consequences of excess freedom correctly fall on the virtueless, which is the fundamental problem trads and progs have with liberalism since charity for those people isn't mandated), we can understand it, but we can't really do anything about it other than offer our velvet glove before we give 'em the iron fist.

That does mean HBD predicts those most likely to get the iron fist are going to be [characteristic predicting poor performance], which means we can have the potential blind spot of confusing [characteristic predicting poor performance] with [poor performance], and the fact we know that means we're vulnerable to the bad-faith rent-seeking my outgroup defines itself by having the right to do because Muh Oppression or whatever.

[1] And now you know why otherwise high-potential modern teenagers and early twentysomethings are so fucked up- arresting development like this has serious group-level long-term consequences, but we pretend it's OK because "at least it's not HBD".

[2] Knowing One's Place is not unique to Traditionalists; after all, Progressives have the same stack vocabulary, they just put themselves on top of it axiomatically, where with the Traditionalists they at least have the notion (albeit as unenforceable as the liberal claim that charity will fix the problems) that those on top are to perform like they're at the top.

[3] And note that liberalism doesn't inherently conflict with HBD categories from being imposed; you can still have a liberal slave-owning society, or one with limited franchise for certain groups, and nearly every place with a tradition of liberalism has been this way at some point. This is another weakness liberals have to progressives, since progressives will argue using liberal aesthetic but will destroy all protections for high performers in the process if left unchecked.

Since the entire conceit of liberalism is that good performers who are worthy of unrestricted freedom shouldn't be held back by bad performers who are not[3] (and those negative consequences of excess freedom correctly fall on the virtueless, which is the fundamental problem trads and progs have with liberalism since charity for those people isn't mandated), we can understand it, but we can't really do anything about it other than offer our velvet glove before we give 'em the iron fist.

Yeah I must admit this is a pretty scathing indictment of the whole 'liberal' project. Alas.

Well, you can have that, or you have the traditionalist/progressive projects which are just unironic rewrites of Harrison Bergeron (the only difference between the two is the hair color and name of the antagonist).

(And that story itself is basically just a modernization of Cain's justification for killing Abel.)

Nah, there's a middle ground. "Trad with liberal characteristics" or whatever, where you acknowledge that some people are gonna do what they want and have it mostly work out for them, and encourage them to do it in isolated enclaves like SF, while still discouraging it in the general case.

What we instead got is this monstrous inversion where our successful people generally act conservative in their personal lives while encouraging self-destructive libertinism and emotional disregulation in the rest of the population. This helps those individuals, by hamstringing their competition, but it is virulently anti-social.

What we instead got is this monstrous inversion where our successful people generally act conservative in their personal lives while encouraging self-destructive libertinism and emotional disregulation in the rest of the population.

Indeed; and while invoking Cain and Abel may flatter my personal biases, there's another one right next to it that very certainly does not: you can perhaps view [those humans given to be] traditionalists as Adam, progressives as Eve, and liberals as the Snake (and the sexes in that story are that way for good reason).

The liberals lie to the progressives so they'd take accept something that was too advanced for them and [that the liberal knew] the only reason they [progressive] wanted it was to be turbo-selfish with it.
The progressives in turn lie to the traditionalists, saying the thing was perfectly fine and good for everyone, don't think about it, just enjoy it.

And now everything's fucked up because beings that weren't supposed to have to deal with knowing [thing] now just have to deal with the consequences of knowing you can do [thing].
That, combined with the separation from God that comes from not being perfect with it, is how the knowledge from the fruit kills you!

Actually, both the Garden of Eden and Cain vs. Abel contrapose when read this way, but then the difference between the snake and Abel was that Abel acted faithfully and the snake faithlessly (and the siren call of the liberal t'was ever thus: did God truly say?)

It's strange that I've never heard anyone explain this in this way. Or maybe not, considering it's quite embarrassing, and especially to those "closer" to the fault (though there is ultimately no degree of "closer" in sin, and the traditionalists are too busy abusing it to shit-talk the progressives anyway in the "hurr Eve ate it first that means I'm better" sense anyway).

And maybe it's wrong, maybe I'm reading too hard into these... but if you're trying to explain how human nature and sin works to a prehistoric people then I'd say it describes the major players/impulses/excuses of the classes of humankind very well.

Of course, it doesn't say what each should do in response; the fact people can be bucketed this way is [and quite importantly] not part of the curse, but "the people more ready to accept 'did God truly say?'-type questions when they're posed in faith will instead desire and be ruled over by that class of people who are not so willing, and they will not be willing because they're cursed with having to work for a living until they die" sure is!

(And that story itself is basically just a modernization of Cain's justification for killing Abel.)

To give the traditionalists their due, Cain WAS the bad guy in that story.

Liberalism (meaning, not socialism and not hard right) is the dominant position here, and pretty much everywhere else too. Libertarianism is also popular here.

You were probably looking for a term like “progressive” or “woke” instead of “liberal”.

Interesting. Maybe? Idk I don't know that liberalism is the default view around here. Perhaps 'liberalism if they agree that Christian values are the correct values for their individual flourishing.'

"Liberalism in the way it was meant 200 years ago" is pretty common here, and yes Christian values are part of that because they're significant rootstock of the project.

"Liberalism as used by David French to describe Ketanji Brown Jackson" is not, and is unrelated to the first definition, despite being more common in the common discourse.

Alas! Language evolves.

This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans.

While the tone of your post is a bit aggressive, I do strongly agree with this line of reasoning. I've always been skeptical of hard HBD because I grew up in a rural white town, where there was so much despair and economic struggling.

In my opinion culture is OBVIOUSLY the bigger factor than genes or IQ. And the rise and current downfall of most whites is actually the perfect example. White people used to rule the world with an iron fist, we roamed the seas and dominated everything we saw. Then our culture changed over time, and despite our very similar genetics to our ancestors of a few hundred years ago, we have... the problems we have now.

White people used to rule the world with an iron fist, we roamed the seas and dominated everything we saw. Then our culture changed over time, and despite our very similar genetics to our ancestors of a few hundred years ago, we have... the problems we have now.

Some white people roamed the seas and conquered, but most stayed home. Part of culture/context/circumstance isn't how talent is developed, it's also what talents are brought to the surface and become visible.

Consider a toy example: Puerto Rican baseball players

Until 1989, Puerto Rico was treated as a Latin American nation by Major League Baseball, teams signed players at 16 for cash (and typically they had under the table agreements with trainers before the players came of age). Young prospects in Latin American countries can start earning money at a young age, often getting support from trainers before turning 16 if they showed promise. This has lead to Caribbean countries producing disproportionate talent relative to their population, because kids are incentivized to focus on baseball from a young age.

By contrast, in the United States, players can't be signed for cash, they can only be drafted after graduating high school (or attending college) at 18. Players in the draft (historically) got less money than international players, and they got it at a later age.

After the change, Puerto Rico produced fewer MLB players, and according to some reports a lot of athletic poor kids switched to soccer, where they could be signed at a younger age.

Let's take this as a toy model. Assume that 100%, or near enough, kids will pursue the dominant sport. Soccer and Baseball are different enough that there's probably almost no crossover between athletes who could do either at a professional level, genetically they're going to be two distinct groups. Assume for our toy model that 2% of Puerto Rican kids have the freakish foot-dexterity and cardio to play Soccer professionally; and a separate 5% of Puerto Rican kids have the tremendous eyesight and hand-eye coordination to play Major League Baseball.

Under one MLB regime, Puerto Rico will produce MLB stars. Under a different regime, it will produce soccer stars. The 2% that are genetically built for soccer will be merely good athletes if they pursue baseball, and the 5% that are genetically suited for baseball will be merely good athletes if they pursue soccer. Puerto Rico's overall athleticism hasn't changed, the genetics haven't changed, but what aspects are highlighted have changed.

HBD, by which we probably mean IQ is what like 30-60% genetic and average IQ scores for whole racial groups vary, is only really worth discussing because so much of academia and society goes berserk if you bring it up. It's a truth that upsets the blank slatists so much that they pervert scientific discourse to bury it.

But it's not actually all that useful a model for the world? Society doesn't change that much if it informs your view: AA doesn't structurally fix anything, maybe try not to force kids to do school programs they can't possibly succeed in, maybe "learn to code!" is cruel. Ok cool. Now that that's out of the way we still have crushing social problems to deal with.

But it's not actually all that useful a model for the world? Society doesn't change that much if it informs your view: AA doesn't structurally fix anything, maybe try not to force kids to do school programs they can't possibly succeed in, maybe "learn to code!" is cruel. Ok cool. Now that that's out of the way we still have crushing social problems to deal with.

These seem like absolutely huge changes to our understanding of how to manipulate society in order to improve it, though. AA and similar programs are juggernauts in modern Western society, and so our understanding of how/if they work have huge impacts in our understanding of the world.

I replied already but wanted to address a different point more fully. I don't think public education changes that much if we embrace HBD. E.g. even if we can't turn inner city black youth with 75 IQ into doctors, it still probably is worth sending them to public school to try to get them up to 90. What's the alternative?

Presuming that all that stuff about IQ in HBD is true, then we can make those schools more efficient for turning 75 IQ people into 90 IQ people and measure our success based on how well these schools accomplish this. Instead of being upset that we're not consistently turning 75 IQ people into people capable of working 120 IQ jobs and trying to fix it by pouring more money into such a futile project.

Well, I think that's the chief complaint about public school already in these parts? We spend a fortune to try to bring up the low end and mostly leave the above average kids to suffer with boredom and turn into misanthropes.

How do we make them more efficient? Giving up on telling the dumb kids they can be doctors is probably a moral good but I'm not sure it opens up efficiency gains? What do you have in mind?

Giving up on telling the dumb kids they can be doctors is probably a moral good but I'm not sure it opens up efficiency gains?

If we're spending a fortune, futilely, to bring up the low end and we stop doing that with no change in results, that's an efficiency gain.

I'm sure many people with greater expertise in pedagogy than me could come up with better ideas, if they're looking at the students based on truth rather than on wishful thinking. One idea that comes to mind is having different tracks based on student competency and making sure that school performance isn't measured by overall performance but rather based on how students on each track meet their goals. And perhaps focus on career training for low IQ jobs for the lower tracks instead of academics, at least beyond the 3 Rs.

My view from the inside of orgs is even if you fall all over yourselves to do AA (like Google did) it barely increases diversity.

I mean, if genes/IQ is real, it's probably small but compounding, a factor on a thousand stacked decisions, like a random walk biased upward or downward, second or even third order. In that case, most causes of bad things happening in their life would seem to be largely unrelated to IQ, since every step has a better causative explanation than IQ, but IQ would still be the determinant of where the chain ended up. (Admittedly, that's very hard to falsify.)

My problem with HBD as it typically discussed in rationalist spaces and especially the Motte is that it is itself a massive Motte and Bailey.

The Motte is that broad differences between racial groups are real/exist.

The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.

People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.

You can spongebob meme at me about "dEmoCrAtSaReThErEaLRaCiStS uwu" and call me cringe, but if the truth is "cringe" then cringe i shall be.

As i touched upon below i am increasingly convinced that the reason HBD and other sweeping generalizations about race are so popular amongst priestly caste (academics, politicians, journalists, et al) and on certain parts of Twitter, is that it allows them to absolve themselves of responsibility for the negative consequences of thier policies and behavior. You can't blame me, it is genetics (or some structural "ism") that are the true culprits!

I think claims about general tendencies in this forum should at least be furnished with some examples of the beliefs you claim to be widespread, if you can't provide quantitative data. Otherwise, well, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

(Even the most expansive bailey I recall seeing around here, implicitly or explicitly, on this topic amounts to "always assume group differences in outcomes are fully innate, and refuse to acknowledge the possibility of racism in legislation, jurisprudence or social engineering programming", which is still a far cry from anything that amounts to using racial background as a means of organising society (like Apartheid South Africa, Israel or like Progressive America?).)

How many examples with how many upvotes would i have to provide to convince you that it's not a fluke? How explict do they have to be? Will you accept plain language at its meaning, or should i expect you to play the old "defund the police doesn't literally mean defunding the police" card?

2 or 3 from different users, explicit enough about what you claim to make up the "bailey" (including in particular language that is similar to your "scientifically correct means of organizing a society" quote), perhaps at +25 or more to back up your claim of being especially supported by this forum, with the responses and derisive responses to those posts you claim to exist below those posts.

Also, there should be at least something linking those posters to the "HBD" label, either explicitly or implicitly by way of some post where they display beliefs or preoccupations that are characteristic of that community (e.g. subpopulations of Nigeria). You can't just grab some old white supremacist off the metaphorical street and claim that he's actually representative of HBDers, as this would be pretty circular as a means to establish that your slander (that HBDers usually just amount to [garden-variety racial supremacists]; nobody is disputing that garden-variety racial supremacists exist) is not baseless.

Hard mode: No upper-caste Indian guys shopping around for frameworks to justify Indian caste society and their position in it.

I mean, at least one, on this forum.

As one of the HBDers that you deride, my position is that HBD is a thing that we should take into account when looking at the world. It's not the only thing, but it is one of the main things. Pretending that all ethnic groups are identical blank slates is wrong and leads to bad outcomes.

But I've yet to see an HBDer in the wild who ignores everything else. He's a strawman for people like you who aren't willing to say 'all races and ethnic groups have identical IQ' but still force everyone to debate as if that were the case.

This is pretty much my take on 'HBD' or what I might term the 'neo-racialists'. It is no doubt true that there's genetic variation, on the population level, across the human race, and these variations to some extent correlate with racial categories. I can't really argue with that. However, the HBDers routinely outrun that observation and draw massive, sweeping conclusions about the desirability of using race as a proxy for a huge number of other issues, and therefore organising society, or even treating individuals, on the basis of race. The whole thing is just a motte and bailey.

The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.

People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.

We must be reading totally different threads. Every time the topic comes up it's people defending what you're calling the motte from blank slatists. Not to consensus build, as I'm sure we have people who cynically want to live in the bailey, but it really seems like the modal motte opinion on the topic is that HBD is obviously real is a large part of various outcome gaps and what should be done about it is to stop trying to overturn every inch of society for a racism of the gaps. It's an end to affirmative action, not establishing a racial caste system.

It's an end to affirmative action, not establishing a racial caste system.

Right. The more cynical HBDer will note that the racial caste system establishes itself as a result of HBD... even given heroic efforts to suppress it.

Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.

And then you had to go and fuck it up.

I feel like if I report this as a quality contribution, the mods will start ignoring my other positive reports.

But this is a quality contribution.

Hm, thank you for bringing this up.

One thing I remember of the HBD debate is the meta-debate over why it's being discussed at all. The anti-HBD side is not quiet about their belief that pro-HBDers are just racists seeking to deploy this information as an offensive weapon, so that they may construct a system of white supremacy. The pro-HBD side sometimes says that it's mainly brought up defensively, as a counterargument to assertions that the only cause for outcome disparities between racial groups has to be white racism, (and therefore the only solution to outcome disparities is to squeeze white people more until they give up whatever kind of oppression they're doing.)

So, if we're hearing about HBD less in a period of right-wing ascendancy, as compared with a period of left-wing ascendancy (e.g. when Black Lives Matter defined the discourse,) that strongly suggests the defensive explanation is true.

And I'm relieved, because I don't want to live in a society of enforced racial hierarchies, whether they're built on IQ or on blood guilt or on anything else.

So, if we're hearing about HBD less in a period of right-wing ascendancy, as compared with a period of left-wing ascendancy (e.g. when Black Lives Matter defined the discourse,) that strongly suggests the defensive explanation is true.

Does it? The anti-HBD side as you define it could just as well say that the pro-HBDers have gone quiet because their guy is already god-emperor, so they no longer need intellectual grounding to "construct systems of white supremacy" instead of getting on with oppressing non-whites directly.

(Of course, I don't believe either side of the meta-debate.)

Maybe they could, but irrelevance is not what I'm hearing them say.

Though I'm sure it can be found written in the Library of Babel that is Twitter.

Auron's just talking past him. He says "the institutions must be dismantled and replaced from the ground up with organizations that reject wokeness and the root ideology of universal material equality" and doesn't address the issue that you can't do that without human capital.

Is he? Cofnas implies that facts will persuade EHC to flip sides, and Auron is saying facts and arguments have failed to do that. Is there an objective debate moderator who can determine if Cofnas is right because evidence wasn't presented; or if Auron is right because the evidence was presented, and ignored?

You're right that Auron does not give an alternative plan to co-opt EHC, but do you have one?

You're right that Auron does not give an alternative plan to co-opt EHC, but do you have one?

No more Trump, RFK, Hulk Hogan, or prayer breakfasts.

You're objecting to a billionaire Wharton grad, a graduate of the London School of Economics who happens to be a scion of a family that has been described in terms similar to royalty, and an entertainer with a long and illustrious career.

I don't think you'd know Elite Human Capital if it leg-dropped you.

The majority of Trump voters (let alone the 'independents' who have been deciding our recent elections by flip-flopping between Obama, Trump, and Biden) don't think about immigrants, nationalism, or even gays, in the same way they do.

How do the majority of Trump voters and flip-flopping independents think about such things? How do right-wingers like Auron think about them?

As for gays, they've adopted a strict "no compromise" policy that I don't think is popular IRL

It's getting more popular amongst Republicans but I think that's wholly because the gays have either abandoned their movement or refused to Sistah Soulja the trans side.

If they totally surrendered today and treated trans like NAMBLA...maybe Republicans would give up and rebound. But that's impossible (the best they can manage is just silence) so who knows when the backlash will bottom out?

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I remember the GOP before Trump. Still disadvantaged in academia and the like.

Trump is demonstrably capable of gaining power though, and you’re not, so assuming your Nietszchean WTP movement is, as seems tautological, more directionally aligned with him than with current bio-Leninist leftists, how are you going to build on his provable successes?

Notice how you didn't dispute my point that Trump, RFK, Hulk Hogan, and prayer breakfasts alienate EHC. You know it does. You're correct that Trump's a good (as in, good at winning elections) politician. If your priority is winning elections by appealing to the unwashed masses, congrats, it worked. Don't turn around and complain that EHC don't want to vote for your party when you did nothing to appeal to them.

My priority is winning, because that’s how you execute power. If EHC needs to be appealed to in order to understand that having power is better than not having power, I question how elite they actually are.

Again, what is EHC actually going to do? If they are so elite, why are they incapable of directing the herd of unwashed sheep?

Traditionally, a shepherd demonstrates his superiority over the sheep by making sure the sheep do what he says. If he’s not capable of leading them, he’s not much of a shepherd.

So, again, assuming your Nietszchean WTP movement is more aligned, even if only a tiny bit, with MAGA than with bio-Leninism, how do you propose to build on that opportunity? How will you lead the sheep?

You do have a point, I wrote a character in one of my stories who makes these arguments:

“Nobody has addressed my point that there’s no path to political power with this stuff. Republicans, moderates, and Democrats do not want to elect anti-Trump Nietzschean centrists! I have some real, non-condescending advice for you guys: get involved in your local Republican parties. Run for state legislature, run for city council. Are you elite human capital? Act like it. Nietzschean centrists glorify Napoleon and Ceasar, Men of Action. What would Napoleon be doing were he alive today? He’d be running for office, telling the proles what they want to hear. You have no respect for the creekshitters? Rule over them, natural aristocrat you! A lot of these guys don’t want to deal in the democratic system; don’t want to take up the gun and fight it either. They just want to have their podcasts and laugh at the proles. I’m like, ‘that’s fine, but can you be a little less self-congratulatory about it?’”

https://alexanderturok.substack.com/p/march-2025-whynat-meeting

Nice strawman. But even the most hardcore HBD believers would accept that the worst whites are likely worse in some aspects than the best non-whites. That doesn't imply at all that bringing in foreigners, even pretty ok ones would be a net increase in the average quality of the humans in the country. So the motivation for closed borders is not at all inconsistent with HBD ideology. And trade protectionism, while largely supported by the same coalition that supports HBD, is not the same as keeping foreigners out.

Wanting to support the weakest and most vulnerable inside the country is also not really a component of HBD. That's just being a good person.

This post reminds me of this meme just replace christian with HBD beliver

there's a huge mass of white men without jobs

Yes

who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China.

Absolutely not. Job losses and wage depression are a harm in themselves. But few people are arguing that it's the cause of fent zombies. And the vast majority of people affected by illegals and free trade do not become fent zombies.

In fact the mainstream right wing opinion has little sympathy for fent zombies. They would be happy to have the zombies rounded up and disappeared, while also advocating for secure borders and trade protection.

The unemployment rate is only low because these people are so dispirited that they've given up looking for work.

Yes

We need to drastically remake our economy to help these unfortunates, who are incapable of helping themselves. This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans.

Can't even begin to respond to how hateful this message is.

89.2% of men aged 25-54 are in the labor force

And it's near the lowest ever

a figure that is likely higher for whites,

You have zero evidence of that.

The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain. Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?

Interesting that all the things rightists propose help (or affect, if you think they're bad) all Americans equally, but you're the one over here projecting your racism on others.

Nice strawman. But even the most hardcore HBD believers would accept that the worst whites are likely worse in some aspects than the best non-whites.

Ethnonationalists are (often) also HBD believers, and they say that the important aspect of a person is their race, full stop. You could point to higher intelligence, longer life, better health, or lower criminality among other ethnic groups, but that still wouldn't convince them that someone from another race is better in the ways that matter because that's not what they're judging people on.

But they aren't saying that race is the most important part of a person because of HBD, but in spite of it. All white supremacists believe in white supremacy but only a subset of them believe in HBD.

I've also seen arguments that a particular distribution of values for IQ, Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, etc (including many factors that psychologists don't measure) is the best for a nation, and the only way to get spread is to select based on race.

Even though the "good" numbers might be higher on other people, naive number-maxxing would lead to a failure mode of some kind. It's often unspecified, but the ones I can remember involve out-of-touch highly [good trait] people making norms that are legible and achievable to them, but disastrous to everyone else. Liberalization of sex and drugs are the main culprits.

Nice strawman. But even the most hardcore HBD believers would accept that the worst whites are likely worse in some aspects than the best non-whites.

I have seen it argued on multiple occasions right here on the Motte that racial background is the "most dispositive" factor in determining human behavior. That is to say that a person's race will tell you more about how they are likely to behave than whether they are male or female, young or old, married or single, rich or poor, urban or rural, republican or democrat, etc...

By extension wether a man is black or white must matter more than whether they are an aged Supreme Court Judge or a Twenty-something meth head. You may claim that the Motte is not representative of the HBD movement or that when users here say things like "most dispositive" or "predictive" they don't actually mean it literally, but it's not a strawman.

Certainly this can be argued for certain aspects of behavior. For example, educated professional blacks are more likely to commit violent crime than the most impoverished White trash in Appalachia. It all depends on exactly what you're trying to disposit. This can be extended to argue that such White trash is somehow "superior" to more economically advantaged individuals of other races, though I would not personally agree with this conclusion. Anyways this still only applies to groups and even the most hardcore HBD believers would also accept the existence of individual freak exceptions to the rule.

By extension wether a man is black or white must matter more than whether they are an aged Supreme Court Judge or a Twenty-something meth head.

Maybe. I saw some stats on the Trump 2016 election, and the survey showed that being Black was a better predictor of presidential vote than being a Republican.

The correlation is weak at best and even if it was strong, the same source in 2024 tells a different story.

In the meantime, being in a heterosexual marriage appears a more reliable predictor of voting preference than either racial or party affiliation.

Where are you finding that?

Can't even begin to respond to how hateful this message is.

If you read more carefully, you'd realize I was mocking the message and saying it was wrong.

  • -14

Don't you have bigger problems? It's not like you should feel any "political" loyalty to them...

This is a general anti-empathy argument. Too general. If this was a principled consistent stance applied fairly to all political groups, then it would be merely ruthlessly cutting support for low performers in order to focus on broader goals. We can instead want to support some lower performing people and also pursue other goals. It is some bearable amount of opportunity cost that political groups accept.

I'm not concerned about imaginary white extinction or getting coal miners back to work, etc. But, I can feel some empathy for the victims wage suppression schemes. People who can't outcompete a Bangladeshi child or a Guatemalan in willingness to live in poverty or accept harsh working conditions. Even if they were hypercompetent, they can't and shouldn't want to win this race to the bottom against literal 3rd worlders.

If some white racist also extends some empathy to such people and feels some affinity to them, I don't think it makes sense to criticize that as not sufficiently important. The health and prosperity of their chosen group seems obviously important. Of all the criticisms to level at white nationalists, I'll give them a pass for wishing poor white people in the Midwest were healthier and had a higher labor participation rate.

I'll admit that I don't follow politics super closely, so could have missed something, but I have literally never heard any right wing person defend the use of fentanyl. None have ever said that fentanyl is good, or that people should have fentanyl, or even done the George Floyd thing of portraying fentanyl-users as victims of someone other than themselves.

I might be missing some large coalition of right-wing fentanyl apologists, but I think it's more likely that you're tilting at strawmen here.

or even done the George Floyd thing of portraying fentanyl-users as victims of someone other than themselves

There's definitely right-wingers who have jumped on the "it's Pharma/The Sacklers/Purdue's fault" bandwagon, and some who blame China.

In this post, you condemn and criticize the concept of white solidarity. This is a sentiment that you share with almost everyone else in the Western "first" world today, except for a tiny minority of self-conscious white advocates.

Your primary motivation for writing the post was your negative sentiment towards white solidarity, rather than your positive support of an alternative political program. We can tell this by the way you framed your post: almost the entirety of it is dedicated to criticisms of the white identitarian right. If your goal was to give people positive, substantive reasons for supporting your own preferred political program, you would have instead titled your post "why I think the right should support pure meritocracy / free trade neoliberalism / race blind Nietzschean will to power / whatever terms you would use to describe your own ideology".

Why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable? It can't be a purely "formal" concern like, "I think the Online Right is wasting their time pursuing a futile and unhelpful set of policies; they could instead be devoting their time and resources to my cause instead". The Online Right is small and powerless; you can't be that eager to enlist their help. Whatever your preferred political program is would probably find itself right at home in the agenda of Ramaswamy, or Musk, or Thiel, or the Koch brothers, or maybe even Trump himself. You have far more powerful and influential backers you could be appealing to, instead of wasting your time trying to persuade the "Online Right".

So, again, let's start with the heart of the issue: why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable?

I can't speak for him, but I think that in general the particular aversion to white solidarity comes from the understanding that ingroup preference necessarily induces outgroup hostility; it is impossible to love your neighbor without (at least somewhat) hating the outsider. Considering that whites are by far the most dangerous race on earth, with a proven track record of BTFOing everyone else, it's completely reasonable for white solidarity to be seen as more of a threat than other races' ingroup preferences; if you lived next door to an 800-pound gorilla, you wouldn't want to give it any ideas about how hungry he is and how tasty you look.

t's completely reasonable for white solidarity to be seen as more of a threat than other races' ingroup preferences

They're also outnumber 10:1 on the global scale. It's not at all reasonable for it to be seen as more of a threat.

And seeing only one kind of racial solidarity as unacceptable is A) illiberal and B) corrosive to multicultural societies.

Since when did population ratios matter? They certainly didn't matter to the British Raj or to the conquistadors. Sure, the power gap between whites and everyone else is smaller than it was in 1870, or even 1492, but most of the other ~7.2 billion people on Earth simply can't constitute a real existential threat to whites, you don't even need HBD to justify it. Even wrt China, they're a unproven upstart that lacks the proven track record of Europeans in global dominance.

seeing only one kind of racial solidarity as unacceptable is A) illiberal and B) corrosive to multicultural societies.

I offer an explanation, not an excuse. As for multicultural societies, their myriad weaknesses have already been extensively detailed, what's one more?

why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable?

In common discourse, no one would say "white solidarity", they refer to this concept as "racism". I suppose most people would be uncomfortable with something they pattern match to open proud racism.

I suppose most people would be uncomfortable with something they pattern match to open proud racism.

That's the catch, people don't pattern match their own proud racism to "racism"

Or, alternatively, ‘racism’ is deployed as a pejorative to prevent white people from finding common ground in the same way that people from every other race are exhorted to do on a constant basis.

Very clearly people are not allergic merely to race-consciousness or even racial hatred on a platonic level, or they would object strongly to it when black people (sorry, Black people) do it. Such genuinely principled race-blind people exist, of course, but I do not see them in sufficient numbers to account for the taboo.

Yes, this is selectively applied only to white people. I can walk by a huge "La Raza" mural and most people don't seem to mind. An equivalent "WHITE RACE" mural would never be tolerated.

And you will encounter no politics at all during, say, Black History Month?

How do you differentiate 'people who talk about witchcraft are witches, so they're tabooed' vs. 'if you taboo any discussion of witchcraft, only maniacal Satanists will talk about it'? See e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/

unspecified "lots" of white people think white identity is silly too, and there isn't even a white identity month, nor explicit hiring/educational quotas for white people.

I don't think you have a consistent rubric for what racial politics actually looks like.

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Yes, discomfort with white solidarity often manifests as labeling it "racism," but it's not clear this can said to be a cause.

An example cause: Historically, white solidarity has lead to genocide, so people are uncomfortable with it.

The "leads to genocide" observation is hardly exclusive to white people, though. See also: Japan/China in WWII, Rwanda, any number of sectarian feuds in the third world. Realistically, it seems like it was largely the norm or at least not uncommon among almost any group with the power to do it until largely-European philosophy eventually decided it was a morally repugnant idea (to which I'd agree).

Sometimes it seems like "genocide" only applies if European-descended folks (er, Volks) are doing it, otherwise it's just "sparkling ethnic cleansing" or something.

We may take your "genocide" observation and ask: why discomfort with white solidarity manifests in calling its repugnant feuds "genocide."

I wonder if the focus on white solidarity truly is misguided. Indeed, as we have seen this year, accusations of genocide are not exclusive to white people. (Depending on if you think Jews are racial shapeshifters, I guess)

I still haven't a clue why specifically the discomfort some of the time. It probably is different for different people. For many, I imagine the colonialism and power imbalance really is a big deal. For someone like Toruk, obviously it isn't. Others still are surely just reciting tribal deepities.

Very perceptive of you. Yes, Toruk is mixed I think, so any racial solidarity movement would exclude him.

Probably the reason he is obsessed with white identitarians is not that they are currently powerful, but that they are up-and-coming. Also, its probably the only actual racial identitarian movement in US politics that anyone talks about. I'm not even sure you can say woke is properly a racial identitarian movement, since it makes concessions to a long list of non-racial coalition groups.

Also, its probably the only actual racial identitarian movement in US politics that anyone talks about

Black identitarian movements are a thing.

Yes, Toruk is mixed I think, so any racial solidarity movement would exclude him

I'm a mischling, which "soft WN" is full of.(BAP, Yarvin, etc.)

Probably the reason he is obsessed with white identitarians is not that they are currently powerful, but that they are up-and-coming

Yep.

I'm a mischling, which "soft WN" is full of.(BAP, Yarvin, etc.)

There is something endlessly entertaining about many of the thought leaders of the "soft WN"/dissident right/very online right having Jewish heritage (BAP, Yarvin, L0m3z, Peachy Keenan, and others I'm forgetting, I'm sure).

BAP, Yarvin, L0m3z, Peachy Keenan

One of these things is not like the others

One of these things doesn't belong

Can you tell which thing is not like the other

By the time we finish our song?

I'm a mischling, which "soft WN" is full of.

Ah! Well, that's certainly an important piece of information that was elided. You should have simply started there and been honest about your concerns and worries, instead of going for the "500 IQ pwn everyone with facts and logic" play. The dialogue is so much more insightful and constructive when we cut the bullshit and just talk about what's actually bothering us.

I'm not unsympathetic to you, because I'm not without my own anxieties about race. Although I've received 99.9% (non-Ashkenazi) European (and 0.1% SSA/MENA/etc) from multiple ancestry tests, my appearance is rather on the "swarthy" end by white standards, which lead to teachers and other kids at school asking me on multiple occasions if I was mixed with anything. It gave me doubts about what I actually was, or if other white people even saw me as white at all.

Combine that with the fact that I never knew my birth father, and I'll never be able to be truly certain about what I am and where I came from.

But in some sense none of that matters, because I believe that the way that white people are treated by modern wokeness is wrong, and I believe that they have the right to have their own political movement, on their own terms. Even if those terms were so strict that they excluded me. I'd still believe that regardless of whether I was black or Chinese or anything.

Now, my situation is different from someone who is knowingly and visibly mixed (especially someone whose "other half" is both non-white and non-Ashkenazi). But the point is, you're not the only one with anxieties, and honest political dialogue starts with facing those anxieties and putting them at the center of the conversation, because they're essentially the major determining factor of your political orientation.

The Online Right is small and powerless

Not true. Google Marko Elez.

So, again, let's start with the heart of the issue: why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable?

It doesn't. Nothing in the post was directed against white solidarity, which I have no problem with.

  • -13

Not the OP, but I'll bite too: I am uncomfortable with any powerful enough identity group whose membership is assigned rather than chosen trying to express solidarity in a way that excludes people not of the group. This tends to lead to very anti-meritocratic outcomes. "Whites" just seems to be the most powerful such group in the current day.

I would also be uncomfortable with the concept of solidarity for following identity groups in order:

  • Han Chinese,
  • Muslims (even though this is pushing it with the assigned rather than chosen bit),
  • Hindus,

though there's a significant drop-off in my level of worry each step down. This is also based on factual beliefs about the world that I could easily be convinced out of with the right evidence.

I would not be concerned with solidarity among Navajo. Sure this is bad in theory, but it's not really likely to have any significant material impacts to anyone so it's not worth wasting effort on. Maybe I would feel differently if I lived in northeastern Arizona however---I don't really know what the situation is like there.

distasteful comments

Speaking as a millennial who was raised to genuine colorblindness, complete with black and Jewish cousins... have you ever heard anyone else talk about anyone else?

I expect non-Hajnali 'whites' to basically end up as an underclass, so it is what it is I guess.

That would be a surprise to the 40 million or so Irish Americans.

If by "non-Hajnali" you mean "on the other side of the Hajnal line", you seem to be referring to this map where allegedly the blue line marks area which "did not conform to Western Europe's marriage pattern" i.e. late marriage and low fertility:

The Western European marriage pattern is a family and demographic pattern that is marked by comparatively late marriage (in the middle twenties), especially for women, with a generally small age difference between the spouses, a significant proportion (up to a third) of people who remain unmarried, and the establishment of a neolocal household after the couple has married.

I'm... not particularly convinced by that map because I think there is a degree of cherry-picking going on (why the line around Finland, for instance?) but even if mediaeval Ireland wasn't in tune with mediaeval Britain (citation very definitely needed, because if this theory is going to emphasise the role of the Church then Ireland was and remained Catholic longer than the Brits), but say for the sake of argument we accept that.

You forget the role of the Famine. That steamrollered over traditional Irish culture and pushed for late marriage, higher age at marriage, lots of unmarried people, etc. because now the emphasis was on "marry for money, money is survival" - women needed dowries, men needed jobs or land which would be worth something for the bride's family. If the money and land in the family went to the eldest son and eldest daughter to get them married, then the younger siblings were disadvantaged. Working to earn enough money or waiting for parents to die off and let you inherit the land mean waiting until being older to marry.

And emigration solved the problem of our 'excess' population.

It might be, which has no bearing on its reality.

Lost the source but I recall reading that in fact Irish immigrants were ruthlessly genetically culled for generations in the era before the welfare state. Apparently most of them have few or no surviving descendants. Those who do, have been selected for traits more in line with modern society.

My understanding is that the modern narrative of "See Irish were originally thought of as different but now we know better" is deeply unfounded.

ETA: Quick searching indicates that the majority of Irish immigrants to the US died without forming families. Mainly this seems to have to do with hard working conditions, poor access to nutrition, and disease in overcrowded slums, but if those aren't effective mechanisms of selection I don't know what is. The ones who escaped or overcame those filters reproduced and here we are today.

So yeah, take the top couple deciles of Irish immigrants and fast forward to the present and I'm not surprised that they're about average. Especially given the inevitable admixture over that time frame.

Albion’s Seed is instructive here. Lots of Borderers are likely over represented

And most descendents of Borderers have intermarried with descendents of non-Borderers. You simply can't trace most white Americans' ancestry in a clean unbroken line back to specific founding-era groups without lots of intermarriage and interconnection. This is why I find the discussion in some groups about "founding stock" to be inane, I have a large cluster of ancestors who were apparently here before portions of the 13 colonies were even ruled by Britain, and another large cluster of ancestors who came in the 1800s and early 1900s. Most whites are the same.

I fully understand the diversity of my ancestors, and I think picking just one of those and saying "this is me" is very silly. I treasure their stories and what they contribute to my heritage; I have a copy of the original Lutheran hymnal in German that my great-great grandmother owned. But I speak American English, watch American movies, am concerned about American politics and eat American cuisine, I celebrate the Fourth of July and when I stand, I lean. I'm an American, of European descent. Anything more specific is irrelevant.

And most descendents of Borderers have intermarried with descendents of non-Borderers.

Do you have evidence for this claim, or is it just a vague assumption? Class assortment is pretty strong in marriage and reproduction, and few move in to the rural areas where the borderers live

There’s also big differences outside of the Hajnal line in Europe itself. Slovenia is a prosperous country with well functioning infrastructure on track to surpass the UK in terms of GDP per capita while Serbia is a poor corrupt autocracy, even if both were part of Yugoslavia and are ethnically south Slavs.

I don’t know any circumstances where HBD is a better explanation than culture and history.

The American conflation of race with class is bizarre. Upper-middle class urban white Americans share few cultural values with unemployed drug-addicted Appalachians and grouping them together as a homogenous “white” block makes little sense.

Wasn’t there a link a while back to one of those Woke Rightists who moved to a majority white town and realised he had nothing in common with the people there, and ended up missing the diverse big city?

One of my favorite articles. A white nationalist realizes he is actually the true rootless cosmopolitan. He also seems to really distrust and maybe dislike white women. Which is going to make having white babies very hard.

I hope he found happiness with a good Mexican or Asian woman, since he doesn't much seem to like white ones.

He also seems to really distrust and maybe dislike white women. Which is going to make having white babies very hard. I hope he found happiness with a good Mexican or Asian woman, since he doesn't much seem to like white ones.

Reading that article and a few others of his, the story isn't that hard to put together. He's a manipulative and hyper-verbal BS artist (he's a guy with 2 email jobs and calls himself a pirate, c'mon), and his style works very well for seducing leftist women who have poor defenses to that approach. He moved to the midwest, and his approach was less successful. However, at one point he tried to run his game on a disagreeable, intelligent conservative woman (whom he describes as a "Dagny Taggart" type), and she saw through him and hurt him in a way that still smarts a decade later. He asserts it's because he showed weakness and wasn't "batman" 24/7, but far more likely is that she realized he was unable to live up to his BS claims and was disagreeable enough to hold his feet to the fire.

What's particularly odd to me about his essay is that his descriptions of what "normie conservative church girls" are like doesn't ring true to me. It's true that a lot of country women are into burly, hardworking country men. Obviously! But I'm pretty close to his description of an "extremely online neurotic weirdo intellectual", and I've always had an easier time dating "normie conservative church girls" than dating "bohemian art hoes." Who, to be honest, are often more unstable, which the author admits in a comment describes him; like attracts like. The ideal, of course, is "intellectual country girl," and let me tell you, "she is far more precious than jewels."

I'm guessing it was the outright white nationalism, disagreeableness, and evident heterodoxy that made it hard for him, not the fact that he's smart and creative.

It's also really funny when he says this:

People there would get very hostile when I tried to start conversations comparing their region with others where I’d lived, regardless of how polite I was about it.

Considering his ultimate reflections on the Midwest, I'm guessing this conversation was a lot more critical and judgmental than he believes they were, and his interlocutors picked up on it. I take as my evidence for this point the fact that he calls German-Americans "low T" and says that they like smooth brains and not thinking about things, and then has the gall to say, "believe it or not the point of this article isn’t to shit on Midwesterners."

This is a disagreeable man whose default mode is to critique to death everything he sees. Of course agreeable church girls didn't like him!

The American conflation of race with class is bizarre.

Yes. The 'white' people of appalachia are not the same race as the 'white' people of New England, c.f. Albion's Seed or for that matter the Hajnal Line. Or for blacks we could easily distinguish between, say, Bantu and Igbo.

And even after distinguishing race at a more granular level, yes, there are classes within races.

Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore.

It's literally being debated in the post before yours...

Yeah that was what reminded me of the subject.

  • -13

So why are you asking if people remember something that they're reminding you of?

His tone is annoying, but the basic point is valid: the Online Right, insofar as I casually track its movements on Twitter, emphasizes HBD less than it used to.

The point of HBD discourse is to show the progressives are being done when they are campaigning for whatever in vogue racial justice program they are currently pursuing. The left is, instead, currently caught up in a fervor for Hamas and Iran, which while low IQ nations compared to their foe Israel, the left isn't really pursuing their fight along that line. So its not really relevant to parrying the set of attacks currently being deployed. If anything it could be used for dunking on Dems, in the "haha dummies thought a bunch of 90 IQ cousin-f*ckers could win a war with 110 IQ Jews" but that is probably not what the smart people (and that is who ever engages in HBD discourse) are interested in doing.

but the basic point is valid: the Online Right, insofar as I casually track its movements on Twitter, emphasizes HBD less than it used to.

Liberals used to explicitly believe that their belief system is justified by science, and anything that contradicts it must be not only morally, but factually wrong. This was the background for the rise of the HBD conversation, trying to own those stupid racists by showing how scientifically illiterate they are. After they crashed into that particular wall, head first, several times, and noticed it ain't budging, they decided to avoid the conversation altogether, which is why it also lost a lot of it's utility for the right. It's not even limited to this particular topic, there's a broader trend that Dave Green calls "the death of discourse".

There's a kind of coarser, more vitriolic type of racism and anti-semitism emerging to take its place.

This isn't even specific to the right.

Almost nothing is specific to any one group, especially when we're dealing with groups as broad as "right" and "left", but I do think it's ugly and getting uglier on the right.

I'm saying it's bizarre to single the right out when there was a general raise of "antisemitic" sentiment, and a big part of the current vibe shift was Jewish people responding to the left's reaction to 10/7 .

And it's broader than racism. For instance, I'm closer to Trace's side than I am to Auron's in this exchange, and so I don't want our politics to go down the path Trace is arguing against.

I assure you Trace is no stranger to deploying shame against people he disapproves of. In fact, I don't think you can have a functioning society without shame.

If he (or you) wants to argue that everyone needs to act like trans aspect of trans people should be completely ignored in all contexts not related to sex, he can knock himself out, but I don't see any vitriol in rejecting the concept of transgenderism, and guarding against your movement being eternally trapped in the progressive frame.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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