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I don't think there's exactly a word for it but I see this phenomenon everywhere on open internet forum forums and social media sites. It really seems like all it takes is a couple posters with views that someone finds intolerable being tolerated that gives the impression to some subset of people as totally captured. The Social justice lot on reddit genuinely convinced themselves that reddit was a right wing echo chamber held up intentionally by the admins because a handful of harshly moderated communities were, for a time, allowed to remain.
I don't think it's cynical, I think people with this perspective are reporting their experience truthfully. But I always come away from posts like this scratching my head. I have read/listened to greater than 80% of every comment that has been posted to a CW thread since the site spin off and before. It's just not the case that neonazis right wing extremists run rampant, it's just not that case that they outnumber liberals. It's not even clear to me that if we held a motte wide vote that Trump would win. The last couple times I've broached the topic here it felt like, although there was plenty of representation of the opposite side, my generally pro-israel position was at least as well received. The jew posters we do have receive strong pushback on their posts even if I, like many, aren't that interesting in relitigating the subjects as endlessly as they are.
If for your own good you can't maintain good mental health in a place that allows nazis to post if they do so under certain conditions then I hope you do what is right for you. But if this is related to a recent crash out drama then I think you're just misreading the room.
FWIW, the "nazi by association" rule has been strongly enforced by leftists and the leftist-dominated mainstream for a long time, has been weaponized, codified in rules and even law, has been a defining aspect of the German political landscape for generations (still being called the "Firewall" here). It's absolutely the water that most media swim in, classical as well as social, and the preferred weapon of SJWs and SJW-influenced useful idiots everywhere.
Anecdote: I used to discuss politics with my mother. Once, as she was mid-rant about the nazis ruining society, I told her that I had gotten to know an AfD voter and that they were an actual human being. Since then we never have spoken about politics again. Her way of eliding the issue that, by the rule of association and a failure to apply the rule correctly, I was now on the wrong side.
This isn't some new or poorly-observed phenomenon (just to be clear; I'm not implying that you see it that way), but a core doctrine of the left in the culture war.
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Famously, Scott's post on "witches" addresses this. Also, I think EY on "evaporative cooling."
Has a lot of use for modeling the group dynamics of just about anything, whether online spheres or say academia.
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It's taken me a few reads (and realizing that AlexanderTurok posted below) to figure out what's being said here, I think.
I think what he's saying is kind of another spin on "you moderate the libs who annoy you for fairly inconsequential things, but not the rightoids who annoy me for the same"
I don't think he's that mad about jew-posting (I've personally never seen it, but I skip all the conversations I find boring, which is a lot of them), more so that if he has to deal with Jew-posting, which makes him unhappy, he'd like to also enjoy posting that makes others unhappy too. But if they're getting banned for being annoying what is the point.
Right, I assumed it was the resent Turok ban that set this off, but it just also isn't the case that rightoid posting like Alex did wouldn't cop a ban. Like we see this from both directions, go to a place where a right winger is banned and you see basically symmetrical complains. There's this soccer dynamic where no matter the cause people from the offending team rush in to argue with the ref while the rest of the field ignores the interaction and every fan goes home assuming the refs were against them. Like are they seriously of the opinion that right wingers don't cop bans on this site?
I assume so? I used to think this, but have come around to agreeing this isn't true.
However, when many left-leaning people are saying this over and over again, what do you do? If you listen to them, I guess you end up banning more righties and making them mad.
If you don't, lefties will continue to drift away and you'll evaporatively cool the community into a right wing cesspit.
It's hard, it's very hard. At the bare minimum, I think we should triple the jannies salaries for all their hard work
We ban more rightists than leftists. Rightists are more numerous, and thus when someone flies off the handle or starts insulting people or posting about how much he hates his enemies, it's more likely to be a rightist.
This of course has resulted in rightists claiming that we don't ban leftists enough.
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Neo-Nazis: you're right, not many of them.
Trump: Trump is complicated because most Mottizens are not Trumpists, but a lot of Mottizens tend to downvote anti-Trump views because they associate it with SJ. Anti-SJ posts that also disparage Trump (particularly on a personal level) are eaten up with gusto; I have one at +17/-0.
"Right-wing extremists": it really, really depends on how you define it. The big stumbling block here is racism: obviously there are a vast number of possible views on "what genetic racial disparities in cognition/personality exist and what should we do about them", but according to SJ and much of the centre, literally any view on the topic other than "all numbers are zero" is automatically far-right extremism. And, well, "all numbers are zero" is quite an unpopular view here; it's outnumbered well over 2:1.
(Heck, they'd likely consider me far-right due to this, which is hilarious since I'm also a socialist.)
If you remove that one particular third rail... it still depends on definition (including whether your definition of "liberal" is the insane modern US one or the etymological one; there are a lot more Actual Liberals than there are SJers). There are more Actual Liberals here than there are ethnostate advocates; there are less SJers than there are people who think major reforms are needed to dismantle SJ; there are probably more SJers than people in favour of chucking bombs at SJers.
Out of pure curiosity, would you consider yourself an id-pol type socialist (in that you think most ideological warfare stuff diverts attention from the true more important class and economics issues, whether on purpose or not), more of a regular political person with a sufficient number of specifically socialist views, a Democratic Socialist type who is mostly a 'liberal' and/or 'capitalist' but likes bigger social safety nets, or a more communist-socialist type? If I'm even capturing the variety right. <Edit: oops you mentioned command-economy below. I have questions: does that imply anything about desirable state political structure? But maybe that would be better for a different post. Maybe stick your neck out and do a top level 'perspective' post sometime :)>
At least in terms of the Motte breakdown I dunno about the exact proportions but I will say that people in general have a wider range of sometimes grab-bag opinions than the classic models might predict. I don't think it necessarily follows that 'everyone is a hypocrite on something' but it's certainly not correct that most people have some kind of rigid political philosophy (even if the ones who do often have the most interesting posts!)
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I've been inactive for a hot minute, but the last time I was involved in a big HBD hullabaloo the most common position (hard to tell if it was actually a majority) was something like: "HBD is real and the societal solution to that is something like Classical Liberal Individualism." So nicely enough if you're already of a Classical Liberal bent then it's a solved problem either way.
(Obviously, with all due respect, fuck socialism tho. Historically, it's Western Socialists being out of step to think socialism and racism are somehow at odds. The Russians and the Chinese were/are far from race egalitarians.)
Obviously the ethnostate types don't need HBD to be real to justify their preferences. Real race scientists know how to distinguish the "good" whites from the "less good" ones, anyway. And, at a minimum, East Asians and Jews (boo hiss) are pretty swell by any objective measure of HBD I'm aware of.
Being an SJer and open-minded enough for debating core tenets is a rare combo.
Still pretty common.
Just so we're clear, when I say I'm a socialist I'm saying I support at least a large degree of command economy. I'm not saying I want a totalitarian one-party state.
If you're still saying "fuck that", okay, fine. I just want to be sure we're communicating effectively.
Oh we don't have to start an econ flame war here. Usually, when someone unironically uses the phrase "socialist" they do mean some kind of actual Marxist. And while I believe you that you do not support totalitarianism, the problem is that, empirically, a "large degree of command economy" instituted under Marxist ideology turns into a totalitarian nightmare.
If it's the kinder gentler kind of non-Marxist socialism it just leads to economic stagnation. Not nearly as bad.
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I agree with this take a lot. I think there's a real "if there's a table with 10 people and 1 of them is a Nazi, then it's a table with 10 Nazis" kind of phenomenon going on here. It probably doesn't exclusively go one way, but I seem to observe it always going one way, which I think reflects a way that the modern mainstream left seems to model ideas as akin to infectious diseases, which can spread from person to person merely through contact and which can contaminate entire areas merely by existing in one section of it.
Yes, but are they really all that wrong to model them — or at least some ideas — that way? I mean, isn't this a key part of why, traditionally, heresy was considered such a serious matter? Doesn't the "contagion" model somewhat follow from Dawkins's original "meme" concept; not to mention previous thinkers like Bernays and McLuhan on mass communications?
I mean, this is probably an area where I'd agree that "the Woke are more correct than the mainstream," and that your moderate centrist (classical liberal) sort are way too dismissive of the potential importance of memetic hygiene.
There's three unpalatable implications arising from that model. One is you get a purity spiral/circular firing squad. The second is the question of where did their ideas of purity come from. Was it objective, rational, independent inquiry, or was it just a different strain of meme?
A third implication is that, in the absence of a meta meme of shunning competing memes (memetic hygiene), their meme is too weak to overcome competing memes. If ideas are infectious, and there's one Nazi at a table with nine other people then why doesn't the Nazi get infected with the non-Nazi meme? By this logic they should be inviting Nazis to their table to convert them away from Nazi-ness. So why such a lack of confidence? Because of the repressed awareness that their own beliefs are merely memetic infections, aka psychological projection.
A lot of the current angst in the left is that a table with one communist and nine people remains a table with one communist and nine people, which drives them crazy.
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This is where you get to postmodernism — the view that there is no objectivity, it's just warring memes and primate social games all the way down (the wordcel version of "there is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it"), you fight for your tribe and its memes because it's your tribe. For many people, they do not have "principles" or even beliefs, they have a side. (Wasn't that the whole "arguments as soldiers" thing?)
I'd push back a little here, thinking about both the Sacred Congregation of the Index, and modern online debates, about the memetic competitiveness of ideas on equal versus unequal knowledge bases — a priest is equipped to defeat the "viral memes" of a heretic in the way the lay person is not. Because a "heretic" often knows more about the field of their heresy than the average lay person. To consider items from this forum, the average HBD proponent probably knows a lot more about human genetics than your average "blank slate normie." Or, to go to the "Nazis at a table" analogy, our own resident Holocaust revisionists know a lot more details about the history of the camps than someone who's maybe just watched Schindler's List once.
In fact, I see people on the left make this argument; that between equally well-educated academic experts in a field, the left-wing ideas inevitably win the debate against their rivals — hence the left's near-total dominance of academia — but the ignorant lay people, not so well-armed, end up being led astray down the "far-right radicalization pipeline" by smart-but-evil figures like Jordan Peterson.
Except that they do sometimes try to "convert them away from Nazi-ness"… in the matter of an inquisitor (or a fire-and-brimstone Puritan preacher): "Repent your heresy, or suffer the consequences!" And for Puritans in particular, expulsion from the community, shunning from "polite society" is a major part of "consequences." Remember, excommunication is "a medicinal penalty of the Church," intended to bring the offender to reform their behavior, repent, and return to full communion.
(And maybe add in a bit of the disgust/contamination mechanisms behind the concept of "untouchability" that appears in so many cultures — that some people are just so indelibly tainted that anything and anyone they contact will be irreversibly polluted by it, as to why certain people must never be associated with, and anyone who has so associated must be treated as one of them as well. EDIT: see also @Southkraut's comment here.)
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I think they're mostly wrong. There's some truth in that the knowledge of an idea can spread due to the idea being publicized. Obviously the knowledge of the idea is a prerequisite of the belief in the veracity of the idea, so if you squint you can see the truth of it, but the modeling of the belief in the veracity of the idea being helplessly thrust upon someone like a cold virus is far less useful than the one involving treating ideas like things that people can and do accept and reject. Not always based on reason and logic - not often based on reason and logic, even - but not helplessly.
I think the belief that ideas spread that way is a key part of why, traditionally, heresy was considered such a serious matter. There are many things that people have done traditionally based on the belief that something is true.
The sharing of an idea is usually a prerequisite for its spread though, unless it's a particularly obvious idea.
The spreading and individual evaluation of ideas by informed citizens is supposed to be an ideological immune system, suppressing it does indeed allow you to install a fragile ideology that wouldn't survive immune response. Perhaps it's like a transplant in which suppressing the immune system is good and necessary, but "just suppress your immune system because it keeps hurting me" is also the kind of thing a disease would say.
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They're not wrong, but the actions they endorse, promote and undertake based on this run contrary to popular concepts like the "marketplace of ideas", "free speech" or "each citizen is an educated adult fully qualified to choose on his own what to think".
Lots of people may profess to believe this when asked directly, but it doesn't really seem all that popular a concept in practice. Plus, as for "free speech," this is also the 'your speech is violence, our violence is speech' and 'free speech does not include "hate speech"' crowds. And social media seems to be eroding people's confidence in "the marketplace of ideas" as well. Again, the woke are more correct than the mainstream, and they're just ahead of the curve on abandoning these false and unworkable positions.
I just realized an absolutely fantastic essay/blogpost title would be “Shoplifters In The Marketplace Of Ideas.”
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