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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28383 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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Recently @RandomRanger accused me of strawmanning the Right:

Turok was being banned for being overtly aggressive and obnoxiously creating imaginary narratives like "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."

That's not what the 'woke right' thinks and he surely knows it. He need only check the MAGA rhetoric from Trump about good factory jobs, or the rhetoric from the right about the need to mechanize dull fruitpicking jobs and raise productivity. Why, they say, should millions of people be brought into the country if AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs? Or the need to have American wealth kept in America rather than sent off in remittances. Or them hating H1Bs as cost-cutting that interferes with developing talent. Or them not seeing the country as purely an economic zone but having responsibility to native citizens. It's an insanely uncharitable and aggressive butchering of other people's ideology.

Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:

FOX: I think American citizens are willing to do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do.

LORI CHAVEZ-DeREMER: Americans are willing to do the job. What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.

DeRemer refers to "Americans," the online racialist Right is talks about whites, but in both cases the vision is the same, uplifting the ingroup means getting them the opportunity to do the jobs currently done by the guy standing in the Home Depot parking lot. Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party? Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor, which is why in the video DeRemer goes on to talk about how Americans will be given opportunity through being "skilled, upskilled, re-skilled" and how the Trump administration is increasing apprenticeships. Of course, few illegals do those high-skilled jobs, so upskilling Americans won't replace many illegals, but it's not like the Fox News host is going to point out the apparent contradiction.

Given that I've given an example from a cabinet-level Trump administration official, (not "nutpicked" from some rando on Twitter) I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim that I "obnoxiously created imaginary narratives" in the interests of truth and courtesy.

  • -37

Why do you think it makes sense to say that the views of some random politician are emblematic of the "online racialist Right"? During the Biden administration, could I quote some random official and say that their position is the position of online radical leftists?

People accuse you of unfairly representing other groups opinions... because you don't understand their positions and represent them unfairly. And when people point out that you have done this you throw a big hissyfit. Then, you go right back to doing the same thing.

Why do you think it makes sense to say that the views of some random politician are emblematic of the "online racialist Right"?

She's a member of the United States Cabinet!

Lotta people have gotten used to being out of power. Now that Trump is President they're forced to either defend the administration they supported and voted for or criticize their own side, and they don't want to do either.

Relevant mod comment. If you want to say "these are the views of the Trump administration", then say "these are the views of the Trump administration".

Also, what do you mean by the adjective "racialist"? WN defines it as:

  1. A believer or advocate of racialism, the ideology of racial nationalism.

  2. (UK, dated) A racist.

Is "online racialist Right" an endonym? Who are these people? Do they want a white ethnostate in the US? Are they HBD-believers who want to restrict immigration based on what they see as genetic group differences? Did you just want to call them straightforward racist, but knew that this would generate a backslash, so you picked a rare word which strongly implies racism without saying the r-word outright?

On the object level, I think I share most of your opinions about Trump's immigration policy, which I detest. But I do not think you are doing a good job of accurately representing the beliefs of the Right, which is a prerequisite to honestly criticizing them.

I don't think that the Right has a great answer to what will happen to the fruit prices once the migrants who are willing to pick them in shitty conditions for low wages because they can feed their family in their country of origin with these wages are all deported. I think that a significant fraction of the MAGA base imagine that Trump, being a stable genius deal-maker, will simply pull the US into a golden age of prosperity and nobody will worry about fruit prices. The more realistic Trump voters might concede that prices of fruits might skyrocket if the pickers are US citizens earning a competitive wage, but simply see this as a price worth paying to kick the illegal immigrants out. Your framing which includes White druggies kicking their habit getting of their asses and start to pick fruits seems to me to be a minority viewpoint on the Right, to put it charitably.

Is "online racialist Right" an endonym? Who are these people?

Turok has a public Twitter account. Many of the people he responds to and interacts with on Twitter would be part of the "online racialist Right". If you're familiar with the term "dissident right", it's basically the same group of people. The primary dividing line between members of this group is the degree to which Jews should be blamed for societies various ills. I don't think that's an unfair characterization and if requested, I can try to put in the effort to cite to these various people and their statements.

Turok has a public Twitter account. Many of the people he responds to and interacts with on Twitter would be part of the "online racialist Right"

Here I think is the rub. I've personally gotten more familiar with the twitter/x sphere since the musk takeover. There is a common dynamic that happens there, where someone responds exclusively to the people they most disagree with in order to argue, a natural enough behavior. This however creates a kind of reverse echo chamber where the algorithm feeds them an overwhelming amount of exactly that type of person. I personally have frequently found my feed overwhelmed with Chinese Maoists regularly with only the occasional response to their nonsense. I know that Chinese Maoists are actually pretty rare so I've found it pretty easy to not assume that this is actually the mainstream belief but if you are responding to extreme racialists I can see how one could convince themselves that this is a major opinion of the online right. But what is really is is a kind of shadow of the poster's opinion, everything they most disagree with, because the algo accurately assumes it's what drives engagement.

This dynamic, where I see Chinese Maoists, confrontational conservatives there see idiotic leftists and @AlexanderTurok sees moronic Trumpists causes each of us to have a distorted vision of our opposition. Turok makes the mistake of then coming to this forum of actual thoughtful people and assuming the conservatives here need to answer for the worst Trumpists the engineers of X can serve. The conservatives here don't recognize themselves in the criticisms he levels at them and drama ensues.

This is all very understandable, but also very silly and avoidable. In fact the rules of this forum can and should correct for it But it's much more satisfying to assuming all of our enemies are as dumb as the dumbest people the algo of X can serve us. It's a very satisfying kind of assumption. It's just too bad that anyone who falls for it is going to spend the rest of their days tilting at windmills.

Turok makes the mistake of then coming to this forum of actual thoughtful people and assuming the conservatives here need to answer for the worst Trumpists the engineers of X can serve. The conservatives here don't recognize themselves in the criticisms he levels at them and drama ensues.

I am not a newcomer to the SSC sphere, I've been posting on ACX and DSL for years, and I've won DSL's Diadochus award for my posts twice. (I'm also currently banned from both places.) I'm not attributing the stupidity of Twitter to this place, I'm just reading what people here write, like coffee_enjoyer:

Sewing bras is more conducive to wellbeing than stacking them on a shelf. Picking fruit is so Edenic that it’s the first recorded activity of humanity. In what world would “picking fruit” be pathetic? I think you are having trouble dissociating the image you have of these things now, with what they would look like if employers didn’t have a semi-slave class. There’s a farm near me where people — college-educated, white, smart — sign up to plant and reap for free. Because in return they get free room and board, and most importantly a social environment filled with other young white people. They work quite hard, then they drink in the evenings and dance and fuck and make music and so on. This is exactly what agricultural work was for nearly all of history. Not for the slaves, of course, but for the non-enslaved.

This, by the way, is what I mean by "poverty fetishism" and "third worldism."

I'm also currently banned from both places.

With respect, this means you should understand why you're being modded in this place. I want to, gently, repeat my request that you drop the sardonicism, snark, and drive-by insults because I think this place would be worse off without someone like you. Also, I am much closer to your side than the other side, so I'd hate you see you banned.

Don't get too caught up on coffee_enjoyer; he's a unique breed. He's like a BAPist – prone to philosophical musings – but with a relatively benign dose of anti-Semitism thrown in.

I am not a newcomer to the SSC sphere, I've been posting on ACX and DSL for years, and I've won DSL's Diadochus award for my posts twice.

I'm not accusing you of being an outsider, I'm responding to @shoeonfoot 's understanding that you're porting your disagreement with people on X, the everything app, over to this site. You can do that of course, it's a wellspring for many posts here, you posts would just be much better received if you appended "on twitter" somewhere in them so that people here can choose whether or not they want to defend those ideas without feeling like they're being imposed on them.

I'm not attributing the stupidity of Twitter to this place, I'm just reading what people here write, like coffee_enjoyer

I detect some differences between what you accused rightists here of believing and what coffee enjoyer is actually saying but if you had launched into your impassioned screen in response to this then the whole dynamic of the conversation would be different. That comment spawned some fair back and forth even among the right leaning contributors, I'd hazard that if this whole topic was less heated from the get-go you'd see even more pushback from other rightists who don't feel like you've forced them to defend this position by tying it to rightists in general.

This, by the way, is what I mean by "poverty fetishism" and "third worldism."

As an aside this is kind of confusing because "third worldism" has a different more common meaning related to anti-imperialism. It took a few times of you using and me scratching my head to realize you were using the term to mean something like sweatshop romanticism.

if you had launched into your impassioned screen in response to this

Would not be possible as that is a response to my impassioned screed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temporal_paradox

As an aside this is kind of confusing because "third worldism" has a different more common meaning related to anti-imperialism. It took a few times of you using and me scratching my head to realize you were using the term to mean something like sweatshop romanticism.

I'm repurposing it because the hero of the Online Right should be some unvaccinated Bengali peasant who drinks raw milk and does honest labor in a farm or factory rather than effeminizing fake email jobs and trusts religious authorities rather than scientists.

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The primary dividing line between members of this group is the degree to which Jews should be blamed for societies various ills.

Sounds unpleasant. Personally, I came to believe that some HBD claims are true by reading Scott Alexander on the Ashkenazi intelligence hypothesis. "HBD explains why there are many Jewish Nobel laureates without having to resort to conspiracies" is actually a major selling point for me. (Of course, I would also prefer if the left would give up to insist that any inequality of outcome was due to unfairness and in return people would shut up about HBD until we can CRISPR everyone.)

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