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In the last Culture War Thread, in a very interesting exchange about why white people in America (and the so-called West more broadly) tolerate being constantly denigrated from every corner of the intellectual elite, the always-insightful @FiveHourMarathon had an interesting comment that resonated with me. He finds the grievance-oriented, victim-mindset side of the white identitarian sphere viscerally off-putting and pathetic. Why, he asks, should I be proud to be white, if in fact being white means being weak and crying out for forbearance and mercy from the ascendant coalition of white-hating POCs whose power and vengeful intent increases daily? Why would one choose to identify as a powerless victim, and what appeal would that self-identification have for those well-adjusted, successful, thriving individuals whose allegiance the white race ought to covet most assiduously, especially if it is indeed true that whites’ prospects are at a historic low point? While the downvote totals indicate that his perspective was poorly-received by many of our pro-white posters (for understandable reasons upon which I will touch shortly), I found his comments extremely instructive and worth reflecting on - a splash of bracingly cold water which ought to invigorate those on my side who wake up every day and wonder how white people let ourselves get to this point.
The conversation dovetailed wonderfully with Jared Taylor’s excellent essay, adapted from a speech he gave at a recent American Renaissance conference, in which he delves deep into the historical antecedents of white people’s current malaise. In this essay, Taylor points out that the ethno-masochism which pervades Western elite consciousness is consistent with a more general philosophical framework that has characterized the European psyche for centuries. He illustrates that the individuals who drove many of the most influential social/political reform movements of the last 300 years - from the Jacobins and the abolitionists to the temperance movement - have all demonstrated a fairly consistent psychological phenotype: a sort of Protagonist Syndrome, obsessed with virtue (and particularly with displaying that virtue to other white people) and with uplifting the underdog, and driven by an atavistic hatred of fellow white people who don’t share that same temperament.
In a sense, the leftist psyche - and, as a former committed leftie, I think I understand this temperament pretty well, and am still an example of it in many ways - is an extension of the “Faustian spirit” that many right-wingers love to attribute to European Man. In this telling of history, the most important defining characteristic of the European soul is its driving need to conquer, to transform, to bend nature to one’s own ends. This boundless desire for conquest drove the great achievements of Western man - from conquering the globe, to unlocking the secrets of wielding nature’s forces to our own benefit, to curing disease, to landing on the moon - but I think it also drives the leftist desire to transform humanity itself. To improve humanity from its basic, crude, unworked Hobbesian “state of nature” and to unlock its true potential. Hermetic alchemy applied to the human spirit - never accepting limits, never taking “that’s just the way things are” as an answer, always believing that we can keep pushing the limits of what is possible. Combine this with an almost pathological altruism, the anguish one feels when contemplating the plight of the downtrodden, and it’s very easy to see why Faustian man is so driven to “correct” the obviously-unjust vicissitudes of random chance that have produced the current distribution of human fortunes.
I know that I personally still feel deeply this instinctive sympathy for the underdog. It’s so ingrained in our national psyche that it’s incredibly difficult to overcome it. It has characterized my experience as a sports fan, and it was a major formative element of my self-conception as a college progressive. Wresting myself out of that mental framework as I’ve drifted rightward has been, and in some ways still continues to be, a psychologically disorienting experience. On the one hand, the recognition that unequal distribution of talent and fortune is an unalterable fact of reality, baked into the human spirit, is a bedrock element of the right-wing worldview. Hierarchy is right and proper, and the strong and capable shall always prosper while the weak and mediocre will always vainly envy them. On the other hand, this offends Faustian man’s innate sense of limitless ability to transform the world. Much as Europeans looked at grim realities such as the ubiquity of deadly disease, or man’s inability to traverse the skies, and said, “I have the power to change that,” we have the unshakeable sense that the injustice of fate which has rendered some less fortunate than others is yet another so-called reality just waiting for us to apply our ingenuity and boundless power to correct. A mere engineering problem which our best minds are rapidly working to solve. And hey, if I’m the process of fixing this problem we also gain the opportunity to ostentatiously display our own virtue and gain relative status accordingly, all the better!
This instinctive desire to uplift the underdog is, ironically, only rational if one believes that one’s own interests are not threatened by that underdog’s success. If I can help the underdog get his piece of the pie while my piece stays the same size, that means that in reality I must have been stronger than both the underdog and the supposed overdog against whom he was striving - I was so far above the conflict that I could observe it as a spectator. The underdog becomes, then, a sort of prop or vessel through which I can achieve emotional satiation of my altruistic instinct, at little to no cost to myself.
Where, then, does this leave racially-conscious whites, who assess the state of the world around us and see genuinely foreboding trends which appear to pose a serious threat to our people? Who observe the rising chorus of hatred and envy echoing from the halls of power, who dismay at the ever-worsening fertility differentials, and who see our own elected representatives seem to revel in our decline? What is the optimal rhetorical strategy to appeal to successful white individuals in order to get them to see the disturbing portents and to realize that things are not looking good for us? That this isn’t, in fact, an idle game, but in fact deadly serious? Well, one very appealing strategy is to appeal to that characteristically-European sympathy for the underdog. It’s to say, “Look, guys, we are the weak and vulnerable party in need of special concern and uplift! I know that you’ve been trained by the media to view white people as the permanent bully in need of humbling and people of color as the noble and scrappy up-and-comer just looking for a fair shot - and yeah, at certain points in history that was even true! - but at this point in time the tables truly have turned. We lay ourselves at the mercy of the victors, and ask only for their mercy and indulgence. Quit picking on us!”
This is also, I think, the motivation behind much of the “JQ” discourse on the right; Jews can be portrayed as an all-powerful enemy, against which we defenseless whites are fighting an impossible uphill battle which we can only win through a herculean effort. “Feel bad for us! We, too, know what it is like to suffer systemic discrimination against our rapacious racial overlords! It’s not faaiiiiir!” However, for a lot of white people, feeling like a victim just doesn’t come naturally to them at all. They look at the history of European man and think, “You know, seems like we’re pretty fucking awesome. Whatever minor setbacks we’re suffering right now, it seems like we’ll get through it just fine. I like our chances.” And, historically speaking, that is a pretty damn astute assessment! The all-time scoreboard sure seems to back that up. There haven’t been a whole lot of limits or setbacks that we’ve faced in the past that we haven’t been able to overcome with some ingenuity and some elbow grease; why should something like collapsing fertility rates be any different? The only way we lose is if we beat ourselves, and we can choose to start winning again at any time once we put our mind to it.
This is, I think, a far healthier mindset than the doom-and-gloom, woe-is-me, why-won’t-the-Jews-stop-picking-on-me mindset that so alienates @FiveHourMarathon. Our problems are real, but they’re ones that we ourselves created, and they’re ones that we ourselves -and only ourselves - can fix. We haven’t even begun to conquer the stars yet - how are we going to let ourselves get bogged down by such comparatively quotidian setbacks? We only lose if we keep tying both hands behind our backs - all we have to do is untie them!
I don’t know, I’ve been sick with the flu all week and I might just be deliriously rambling. I’ve been ingesting a lot of blackpills as of late, so this line of thinking is a useful whitepill to counteract their toxic effects.
...There's a lot here, but I'm kinda done with the alt-right/WN arguments after the last couple threads, so I'll leave it at noting that this entire thread is the rhetorical equivalent of a giant, killer-asteroid-sized billboard painted with the words " @HlynkaCG 's thesis about the alt-right is indisputably correct."
I mean, I’m not really interested in picking a fight with Hlynka or with taking unprovoked potshots at his worldview, but it can simultaneously be true that 1. he has accurately identified that both the far-right and far-left have converged on a recognition that identity politics are valuable and that classical liberalism is a failed project, and 2. his proposed solution - “and that’s why everybody should be a Reaganite conservative who Doesn’t See Color™️ and worships at the altar of Martin Luther King, ‘content of their character’ yada yada yada” - is a total non sequitur and doesn’t even begin to address the actual reality we’re facing.
The thesis I was referencing is that WNs and alt-righters are, in fact, Blues applying a fundamentally Blue worldview. You are jointly your own closest brothers and worst enemies.
If I can say to you, "A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing", and mean it, live by it, raise my children and build my community by it, what does any of the above or below have to entice me? The standard response is that Christianity has failed... delivered, generally, by people who willingly chose to abandon the faith of their fathers to embrace an alien and alienating worldview, and refuse to let it go.
Your post honestly deserves a more detailed response than that, but this, to me, is the core of the issue: You're looking for a banner to rally behind, but you've rejected the most proven banner known to man because it's incompatible with fundamental elements of the Blue worldview, which you still hold. Meanwhile, the Reds that comprise most of the people you're trying to rally have no interest in the alternative banners you offer, because they recognize their fundamentally Blue nature.
The biggest flaw of Christianity, which sets it apart from many other religions- including the pagan traditions of the fathers of their father, is that Christianity requires a superstitious belief in the literal truth of claimed miracles. Is such a religion sustainable?
Paganism was about worshipping symbols and myths of the people, with collective public and familial rituals, to direct society in a positive direction. Other non-theistic religions like Buddhism also do not require the allegiance of faith in the truth of claimed miracles. Whereas there is no shortage of superstition in Judaism, especially among religious Jews, the Religion is ultimately about The Chosen People and so it coheres even non-religious Jews who internalize that sense in a non-theistic manner.
Christianity on the other hand... it's ultimately about belief in the truth of claimed miracles that emerged from the body of Jewish superstition. It's in fact historically unusual in this regard. If those claims are false then the religion is a farce, whereas the Jews exist as a coherent people even if you don't believe in a literal Yahweh. Yahweh as nothing more than a tribal mascot of the Jews is infinitely more real than Christianity if you take away the truth of the miracles. If you don't believe in the literal truth of those miracles, even if you were to support the religion in every other way, you are a heretic and in the outgroup.
You think Christianity is based? That it promotes good morals and is necessary to save Western Civilization? Too bad, you can't be a Christian if you don't believe in the literal truth of it. Or you can just pretend, and sit in the pews with a Religious experience that is totally discordant with everyone else sitting around you.
I've seen fairly large-sample Telegram polls in the DR and the polls were split exactly 50/50 on the Christian Question, making it highly divisive in that space. But the divisiveness is good, because it's a hard problem that has to be solved to move forward.
@Job mentioned he's seen people turn towards religious extremism. I've also seen the same, high-quality people (some previously atheist) who turn inwards towards their relationship with God and closely studying Christian doctrine. They avoid the alienation but what is that going to accomplish?
This isn't how anyone but weirdos like us think about things though. The majority of good christians are just followers. For them, believing in the "literal truth" of it is not challenging, but it also isn't a profound intellectual thing. Most people don't analyze the truth claims of their religion like that. They just believe and repeat and thats it. No bigger implications.
In my experience, you can participate without believing in the miracles, and not have a Religious experience that is totally discordant with everyone else sitting around you. The collective effervescence is there for you whether you intellectually accept the physical reality of miracles or not. Why can't you accept it symbolically like the pagans you refer to?
There are clear "game theory" advantages for social groups espousing wild shit. It represents a signal with a cost. A core selective challenge for social groups is to sort people who are actual team players from parasites. There is a minor cost associated with saying something crazy like "Jesus rose from the dead". It harms your credibility with every other group that doesn't claim that crazy thing. That cost acts as a clarifying pressure for people to either be all in on being truly members of christianity (who will cooperate with christians) as opposed to fakers who want to play both sides.
I'm not at all convinced by this. Any social group with good mechanics to maintain cohesion over multiple generations is going to have systems to make signaling group identity somewhat costly. I think many groups require their members to claim that actively believe weird shit, that's not just christianity. There are plenty of miracles professed by other religions. There are other methods to make signaling group membership costly, like wearing stupid looking clothes, or ritual scarification, etc. But publicly espousing weird nonsense is a really common trait. And it looks adaptive to me.
I do feel you on it being uncomfortable because I am also a weirdo that cares about things like that. Thats part of what is so grating about modern american progressivism - that it requests me to say so much weird stuff, so I don't. But if I thought it was "based" and would lead to healthy outcomes for me and mine - I might not be as bothered.
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It does not work this way.
"If YHWH is just ancient myth, if the bible is just book of ancient tales, why shouldn't I marry this nice Gentile in romantic interfaith Jewish-Catholic-Buddhist-Wiccan ceremony?
"Ancient tradition? You mean thousands of years of persecution, pogroms and genocide? Thanks, but no thanks."
Actual Jewish leaders do not share your complacency about great future for Jews in absence of religious faith.
Secular Jews seem no less inclined towards worshipping their own suffering and persecution. Their identity as the eternally, innocent persecuted is a pull factor rather than a push factor for secular Jews.
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Which miracles do you question?
Resurrection of Jesus for start.
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I'm not a white nationalist, but I would dispute the red/blue framing for understanding very online dissident right wing thought (which itself isn't really white nationalist or alt-right anymore than progressives or wokes are all antifa socialists).
To my perspective it is the blue worldview that is christian, and the non urban, lesser educated, bluecollar workers are decidedly not religious and not Christian. Furthermore they have been non Christian for all intents and purposes since the industrial revolution. It is only in what I read or hear about one country (the USA) that the reds are christian.
Being a christian makes you just one subset of the blue tribe. Only atheists can be in opposition to a fundamentally christian derived worldview (blue progressivism) imho.
To someone from the UK who knows their ancestry is entirely working class/peasant for 500 years, and great grandparents spoke of their own grandparents speaking of their grandparents thinking god and church was all horseshit.... it really is hard to understand this american religion of your forefathers view.
It never was our religion, it was imposed. Top down, by the sword at times, and then by the zealot middle class as Britian underwent the pre industrial revolution demogrpahic and cultural spasms of the 1500-1750 period as far as I am aware.
The glib overly simplified history would then have the christian nutcases mostly leaving for the new world.
In this model dissident right wing anti left-progressive, anti woke, anti blue thought can be fundamentally anti christian at the same time, while simultaneously being non conservative (as that would require being blue-left-progressive-christian).
Christian conservatives and the woke are the same when viewed from far enough away.
Well, both movements are composed of humans, and as individuals we both shape our lives around metaphysical claims centering on questions of good and evil, wrongdoing and justice. Much of this debate hinges on how the boundaries should be drawn.
The entire red/blue analysis is based on analysis of American culture, and obviously isn't going to transfer well to foreign cultures. I'm skeptical of your claim that Christianity had no penetration into rural life in England, given everything I've read about British history in particular and European history generally; the explicit fights between various factions of the faith would seem to be fairly solid supporting evidence.
I've no disagreement that there's a dissident-right faction that's specifically anti-Christian. I also maintain that Christianity has been fighting Progressivism more or less since the invention of Progressivism, for reasons that have not significantly changed over time. But then, various factions of progressivism have likewise fought each other, so fights clearly aren't a workable way to determine how the boundaries should be drawn. Still, if you think Progressivism and Christianity are ultimately similar, shouldn't that similarity cash out in some sort of similarity in observable outcomes?
"Well, both movements are composed of humans" - on the internet no-one can tell if you are a dog.
With regards to christian pentration into rural areas I refer to the class distinction being one that Christian belief is a sign of wealth, working people less so afaik. I am arguing that it is top down and.most peasants or working class individuals did not, and do not actually have religious belief of any kind. Which seems inverted im the cultural analysis of the USA.
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There was a time in the not-so-distant past that the country was effectively 100% Christian and weekly church attendance was the norm. Where did that lead us? Obviously God is not such a bulwark after all and doesn’t automatically eternally guarantee based tradwives until the end of time.
You have to then answer the question: Why will it turn out differently this time?
To many good things. Where did the abandonment of such practices lead us? Who started that abandonment rolling: the most committed Christians or the least?
"My wife kicked me out, that bitch."
"Found out you were fuckin' strippers, huh?"
"Yeah, but I bought her a nice diamond bracelet to make up for it. Crazy skank threw it at me, and slammed the door in my face. Crazy, huh?"
...Which is to say, only the very foolish treat meaningful, intimate relationships as transactional. To dumb it down to the level of chanspeak, Trad wives are best pursued via Trad lives. God is a bulwark in many ways, but the fact that I am committed to him in a durable way, and so are those I surround myself with, is certainly not the least of them. You are looking at the people who chose to abandon Christianity, and then suffered serious consequences, as evidence that Christianity does not help. You might as well argue that, having been shot after leaving your body armor at home, the armor is what failed you.
Or to put it even more simply, mankind cannot build things that other men can't tear down, if they choose. Understanding this, we still have a responsibility to build good things and tear down bad ones. The pleasantness of our lives greatly depends on the degree to which we take this responsibility seriously and execute it well.
Because the Enlightenment is dying, and the historical and social conditions it relied on to sustain and grow its power no longer obtain. I think that if you understand how and why the Enlightenment operates, you'll likewise understand why it's breaking down, and why there is little hope that breakdown can be reversed.
In short, it's a movement that claims very smart people can solve all our problems, when in fact they cannot actually do that. People bought in when science and tech were hitting a growth spurt, which the Enlightenment itself did not actually generate, but which it very effectively took credit for. That credit was then spent advocating an endless series of insane policies that wreaked havoc on societies world-wide. The Enlightenment is not, centrally, Newton and Einstein, but Rousseau, Marx, Freud, Dewey and so on.
Now, science and tech are stagnating or collapsing, with few hopes for a breakthrough on the scale of the industrial revolution*, and the Enlightenment's modern standard-bearers find themselves suffering policy starvation. The runaway blaze of the Culture War post-2014 is a symptom of that policy starvation and it will continue to get worse until the existing system breaks down. Whatever comes out of that, long-term, won't be the Enlightenment or Progressivism in its currently-popular forms.
*The best counter-argument being, obviously, AI. It's one of the reasons it's such an interesting time to be alive, though I doubt most Blues would have expected Christianity to be one of the last ideologies standing at the cusp of the hypothesized Singularity.
What the heck does "policy starvation" mean? I've seen it a few times here and I can only sort-of guess at what it means.
Also, from my point of view, I suspect that any breakdown of Enlightenment power will only lead to a return to massive, bloody war, and less so any re-discovery of God. The conditions under which the Enlightenment was born were, if I'm not mistaken, near-constant sectarian conflict.
An explanation can be found here.
The Enlightenment seems to have led to some pretty big wars of its own, likewise based on fairly close analogues of sectarian conflict, until nukes and the Pax Americana put the lid on. ...And by "put the lid on", let's be clear that we're talking about Enlightenment Ideology only motivating mass slaughter in half the world rather than the whole of it. It does seem pretty likely that significant political unravelling will result in a lot of dead people. Look around you: do you honestly believe such unravelling can be postponed indefinitely?
The point is that, for all the bodycounts post-Martin Luther, things could get so, so much worse.
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But it can tell us it had, or would have if not for those Red Tribe wreckers, and the vast majority will believe it. (COVID being the textbook example)
And thus what comes out long-term is not a religious revival, nor a rollback to 18th century Enlightenment, nor a return to feudal or Roman systems. Instead, it's either Orwell's boot stomping on a human face forever, or a true collapse of civilization with the megadeaths that entails.
I disagree. I see little evidence that attempted dystopias are any more stable long-term than attempted utopias. Social science doesn't actually work that well, and so sooner or later, human nature regresses to the mean. Collapse of civilization is certainly a thing that can and has happened, and then new structures rise from the ashes. This is certainly inconvenient for us individually, but life is about significantly more than individual convenience, or even individual or group survival. I'm comfortable betting on my faith long-term, regardless of the circumstances.
My wife and I actually had a conversation about this a year or two after we got married. Looking at the increasing craziness of the world, the question arose of whether it was worth having children, given what a mess the world was in. My answer was that it was obviously worth it; the world is always a mess, and children are good regardless. Everyone experiences hardship and suffering in this life, and they also experience delight, joy, love, and many other good things besides. The idea that comfort or pleasure determines the value of life is a pernicious falsehood.
If the boot stomping on a human face isn't stable, we get gored by the other horn of the dilemma -- collapse of civilization and megadeaths. Yes, new structures arise from the ashes, and they probably will even if we get a collapse accompanied by a major nuclear exchange. That perhaps humanity will eventually rebuild a non-dystopic system is not much of a consolation. And while it is likely the structures arising from the collapse of civilization will include religion, it is quite possible Christianity will not survive in any recognizable form.
The new society will indeed be "red tribe" for a time; the unconstrained vision cannot survive easily visible and always-struggled-against constraints. Again, not much consolation.
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It would be fair to conclude the armor is no good if it has some flaw that causes us to repeatedly leave it at home. Perhaps it is too bulky or too uncomfortable to wear.
Also you are just responding to Christianity’s failure by saying that we just didn’t Christianity hard enough. Which is not very persuasive to say the least
That isn't what he's saying. He's saying that if you don't do Christianity at all, your problems can't be reasonably laid at the feet of Christianity.
But that's still not answering the question of why, in the past, more people did Christianity than today and why Christianity could not prevent this.
To draw the obvious parallel: we know that CICO sufficiently explains the weight gain in the general population since the 50s on a mechanistic level: the amount of extra calories that people have started to consume since then lines up perfectly with the extra amount of weight the standard model predicts they would and that they actually have put on. If you don't want to be fat, eat less calories. But none of this answers the much more interesting question of why, as a society, we consume so much more and why large swaths of it are unable to self-regulate, despite obvious consequences in terms of aesthetics and health.
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All the "red tribers" who've done this for the past century have had their childrens' values turn much bluer, while also being economically and politically dominated by the blues. Just saying "god is really really good" doesn't actually do anything, and it certainly won't stop the 280lbs churchgoing christian from enjoying tiktok and pornhub.
If you don’t understand the differences in behavior between church attending and non-attending Christians, then you have no business pontificating on demographic or social trends in Christian communities.
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No, in fact, the failure to do this, and some other things as well, is what caused so many Reds to lose so badly for so long. The losses we have sustained are grievous, but I do not think they are terminal, nor is the dominance the Blues enjoy eternal. The conditions and the tactics they've derived such storied success from have more or less run their course, and will not be effective a second time. Policy starvation and its knock-on effects will bring them down, and it does not seem likely to me that they will recover.
Well in the first place, there's a good bit more involved than "just saying God is really, really good," hence the part about believing it, raising one's children by it, building one's life and community around it. In the second place, those things that you're evidently missing is in fact one of the only things that stop people of any weight from "enjoying tick-tock and pornhub", by helping them to understand why they benefit from removing such things from their lives.
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In East Germany the church was allowed to remain under only limited molestation, and to have it's own an associated political party, provided it proclaimed that actually Christians are perfectly loyal communists. I wonder how many people actually ended up believing this. It can even be supported biblically, but was clearly not the source of the East German Lutheran's professed values. No Christians had not been loyal communists, until the powers that be told them, and then they cited their faith to support it. The fact is the average evangelical Christian was perfectly fine with racial identity and segregation until power told them they were wrong. Evangelicals found a way to overlook the historic Christian opposition to abortion, and correspondingly the Southern States had the most liberal abortion laws until after Roe v. Wade. Belief in the morality of inter-racial marriage was at 4% when the laws banning it were struck down. It only reached 50% in the 1990s.
Christians, being a group of Humans, bend under pressure. Christianity has not yet broken. The Enlightenment's adherents began writing our obituaries three centuries ago. The Communists thought they were digging our grave a hundred years ago. Dawkins and Harris and the rest tried to write us off as irrelevant a decade ago, cheering on a social inflection that has now eaten their movement alive.
I like our chances, honestly.
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Well that, and it’s simply not how the 95 IQ rednecks that motteizans like to use as a median red triber think about race or recent racial policies. Cletus and Jamal mostly get along pretty well in person, and when they don’t get along they simply don’t interact and don’t get why Karen is so insistent that they do.
Red tribers are very aware that anti-white racial policies mostly do not come from people blacker than Meghan Markle, and they are aware that the median black thinks these policies are ridiculous. These ideas can be lain squarely at the feet of the blue tribe, which is mostly white and hapa.
Yeah, because the blues told them to! Those peoples' ancestors would be in agony if they saw their great granddaughters' mixed-race husbands today. This doesn't make them wrong, but does indicate the "red tribe" isn't as red as they used to be.
White women marrying black men- or partly black men- is an uncommon and not particularly red tribe phenomenon.
Actual rednecks and working class black people will just… not interact with each other if they can’t come to an agreement. This isn’t politically correct, but it does work at avoiding conflict.
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If the reds listened to what the blues were telling them at the time when anyone was in agony at the thought of their great granddaughters' mixed-race husbands, we'd probably still have an active eugenics program right now.
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Whitey bad, white woman racist cuz she won't look at me. Whitey did slavery, he lied and put papa in jail, he owes me money. This is not complicated, and doesn't require acceptance of some batshit academic theory. Your insistence that this kind of thinking is not common among blacks is utterly baffling to me. Have you ever been near lower class blacks; talking amongst themselves about racial issues?
Furthermore, specific racial contempt is hardly relevant given how they treat each-other without needing any ideological excuses for it. The question is can my child walk the streets in a neighbourhood where they are around without fear of being hurt. I don't care why someone threatens me and those I care about, just that they do.
Stop doing this. If you want to discuss race relations and your opinion of lower class black culture, do it without the diatribes and the caricatures.
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Worked with a whole bunch of them daily for about a year and a half in a factory. We never talked about racial issues; we mainly did our jobs and bitched about the usual annoyances of life. They were people, same as any.
If you live in a bad neighborhood, move. There are a lot of bad neighborhoods. There are a whole lot more good ones. Black criminals are not an existential threat to you or your family. Mostly they are a threat to each other, and to a lesser extent other blacks and the blues who live around them. There are significant racial problems in our society, but they are highly localized and can be avoided without too much trouble by most functional, net-positive citizens.
Well, I can only say that my personal experiences with American (as opposed to immigrant) blacks have been pretty universally hostile and this was before I had any racist tendences, but I guess personal experiences or tolerance must vary. Thank you for your anecdote.
''' Black criminals are not an existential threat to you or your family. Mostly they are a threat to each other, and to a lesser extent other blacks and the blues who live around them. If you live in a bad neighborhood, move."'
Yes, most whites in proximity to black violence tend to be blues, but that's because most people who haven't fled the big cities already are blues. Should I not have the right to live in the (severely declining) centers of our civilization if I want to be safe?
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That too, and it's a point I've brought up myself as well.
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Right, this is all well and fair, and I don’t disagree with much of it. Where I differ from you and Hlynka is that I don’t actually believe Red and Blue are true enemies. They’re two complementary halves of a syncretic whole - two equally-valuable parallel strains of the European psyche, which function best when they can strengthen each other by checking each other’s worst impulses. They’re the two components of a Babble & Prune machine, cyclically working in ostensible conflict in order to ensure long-term mutual success. The fact that Red and Blue are locked into what appears to be an existential conflict is due to a complicated mix of factors, which have been discussed to death here already, but in the long run both must succeed equally for European man to continue in the next step of his cosmic journey.
...and I reject this as just more "blue propaganda", specifically an unwillingness to accept the possibility that someone can be both "smart" and "wrong". One of the core tenents of the whole blue tribe memeplex is that behavior and morality exist completely independently of the other. It doesn't whether a man is a hard worker or a good father, what matters is what he thinks and what he feels. You see the alt-right and woke-left as having both recognized the value of identity politics. I see them as having been bitten by the same zombie.
Users like @Lepidus, and @SecureSignals like to talk about how the wokes' primary loyalty is to the black race and other such nonsense, but I find it difficult to see how any reasonable person someone could look at their rhetoric or behavior and come to that conclusion. It seems obvious to me that their primary loyalty (if one can call it that) is to politics. The reason guys like @the_nybbler and @kulakrevolt keep asking me questions like "what is the value you of your rule if it brings you to this?" is that they are so deeply embedded in their own blue tribe backgrounds that they don't know the answer to "what is the point of being a good man if it won't get you ahead in politics" and my reply is simply "to hell with politics". One of the most intelligent and true things EY ever said was that politics is the brain killer, and cynically that is why rationalists seem to be so obsessed with it.
The rest can be summarized as "what @FCfromSSC said" but only because they did a damn good job of summarizing things I've already said elsewhere.
This is just absolutely ridiculous and demands justification
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…….Hlynka, the reason why people like me get so frustrated with you is that a lot of the time it just seems like you don’t actually take any time to really read what people actually wrote or even make an effort to evaluate our actual arguments; you have a handful of stock arguments prepared and you deploy them, regardless of their precise appropriateness to the specific argument or interlocutor you’re responding to, as a way to sort of rhetorically pump your shotgun and let us know we’re not welcome on your property.
And it’s not fair for me to get frustrated at you for doing this, because that’s the correct and appropriate strategy for Reds! I don’t mean that as an insult or to infantilize you, although I’m acutely aware that this is how it will be received on your end. What I mean would be more clear to you, I think, if you made an honest effort to understand the arguments in the “Babble & Prune” essay that I myself linked. Surely you’ve been kicking around these spaces long enough to have stumbled upon that essay before.
The entire thrust of that essay is that Blues represent the “Babble” half of the dialectic, meaning that their whole purpose is to come up with a ton of ideas, the majority of which will be wrong. So, not only can people be both “smart” and “wrong”, it’s probably on average more likely that a given idea formulated by a smart person is wrong than that it’s right.
Furthermore, I have talked extensively about my own major change in worldview within my own lifetime. That means that not only can smart people be wrong, I was one of the smart people who was wrong. Like, really wrong. Like, potentially irretrievable damage to my life outcomes type of wrong. If I had listened to Reds, and adhered to one of their prescribed life templates, my life would be unspeakably better right now. But, if I’m honest with myself, I was never going to - not when I was young and shit-hot enough for it to matter - because I’m a Blue. Much like Blues gravitate toward lottery professions, the Blue phenotype is a sort of “lottery ticket personality”: maybe you figure out how to split an atom or write The 1812 Overture, or maybe you end up penniless with syphilis in a snow-filled gutter at 30. There’s obviously variation - almost nobody is a “pure Blue” or “Pure Red” - and I am gravely weighing out the feasibility of giving the Red template my most sincere try, but certainly the bimodal distribution is real.
I understand why you loathe Blues so much. At the historical moment in which we live, they’ve been able - through what I consider egregious subterfuge and bad faith - to artificially inflate their own power over Red, throwing the Babble & Prune machine wildly out of balance, and now they’re presenting a very real threat of trying to turn your kids Blue and trying to destroy what you hold dear. Trying to take the outside view, though, I think it remains true that neither Blue nor Red can destroy each other without destroying themselves in the process.
Uh, you can totally have a society without blue types. It would have much worse art and much less innovation, but it would work. Because the things that make civilization work are by definition things that we already know how to do, which the red types are good at.
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Happy to serve.
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er, clearly hoffmeister and some of the alt-right believe that e.g. the libs and (for the alt-right) jews are both very smart (given both technical achievements and cultural influence) and wrong.
... both the alt-right and probably hoffmeister value "hard work" and "being a good father". Did this idea come from the left accusing people of being racist, and racism is a "think and feel" instead of a "behavior"? But "blue tribe morality" prescribe plenty of behaviors such as giving to the poor (note all the blue-tribe charitable foundations).
The value of being a 'good man' is always something though! "Being a hard worker" is valuable in that that work produces something useful for people. "Being a good father" is valuable in that it helps raise children! If you're 'being a good father' in a way that isn't helping a child, or "working hard" as a MLM marketer, you're not actually "being good". (this suggests that "being good" isn't an informative statement itself, that one needs to point to the actual thing being done). Those people are saying that the thing you're doing isn't actually accomplishing the thing you're claiming it is.
Unless I'm failing badly to understand you (which is possible), you seem to have completely failed to grasp the point @HlynkaCG is making here. No, things like working hard or being a good father aren't valuable because they produce good things. They are valuable in and of themselves. Even if you live on an island by yourself, working hard is good. Even if you knew for a fact that your children would die tomorrow, doing your best to raise them today is good.
You seem to be doing this thing I see a lot in this forum, where consequentialists advance a consequentialist argument for a virtue and think that they have understood their interlocutors' thinking. But every time I see that it's incorrect, because the consequentialists fail to grasp that their interlocutor simply does not care about the consequences as a reason for doing good things.
I don't agree with everything that @HlynkaCG said (for example, I do think that you can be a moral failure and still have true and valuable insights about other areas of life), but he's spot on about one thing. The reason to be a good man (or woman) isn't because it gets you anything. It just doesn't matter if you lose some culture war, or even a real war, because you stuck to your principles. What matters is that you stuck to your principles.
I'm directly arguing against that point. Also, I know I'm carelessly trampling all over hundreds of years of vigorously debated philosophy, and this is a massive tangent, but it seems to be a big part of hiynka's issue with blue-tribers.
What is working hard, and what is being a good father? These ideas are derived from attempts to benefit society or one's kin, or accomplish greatness, or something. If one looks at someone clicking away at league of legends, even if they're trying very hard to click, or someone who's working very hard at applying makeup properly to attract a mate - this isn't "hard work", because it's not benefitting society or yourself. Playing league or doing makeup well are somewhat mechanically challenging, take patience and knowledge, and aren't obviously less so than working as a janitor. The only thing that really distinguishes someone 'hard at work' on a tough, soft task like writing, from someone lazily arguing on the internet, are the usefulness, or interestingness, of the output! Same goes for 'being a good father' - what makes a "good father" still requires the """consequentialist""" judgement of what actually benefits the child! If a father, to benefit their child, feeds them bleach to "clean out parasites" ... are they being a good father? No. Replace bleach with ivermectin, assuming the right kind of parasite, and yes. Similarly if instead of bleach, it's 1700 and the child is fed some poisonous healing brew that isn't "obviously bad" in society's eyes. Saying these particular categories are "valuable in and of themselves" still makes most of the same consequentialist value judgements, with all the latent complexity, just hidden behind socially-claimed sanction.
The idea is - i think - if you care about consequences over 'process', then you become corrupted by power / unrestrained / an evil leftist, and therefore, the argument goes, forget about the actual good things - i.e. consequentialistly pursuing "lots of good people" turns you into the progressive EA who forgets about his children and community. And to avoid this, we'll say "there are Goods - real moral actions you need to follow, that you can't reason around"! The problem is this still posits various ... good things, that are, purely observationally, justified by their consequences (your children and family are unhappy, your society collapses from deracination and lack of purpose), which are the 'principles you need to stick to' - but the complexity of causation means you can lose those goods too! The person 'sticking to their principles' is doing so because they're arguing those principles do maintain the children and family and society in a way the consequentialist doesn't, and that the progressive consequentialist, by abandoning them, gets confused or corrupted by power and forgets what's good - the issue is that saying 'there is a Good' doesn't make the goals of said 'Goods' go away - the children and society still physically exist, it's still worth actually helping your child, and when that conflicts with your list-of-virtuous-actions and you follow the Virtuous Action and your child learns less or your society collapses, nothing was gained! And progressives aren't failing because they forgot to follow the restrained-list-of-goods and were too rational, it's because they genuinely believe different values are Good and follow those!
But those principles are clearly and obviously there to achieve certain ends! If you follow your principle of "working hard" but your hard work is as an accountant in the Progressive Eugenics Department - or what if you're a subcontractor, and you just work at Ernst & Ernst, you just happen to notice you're doing accounting for the PED - or you are a "good father" in that you indoctrinate your child into the Blue Tribe, like the rest of your community does ... and how can you even know this isn't "working hard" or "being a good father" without tracing out the physical consequences of those actions?
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That is certainly a significant difference. I'll try to make the time for a more substantive comment soon.
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