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The last time I participated in this community I was in November. When as part of some discussion about how DnD had gone woke or something, /u/RandomRanger posted a very long comment where, to paraphrase, he said that black people were an inferior stupid race who bring crime and dysfunction wherever we go and that in order to stop the west from being "overrun" with blacks, white racists would need to "block" us in a way the didn't account for "international law" and "human rights". I replied calling him a cracker bitch and was temp-banned by the mods.
Now I know my outburst was against the rules, it was uncivil, I was reacting with anger, and I knew at the time I'd get banned for it. But I don't know, when I see someone essentially laying out a justification for bringing back slavery, how am I supposed to respond, as a black person? Am I expected to lay out some "well have you considered..."-ass intellectual rebuttal, Am I supposed to beg and plead for my own rights? "No sir, Please sir, I'm one of da good ones see!" I'm sorry but I don't have the patience for that
When made my first comment here where expressed profound distress over the possibly that HBD is real. I got a lot of responses along the lines of "well, what's it matter to you? you're an individual and population level statistics don't apply to you." I never thought that they applied to me. But when people in this community use HBD and crime statistics to argue that things Jim Crow and Apartheid were good and just and maybe should even be brought back THAT FUCKING AFFECTS ME. I'M BLACK
I remember another person asked me if I sincerely related to black underclass criminals and no I obviously don't but I relate to people like Toussaint Louverture, Malcolm X, Steve Biko. The intelligent black men who dedicated their lives to fighting the people who wanted to keep us in eternal subjugation for all the same goddamn reasons. And when I read what RandomRanger says about how society ought to forcefully disempower black people for the sake of having a "civilized" country. I'm reminded of the poem written by Claude McKay during Red Summer when white supremacists were terrorizing black people across America:
So bring it on! I don't care if we won't win but I'll FIGHT LIKE HELL for my people and if I die I know I'll have died a proud black man who stood for dignity instead of cowering negro who submitted to slavery. I'LL NEVER BE ACCEPT BEING A SLAVE!!!
Now this is the kind of energy holocaust deniers need to cultivate. Proactive denial.
I've long felt that the reason progressives and similarly minded don't do well here is that the ruleset is kind of stacked against them. They argue differently. It's a lot more emotional and haughty. It challenges you on a different level. It's more personal. And, frankly, it's also more earnest and fun. They're more viscerally and honestly channeling their emotions through text.
But the flipside of that is well... everyone else can also do that. So whilst this might not be the venue for that kind of clash, I'd also ask, do you really want it to be? I have had faith in some progressives I've argued with. Their wit and tenacity was impressive, if nothing else. But are you one of them? If this is all you can muster before crashing out then I don't fancy your chances.
You're getting a fair amount of sympathy because you're black. I don't understand why. Your post was probably the worst thing one can write and I find everyone coddling you to be absurd to a point where I barely have the heart to engage with it.
If white people can muster the strength to walk past all the white victims of black crime without just calling every black person the n-word all the time, I think you should be able to do something comparable when one of the whites finally has enough and allows themselves to verbally wonder in a scarcely populated recess of the internet whether this whole civil rights thing was worth it.
Comically, your reply was probably the least dignified and most validating argument in favor of such skepticism possible. You offer no sympathy, no understanding, just go straight into the most selfish and aggressively verbalized ingroup/outgroup pathology possible. Leaving no room for interpretation other than that there will be no sympathy for the white devil. He shall continue to give life and limb to the continuous project of racial reconciliation in America to the benefit of your ingroup pathology.
I can't imagine a position less deserving of sympathy than yours. Why you are receiving any is, again, absurd.
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That sounds better than whatever you are trying to do here. Is this post an attempt to convince the racists that they should include you and people like you in the future? My understanding of present-day white racists is that the violence and attitude are exactly what they would rather do without.
Note that in some ways the racists of slavery or Jim Crow days were perhaps less racist than the current racists. I don't know of any anti-black racist who would let a Mammy into their house to nurse their children. There are certainly white racists in nursing homes being taken care of by black workers, but I can't imagine that this was their own device.
While I'm sympathetic to the straightforward expectation from a black US citizen to get some considerations from other Americans, I do not understand why some people think they deserve to live in the vicinity of white people. I would never move to China and demand the Chinese people start supporting me and share the products of their hard work.
Regarding actual slavery, I would wager a guess that your best bet is still team White Power. Actual slavery is still going on in Africa and the Middle-East, as is traditional in these areas when Europeans people are not controlling them. It seems to me that East Asians are also less accepting of Black people than Europeans. What I'm saying is that if you in the future were at risk of being captured by some kind of enemy forces, you probably should be hoping that they are Europeans rather than any other race.
Just like it would seem that a Black highschool celebration would be more likely to get shot at than the equivalent White highschool celebration, in the US.
Therefore actually being friendly with White people may in some way be the best option for you. Even if that may hurt your ego.
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On this forum, you are supposed to respond to abhorrent claims with dispassion, equanimity, and unearned civility- with reason, insight, and numbers. The sins of another poster are their own. They are not an invitation to join. That is the entire point.
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Honestly, I don't fucking care. I (and many other "fucking white men" and "stale pale males" or whatever) sat through a lot worse during the earlier parts of the Culture War. I kept arguing back without resorting to insulting outbursts, but even holding my position was sufficient to result in bans and worse. If you can't keep a moderately civil tongue when you're typing (and thus have the ability to tone it down before pushing 'send'), that's on you.
OK, now I suspect you are not sincere but rather a refugee (or invader) from /r/drama.
I think Jim Crow is worse than DEI actually
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You have to think of The Motte as a zoo. There are dangerous animals here, but they're in cages and can't do anything unless you jump in the cage.
It's not like the people you think are awful cease to exist based on the existence of the Motte. And yes, I certainly think some people whom I won't name are awful human beings. But sometimes I want to know how they tick. I want to know how they react to evidence which contradicts them. And often not responding is the best course, because there's nothing to be gained.
My question to you is what does "fighting" entail? There's never going to be a magical utopia where everyone gets along. There's always going to be some percentage of assholes. "Progress" is just a reduction in the number of assholes and the degree of their assholishness. But it can never reach zero.
There has to be a balance between advancing your beliefs and realizing that caring too much about the mere existence of distasteful things just makes you unhappy. There's no "killing" in debates, so the end result of debates is 1% of the time someone changed their mind and 99% of the time nothing changed.
The people here are extremely used to being told by other people they're bad people. They don't care. What are you hoping to accomplish?
I'm saying that if /u/RandomRanger got his way and there was some "reawakening" in society where they agreed to "block" black people using state violence I would fight
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Cue the classic tweet.
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Was the comment significantly edited? It's not particularly long. There's
3 paragraphs laying out the basic case that race, as fuzzy or distinct as it is, is distinct enough to be weaponized against white and asian people. Which seems to basically be true, if we want to do racial abolitionism and agree not to see race then we can't at the same time use it for a bunch of other purposes. And then2 paragraphs of pretty hot culture war fodder.There's not really any way to interpret what he said as endorsing slavery. Slavery isn't just what happens when racism gets sufficiently supported and all he actually endorsed was anti-immigration, and yes a rather racist perspective.
you're supposed to make an argument addressing at least some of the points. You could have pushed that racism is indeed fuzzy and pointed out that it's not like all black people are responsible for the DEI edifice. The Average black guy has absolutely no hand in Havard's anti-asian racist policies. You could have tried to dispute the facts of his more spicy stuff. You could just collapse the thread and ignore him. Same as anyone else, when I run into some anti-white rhetoric in the wild, which used to happen fairly regularly, and still does occasionally now I either go point by point dispassionately or ignore it and move on. I know that black history is more painful but stooping beneath the level of the racist position isn't doing you any favors even if it was within the norms of the site. Do you think your outburst won you any support?
Not beg, argue, this is a place for arguing. @RandomRanger cannot take your rights from you only defeat you in an argument.
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For what it's worth, this is the correct response.
Briefly: "You appear to be advocating the unlimited oppression of, at a minimum, ~40 million of your fellow countrymen. Why should they accept this oppression, and why do you think your way of life will survive if they do not?"
Less Briefly:
"No side, after all, will ever accept a peace in which their most basic needs are not satisfied — their safety, and their power to ensure that safety, most of all. The desire for justice is a desire that we each have such mechanisms to protect ourselves, while still remaining in the context of peace: that the rule of law, for example, will provide us remedy for breaches without having to entirely abandon all peace. Any “peace” which does not satisfy this basic requirement, one which creates an existential threat to one side or the other, can never hold."
To the extent that you believe such people are worth being concerned about, I think the proper response depends on your values.
From a practical materialist perspective, the proper response is to cultivate the coldness of heart necessary for effective long-term resistance. It seems to me that this involves not only the willingness to fight, but also the willingness to endure whatever hardships are necessary to maximize chances of winning that fight, including humiliation, misery and despair.
From a Christian perspective, one is required to love their enemies, as maddening as that requirement may be.
If you're willing to endure hardship, the other side will be glad to provide you as much as you can stand (and more); this will not improve your chances to win.
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Hey man, echoing what @Amadan says. I am not convinced by the HBD stuff though, unlike him. But I am also open to just come to this "public square" to listen in and see what it's about. I suppose the way that I stayed here so far was that I treat my presence here like Louis Theroux on an investigative trip. Only recently did I take a more proactive approach of actually contributing or starting conversations. I would encourage you to fight! fight on! And yes, it means in certain places and at certain moments, we fight by the rules the arena setup and rewards us for. Thankfully I trust in the mods of this arena, and also I guess a healthy boundary between knowing that "these people who I disagree with is out there" and "these people who I disagree with is harmful and dangerous to me imminently". This is after all just one corner in the vast internet, and the true public real life world out there has plenty spaces for me to fight, and not just by writing.
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In addition to what others have said about how the rules do in fact require you to be civil, I would encourage you to make use of the block function. I have a handful of users blocked (including the one you were responding to) because I find them to be toxic posters who almost exclusively make hateful posts about how terrible their outgroup is. I have no interest in reading that shit, so I blocked them. It makes the experience of participating in this site far more pleasant for me, and you may find it does the same.
I agree. This site's block function is really good. I would've stopped coming here a long time ago if it didn't have it because some posters are so predictable and irritating that I'd rather not see the site at all than see what they have to say.
Overall, a few bad apples(quite a few..) doesn't prevent this site from being my favourite place for politics.
On a side-note, I'm curious which user has been blocked the most times, and which user has the most other users blocked.
Unfortunately, the blocks page is in chronological order. And also might not be generally visible. You might be able to extract the data, though.
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My general sense is that when people attempt to silence so-called "racist" speech, it's not so much that they don't want to hear it as that they don't want other people to hear it. They don't those ideas being propagated. From this perspective, a block isn't going to work.
Yeah, that tendency does exist. And if that's where @Chi_Wara is coming from, then he will certainly be disappointed in that desire. Hopefully, though, he will be ok with merely not having to wade through racist posts even if they still exist.
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Amadan's reply said most of what I was going to say far better than I would say it, but I want to emphasize this.
It makes sense to me that reading these words, knowing that people have these thoughts would upset you. I get it. Rage in the existence of such a thing is not a productive emotion and at the same time it is an understandable one. That rage lies to you though. It might tell you that such and such belief is widespread, or "real" - I imagine the most of the sayers are keyboard warriors who would wilt at the thought of actual implementation for instance.
Channel that pain somewhere productive - know that every time someone says something brutal and mean about Republicans or Whites or Men (and even about Democrats and Women!) that a similar pain is produced.
Don't contribute to that pain in others, yell at people who generate that pain - do unto others etc.
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Am I missing something here? As far as I can tell, the OP is commenting specifically on the issue of migration from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe and North America, and argues that such migration should be blocked/stopped and that such migrants should not be given ‘free stuff’ / handouts / welfare. That’s it. How does that equal promoting slavery or Jim Crow or Apartheid?
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For what it's worth, I think the HBD folks are usually obsessed with IQ in an unhealthy way. Black culture, despite the bad parts, has some really lovely vitality and openess and warmth that a lot of more standardized western culture lacks. I for one think HBD, while true in some narrow sense, doesn't even come close to justifying bringing back slavery.
Hey that's not fair, many of us are also obsessed with violent crime rates. That, and how many more decades of complete abject miserable failure on that front it's supposed to take before "anti-racist" views on the subject are considered refuted.
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From the perspective of some, doing anything other than burying one’s head in the sand with regard to racial IQ differences is ipso facto unhealthy.
Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?
High violent crime rates, lifetime net tax consumption, and racial narcissism and outgroup hostility are quite the vibrant way to express lovely vitality and openess and warmth.
Indeed, many wrongthinkers would agree that US slavery and its outcomes were a mistake—albeit for reasons different from progressives—and to not make the same mistake twice.
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Reject community. Embrace individualism.
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As someone who has frequently been mod-slapped on the wrist and eaten temp bans for responding immoderately, I can only advise you:
Bite your tongue. Hard. No, harder than that. Bite all the way through if necessary.
Yes, you are angry and hurt and taking it personally. This is a "you" problem, not an "OP" problem so far as the mods are concerned.
Play by the rules. Even if you feel very strongly the rules are stacked against you.
You can call the [expletive deleted] all the bad names you want in the privacy of your own skull, but when writing on here you must - and it will not be excused if you do not - adopt the persona of an early 20th century academic in an M.R. James tale. Well dear dear, I was somewhat taken aback by the proposal as set out by my good colleague KillTheScum about killing the scum, i.e. me and those of my ilk. Perhaps some gentle converse and exchange of views in a civilised manner at a tepid degree might be in order? Though I quite understand if the community feels that would be outrageous over-reaction on my part!
This last is just my own means of dealing with the tension. It may or may not help you. Recite to yourself while typing the tepid, moderate, response the verse of Hilaire Belloc:
"Killing scum is certainly not a policy humans innately abhor, but the wide variance in definitions of 'scum' seems to me worthy of attention in discussions such as this one. It appears to me that a large plurality considers those who espouse the views you are arguing for here to be scum worth killing. If this be the case, how should we proceed?"
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Aside from his Cautionary parodies, I was always a fan of his Epitaph on the Politician Himself:
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I'm currently reading Tim Keller's "The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism", and so I'm knee deep in the apologetics of a theologically orthodox pastor capturing a key part of his experience, essentially, running his church in Manhattan in the 1990s and 2000s and raising the kinds of objections he got constantly from New Yorkers who engaged with him and more traditional Christianity in that context. And quite a number of his interlocutors (from the quotations he includes, but also this is obvious if you know the culture he's talking about anyway) overtly think the world would be improved if his entire belief system, everything he valued, and everything he sacrificed for, disappeared from the face of the earth... I mean, obviously. I certainly have encountered this stance in my life from plenty of people too when it comes to the beliefs of more traditional Christians.
And the reality is, there were and are a bunch of obstinate, noisy fundamentalists who make that dynamic much worse. The frustration with certain high profile strains of traditional Christianity is a complicated phenomenon, but it didn't come out of nowhere.
I'm leading with all of this to say, I could easily imagine being Keller and finding it enormously exhausting to go thrust yourself in conversations with people who would like to see your way of life and deepest beliefs dwindle away and disappear (but then, that's also why I'm not Tim Keller). But I also think he was right, in an important sense - he recognized that he couldn't reach everyone, but that when he publicly fielded questions from skeptical New Yorkers after his sermons, there was often a curious audience there, and a spectrum of skepticism, and while that might've meant he had to field particularly unsympathetic or even unfair questions from certain perhaps unreachable audience members, how he fielded those questions mattered in how he reached other people, and how he developed his capacity to reach such people. It would be the easiest thing in the world for someone like Keller to cultivate a thin skin about the public bigotry against traditional Christians that legitimately does snake through many of our higher status institutions, and perhaps Keller would even be morally justified in doing so... but that version of Keller wouldn't have affected all the people he did, and it would have prevented him reaching people like, well, me.
I suspect the audience here is, in some ways, like the audience Keller faced at his churches, but for a bunch of progressive stances at this point. There is a spectrum of skepticism. And exactly like those high profile fundamentalist voices had a way of poisoning the well that Keller had to deal with, the obliteration of the older racial conversation detente by a bunch of extremely loud, aggressive progressive activists and their influence in major institutions over the last decade and a half means that a lot of us now have a huge amount of skepticism when now it comes to the new social justice "consensus" that has been rammed down our throats (especially if we exist within high status progressive social spaces, as many of us do). And a big part of the obliteration of that consensus is a new willingness, on the part of people like the ones here, to entertain ideas that the consensus wants to police entirely out of existence, because there's a sense that the man behind the curtain has been revealed, and a sense that truth seeking and authoritative boundary policing are increasingly sharply at odds. But that does mean many of us have a willingness to entertain all sorts of really unpleasant ideas, because we've noticed that some of those ideas do come true, and we've also noticed the one way ratchet of the social policing of unpleasant ideas has been aggressively used as a tool to grab social power and engage in ideologically driven social engineering. But all these dynamics come together to make a space where really morally awful (by most lights) ideas get entertained, too, and when a group relaxes boundary policing, some people use that relaxation to grind their axes and engage in overtly hostile behavior.
At this point, I think Progressives need their own small army of Tim Kellers - public thinkers who are willing to endure the hardest critiques of the fundamentalisms of their movements, actually hear those critiques, and publicly endure the truth in them in good faith and engage with them. I don't think the overwhelming majority of people who are extremely skeptical of progressive shibboleths or even accept the general HBD frame want to bring back slavery or even be particular unkind to decent, law-abiding black citizens. But there is absolutely a spectrum of skepticism here, about a great many received social justice fundamentalist critiques of our inherited culture, and we've reached a place where it is very, very difficult to publicly discuss empirical reality as we see it without the morality police stepping in and inadvertently torching their own public legitimacy at very high volume to drown everyone else out.
But it might not be your role to be a Tim Keller but for babysitting the skepticism of anti-woke people in the context of topics about black people. It might not be your role to engage with a spectrum of skepticism and respond winsomely. And I totally get that - my capacity to endure being around doctrinaire progressives at this point has fallen off a cliff, too, even though I've often had relatively good rhetorical success gently drawing conversations out of their inherited partisan frames and adding a bit of nuance and complexity and so on and persuading people to see some issues with more nuance, if I'm dealing with people who aren't too radicalized. But it often means enduring a lot of thoughtless NPC bumper sticker slurs and bigotry along the way, and eventually it just makes me tired. To be honest, if I were black or a woman, I'm not sure if I would stick around here either - it is absolutely the case that there are selective demands for rigor here on some topics, obviously. But I think think that may be necessarily tangled up with what works about this place at its best, too.
I feel like the older I get the more evidence I have that religion (and sadly, bigotry, although I'm not going to comment on the relationship between those) are a kind of zero-sum quantity in human nature. We can recognize them when we see them, and make efforts to move away from them, but those are doomed to just ooze out in other, often less well-understood places. New Atheism thought it had defeated God, but it really just built its own idols and called them something else. I don't think years of progressive anti-racism activism has managed any broader changes than merely changing the acceptable set targets of bigotry (in "proper" circles) in the modern era (in: Jews and rural white people, out: everyone on the "progress" flag).
And I say this as someone generally neutral on religion: I have my own beliefs I'm content with, and I'm happy to let-live with reasonably wide bounds on others'. And I find racism and bigotry generally to be pretty abhorrent and I'd love for there to be less of it in the world. I'm just not sure how to actually fix human tribalism and it's downstream failures. But I'm open to suggestions.
As usual, there is nothing new under the sun. Bonus amusing phrasing from wiki:
"Psst, Moses, you won't believe what those rascals are up to!"
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You should say what you believe in about yourself. This is, as far as I see, allowed and encouraged on this forum. "I will not be a slave" was not the bannable offense, "you cracker bitch" was.
There are many people here who I not only disagree with but find their propositions for what the world should be abominable and ridiculous. For some of them, I still hold the minimum of respect, and that is because they do not descend to shit-flinging. This is despite their projects being, in my view, more hopeless than yours.
It is not within your power to stop people from noticing that group IQ differences exist, and some of them will irrationally extrapolate them on all members of your group, in all aspects of life. Those people you can't change. Fortunately, what I see is that such people who zealously believe in IQ graphs and ignore anything in front of their eyes are in the minority.
What you can change is change how you act, and those whose view of black people is informed not just by IQ curve graphs, but also by their observations of how black people act, will see that you do not act as a racist would predict you do.
No, you don't have to plead that you're one of the good ones. You want to actually be one of the good ones. It's unfair that you might have to try harder compared to whites, but it's life. What appears to hurt black-white relations a lot in my observation is when you start seeing "being one of the good ones" as some kind of a shameful thing, a performance you must put on for the snobby whites, you start taking pride in doing the opposite of putting up appearances for the whitey, and then all of you appear worse than average.
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Your feelings are perfectly fine, but consider where we are. This is an online debate club for heterodox opinions.
It's not inappropriate to use one's indignation to bolster rethoric, but if there's no content to what you're saying besides that you feel bad people think a certain way, that means you have nothing to say.
I despise the views of some of my mottizen brethren, and I'm quite certain some despise my own views. So what?
This is what reality is like beyond the veil. People have abhorrent, insane, malicious, despicable opinions and they act on them. But wise men in all eras recognized that it's better for them to say them openly lest we lose the ability to find the truth altogether. And all the comfort in the world is not worth losing sight of the truth. Delusion is damnation certain.
Now that you know what the trench of intellectual rigor smells like, you can either embrace the suck or walk away. That's your choice to make. But there's no sense in complaining about the smell, it's been there for thousands of years.
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I sympathize. I really do.
I, personally, do not like racists. I do not like antisemites and Holocaust deniers. I do not like misogynists. I do not like a lot of people. I sometimes struggle to be polite to the most hateful people here. It's a daily exercise, trying not to hate the haters.
But the answer to your question: are you expected to lay out some "intellectual-ass rebuttal" to people saying, in so many words, that black people are orcs, is yes.
There are Jews here. They have to read people talking about how Jews are responsible for every evil in the world and are secretly conspiring against the goyim because Jews are sneaky evil parasites who hate everyone else. They aren't allowed to just go off on the antisemites and call them names. They have to engage politely, or choose not to engage.
There are women here. They have to read people talking about how women are non-sapient hypergamous slutwhores who should be kept the property of their fathers for the good of civilization, and definitely not allowed to work or vote or even have a say in who fucks them. They have to engage politely, or choose not to engage.
We have Democrats and liberals here (not the same thing but for practical purposes almost always treated as the same thing here). They have to read people talking about how "Blues" are hypocritical amoral stupid mindless traitors with no principles or reasoning abilities and we can't wait to line them up against a wall. They have to engage politely, or choose not to engage.
That's hard, and not everyone can do it, and now and then we have someone who flames out because they can't. Being a black person, I understand why you'd be tempted to flame out at people advocating Jim Crow or apartheid or just casually talking about black criminality and low IQ.
But the Motte is a weird place. It's intended to allow the most outrageous views, the ones that are unsayable in most places, to be civilly debated. Hopefully views that are truly outrageous and offensive- like "Black people should be slaves" or "The Holocaust didn't happen and it's good that it did" - will be debated and pushed back against. And usually they are! But you may be disconcerted to realize that many people in fact agree with those views. Is that infuriating? I am sure it is. Sometimes I'm angry at the shit people say about black people or Jews or women, and I am not black or Jewish or a woman. But the Motte lets you bring your hottest take, your most controversial opinion, the things you want to propose that you know would get you kicked off most mainstream sites, and put them out there and see what people say about them.
Hopefully, if your views are just stupid and offensive, you will be persuaded to rethink them. (Yeah, this rarely happens.) But that's the purpose- to allow the conversations that aren't allowed anywhere else. People can talk about HBD here. People can talk about evpsych here even in the most reductive "are-women-actually-people?" way. People can talk about pedophilia and accelerationism and the Holocaust and trans people here in ways that make peoples' heads explode everywhere else.
The Motte is a weird place. A lot of people are offended by our very existence. We have trolls who come back again and again to call us a bunch of Nazis because they just can't believe we allow literal Nazis to post here. I have been attacked, personally, for participating and modding here. The assumption being that if I enable a place that allows horrible views, I must support those views. Of course I don't. But I support having a place where those views can be expressed, so I can see what sort of people seriously espouse those views. I have learned a lot about the real, unironic Holocaust deniers and white nationalists and rape enthusiasts from people who were mostly just Internet boogeymen until I started talking to them. I like to think it's made me better at arguing with them, but I can understand why those who think we simply shouldn't platform them at all would think this is delusion.
I am proud of what the Motte is, as an actual bastion of free speech, and disheartened by what it's become, when you actually allow free speech. I would not want every other place to be like the Motte. I assure you I would prefer not to deal with Holocaust deniers and segregationists and pedophiles on my other social media sites. At the same time, I am like many disaffected liberals who have been driven off of many other social media sites because even asking questions that offend people is unsayable there.
Since this is personal to you, let me make it personal. I am a Gen Xer. I grew up in a world where we believed everyone was supposed to strive for the goals of that Martin Luther King speech. We were all supposed to become "colorblind." We wanted racial harmony and believed it was possible. We believed in racial equality and thought all we had to do was stop being racist and it would happen.
Those hopes and dreams have crashed and burned. Not just because I have come to the sad realization that HBD is real and that, in fact, there are racial differences in behavior and IQ. No, hear me out, I am not trying to make an argument for why the racists are right! I am telling you that eventually people like me notice things and have a hard time reconciling them with our ideals... and then we're told that Noticing such things makes us racist. I have had... mostly unpleasant interactions with black people. I wish this were not so. (I also have black friends. Yeah, yeah, "Some of my best friends...") I still believe every individual should be treated as an individual. I still want a world where we can coexist. But what has happened is on the one side, we have the most awful people in the world who unfortunately make some compelling arguments, and on the other side we have people saying "Shut up. Stop noticing things. Racist!"
Who do you think is going to win?
I wish you would stay. I wish you would participate, even if it means gritting your teeth to make "intellectual-ass arguments" against people who want you put in a reservation. I get that it's probably not easy, but we have a lot of people putting up with awful things being said about their group who do put up with it. Yes, if you just call people "cracker bitches" you will be banned. But I assure you even the most racist people will engage with you civilly if you engage with them civilly. And if they don't, they too will be banned, because while we allow "controversial" opinions, we also do not allow people to just say "Black people are orcs/criminals/subhuman." (And people have been banned for that.)
You can decide whether the Motte project is for you or not. It's not for many people. We have very few people at the pointy end of debates here who stick around, and it's easy to see why. Who wants to hang around with a bunch of people who barely consider them human and have to be polite to them? But I hope you will give it a shot.
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