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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!!!
(Side notice: why is parent modded to -14? Are there so many lurkers who disagree with him? I see this as evidence that the voting does not confer useful information beyond the alignedness with the local groupthink. Some sites (LW) do manage a culture where contrarian-but-interesting takes are upvoted. If anyone has css ready to hide post votes, I would be interested.)
The poster child for HBD is the intelligence advantage of the Ashkenazi Jews, to the point where Scott himself used them to tentatively advance that idea. Yet for some reason, I do not recall anyone here suggesting that only that group should have the franchise. Instead, HBD is used to argue for propositions which for some strange reason happen to rhyme with racism of old.
Personally, I am in favor of colorblind meritocracy all the way. We do not need to use ethnicity as a proxy for intelligence or whatever, we can simply select directly for it. Picking people who are known to be intelligent is much more effective than picking Ashkenazi in the hope that the individual variation is in your favor. Ideally, we could do this regardless of HBD.
The only reason to bring up the HBD hypothesis at all is if the SJ whines about disparate impact and unequal outcomes, which for them imply that the system is racist and unfair, and needs to be changed. And sometimes they might be right, in that our systems (e.g. criminal justice) are less colorblind than we would like them to be. But sometimes the answer may well be that genetic or cultural group differences are to blame for the unequal outcome, and we should just shrug and move on.
I have another, less savory reason to insist that people are treated equally before the law. Good old Niemoeller. If I were to grant that small racial differences in genetic inclination to violent crime are a reason to disenfranchise one ethnicity, I will have no reason why I should not lose the franchise for being a man -- after all, the crime sex gap is rather impressive.
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There's a small subset of commenters here that are experts in what is covert, effectively bad-faith argumentation, perfectly calibrated to the rules. You will post a substantive comment arguing/claiming/observing A B C D and they will nitpick B, and respond to D with their most full-force argument. Of course, ignoring entirely A and C. If you're interested in light and truth of course, this is a most strange way to respond, but many of these people aren't. To many of them forums are about WINNERS and LOSERS and they are determined to be 'winners'. Tragically, most people in this forum seem inclined to let them get away with it. Who cares if someone ignored A and C? Disagree = downvote, rebuttal to D was strong = upvote. "Hey you ignored my point" = crickets. Then, for bonus points a week later, a toplevel post with a gish-gallop of blue-links chosen for maximum effect. It's effectively the loophole here.
Personally I'm not interested in playing the game back, I value my own integrity too highly, so I'll begrudgingly accept reddit-hivemind downvote patterns, block a few people who are particularly egregious, and accept that I'm here purely as a mix of fun and intellectual hobbyism. I'm not here on a crusade to change minds because the personal cost is too high. I'll say my piece and maybe people will find it interesting. But if you're wondering if this community lives up to its billing the answer is no. Is that depressing? Yes, a bit. Is it ironic considering some of these bad-faith people are some of the very same lamenting the slide of society into a "low-trust" paradigm, which is, of course, allegedly the fault of progressives and minorities? Yes. It's not even really the mods' fault because a) their job is really hard and b) some of these people are just way too good at skirting the rules in just the right way.
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The issue with your position is that you are wrong and RandomRanger is correct. Black peoples ruin civilization and the best thing you can do is to create barriers to being around black people. It’s obviously not ALL black people but 20-50%. If a city has 200k black people then 40k of them will ruin everything without doing mitigation.
I like living in dense walkable urban environments. That does not exists in America because black people ruin the commons. I have to live abroad in order to live the lifestyle I want because black people are in my country.
Black people have been present in North America since the 17th century. The time when North American urban environments have become practically unwalkable was sometime around 1980 or 1990, as far as I can tell. Are you really sure that it’s the presence of blacks that is responsible for this development?
White Flight atleast in Chicago is assumed to have occurred between 1950-1970 with the peak in the 1960’s. America building only “non-walkable” cities would be just after white flight had been completed so a 1980 date fits with the timeline. Wikipedia tells me in 1900 only 20% of blacks in the South lived in cities and >90% of blacks live in the South.
I am confused by why you would question my claims by saying blacks have been here since the 17th century? They literally were not in cities or out of the South in large numbers until the 1950’s. Before the 1970’s we had explicit segregation laws. Timeline wise American cities being unwalkable in the 1980’s fits with black migration patterns and the end of segregation.
In the 1970’s 80% of blacks now lived in cities. By your own timeline the very next decade was when America quit making urban walkable cities.
You can disagree with my claim that blacks caused the end of urban America but you can’t disagree with my claim that the timelines agree.
You’re specifically and categorically claiming that blacks ruin civilization, including the commons. That’d mean that they’ve been ruining everything around themselves in North America ever since they started arriving there, that every urban environment where they have been present should have been unwalkable from the start. Which, I argue, is not the case, because the transformation of US urban cores to unwalkable wastelands was a complex and decades-long process that had multiple causes, many of them unrelated to the issue of race. I’d tie this to another suggestion of mine, namely that we can make the same argument about the causes of white flight.
Also, I doubt there were segregation laws banning blacks from walkable urban areas altogether.
Less than 10% of blacks lived in urban environments before 1910 and virtually zero outside the South.
I am quite confused and feel like you are being ridiculous. The civil rights act wasn’t passed until 1964. So you could just arrest blacks for being in the wrong place before then.
So yes when you can take extreme mitigation (by modern standards) then blacks didn’t ruin nearly all urban environments in the US.
Many would also claim the urban environments began to fall apart before the 1980 date you chose. White flight was earlier.
I feel like you’re trying to force me into a ridiculous claim that a black person in Alabama was ruining Chicago. Black people didn’t show up in Chicago until later. And then Chicago lost the Southside in a handful of decades.
I'm just suggesting that your worldview is simplistic in this regard.
I don’t care if some things “simplistic”. I care if it’s an accurate model of the world. The end of the American walkable city perfectly correlates with the timeline of blacks moving into cities. If I made the exact same argument and said - “White flight occurred because white people are racists and moved to the suburbs (or redlined, zoning, etc) when black people moved to the city. Robbing the urban environment of economic resources to make strong comminities” - I would be a Professor at Harvard and you would likely praise my intellect. Instead of blaming white racism I am saying white people fled cities because black people came to cities and littered, trashed public spaces, killed people, couldn’t behave in schools, etc.
https://x.com/atlanticesque/status/2049111059613495356?s=46
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Yeah, I'm gonna tap the sign.
Let's imagine for a second that someone does not agree with you. What the fuck are they supposed to say? "Nuh uh"? At least when people cite crime statistics, they can have an actual argument over whether they're real, representative, whatever. What you've got here is made-up numbers and venting.
Fair. I was tone matching. And doing a generalized argument. From personal experience my hood in the 2010’s and more post covid in downtown Chicago faced falling property values with one of the reason being that violent crime increased. Just a month ago my old condo building had its convenience store robbed at gun point.
The process of white flight that largely occurred in the ‘60s was once again occurring in Chicago. Ken Griffin being the most prominent participant.
/images/1777224022404828.webp
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That was an ironic and underdiscussed part of the “Japan is Wakanda for white people” dicussion a few weeks back. To the extent Japan is Wakanda for white people, a large part of that is because Japan is generally devoid of the type of people who look like Wakandans.
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Um, aren't the best places abroad also typically places with porous borders and thus ever more melanising? If they'll let you in, they're not going to discriminate on race against others?
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The central lesson of social justice is strength über alles. If your people are weak, they will be subjugated - you must fight. If my people are weak, they will be subjugated - we must fight. There is no tolerance or coexistence. There's only power relation.
What's the point in having this conversation? Social skills are also a weapon, but only where people who matter might hear them.
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You’re supposed to bring facts to demonstrate that he’s wrong.
People much higher on the Actual Power totem-pole than “internet randos” lay out justifications all the time (followed by, y’know, actual laws) that white and asian people deserve to be discriminated against in hiring for high-prestige jobs (proportionally squeezing more of us into menial labour in the cotton fields), and most of us manage to respond to this without resorting to autistic screeching. Maybe they’re right! Maybe you, or I, do in fact deserve to be toiling on the plantation. If it’s right and true and just, then it’s to be celebrated, not struggled against. The only way we determine if it’s right and true and just is clear-headed discourse.
If society decides that it’s true and just for black people to be subjugated than I will struggle against it. Simple
More power to you! The society we live in has currently not decided that though, so why don't you instead engage in debate on the terms of the website which you have chosen to use?
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It's very unlikely that slavery will come back for blacks, at least in the US. White TFR in both the US and Europe is sinking. Why? Feminism, cost of living, more educated women, contraceptives, the list goes on. Only in Africa is TFR still high, and it's possible that there will be substantial black African immigration to the US in the future to replace an increasingly aging white workforce.
You should be rejoicing over the current population trends. The US will be increasingly black, and it's not as if black people will choose to enslave their own tribe. Or actually, the US might be increasingly latino, so the risk is that latinos decide to enslave blacks.
Let me suggest a course of action to better secure the future for all blacks. With no sarcasm, just impregnate as many females as you can, focusing particularly on latino and white women. Impregnating white women reduces the threat of a a white majority eliminating the 13th amendment, like you fear. Impregnanting latino women is securing the near future, which is likely to be latino dominated. Latino TFR is dropping too, so after that it will just be black TFR maintaining the world population.
Mixed race children with black ancestry are often treated as just black. The larger tribe is usually safer, especially in a democracy.
TLDR:
Don't want to be a slave? Make your tribe bigger, embrace democracy. HBD says my tribe is dumb? Who cares, I impregnated your tribe's women, we are all my tribe now.
The black population in America is declining as a percentage. Immigration comes heavily from everywhere but Africa, the AADOS TFR is lower than the white TFR, etc.
Yes, very much so. US black TFR is low - but their TFR is not the one that matters, it's the black African TFR that will immigrate and likely assimilate into US black culture. US/Canada are immigrant powered capitalist countries traditionally powered by immigrant labor. Even though AI is reducing the need for some labor, AI will not replace blue collar labor anytime soon. If we AI can replace my roof and fix my plumbing, we are in a very different, nearly post-scarcity society.
When latino immigration and TFR eventually dries up, as it is already doing, the last source of able bodied blue collar workers will be from Africa. The US by then will be older, much more latino, and in need of immigrant labor that can only be sourced in sufficient numbers from Africa. No one else will be willing to do blue collar work. We see the first signs of this in Somali immigration to the US, who are highly incentived to immigrate for a better life, and they are working blue collar jobs Americans don't really want.
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The transatlantic slave trade was largely Africans enslaving other Africans then selling those slaves to Europeans for transport.
Yes, true. But the culture of preindustrialized African societies is not the same as US blacks. Unless you are thinking that the propensity to enslave is genetic, rather than sociocultural, economic, and political opportunism. From the perspective of the Africans selling slaves back then, they were mostly selling the populations of rival tribes who were enemies. The romans enslaved the gauls, and they probably had a similar skin tone too. Selling off slaves of enemy populations was both profitable and weakened them in potential future conflicts. It was a good idea to sell them to distant strangers if possible, so the slaves would be unlikely to return for revenge.
So, the colonial age Africans who sold rival Africans were just doing what all of warring humanity had always done until the modern age. It does not mean US blacks will be more likely than average to sell other US blacks into slavery.
I don't think anyone is bringing back chattel slavery, since the economic conditions that made it useful no longer exist. The closest thing we have to modern chattel slavery, human trafficking, is mostly same race people victimizing each other. I don't think any US race is interested in enslaving any other race; it follows that the relative population of whites vs blacks is irrelevant to slavery in modern terms.
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Somehow the question of who evil whitey was buying the slaves from gets forgotten. For example, Biden’s apology to African leaders for America’s “original sin” of slavery. One summary made by wrongthinkers: “sorry for buying what you were selling.”
I've concluded that most people think Americans caught them in Africa with big butterfly nets.
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Well, it's fair to say the original sin of slavery is probably held by any large states that exist today, and thus indirectly by all modern populations except maybe the tiny islanders like the Sentinelese. Rome, Chinese dynasties, pretty much everywhere that won wars used some form of slavery.
America's slavery was in more recent memory and the ex-slaves have not fully genetically mixed into the descendants. Also Biden wanted to score some points with his voting base, so that was just tossing red meat (blue meat?) to the base.
Other than that, the justification for slavery, uplifting from barbarism, is bad from a modern Christian perspective. So a constant Christian apology must be given for the original sin of the past. The apologies will continue until the US is gone or until all of the US could be considered black.
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See this is an important and valuable post. He knows my ideas are a threat to him. He's not interested in abstract logic or the interests of other ethnic groups. Nobody could ever persuade him to give up power or his co-ethnics position for the sake of some universal value or the interests of others. The thought would never enter his mind. He would much rather fight and die than lose power. He doesn't spare a sentence to justify his case based on universal values (besides the value that blacks deserve more), he holds the very idea of justifying in contempt. Why should he need to justify his ethnic group's position?
He sees a threat to the power of his ethnic group and he rails against it as hard as he can. Because losing power is innately bad. Anything that reduces the power of blacks obviously threatens him, even if it's a random person deep down in the comments of a tiny internet forum speaking with people who either already agree or despise the idea. The interests of other groups? Totally irrelevant.
Likewise he appeals so deftly to the mythology that's been so painstakingly established, like I want blacks enslaved again. Who thinks blacks would add value as slaves? Machinery would do a much better job. But it's a great uniting narrative.
This is politics in action, that's the core of it fundamentally. You get power for you and yours, any threats to your power you identify and rail against. You unite your allies against the threat with myths, songs, poems and culture.
The guy who doesn't even proofread his final dramatic statement 'I'LL NEVER BE ACCEPT BEING A SLAVE!!!' has given us a masterclass in how normal people, non-WEIRD, non hyper-intellectual people actually see things, how things actually work. First-rate post that many here could learn valuable lessons from.
This is how and why schools give blacks all these bonus marks for admission, why Biden promised to appoint a black woman to the supreme court, why there are all these subsidies and contracts for nominally black businesses that then subcontract to whites when work is needed, why there is affirmative action in hiring, why there is an outcry when blacks are shot by police and why the AP style guide capitalizes Black and not white. It's a highly effective political strategy when left uncountered.
Suppose I made a utilitarian argument that the bottom 90% of whites (and other races) are dead weight loss that only survive because of taxes from the top 10% and we should strip their citizenship. Additionally, members of this group may, at any time, be harvested for organs, used for medical experiments, neutered and raped for our pleasure, or deported. Are you going to offer a counter-argument on utilitarian grounds? Or will you say something more like "fuck you, go ahead and try" chambers automatic weapon. You can only make a deontological argument that this is sick and evil.
I'll make my point very clearly.
He is dressing up a desire to retain wealth, special priveliges and high status as 'seeking equality' because these words are effective politically, especially against people who go in for these abstract logical points, who try to be charitable and fair and honest.
Blacks rape and murder whites for their pleasure all their time, culturally abetted by all these tropes about 'white women's tears' or 'To kill a Mockingjay'. Reality is the sickest possible inversion of the point you're trying to throw at me.
American girl, Stanford Graduate, Fulbright Scholar, anti-apartheid activist, goes to South Africa. Gets murdered by some blacks who hates whites. The blacks all get let off by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The father of the girl goes to South Africa to meet and forgive them:
You've got the parents of the murdered girl setting up a foundation to empower the murderers, directly employs two of four... That's what I'm saying is sick and evil, this bizarre worship of blacks that Americans have developed.
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You say all that as if "not being disenfranchised, particularly within the country they're very much not first-generation immigrants in" is an interest that's so uncommon and morally unreasonable for a group to hold that it can only be viewed with amused dispassion. "Look how politically effective their strategy is, asserting that they won't be second class!".
Yeah, it's insanely politically effective.
That's why they have all these special privileges, why they have these holy words that only blacks can use. If a white says the word, many consider it a justification for violence. A company hires too many whites, that apparently means blacks can sue them or get cushy jobs there to restore balance.
They shriek about not being slaves or having to sit at the back of the bus 70 years ago. Now, feeling emboldened, we see all these videos of blacks making massive scenes on public transport, playing the knockout game, pushing people onto the rails in subway stations, threatening and leering and occasionally murdering white people like Iryna.
Some black drug dealer gets choked under arrest or dies of fent and it's a global event of massive significance, all this evil racism. A black ties up and beats a 3 year old white girl to death and nobody could care less, this is apparently trivial news of no racial significance.
https://www.wesh.com/article/man-arrested-for-death-3-year-old-child-marion-county/70432617
They enjoy being treated like noblemen in some feudal backwater and shriek about being oppressed or how they might be treated as second-class in the future, it's a comical inversion of reality. Meanwhile the people who are being treated as second-class, who are being spat at and harassed in the present are often defending them or oh so careful to say they're not racist or prejudiced.
Is it morally unreasonable for a group to assert that they will not be second class citizens?
It's unreasonable to do so while victimizing other groups at hugely disproportionate rates and getting preferential treatment across society.
In each of my posts I bring up examples in the present of how whites are being treated badly in favour of blacks. What argument do you think I'm making with those points?
Is a particular black man responsible for a proportion of other black men victimizing someone or having gotten preferential treatment, that he should not argue for the bottom line of not being made into a second class citizen because of what the others did?
I think you're making the argument that currently, the powers that be are overly protective of the bad blacks in the way that they are not of bad whites. I agree with that assessment.
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Are there any left-wing arguments that right-wingers are allowed to have emotional spergouts about, and you will personally defend them if they do?
I do not care to project my position on every issue ever ahead of time to prove to you I'm not a committed partisan or something. You can check my post history if you're really curious and go with that.
I'm not asking you to prove your past track record, I'm asking if you can think of a similar argument from the other side that you would treat the same way.
If there was a similar argument on the "other side" that convinced me, it would be an argument on my side. I reject your attempts to shoehorn me as a leftwinger, whose arguments must be scrutinized for sincerity if they happen to oppose rightwinger arguments.
If you think there's no discussion with me because I'm partisan then there is no discussion to be had. If you have specific evidence of my partisanship then you can list that.
I'm not shoehorning you with anybody. I'm just bemused that these "group X should be able to react emotionally to your arguments" demands are seemingly only made of me, and literally never on my behalf. I couldn't care less which group you belong to, or if you don't belong to any group at all, I care about the dynamics.
There appears to be plenty of emotional reactions to all sorts of arguments here.
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There is a difference, not just of degree but of kind, between "I refuse to give up a superior position and be equal to my neighbour." and "I refuse to give up an equal position and be inferior to my neighbour."
It is entirely consistent to condemn the former while holding to the latter.
What's really going on though isn't so much a matter of principles. That's my whole point:
I know armchair philosophizing is bad and we really shouldn't try to psychoanalyze people we've never met. But I'd bet that the guy who gets so angry about my comment that he responds with this and then comes back months later, still enraged, is not really motivated by abstract, consistent moral logic. It's pure group identity. He sees someone that says something bad about blacks, he pattern-matches it to slavery (I never even mentioned slavery), he's enraged past the point of reason.
He comes back and dresses it up more but the underlying motivation is clear.
Yes actually. I care about my group identity. I don’t understand how this is supposed to be an argument against me
I don't have any problem with you caring about and working to advance your group identity. Do you have any problem with whites caring about and advancing their group identity in the way you do? If you say no, I will consider you a hypocrite, but I still won't have any problem with you objecting to your own race being discriminated against or enslaved, of course.
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Everyone can see you care about your group identity.
You are using abstract moral logic as a tool to defend your group identity and claims to resources. And not sincerely, not actually using it, invoking these talismans like slavery or Jim Crow and hoping that credulous white people think they've done something wrong and don't play the same game. For if white people advance their own group interests as energetically as your group advances yours, you'd be in lots of trouble.
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But is Mr Wara objecting to his group being treated as equal when he thinks it entitled to superiority, or is he objecting to his group being treated as inferior when it deserves equality?
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Block them. Or, if you are stronger person than me, ignore them. Or, if you are a real life hero, a model to us all and an enviable example to many, calmly and artfully demolish their argument. But calling them slurs would probably only please them (and the inevitable ban that follows would delight them even more). If your enemy loses it, that means you are getting to them, and that's a kind of winning. To some, the only kind they could ever get.
But is it really what is happening? I mean, what are the chances for the reincarnation of slavery in the US, practically? I would say, zero. I mean, if the current civilization collapses - even less, even only the Western civilization collapses, and the US territory is captured by another civilization - then the slavery would return. In fact, the slavery exists right now, in our times, outside the West. But as long as the current United States exist, and are rooted in the Western civilization values, the return of the slavery is impossible.
Thus, these people are not a real threat to you, at least as far as return of slavery is concerned. They are a threat to you as far as making you appear weak, incoherent and unable to argue your side.
Actually, yes, if you choose to participate in a forum like this (a free choice), some kind of intellectual-ass rebuttal is what is expected. That's what this particular place is for. Nobody could ever force you to play this game, moreover, nobody would think less of you if you opted out, but if you're playing then those are the rules. You don't have to plead or beg - you can appear as strong and forceful and confident as you like - but just throwing abuse around is not going to do any good.
I would say the renewal of chattel slavery isn't impossible in US - but it would require dramatic changes in culture and/or government to be possible. It would at minimum take a constitutional amendment and broad social acceptance.
At that point, historians would be looking back and say, yeah, that's the end of 'classical' western civilization and the rise of 'neo-western' civilization.
I think changes in technology would have a greater impact; e. g. Alien Space Bats zapping away everything from the steam engine onward. (It's not a coincidence that the Industrial Revolution and the Abolitionist movement came from the same island, and contra Stuart McMillen, the fastest route to the reinstatement of chattel slavery of human beings would be the abolition of the so-called 'energy slaves' of Buckminster Fuller; baruch haShem, fossil hydrocarbons are not the ultima Thule of energy abundance.)
No need for alien space bats, a nuclear barrage exchange is sufficient to reduce our tech base level if the destruction is thorough enough. Like the cannibal slaver gangs from Fallout.
Alien Space Bats was just the first thing I thought of; a nuclear exchange, supervolcano, or asteroid impact of sufficient magnitude, or a political victory by the degrowtherismists, would also fit in that space.
(e. g. = for example; i. e. = in other words.)
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Even pre-industrialization Medieval/Early Modern Western Europe and Medieval China, while having forms of coerced labor, did not have Chattel Slavery. While I'm not 100% percent certain about a grand theory of 'where do societies have chattel slavery', industrialization seems to be a sufficient, but not necessary, ingredient of a society that doesn't have chattel slavery.
True; I only referred to chattel slavery because the previous posters were arguing whether or not its restoration was an absolute impossibility. A society deprived of machines might very well turn not to chattel slavery but to serfdom, casteism, enslavement of petty criminals combined with an extremely strict and micromanaging legal code, enslavement of prisoners of war combined with a bellicose foreign policy, or some form of unfree labour not currently attested in history. What wouldn't happen is everyone accepting a life of drudgery without complaint. People want to make their lives easier, and obtain greater creature comforts for less toil; if they can't shift their workload onto machines, they will seek to dump it on to people weaker than themselves.
That is very good insight. I think the clearest case today are hard manual laborer jobs in the first world; you either get coercion in the form of parolees and/or prisoners doing them, or third world immigrants often of dubious legal status doing them. I don't think there is a way around this except growth and automation to the point where robots do those jobs instead, which is another example of your point.
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Now this is the kind of energy holocaust deniers need to cultivate. Proactive. Assertive. 'The holocaust didn't happen, but keep citing Nizkor and it might! Right here, right now!'
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.
What's with this hard-on all you reactionaries have for collective punishment? Some black people commit crimes targeting white people, so now every black person is guilty and deserves to be greeted with the most inflammatory word you could throw at them?
And oh, what a magnanimous sacrifice it is, apparently, to simply not racially abuse strangers who have no connection to the events you're citing. You're absorbing crime statistics, almost certainly wholly unrelated to you personally, and Chi_Wara is sitting in a forum reading a direct argument for his own ethnic subjugation. These are being presented as equivalent burdens requiring equivalent restraint. They are not.
What are the reactionaries reacting to? I'll just make the case as quickly as I can since you brought it up.
Collective guilt is the game being played on all sides. That's why, when black outcomes aren't on par with whites, we blame systemic racism, which is allegedly perpetuated by the existence of white people.
So whites swallow their ingroup bias, funnel trillions to a minority group that disproportionately rapes, robs and murders, all whilst being continuously bombarded with crap about how evil whites are. Yeah, it is a pretty... 'magnanimous' thing to do. I'd call it hateful and coercive to do that to whites or any other group of people, but whatever.
Given that state of affairs, I don't feel like an increase in the black share of my environment, near or far, is unrelated to me. So to borrow a phrase from our friend: THAT FUCKING AFFECTS ME. I'M WHITE.
Hmm. Maybe we should take a step back here. Unless I am missing context, RR didn't say blacks should be subjugated or enslaved.
Regardless of that, my point was that two people had an ethnic grievance directed at each others group. One chose to make a point that can be verbally engaged with, the other called him slurs and said he deserved to be killed.
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To be fair though, if someone was talking about hurting you, then is there much of a meaningful difference if they say it with an emotional passion vs a deadpan matter of fact tone? Either way their intent and meaning is the same, they want to hurt you!
"I want to kill people like you" vs "I want to fucking kill people like you" only really differs in that maybe the emotional passion behind the second makes it more believable. But if we believe both to be equally honest, then what difference is left in actual meaning? Even if we dress it up as "I believe it is beneficial to me and my group if we killed people like you" it's basically the same.
If we have an issue with the swear one but not the other two then it comes off more as prudishness about swearing or "conduct" rather than anything else.
Like look at the mod response
So if they said "I politically believe that people like me are benefited from seeing people with views like you as demonic monsters and that killing you would be a net positive to my group's quality of life" is that really gonna be ok?
There are many screeds on this site against Jews and to a lesser extent East Asians (mostly Chinese?) which are dignified with coherent, if scathing, responses. While I sympathise with the poster insofar as that his "team" is much more sparse than a Jewish or an East Asian poster's would be in this arena, and the animosity against blacks here would definitely be extremely unpleasant for a black person, it's not like 2rafa flames out on the regular when one of the resident jooposters posts another novella's worth of holocaust denial.
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Yes, those are the rules. Anyone is free to express their desire to commit torture, rape, and genocide as long as they are polite about it. That may seem ridiculous, but it has worked out for us so far, while other comparable fora have died from lack of engagement or collapsed into (greater) ideological conformity.
It's an interesting sort of prudishness to find support for something like the Holocaust as acceptable, every slur imaginable is allowed, but a little bit of swearing could be beyond the pale if it's found to be "rude".
Is "I am politically working towards the goal that you and your entire people are subhumans who will be subjected to cruel torture and genocide" a polite statement? If so, how about "I'm gonna beat your mother, cause fuck you". Both are hypothetical goals of enacting violence on the other speaker.
I think most people in general society would agree that genocide and murder is worse than just beating someone up and calling them a few swears while doing it, but hey maybe the normies just don't understand what being polite actually means.
As if this place isn't mostly like 7-8 people who are that active
Yeah, it's already severely conformist with how aggressive people are (refer back to how it's circlejerked so hard that calls for violence against someone are seen as more polite than a little swearing) but I'll admit I've seen worse among some of the online tankie groups.
It's not the swearing. Generally, you can swear all you want, though a post that seems to be full of swearing used as punctuation just to be edgy might be modded for being low-effort and trollish.
And slurs are allowed in that you can use the words, but you cannot call people slurs.
What you can't do is engage in personal attacks.
You also cannot make general statements about your outgroup, and generally we will also mod calls for violence.
The Joo-posters are always walking a fine line, because "Here is why the Holocaust is a lie" is an argument you are allowed to make. "Here is why Jews have too much political power" is an argument you are allowed to make. "Here is why we should kill the Jews" (the argument they really want to make) is not an argument you are allowed to make.
No, which is why they aren't allowed to explicitly advocate for that. Steelmanning the Joo-posters and white nationalists, I am sure many of them would say they don't want to subject their enemies to torture and genocide, they just want to send them somewhere else. (You know, like the Nazis just wanted to send the Jews "somewhere else.") It's almost plausible in some cases. And you can make an arguable case for peaceful separation; that's @Hoffmeister's thing, and while I think his project is both infeasible and immoral, I believe he's sincere about it.
Obviously, literal genocide and murder is worse than "beating someone up and calling them a few swears."
But the actual comparison here is "using words" versus "actual physical violence."
You're using the "words are violence" framing here, which is absolutely toxic to the very idea that we can have heated discourse and free speech.
Which is worse: me saying "I think your kind should all be murdered" or you physically assaulting me for saying that?
I would argue that while my words are insulting and inflammatory (and in certain circumstances, but certainly not an internet forum argument, could even be considered threatening) and your anger is understandable, you are not justified in physically assaulting me for saying mean words.
We have more than that, but sure, what's your point? We're a bunch of losers who don't matter, but you hang around here because you need to argue with the losers who don't matter or they might commit genocide?
Who has called for violence against the OP?
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It has long been Noticed as a trope that: in their responses to hate facts, wrongthink, malinformation—blacks tend to reinforce the bases behind such hate facts, wrongthink, malinformation via the level of impulsivity and (lack of) erudition in their responses. And yet, still get coddled with the Gordon Ramsay “oh dear, oh dear, gorgeous” treatment.
@The_Nybbler is actually slinging some hopium in positing that OP is a troll, although it’s possible he’s right. Poe’s Law.
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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.
Probably not Jim Crow, but slavery in the United States had a sincere paternalistic dimension, and that social dynamic no longer exists. Slave Owners actually did have a social responsibility for their slaves. Whites today do not have a similar social burden because blacks have equal rights. Social Justice rhetoric tries to infuse the paternalistic social burden onto whites even in the state of equal rights, through racial guilt and scapegoating whites as the cause of persistent dysfunction in the black community, but that's what modern racists reject.
It's not because they are more hateful per se, it's a totally different social dynamic and Whites no longer have a duty to uphold in that dynamic.
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As I explained earlier, the humiliation is the grievance. Blacks don't have to be enslaved to be treated as a slave race, which is the necessary conclusion of HBD-inspired right-wing thought.
Yeah, they pretty much do. Anyway, that's not a conclusion of "HBD-inspired right-wing thought". When slavery was still a thing there were those who thought blacks were natural slaves, but I believe the HBD types believe that blacks actually make terrible slaves.
In fairness, I admit that the exact phrasing of "treated as a slave race" is too extreme. Still, any real measures to address black dysfunction would necessarily entail the solidification of disproportionate outcomes between whites and blacks, which would inevitably fuel the resentment towards whites that has burned in the heart of the black man since 1619.
Aww, you ruined the surprise - I was building up to that. But yes, the widespread acceptance of HBD among whites is an existential threat to blacks, and in varying degrees to all non-whites.
Blacks already resent whites. If blacks insist on equality of result as a condition for ending their resentment, they (and white people) are just going to have to deal with the resentment.
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No, it isn't. Widespread acceptance of HBD among whites is unlikely to lead to genocide of blacks, and certainly not of East Asians.
They have not, and will not, simply "just deal with the resentment", as evidenced by all of American race relations since Reconstruction.
You're right writ. East Asians, hence my qualifier "in varying degrees". But towards other non-whites, and especially towards blacks, the argument put forth by Teddy Roosevelt (and in my linked comment above) is simply correct, and by extension blacks are correct in doing everything in their power to hold back the day when acceptance of HBD reaches critical mass among whites.
They're not going to have a choice. Because the alternative simply doesn't work.
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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
Is it? While Jim Crow was in vogue, USA prospered. The last remnants of Jim Crow fell in 1968 and USA started going to shit in 1971 ...
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Dollars to donuts YOU never experienced it. And speaking favorably about Jim Crow isn't Jim Crow. And further, /u/RandomRanger didn't even do that. He pointed out some unfavorable things about blacks, and made some unflattering generalizations against them. But the only things he advocated for (and those only implicitly) is to not let foreign blacks move to Britain, Australia, and America and to not give blacks in those places free stuff and special privileges. But I understand that when one is accustomed to privilege, equality can feel like oppression.
Did you read the second linked comment? He pretty explicitly advocates for the barring of blacks from public office.
He actually didn't explictly advocate for that; he presented two thought experiments, one in which all public officeholders were black and one in which they were all non-black, and claimed the outcome would be better in the second. But that's still not "Jim Crow".
Arguing over semantics does you no good. The logic presented in his comment also justifies the mass disenfranchisement of blacks ("as to minimize their deleterious effects on national politics"), their segregation from whites in public spaces ("to spare whites from their criminality"), and the banning of interracial relationships ("to not pollute the white gene pool"), just as any Southerner would understand how to keep the blacks in their place.
Semantics is meaning. WTF else are we to argue about, syntax?
And "he implicitly makes arguments which, if extended, would result in segregation" is a long way from (explicitly) advocating for Jim Crow.
I, too, would like to reduce black criminality. I don't want to do it by segregating blacks (I live in a suburban town that has a substantial black population -- this was partially due to black flight from Newark, NJ and its inner suburbs, and those blacks weren't fleeing whites). I want to do it by arresting and convicting actual criminals who commit crimes against persons and property which would be recognized as crimes throughout most of history -- that this might have a by-catch of white criminals also is fine. But I recognize that those caught, at least in most urban and suburban areas of the US, will be rather disproportionately black.
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It's not semantics. "Implicitly" means a completely different thing than "explicitly", and your argument is nowhere near as strong if you meant the former.
It might, or it might not, depending on many other factors. Reacting aggressively before determining what he said was true, is actually giving more strength to that argument than he did.
Any other factors in question are contingent on the truth of HBD, which I assume you and I are in agreement on.
RandomRanger's argument is sound, I don't dispute that. Before I elaborate further, I'd like to know: what do you think my argument is?
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On the books, its possible, in practice DEI actually held back far more people with potential.
The harm from Jim Crow was largely not from the suppression of Black talent, but in the message it sent to the Black man - that even after he was freed, he was still the White man's strict social inferior.
The law is a teacher. If it is correct that is good
Yes, it is good - for Whites. I do not dispute the facts of HBD, I simply note that the interests of the White man and the Black man are fundamentally at odds. I hope dearly it is not so, but this is the only conclusion I can draw.
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All of these sting but truth still stings today. Now that there are almost no practical barriers to success, African-Americans still lag behind. They still lag behind fresh-off-the-boat immigrants who recently learned English as a second language.
I'm curious about what he would have thought of the current state of the respective nations of Asia and Africa. Would he have changed his mind about the necessity of political independence for Africans after witnessing decades of barbaric civil wars, horrible mismanagement... etc?
Can somebody predict the next thing African-Americans will blame their relative lack of success on in the next century?
DEI elevating useless sycophants and grifters, attempting to shoehorn black talent into a 'systemic racist' white academic system instead of focusing efforts on building a separate black one? White people refusing to have children that black parents could send their kids to school with to 'integrate' them? The racist government-subsidized industrial food system? The coke-to-diabetes pipeline? Greedy marketing executives forcing black mothers to feed liquid corn syrup to their innocent children?
The excuses and just-so narratives can keep coming longer than you can remain solvent.
Institutional Racism
Socioeconomic Factors
Food Deserts
Food Insecurity
Nutritional Inequity <- We’re already here.
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I feel I should note that I could switch some words around in this sentence ("suppression of male talent", "the woman's social inferior") and then draw a line between DIE and "quiet quitting".
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Was worse. Jim Crow does not exist anymore - in fact, it is so officially banned that a lot of freedoms which were considered absolute before - such as freedom of association, freedom of conducting or refusing business, locality of power, etc. - had been abridged by the government to not let it ever come back. I am not going to argue whether it was worth it - that's not my point is. My point is - DEI is with us right now, right here, and impacts the lives of millions. Something bad that happened in the past may be really bad, but it was the past. We can not influence it, and it can not influence us anymore. But DEI is something that is happening in the present.
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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?
Yeah, and Charlie Kirk faked his death.
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Eh, there kind of is. The cancellation movement inflicted RL punishments for people's Internet speech (including, outside the US, some people being jailed), and even in the literal sense it's not usually impossible to track down someone from the Internet and murder him (though there are a few on theMotte in particular who have taken massive precautions against that).
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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
As far as I can tell, even the alleged racists themselves don't think it will happen. As far as I can tell, the people here see themselves not unlike a country about to fall and barely holding on. Conversely the left is culturally dominant, held back only by squandering power on absurd causes.
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And you would be right to do so, if indeed that happened. But it's not happening, and the chances of that happening, however much any random ranging racist wants it, are pretty low nowdays. And that's a good thing.
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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.
I'm betting on SecureSignals for most blocked user. I haven't blocked anyone, but I minimize their particular contributions and move on.
Edit: this person previously blocked me. I don't think I ever interacted with them other than this comment. They are not kidding about exercising the block function.
Blocking people are for people who are weak emotionally especially the people describing why they do it in these comments. The legitimate reason to block someone is if they are essentially spam. Blocking because you can’t emotionally handle their positions is for losers.
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I'm also blocked by them. I'm honestly surprised anyone thought I was noteworthy enough to block.
He must be a Luca Goers or Al Bhed Psyches fan.
Edit: on second thought, he's probably not a Psyches fan, the Al Bhed are too Jew-coded.
Good point!
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Isn't there a rule against mass blocking? We have a handful of relatively prolific posters who seem to have blocked every other prolific poster.
No, there's no rule against blocking people. You can block anyone you want to. (Some people even block mods. This does not prevent you from being modded.) If you use it to taunt the people you've blocked, you might be modded for antagonism.
There was one back on Reddit, because they prevented the blocked from replying to the blockee at all, rather than just hiding the response from them.
Ah yes. Well, blocking worked differently there. We allow people to block mods, for example (though I think @ZorbaTHut should change that so mod-hatted messages can't be blocked) because mods can still warn and ban posters who block them. (And if you block me, and I warn you, and you don't heed the warning, we will not distinguish between "couldn't read it because I blocked you" and "chose to ignore you.")
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Unfortunately, the blocks page is in chronological order. And also might not be generally visible. You might be able to extract the data, though.
Only mods can see that, which I think is a good thing.
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It's not. 403 Forbidden.
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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.
Huh? Like what? Rap? Scam culture? So confused by this comment.
Men clap each other on the back and are extremely warm with each other. Black people gas each other up all the time. There's a physical vitality and liveliness that I don't see celebrated as much in white culture. A focus on athleticism, and physical strength.
There's also a general rootedness, less of a willingness to just pick up and leave your entire family on a whim for a better social scene or career prospects. All of these are good things, imo.
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Black culture is more warm in the sense that people are gregarious, speak louder, touch each other more, and have more large raucous social gatherings than certain types of borderline autistic northern Europeans or WASPs who stand six feet apart, never talk over each other, and eat meals of boiled potatoes and beef in respectful silence. Of course, not all western cultures are like the latter, and southern whites in the US are noticeably more similar to their black neighbors in behavior, food, accent, etc. compared to northeners.
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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.
I'm definitely in favor of more hardcore sentencing for violent criminals, at least repeat offenders. Three strike laws for instance, when it comes to violent crime, are totally fine for me. Definitely not woke myself in other areas.
That doesn't mean that I think black people are inferior, subhuman, or deserve to be treated overall with less dignity than white people.
Good for you?
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The thing is, reducing violent crime is not that hard. I mean not brining it to zero, but bringing it to a place where it's not an everyday concern to a layperson. It has been done, and it has been undone, and in both cases it not a function of genetics or races or any of that stuff. It's just the question of resources and consistent unyielding enforcement. You just need to catch the criminals and put them in jail and keep them there. You don't need to analyze their genes or skin color to do that. It is true that people who un-do it, very much look at genes and skin color as a justification of why they are not doing the right thing, but there's no reason to uphold their framework and only change the signs. It is possible to toss the whole broken framework altogether and replace it with one that looks at the actual behavior and not genetics. You don't put people in jail for their genes, just for their crimes. If you do that, you don't need any HBD. I mean, you can still do a PhD in theorizing about what causes people to do crime, but practically it doesn't matter - if the criminals are in jail, nobody cares about their biology. Everybody cares that they are in jail.
Until five seconds later when someone accuses you of being the Grand Wizard because the people you locked up were disproportionately black. C'mon now, I know you didn't just fall off the turnip truck.
You are saying "I must be racist because other people are racist, so I need to be exactly like them, but with different sign". No, you don't. You missed all of my point exactly. The people that would accuse you would be racists, but you do not need to build your own racism to defend against them. I just showed you the correct way, and you treat it as some kind of weird nonsense. That's the problem.
Oh okay, when a bunch of wokies paint me as Hitler and try to terminate my career because I colorblindly arrested six times as many black guys, or whatever, I'll just pass them a copy of your post. It'll fill their hearts with a sense of civic virtue and society as a whole will decide that actually it doesn't really want the answer to that question after all. Then, finally, at last, no one will "need" the actual answer and you can quit hearing about HBD.
I'm not sure how this even computes. OK, I understand you are pissed off at the wokes. I am too. They are totally wrong. But then something bizarre happens. I am saying "yes, we should ignore the wokes and arrest as many black guys as commit crimes. And as many white guys as commit crimes". But you say - no, that's not gonna work. You see, the wokes are in the way, so the only way to solve it is to build this theory that treats black people as low quality humans, and somehow introduce it it into all the society, and obsess about wide-populational statistical differences. And when I am asking - well, how exactly that is going to help with arresting the actual criminals and keeping them in jail? You tell me - but the wokes! The wokes!!! The wokes!!! Yes, I know, the wokes. The wokes are bad. The wokes are racist. They are making everything worse. I got that. The part I didn't get is how exactly HBD is helping you here? I am saying the practical way to solve the crime is to put criminals in jail. You are saying it's impossible because the wokes would interfere and thus we need HBD. But how HBD is helping you? Sure, you could start despising black people for their supposed statistical inferiority... and? How that solves anything?
The wokes get their justification by claiming that disparate sentencing alone proves that law enforcement is racist and illegitimate, and having wide public agreement for this because HBD arguments are taboo and can't be uttered in polite society. If HBD became common knowledge, this would stop working.
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HBD comes in when you do that, then look at the people in the jails and notice they don't look like the general population.
Crime does not look like the general population, because criminals aren't general population. That's why we lock them up in jails. If everybody would be equally likely to commit crime, locking people up would be useless. But it's actually very useful, because only a very small number of people, compared to the whole population, does crime, and even smaller one - does crime repeatedly. But again, you do not need to have scientific explanation why every person does crime to lock up criminals, no more than you need to study quantum gravity theory to build a bridge that does not collapse. The practical way is easy.
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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.
Well brotha we can’t exactly “embrace individualism” so long as the RandomRangers of the world view us as part of a community. I don’t think you should be the kind of reflexive tribalist who defends whatever a black person does. That’s the kind of mindset that makes race relations and “our community” much worse. But the reason I’m invested in “the black community” is the simple fact that how ousiders perceive us as a collective DOES IN FACT affect US as individuals. They did not spare the “good blacks” the last time and I don’t want to have to rely on rolling the dice and hoping that they will the next.
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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'm not sure I see how this would work. Progressivism doesn't have the sort of separate magisterium firewall we've been culturally evolving for recognized religions probably since the Roman Empire, where people agree to a game of partial make-believe around it. By its own lights, it's supposed to be the for-real, actual undistorted picture of reality, no myth-making or noble lies. So if it turns out there were noble lies placed into the foundation after all, it's not an idea you can entertain in a discussion, it's an existential threat, you need to set up a totalitarian system of suppression and taboos around them or risk your whole edifice crumbling.
The same is true of Christianity if you actually believe in it, which by all accounts Tim Keller does.
That's what the texts Christians are supposed to believe in say, but the reality is pretty complex. Educated people in medieval Europe probably could claim Christian metaphysics as the correct theory of reality and not get pushback, but at some point pretty long ago this stopped being a thing. I'm pretty sure things had moved from thinking this was literally true to lip service by the late 1800s, and by now the Christians themselves know this too. There's a lot of twisting your brain to apologetics-pretzels to keep things going, and everyone openly knows that apologetics-pretzels-work can be necessary even for the people on the inside and there's no deep exchange of ideas with people on the outside because outsiders will just point-blank reject essential premises of the religious worldview. There's also very long tradition of co-existing with religions you don't share, which relies on things being explicitly labelled with "this is a religion", which is only a thing if you're living in a cosmopolitan society where you actually need to routinely deal with multiple religions.
Progressivism right now is a lot more like what religions might have been like in societies before things got to the point of a cosmopolitan Roman Empire. At that point people weren't saying "this is our religion", it was just the shared understanding how to act in the society and what the world was like. Once you need to interact regularly with people who have a different religion who you can't just conquer and subjugate, your own religion has a new authority problem and you start needing words like "religion". Once the world starts being much bigger and more advanced than when your religion was formulated, so your religious dogma both looks absurd at face value and your clerics start getting curbstomped in public debates because people don't share their load-bearing assumptions about how their worldview works anymore, you have more problems. Progressivism is still new enough that it hasn't really run into either of these problems, while they have been undeniable reality for religious people for centuries now. You can say Christianity is the literal truth, but with the sociological support not being around anymore it will look like performing to everyone, and people will assume even you treat it as performative more than literal.
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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.
It's rare for me to find someone complaining about both. No, really! Most people say 'racism' (by which they mean 'bigotry') and leave it at that.
How are you distinguishing between the two?
IMO racism is the belief that there are, on average, substantial genetically-rooted differences in behavioral proclivities among different populations, which is at this point beyond question -- not that it ever should have been otherwise (we did just get this cool new paper in Nature though! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10358-1). In other words, racism is simply right and true.
Now, whether acting accordingly to that knowledge is 'bigotry' is an interesting conversation, but not one I almost ever see anyone have.
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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.
I am strongly in favor of institutional color- and gender-blindness. Give everyone the same admission test, and if half of the people with the top scores are Ashkenazim, that should be of little interest to the university.
I think that this is what MLK argued for -- let everyone compete on equal footing, and let the outcome be what it may. Racial equality before the law seems an excellent idea, but does not imply racial equality of outcomes. Nor is the latter required for peaceful coexistence.
When it became apparent that equal(ish) opportunity does not lead to equal outcomes, it was the SJ left who defected from colorblindness, and pushed for racial discrimination. This creates perverse incentives. If medical school was colorblind, then I as a not overtly racist patient would have no reason to care about the skin color of my doctor -- after all, they all competed on merit. If the schools practice affirmative action, then as a rational patient I would prefer a doctor whose racial group would be overrepresented in a meritocratic system, e.g. someone White or Asian. It is hard to overstate how fucked up this is. We have the tools to measure individual merit much better than what racial stereotyping -- even if backed up with decades of HBD research -- could ever accomplish. And then we forgo these tools, so crude racial stereotyping will be the most effective tool for the individual. (I think the reason is that SJ does not really believe in individual qualifications. High-earning careers are simply deserved.)
But that's the problem - when institutional and color-/gender-blindness happens and fail to achieve equitable outcomes, people lose their minds, because any explanation other than structural bias is unacceptable. If they resort to explanations that are Less Wrong, then everything implodes.
"What can be destroyed by the truth should be" is something that most of the world won't agree on when they are what will be destroyed in the process.
Yep.
As an Elder Millenial I can recall the colorblind world that the Gen Xers were trying to create being very close to fruition...
But the snag came because disparate outcomes were inevitable. Once you'd done everything you can to level playing fields and boost disadvantaged players, the remaining disparities are probably intractable. Whatever reasons you think cause that, its still resulting in one group seeing better performance, better outcomes on average, and your other group is still lagging and you've already skimmed the cream of the crop.
And if you sneak in an assumption that equal outcomes is the true goal, this can't be allowed to stand.
I've lived through both the realization that the actual goal was to ensure equality of outcomes, and the increasing ham-handed efforts to achieve such a goal...
AND the ultimate realization that to make things equal, they have to actively disadvantage people who would otherwise find success and contribute more to society, and they feel this disadvantaging is morally justified and right.
Even as this gnaws at the load-bearing infrastructure of your civilization in more ways than one. The colorblind world was probably possible, but it was an unstable equilibrium that required us to be okay with some groups just continuing to 'win' fair contests and certain groups hitting a ceiling that we can't guide them past.
It's because if the reasons are subject to the hard reality that there's nothing that will make a poor white kid run a marathon faster than a Kenyan, there's no point in the kid trying in the first place. And that's not something people are willing to say.
It's one thing to design society to be Gattaca, it's another thing entirely to be told that Gattaca already exists and statistically, certain things are close to impossible for you and your children. An entire generation that was told growing up that they could be President or go to space hasn't come to terms with it.
That's probably a part of it.
There was an element of inflated expectations that kids in my generation grew up with. I get the sense that Gen Z does NOT have such a core belief of "I am a being of unlimited potential I just have to choose my goal and work at it!" So they're more nihilist, whereas a lot of millenials had to learn some hard lessons about their own
I, personally internalized something like The Mewtwo Lesson. But it turns out that the "circumstances of one's birth" are pretty damn relevant to your long term outcomes, and you can either lean into your existing strengths or you'll inherently underperform and end up fighting twice as hard for half the success. And that's assuming nobody has actually stacked the deck against you.
Cold meritocracy pokes through either way. We have more ways to make people's skill differentials apparent than ever before.
The original Pokemon games were lowkey based for teaching children a lesson.
You can give your Pokemon team all the tender loving care in the world, the best socioeconomic factors, take them on bike rides, play them the Pokeflute, bring them on cruises like the SS Anne, nurture them from the time they were level 5 with careful battle experience and with the best potions, ethers, elixirs, and rare candies that money can buy.
Yet, a Mewtwo who spent half his life experimented upon in a lab and the other half of his life isolated in a cave can solo your carefully-crafted, nurture-maxxed team.
Funny anectdote on that. In the original Red, Blue, and Yellow games the early version of Effort values meant if you leveled up your Pokemon the standard way, just constant battles, its 'under the hood' stats would actually be higher than if you cheated it with rare candies to reach level 100. I chose to level my favorites by grinding the Elite 4 and Cerulean cave.
So one time I battled my cousin using the Gameboy link cable (how's that for old school) and his team of straight level 100 'mon, and me, my strongest being a level 98 Mewtwo, and it turned into a surprise stomp in my favor, although it did come down to both of our Mewtwos in a slapfight to end it. I had NO CLUE about the hidden stats, I just chose to believe that because I had raised my pokemon with more care and attention as opposed to just pumping them with chemicals, they wanted to fight harder.
So the lesson is that yeah, sometimes pure effort does win over mere pedigree and performance enhancing drugs.
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I have to correct you here- MLK was very much in favor of Affirmative Action and reparations. Yes, his ultimate goal was a "colorblind" world, but he was not in favor of institutional colorblindness until the scales were balanced. He wrote about this quite extensively.
A lot of people today, even conservatives, like to throw their arms around the shoulders of MLK's ghost and claim ideological kinship with him, but the fact is, if MLK were alive today, he'd be very much a SJ. Perhaps a more intellectual one than Ibram X Kendi, but I doubt he'd accept HBD as an explanation for why blacks aren't achieving equal outcomes.
He was in favor of AA as a temporary corrective required to rebalance the scales. It is not at all clear that 70+ years later he would still endorse it. And in a decade or so, everyone in the US will have been born after the CRA.
At the very least, consider Return of the King as the alternative view.
well were there any people who said something like "after NN years of AA, i changed opinion and don't endorse it"? Quite a lot of people only doubled down on that.
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Agreed, we can extend this to a host of other progressive thinkers and even creatives as well. See the modern-day genre re-readings of Ursula K. Le Guin, who was already ahead of her time and could be considered woke even today.
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