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Goodguy  1d ago (text post)   Edited 1d ago   8220 thread views

Midterms Megathread

Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.

The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.

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It reminds me about an old SSC post about the politics of his readership. It was mostly Bay Area bugman leftists for the obvious reasons, but among the right-wing minority there were a lot of (self-identified) libertarians, enough neoreactionaries to be worth making them a line item in the report, a significant number of people who wrote screeds about their unique political views in the free-text box, and precisely zero mainstream red tribe conservatives. My impression is that the founding stock of the Motte is that eclectic "grey tribe" libertarian-leaning right-wing minority of the original SSC readership.

@JeSuisCharlie correctly senses that this is not a red tribe forum, and concludes that it must secretly be a leftist one. I suspect he would feel the same way on a European monarchist forum or suchlike.

It reminds me about an old SSC post about the politics of his readership. It was mostly Bay Area bugman leftists for the obvious reasons, but among the right-wing minority there were a lot of (self-identified) libertarians, enough neoreactionaries to be worth making them a line item in the report, a significant number of people who wrote screeds about their unique political views in the free-text box, and precisely zero mainstream red tribe conservatives.

That would be "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup":

But I’m not only on Reddit. I also hang out on LW.

On last year’s survey, I found that of American LWers who identify with one of the two major political parties, 80% are Democrat and 20% Republican, which actually sounds pretty balanced compared to some of these other examples.

But it doesn’t last. Pretty much all of those “Republicans” are libertarians who consider the GOP the lesser of two evils. When allowed to choose “libertarian” as an alternative, only 4% of visitors continued to identify as conservative. But that’s still…some. Right?

When I broke the numbers down further, 3 percentage points of those are neoreactionaries, a bizarre local sect that wants to be ruled by a king. Only one percent of LWers were normal everyday God-‘n-guns-but-not-George-III conservatives of the type that seem to make up about half of the United States.

Thanks

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