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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38174 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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In a previous open thread, the topic of immigration in Europe came up. At the time Sweden was being discussed and it was unclear to what extent immigrants were contributing to crime and other social problems. Unfortunately Sweden's publicly accessible data isn't sufficient to really dig into the issue.

Then I discovered this link which actually does address the issue of immigrant crime in Europe quite directly, albeit in Denmark instead of Sweden. It also addresses issues such as welfare use. As it turns out the racist right wing seems to be completely correct on facts.

Financial Contribution

Danes and western immigrants to Denmark are, on average, positive contributors to Denmark during their working years. The same is true, though less so, of "Other non western". However it turns out that the controversial group of immigrants - MENAPT (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey) - are net negative contributors at every age.

A breakdown by country (for countries with at least 5000 immigrants to Denmark) is provided and the result is exactly what the far right would predict: white people, Indians and Chinese make good immigrants and contribute positively to Denmark. The average American benefits Denmark to the tune of about $12k/year, the average Indian a little bit less. The average Somalian costs Denmark about $18k. Thais, Vietnamese and Filipinos are net neutral.

Crime

Western immigrants commit crime at rates more or less equivalent to Danes. Non-western immigrants commit about 3.5x more violent crime (including murder) and 7x more rape.

Crime rates can be further broken down by country of origin. After adjusting for age and gender, we find that again the racist far right are entirely correct in their views. Somalians have crime rates about 7x that of Danes. Americans, British, Indians and Chinese have crime rates about half that of Danes. I was surprised to see that Israelis and Thais have higher than average crime rates.

Conclusion

In countries where data is available (such as Denmark and the US), said data strongly supports the position of educated internet right wing racists. Some countries, such as Sweden, try to obfuscate the data as much as possible to the point of not describing criminals.

I argue that the most reasonable thing we can do is assume that for nearby countries more or less similar patterns apply even if we lack data drilling down at the level of individual subgroups.

(I use "educated" as an important caveat. I do not necessarily expect a random American racist to make distinctions between Indians and Pakistanis, though a random Brit might. However the typical racist motte poster certainly does.)

edit

Do american blacks next.

Broadly, the question is not whether crime rates are higher, but instead how to interpret that fact. For example, using this information to discriminate against people based on their race would be racism. If you were to structure an immigration policy, you wouldn't ask what race a potential immigrants was. Instead, you would look at education, criminal record, and other non discriminatory factors and use that to inform your decision. In fact, the large disparity in these dimensions for mena immigrants can largely be attribute to the fact that such determinations were not used when accepting such immigrants, since they were accepted due to being refugees, or immigrated illegally.

There has been a consistent majority against immigration to Sweden for decades yet politicians have pressed on. Even among non SD-voters, the views on immigration tend to be right of the party.

What you are forgetting is the main issue, social cohesion, the sense of beloning and the deep trust that has existed in Swedish society. Swedes in Dubai don't socialize with rich arabs. Most people have friends in their own age group, with similar levels of education etc. People don't want to feel like an alien in their own community. Swedes start moving out of an area as early as 4% of the inhabitants being migrants. Even if the migrants weren't more likely to engage in migrants and even if they paid more in taxes most people don't want to live in a Bangalore even if the people there are smart and productive.

The idea that society is nothing more than a platform for economic exchange completely misses most of human experience and what builds a strong well functioning society. Take the top 10% of ten countries and put them together and you want have a super-country. You will have a corrupt, dysfunctional society.

People in Western countries consistently poll as being opposed to immigration but in practice do not express supermajority support for anti-immigration parties. It is a fair point. If people prioritized it as the number one issue, the Sweden Democrats, AfD etc would do better electorally.

Indeed. For all the griping that OBVIOUSLY everyone hates immigrants, the parties making the loudest fuss about them don't poll all that well.

that there are many more law-abiding immigrants than there are criminal immigrants,

That's essentially saying "Rates? Who cares about rates?"

We make comparisons using rates and numbers, and not "many", for a reason.

("We" meaning educated people. I don't want to be accused of building consensus.)

Can you link to leftists who openly acknowledge the "rapefugee" problem (not necessarily using that term), the disproportionate welfare consumption and the overall net drain on the public finances? I'm curious to hear their arguments.

A notable fact I'd love to see them recon with: if in fact the harm caused by immigrant communities is the result of a small minority of criminals and welfare users, why not just deport that small minority and solve the problem? I.e. suppose 90% of Somalian immigrants are $10k net positive, but the average Somalian contribution is -$19k (this # is actual). That means the bad 10% of Somalians cost an average of $280k/each (per year!). Why keep them around?

Yes.chad, and deport the rapists with citizenship too.

Has anyone proposed only allowing women and children in, unless the men were fighting for the allies of the accepting country? The argument being that men are supposed to take up arms in defense of the fatherland and fight and die in order to protect their freedom and way of life. The guys that stuck their necks on the line fighting the Taliban also get a pass, those guys probably got killed after the Taliban took over, for example.

Since I was tagged, I'll just reiterate what I've written before: the key here is distinguishing between labor-related and humanitarian-related immigration (and distinguishing between these two forms is very common, right now the Finnish liberal-right and conservative-right parties are fighting in the government negotiations about both of these categories as separate instance, apparently coming to a compromise where humanitarian-immigration rules will be tightened but labor-immigration rules probably at least partially loosened).

When it comes to labor-related immigration, it is of course of major relevance what the actual net financial contribution is, and differences vary greatly in analysis over that level. However, labor-related immigration in Europe mostly nowadays comes outside of the MENA area; a lot of it comes from other European countries (MENA and non-MENA), another major part comes from countries like Thailand and Philippines.

However, when it comes to the categories of immigrants most associated with crime, welfare dependency etc, the main reason why they come to Europe is through humanitarian mechanisms, and there the big issue why they are permitted to come is not related to their financial and societal contribution but the maintenance of the actually existing treaty framework underpinning the current world order and that forms the ideological underpinning for the West's current effort to stay on top of that world order.

That doesn't think that financial matters, crime etc. are unimportant; they, and the populist reaction they lead to, are a major part of the reason why many European countries have tightened their interpretion of the asylum/refugee laws. However, insofar as this debate goes, it should at least be understood why the general asylum/refugee policies still continue, and the reason is the human rights treaty framework and is role in the maintenance of the idea of a global community.

One might disagree with that need, one might (especially now) consider the global community to be broken already - I believe that these arguments will get stronger year by year and will bolster right-wing parties in Europe and elsewhere. Still, my opinion continues to be that the idea has enough legs that the framework, including asylum treaties, should be maintained.

Certainly, if the last year's events in Ukraine have started developments chipping away at the idea of a global community in general, they have provided a very specific example of a fact that, even in Europe, wars precipitating vast refugee situations might happen; many Ukrainians have probably been saved and helped by the fact that Europe has developed policies and practices to take in vast numbers of refugees and facilitate, at least in some ways, the integration.

But if a MENA refugee is projected to cost the state, say 100k, while a ukrainian or north korean refugee costs 10k or even nothing, you can help far more of the latter group for the same cost. So even in a purely humanitarian framework, to maximize asylum we should discriminate.

When it comes to the framework, it's not a question of a monetary cost-benefit analysis. It's about the problem posed by asylum seekers themselves; if someone comes from, say, Syria, and says that they're an opposition activist and they can't go back because if they do then Assad's goons kills them on the spot, what do you do?

He might be lying, he might be a terrorist, he might be a common criminal, he might in many cases actually not be from Syria at all etc., but if we want the framework to hold, we must at least allow for a possibility that he is actually telling the truth (after all, Syria continues to be in some sort of a state of civil war and Assad continues to be, at the very least, a strongman authoritarian whose goons have indeed killed people), in which case he would indeed be entitled to asylum. If he is just summarily sent back, the framework is broken, and taking in some other guy from Ukraine won't fix it.

Of course, there's a whole process where we try to deduce what the actual truth status is and if the asylum criteria are met, but that takes time, and some arrangement must be found for him in the meantime.

If you assume there is a limited number of resources (reasonable assumption), you will always run afoul of the pie-in-the-sky framework. Ideally, every legitimate asylum seeker should get one, and every human should live in freedom, peace and abundance. But since we live on earth and not paradise, we might want to remember the limit and save more of those that can be saved. The likely liar/criminal/terrorist is just shit out of luck.

There are leftists, open border libertarians and moderate conservatives who talk honestly about immigrants in Scandinavia. Some users on this forum fit those descriptions, including some who are from Scandinavia themselves. @Stefferi.

“There are literally dozens of us!”

The other groups I mentioned acknowledge problems that have arisen as a result of immigration, but argue that there are benefits that are not captured by simply looking at net tax contributions,

Like what? Ethnic food?

that there are many more law-abiding immigrants than there are criminal immigrants

This reminds me of the poison smarties thought experiment.

that crime levels need to be seen in perspective (e.g., Malmö's homicide rate is magnitudes

This is a fully generalizable argument for anything though. “This isn’t an issue because in some far off place it’s even worse” it’s pure sophism and poorly reasoned rhetoric.

and that people who have acquired Swedish citizenship should be afforded the same rights and protections as ethnic Swedes.

by definition. We aren’t talking about citizens.

Interestingly, the rate of violent crime in many MENA countries is actually not particularly high.

Everyone remembers teachers in school who could command a class authoritatively to the extent that nobody even whispered when they were talking, and others who would be so weak as to allow the exact same group of, say, 11 year olds to run riot. I remember reading and watching interviews with some of the young male Syrian, Afghan etc migrants to Germany and so on after the 2015 refugee crisis. What seemed to be shared most of all was twofold:

  1. A deep-seated contempt for Western society for its liberalism. This, of course, is broadly shared by internet rightists, so can hardly be a major point of disagreement.

  2. The belief, real or fictional, that authority in the West was extremely weak and that, presumably unlike at home, they could get away with almost anything. This, of course, is also broadly agreed with by internet rightists.

Import young men from traditional cultures to a degenerate western society full to the brim with licentiousness, in which many crimes are barely policed, in which traditional morality has all but broken down, and you can’t be surprised if they take advantage.

The grooming gangs of Rotherham were able to rape so many girls in part because they knew there would be no posse of fathers and uncles coming for them. Most of the girls didn’t even have fathers, they were products of single motherhood in the dregs at the bottom of English society. In Pakistan, fathers and brothers risk jail to protect their family’s honor all the time.

Similarly, when it comes to work, Swedish Somalis are no doubt capable of working if the choice is between labor and starvation. If it’s between labor and generous welfare, though, the basis for the decision changes.

Opposition to mass immigration is fair, and there are many reasons why it is justified. But the truth is that - for the most part - these migrants do what they do not because it is in their nature but because Western countries allow them to. The old 4chan “they are laughing at you” really does apply here.

In countries where data is available (such as Denmark and the US), said data strongly supports the position of educated internet right wing racists.

What US data is that? Because I have largely seen the opposite. And see here.

https://cis.org/Report/Misuse-Texas-Data-Understates-Illegal-Immigrant-Criminality

Illegal immigrants are often not identified as such by most state prison systems. Also any claims that illegals are less criminal than natives doesn't pass the most basic of smell tests: illegals skew younger and more male (which universally correlates with higher crime rates) and the very nature of their status as illegal immigrants makes certain crimes like identity theft (to secure housing/employment/etc.) much more common.

In situations where we do have more accurate data on the immigration status of convicts (such as federal prison system) the data suggests that the internet racists are, in fact, right. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/departments-justice-and-homeland-security-release-data-incarcerated-aliens-94-percent-all

Your second link, re federal data, is not particularly convincing, in part because federal criminals are a very small pct of all criminals, but also because federal inmates are those who committed federal offenses, many of which, such as drug smuggling 44 percent of the total, are often international offenses, so of course non-citizens are going to be overrepresented. It is also unclear whether many of the people referenced in the report are in custody for immigration-related offenses or because they are in removal proceedings.

Illegal immigrants are often not identified as such by most state prison systems.

Right, the article re Texas mentions that TX is one of the few states that has good data, which is why they look at Texas

As for the CIS report, if you look at the database they include, homicide rates are a bit higher for illegal immigrants (assuming that the denominator for the illegal immigrant pop is correct), and sex assault rates are higher, but rates for assault and robbery are lower. It sure looks like overall violent crime is lower, or maybe about the same.

Also any claims that illegals are less criminal than natives doesn't pass the most basic of smell tests

...That by definition the group is comprised of 100% criminals?

Don't ever concede that point if you don't need to.

But the old advice of "only commit one crime at a time" applies here too, presumably; if you're in a country illegally, it is in your interest to not do anything that could cause the police to pay attention to you and discover you entered illegally.

Like buy forged documents and evade taxes?

The internet racists will say:

  • Crime by American blacks is very high

  • Crime by hispanic immigrants, particularly illegal ones, is higher than native whites but might be lower than native blacks

  • Similarly, expect high crime by hispanic natives (but less than blacks)

  • Crime by legal immigrants will be lower. Very few Salesforce Integration Engineers on an H1B visa or Abuelas brought to the US on a family reunification visa do crimes.

  • Crime by immigrant Somalians will probably also be high.

  • Crime by native whites is low

  • Crime by white immigrants, such as British or Danes, will also be low

  • Crime by immigrant Indians and Chinese will be very low

Do you disagree with these claims?

Neither of your sources has much to say about them. Your sources claim that the average of immigrant Hispanics and Chinese is lower than the average of native whites and native blacks.

It's odd that they didn't disaggregate the crimes of natives in such an obvious way, or break down immigrant crime by country of origin. Why do you think they didn't?

From my first comment:

data strongly supports the position of educated internet right wing racists.

What more would you like?

Just acknowledge that you agree with them.

Please refrain from telling others what they believe. This sort of thing adds only heat, no light. Don't post like this.

Crime by native whites is low

It looks low in comparison to the AA rate, but the US white-offender homicide rate is still higher than most developed European countries' total rate (and many of the poorer ones as well). Even if you assume that none of the "unknown" in the first link below are white, it's still 2.1 per 100,000. If you use the distribution of victims as an estimate (2nd link) since most murders are same-race, you get 2.5; if we assume the unknowns are distributed the same as the knowns (41% white), then we get just under 3. Countries such as Austria, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, France, the UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands are all below 2, as well as Poland, Spain, Albania, and Croatia, among others.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-2.xls

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States#Vital_statistics

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

Thanks for the links, one important point though is that this shouldn't matter for Denmark to not want to become Indian, Chinese, or MENAPT. I don't care if the Chinese have positive tax contributions and lower criminal behavior than Danes, I don't want Denmark to become Chinese. Opponents of immigration shouldn't fall into the trap of "it's not about race, it's about crime and tax dollars". That didn't work in the US, it's not going to work in Denmark. It is about race.

The LLM disagrees with me as well, and for basically the same reasons: it's been trained to think that.

"Being English has nothing to do with ethnicity", yes I would say that is the perspective of someone who has been brainwashed. How do you think such a prevailing opinion has come to be? Do you think if the culture were different then the public would have a different opinion?

Let's take this story from a few days ago: Anglo-Saxons aren’t real, Cambridge tells students in effort to fight ‘nationalism’

Cambridge is teaching students that Anglo-Saxons did not exist as a distinct ethnic group as part of efforts to undermine “myths of nationalism”...

Its teaching aims to “dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism” by explaining that the Anglo-Saxons were not a distinct ethnic group, according to information from the department.

The department’s approach also aims to show that there were never “coherent” Scottish, Irish and Welsh ethnic identities with ancient roots.

The increased focus on anti-racism comes amid a broader debate over the continued use of terms like “Anglo-Saxon”, with some in academia alleging that the ethnonym is used to support “racist” ideas of a native English identity.

Information provided by the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNC) explains its approach to teaching, stating: “Several of the elements discussed above have been expanded to make ASNC teaching more anti-racist.

“One concern has been to address recent concerns over use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and its perceived connection to ethnic/racial English identity.

“Other aspects of ASNC’s historical modules approach race and ethnicity with reference to the Scandinavian settlement that began in the ninth century.

“In general, ASNC teaching seeks to dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism - that there ever was a ‘British’, ‘English’, ‘Scottish’, ‘Welsh’ or ‘Irish’ people with a coherent and ancient ethnic identity - by showing students just how constructed and contingent these identities are and always have been.”

...

However, the term Anglo-Saxon has recently become embroiled in controversy, with some academics claiming that the term Anglo-Saxon has been used by racists – particularly in the US – to support the idea of an ancient white English identity, and should therefore be dropped.

Cambridge teaching its students that there are no English, Scottish, Irish, or Welsh ethnic identities could be considered brainwashing or education depending on your perspective. But whatever term you choose, the fact remains is that public opinion is indeed trained by these institutions.

These students, as learning agents, are being trained to believe that "being English has nothing to do with ethnicity", which is a complete lie from any reasonable perspective that would acknowledge the biological reality of an English ethnic identity. LLMs are fine-tuned by similar people with similar methods and for similar motives.

If these cultures and institutions rallied around a real history of English ethnic heritage which recognizes the Anglo-Saxons, public opinion would be very different, and public opinion was different when the narrative described in that article was the popular narrative.

The LLM disagrees with me as well, and for basically the same reasons: it's been trained to think that.

Yes, yes, we're all brainwashed

"Being English has nothing to do with ethnicity", yes I would say that is the perspective of someone who has been brainwashed.

Don't call people brainwashed. The user you responded to baited you, and you took the bait. And worse, you trained them that the snarky response is what gets you to actually make an effort and respond.

Effort responses for effort posts. Mod reports for low effort snark.

Well, yeah. You have no real argument despite massive evidence being weighed against your position. It’s just neurotic appeals to emotion, constantly.

Just leave the conversation if all you are going to say is a snarky comment.

For you, sure. But it might not be for others - such as me - since among other things, I don't think I'm the same race as you.

So you would be fine with Denmark becoming significantly or even majority Chinese if it meant lower crime and higher tax income? I ask because so many conservatives try hard to convince themselves that it's not about race when they oppose illegal immigration, but they are just in denial.

I at least wouldn't have any problem with that in theory. I don’t see the point of trying to freeze the ethnic map of the world at any particular point in time, as these things are always in flux. In practice, however, the things I do care about (cultural practices, crime rates, behavior) are so highly correlated with national origin that the simplest approach is to screen by background rather than thoroughly vet every individual immigrant to get only those that will assimilate well.

When I have visited Scandinavia in the past, the thing that annoyed me about immigrants there wasn't that they were nonwhite, it was that many did not seem to speak the local language, and I came close to berating several shopkeepers in my broken Swedish for their lack of respect towards their new home.

Cultural homogenization or breakdown of law and order are much worse outcomes in my eyes than racial replacement, and to the extent that they can be disambiguated (and perhaps they can't, this a point of disagreement), I don’t particularly care about the latter.

I don’t see the point of trying to freeze the ethnic map of the world at any particular point in time, as these things are always in flux.

I completely agree with that, but that is also the point I am trying to get across to OP. This isn't really about crime or taxes, it's about ethnogenesis, which is monumentally more important than any of those issues.

I also don't see value in trying to freeze the ethnic map of the world, but being conscious of its direction is of extreme importance, and hiding those anxieties behind complaints about crime or taxes is the road to failure. Ideally, you would rationally and intelligently influence the ethnic map of the world to achieve some desirable outcomes.

I came close to berating several shopkeepers in my broken Swedish for their lack of respect towards their new home.

I'm not trying to be snarky when I say that this is just a lack of cultural sensitivity on your part. If you put a mouse in a barn do you berate it for not acting like a horse? They are not Swedish and they never will be, you either accept that along with the concurrent changes in Swedish language and culture or you get serious about the problem of ethnogenesis.

Based on the last paragraph of this post perhaps you might allow me to pose a question.

I am an American citizen (Caucasian, more or less, if it matters, with some Native American ancestry) living in Japan, my home now over two decades. I speak the language passably well though my kanji isn't what it should be (even recently on this forum I goofed a very basic term, and, as one might expect, was gently corrected). Though I am not in a service job, I am public-facing in that I stand in front of adult students every day. Would you argue that I shouldn't make efforts to learn Japanese, or that my learning of Japanese should be done only as a means of communication, and not as one of a larger set of strategies to integrate (to whatever degree) into Japanese culture?

You may suggest that I am "not Japanese and never will be" and that is of course not an unpopular perspective (particularly, even especially here). But surely the old saw about when in Rome carries some water in your mind? It's possible I'm misunderstanding you.

You are inclined to learn Japanese and respect the local culture, my point is it's not reasonable to expect that same behavior from masses of third world economic migrants. If a Japanese person wanted to maintain Japanese culture, it would be a bad idea to import masses of people who are unlike the Japanese and expect they will adopt the "when in Rome" mentality that you have. Culture is more dynamic than people and their personalities, it's more likely the culture is going to change than a Paki is going to start acting like a Swede.

If mases of Turks or Syrians moved to Japan, how many Japanese people would say "oh well, being Japanese is an idea that has nothing to do with ethnicity so these are now fellow Japanese people"?

I'll trust your judgement on that question, but why would their response be so different than the Swede who feels compelled to voice his objection by couching it in terms of taxes?

A friend of mine has a daughter, raised her here though my friend and her husband are from the US and both blue-eyed and white--their daughter is also. But the girl, because of her upbringing, can, and does, move as fluently through Japanese culture as her classmates. She is also perfectly, natively fluent in English. It's a marvel to see her slip in and out of these versions of herself.

In Nihonjinron scholarship (if that's the word to use) there have been many efforts at defining "Japaneseness." Some suggest both parents need to be ethnically Japanese. Because Japanese culture is so much a part of functioning here, however (that's a whole can of worms), others suggest that to be Japanese one has to be fluent in the language and preferably born in Japan.

That, too, sometimes doesn't matter. Returnee students who may have spent a few years abroad (especially if in early youth) are routinely told, on return, that because of some alteration in attitude, dress, or ineffable behavioral trait, they're "not really Japanese," as if their Japaneseness has been stripped from them.

The dimensions of the definition become more and more Procrustean as one goes on, as you might expect.

Eventually the concept "I know a Japanese when I see one" becomes the answer if the subject is pressed--and of course one cannot press the subject very far, for highlighting disagreement.or inconsistency in this way would be poor manners, itself "un-Japanese."

Older people might not consider the girl in my example above as ever having any chance of being Japanese, any more than a Zainichi Korean or third-generation Chinese. It isn't hard to find people using the term "Japanese blood" when the topic comes up. One quickly realizes nationality isn't the issue, or even culture, or language--or even biology (though there is of course that rather infamous book arguing the Japanese person's brain is structurally different from, well, from all the rest of us.)

I have the distinct sense that all this evaporates if you boil it down enough and you'll be left with steam, and, eventually an empty pot.

To address your question, there seems to be no real movement here (with a non-Japanese presence of around 2%) to shepherd anyone into the Japanese fold. Though I am considered uchi (内) or "one of the group/family/elect" in certain contexts here, remove one layer and I am again soto (外) or an outsider. But I haven't ever considered attempting applying for Japanese nationality.

I'd a fairly extreme (if benign) racist acquaintance some years ago who liked Japan and the Japanese fine because of the sense of clear delineation he felt here.

Could you clarify what you mean by "ethnogenesis"? You don't seem to be using the standard definition.

I'm not trying to be snarky when I say that this is just a lack of cultural sensitivity on your part. If you put a mouse in a barn do you berate it for not acting like a horse? They are not Swedish and they never will be, you either accept that along with the concurrent changes in Swedish language and culture or you get serious about the problem of ethnogenesis.

Do you think Turks, Syrians and the like are just unable to learn Swedish?

I mean race formation, checking the definition of "ethnogenesis" I see:

the formation and development of an ethnic group

Which is the sense in which I am using the term, by saying that this is far more important than secondary issues like taxes. If a Swede doesn't want his ethnic identity to become half Middle-Eastern, he shouldn't have to voice his objections in terms of some accountant analyzing a tax ledger.

Danes and western immigrants to Denmark are, on average, positive contributors to Denmark during their working years. The same is true, though less so, of "Other non western". However it turns out that the controversial group of immigrants - MENAPT (Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Turkey) - are net negative contributors at every age.

A breakdown by country (for countries with at least 5000 immigrants to Denmark) is provided and the result is exactly what the far right would predict: white people, Indians and Chinese make good immigrants and contribute positively to Denmark. The average American benefits Denmark to the tune of about $12k/year, the average Indian a little bit less. The average Somalian costs Denmark about $18k. Thais, Vietnamese and Filipinos are net neutral.

This is why I always found it strange that there is a corporate argument for lllegal immigration - that somehow this improves the economy and business of European companies. Maybe, but the taxpayers are big losers ultimately, having to foot a massive bill that will inevitably result in either an increase in taxes (in already the most highly taxed countries in the world) or (more likely) a decrease in quality of services. It’s a lose lose situation.

Corporations benefitting at the expense of the public purse is not exactly a new idea. Indeed, it is one of the more compelling arguments against unfettered capitalism.

I would absolutely expect that corporations would like more cheap labour that is ultimately subsidised by taxpayers, especially in places where corporations are not themselves especially highly taxed. It's the same principle as Walmart workers on food stamps, writ large.

The likelihood that the general public would not buy the economic arguments in favour of immigration if they were more familiar with the numbers (at least in Denmark) may explain why those numbers do not seem to be particularly well reported.

Well wouldn’t an increased tax burden eventually translate to increased corporate taxes? At some point they must see this also goes against their interests

The Gays Destroyed The "No Politics" Rule

Pride month began, and the moderators of /r/Battletech enforced their "no politics" rule as they have through elections, wars, referedums, economic crisis, etc. A long standing rule fastidiously kept by most Battletech groups I frequent. It's preserved Battletech as one of my escapes for long years as every other hobby I had got overrun with far left politics. Alas, no longer.

In response, Catalyst games launched /r/OfficialBattletech, specifically calling out the "bigotry" of /r/Battletech, and announcing Battletech is a "safe space". They parachuted in a community leader with experience moderating "safe spaces". People began making the sorts of spurious claims against the mods of /r/Battletech you are used to seeing, calling them being fascist at best, literally "Heil Hitler" nazi's at worst on the most spurious of circumstantial evidence. The originator of /r/Battletech came out of nowhere and completely removed the mods of /r/Battletech to make damned sure /r/Battletech participates in Pride Month.

Because it's not political. It's just being a decent person.

So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are no allowed to opt out of their politics.

Hobbies/Fandoms I'm allowed in

  • Video Games

  • Board Games

  • Science Fiction

  • Star Wars

  • Star Trek

  • Battletech

  • Woodworking

And I log into youtube to watch Stumpy Nubs tell me how to sharpen a chisel every day in fear some flashpoint will have occurred. That the Eye of Sauron finally noticed that woodworking is too white and must be destroyed. And suddenly every content creator I watch will be posting these mewling apology videos for not doing enough to foster diversity and inclusiveness in this important hobby. And the rest of the month ends up being pride themed woodworking content. Making your own buttplugs on a lathe or whatever. How to add glitter to a poly finish.

So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are not allowed to opt out of their politics.

I don’t want to be accused of parroting the standard libertarian line, but, you need to make your own stuff dude. You need to make your own Battletech, and enforce YOUR politics. (This is the royal “you” - the responsibility falls on all of us, not just you alone). You can’t depend on anyone else to do it for you, or to provide a space that will be amenable to you.

The right can’t complain about losing the culture war if they’re not even playing in the first place. Where’s your culture? What have you made?

This is an unfair argument.

Take Kiwi Farms, for example. You could extend your argument you make, smugly saying: 'make your own payment processor, make your own DNS, make your own web-host.' The left extends controls over previously neutral institutions and you say 'why not make your own?' Why not make your own laws, your own bank, your own country? Your own autonomous sovereignty, right-wingers?

Imagine my face: it is a chiseled, manly expression, saying YES.

All culture war issues are essentially coup-complete ones now because of the left's influence over the government and the media. If you want to keep the globohomo out of your Battletech: you must first overthrow the US government.

There is a vast gulf between the Battletech and Kiwifarms situations. The latter attracted culture warfare in a way that a Battletech successor would not.

Why are you so sure? These people are petty tyrants. I see non explicitly left wing "spiritual successors" to brands that went woke get deplatformed all the time. Think of all the projects taken off kickstarter. Think of all the publishers banned from DriveThruRPG. Think of all the projects that lost their payment processing because of Stripe or Mastercard. Look at all the lawfare directed at Gygax's son.

Nothing is too small or petty for these people to attack and destroy. It's like, their favorite thing. They are also ideologically beholden to wiping you off the face of the earth, because even a single person like me spoils their utopia.

The comparison is in scope, not in kind. The reason there isn't a conservative Battletech is the same reason why there isn't a conservative credit-card. If the left is going to turn every conceivable facet of human existence into culture-war, things as diverse as crochet, miniature-painting, hiking, whatever - it is a total war.

Innocence (or a complete lack of relevance to politics) is no defense: they're going to come for your little comfy niche hobby eventually and cover it with rainbow paint. And unless you're willing to fight as hard as the Kiwis you'll be shoved out and marginalized and kicked out of your own communities. You can't flee. You can't abandon the high ground to the woke. You have to fight.

Kiwifarms is still up and still thriving, though, in part precisely because its users care.

You don’t need to make your own country, you just need to stand up for yourself and make persecution too bothersome to enforce. You don’t need the powers that be to agree with you, you just need them - as with the Bud Light boycott reaction - to say “it’s not worth it”.

The threshold for “it’s not worth it” is actually quite low, but fat American rightists grown comfortable on cheap entertainment and cheaper corn syrup find it hard to meet even that reduced standard.

DeSantis in Florida, which isn’t even a red state traditionally, shows how easy it is for real legislative wins. You can drive these people from the institutions, try to make them destitute, defund them, cancel them, and reduce their influence with barely any ‘revolution’ at all. Imagine that x30 GOP states, plus a Republican president and conservative SCOTUS engaging in consistent rapid lawfare against the left. But the right just don’t care. They want their Donald back to own the libtards on bird app.

The threshold for “it’s not worth it” is actually quite low

I don’t believe this. The implication of your entire comment is that progressive activists would rather not have to expend effort against their enemies. I think that’s wrong. The substitution of the progressive surrogate goal in the place of meaningful labor in order to satisfy the Kaczynskian power process is the whole point of progressive activism. They love crushing their enemies. Victory begets victory. It does not beget resting on one’s laurels.

You seem to be under the impression that conservatives won the Bud Light fiasco. If they did, then why is Bud Light still donating to the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce? They lost 20% of their entire multinational conglomerate’s market cap and they’re still pulling this shit.

You seem to be under the impression that conservatives won the Bud Light fiasco. If they did, then why is Bud Light still donating to the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce?

If donations to the “National LGBT Chamber of Commerce” were what conservative boycott organizers cared about they’d have acted years ago. They didn’t. The evidence is that conservatives don’t care much about companies donating to these kinds of political organizations.

They did claim the two most senior scalps in the marketing of Bud Light, and neither they nor other beer brands that cared to the same audience will try a similar marketing technique again. Look at how quickly so many on the left walked back anti-police rhetoric as soon as polling data showed even a small swing against them.

neither they nor other beer brands that cared to the same audience will try a similar marketing technique again.

Why not? Has the internal culture changed? Have they become more sensitive to the values of their core customers? The evidence suggests they still think LGBT inclusivity is more important than appeasing the politics of rednecks. Unless AB’ internal messaging is explicitly marking this as a cynical move to stay in good graces with the powers that be, some poor sap is going to rise through the ranks actually believing that LGBT inclusion is a core value of Bud Light, and then they’ll make the exact same mistake as soon as they’re put in charge of marketing.

Conservatives on the bud light boycott explicitly didn’t have a win condition- they declared they were burning bridges to make an example out of them. There might be worse yet to come- it’s possible that republicans will at some point in the future investigate them for trying to sell alcohol to minors(which I have a strong prior that 110% of alcohol companies do).

The point of the bud light boycott wasn’t to get bud light to change. It was to make other corps more susceptible to pressure campaigns and gestures wildly at target and the MLB.

MLB

Didn't the Sisters get de-disinvited?

Yes. But the MLB backed away from pride logos and at least one team, the rangers(incidentally the top performing team this year) will not be holding a pride night.

Haven't the Rangers never held a pride night? I remember reading a few years ago that they were in hot water for being the only MLB team to not have one. I had assumed they caved at some point like everyone else, but maybe not.

More comments

They got reinvited.

LA Dodgers apologize to Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, reinvites group to ... https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/sanfrancisco/news/la-dodgers-sisters-of-perputual-indulgence-apology-pride-night/

They lost 20% of their entire multinational conglomerate’s market cap and they’re still pulling this shit.

Being between the Devil and the deep blue sea, and seeing that they couldn't just slap some redneck branding on the cans and get the lost customers back again, they have little choice but to kiss the boot and submit to the lash and prove their undying fealty by money and blood. Like it or lump it, they got themselves identified as the 'gay beer' and now they have to go with the flow there, especially as they were getting backlash for being insufficiently robust in defence of Dylan Mulvaney.

Kiwifarms is still up and still thriving, though

Not on the clearnet. kiwifarms.net has been down for several weeks.

Right, Kiwifarms has survived as well as it has because Null is both extremely stubborn and extremely competent. But that's not enough against people willing to break the internet (transit providers null routing their ASNs) to get rid of them.

Ok, maybe my disclaimer had the opposite effect from what I intended. Sorry for not being more clear.

In general I am opposed to the naive libertarian line of "just build your own X". I know very well that you can't build your own university system, you can't build your own DNS, you can't build your own facebook. That's why I'm not a libertarian.

But! There comes a point where you have to make an assessment of the situation, and you either decide you're going to do something about it, or you need to just live with the consequences. It should be assumed at this point that any cultural space that is in any sense "mainstream" or "corporate" is leftist by default. It's omnipresent; so don't be surprised when they come for you and your favorite thing. That's the default assumption.

So you have two choices: you can either do something to influence culture, or you can accept the culture that other people have made for you. Yes, you can't just set up your own parallel culture overnight, but you can't say that you're just condemned to inaction either. I mean, look at Stonetoss. He's creating a cultural product that is to the right of even what the majority of mottizens would want, with all the attendant controversy, but he's still out there doing his thing. Why can't you do what Stonetoss is doing? If culture is that important to you, why aren't you making something?

I know exactly what it's like to have something you love colonized and ruined by wokeists. I'm not just glibly dismissing the issue. It's just that I can only see this narrative play out so many times, the narrative of "I can't believe those leftists came for X classic wonderful thing AGAIN!" before I ask, ok yes we know that this is their M.O., so what are YOU doing about it?

I actually do make things: I'm a writer, but the content I make is perhaps too spicy for here, being 4chan-adjacent. :P

I'd say you've got a decent chance of getting there working through the system, if only because nuclear war is fairly likely and in the aftermath with the highly-lopsided deaths, the really-scary tools of impeachment and constitutional amendment are unlocked (as they haven't been since, really, the Civil War). With super-angry Republicans suddenly getting those, I'd be substantially more worried about overcorrection and White Terror than about them failing.

You are describing what I used to criticize here as liberalism of the gaps: the theory that the solution to culture and institutions falling to progressivism via post-detraditionalization liberalism is MOAR liberalism!

No, the solution to protecting tradition and institutions is protecting tradition and institutions, both through fortification and legal protection. Libertarian solutions to protecting / building institutions cannot work in a legal landscape that makes a key component: free association, illegal.

OP is pointing this out with the fact that 'no politics' is subverted when you declare X value neutral. But the other side of the coin is also on display. When X is value neutral, anti-X is illegal discrimination / harassment. Start your own... cannot work without first winning back the neutral ground, which cannot be done when you spend all your time abandoning your institutions and fortifying elsewhere.

Show me an example where conservatives/traditionalists abandoned X to go build their own X-prime, where X-prime remains both not a ghetto and not actively infiltrated.

Your question about why traditionalists don't build their own X is easily answered in that they can't build their own X, and part of the reason is ironically because half their rank are actually liberals who keep telling them to build their own X.

Example:

Jonny Vanheusterwhilton is a made up character who used to get picked on as a child for his ridiculous last name, but that is completely irrelevant to this story so let's call him JV and we don't need to spell out his last name again.

Jonny V (JV), has lived in his neighborhood his whole life, even buying his parents' house when they retired. It's June 1st, and bigot that he is, JV (Jonny) bemoans that the neighborhood is plastered in Pride Flags and preachy yard signs. He's saddened that his neighborhood July 4th picnic has been discontinued and replaced with a late June Pride Party.

Jonny's actually not even a bigot, not even by modern standards, nor even a conservative. He is very pro-LGBT right, a believer in letting people live their own lives etc. He's just a combination of patriotic, nostalgic, and finds pride to be tacky and over commercialized. Yet this gets Jonny labeled a right wing bigot, which almost frustrates him as much as getting picked on for his name as a child.

Eventually his friend, @Primaprimaprima encourages him to just build his own neighborhood. (+) Out of options and tired of being picked on JV sells his family house and buys some farmland with several others in a less desirable exurban part of the town to turn into a new neighborhood. Saddened by the lack of mature hardwoods, history, culture, or accessibility to the broader city, JB puts that aside and focuses on the upside: no more Pride Month.

Although JV is not a conservative, it took partnership with a lot of them, and some outright bigots to even get this neighborhood started. No worries, though, because they aren't banning anyone. JV has a simple liberal solution: Their HOA will just say, no value-messaging yard decorations.

The HOA includes a lot of other shit JV doesn't like. His old neighborhood didn't have an HOA, but now, just to get back to neutral JV has to accommodate regulating EVERYTHING, even the length of his grass. He hates mowing. Almost as much as he hates his last name. Or being called a bigot.

Trouble begins when some of their conservative neighbors put up a cross on their front door, or Easter decorations. 'Hey,' yell the libertarian sect. NO MESSAGING. The French neighbor, Le Prima, convinces everyone that secularism is the best they can hope for in this new arrangement, the conservatives mostly* sadly acquiesce, telling themselves, at least it's better than Pride Month. (*A few with conviction move away to an even shittier, further exurb, to find out what happened to them scroll up to the + above and start reading. Continue recursively.)

This satisfies JV until July 4th comes around, JV's favorite holiday. There will be no J4 parade, and he is forced to take down the American flag he hung must come down at once.... Oh well... at least in the name of fairness this is a compromise.

JV wonders how previous generations like the one he grew up in were able to use maintain communities with shared traditions, while keeping out the elements they didn't like without over-regulating everything. JV can't ponder long before his neighbor accusingly reminds him about the types of discrimination that happened in yesterday. Remembering quickly that nostalgia for any aspect of the past is for bigots, JV quickly stops his musing, and never follows his train of thought to the answer: The type of community JV is describing is found alive in the neighborhood he left, albeit with different values.

Well all goes well for 2 more years until, as the city grows, his neighborhood does too. His exurb becomes a desirable suburb, and now folks who would have simply ignored the neighborhood move in. Doesn't matter thinks, JV, they'll have to live by our rules just like everyone else.

Imagine Jonny Vanheusterwhilton's shock on June 1st of the current year, when after returning from a trip oversees, he sees PRIDE FLAGS everywhere and a flier for a neighborhood pride parade.

"But.. but...but...," stutters Jonny. "I thought we didn't allow value messaging!"

"We don't," his helpful, new neighbor replies. "But... this was brought up at the HOA meeting you missed. You see us new neighbors quickly explained that this isn't about value messaging. It's common decency. To suppress it wouldn't be neutral, it would be bigoted and hateful. They saw it our way.

There were a few hold-out undesirables, but our lawyers were there to make sure they understood this is not negotiable, it's equality. I mean, anything less would be like not allowing you to hold your wife's hand while walking around the neighborhood."

"I'm actually gay," says Jonny.

"And a happy Pride Month to you!," the neighbor replies cheerily, while handing him a school board voting guide for the candidates who most protect trans youth.

That night, JV's visiting his old friend distraught. "It's simple," says Primaprimaprima as he opens a beer and hands to JV. "Just start your own neighborhood."

This is only the sole option because conservatives clearly don’t care about actually conquering institutions, as Trump’s polling over DeSantis transparently shows.

My point exactly. (with the caveat that these people aren't conservatives. They are right-wing, republican liberals.)

I'm sure the conservatives would all love to conquer the institutions, they're mostly wary that yet another "ally" savvy to the ways of the institutions will turn out to be an infiltrator who will betray them when the stakes get high enough. Many would rather bet on the boisterous man who makes himself an enemy of institutions at every turn. He might not be the best to convert institutions, but perhaps he will succeed at razing them or culling them (he hasn't so far, but there's also a much longer record of conservatives betraying their base).

Corporations, trade unions, NGOs, they're all just spokes on a wheel. One's on top, then another and another. And on and on it spins crushing those who just want to play a game/sell their labor/cook some food.

I didn't vote for Trump to stop the wheel with my ostensible allies at the top, I voted for Trump to shatter the wheel to splinters.

Did it work, did he shatter the wheel? Did taking over the wheel work for your ostensible enemies?

No, of course not, but he had the best chance of anyone of doing so. Probably still does.

Better chance of catching a bullet to the skull thanks to one three letter agency or another.

Is no one going to point out the Game of Thrones reference or is it too obvious?

You can not shatter the wheel. You can only be on top of it or beneath it. This sort of fanciful thinking derives from the same place that makes progressives think that they can overcome human nature through socialization. In the end these two western pathologies have the same root.

The thing is that BT has existed for 35 years and used to be a thing everyone could participate in. One of the authors of some of the old books got cancelled for being too right wing a few years ago, so its not like conservatives didn't try to make our own things (the biggest BT author from back in the day is pretty woke though, this was a bi-partisan institution IMO). But now that the previous thing that everyone had and which conservatives did contribute to is taken over now we need to make our own thing.

How come that didn't apply to the left? How come the left gets to take all the previously neutral stuff instead of being told to fuck off from that and make a left wing BT? Cause this is ALWAYS how it goes. Frankly, when one side takes a previously jointly held territory and then replies to complaints with "just make your own thing without any of the history and existing buy in" that is such an obviously hostile comment that I cannot believe you actually think its fair. Its bullshit. And based on everything we have seen the result will inevitably be that if the new rightwing thing is at all good the left will either do their best to colonize that ALSO or they will use their control over other previously neutral ground to cut the legs out from under it.

I’ve never heard of Battletech until now, but the post from the new guard made reference to the old guard having an ”1988” stipulation rule - is this some attempt to delineate the franchise prior to some woke spoilage?

My understanding is 1988 is when Battletech came out, and the historical timeline and the Battletech timeline diverge. So anything you post about actual history after 1988 will never be about Battletech, and does not belong on a sub that is only about Battletech. Why include that rule when there is already a no politics rule? I donno, maybe they had to when some really aggressive rules lawyer user kept harassing them. Maybe they are just autist that can't help but be overly specific.

Naturally the 88 in 1988 was used to accuse the mods of being actual Nazi's.

My understanding is 1988 is when Battletech came out

Sorry, late response since I've been busy, but this isn't true. It came out in 1984 by the FASA company.

You're more likely to have heard of it under the MechWarrior or MechCommander name (used for games, some books), as opposed to BattleTech (some RPGs, some books) or Battledroids (original tabletop game, largely dropped post-1986).

The old rule #1 was :

1: All posts must be BattleTech related

We allow anything, as long as it is talking about BattleTech. If you don't like something, downvote it or filter it out.

However, it is not appropriate to use BattleTech as a veneer to discuss the real world, politics, or current events in this subreddit.

The year 1988 serves as a line when it comes to judging whether a post is about BattleTech, or using BattleTech as an excuse to discuss the real world, politics, or current events. Users may attempt to rectify this deficiency by including additional statements focusing on and generating discussion about BattleTech (and likewise the more discussion about real-world events, the more it weighs against the topic). The farther away from that line towards the present a real-world event mentioned is, the more the topic is presumptively about the real world and not about BattleTech, and the higher the burden.

This covers everything from mechs painted in flag patterns, topical issues, and everything else real-world.

Battletech's a little weird because it's technically an alternate history/future setting, even if most players or readers (especially of the MechWarrior stuff) would be surprised to hear that. While the play focus is usually around giant robots fighting interstellar wars somewhere in the 3000s, officially the branching point was the fall of the Soviet Union in 2011, with the resulting differences in interstate politics leading to development of a functional fusion reactor in 2018 and (eventually) the titular mecha and faster-than-light travel.

It would be very rare for pre-divergence issues to end up relevant for a discussion, but it's at least imaginable: several of the Houses for Inner Sphere are both pastiches of and descended from real-world states. But a political discussion of an event that occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union doesn't really make sense from a lore perspective; the setting expects such an extreme divergence within just a few years that it's unlikely almost any specific event occurred in both cases.

((I don't know how effective this was.))

It is hard for me to understand how posting about Pride could fall afoul of such a rule given that Pride, as both celebration and flag, pre-date 1988.

I'm not sure how accurate the summary here is, but from a quick look at the anthology, I expect that the previous moderation team was not particularly focused on the 1988-rule at the time.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden existed in 1988 too, but it would be disingenuous to post something involving them that is like 99% of the things posted about them online, and excuse it with "well, they existed in 1988".

Nobody of significance would write something that's about Pride (or Trump) that solely extrapolates from their status in 1988.

The anthology is here.

I tend toward inclusionism in the Gwern sense: I can understand the problems that arise when not filtering for quality or subject matter focus, but I think on average the sort of people who moderate decisions about that tend to overcorrect. So I'm not sure how much value my opinion would hold. Even within that constraint, I think it depends on the purpose of the rule.

Is the rule against literal veneers? There's a reddit thing (eg) where people will throw a Pride or trans flag (sometimes with poorly-executed paint) onto something, charitably to celebrate Pride, less charitably for karma farming. This isn't in that set; even the lowest-quality story is still actually a story of its own, in the setting, if sometimes not especially good even by the low standards of BattleTech writing.

Is the rule about avoiding specific current-day events at the object level? The anthology doesn't have a bunch of stories set in the 1990s or 2000s, with some sprinkles of BattleTech flavor. ((This might seem like a bar set low enough for earthworms, but I'll point to If You Were A Dinosaur My Love.)) Masquerade and Old Wounds, Old Words are probably the weakest, since the main character's background as an arena fighter and recent war college graduate, respectively, more drive the story than actually show up in it. But Small is about infantry versus a Mech, Test Drive is about stealing a mech (even if one step involves squicking out some Clan-sphere bandits with the idea of 'free love'), and Dragon Slayer a set of Elementals (power armor) against a conventional mech.

I'd probably give Old Words as clearly acting as a proxy for political discussion -- a large part of the crux rotates around two characters discussing various terms for religious taboos, afaict all real-world ones rather than BattleTech ones -- and put down a maybe for Masquerade. I'd probably put 60% BattleTech as more than enough for a link, but I'm not the one making the call.

Is the rule to avoid unnecessary political discussion, when not necessary for the BattleTech content? I don't think any of the stories actually needed the LGBT stuff to be successful stories; Dragon Slayer in particular feels a little like it got crowbarred in, and Small you could miss if you were speed-reading. I'm not sure how interesting Old Wounds Old Words would be if stripped from any real-world historical context, but people do read LitRPG or learn how to speak Klingon. The anthology as-is would flunk it, but then again, so would a lot of writing -- firearms and military tactics as well as their real-world ramifications are pretty common in a setting like this, Clanners have a caste system that lends to some very obvious metaphors a lot of people touch -- and I don't think it'd be a reasonable rule.

Here is my bugbear with it.

Being gay is not political. Pride month is explicitly political, with all the accompanied political fundraising, canvasing, local DNC candidates having booths at the events, etc. Another Battletech group I'm a part of had someone try to use the bruhaha on Reddit as an excuse to post a thinly veiled miniature raffle to fundraise for The Trevor Project. It was swiftly deleted under the "No Real World Politics Rule" of that group.

We'll see how long that lasts.

Want to do your big gay Battletech fanfiction? Sure, why not. Want to coordinate it with an event as specifically and manifestly political as Pride month? That's real world politics. You're outta here (at least in my perfect world).

The whole purpose of a Battletech sub is to discuss a fictional universe that exists after massive social and economic changes more than 1,000 years removed from our own. Shit that happens in our world that seems really all encompassing should have less bearing on any discussion there than Monophysite vs Miaphysite debates have on our culture wars. It's supposed to be a place where the debate is focused on the merits of House Steiner vs House Liao or why catgirls from the Magestry of Canopus are clearly the best faction.

I guess I'd need to know about the content of the stories to judge if they were "political", but painting a mech in rainbow colors strikes me as so milquetoast that deleting such posts is petty.

I disagree strongly. Rainbow colors are a political statement in the same way that a swastika is a political statement.

Culture shouldn't be corporate. A corporation shouldn't run something that ultimately isn't about money and that can shape the values and culture of the participants. Woodworking is safe since nobody owns woodworking. There may very well be communist, jihadist, trans, national socialists etc who do wood working, but ultimately they can't set policy in the wood working world. Copy right law ensures that a few people who often don't even belong to a fandom can control it without the fandoms or society at large's best interest at heart.

Getting deep into a corporate product is slightly cringe, opt for forms of entertainment that aren't copyrighted or have some natural monopoly.

Woodworking as very white, conservative, and higher-income hobby has been a meme for a while, although I don't know how many actual woodworkers (eg Katz-Moses, Matt Estlea, etc) or even CNC spammers in the YouTube sphere care, and the smaller profile of the community makes it less relevant for the sort of people looking for status to hollow out and wear like a skin suit.

There's been some PRIDE-style stuff, both of the productive and defined-by-opposition variants (tbf, including my own attempts, though the stuff I can link isn't as rainbowy as the stuff I won't). But it's definitely less assumed that it's the sort of thing that Must Be Announced as in the broader Maker sphere, rather than someone's own personal interests.

Reddit has always been a place for left-wing moderators to run rampant and take action against people they don't agree with.

Is that what kids call Year Zero? I distinctly remember Reddit moderators and users successfully coordinating to bully a woke Reddit CEO out of her job.

In practice Pao was less woke than her successor, but the uproar from users provided the current CEO and the board (and Conde Nast, which was and remains the largest shareholder) with the pretext to fire her for someone else.

So? How were people supposed to know she's going to get replaced by someone worse?

In another thread you're telling someone that the Bud Light boycott is totally conservative win, from your response here I'm betting you will switch to saying Bud Light going even more woke was the boycott's fault.

Why wouldn’t she be replaced by someone worse? It’s exactly the problem of not understanding how organizations work and what the differences between them are.

Reddit was and is unprofitable and the money it does make is derived from cat gifs, the AskX subs and porn. It was entirely beholden to the ideological whims of its leadership and board, and its primary owner is literally the publisher of Teen Vogue.

Again: so? Aall that means they could have just hired someone worse than Pao to begin with. If Reddit was and is unprofitable, that means Bud Light can become unprofitable, and the same logic will apply.

It could, but Bud Light operates in a very different market from Reddit. Switching beers is much easier than upending a community is.

ShitRedditSays was the first reddit which banned posters for dissent, and for a long time the only one. Before, it was assumed downvotes (which if getting sufficiently many, didn't yet make you wait between posting comments) were sufficient.

Reddit has always been a place for left-wing moderators to run rampant and take action against people they don't agree with.

This is blatant retconning. No, it has not always been this way. For many years, yes, but not forever.

Reddit has always been a place for left-wing moderators to run rampant and take action against people they don't agree with.

This is a classic misremembering of history that is repeated at Twitter (walked back a bit), Reddit, Youtube, etc. These sites were BUILT by right of center users because they were places that gave a platform for things outside the left wing media window (including even Fox). Stephan Moleneaux (sp?) was a power user on all three at one point. The_donald was once the most active subreddit. These sites only really started systematic censorship after they became the default platform for XXX sort of media. Its basically a classic bait and switch. People invested in the platforms when they were neutral or right of center. Then they basically came to those people and said, "haha that $10k is mine now."

Sounds like the problem here is the originator opening the gates. Otherwise the mods and population could have kept chugging along. At least until someone justified a wargoal to Reddit admins.

I don’t think that plays out the same way for woodworking. There’s no originator to destabilize the whole community. You’d have to go straight to the top and try for mass demonetization. As I understand it, YouTube is absolute garbage as a platform, but I don’t think it tends to moderate for not saying something. I hope.

I recall something similar happening when I last was looking for Minecraft launchers. One of them was reasonably recommended, but the latest commit had deleted a woke code of conduct. Ooo, scary—oh. He also booted anyone he thought was too left-leaning from the permissions. There goes the neighborhood.

Easy fork, right? Just make their own PolyMC and don’t let this guy in. But network effects mean that requires a bunch of hand-wringing warning people off the old brand name, which is now dead to “anyone of sane mind.”

I mention all that because my first reflex was to tell you to suck it up and make /r/TrueBattletech or whatever. There’s clearly a supply of recently unemployed moderators. But I realize that the network effects are stacked against you, and that no matter what you do, it will be painted as a reactionary shithole. That sucks, and I’m sorry to hear about it.

While we’re on the subject…Please tell me that RogueTech is still okay?

That's why it's important to have a principled rule in the first place, because majorities don't have principles.

I think there are a lot of reasons to distrust upvotes as a metric of value or even general preferences.

If the userbase did, in fact, overwhelmingly prefer to amend the rules, that’s fine. Would that have resulted in this sort of originator revolt?

I recall something similar happening when I last was looking for Minecraft launchers. One of them was reasonably recommended, but the latest commit had deleted a woke code of conduct. Ooo, scary—oh. He also booted anyone he thought was too left-leaning from the permissions. There goes the neighborhood.

To be fair to the broader Minecraft community there, launchers by necessity have to have the ability to run arbitrary Java code with a pretty minimal level of sandboxing: there's a lot of harm that can and has happened through supply chain attacks. Booting a lot of maintainers has been one of the warning signs for a GitHub compromise.

If you want a real spicy version, I'd point to how LexManos got kicked out of leadership roles.

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I don’t think that plays out the same way for woodworking. There’s no originator to destabilize the whole community. You’d have to go straight to the top and try for mass demonetization. As I understand it, YouTube is absolute garbage as a platform, but I don’t think it tends to moderate for not saying something. I hope.

I put nothing past them. Having centralization of a hobby makes it easier. But activist and infiltrators make it work just as well, just slower, without.

Maybe it starts with a campaign for all woodworkers to start putting their pronouns in their correspondence, and announce it at the beginning of each video. It's not like everyone would do it overnight. But maybe a few would. Then maybe one of the really big channels on Youtube gets talked into doing it, and suddenly there is a sea change. Next thing you know, if you aren't announcing your pronouns at the beginning of your woodworking videos, the comments section becomes a sea of accusations of bigotry. I know, I know, comments on youtube, what do you expect? Well, at the moment, most comment sections on woodworking video are actually profoundly helpful. I know, right?

Then the pressure ramps up. Suddenly all the channels are trying to outdo each other promoting Pride, or donating to LGBT causes. A little bit later, they are just straight up proselytizing for Democrats and calling all Republican's Nazi's.

Because it's a community, and it's also a hustle. In a sense it's zero sum, because there are only so many eyeballs you can get on your content. And most of the creators network extensively, and you don't want to find yourself outside the network. Same as most Youtube verticals.

Maybe a few channels find themselves left out of the network because at some point the meat AI that is the typical mob of "creators" that's been trained by the Youtube Algorithm hits a line they simply cannot cross along with everyone else. Maybe they can't throw their family under the bus as being bigots. Maybe they actually don't agree with mutilating and sterilizing children as a form of "trans health care". When all their former friends and colleagues treat them as persona non grata, they are immediately radicalized in the other direction.

And that is the hellscape I'm afraid is in woodworkings future. Because I've seen it happen, over, and over, and over again.

I don’t think that plays out the same way for woodworking. There’s no originator to destabilize the whole community

If it happened to knitters it can happen to woodworkers. Centralization helps but isn't critical. There was no centralized platform for internet atheists, but Atheism+ still happened.

Gays destroyed the what now rule?

You don't have to look all that far back to remember days where the dynamic you see was, in fact, entirely upside down. DADT was implemented in the 1990's, and was replaced by gays being allowed to serve openly a cool two decades later. When my parents left high school and the male graduates applied at the draft office, the military still undertook serious effort to root out anyone gay - and I live in a nation that is friendlier to gay people than most of Europe is.

Talk about the vacation plans you and your (fellow gay) SO have been making in 1993? You're fired, do not pass go, do not collect $200. You don't get to marry that person, because of course people of the same sex don't get to do that. Local drunks will ambush you if you go for a drink and the police will cackle about this. If you bring any of this up, well, it's really not politics, is it? It's just being a decent person.

Yes, there's excesses in this: call it part of man's desire to have his culture be superior over others. So it goes. But accusing the gays of this uniquely? Please. Many of them well remember how they used to live, they can see places in their own nations where people still do, and they act accordingly. There's nothing odd or particularly wicked about these people, and we don't have to pretend otherwise.

Gays destroyed the what now rule?

You don't have to look all that far back to remember days where the dynamic you see was, in fact, entirely upside down. DADT was implemented in the 1990's, and was replaced by gays being allowed to serve openly a cool two decades later. When my parents left high school and the male graduates applied at the draft office, the military still undertook serious effort to root out anyone gay - and I live in a nation that is friendlier to gay people than most of Europe is.

DADT was not a serious effort to root anyone gay out, it was a serious effort to keep them in. It's fair to say it was still unfair, too restrictive, and discriminatory, but it is extremely dishonest to claim that the goal was to get rid of gay people.

Even with this example in mind, it is pretty clear that progressives are explicitly destroying attempts to keep non-political spaces. Given that their protestations that they just want to be left alone quickly turned to bullying bakers, and promoting mastectomies for minors, it's fair to say their goal was never to keep anything apolitical.

The progressives disagree with you that these spaces were ever non-political, and frankly, I think they're right. I could talk at length about Dutch pillarisation and the funny consequences this had for society, but the people who bemoan politics being everywhere now are people who haven't been paying attention for all that long.

Frankly, this is bullshit. Name a single "non-political" internet space that ever had giant crosses plastered across it, and the rules updated to include "in this space we believe: there is no god but Jesus, all who do not praise him will be banned"

"There is no such thing as no-politics" is just used as an excuse to do whatever you want to people, claiming there are no standards of decency and pluralism that should stop you.

I refer to my original comment, where being known as gay would get you barred from the military or most any normal person's job, and where this was so pervasive it was the expectation. "There's no such thing as no-politics" indeed, because these gay people I've met and spoken to never had a choice.

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They absolutely had a choice. They made the choice to be gay, and not just homosexual, and that was a political act of their own free will.

Nah.

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It would be better to just drop the conversation altogether rather than leaving comments like this.

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So? Why should I care about what an unrelated organization did? This is a hobby space ffs, not some government or public entity. You’re trying to justify totalitarianism based on some kind of collective blood libel that almost no one alive in the country has anything to do with.

No, being known as gay would get you barred from high status jobs, which most normal people don’t have.

More to the point, the objection isn’t actually ‘gays should go into the closet’. There are people who believe that but it’s not the contention at issue. The contention at issue is whether a ‘no discussion of current events, period, with current events defined as anything after 1988’ rule should preclude 2023 pride month specific content. Which seems obvious.

I get why gay activists feel like they should have a special exception. I just don’t care. They got what they wanted.

That might apply to some places. It doesn't apply to the hobby groups that are being discussed. You absolutely could participate in Battletech or video games without saying anything whatsoever about your private life.

I mean, you certainly couldn't play Counter-Strike without someone saying quite an awful lot about your private life. And your mom's private life, too, for that matter.

No, you couldn't pay Counter Strike without someone baselessly speculating about your private life. There were no consequences for what they said, because none of it was real, they were just fishing around for insults. There is so much difference between "anonymous person makes something up to annoy you" and "being known as gay would get you barred from the military or most any normal person's job" that it's a difference in kind, not degree.

"We never had a choice!" he screamed from atop a float shaped like a dick as it slowly trundled down the main thoroughfare during the second week of Pride Month.

For a while they were at the very least acting like all they wanted is apolitical treatment, if they never believed it, why should I take them at their word regarding anything?

but the people who bemoan politics being everywhere now are people who haven't been paying attention for all that long.

That's flatly wrong. It was indeed possible to participate in hobby groups and focus on the hobby instead of any politics for many, many years prior to the awokening.

For a while they were at the very least acting like all they wanted is apolitical treatment, if they never believed it, why should I take them at their word regarding anything?

The standard response, and the correct one, is that the people who used to get them fired and beaten and marginalised are suddenly uncommonly invested in a tolerance they never believed in. Why should they believe anyone who talks about it when it never seems to have been on the table before?

That's flatly wrong. It was indeed possible to participate in hobby groups and focus on the hobby instead of any politics for many, many years prior to the awokening.

Not for gay people, it wasn't. And lest you compare their fate to yours, they were in fact born that way in a way the people bemoaning anything rainbow-colored aren't.

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The standard response, and the correct one, is that the people who used to get them fired and beaten and marginalised are suddenly uncommonly invested in a tolerance they never believed in.

That may be the standard response, but no honest person can claim it's correct. For example, you are not talking to a person who tried to get them fired, beaten, and marginalized, you are talking to a person who tried to protect the from getting fired, beaten, and marginalized, and tried talking extremely bigoted and aggressive people into acceptence.

The correct response is that people who were arguing for broad principles of acceptance and free speech are suddenly uncommonly invested in intolerance. I'm not going to say that they never believed in it, because it's starting to look like they always did, and were just hiding it.

Not for gay people, it wasn't.

Yes it was. No one cared what you were doing outside the hobby group.

no honest person

You can do better than insist you're only talking to liars, and I'd appreciate if you did that rather than accuse me of lying to your face.

Because, for what it's worth, I'm sure those are the things you believe. And I'm also sure gay people are right to point out that these beliefs, today, are the ones of people who'd love to shove them back down the closet. Until there is a way to distinguish the likes of you from the likes of them, a good deal of them are going to take a dim view of people who bemoan a lost tolerance. A tolerance, I'll add, that they didn't see much of in the first place.

No one cared what you were doing outside the hobby group.

The workplace. The military. Public life in general.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. History didn't start off in the 2010s, and plenty of people cared about that just fine.

Until there is a way to distinguish the likes of you from the likes of them, a good deal of them are going to take a dim view of people who bemoan a lost tolerance.

But there was a way to determine it, public people like James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghosian, the Weinstein Brothers, etc. have a track record. Private people like me also do, even though it may not be accessible by randos on the Internet, it was accessible to people in my immediate environment, who suddenly decided continue the march of progress and steamroll over all concerns.

The workplace. The military. Public life in general.

Scroll back in the conversation, it was about hobby groups. You were claiming politically neutral spaces never existed, that's what I'm disputing. You might notice the issue people are raising isn't about taking politics out of public life - something that might very well be a contradiction - but about having some spaces were we can set aside intra-societal disputes, and focus on the things that we have in common.

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Not for gay people, it wasn't.

Yes, it was, speaking as one. It's not relevant, why would I fucking bring it up? I participated in a load of internet forums during the good era of the internet and not once did it become necessary to announce what categories of people I was attracted to, or even my actual real life sex, age, or location.

Strange as it may seem these days, it is completely possible to NOT plaster all the details of your personal life all over the internet all the time. In fact, it used to be the norm to avoid doing that at all costs!

I, too, was around for that era of the internet - and I, too, miss it dearly. It died once the internet stopped being for nerds and started being for everyone. Neither of us are getting those days back.

We can have them back, those rules just need to be enforced instead of implicitly understood by everyone.

Enforced anonymity would do a lot to fix the internet, or small portions of it.

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I participated in a load of internet forums during the good era of the internet and not once did it become necessary to announce what categories of people I was attracted to, or even my actual real life sex, age, or location.

That was, coincidentally, the time when it was perfectly normal to call a game mechanic you were not fond of "gay".

It was indeed nice when people weren't perpetual offense-seeking fannies, yes. I wasn't offended by it, despite being a homosexualist. Toughen up.

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The victory I wanted was for everyone else to not care, too. Instead, I got LGBTQ2A+ climbing night at the local gym, corporations under the auspices of straight white women plastering rainbows on every surface, and “we believe love is love and kindness is everything” along with casual discussions on the internet of the moral imperative to punch my face.

We replaced homophobia with political enmity, not indifference. To me, the pride flag feels sorta akin to the confederate flag. Its not exactly a symbol of hate or exclusion for most of the people flying it, but it sure feels that way on this side of things.

We replaced homophobia with political enmity, not indifference.

The enmity is because the homophobia, to a large degree, remains. Many homophobes have grudgingly agreed (or been forced by law or social pressure) to not actively persecute homosexuals, but their position remains that homosexuals are not legitimate members of society and should be tolerated only on the condition that they keep it to themselves - don't express affection in public, don't "shove it in my face", don't say gay acknowledge homosexuality. And, of course, many of them do persecute homosexuals.

Indifference is reacting to two men kissing in public the same way you'd react to a man and a woman kissing in public, not tolerating private homosexuality.

  • -10

This makes no sense, there is massive political enmity aimed at people who are not homophobic, and who are saying homosexuals are legitimate members of society, and shouldn't be prohibited from expressing affection any more than straight people are.

don't say gay acknowledge homosexuality

There's been a bunch of these bills passed, so I can't vouch for every one, but "don't say gay" is mostly a lie. It's mostly "don't show porn to kids, and don't indoctrinate them with whacky pomo theories".

Yeah, some time ago someone brought up an anti-transition bill setting the minimum age to 25 years. Like you said the incompetence is extremely frustrating, since you can get the same effect with better optics, and most of the time you don't even need to come up with the law yourself, you can just copy-paste a bill from another state. I don't remember the state, but by contrast someone else passed a law forcing insurance companies that pay for transition to also pay for detransition, and the critics are forced to incoherently mumble about how detransitioning is incredibly rare, but the bill is also somehow an unacceptable attack on the LGBTQ+ community.

But the whole thing makes me wonder if optics even brings anything, given that the whole "Don't Say Gay" mantra started with Florida's bill, and to my knowledge my summary of it was accurate.

Indifference is reacting to two men kissing in public the same way you'd react to a man and a woman kissing in public, not tolerating private homosexuality.

Correct. The right way to go about it though is to discourage both men and women kissing in public. Keep those to your bedroom, the rest of society doesn't need to see it. Until westerners grok this simple fact they should be treated to frequent public displays of gay men passionately kissing until it dawns upon them that a man and a woman kissing is indecent in the exact same way and to the exact same degree as two men kissing, it's just that their own oversexualised social mood makes them ignore the depravity of the former.

I think it's rather unfair to blame that one on the rank-and-file westerners. It wasn't that long ago when kissing in public was seen as indecent. The oversexualization came about through a massive amount of psyops, and arguably it was done specifically to pave the way for double mastectomies for minors, and whatever lies beyond.

don't express affection in public, don't "shove it in my face", don't say gay acknowledge homosexuality

Correct. Homosexuality is fundamentally anti-social and anti-civilizational in a lot of ways. Merely being allowed to not be killed over it is a huge ask.

When you inevitable complain that homosexuality isn't anti-civilizational, consider that a civilization of homosexuals isn't possible. It will be gone within a human lifetime. Only a civilization that encourages self-reproduction is possible over timelines longer than a few decades.

"We can't have a civilization if it's literally 100% X" doesn't imply "X is fundamentally anti-civilizational".

I find his universalization a bit hyperbolic, but if it isn't too much to ask would you say that acceptance of homosexuality is closer to being moral or immoral as it concerns moral duties and virtues?

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Do you feel the same way about, say, monks or nuns? What is your criteria for anti-civilizational to a degree that deserves execution? It can't be "a civilization composed exclusively of X couldn't survive" because that's a criterion that would condemn, among others: men, women, the elderly, babies, doctors, etc...

Midwestern roots here- I don’t want to see any kissing in public or know anything of anyone’s sexual identity. It’s not my business and its quite impolite of you to make it so. So yeah, keep it to yourselves, everyone.

More seriously, I can’t quantify how many homophobes exist in the wild and the extent to which they make it known. I’d agree that homophobia remains, but I disagree it’s the cause for the political enmity. Hating across party lines is something new.

It feels like the implicit argument, to put words in your mouth, goes like this: the homophones, however many and however vocal, hate you and yours after all this time, so you are justified in hating them back, and twice as hard. There is no off ramp here.

Midwestern roots here- I don’t want to see any kissing in public or know anything of anyone’s sexual identity. It’s not my business and its quite impolite of you to make it so. So yeah, keep it to yourselves, everyone.

I'm not particularly approving of PDA either, but that's not the core of I'm talking about. It's merely an illustration. You have aggressive homophobes who actively lobby to oppress homosexuals (e.g. they want to roll back things like gay marriage), but you also have low-key homophobes. They grudgingly tolerate homosexuals on a day-to-day level, but they'd prefer they be excluded from public life, regard them as intrinsically suspect (see also: groomer discourse), and will support homophobic politicians and policies.

It feels like the implicit argument, to put words in your mouth, goes like this: the homophones, however many and however vocal, hate you and yours after all this time, so you are justified in hating them back, and twice as hard. There is no off ramp here.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the enmity continues to exist because the war is still on. It's not like all the homophobes gave up and decided it was okay after all. Homophobia still has social and political power, even if it has fallen on hard times. As @Nantafiria notes, you still have children being disowned by their families for being homosexual. You still have anti-homosexual laws being proposed (and passed). It's not about justification, it's about acknowledging what is actually going on. As long as you have people trying to shove homosexuals back in the closet, homosexuals (and their allies) are going to shove back.

There might have been a compromise built around public institutional neutrality and pluralist tolerance, but that was never actually on the table. Instead we got attempts to entrench legal discrimination. Every concession to tolerance and legal recognition of homosexuality was, in effect, torn from the unwilling hands of people who want homosexuals to stay in the closet (or not exist). As long as that is the case, you're not going to get people to back down from ostentatious celebration and inclusion of homosexuality and hostility towards even mere disapproval. Though it almost certainly is no off ramp at this point - when total victory is in sight, there's no reason to settle for anything less than unconditional surrender.

Thank you for sharing your view on the matter from the other side. I’m sure I don’t notice much of what is going on because it’s not directed at me.

I do see quite a few anti-trans laws being passed in national news but I haven’t seen any anti-homosexual. Are you lumping the one in with the other or perhaps I just haven’t noticed? Would you mind providing an example or two?

Though it almost certainly is no off ramp at this point - when total victory is in sight, there's no reason to settle for anything less than total victory…

The push for total victory is counter productive - it pushed me in the opposite direction and I’d guess I’m not alone. I got off the train when actual friends started unironically talking about literally bashing in the skulls of people with my political beliefs. I know I shouldn’t pin the beliefs of Bay Area radicalists on the movement at large, but I don’t know how to not do that, either.

Midwestern roots here- I don’t want to see any kissing in public or know anything of anyone’s sexual identity. It’s not my business and its quite impolite of you to make it so. So yeah, keep it to yourselves, everyone.

Do you go around telling straight people to keep it to themselves? What about seeing a man and woman holding hands with prominent rings that indicate their marriage? Or are we going to say that straight isn't a sexual orientation? You may have some friends over at /r/GamingCirclejerk if you think that.

If you only ever raise issues with the identities of gay people publicly, how are you meaningfully going to differentiate yourself from those who just hate gay people?

The new sub removed a photo of some mechs painted up in police colors as police are hostile to pride and so posting that in pride month right after a pride related kerfuffle was considered unacceptable. There is nothing but excess in the way the pride people work and if it weren't for double standards they wouldn't have any standards at all.

Since the military has made gays openly serving a policy, how has their organization been doing? Have gays been rushing the fill the recruitment numbers? Or are they in a crisis to find anyone who even cares to join their organization?

Maybe there is a reason for this fence that has existed for thousands of years. Or you think you know better than all your ancestors?

No differently than before, if the numbers are anything to go by; I see no dropoff in the slightest after 2011. Are the numbers wrong, or are you?

Try looking at actual numbers, not just the first graphic from a web search. Active duty numbers are published yearly and it's public information, and if you're not poor statista will compile that into more parse-able charts. There is a noticeable drop from a local peak in 2010 to 2016 but that has halfway recovered since. Keeping in mind that in raw numbers it's a drop on the order of 100,000 members, with a recovery on the order of 40,000 and that in per capita terms that is a continuing decline.

One hundred thousand fewer people on active duty, in an army of over a million, the cause of which the statistics (obviously) won't tell us.

If that's it, I'm going to keep filing this under the non-issue drawer, yeah.

Your numbers lacks serious range, stopping around 2011 for some reason. I still can easily see a visual steep decline starting when “don’t ask don’t tell” was implemented, which actually helps prove my point.

https://warontherocks.com/2023/03/addressing-the-u-s-military-recruiting-crisis/

How bad is the recruiting crisis? During the last fiscal year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 15,000 active-duty soldiers, or 25 percent of its target. This shortfall forced the Army to cut its planned active-duty end strength from 476,000 to 466,000. And the current fiscal year is likely to be even worse. Army officials project that active end strength could shrink by as much as 20,000 soldiers by September, down to 445,000. That means that the nation’s primary land force could plummet by as much as 7 percent in only two years — at a time when its missions are increasing in Europe and even in the Pacific, where the Army provides many of the critical wartime theater enablers without which the other services cannot function.

There are in fact many things about which I know better than all my ancestors. The safety of lead plumbing, the causes and transmission of infectious diseases – the list goes on.

Anyway, how do you know the person you are replying to has no Greek ancestors?

A fun legend but of dubious factual basis

http://ancientheroes.net/blog//did-an-army-of-lovers-really-dominate-ancient-greece

I don't really think you can put the blame on declining military recruitment efforts on homosexuality. Race-based issues, COVID vaccination policies and the actual actions of the US military in combination with differing social attitudes among the population all seem like far more obvious causes for the decline than anything else, especially seeing as how we have successful historical examples of societies and militaries which didn't really care about homosexuality in the armed forces.

If making hobbyist spaces aggressively pro-gay is a reaction to past abuse, wouldn't the people most in favor of this be older gay men? In my experience, the people most invested in this stuff either aren't gay at all or if they are, their age and class background makes it very unlikely they ever got fired or beaten up for it.

The staunchest pro-gay activists I personally know are people who had to cut ties with just-about their entire social circle on account of being gay. This is one reason, I think, LGBT activism has kept going so strong: the community gets an ever-present supply of people who hate those who'd oppress them with extreme zeal.

Does anyone actually check those stories, or is it the LGBT equivalent of a confessional narrative? Because I've known children of urban lefty professors who make such claims, and while I can't be sure they're false....

Yes, every community has liars and free riders. LGBT activists are human as much as anyone else. Indeed.

Activists have a ready response to no-politics rules: "The personal is political" or maybe "Privilege is getting to define someone else's existence as political."

I'm not sure they're wrong though? On its face, this advice is independent of whatever viewpoint you might hold. Any kind of activity with people interacting will always involve value judgements about how everyone should behave. Post a woodworking video about making a dog toy? That's a statement that you think having pet dogs is okay, and if a subreddit allows that video to be posted then they're saying they agree.

I guess the point is, if you don't like LGBT pride in your hobby, then you're not going to get anywhere by arguing for a generic "no politics" stance since to onlookers it seems like you're ashamed of your own position and unwilling to advocate it directly. If you can't articulate to your fellow hobbyists why LGBT specifically is bad and should be opposed, then you're just going to keep ceding ground to the activists on the other side who feel no such compunction in advocating against "bigotry" or whatever they call their opposition.

I don't know if you're feigning ignorance, but you're saying the things that someone feigning ignorance would say. If pet dogs was an issue for a major political party , people had pet dog rallies that were specifically there to rub pet dogs in the face of people who didn't like them, if people routinely got fired from their jobs for their opinions on pet dogs, and if people's opinions on pet dogs--or even their refusal to speak about pet dogs--marked them as irredeemably evil and not fit for polite company then pet dogs would be political. Just "I have an opinion on whether it's okay" doesn't make it political.

In his 2001 book, “Letters to a Young Contrarian”, Christopher Hitchens wrote the following as a warning:

PS: Since this often seems to come up in discussions of the radical style, I’ll mention one other gleaning from my voyages. Beware of identity politics. I’ll rephrease that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying “The Personal is Political.” It began as a sort of reaction to the defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of small difference, because each identity group begat its subgroups and “specificities.” This tendency has often been satirised – the overweight caucuse of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs – but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.

Anyway what you swiftly realize if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighborhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn’t change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that “humanity” (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, this way.”

This comment got a report for "leave the internet at the door". I'm going to comment even though this is not a warning, because last week someone else got a ban for complaining about some subreddit drama that they shared as a top level comment. So some clarification needs to be made:

What makes this post different from the last one is that most of the personal trouble that WhiningCoil might have gotten into is left out of the post.

However, this post isn't necessarilly a good example, because it is skirting some other rules. There is a bit of consensus building equating pride month with "far-left politics". This is not written in a way to include everyone in the conversation as a result the comments that try to push back all start on a semi adversarial footing. They can't question your viewpoint without also making it a criticism of you.

They can't question your viewpoint without also making it a criticism of you.

I find your terms acceptable.

And then they get reported for antagonism, which is somewhat accurate, but then when I see where the antagonism originates I go and approve the comments. It creates work and headaches for the mods.

Regardless of how people feel about being personally insulted or antagonized we generally don't like to allow it. Because then we end up with an environment where such behavior is pervasive.

I'm coming for woodworking too, you son-of-a-bitch.

I'm already the guy who swoops in at the last second to bid one dollar more on that #8 jointer; the next step is transing you chisels and redoing you benchtop as a laminated rainbow.

(this is a joke, by the way. I can't really make an effort comment here without it being a personal attack so I'm not really sure what to do vis. conveying that I don't like it)

Would you at least agree that the woodworking community as it exists is rather unenthusiastic about expressing allyship?

Yes and no; it's super localized and age gated.

Where I am: Allyship isn't expressed; but it is 100% presumed. Eg, if someone made a rainbow themed credenza and people started complaining about it being political; the response wouldn't have been understanding lets say.

Back east: Probably not the case.

Where I am woodworking (especially hand tool woodworking; which is my bag) is a very expensive involved hobby for upper-class people, thus lower class beliefs re. lgbtq+ai^2 are cast out into the darkness along with watching nascar and listening to country music. That's prole shit! For the fucking poors!

In other places it's probably totally different, I bet.

I'm interested in knowing more about this. Growing up fairly poor it seemed like hand tools were ubiquitous but power tools were reserved for professionals and maybe rich hobbyists. I guess like horses and automobiles the ever-cheaper tech has reversed this dynamic?

Where do hand tool woodworking hobbyists congregate? Is Fine Woodworking magazine still relevant, or does it have too many power tools?

(this is a joke, by the way. I can't really make an effort comment here without it being a personal attack so I'm not really sure what to do vis. conveying that I don't like it)

Consider not commenting, then.

If you want to convey that you don't like a post without being willing to make the effort to articulate your objections in a way that is not a personal attack -- well, too bad. Don't.

And since you've been banned three times for this already, this ban will be for two weeks. Next time will likely be a permaban.


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