site banner
PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38172 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The Canadian Truckers Won. Everything.

by Kulak

I keep encountering this misconception from people who don't follow Canadian politics...

That somehow the Trucker convoy was defeated.

The Freedom Convoy was the most wildly immediately successful protest in Canadian history, maybe WORLD history.

People remember Trudeau's crackdown, old ladies having their skulls cracked with batons, Disabled indigenous grandmothers trampled by police horses, Bank accounts frozen and public employees investigated for mere donations...

And there's a big reason people remember this... It was dramatic, and the media and the regime certainly wanted you to think resistance was futile...

What people don't remember is what happened in the immediate aftermath: The government caved on absolutely everything within a week for the most important things, and then a month or so for the rest.

First off there was the massive political shift that happened as the convoy was occurring:

Jason Kenny, the pro-lockdown Premiere of Alberta (Canada's most conservative province) was forced to announce his resignation, and Alberta immediately lifted all it's lockdown impositions.

Erin O'Toole the pro-lockdown leader of the Conservative Party was likewise forced to resign, his temporary replacement Candice Bergen (not to be mistaken with the actress) being a longtime rival opposed to lockdowns, and his main rival who replaced her after intra-party elections was Pierre Poilievre, the Politician after Maxime Bernier who was quickest to embrace the Truckers and their cry for freedom.

As the convoy was ongoing Trudeau invoked the Emergencies act (the Act which replaced the War Meassures Act for invoking Martial Law)... Now these grant the government almost unlimited powers, famously the War Meassures Act was invoked by Trudeau's Father to detain Quebeckers and raid hundreds of homes without warrants during the FLQ separatist crisis of 1972...the catch is that while the follow on Emergencies act can be invoked by a Prime Minister parlaiment has to sign off on the act's continued use within one week.

Well skulls were cracked, accounts frozen, and as the week passed things came down to the deadline... On the very last night... Trudeau managed to get sign-off (without the conservative opposition) from the House of Commons, but it had to go to the Upper House, the Canadian Senate.

NOW. The Canadian Senate is a shameful institution.

It's like the British House of Lords but without the nobility.

A senate seat is a lifetime appointment, by the prime minister... and that's it. Little to no review, no democratic input, and this is supposed to be equivalent or superior to our elected House of Commons...

Naturally the go-to use of the Senate is as a spoils system for cronies. Do some shameful favour for a prime minister, raise a lot of money for the party, be politically connected to a provincial gov the PM wants to buy off... Get a Senate seat.

One of the longest-standing political agreements in Canada is how badly the Senate needs to be abolished... but can't be because Quebec is nominally overrepresented in the Senate, and abolishing it would cause a constitutional crisis.

So mostly the Senate keeps it's head down and tries to avoid the news... because it will never be sympathetic.

So this nursing home for cronies, criminals, fall guys, and connected activists past...people who's names haven't been spoken aloud since 1996... an institution that was last in the news 10 years ago for an expense scandal whose essence was "Wait we're paying these leeches expenses!?"... that body was called upon to sign off on the emergencies act...

And all these self-important losers smelled blood in the water.

Did they have some principled stand on civil liberties grounds? Absolutely NOT.

They had a principled objection that they weren't being treated as more important!

Sure they'd consider signing off on Trudeau's abuses, but they wanted an ongoing senate committee to continuously review the abuses, with cabinet level briefings for the committee members, regular pressers, inclusion on the forming of policy... Juicy Juicy INFLUENCE.

The exact thing these shameful roaches had been denied ever since their real political careers flamed out in '92 and they'd been forced to become lost souls in the senate.

The speeches these delusional 70-year-old nobodies gave...MY GOD barely coherent gibberish from geriatrics convinced they were great statesmen... convinced their wisdom might now be included in great volumes of Canadian oratory next to Laurier, Macdonald, and Pearson...

With mere hours left to the deadline, no passage in sight, and the nightmare of dealing with these people before him ... Trudeau voluntarily withdrew the act.

In the preceding week his Finance minister Crystia Freeland had given press statements and interviews to the effect that they planned to hunt down everyone who donated to the convoy, and create an expansive new system of financial control... with hints this would extend not only to the protesters, but all the unvaccinated...none of this would happen.

Instead Trudeau weekly tried to claim victory... There were no protestors in Ottawa or on bridges! But in the week that followed lockdown measures were quickly and quietly pulled back. Alberta had already rescinded their measures, and other provinces were following suit. By June almost all domestic restrictions were gone the regime desperately afraid that if the Protesters were able to shut down the capital and cross-border trade in minus 20 to minus 40 degree weather...what might they do in the Summer? Canada Day (July 1) was approached with fear.

By August I travelled to the US for a wedding... Unvaccinated. The greater barrier being the risk the US would refuse me entry than that Canada would hastle me. The US border guard didn't ask.

And on the way back the Canadian border guard, obviously over with this stuff, told me "Now because you're unvaccinated you do technically have to quarantine, and they could possibly call, and if you say you haven't been quarantining they might do something..." I received one email from public health and immediately deleted it. There was no enforcement.

I travelled again in October, and was not even asked uponreturn.

The last measures had been withdrawn.

The Greatest barrier to travel was US border restrictions and requirements... which technically only ended in May this year.

WITHIN 1 month the trucker convoy had effected a hostile overthrow of the Governments of Alberta and the official opposition, the Conservative Party of Canada, from pro to anti- lockdown, and crushed the moderate wing of the conservative movement.

At Multiple points Trudeau was nearly forced out by his own party and his government was humiliated with most of it's perceived power destroyed, it now exists as a rump failing to pass gun control bills (IN CANADA!) against moderate opposition.

Within 2-4 months all domestic restrictions were gone and within 8 months even the pantomime of international restrictions didn't exist, Canada had fewer covid restrictions than the US.

COMPLETE CONSENSUS had be totally destroyed such that in less than a year the national consensus was the polar opposite.

And all the actual action took place in 1 month, on the coldest days of the year, with a movement who's key members had to drive 4000-5000km (~3000 miles) along treacherous northern roads being greeted roadside by supporters who stood out in minus 40 to give them coffee food and support.

This was at once the most logistically challenging protest in human history involving the volunteering of tens of millions of dollars of equipment, weeks of time, tens of thousands of people, across a continent...

And it might just have been the most successful individual protest in human history. The most successful violent revolutions have not achieved such total reversals in culture and policy across so many levels of government, in such few short months.

THERE IS A VERY GOOD REASON THE REGIME WANTS YOU TO THINK OF IT AS A FAILURE.

The same reason things like Brexit, the Yellow Vests in France, or Jan 6th, or the Dutch Farmers protest freaked out the elite so much.

The greatest possible threat to them is that the mass of the Suburban and rural Middle-class: Flyover country, the Petite Bourgeoise, the small business owners, the farmers, the truckers, the Kulaks... The greatest possible threat to the regime is that this mass will realize its incredible power both in coordination, logistics, and initiative... And that it will overthrow the governing class of Bureaucrats, Regulators, Lawyers, DEI Administrators, and leaches who've gotten rich surviving of their tax cattle who actually work and produce things.

They HAVE to play off the Truckers as a failure... Trudeau had to declare victory then cave on every single individual policy.... because they can't let people see what it was:

A premonition of the great Class War to come.

Within 2-4 months all domestic restrictions were gone and within 8 months even the pantomime of international restrictions didn't exist, Canada had fewer covid restrictions than the US.

I admit I don't follow Canadian politics too closely, but I remember the protests happened in early 2022. The ever helpful Wikipedia confirms it was end of January 2022. 8 months from that is October 2022. Nobody had restrictions in October 2022. It's not some heroic achievement. It's like claiming you punched your enemy and he died, 80 years later, in the age of 103. Whatever happened, he didn't die from your punch, that much we could be sure of. In fact, 4 months is June 2022. California lifted its general indoor mask mandate in March 2022 and for schools, prisons and other dangerous spaces in April 2022. Israel (which reacted to covid with very severe restrictions) scrapped their Green Pass system in February 2022 and its mask mandates in April. Removing restrictions in June 2022 is not something that can be seriously taken as a big win of the protest movement.

The aftermath is: Trudeau put Canada under effectively dictatorship for 9 days, and suffered no noticeable consequences. The commission they tasked with whitewashing the ordeal after the fact successfully whitewashed it and confirmed the dictatorship was the appropriate measure to take (which means, in similar circumstances, the Canadian government won't hesitate to do it again). Note also that this is the only use of the Emergency Act ever - thus confirming that this is exactly what it is for, suppressing dissent. The weapon of asset confiscation have been successfully deployed against political enemies, and again, no consequences to speak of, and again, fully confirmed as appropriate and in fact, "unavoidable". Absolutely nothing was "overthrown", or, in fact, changed and absolutely no power was moved from one hands to other. Some victory.

You remind me of Russian liberals in early 2020s (before the war), where they would assemble a protest, get brutally crushed and beaten up, then parade on social media proclaiming "Putin is afraid! We showed him we are the power!" and invent a new form of "creative protesting" - white strips, flashlights, flashmobs, whatever. It ended up with their head person - Navalny - miraculously escaping the murder attempt and ending up in prison, likely for as long as Putin is alive (if he's not murdered by an "unfortunate accident" or "commits suicide"). And all their movement and their goals achieving squat, short of landing the more brave (or less smart, if you will) ones in prison and more smart (or less brave, if you will) ones in exile, where they can continue babbling about how Putin is deathly afraid of them. I'm sure Trudeau is "afraid" of the truckers in the same way.

DID YOU READ!?

A province's government changed, the second largest politcal party switched from vehemently pro to anti-lockdown with the Pro-lockdown losing their jobs, Trudeau's government is basically crippled all of his policies since have failed as seen with his gun ban falling through...

And the emergencies act failed to be extended, the relevant powers were lost when its 7 (not 9) limit expired without the power to extend it.

The fetishism of defeat. The desire to be powerless in the case of clear and undeniable victory is disgusting.

Your enemies can be absolutely as irredeemable, corrupt, and tyrannical as their worst critics imagine, AND STILL BE WEAK.

The hell do you want? Do you want the CBC to pat you on the back and say "No its OK. You won"

Grow up. Politics is war by other means, casualties on your own side are acceptable in the pursuit of victory.

And the truckers won a complete victory. Every freedom I had lost from 2019 to 2022, everything I expected to never get back and to suffer across decades of insurgency trying to claw back... Was restored, mostly within a month, and the rest in half a year.

THAT IS TOTAL VICTORY.

I will not let blackpilled moldbuggians tarnish it with their own impotence.

FLYOVER country won whilst all the theory-cells and blackpilled cosmopolitan right wing wing intellectual wrung their hands... Becuase the flyover rubes are better than you. More fit to rule. More fit for combat. More able to organize. And now it is the job of the right wing intellectuals to catch up with the 40 year old small businessmen and conpsiracy theorists who've shown themselves more capable that the entire right wing political class

the second largest politcal party switched from vehemently pro to anti-lockdown with the Pro-lockdown losing their jobs

Everybody is anti-lockdown now. In fact, nobody even knows anybody who advocated for the lockdown except their political enemies. It's not fashionable now, so everybody has been always supporting what is fashionable now, and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. This is not victory - once the need arises, the agenda will turn back as quickly and you'll find the same policies implemented again - only now, with full knowledge that there are no costs, except maybe having to move on to the next cushy job as the winds change. This rotation happened in Canada, happened in the US, happened in many other places. Attributing it to the power of the protest is a delusion.

Trudeau's government is basically crippled all of his policies since have failed as seen with his gun ban

I don't really see how Trudeau failing to pass the largest gun ban in history of gun bans (while still feeling free to enact various smaller gun bans by executive order) means he is "crippled" on "all policies". This ban was not especially popular before the protests, and claiming its failure is the direct result of the protests - and that it extends not only to this one but all policies - is a bold claim that needs some better substantiation than just proclaiming it.

Do you want the CBC to pat you on the back and say "No its OK. You won"

No, I want some sign that it's not business as usual for all involved except declaring fascism on demand is now confirmed ok.

Every freedom I had lost from 2019 to 2022, everything I expected to never get back and to suffer across decades of insurgency trying to claw back... Was restored, mostly within a month, and the rest in half a year. THAT IS TOTAL VICTORY.

Man, whatever makes you feel better. You think introducing fascism, doing exactly what they wanted, taking away every freedom with no consequences whatsoever, causing thousand deaths and billions of economic damage on the way, then giving some of them back when the need is no longer there, and to make it a total mockery, make an "investigation", which confirms - yeah, we did everything exactly the right way and will do it again - this looks like victory? Well, your "victory" doesn't look anything like what I would want.

Who needs "decades of insurgency" if you have fascism on demand? The government would just take your freedoms when they are an impediment to them, do what they need, then declare "ok we're done, you can proceed as before" and you'd be happy. After all, they have stopped punching you and even though they didn't return your lunch money, they didn't take any more than all you had - until the next time they want your lunch money - so, everything is well and it is TOTAL VICTORY. If that's victory, how does the defeat look like? Some weird BDSM fantasy where the government comes to you personally to oppress you on schedule with whips and shiny leather? That's not how it works. Nobody cares about you to oppress you when they don't need to. When they need to, they have the option to get their way, when they want it and how they want it, and you can do absolutely nothing about it. In other times, enjoy your total freedom and TOTAL VICTORY.

Grow up. Politics is war by other means, casualties on your own side are acceptable in the pursuit of victory.

Except I don't see the victory. Removing the restrictions a bit later than the other countries who didn't experience the "victory" sounds like copium, not victory.

conpsiracy theorists who've shown themselves more capable that the entire right wing political class

Capable of what? The only organized protests that happened have been crushed with the rubes that gave their lives to them now have their lives thoroughly ruined, bankrupted and getting insanely long sentences, while their supposed leaders are afraid to even say something in support of them. All freedom restrictions are removed when and only when the government decided it's no longer necessary for their purposes, with full confirmation that every single one of them was legal and fully kosher to use again when desired. No significant pushback happened to neither lockdowns, nor nationwide riots and abandonment of the rule of law, nor to the wholesale overhaul of the election system, nor to the complete absorption of the big business into the woke agenda. Where is this superior capability deployed and what is it achieving? TOTAL VICTORY?

NAME ONE LONG SENTENCE. ONE.

You are projecting Jan 6 and the failure and symbolic flagellations of it onto the trucker convoy.

Two entire different protest in two vastly different countries with VASTLY different outcomes.

Canada removed restrictions FASTER than the US after the Trucker convoy. In the Angloshpere and Europe it was by no means that the restriction would be removed at all. After the Convoy and sister protests in Europe and Australia exploded these contries opened faster and removed travel restrictions faster than the US.

The American restrictions on entry were only removed in May of this year, last month.

Stop projecting your American Doomer bullshit onto other Countries. Canada had a political revolution over the past year, the Netherlands had a complete political upset with the Dutch Farmer aligned BBB winning major political offices.

The fact YOU are under the thumb of your elite with no effective means of resistance or organization becuase Trump sucked all the energy out of the room and then tried to bargain it away to the elite, does not mean that resistance has failed in other countries.

You are projecting Jan 6 and the failure and symbolic flagellations of it onto the trucker convoy.

I'm not "projecting", I am specifically considering them both as parts of the same phenomenon, because behind the local details, it's the same system at work in both places. As the comment on your claim "Becuase the flyover rubes are better than you.". They may be better than me, for sure, but I am not seeing them achieving anything near TOTAL VICTORY. I'd love for them to do this, but that's not what I am seeing happening. Nor in Canada, nor in the US. In fact, in Canada even worse than in the US, since Canada does not have US's constitutional freedom protections and it is way further on the road to fascism than the US, in general. One bad gun bill failing doesn't reverse all of that.

If, as you say, the flyover rubes were some kind of super-predator capable of overwhelming revolutionary victories, the same victories would be happening, many times over, in the US. They are not. Which puts this claim superiority into question. Unless Canadian rubes have some specific qualities that US rubes do not - which ones then?

The American restrictions on entry were only removed in May of this year, last month.

Very small number of people cares about entry restrictions in the US (and, I suspect, except for the US-Canada border, same goes for Canada). The flyover country person certainly doesn't. All the rest of the restrictions - important ones, ones that affect an average small business owner in a small flyover city - has been removed way earlier. The international ones lasted that long because nobody cared for that enough to push it. If you show that the internal restriction removal was affected by the protests, we'd have some basis for discussing it. But "we protested and in mere 8 months we got restrictions nobody cared about removed" is not something that can be seriously considered.

Canada removed restrictions FASTER than the US after the Trucker convoy

If we consider the internal ones, the ones that affect the average person, I find this claim very suspicious. "The US" is very different - Florida, California, Idaho, Alabama and New York had very different restrictions and timelines. So claiming Canada removed all the restrictions faster, and this was due to the protests (and not the number of cases and deaths dropping, for example) - I think needs some better support than just capital letters.

Canada had a political revolution over the past year,

I'll believe it when I see Trudeau prosecuted for abuses of power or at least a legislation enacted preventing further abuses, and there would be some way to ensure that this legislation would not be just ignored when inconvenient. Until then - enjoy your TOTAL VICTORY until the next time the government needs to squash you like a bug.

Canada had a political revolution over the past year, the Netherlands had a complete political upset with the Dutch Farmer aligned BBB winning major political offices.

Canada has had no revolution, you are imagining these things. The Netherlands had an election upset, but are the policies the farmers were objecting to -- the plans to shut down much of Dutch agriculture -- going away? No, because they're being pushed by Brussels, and without Nexit, there's nothing to be done.

the Netherlands had a complete political upset

It isn't often that we get a mention in this place, but as in all things, foreign takes on smaller nations' politics are nigh-universally mistaken. This is no exception.

First-off: people saw BBB's victory coming a mile away. Something isn't an 'upset' when it's been well-predicted in advance, so I'll take issue with the phrasing you're using here.

Even aside from that, this kind of thing isn't unprecedented, or really uncommon in Dutch politics. Charismatic protest movements do really well in elections all the time. In this millennium alone we've had the LPF, TON, PVV, FVD, and now BBB doing the whole run-around; when you get a new bunch of these guys every election cycle or so it's not so much EXCITINGLY NEW as it is business as usual.

Except, you know, that doesn't sell clicks, and foreigners love to map stuff abroad onto their own politics and vice versa, so now and then we get to roll our eyes. So it goes.

Be less antagonistic.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: you have got to chill out with the rampant ellipses.

But how else would I imagine William Shatner narrating his posts?

It really adds 30 years.

Like cheesy sexting.

Is he actually omitting stuff, or is the original like that? I was assuming the former, but if the latter, that's just plain incorrect. It's like ending this post with a comma,

What about this: Windsor police officer who donated to convoy protest will work 80 hours unpaid? That's 80 hours of unpaid work for a $50 donation, that was given by a person who was on unpaid leave, and never went through because the accounts were already frozen.

My general feel is that, when the protests were taking place, the Western governments were already hard in the process of considering how to gradually start ramping down the unworkable lockdown/mandate/fear cycle that had characterized the Covid response. The most visible parts of the Covid response were generally wound down everywhere at roughly the same time, ie, Jan-Feb 2022. Of course at the same time Ukraine also started to gain more and more importance as an issue in the eyes of the political class, even before the invasion itself.

As such, I'm not sure if the Freedom Convoy propagated these processes or simply came at a time when the consensus had started to form that these things should be wound anyway. It might have even delayed the process (in Canada, at least) by making it an issue of maintaining face for Trudeau.

They won nothing. The COVID stuff was eventually repealed, but the leaders of the trucking protest were jailed, everything the government did to them was upheld (even if the Emergency Act declaration had to be pulled from judgement to avoid rebuke, that WORKED). It is now understood in Canada by all that matter, both in government and by opposition, that the opposition does not get an effective voice and may be put down by any means necessary. The normies now think of the truckers as a bunch of hateful noisy boors who got what was coming to them, not that the normies matter anyway; they'll do what CBC tells them to do.

I know several normies that supported the truckers, which is not something I have witnessed for any other remotely radical political movement.

Bullshit a province's government fell, an major party did a complete 180 on its position, litterally every policy demand was changed within a year or less...

Compare that to anything that was expected in December January 2021-2022 and its a total victory.

Do you care about actually winning the policy victories you want and actually getting people what they want, or do you care about getting gibs for your activist class whilst nothing gets better?

"Within a year" everyone got rid of Covid restrictions. That has nothing to do with the truckers.

This was NOT a given. And the Trucker protest and sister protests in other nation were a MASSIVE cause of restrictions ending.

All the talk in Dec Jan 2021-2022 was of making lockdowns semi-permanent and ramping up the vaccine passport system ever further to crush dissent.

It was pretty much a given, because it's what happened in every single other western nation.

In Australia at least, many politicians went out of their way to divorce themselves from further covid restrictions while the trucker protest was a blazing political dumpster fire in the international media.

Lifting of restrictions was already planned there, but I remember it gaining impetus due to the protests and even prompting copycat protests.

Australian Covid hysteria quietly died in Christmas of 2021. The governments ruined the Christmas of anyone travelling across the border, only for Omnicron to come and sweep the country. Within a few months nearly everyone had had the disease and found it to be no biggie.

Politicians quietly rolled back all the mandates etc. But in Canada they were still doing it and were only talking about changing things when the Truckers hit.

All the talk in Dec Jan 2021-2022 was of making lockdowns semi-permanent and ramping up the vaccine passport system ever further to crush dissent.

A small percentage of the talk in places like this, maybe. This certainly wasn't a widespread, mainstream idea, much less a dominant one.

Good synopsis and I think you're correct.

But there are two types of "winning", and the truckers only got one of them. It's true that they achieved their policy goals - and how! But they didn't personally win. The truckers aren't being ushered into the halls of power in the manner of Lech Walesa or Aung San Suu Kyi. No, they they are still reviled by the elite. There will be no statues on Parliament hill of a brave trucker, CB in hand, fighting for freedom. And I doubt they'll ever be given the credit they deserve. Truckers, and people like them, don't write history.

Do you care about getitng your policy goals? Or getting spoils for your activist class?

The left has won none of its real policy goals in 30-50 years (no income equality, no real improvement in the quality of black lives, no eviromental improvements) but they won tons of spoils for their activist class.

The leading trucker acitvists paid a high price... But a year later literally every single policy goal was achieved. (Canada has no covid requirements of any type)

Any true supporter of any cause would much prefer a trucker victory to a DEI victory.

The left has won none of its real policy goals in 30-50 years (no income equality, no real improvement in the quality of black lives, no eviromental improvements)

If you think there have been no environmental improvements, you have a very short memory. And clearly there have been massive successes re discrimination against all sorts of groups. People here are constantly complaining about the left's successes, so presumably they exist.

People complain about the lefts EXCESSES... their successes are non-existent. Look at black test scores failure to do anything or their hand wringing about how global warming will end everything and nothing's improved or rising inequality that's only accelerating in its rise.

We're just so used to political activism achieving nothing except "do something" initiatives that yield no results and spoils for the activist class, that actual 100% pure and total policy success look irrelevant...

We've been trained so long to thing policy is meant to fail and victory is getting your allies into positions with perma salaries the idea that with politics you could actually achieve the totality of your stated desired results in an reasonable timeframe is completely alien.

People complain about the lefts EXCESSES... their successes are non-existent. Look at black test scores failure to do anything or their hand wringing about how global warming will end everything and nothing's improved or rising inequality that's only accelerating in its rise.

Their goals are not to do something about global warming or improve black test scores or combat "rising inequality". Their goals are to use those things to arrogate power to themselves. Non-improving black test scores demonstrate the need for more and more DEI programs. Inequality demonstrates the need for more confiscatory redistribution. Global warming the need for carbon taxes and micromanaging of people's lifestyle.

YES! Exactly.

Which is why its so remarkable the truckers emerged out of nowhere claimed massive amounts of cultural and politcal power, changed the major perrsonel of multiple politcal parties and provinces, and achieved 100% of their policy goals... within months. Canada opened vastly faster than even the Us after the Trucker Convoy, even red states didn't have the complete removal of requirements that existed in Canada in October 2022

You must be reading different posts than I if you think people only complain about excesses.

And given the number of states that have outlawed anti-LGBT discrimination, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, 1991 and others I am missing, the aforementioned environmental progress, the Voting Rights Act and its repeated renewal, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, laws re bilingual education, etc, it is pretty hard to say that their successes are non-existent. But I understand that it might feel good to pretend otherwise.

No that's the thing.

The left has massive stated goals they never achieve or even meaningfully pretend to be trying to achieve...Every single one of their policy fails, and was basically intended to fail so that the people hired to execute the policy never lose the jobs created by it.

Meanwhile the Truckers achieved their stated plain highest level policy goals, the majority within a few months, and 100% entirely within a year.

This would be as if MLK marched on selma and one year later black and white test scores and median incomes were equivalent.

was basically intended to fail

The crazy thing is that I think you believe that.

This would be as if MLK marched on selma and one year later black and white test scores and median incomes were equivalent.

No, it would be as if MLK marched on Selma and five months later the Voting Rights Act passed.

their successes are non-existent. Look at black test scores failure

If we define as "success" achieving one's goals, then the left is quite successful. Their goals has never been improving "black test scores", if you believe that, please urgently contact me about a lucrative bridge ownership opportunity I have available for you in New York. Their goal is power, which is to be used to fundamentally transform the society along their ideological guidelines. Until that is achieved, their theory states improving anything is impossible, and in fact, it can be considered harmful, as it only entrenches the broken capitalist racist white supremacist cisheteropatriarchical sexist oppression system. Dismantling this system is the ultimate goal, and the reason why some score is not improving is because the goal has not been achieved yet.

And if you realize this, you can see that they have a lot of power - political power, organizational power (they own the Deep State by now), cultural power (they own the academia and the entertainment industry) and they are pretty close to taking over the military too. And the institution they have hard time to take over - like the police, which is very decentralized and thus have been quite resistant - they are openly undermining and destroying. You can not ignore that and claim it's not their successes.

Now, if you looked at the country already fully ruled by the Left - then their goals have to be identified differently. You can't say Communist Party has been very successful in the USSR since 1920s - because, achieving their first goal, to take over, they then failed at many other goals (most of them, in fact, and ultimately at the main second goal - keeping the power). But for the Left in the West, their takeover and rebuilding the society has not been complete yet, so their first goal is not achieved. And their success has to be measured against this goal - and there, we must realistically admit, they have a lot of it. Which is nothing to be happy about - because if they manage to achieve the first goal, the inevitable failure that waits for them past that will affect everybody, and cost very dearly.

What I don't think is well appreciated by some, either in certain bubbles or outside Canada, is that, while the protest was very controversial, its support was quite broad. This was not like some fringe far-right or populist movement that all respectable people were against. Throughout the pandemic, a lot of people across the political spectrum thought the Covid restrictions had gone too far, but they tended to be quiet about it. Not all of these people supported the trucker protest, but a lot of them quietly did. I know some pretty progressive people who weren't too vocal about it, but they would say things like "enough is enough, what do they expect people to do?". I know well-respected successful progressive professionals who donated to it. There was a very widespread feeling, from people who wouldn't ordinarily support something like this, that you can only push people so far and that something had to give. Canadians tend to be very trusting of and deferential to their government, but I witnessed a lot of that trust get burned up by its handling of the pandemic.

I don't know if I agree that the protest was successful though. My impression is that the covid restrictions were reversed the moment the polls showed a majority were against them. I followed the pandemic policies pretty closely for the first two years and it seemed like the politicians, especially Trudeau, were just doing whatever the polls said was popular.

I remember the uncertainty of the outcome of the protest as it was happening and the discussions about whether hard or soft tactics from the protestors would be more effective. It's good to see that the soft tactics did enact change in the end.

Ted Kaczynski - the Unabomber - is dead.

I always found it interesting how, when I first learned about this guy, he was mostly portrayed as an ecoterrorist. The spectre of ecoterrorism and animal rights terrorism actually probably loomed larger in the 90s and early 00s than now, which might explain this. There was even a popular quiz with Unabomber and Al Gore quotes, purporting to demonstrate that the former American VP was just as extreme as the Unabomber.

However, if one actually reads the manifesto, or his other work, it soon becomes fairly clear the ecological aspect was not the central point of his critique, and didn't actually feature in it too much at all. He clearly felt some sort of a connection to the anarchoprimitivist and eco-anarchist movements, but mostly in the way of believing they might be allies and converts to his cause, not in the way of actually being one.

No, Ted K.'s true problem with the technological society was that it made people leftist. Since this is immediately obvious when one actually reads the manifesto in even a cursory way, and since during the last decades, parts of the extremely online right seem to have adopted "Uncle Ted" as some sort of a prophet, I don't suppose this actually needs much demonstrating, but to quote it:

Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general.

But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types. Thus, what we mean by “leftism” will emerge more clearly in the course of our discussion of leftist psychology. (Also, see paragraphs 227-230.)

Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear than we would wish, but there doesn’t seem to be any remedy for this. All we are trying to do here is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two psychological tendencies that we believe are the main driving force of modern leftism. We by no means claim to be telling the WHOLE truth about leftist psychology. Also, our discussion is meant to apply to modern leftism only. We leave open the question of the extent to which our discussion could be applied to the leftists of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization.” Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential.

Not that this criticism is INVALID, of course, as such - I just always found it interesting how, despite the fact that Ted K. got what he wanted and his manifesto was printed very visibly in newspapers - the actual contents then went pretty much ignored until recently, and even now are acknowledged mainly in small and fringe circles. I don't suppose his death will ameliorate that situation.

No, Ted K.'s true problem with the technological society was that it made people leftist. Since this is immediately obvious when one actually reads the manifesto in even a cursory way

What? No. He thought the tech made people unhappy and destroyed the planet, and leftism to him is just an example of psychological suffering. "What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much movement or an ideology as a psychological type".

I think his argument was a bit more nuanced than that, but it's been a long time since I read his manifesto. His issue as I understood it, was that modern technology acted as an artificial surrogate that distorted 'healthy' and normal human behavior. I think you could make a compelling argument for that, even today. Jaron Lanier's (who's basically a techie Ted Kaczynski without a life sentence) made a fairly strong case for the dangers of social media. I've increasingly come aboard to that same conclusion.

WRT leftism, I think he was striking at the ideological foundations that sit at the core of the philosophy. Some interesting studies in political psychology, also indicate that our sociopolitical and philosophical viewpoints are inextricably linked to our early childhood experience and psychology.

For me, he's a classic example of someone for whom it was a ridiculous, comical injustice and indictment of modern sensibilities that he wasn't executed within a few weeks of being captured. Despite my sympathies for his political points, the murder and maiming and completely innocent people should always be met with the swift application of the death penalty in the public square. That such a man died peacefully, as an octogenarian, but only after being caged for decades is a sick injustice that seems ironically fitting with his critique of hypersocialization.

it was a ridiculous, comical injustice and indictment of modern sensibilities that he wasn't executed

I think Ted himself (pbuh) might even agree with this.

You are ok with innocent people occasionally getting executed by the government? That is what happens with capital punishment.

Not that necessarily that is my core emotional reason to dislike the death penalty, mind you. I find the whole idea of the government having the right to execute people to be grotesque.

I am totally fine with innocent people occasionally being killed by justice system, yes. Fortunately, this is extremely rare. Justice system almost never snatches and imprisons totally innocent people for violent crimes. When people are released from prison or death row, it is almost always a case of prosecution screwing up some procedural stuff, or defender being deemed lousy years later, or activists pressuring critical witnesses to recant the testimony years after.

You’ll find it extremely hard to find a case where a person without prior criminal record being imprisoned for many decades or put on death row, who simply had absolutely nothing to do with the crime they have been accused of. On the other hand, for every person like this, I will find you ten people who should have been put to death for their crimes, but haven’t, and killed more people after being released.

The issue of what proportion of people who are innocently convicted is the issue at question, and I'd prefer some stats or research to guide my opinion. Also having 'something to do' with a crime is a low bar.

What about the unknown unknowns, where you don't hear about it but it happened. Looking to the past shows definitively that quite a number of innocent people were put to death essentially by corruption - you think that corruption has now been fixed aside from a few outliers, who you are 'fine with' them dying.

You may not really be arguing for it and more of an aside but utilitarianism is such an ugly morality isn't it, a moral system where you are fine with innocent people dying seems to lack something. In this case I think it's because it claims a morality but is often argued from a shit happens view, which is just fatalism. I may be weak-manning it though.

I may be weak-manning it though.

Yes, you missed the argument I make, though to be fair, I did not put it at the front and center:

I will find you ten people who should have been put to death for their crimes, but haven’t, and killed more people after being released.

It's not that I'm fine with "innocent people dying". What I said is that I am "fine with innocent people occasionally being killed by justice system", because the alternative is that we let people who are know are bad go out and commit more crimes. I am not arguing for knowingly killing innocent people for some sort of utilitarian purposes. What I am arguing is that, occasionally, mistakes will be made despite adequate efforts, and this should not prevent us from achieving greater good, which is protecting totally innocent people from becoming victims of crime. Think of it like, say, doctors making a treatment decision, following all the appropriate procedures and standard, but which nevertheless is incorrect in the particular patient's case, leading to his death. Should we prevent doctors from practicing medicine, just because some people will die from wrong, but reasonable decisions? No.

The issue of what proportion of people who are innocently convicted is the issue at question, and I'd prefer some stats or research to guide my opinion. Also having 'something to do' with a crime is a low bar.

Well if you struck a false positive 1/3 times I'd say the policy in question needs to be revisited.

You may not really be arguing for it and more of an aside but utilitarianism is such an ugly morality isn't it, a moral system where you are fine with innocent people dying seems to lack something. In this case I think it's because it claims a morality but is often argued from a shit happens view, which is just fatalism. I may be weak-manning it though.

But isn't it a primary defense of the Utilitarian to prefer that, precisely because the alternative is worse?

Are you ok with innocent people occasionally getting locked up for 40 years by the government?

It's not that it's okay if innocent people get locked up by the government, but what other way is there govern, without the risk of that happening? People wouldn't accept the proposition in virtually any other domain of social life. Nobody would accept a system, where a million people should starve, in order to guarantee one person with a car that's completely safe, and has no risk of putting you in danger.

As a society, we make that rational calculation and tradeoff, because the cost-benefit calculations we run tend to justify it. We know that by legalizing alcohol for instance, that is 'guaranteed' to result in the death of thousands of people every year, who choose to drive drunk despite there being laws against it.

I personally am not, but I'd argue that at least the false prison sentence has a chance of being proven as such and ended early. You can't really take back a false execution.

You can't take back decades of false imprisonment, either. No amount of money can make up for that.

Well honestly, I don't know what this would do for the justice system as a whole, or how it would affect the rate of conviction. But what if you could insert a legal incentive, which says every wrongful conviction overturned within a category of some criminal tier (e.g. falsely convicted of murder, not petty crime for instance), would result in a $1 million dollar payout for every year they spent in prison? Or a substantial, life-long government pension?

But being alive and exonerated instead of going to the grave with the pain of knowing it was false seems like a benefit. Sure you don’t get those years back but at least you know your name was cleared.

Agreed, which is why I tend to be against both capital punishment and long prison sentences. I'd really like to see the US move away from a retributive model of justice to something more restorative. Less prison, more wage garnishment, and community service.

I find the whole idea of the government having the right to execute people to be grotesque.

Isn't having a monopoly over the use of deadly force the whole point of a government?

Most people who live fairly safe lives only ever interact with the government in its bureaucratic incarnations, and they don't read enough history to realize what governments are even for, what a government even is.

Note that living a fairly safe life includes obeying without question what the government demands. It doesn't take much disobedience to feel the iron fist.

I think the long-view of history proves the contrary is true. At least your first sentence. Any 'perfectly consistent' and airtight legal system would have left all of us trapped in the dark ages. Because if I couldn't do 'anything' in life, without first consulting an FBI agent, or some government sponsored gatekeeper that had to vet and sign off on all of my actions, no matter how mundane, we wouldn't have ever overthrown practices like slavery. We'd have never progressed beyond "a black man can't marry a white woman." Gay marriage (whatever your opinion of it) would've never become accepted.

The legal system is necessarily imperfect, because that's where the fight happens and the changes take place. On the edges. 'That' part may not be safe, but the general level of civility it ushers in and adds to civilization as a matter of progress and practices; is still a result of civil disobedience and leads to a safer life overall.

I'd certainly want to avoid it where feasible, but I accept it as a price of justice.

i'm ok with some innocent people dying if it means a net positive for society that people who impose a cost are removed. the question is what is the allowable margin of error? i think it should be higher. keeping all these people on death row for so long is a drain on resources and even inhumane too. innocent people die all the time from things yet that doesn't mean they are discontinued . air travel for example has a non-zero risk of dying.

Ted was born in 1942, so his parents must have immigrated from Poland well before that. It was common practice back then to anglicize names in order to help with assimilation.

while roughly zero Americans can pronounce (or know about) "Tadeusz Kościuszko.")

Well I'm from Australia, where we also know nothing about him and can't pronounce his name. But we mispronounce it often, and with awe, because we have a fucking mountain named after him. Thus his name even reverberates in our greatest heroic poem:

And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise

Their torn and rugged battlements on high,

Where the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze

At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,

...

The word appears twice in the poem:

I don't know if that's what you consider a heavy Australian accent. The speaker is the real deal, though not what I would call ocker. His voice is well matched to the poem.

Tadeusz Kościuszko

In the New York City people hear about him all the time on traffic reports. Whether they pronounce the name correctly I don't know.

The NYC traffic report I hear has three syllables -- roughly Koz-kyewz-koh or Kos-kyew-skoh.

In the interests of drawing a line to contemporary culture war from the 30 year old news story that Uncle Ted is, I just want to highlight the extent to which reporting on his death is desperately trying to prosecute said culture war by smashing a square peg into a round hole:

From the BBC report:

His crimes seemed to begin shortly after he was fired from the family business by his brother for posting abusive limericks to a female colleague who had dumped him after two dates.

"Seemed" is doing a tremendous amount of work here. To me it SEEMED like his crimes began when he saw machines tearing up the forest. Who is it exactly, to whom there seemed to be an incel agenda?

Reading that paragraph, the words that reach my eyes are as printed, but the words that I think they're trying to get to reach my prefrontal cortex are

"Doing anything that a women doesn't like makes you a terrorist. All bad people are incels and all incels are bad people. Anyone who complains about globohomo only does so in bad faith because they're sexually frustrated."

Being too lazy to look up dates on Wikipedia is doing even more work. His first acts of ecoterrorism (arson, spiking trees) were in 1975. His first bombing was May 25, 1978. The incident with the limericks happened in Aug 1978.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Initial_bombings

An aspect of this whole thing I haven't seen touched on yet is that TK mostly did his thing in the pre-internet age. It seems that he started his bombing campaign before he actually wrote his manifesto, but he did indicate that he was willing to stop it entirely if a sufficiently "respectable" publication was to publish it. So I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that he basically carried out a mail bombing campaign to get his manifesto published.

Doesn't it seem at least a little bit crazy that in the modern but pre-internet age, if you have a viewpoint that's severely heterodox but not inherently dangerous, you basically have to carry out a terrorist bombing campaign to actually get it distributed. (Or at least a pretty smart guy could come to think that this was the only practical thing to do.) Yet nowadays, you can post every conceivable variety of batshit insane stuff on the internet for the whole world to see, basically for free. We get some pretty damn heterodox stuff posted on this very forum every day. I can go pull up his manifesto right now, for free, and it doesn't actually matter whether it was published on the Washington Post's website or some random free blog somewhere.

On the other hand, maybe it was fame and readership he was really after, which still doesn't come for free. Sure you can post anything you want on a random blog somewhere, but you won't necessarily get any more readership or engagement than you would if you made a few hundred photocopies and started handing them out at public events in the 80s. I guess if you were doing it now, you could post a URL in your bombs and presumably you'd get a lot more readers, along with an aggressive FBI investigation of where you posted it and who had been posting things there etc.

Anyways, there's gotta be something to the fact that anyone can post anything for the whole world to see now, whether it's strictly conventional, heterodox but reasonable, or completely bonkers.

Kaczynski could have self-published his manifesto or gotten a small independent press to publish it, and it would have sunk like a stone. The only reason any of us have heard of it and him is because of the notoriety his bombing campaign afforded him.

If you're unsympathetic to his cause, you might accuse him of being a narcissistic glory hound, only interested in the pursuit of personal infamy. If sympathetic, you might say that his message was so important, urgent and heterodox that he needed to use extreme measures to reach a mass audience.

If Ted had just self-published his manifesto, probably nobody would have read it, but he wasn't the only person with such ideas. In terms of ideas seen by the public rather than personal fame and glory, his ideas would be read; even if what gets read is one of the zillions of people with the same ideas as him and not him personally. If they fail anyway, it will be because of lack of merit, not lack of exposure.

I'm not persuaded that any sufficiently good idea will eventually be adopted by society at large - I have a lot of faith in the marketplace of ideas, but not that much faith. There are plenty of historical examples of bad ideas spreading and being implemented while good ideas die on the vine.

I'm about a third of the way through reading it myself. It's interesting enough that I think he would have made a better than average Motte contributor. I haven't found anything yet that would seem to justify a terrorist bombing campaign though.

It's just a dream, and the timeline doesn't match of course, but I want to think we could have told him:

It's okay friend, your views are welcome here! We will read them and discuss them with you. You don't have to blow anyone up!

Of course, that might not work. But the greater the extent to which he had the opportunity to be heard and taken seriously and did that anyways, the more he's just a midwit terrorist asshole whose ideas aren't all that interesting.

The more interesting discussions is, to what extent are people with heterodox viewpoints nowadays able to avoid any urge to take radical action because they can find a community that agrees with them, or at least is willing to listen, on the internet?

No, however much his ideas might resonate with me, his bombing campaign was in no way justified, and he fully deserved to be imprisoned for a very long time. I'm not a huge fan of the death penalty, but if he had been executed I would've found it hard to shed a tear.

The more interesting discussions is, to what extent are people with heterodox viewpoints nowadays able to avoid any urge to take radical action because they can find a community that agrees with them, or at least is willing to listen, on the internet?

A lot of people seem to have this idea that censoring far-right opinions on social media platforms will just cause the people who hold those opinions to change their minds and embrace woke neoliberal globalism like good little boys and girls (alright, good little boys). There's no evidence that this strategy has ever worked, either in the specific case of social media or in the case of censorship generally (diehard Marxist Freddie deBoer was castigated and tarred as a neo-Nazi simply for pointing this out), and yet the strategy is still doggedly defended by every mainstream platform going. If anything the opposite seems to be true: that censoring even moderately heterodox opinions has the effect of radicalising those who hold them, thereby turning boring neoliberals with one or two unremarkable ideological unorthodoxies into scared and defensive far-right nutters. Pretty sure this is what happened to Count Dankula, for example. The dynamic arguably describes a significant proportion of users on this website, and perhaps even the site's own raison d'être.

Reddit, for all its numerous flaws and heavy-handed censoriousness, does recognise that you need the occasional containment sub. The misfits aren't going to magically become better at fitting in just because you've banned all the spaces in which they can be misfits together to their heart's content. Users post and comment things on /r/4chan which would never fly on a non-grandfathered subreddit. It's plausible that the release of this pressure valve may have helped to prevent a few suicides and/or mass shootings. See also /u/TracingWoodgrains's wonderful article about the gentrification of online communities.

I'm still working on reading through the whole manifesto (has anyone else on this thread actually read the whole thing?), but I just found a paragraph that changes my views a bit (bolding is my own, but the whole paragraph is lifted from the manifesto unchanged):

P96. As for our constitutional rights, consider for example that of freedom of the press. We certainly don’t mean to knock that right; it is very important tool for limiting concentration of political power and for keeping those who do have political power in line by publicly exposing any misbehavior on their part. But freedom of the press is of very little use to the average citizen as an individual. The mass media are mostly under the control of large organizations that are integrated into the system. Anyone who has a little money can have something printed, or can distribute it on the Internet or in some such way, but what he has to say will be swamped by the vast volume of material put out by the media, hence it will have no practical effect. To make an impression on society with words is therefore almost impossible for most individuals and small groups. Take us (FC) for example. If we had never done anything violent and had submitted the present writings to a publisher, they probably would not have been accepted. If they had been been accepted and published, they probably would not have attracted many readers, because it’s more fun to watch the entertainment put out by the media than to read a sober essay. Even if these writings had had many readers, most of these readers would soon have forgotten what they had read as their minds were flooded by the mass of material to which the media expose them. In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.

Ah, so the internet did exist at the time, though not as a society-dominating force, and he decided to do violence because he thought he wasn't getting enough attention. Yeah that's a hard no from me. You don't get to do violence because nobody cares about your viewpoint. If he worked as hard at improving his communication and spreading his views though normal methods as he did at bombing random people and evading law enforcement, he probably would have had a lot more influence. Instead, he did what he did and he got exactly what he deserved.

Honestly, the more I read the less I care for his overall viewpoint. I'm starting to think I could do an effortpost going against his actual viewpoint.

Kaczynski could have self-published his manifesto or gotten a small independent press to publish it, and it would have sunk like a stone. The only reason any of us have heard of it and him is because of the notoriety his bombing campaign afforded him.

he could have used his smarts and math cred to get a good position at a university and then that would have increased his visibility. gone on a campus speaking tour, gone on TV

Inadvisable given his analysis of the system. The academics that do this he saw as pawns that just get used to further the goals of industrial society.

Given the way the green movement has been used to get free money for solar panels we don't know how to recycle, I can't really say he's wrong.

Gaming ways of him not having to kill people is pointless anyways.

Ted, like most terrorists, didn't have the feminine disposition or respect for the status quo that would make him see killing as an unacceptable price to further his goals. From his vantage point the system was and is constantly doing much worse things to others and himself anyways.

Doesn't it seem at least a little bit crazy that in the modern but pre-internet age, if you have a viewpoint that's severely heterodox but not inherently dangerous, you basically have to carry out a terrorist bombing campaign to actually get it distributed. (Or at least a pretty smart guy could come to think that this was the only practical thing to do.) Yet nowadays, you can post every conceivable variety of batshit insane stuff on the internet for the whole world to see, basically for free. We get some pretty damn heterodox stuff posted on this very forum every day. I can go pull up his manifesto right now, for free, and it doesn't actually matter whether it was published on the Washington Post's website or some random free blog somewhere.

But there is much more competition because the barriers have been erased. it has not gotten easier. anyone can publish something. making ppl read it, way harder. this is true now as it was 30 years ago

Thinking practically this seems hard to believe. Was it really easier in the past to start a subscription magazine that reached 100 readers than it is now for a Substack blogger to hit 100 paid members?

Ted Kaczynski was one of the most brilliant writers I have ever had the privilege of reading. May he rest in peace.

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. ~ Timothy 4:7

I must have missed the segment of the Pauline letters that commanded blowing up your enemies.

To my knowledge Ted Kaczynski was not a Christian. If I am wrong, someone please correct me. Nonetheless, he fought the fight he believed in, he finished his race, and to the best of my knowledge he kept the faith (a faith of his own invention, with it's holy text being Industrial Society and Its Future) until the end.

He was a paranoid schitzophrenic who murdered innocent people. He's hardly worth lionizing.

Having read his manifesto, I find it hard to imagine a schizophrenic could write that lucidly, and express his points so clearly and concisely. I find him much more lucid, direct and less prone to digression than e.g. Curtis Yarvin or Eliezer Yudkowsky. His defense attorney thought that pleading insanity was his best chance, but he refused to do so, despite knowing full well he'd probably be treated better in an institution than in a prison. You think he shouldn't be lionized, fair enough, but I don't think there's good evidence to suggest he was a madman.

Paranoid schitzophrenia was the official diagnosis of the psychiatrist who interviewed him post-arrest.

ETA Sourcing: https://harbor.klnpa.org/california/islandora/object/cali%3A1205

Fair enough, but see also Wikipedia:

Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz said Kaczynski was not psychotic but had a schizoid or schizotypal personality disorder.[119] In his 2010 book Technological Slavery, Kaczynski said that two prison psychologists who visited him frequently for four years told him they saw no indication that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and the diagnosis was "ridiculous" and a "political diagnosis".[120] Some contemporary authors suggested that multiple people, most notably Kaczynski's brother and mother, purposely spread the image of Kaczynski as mentally ill with the aim to save him from execution.[121]

It seems like a controversial diagnosis even within the psychiatric community. I'd say either he wasn't schizophrenic, or he's the most lucid and clear-minded schizophrenic in the history of the diagnosis.

Doesn’t he have an IQ of like 183? Seems like a relevant variable to that last bit.

More comments

As so often happens, you're both right.

Bingo,

There's nothing inherently contradictory about being a brilliant writer and also being a paranoid schitzophrenic or murderer.

he fought the fight he believed in, he finished his race, and to the best of my knowledge he kept the faith

So, presumably, did many Islamic State fighters. I don't think it makes them worthy of respect if their fight was conducted abhorrently and directed towards awful ends.

It should, because if you don't respect someone you're likely to underestimate them, or otherwise misunderstand them, and so be more likely to fail when combatting them (or when trying to reach a peaceful modus vivendi).

For what its worth we should be reading Jacques Ellul to find the basis of Ted Kaczynski manifesto. The core of the idea is that our existance isn't to "serve the machine". We shouldn't obediently consume products that doesn't benefit us, the planet or even society as a whole. Sadly we don't discuss it enough. We don't discuss that it is the same capital owners that push body positivity that own the producers of shit food that makes people fat and make people sick so they can sell drugs for Type 2 Diabetes and high blood pressure from the drug companies they own. This is what the Ted Kaczynski manifesto was all about derived from Ellul who didn't send bombs to people.

From Institution Building to Identity Building and Back Again

Tanner Greer’s “Lessons from the Nineteenth Century” is the latest in a series on the decline of American self-governance and institution building.

He offers a comparison between the reaction to the Spanish Flu and Covid-19. In 1918 Americans sprung into action, organized committees on sanitation and medical care, delegated responsibilities, held regular meetings. When the crisis was over these committees had stern handshakes all round and then disbanded, not to burden America with ever more bureaucracy.

In contrast, during the early months of Covid no one seemed to know who was responsible, the major agencies all gave contradictory information that varied week-to-week, grassroots initiative was scattered and weak.

Seemingly we've forgotten how to do what our recent ancestors easily could. Nowadays Americans largely don’t practice addressing problems by creating their own organizations with formal structures and set goals. But back in the day if you were in one of America’s countless settler communities and there was a problem with bandits, or fallen trees covering the road or whatever, there was generally no higher authority to appeal to. If you wanted irrigation, you got together with your friends and you dug some darn ditches.

consider the situation faced by the median 19th century American man in a state like Minnesota or California. He lived in a social, economic, and political world that was largely fashioned by his own hands. Be he rich or poor, he lived as his own master, independent from the domination of the boss or the meddling of the manager. If he had settled near the frontier, he would had been involved in creating and manning the government bodies that regulated aspects of communal life—the school board, the township, the sheriff’s department, and so forth. Even if he was not a frontiersman, he was a regular attendee at the town, city, county and even state government meetings most relevant to his family’s concerns. Between his wife and he, his family participated in a half dozen committees, chapters, societies, associations, councils, and congregations.

In the last century these self-governed settlers have had their local autonomy worn away by the twin forces of modern bureaucracy and late stage capitalism, rule from the capitol beltway and the corporate boardroom. Greer speaks ably to how bureaucracy's distant web of control weaves through our lives from thousands of miles away. I’m more interested in what capitalism and wage labor have done to the American psyche, taking us from a world of self-employed farmers, builders, artisans, and shopowners, to a nation of people who show up when we’re told, eat during designated breaks, and ask permission to go to the bathroom. I’ll quote one of my favorite passages from T.J. Stiles' biography of Vanderbilt:

Still more subtle, and perhaps more profound, was a broad cultural shift as big business infused American life. An institutional, bureaucratic, managed quality entered into daily existence ... More and more the national imposed upon the local, the institution upon the individual, the industrial upon the artisanal, the mechanical upon the natural. Even time turned to a corporate beat. Time had always varied from town to town, even by household...But the sun proved inconvenient for the schedules of nation-girdling railways. In 1883...these “distinct private universes of time” vanished when the railroads, “by joint decision, placed the country - without act of Congress, President or the Courts - under a scheme of four “standard time zones”

The collapse of bottom-up institution building into the modern age of subjects-rather-than-citizens is Greer’s answer both to dilemmas raised by the left, but even more by the “New Right” (notice how different the portrayal of the self-actualized American settler is from the reactionary trope of the idealized beach bum-citizen, unconcerned with his distant dictatorial government). No, Greer says, the malaise in modern society didn’t start in 1776, or with the Enlightenment, or with the reformation. It started when people lost the ability to have a say creating their own world and had to turn solipsistically inward to feel any agency at all:

This week I finished listening to an episode titled “Hellenism and the Birth of the Self.” The parallels between the Hellenistic trends Metzger describes and the problems of the current moment are worth pondering...

Destroyed: a world of cohesive, tradition bound city states whose citizens were joined together by shared loyalty to a polity whose fate was set by these same citizens’ own sweat. In its place: a tangle of marauding empires whose political outcomes were decided by the machinations of the distant few in the despot’s court or the mercenary’s camp...Men who led small and bounded worlds now found themselves the playthings of inconstant forces operating on imperial scales.

The intellectual response to these developments was to turn inward...New faiths were focused less on public goods than private salvation...No longer did great thinkers squabble over the form of the ideal polity, or ask what political communities must do to foster good character in their citizens. Hellenistic philosophy was not focused on citizens. It was obsessed with individual ethics...Like the new religions, their focus was on the soul within a man, not the community of men outside him...

To explain this all Metzger quotes historian Peter Green: “The record we have… speaks with some eloquence to the dilemmas that faced a thinking man in a world where, no longer master of his fate, he had to content himself with being, in one way or another, captain of his soul.”

The modern obsession with “expressive individualism,” whether it be gender-bending woke idpol, or right wingers joining neo-paganism or contrived versions of internet catholicism, is what happens when people have no influence over the outside world and instead must turn inward to the only place they have control over: their own identities. It's all just a desperate screaming attempt to regain a semblance of control in a world that has taken that from us. Everyone could win their modern culture war wishlist, but you still won’t have addressed the root issue that’s driven us from the real world and inward down endless black holes.

To end on a positive note, I’ve been a tiny cog in other machines my entire life, but I’ve tasted the kind of self-governance Greer describes. A long time ago I helped run a campaign for a local politician; the whole team was me and my friends, if we needed more staff we had to convince people to work for us, if we wanted people to vote we had to meet them face-to-face and make our damn case. It wasn’t an important race or anything, but the giddy feeling of having a tangible influence on the world around you, of creating something from scratch with your own willpower, has stayed with me ever since. Not so long ago this was just American life. America has changed, but the skills are there waiting for us to pick up and practice. As the shocked Toqueville said of the people he met in the United States:

there is nothing the human will despairs of attaining through the free action of the combined powers of individuals.

America has changed, but the skills are there waiting for us to pick up and practice.

The skills may be waiting, but they are behind barbed wire, with a stern Bureaucrat handing us a dozen forms that may as well be in another language before we are allowed to touch them. Any unauthorized attempts will fine you into permanent poverty or get you thrown in a rape cage.

Not America, but watching Clarkson's Farm recently was heart breaking. Literally everything that man attempted to do on his own property was subject to government approval. And at some point, the government decided it just didn't like him anymore, and said no to everything he attempted no matter how insignificant.

I few months back I was reading a post by someone in my local subreddit about them attempting to navigate the permitting process to do some work by themselves on their own home. The entire system was literally set up so that he could not possibly complete it. It required his "business's" tax ID and other registration information. And no bureaucrat he spoke to about this could provide him any solution. They just robotically repeated that he had to complete the forms in full with all the required information. Not sure how, or if, that ever resolved itself.

Not America, but watching Clarkson's Farm recently was heart breaking. Literally everything that man attempted to do on his own property was subject to government approval. And at some point, the government decided it just didn't like him anymore, and said no to everything he attempted no matter how insignificant.

Amusingly, though, the solution to a lot of this stuff isn't for more local government, it's for less of it. Planning restrictions are almost all decided locally. Pesky municipal by(e)laws are - in large part - why Clarkson couldn't do most of what he wanted to do on his farm. Local government is inherently NIMBYist, especially in a wealthy rural locale, as he found out.

The best answer is to abolish local government and make the smallest unit of government the state or - possibly - the city in the case of extremely large (4+ million inhabitant) municipalities. A 75 year old member of the town board of supervisors living in the local pristine heritage area with a valuable home they bought in 1985 is always going to veto any construction. A 24 year old bureaucrat in the capital city whose job it is to stamp forms can be instructed much more easily to approve everything. Billionaires can lobby the state, but even relative nobodies with a little time on their hands can stymy the functioning of local government.

One of Boris Johnson's core plans was to reform planning in England to make construction much easier (by making it harder for local councils to block planning permission, by simplifying the environmental review process etc). His own voters rebelled, and the Tories lost a by-election in a formerly safe seat to the Liberal Democrats (whose leader said it was "a massive mandate for those of us who were campaigning against the planning reforms"). So they cancelled the reforms.

Endless ridiculous HOA stories show that tyranny, for the most part, is local rather than federal or national. Fewer people with power might well mean more freedom for everyone.

I think the actual answer is to keep the role of government to its proper place. My right to my property must be much greater than the local council's right to interfere with my enjoyment of that property.

Okay, but, you are not allowed to buy the lot next to mine and turn it into a combination pig feed lot, fireworks factory and homeless shelter. That would financially ruin myself and my neighbors. We would follow the obvious and powerful incentives to get our local government to use zoning rules to block that.

The problem is precisely people in the local council thinking their right to their property includes their right to, say, prohibit the construction of a house in front of their own that would block their views (etc).

Outside of hyper contractualist ancapistan where things like rights to a view are priced, sold and bundled as contracts and liens attached to properties, the local council being the community consensus decision making group for balancing overlapping property interests seems reasonable. Local governments can be wildly corrupt and not follow their own rules (see #barnlaw) but the principle is quite sane.

The principle at first glance seems 'sane' but something has clearly got to change in Britain, we simply cannot go on like this. In practice, 'community decision making' means 'elderly home-owner decision making' which in turn in practice means 'sorry you can't open a restaurant because Doris might have to queue in traffic for two minutes to go to bridge'. If these committees were composed of people who dispassionately analyse the costs and benefits it would be fine, but they by and large are not.

Costs and benefits to whom? Why are the benefits to a homeowner who has a long term vested interest in their community (going to bridge) who will bear the costs of increased traffic something you think should be valued lower than a business (are they even property owners or non-permanent tenants?) catering to the kind of people who don't care enough to participate in local politics (or even non-residents). As a general rule, low level politics are dominated by people who care and people who show up.

catering to the kind of people who don't care enough to participate in local politics

Or rather, people who work for a living and don't have time for a second job participating in local politics.

Benefits to the entire are and indeed to the nation, not just to one small section of the community. And as other who have pointed out, it's only time-rich pensioners with nothing better to do who have the time to turn up to such things and so their influence is outsized. The problem is that planning has implications for the entire region or nation, so deciding everything at the local level means that considerations of those benefits gets lost. One project won't decrease rents much in a partiuclar neighbourhood, but if everyone takes that attitude then nothing ever gets built and we are where we are today with thirteen years of stagnant productivity growth. Something's got to give.

To some extent, but your average builder is also heavily burdened by restrictions from the state and federal level: environmental reviews, a litany of Executive Orders, design requirements, licensing and permitting processes, stacks of procurement, contracting and hiring regulation, etc. Good high level government would indeed fix construction problems, but it's like saying good local government would solve NIMBYism as well - the problem is getting from here to there.

Very little of the NIMBYism in, say, Berkeley, CA is coming from the federal government, though. Some of it comes from the state. Even in California, however, much of it is local.

If we're talking about nimbyism as a movement by residents to block local building, then yeah by definition it's a local issue. But state and federal regulations most certainly raise obstacles and costs to building; often they are the very tools that give local NIMBYs their power in the first place. To use your example of Berkley for instance, a federal judge blocked construction of their supercomputer laborotory because the University of California hadn't gone through the nationally required environmental impact assessment. More recently, Berkley's attempt to build more (desparately needed) student housing was blocked under California's state level Environmental Quality Act.

My argument isn't that local roadblocks aren't important, it's just that the solution isn't as simple as shifting authority to higher and higher levels, when you look at their track record thus far.

I think the point is that federal issues are more tractable. If most restrictions were at the central level, and politician X wants to build more houses, he can quietly abolish some of the more onerous ones, and there you go, national housing stock will increase. With restrictions at the local level, that kind of action will never be co-ordinated nationwide.

I’m pretty sure no one actually gets permits to work on their homes. My dad sold his house a few years ago with a completely unpermitted fire place, the only consequence was the inspector reporting this to the buyer. No one cared and they still closed the deal.

I think it's important not to over-doomer it, regulations don't necessarily last forever. Part of the value I got out of the comparisons to ancient Greece was that this stuff always rises and falls in major societies over time. Diocletian's taxes and price controls were abolished, the Sassanians abandoned their mass standardizations, in recent history the American progressive movement made significant process cutting red tape and reducing bureaucratic bloat. Reform is always possible. Even now, the hand of the state doesn't cover all of America; where I grew up it's barely felt and I think that's true for much of small town, rural America - who's really gonna snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances?

Insofar as things carry on at a larger scale, it's at least in part because there's little meaningful opposition to this state of affairs. I didn't include it for brevity's sake, but the remainder of the first blog post, and in this piece for Palladium, Greer outlines what he seens as the actual muscles America needs to flex and train to regain our organizational prowess: 1) the importance of public usefulness as a virtue, 2) a commitment to formality, and 3) the proper use of heirarchy and scale:

The benefits of enshrining public brotherhood as an aspirational ideal:

...First, institutions cultivated a sense of public kinship and brotherhood, sometimes formalized by sacred oaths. Just as citizens took oaths to the republic or upon the Bible, social and political associations took their bonds of loyalty no less seriously. The fraternities, federations, and even political parties that these men belonged to embraced extravagant rituals, parades, and performances designed to build fraternal feeling among their members while reminding them of their public responsibilities. They required earnest oaths that committed their members to a life of charity, public service, brotherhood, and the betterment of their fellow men. Lodge leaders developed these rituals and treated their oaths with great solemnity. This required their culture to have a functional role for solemnity and seriousness at all. When irreverence becomes a universal norm, attempts at seriousness degenerate into performative role-play.

A commitment to formality:

The famously irreverent Boomers were the first generation of Americans born in the shadow of the new managerial society. The “New Left” counterculture of the 1960s was, in turn, the first attempt to break the shackles of bureaucracy and conformity. New Left radicals condemned the “bewildering dependence” of Americans on “inaccessible castles wherein inscrutable technicians conjure with their fate” and identified the “depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy” as “the greatest problem of our nation.” Their movement ultimately failed, however, to create viable counter-communities capable of agency.

A central reason for their failure is that for all of their talk about “participatory democracy,” the radicals of the New Left were not interested in the discipline, formality, and commitment to reasoned debate that made the actual participatory democracy function. Associating rationalism and rules with the suffocating bureaucratic structures that they rebelled against, New Left radicals ended up mounting a titanic effort to liberate themselves from the very intellectual and organizational tools that successful institution builders use to assert their agency. The cause of self-liberation ended up in conflict with the cause of self-government….

Self-government meant a deep commitment to an otherwise mundane set of tasks...Formally drafting charters and bylaws, electing officers, and holding meetings by strict procedures seems like busy work to those accustomed to weak associational ties. But the formality of such associations expressed commitment to the cause and clarified the relationships and responsibilities needed for effective action.

And finally, the usefulness of scale and hierarchy:

The third virtue was, instead, an embrace of functional hierarchy that allowed local initiatives to scale up to a very high level…Many of the postbellum institutions that dominated American life operated on a national scale, occasionally mobilizing millions of people for their causes. However, the lodge and chapter-based structure of these institutions ensured those local leaders had wide latitude of action inside their own locality. Local leaders relied on local resources and thus rarely had to petition higher-ups to solve their area’s problems...

Many of the modern institutions which have most successfully retained their nineteenth-century commitment to decentralized local leadership—such as the LDS church or the U.S. Marine Corps—have famously rigid hierarchies. These institutions integrate clear chains of command with a structure and culture that encourages initiative and independent problem-solving by leaders at the lowest level of the hierarchy. The leaders of these institutions understand that the only way to train someone to effectively lead large organizations is to give them practice acting autonomously on a smaller scale. Empowering people down the chain to make mistakes lets their leaders up the chain prevent them from happening at a larger scale.

Even now, the hand of the state doesn't cover all of America; where I grew up it's barely felt and I think that's true for much of small town, rural America - who's really gonna snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances?

People absolutely snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances. (for bonus points, places attempting to limit anonymous tips have often found themselves facing ACLU opposition), across a wide variety of locations and cultures and jurisdictions.

((For even more fun, it's not just a matter of getting the permit; it's quite possible to get a wholly-correct assembly together, and then have code enforcement decide to call you out years later for a final inspection asking to see things literally buried under feet of dirt.))

They're not even always wrong to do snitch! If someone's laying a hilariously bad electrical fire risk, or pouring 90psi of water at your front door, or propping up a giant hammer with a little piece of string aimed at your property, there's no magic ward at the edge of your property.

But it's often not about that. And short of finding places where the law doesn't touch at all, or having such a large remove from other parcels that there's no one to report, it's just something that comes with home ownership. And this isn't specific to building ordinances.

There is a small industry of ADA testers that will find any business that doesn't meet their standards, even if they didn't intend to actually buy that businesses's products or services. There's EPA and Army Engineers if you want to build on a wide variety of parcels -- and even if you think your land isn't covered, the right advice right now is to get them to actually give you that in writing instead. And this is just the easy universal stuff! God forbid you do something dangerous like deal with chemicals, or firearms, or anything financial. There's thousands of these things.

There are two things ordinary people will fight like rabid dogs over - wills, which tear apart families where siblings will cut each other's throats over who gets Granny's good china tea set, and neighbours - did you trim the hedge? did you not trim the hedge? is a branch of a tree in your garden growing over their boundary wall? are you encroaching two inches on their property? are they encroaching two inches on your property? are they/you parking their/your vehicle outside their/your house, and does this block them/you off from access to their/your own property?

Ordinary people can get bloodthirsty vindictive over cutting three inches off an overgrown hedge.

People absolutely snitch on their neighbors over building ordinances.

No denials at all that latticeworks of these kinds of building regulations absolutely do exist and weave through American life. But these examples all happened in Miami, Nashville, Atlanta and its suburbs; the smallest polity here is Lancaster Ohio, whereas my comment was about rural areas farther removed from the modern reach of the state. When I say "neighbor" I mean it in the sense of someone you know personally and have a relationship with rather that someone who moved next door but you don't interact with.

I don't doubt that someone could find an isolated example of this kind of behavior in nowheresville, but it's assuredly much less common. As an example, my old boss decided he wanted to build a guest house on his property that he could rent out. When we laid the permanent foundation I asked him if he was supposed to have gotten a permit for it. He replied something like "possibly, I'm not sure." Why would he care? He was building in the middle of the woods and his property was surrounded on either side by his mother and uncle's farms. His isolation was extreme but not that extreme; most people where I grew up lived in areas with low visibility, far from the reach of your local bureaucrat, and flanked by people who cared about them; this is still reality for lots of rural Americans.

I heard a similar tale about a guy who built a barn on his farm. No permits or anything just did it because it was his property and he could get done, besides he was close with all the people who mattered in the small town including the planning board. Except he put it very close to the property line in violation of setback regulations which caused property damage to his neighbor's farm. That neighbor has since been going after him for the damage and now the town planning board because they tried to protect barnguy (a local) from this weird autistic scifi author from Boston (injured neighbor) and violated all kinds of their own bylaws (and state records/meetings laws) to try to retroactively bless the creation of the offending barn. Last I heard there's still three lawsuits on going against barnguy and the town and the angry neighbor got himself elected to the state government out of spite.

He'll be made to care if, heaven forbid, anything happens to the people renting out his guest property and they take him to court. Then it will all come out about "did you get a permit" and the rest of it.

I should clarify he was a career carpenter who had built his own house, not just a mad lad looking for a quick come up.

You might be able to get around many of those bureaucratic restrictions in the hollowed-out husk of some rust belt city, where there is minimal municipal oversight and what little there is could probably be convinced to look the other way for the right price. Everyone involved would probably have to be black, however, otherwise the kind of security measures needed to protect such a community-building endeavor would draw the wrong kind of publicity.

Or you could do it in the middle of nowhere.

watching Clarkson's Farm recently was heart breaking. Literally everything that man attempted to do on his own property was subject to government approval. And at some point, the government decided it just didn't like him anymore, and said no to everything he attempted no matter how insignificant.

This is true, but I should like to say that this is because of a surfeit of local control, not central control. It wasn't because of some faceless bureaucracy that he was thwarted, it was the people who lived amongst him that stopped him, wielding of course tools granted them by central government, but nonetheless it was local NIMBYs who got up and stopped him, not some civil servant dispatched from Whitehall. Indeed, if we are going to start building again in Britain, power must move closer to the centre, not further from it.

I think we have been institutionalized to a very large degree and that’s why COVID responses didn’t really form the ad-hoc organization. Most of us don’t do that anymore and in fact it’s now a skill that much like cooking and fixing stuff and making art and so on are lost. In fact the skills that form group cohesion are being eroded as well, which is why the cry-bullying seems to grow by the day. Such a thing cannot work in a situation where members of the group hold autonomy. They’d simply kick the malcontents out. But since these decisions are no longer local, the tactic of appealing to the authorities is much more useful than the tactics of negotiating and fitting in.

But since these decisions are no longer local, the tactic of appealing to the authorities is much more useful than the tactics of negotiating and fitting in.

Ironically, if I haven't inundated this forum enough with his blog, Greer makes much the same case, arguing that modern victimhood isn't a cultural quirk but a pretty reasonable response to a society where the most effective way to get things done is earning the sympathies of the vast, impersonal powers we all live under.

it’s now a skill that much like cooking and fixing stuff and making art and so on are lost

I found this sentence rather disturbing. Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?

What about stable diffusion for art? Surely the barrier to entry for art is very low and falling rapidly! I was always rather hopeless at drawing but a decent GPU is within reach of most. Or Midjourney? Or writing a story with a word processor?

I found this sentence rather disturbing. Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?

Within certain classes of people generally no. Between fast food restaurants, full service restaurants, meal prep/delivery services, ready-made meals, frozen meals and meal replacements it is quite possible for Millenials and Zoomers to never operate anything more complicated than a toaster, a microwave and maybe boiling water on a range. Especially if the skillset was not deliberately passed down by Boomer/Gen X parents whose own skillset may be lacking/atrophied compared to their parents' generation. What level of cookery is necessary to prepare a dinner of hamburger helper or pasta from a box paired with sauce from a jar, after a breakfast of cereal from a box with toast and a lunch of factory sliced cold cuts/cheese/bread sandwich and a bag of chips?

Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?

In the full sense of "buy fresh ingredients from a grocery store and prepare a meal from scratch" I would say the proportion of Americans that regularly do that has been in continuous decline since at least 1945. The idea of a nice home-cooked meal to a typical Amerikaner might be a can of tomato sauce heated up in a pot with some prepackaged meatballs served over spaghetti with some mozzarella dust from a jar sprinkled on top, so about the only skill needed is knowing how to turn on the stove and boil noodles. If our hypothetical home cook decided to splurge and get better tomato sauce it might even have recognizable bits of vegetables in it.

Well if there's a pan involved, then it's cooking IMO. I put vegetables and meat in a pan, stir it around a bit, rotate at times.

It's a significant decline from the Boomer/Xer generation from my read.

I haven't met a single zoomer who can cook. When they attempt it, it's aggressively bad. Millennials tend to be outliers - either they are horrendous cooks who subsist mostly on takeout or they consider cooking a hobby and absolutely crush it (my friendsgivings are almost universally excellent for every dish).

When it comes to DIY items it seems like everyone gives up and has someone else do it for them. Some folks can't even be bothered to get multiple quotes. I know that I personally am absolutely shitty at maintaining a house compared to my parents, and I'm still the guy people call about house problems etc.

Do Americans not cook for themselves anymore?

I disagree with all the other comments on here. I was just in East Asia for half a year, no one cooks at home- people don't even have ovens in their homes, and food is so good and plentiful and cheap there that no one eats at home. Americans cook way way more than that, everyone I know from my mom to my brothers and sister to my friends in NYC to my friends in the midwest are into cooking their own food. Eating out is very expensive in the US. My dad, recently deceased, ate out every meal of his life after leaving home, but he was particularly rich and an outlier in many other ways. Everyone else in my family cooks for themselves and their families.

Less and less, I think. I have friends with persistent delivery habits, and though I regularly cook for myself, I'm tremendously lazy about it - fry some meat in a pan and have some kind of simple starchy carb with it.

I met this woman at a friend's birthday party who was early 30s, corporate lawyer, she said the last thing she had cooked herself was something like 6 months earlier and it was an egg. She and her partner just order out for every meal. Very real in big cities in America.

...the median 19th century American man in a state like Minnesota or California. He lived in a social, economic, and political world that was largely fashioned by his own hands. Be he rich or poor, he lived as his own master, independent from the domination of the boss or the meddling of the manager.

Is this actually true? The average 19th century Californian man likely lived surrounded by a highly complex network of social connections that drove numerous responsibilities and obligations. These may only distantly have included the federal government in Washington but they certainly included locally powerful figures with whom he was most likely not directly acquainted and who wielded a substantial degree of power over him.

I agree with @Soriek, while the early settlers and people in previous historical communities didn't control everything that happened around them, there were faces they could either love or hate depending on their circumstances. They could go to another person, beg forgiveness or extension, and generally make sense of their world in a more comfortable way.

The modern issue of dealing with "machinations in a distant court" is the exact problem here. Humans have lived with tribes and been comfortable dealing with powerful people in their direct, personal experience for almost all of our history after language, probably even before. Dealing with your life being ruined because of an indistinct rule created by a bureaucrat you've never met and will never meet is much more emotionally difficult than having your life ruined by Steve down the street.

I'm of the opinion that this alienation is why so many modern movements are focused around spite and anger, such as the Alt Right or whatever name they go by now. Our current way of living in the Western world forces us to constantly repress anger, and there's no good outlet for that anger because we don't personally see the people screwing us over.

Edmond Dantes was in deep despair while imprisoned in Chateau D'If for an unspecified crime on the accusation of an unknown person. Only when he finally deduced what his "crime" had been and who was responsible for his wrongful imprisonment did he regain his will to act.

I think this is an accurate reflection of how many people internally experience oppression by a specific person with intelligible motives versus oppression by an impersonal, alien force to which they are merely unnoticed collateral damage.

"Why is my rent going up this month? Isn't there anything you can do?" "Nope, sorry, the computer system says your rent goes up $125 this year. Corporate sets the rules, there's nothing I can do."

Indeed, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Without a "why," the "how" is often unbearable.

Dealing with your life being ruined because of an indistinct rule created by a bureaucrat you've never met and will never meet is much more emotionally difficult than having your life ruined by Steve down the street.

I disagree, or at least I would warn against generalizing on this point

When I say emotionally difficult I don't mean it's always better, I just mean in terms of having an outlet for your anger or being able to process the emotion it's easier. You're mad at Steve - you can imagine punching him in the face.

So many folks nowadays are angry, depressed, manic-depressive, anxious, etc etc etc because they have a massive amount of repressed emotions and don't know how to cope or process them.

That presents different problems. The tyranny of the ten most powerful people in your village might be genuinely and significantly worse than the tyranny of the central government, which doesn’t care about anyone in the village specifically but might care about upholding broad rules that protect you from those ten people. Often local politics is far more aggressive, far more bitter, even far more violent than national politics.

At least the person in the village could be ousted if not appealed to. Modern decisions are made in such a way that most decision makers have never been to the places affected nor bothered to meet, much less talk to, those people who would have to live with the decision. To the modern tyrants you aren’t a person, you’re a number in a spreadsheet. Your town, your street, your school? It’s a couple of charts. You are data you aren’t an autonomous agent, you’re a statistical model.

That's kind of orthogonal to the argument, no? Your point is about the objective conditions of the system, whereas the argument was about the subjective ease the people in the systems have dealing with the systems.

It's worth pointing out (in case it doesn't come across in my re-telling of his work) that Greer isn't arguing for anything like libertarianism or an appeal to a lofty past of rugged individualism, but rather "rugged communalism." He very much acknowledges and expects us to live "surrounded by a highly complex network of social connections that drove numerous responsibilities and obligations," that's part of the appeal! He just wants the bonds and obligations thick and personal.

His urging is that the network of rules that surround us and govern us be made by people as physically and socially close to us as possible. Your local rich guy may always have an outsized influence, and your own impact on any given process will vary, but ideally most of the important institutions you come in contact with, your school board, church, sheriff's department, will be built and ran by people who know you by name and face and understand and care about your concerns in a way that isn't possible on a much larger scale. A world where if you and your friends encounter a problem, the first thought everyone should have is how you can organize and address it, rather than how you can make your cause sympathetic to an institution far away.

His urging is that the network of rules that surround us and govern us be made by people as physically and socially close to us as possible

(edit: I was+am aware these are greer's views, not yours)

But the rules I care about the most are about "the kinds of high-tech chips and electronic devices I can purchase", "copyright and intellectual property of text or image bitstrings", or "ability to reverse-engineer and adversarially interoperate with online platforms". The company I work for probably sells their product over the internet to people not only in every state, but in dozens of other international jurisdictions, how can local rulemaking work for that? Even the most physical ones would be something like "environmental regulations, e.g. on dumping and pesticide use, on farms and factories within a 12 hour drive from me". Plus, aren't two of the biggest examples of local control today pathological, development-strangling environmentalism (neither endorsing nor non-endorsing that judgement) and NIMBYism?

I should probably add that I'm mostly relating the views of someone else, views I'm sypmathetic too and would like to draw some inspiration from, but do not fully endorse. I'm not an anarchist nor a libertarian and I think there are a lot of advantages to modernity, capitalism, and bureaucracy that I would not personally be willing to trade away. But there can be reforms that ideally lead towards a happy medium between some of the advantages of both. I also appreciate his work for a meta-level take on the two different sides of the culture war being an unproductive manifestation of the same root cause, rather than a solution to our actual prolems.

Greer isn't arguing for anything like libertarianism or an appeal to a lofty past of rugged individualism...

His urging is that the network of rules that surround us and govern us be made by people as physically and socially close to us as possible.

Very confusingly, this description is somewhat close to what is sometimes called American individualist anarchism or aesthetic anarchism, which is somehow a branch of libertarian socialism or mutualism? Or maybe the other way. I think the gist of the idea is that individuals should voluntarily form mutually supportive networks, but that those networks should be made via deep and direct social connection rather than a mandate enforced with a monopoly on the use of force. Some of the terminology is archaic and not in the current common usage, so IDK if the message is aligns with real libertarianism.

Once you get into the fringes of homesteadism the lines between far left and generic kind of right-libertarianism blur since ancoms consider homesteading to be acceptable personal property + owning your own means of production.

I'm not sure what Greer would make of the labels, but he pointed out that the movement against bureaucracy was for a long time considered the purview of the New Left, though nowadays it's more popularly associated with the right.

A long time ago if you wanted to build a house you needed land and the knowledge of practical house building skills: brickwork, carpentry, plaster, etc. Today, the practical skills associated with house building are more complicated: electricity, plumbing, gas lines, scoping for major appliances, carpeting, the physical systemization of everything, a higher expected level of finish and polish on everything.

It's harder now to build a house just based on practical matters- it is less likely that a regular person will have all the skills to do it himself. He might be forced to hire a specialist or three. He may feel like he is no longer a master of his fate in this regard.

Navigating regulation is a skill of its own, which must be learned. It is not an intuitive skill. Some people aren't good at it, but I don't think it represents a phase change in personal ownership- only a change in degree.

That being said, the value/cost ratio of regulation like this is probably low in a lot of cases.

My family built two houses doing everything except hanging the garage doors once and everything except hanging the garage door and some concrete work the other time.

Power tools are nice but the gigantic advantage someone has today is theres someone showing you how to do everything for free on youtube. Reading a book on how to wire a three way switch and then successfully wiring one in is hard, unless you have done some electronics work and know how a flip flop works. Doing it after watching someone wire one on YouTube is ezpz.

You need enough basic skills to differentiate between the martial art and the bullshido though.

I wonder if there is even much bullshido on YouTube. If you want to replace the driver side window on a 2011 Honda Accord, there's a YouTube video for that.

In some ways, but I think in a lot of ways building is way easier now. Anyone who's played around with power tools has to wonder "how the hell did anyone ever get anything built before these?" And I'm not just talking about the difference between a hammer and a nailgun, but literally having ready access to the nails.

Having done it the old way in the literal middle of the fucking jungle:

With friends.

You put out the call and everybody comes; the dudes from the harbor bring block and tackle; the dudes down the valley bring some donkeys, and everybody brings their sweat and you put that shit up.

Working without fasteners isn't actually that much harder for simple structures; it's just much more time consuming.

Then again; I can't imagine doing it without the products of industrialization. Even if we didn't have electric drills we did have HSS bits, as it were.

Then again; I can't imagine doing it without the products of industrialization. Even if we didn't have electric drills we did have HSS bits, as it were.

As you say, same thing only slower.

You can bang a spade bit out of iron, or even stone I guess -- you can make a brace out of various things, with a bow drill being probably most primitive.

You can hack boards with an axe -- which is one of the older tools in existence.

The story of technology is that of workers figuring out ways to make their jobs easier, and it is a pretty long story before you get anywhere near the industrial age.

And power drills and nails are designed and fabricated at locations very far from you, and are useful to you or not (supply, packaging, standardization, spare parts, etc) based on the decisions made by far away people, often times leaving you no recompensed if those decisions impact you negatively.

The glib libertarian answer would probably be that the kind of international trade that facilitates the manufacture and supply of technology is also best maximized by getting the government out of the way. But I'll bite the bullet and say that I think modern states also frequently lower transaction costs for trade, and that the kind of institutions that create power tools are likely to be large scale corporations with bureaucratic management structures themselves. I'm a great enjoyer of modernity and I think the vast, impersonal scale of our institutions is part of what drives prosperity. There's a reason why humanity generally trades off independence and self-reliance for the stultifying comforts of advanced society.

I certainly wouldn't undo that trade myself, but I want to highlight that something important was lost through the trade, something that's partially a choice and can be recovered without sacraficing everything else. The Spanish Flu response that Greer highlights was in the early twentieth century, after both industrial capitalism and modern bureaucracy had been built, and yet we still understood how to achieve wide-scale, grassroots activism and institution building. A society that regained those skills would be much stronger, more self-actualized, and more operationally democratic than the one we have now.

A society that regained those skills would be much stronger, more self-actualized, and more operationally democratic than the one we have now.

Agreed. Maybe I was taking issue with the framing, as if these skills were "just lost" like a penny in a gutter, or via some nebulous "force of bureaucracy". They were abandoned for the same reason that you cannot build a power drill yourself (or probably even a hammer).

(Though I also believe we'd be a better society if everyone knew how to make a power drill)

Generally nails weren't used, I assume you are familiar with thatch and carving notches in logs.

Part of the good thing about living in Amish country is that they still do post and beam construction, versus the modern balloon frame construction where the shell is the support structure as well.

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.

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?

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.

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.

deleted

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?

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.

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.

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.”

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The anthology is here.

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 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).

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.

  • -19

"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.

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.

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.

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.

  • -22

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

More comments

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.

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?

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?

More comments

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...

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.

  • -19

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.

More comments

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.

More comments

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.

More comments

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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/

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

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.

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.

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.

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'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)

(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.

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?


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats