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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   32507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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Contra Cori Bush, the War on Woke is not a proxy for race issues. In fact, it appears to be diverting the Right from those problems. That’s a grave mistake. Mass immigration and anti-white racism are far more important than who Bud Light puts on a beer can.

anti-wokeism is rebranded '80s, '90s and early 2000s era culture wars. Race, ethnicity are supposed to be irrelevant or secondary.

The left has a clear idea of what it means to be "woke." They believe that since American life is built on a white supremacist foundation, equality demands race-based redistribution policies. These include mandatory racial quotas in hiring, DEI indoctrination in schools and businesses, and criminal justice reforms designed to benefit POC. Race is central to how the left understands "wokeness." Everything else follows.

I actually don't think that's the case. Sure, that's the message...but in reality, note that anything that actually negatively affects them and their circles are omitted from this. I would actually argue that this "Woke"...this modern Pop Progressivism is more defined by what it isn't rather than what it is, what it excludes rather than what it includes. That is, protecting and enhancing the role of class and status privilege in our society. The focus on certain identity characteristics...first it was sex, then it was race, and now we're on gender in terms of a strict oppressor-oppressed dichotomy serves that purpose.

Because not freezing out those facets, frankly, things look awfully different. It looks a lot more like the dismantling of the managerial class, both private and public in favor of lower-class workers, giving the latter more status, power, and most importantly, money and wealth. We don't see quotas in hiring, we see pressure to increase the churn among established workers along with a post-bias process for new hiring. We see largely a dropping of those DEI departments, to be frank, to increase funding for front-line positions in terms of additional wages and manpower (so their jobs are less difficult). The criminal justice thing? You know, that would probably look like both a more responsive and a more responsible police policy. Basically what liberals (I.E. the south of center range of people flowing from materialist Marxists to Classical Liberals.) have been calling for.

I think it's a mistake to actually take these ideas at face value.

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Also giving executives who fail miserably huge severance packages instead of doing what they should, telling them to get on the dole like a normal person.

They get severance that you don't for the same reason that they get paid more than you. So I'd say that yes, they should get huge severance packages.

You seem to be playing some sort of game here, and I strongly suspect you are trolling.

You have posted several times like this, long form culture war articles which you don't explicitly agree with, even suggest you might disagree, but this appears to be merely a guise for introducing the article without committing yourself to actually endorsing it. "Look at this article by a white nationalist; isn't this interesting?"

Normally, while I might consider this a little sketchy, you aren't the only regular poster who makes a habit of being somewhat oblique about your agenda, and we don't exactly have a rule requiring you to be explicit about your POV and agenda. (The requirement to speak plainly comes close, but people often misinterpret this as "You must always be direct and explicit and literal about what you're saying," and that's not really what it means.)

You've been warned a couple of times by @naraburns, and your now-deleted responses are consistent with this pattern of being coy about your intentions. @naraburns has also observed your tendency to write trollish posts that seems calculated to provoke responses without really saying anything.

Following your last posting spree, you deleted all your previous posts. While we allow people to delete their posts (though we'd prefer they didn't), this also looks quite suspect.

All of this is to say: whatever you are up to, you have attracted the attention of the mods, and while this post in itself is borderline (you basically repost the article with minimal commentary), you are starting to look like a bad actor. Whatever game you are playing, start being upfront and stop looking like someone who's not posting in good faith (and is likely a previously banned poster).

Would it be possible to make the policy against deletion harsher? I get if people want to be done with the site, and want to delete things to do what they can to remove their traces from the internet, but just run of the mill removing comments in the midst of a conversation, especially top-level ones, while continuing to post new ones, is something that I think is fairly harmful. (also not a huge fan of private mode, but whatever—in any case, being in private mode makes deleting top-level comments even less defensible)

You have posted several times like this, long form culture war articles which you don't explicitly agree with, even suggest you might disagree, but this appears to be merely a guise for introducing the article without committing yourself to actually endorsing it. "Look at this article by a white nationalist; isn't this interesting?"

But he made a similar post of an article by a far-left person (the article by ganz). All told I'd rather have his posts than not.

Also ... while for each individual post I'd prefer some commentary than no commentary, the requirement to add commentary instead of just excerpts significantly decreases the number of posts, and if the rule would lead to e.g. the ganz post not being posted because the author has no commentary I'm not sure it's a good rule.

It's a shame, because they'd be welcome as a progressive poster interested in what conservatives think. And I genuinely do think a lot of the articles this user has posted have prompted interesting discussion. But deleting posts after a few hours on such a regular basis is poor form (at least wait until the end of the week).

There is no way this guy’s a progressive. What is he, writing a PhD on the identification of different flavours of stochastic terrorism? We get few progressives as it is, and it just so happens this one is more interested in far right content than we are.

Greer is interesting in that he presents himself as a race conscious conservative, putting him well outside the mainstream, but he never "calls out "Jewish power", which has alienated him among other far right online commentators.

Just add quotes around ‘jewish power’, and no one will notice the odd insider narration. Actually I'm pretty sure I read the above sentence, possibly about another guy, from another disposable account. To JQ or not to JQ, that is their question.

Inb4 OP deletes.

He has argued against resident reactionaries before (example today). Could it be a next-level psy op? I guess it could. My guess is he's a rationalist-verse poster though, not a Sneerclub regular. I could be wrong.

It’s weak bait, a few breadcrumbs. From a private, month-old account who never stays for any real discussion. Last time, you said you liked his posts, then he deleted everything, hours after posting. You may find it comfy to have him lobbing the easiest balls in your direction, but he obviously has a record of dishonesty. He’s far right, not sneerclub.

foreverlurker just posted this OP:

In the Culture War thread, SecureSignals cited an article in which Ron Unz quotes a "secret report" from the Polish Ambassador to the U.S. In the report, the Ambassador supposedly wrote that, basically, powerful Jews in the U.S. are responsible for turning public opinion against Germany.

SecureSignals claimed that the authenticity of this document was "confirmed many times over", but provided no evidence of this. My brief search found that the Ambassador, Jerzy Potocki, denied that he wrote the document. Reading the alleged report, it's so nakedly and unoriginally anti-Jewish that it seems like the kind of thing that the Nazis would fabricate, but I'm wondering if anyone has more information on the report or about Potocki more generally.

Of course, even if the document is authentic, Potocki's claim that "propaganda is mostly in the hands of the Jews who control almost 100% [of the] radio, film, daily and periodical press" is nonsensical in light of how much editorial power William Randolph Hearst had in the 30's and 40's.

I don’t know anything about this affair, but the denial by potocki in 1940 seems suspect to me, like I’m sure to most reasonable people. Now do you see the bait? It's encouraging people to find out that potocki really said those things, and then.... profit .... people's minds will be blown by the JQ. And he's like 'Oh my , how can such vile antisemitic claims be uttered by a pole, let alone be true. Wait, let me find more antisemitic claims for you to "debunk". "

He talks exactly like the last alt , from the same faux-mainstream perspective, about the same topics, 99% JQ.

While I'm at it, @SecureSignals , @hanikrummihundursvin , do you honestly think this guy's not on your side?

The Potocki report is suspect not because it's unbelievable that a Polish aristocrat from the 1930s would be anti-semitic (would be surprising if he wasn't), but because it's suspect that a Polish diplomat would author a report that boils down to, "the only reason the Americans and English would want to go to war for Poland is because the Jews are tricking them into it." If Potocki really did deny writing it, and it boils down to "he said she said" then I think it's probably a Nazi fabrication.

Sounds polish enough. What about the evidence unz gives (here's the book), does it seem credible to you?

Well like @Esperanza says, only two or three of those are 'hostile witnesses' whose bias would not be to confirm such documents. Even if some of the documents in the 'White Book' are real, doesn't mean all of them are. In any case, I don't see what the 'bombshell' is supposed to be. It's one man's subjective opinion. In general I think Unz's "American Pravda" articles are bad.

To be fair, it seems pretty hard to find information about it on the internet. I did a search before making my post and could only find that 1940 Jewish Telegraph Agency article which is probably what he found. That indicates he also did a search, could not find anything to corroborate the authenticity with google searching but found a denial, and then asked if anyone had more information. The only other brief reference to this was this Wikiquote link which contains a quote from the report which is flagged as disputed, with the very same 1940 JTA article as a source.

The only sources I can find confirming the authenticity are the very same cited in the article I linked, so he probably did not find anything to corroborate the authenticity from a google search.

In conclusion, a Google search yields essentially nothing about these documents except the 1940 JTA article. So him concluding "this is probably fake but if it's real it doesn't matter" seems genuine to me. It is pretty mind-blowing how closely that memo mirrors German propaganda all the way through alt-right propaganda about "spreading freedom and democracy" in the Middle East as a front for fighting wars on behalf of Israel. It's understandable why someone who denies the JQ would regard this as highly suspect for what is essentially contemporary, independent corroboration from a Polish ambassador to the anti-Semitic rhetoric.

But I'll admit I'm not 100% certain, maybe he's a DR person throwing soft-balls, but he is saying enough things that indicate to me he's not. It's easy to accidentally throw softballs at the DR if you are not experienced actually talking to them.

The only sources I can find confirming the authenticity are the very same cited in the article I linked

Why then did you say earlier its authenticity "has been confirmed many times over"? Are you and the DR in the habit of taking nazi propaganda at face value?

Because the article contains multiple sources with citations? If it didn't contain citations I wouldn't take it at face value:

There is no question that the secret documents taken from the Polish Foreign Ministry in Warsaw are authentic. Charles C. Tansill considered the documents genuine and stated, “Some months ago I had a long conversation with M. Lipsky, the Polish ambassador in Berlin in the prewar years, and he assured me that the documents in the German White Paper are authentic.”[6]

William H. Chamberlain wrote , “I have been privately informed by an extremely reliable source that Potocki, now residing in South America, confirmed the accuracy of the documents, so far as he was concerned.”[7] Historian Harry Elmer Barnes also stated, “Both Professor Tansill and myself have independently established the thorough authenticity of these documents.”[8]

Edward Raczyński, the Polish ambassador to London from 1934 to 1945, confirmed in his diary the authenticity of the Polish documents. He wrote in his entry on June 20, 1940: “The Germans published in April a White Book containing documents from the archives of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs, consisting of reports from Potocki from Washington, Łukasiewicz in Paris and myself. I do not know where they found them, since we were told that the archives had been destroyed. The documents are certainly genuine, and the facsimiles show that for the most part the Germans got hold of the originals and not merely copies.”[9]

The official papers and memoirs of Juliusz Łukasiewicz published in 1970 in the book Diplomat in Paris 1936-1939 reconfirmed the authenticity of the Polish documents. Łukasiewicz was the Polish ambassador to Paris, who authored several of the secret Polish documents. The collection was edited by Wacław Jędrzejewicz, a former Polish diplomat and cabinet member. Jędrzejewicz considered the documents made public by the Germans absolutely genuine, and quoted from several of them.

Tyler G. Kent, who worked at the U.S. Embassy in London in 1939 and 1940, has also confirmed the authenticity of the secret Polish documents. Kent says that he saw copies of U.S. diplomatic messages in the files which corresponded to the Polish documents.[10]

The German Foreign Office published the Polish documents on March 29, 1940. The Reich Ministry of Propaganda released the documents to strengthen the case of the American isolationists and to prove the degree of America’s responsibility for the outbreak of war. In Berlin, journalists from around the world were permitted to examine the original documents themselves, along with a large number of other documents from the Polish Foreign Ministry. The release of the documents caused an international media sensation. American newspapers published lengthy excerpts from the documents and gave the story large front-page headline coverage.[11]

More comments

FWIW he doesn't strike me as a DR person trying to under-cover drop redpills or anything. i.e. he said:

People familiar with the online right know that there's a rift between those who prioritize hating black people and those who prioritize hating Jews.

It's either a talented troll, or he's sincere and should just lurk more until he has a better understanding for posting standards. I think it's the latter.

On the same day as Cori Bush’s unhinged rant, conservatives cheered on Muslims protesting LGBT curricula in Montgomery County, Maryland schools. They championed Armenians beating up Antifa at a protest against school Pride Month activities in Glendale, California. These immigrant communities were heralded as the new bastion against progressivism, a POC revolt against white liberal extremism.

The enemy of my enemy is my enemies enemy, no more --- but also no less.

Contra Greer, I like Asian-Americans, find that they are on average excellent American citizens and net contributors, and the extent to which their politics leans Democrat seems heavily driven by continued wignat sentiments. I don't actually think I need to "remember that identity will always remain paramount" to find common cause with Asian-Americans in battles against affirmative action or other racial spoils systems.

the extent to which their politics leans Democrat seems heavily driven by continued wignat sentiments.

Don't overestimate the impact of a tiny fringe of online shitpoasters. Most Asian-Americans live in heavily-progressive areas; the dominant culture of these areas is progressive, and this has permeated nearly all the institutions around them. Their kids are brought up in classrooms where the basic progressive narratives on ethics and history are taught as gospel and entirely unquestioned. They live under progressive governance. Thus, they learn to play the progressive game - advocating for ethnic spoils as an "oppressed minority" - because that's how to get along as a numerically-small minority in large blue polities.

deleted

My guess is that at least a part of Asian-American Dem identification is also simply driven by the fact that GOP continues to be the party of (mostly Evangelical Protestant) Christianity and, out of the major US demographics, Asian-Americans are least likely to be Christian.

Only when you lump them under the same umbrella. Koreans and Filipinos are Christian to the point of stereotype.

'Asian American' is far too broad a category. Indian-Americans and Chinese-Americans are about as different to each other as either is to European-Americans. In general on the 'new right' we see (and have long seen, see Dinesh D'Souza in the 1990s) quite a substantial number of South Asians (including even a few Pakistanis and Bengalis here and there), but very, very few East Asian Americans, who are more uniformly progressive.

This doesn't track with personal experience or with any polling I've ever seen. Indian Americans are the Asian American group that is usually most consistently supportive of Democrats (e.g. 2020 and 2012). It's possible that East Asian Americans are just less likely to engage deeply in politics overall, so your observations may just be a variance effect.

Too broad for what, exactly? We surely can drill down even further and note that Hmong-Americans aren't socioeconomically advantaged, or that Korean-Americans do tend towards more conservative affiliations (see Michelle Steel and Young Kim, see also the relationship of Korean immigrants to the LA riots), and I think that makes sense at times. I agree with the obvious statement that South Asians and East Asians aren't very similar. Nonetheless, my statement above seems true for the aggregated group that includes both South Asians and East Asians. Most importantly in the context of the Greer article, I reject the idea of my racial identity being highly salient when it comes to whether I should regard people of both South Asian and East Asian as both good Americans and potential allies across many political dimensions.

When you say 'I'm anti-woke' when you talk about wokeness, you're saying 'I'm anti-Black.’”

How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.

More generally, I think reactionaries are too obsessed with black people. Black people are unlikely to make up more than 15% of the American population any time soon. AA birth rates have converged with the white rate. In South Africa, black people are the great majority of the population. In America, they likely never will be. Black people have been in the US longer than many Europeans, and have nothing much to do with the large scale demographic change that has occurred since the 1970s. Ultimately, any pro-black affirmative action, state support etc will always have to be passed with the assistance of the majority of the rest of the population, whether that is white or latino or a mix of both. Issues with race relations that exist between black and white Americans are largely separate to mass immigration, and would exist in the same way even if America had remained 85% white.

I think the code thing is true in both cases more or less. If you’re anti-woke you oppose the DEI and “anti-racism” agenda and so on (anti-racism in quotes because this isn’t the same as beliefs in equality, but a suite of social and political views that are called anti-racism).

And in most instances, anti-racism is, in practical terms anti-white. When companies brag about their diversity, it’s generally that they e made a special effort to find, recruit and promote non-whites. When schools talk about reading more diverse sources, generally it means setting aside classic European texts to add in texts from Africa, Asia, and Latin America where the population isn’t white.

How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.

One is true and the other is false.

One is hinged, one is unhinged.

@The_Nybbler was certainly playing a bit loose with the boundary of "low effort", there, and I definitely directed a frown in that direction, but all you did was add heat to it. Please don't do that.

"Diversity is code for anti-white" is based on the logic that since efforts to diversify organizations/companies/government/etc. typically involve reducing the relative proportion of whites and increasing the proportion of non-whites, diversity is anti-white.

"Anti-woke is code for anti-black" is based on the logic that since 'anti-woke' efforts include as a central pillar the elimination of affirmative action (in education, employment, federal contracting and so on), thereby certainly reducing the relative proportion of black people in those organizations, anti-woke is anti-black.

You can take a principled libertarian stance that 'diversity' is manipulating the ratios and 'anti-woke' merely restoring the natural order of things, but from a consequentialist perspective one linearly reduces the proportion of whites in major organizations and one linearly reduces the proportion of blacks. A white person advocating the latter and a black person the former are both displaying ethnic self-interest.

"Anti-woke" includes many things that are beneficial to black people, most obviously in that it opposes wokeness in areas that have nothing to do with race, but also even within the realm of race. For instance, consider the CDC's COVID-19 vaccine prioritization policy. They deprioritized older people relative to essential workers because older people are more white, even though they estimated this would result in many additional deaths (especially if the vaccine was less effective at preventing infection than serious disease, which turned out to be the case). This policy killed more black people it just killed even more white people so the proportion of the deaths was more white. How did it benefit black people that more of them died so that more white people would die so that the percentages looked better to woke ACIP/CDC officials? Take the argument from the expert on ethics and health-policy the NYT quoted:

“Older populations are whiter,” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”

I don't think the average black person would really be sympathetic to this argument, even before you pointed out it was also going to kill more black people. These sorts of arguments are mostly only appealing to the woke. And of course the same is true for plenty of less life-or-death issues, like Gamergate's NotYourShield consisting of women and minorities who didn't think they benefited from journalists defending themselves by accusing critics of being sexist/racist/etc.

Furthermore, even within the limited realm of affirmative-action I don't think wokeness genuinely serves the racial self-interest of black people. There are many more black people who benefit from infrastructure than from racial quotas in infrastructure contracts, more who need medical care than who go to medical school, more who use Google than who work for Google. It isn't just the principles that want the black percentage to be high vs. the ones that want it to be low, there is an inherent asymmetry because meritocracy isn't just an arbitrary "principled libertarian stance", it serves an important functional purpose.

Of course diversity advocates also sometimes say that affirmative-action/etc. benefits everyone, it's just that they're wrong. Other times racial resentment and malice clearly play a role, but even then that doesn't mean it actually serves racial self-interest. In general I think ideological conflicts have a lot more true believers and a lot less people cynically pursuing their interests than people tend to think they have.

"Diversity" is aimed (often explicitly) at reducing the relative proportion of whites (and sometimes Asians). Elimination of affirmative action is aimed at NOT doing that. These are not the same.

You can’t tell me that anti-affirmative action advocates aren’t firmly aware that they’re in practice advocating for a huge reduction in black representation in top colleges, businesses, civil service employment, state contracts and so on.

Aware - maybe, want - not at all. Reducing the representation is not the policy goal. Stopping artificial racist distortion of the market (and society) is. If the statistics would be different - then it will be, but it's not the goal of the advocacy. Just as the result of reducing child mortality could be raise in crime (because poor children would die more often, and if they stop dying, they have higher chance to grow up into criminals), it does not mean every pediatrician has increasing crime as their goal. Making such inferences is both unproductive and unfair.

2rafa is arguing consequentialism here, that anti-AA advocates are firmly aware of the consequences of their actions. This is indeed the bar because the context is that Diversity is anti-white in consequences.

If pro-AA advocates can play the intent and goal card, then the policy goal of Diversity is to stop artificial racist distortion of the market, which is what results in underperforming minorities.

Are both of these inferences unfair, or only one?

then the policy goal of Diversity is to stop artificial racist distortion of the market, which is what results in underperforming minorities.

That assumes such a distortion exists, which is very much unproven. While the AA distortion is obvious and easily seen - and, in fact, nobody even attempts to hide it, and if they did, it'd be extremely easy to disprove just quoting their own policies - the other side requires introducing phlogiston-like "systemic racism", which is immeasurable, imperceptible, unfalsifiable and can only be proven by employing the circular argument from the outcome. Admittedly, some racist policies existed, and it is theoretically possible somehow, somewhere the remnants of them survived (e.g., gun control policies or union protections have well known racist roots) - and if they did, getting rid of them would be appropriate. However, that is not what AA proponents are arguing for, and that's not what they are basing their argument on. There's no symmetry - it's like comparing General Relativity and flat-earth hypothesis - on the surface, both look structurally similar, as they both make some claims about certain phenomena, but once you bother looking deeper, the similarity disappears entirely.

"Diversity" is anti-white in intent, in action, and in consequences. As we routinely have confirmed with advocates of such using phrases like "stale, pale, and male" or "useless white male pilots".

I am saying that removal of discrimination is not the same as implementing it, even if some of the effects are.

Can a disabled person argue that eliminating disability welfare is anti-disabled people?

That's not comparable at all. The point of disability welfare is to provide them with the baseline of a life worth living, which we want to provide to everyone. Few proponents of meritocracy propose letting the useless languish.

AA, however, goes way beyond that. It gives blacks an advantage beyond that. It's fair to say everyone should live a dignified life. It's not fair some people to say some people should get unmerited success beyond what others get, based on their skin color.

I wouldn't say being a against a blindness quota for pilots is anti blind people.

Are you prepared to argue that being black is a disability akin to being blind? Should you argue we should allocate some NIH funds to look for the cure?

They can argue anything they want, but I see no reason to accept their framing. "You're arguing against an advantage for me, therefore you are anti-me" isn't valid.

I agree to an extent. Conflating demographic replacement with blacks was always an implicit lefty meme born out of their inability to distinguish ingroup/outgroup bias from narratives surrounding immigration and birthrates. The concern over blacks in the US is not demographic but 'cultural' for a lack of a better term.

When 6% of the population is committing 50-60% of all violent crime you should be allowed to ask why they are all black men and what can be done about them as black men before you start restructuring your potentially high trust white society to account for such a disruptive minority. In that sense blacks act as a disruption generator that fuels the aspects reactionaries hate the most about modern lib/left/progressive expression. Primarily the aspect that they are traitors who refuse to face the hard truths and instead let others carry the cost of the fantasies their unexamined privilege affords them.

To that end black emancipation was never achieved off the back of a popular majority. It was always the elites pushing the envelope and imposing their delusions on the lower classes. The old generation with their old propaganda gets cycled out and the new generation with new propaganda gets cycled in to continue where the old left off.

On the other hand, modern US society is in part based on worshipping black people. I mean, can anyone deny to ridiculous effort both sides of the mainstream enact in just to get a black person to mouth off their talking points? And the fact people genuinely feel that their side is more valid if they have a black person on their side.

I wish I could find the study that, in broad terms, showed how depicting blacks as fighting for a just cause made people more likely to assume blacks in general were more virtuous. It, at the very least, confirmed all of my biases regarding the effects I felt after being exposed to a nigh endless propaganda stream of blacks protesting during the civil rights era against the evil white supremacist empire. I mean, why were the evil white police hitting the innocent blacks who just wanted to be treated the same? My 12 year old brain could make no sense of it, and came to the obvious logical conclusion that one side was good and the other evil.

To that end black emancipation was never achieved off the back of a popular majority. It was always the elites pushing the envelope and imposing their delusions on the lower classes

Is this really in reference to slavery? If so, black emancipation won a fairly resounding seal of approval in 1864 and 1868.

That's not the entire truth though. The backdrop to the peaceful protests was violent riots and full scale political terrorism, as is examined in detail in Days of Rage In full context, the civil rights movement is not just a bunch of innocent blacks getting beaten up by sadist white men. But that would only exist as a sideshow to the baseline that black people, in general, are not more virtuous than others, despite many people intrinsically believing so.

As for black men and crime, as long as the societal norm is to apply blame and dish out punishment based on historical crimes made by your ancestors, like is done to white people, on top of blaming them as a group for any activity a white person undertakes as an individual, which is done on top of actively marginalizing against white men based on the comparatively poor performance of blacks, as well as actively fostering an environment that excuses black crime and vilifies white crime, and all of those activities existing under an umbrella of anti-racism, I see no reason why we can't have an active anti-racist marginalization campaign enacted against black men.

Nothing should be done about "black men", but something can be done about criminals. Those are two separate categories.

I very much agree with this but would like to make sure we're on the same page on drilling down to the individual in our pursuits of equal treatment. We should address only the criminals no matter their skincolor. But we should also be distributing aid and help also only based on need correct? No blanket affirmative action pushes so that the poor white trailer kid gets the same help as the poor black resident in a blighted neighborhood?

When you say 'I'm anti-woke' when you talk about wokeness, you're saying 'I'm anti-Black.’”

How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.

Because it’s not the same rhetorical game. In my experience the ‘anti-woke’ people are vocally and actively anti-affirmative action, blackwashing, pride stuff, etc and ‘diversity’ people in my general experience tend to express that it’s never meant to be anti-white, even when it is (except that’s a good thing).

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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.


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