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I've removed this post as it was just a copy-pasted article. Please remember:
In other words, this is a place for discussion. If you'd like to discuss this essay, you may link to it, even quote from it, but then you have to do the work of offering some evaluation or insight of your own. There is no minimum word count, but "low effort" is something that is often evidenced by a low word count.
On a somewhat meta point, this isn't the first case of a low-effort repost of some white nationalist rant on the Motte, is it? I'm starting to feel a little concerned that the Motte has been identified as a possible recruiting site by people in that sphere.
As Naraburns points out in another comment, if you want to stick to spaces where white nationalists are not allowed to attempt persuasive arguments in favor of our positions, you are welcome to try everywhere else on the entire internet. Can you let us have this one teeny-tiny space where we can actually have a respectful and open dialogue with people, allowing them to weigh our arguments without multiple layers of reinterpretation and misrepresentation by media gatekeepers? I do hope that’s not too much to ask.
It is too much to ask if those discussions crowd out everything else.
Just on a practical level if white nationalist talk floods the forum, it will cease to be an interesting forum to non-white nationalists.
There's a genuinely difficult problem here when it comes to creating an open discussion forum. If everything is allowed, at least some percentage of that everything will be vile. Many people don't want to be in a space where vile discussion occurs, and therefore will avoid it.
If there's a position that, by virtue of being included, will automatically lead to other positions self-excluding, then including that position may actually reduce the range of potential discussions. How to handle positions like that?
I can already hear the complaint - isn't this just giving a veto to the censorious and intolerant? And certainly it doesn't seem like a good thing to optimise for just having as many people as possible. The goal of the Motte isn't to get as many people as possible, so it definitely makes sense to just go ahead and let 'normies' feel uncomfortable if that's the price of attracting intelligent people with controversial ideas. However, even intelligent people with controversial ideas may not want to associate with certain ideas. So there should be a line, it seems to me?
The line shouldn't be placed at zero, where everything that offends anyone in the majority is banned. But neither should it be at one hundred, where literally everything is permitted including the guy who just likes to scream 'DIE N---ER DIE'. Where should the line be? If we want to curate a healthy, vibrant garden of ideas - where are the borders?
I know this will be interpreted as a call to censor. That's honestly not where I'm trying to go. My preference is to try to maximise the interchange of interesting ideas. It's just that how to do that isn't an easy question. It isn't resolved by just picking an an absolute principle like 'everyone is welcome full stop' and standing on that.
On a purely individual level - should they do that? As a matter of fact, what's the harm from discussing disgusting ideas? I think, in an ideal sense, 'taboo ideas' wouldn't exist in the context of discussion. Whether that's 'is pedophilia good, actually', 'is slavery good, actually', 'is eugenics good, actually' - it raises very interesting philosophical questions that flesh out aspects of reality you would otherwise understand less. The writings of history's evil reactionaries deeply influenced the thought of history's foremost progressives, even though they were at odds morally.
It's also not a coincidence that the mainstream lines of thought on every taboo topic is hopelessly confused. That's what happens when you make intellectual inquiry taboo!
At the same time, you have to strictly enforce a quality floor, and be fine with that quality floor having a 'disparate impact' on the witches.
While I think, ideally, everyone should 'not defect' and tell all of the self-excluders to suck it, TheMotte is one of the very few spaces that does that and simultaneously maintains a quality bar (and also an implicit IQ/competence filter), which makes it especially important we allow such badthink.
It's all very well to claim to be above such tribal or social associations - but I very much doubt than anyone here is. I know that there are people interested in the Motte's ostensible purpose but who have quit the community because it contained too many witches, and was going down a groupthink-y hard right hole. The Schism is the most obvious example because it's a public community, but every individual who quits and doesn't advertise it adds to the count, but does not leave an obvious record to point to.
All humans are social animals. If you want to recruit exclusively from people who don't care about social associations, you're going to get only the tiny proportion of weirdos who don't care and the people who genuinely like the social associations here (i.e. the witches). It is not at all clear that the resulting community is going to be one that's maximally open to the discussion of interesting ideas.
I'm not claiming to be above tribal and social associations, that would be stupid - both in that it's untrue, and that it'd be dumb to do so, such tendencies exist because they're very useful!
I am claiming, however, to be interested in talking to people and considering ideas, no matter how disgusting or obviously wrong or taboo the topic is (and that does include far-left stuff, like weird kinks, anarchists, gender-abolitionists, authcoms, etc). And I think everyone should do that. Obviously this goes against natural tendencies and is generally a weird idea.
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