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Obviously, because propaganda is dominated by people like you who are very hostile against white people. The people targeted by Stalinist trials but ended up murdered also in majority of cases professed their love of the great Stalin, admitted their errors but still their final fate didn't change. Maybe they saved some relatives from murder or spared themselves torture. But Stalin was not worthy of love and themselves not worthy of hatred for being persecuted by his regime.
The reality is that all nationalists are capable of violence and all groups deserve rights and people to promote them else other nationalists will go extreme and screw them over. In the current situation where there are no pro white organisations with significant institutional influence but there are plenty of anti white pro other groups organizations, the excess of nationalism we have is not of the white variety. Hence, the obsession about the first over the later is for the same reasons that when a trans antiwhite shooter shot Christian kids at a school, the Biden administration talked about how they stand with the trans community but not the Christian community. Its all about the racist sympathies of those in control of institutions. Its for the same reason that when it has been discussed or from being underdiscussed many people in this community are unaware of the various genocides of ethnic groups commited by the communists.
There isn't a unique evil to white people and their tribalism. Right now a different form of nationalism is the one committing the most violence. Moreover white people who aren't white nationalist but are unhinged nationalist for different groups are right now contributing more to violence than white nationalists.
Beyond the issue of promoting the interests (valid or excessive) of a group, there is also the issue of communities rights to existence, their own traditions, etc, etc. People deserve their religious and ethnic communities to not be persecuted and part of the richness of humanity does lie significantly in its different ethnic groups and their different ways of being. Ironically the cultural marxist idea of destroying whites to end racism is the more homogenizing vision against world diversity. Although it won't suceed and even if it would it wouldn't work and there will be conflict among non white different ethnic groups that colonize western countries. The cultural revolution that destroys many ethnic group's culture and existence is evil for what it does to them in particular and unjust, and obviously humanity as a whole is deprived. No more white people and destroying their culture, and shitting on their ancestors and civilization is also an evil against humanity as a whole.
And of course in addition to nationalists of the more obvious variety, marxist nationalists and even marxist fanatics against nationalism have their own legacy of blood. But the pressure isn't towards this ideology and its adherents for the mountains of skulls and unfortunately so. Marxist ideology can suck so much that it can share with it the more extreme elements of nationalism.
What are those? But extreme antinationalism at expense of the hated outgroup. Like the nazis considered Poles, Greeks, Russians, and yes Jews too to be a threat to them, so does George Soros in accordance to his son, obviously ADL, obviously you, consider European Christians a threat to minorities.
The extremist antinationalist who sees as evil a community of people existing in their homeland and the religous, or moderate nations that want to continue to exist is a case of the first tribalist for antitribalism being far worse extremists. People who try like Trotsky to collectivize individualism and really hate ethnic groups just for existing are incredibly dangerous and have an enormous legacy of blood. They are also oppressive totalitarians beyond just the threat of death. Beyond just ethnic groups, we should also be concerned about the threat of these fanatics to right wingers too. Like a majority of French for example want France to remain France and oppose mass migration. The movement you are part of sees this as white supremacy and nazism too. Many millions of decent people, just for wanting their ethnic and religious communities to continue existing and opposing self genocide are seen as iredeemably evil under the inanely evil antifa framework.
The hatred based on ideology against nationalists and religious people and against those who aren't far left by the the far left has such enormous legacy of blood, and repression, that it requires also more recognition as a great evil, than just the ethnic persecution although they are directly related. To the extend people think that they aren't persecuting ethnic groups (they are) but just people who hold an ideology, well your ideology persecuting perspective has destroyed a huge number of good people and has shown it self incapable of restraint.
The hateful oppressive societies that are created by this mix, demonize particular ethnic groups in this case white ethnic groups, and lead to violence, toleration of crime and also a more slavery like society with less rights and freedoms for the outgroup. Certainly no freedom of speech but also no freedom to a community and self respect but imposition of humiliation, cruelty and very low status. Plus such policies as in south africa of extreme racism against whites and abadonment of standards, tolerating criminality, leads to societal decline and collapse.
The less violent inducing ideological mix would be to tolerate white tribalism, but not promote white ultranationalism, excessive rights for whites at expense non whites and also to limit in the same manner the tribalism for non white groups. Yes all nationalist ideologies can go too far (so there is a threat of violence by all of them but also by people who identify as antinationalist humanitarian types but their far left ideology has a greater legacy of cruelty than most nationalist ones) and ironically one of the ways they do this is to not recognize any rights for other ethnic groups. Going too little can result in self hatred and identifying with excessive nationalism for other groups as it is happening right now.
Nationalism is also related with not only bad things in its excess but opposing oppressive empires and creating free national state democracies where ethnic groups are able to live freely. The multiethnic (and multireligious) situation is often a situation where some ethnic or religious groups dominate this multiethnic state impose a second class citizen status on the others. Cultural marxists are people who do have enormous sympathies and enormous antipathies. If you do have a multiethnic society, allowing no group rights and identification with their own interest for the majority/pluralirty ethnic group designated as threat of everyone else, is how you create a racist supremacist caste system, and oppress the majority/plurality too.
Self respect and defending your legitimate rights is a good thing. Promote reciprocity and the idea that where one groups rights end another's begin. Wreck and not tolerate the antiwhite ultranationalist ideology where white groups can do no right and non white groups can do no wrong. There is a sweet spot in the level of native tribalism for white ethnic groups which includes white tribalism for either groups like white americans in a more direct manner or as a supranational more broader civilizational group identity.
But I do think the primary ethnic identity for say the Europeans should be their nation but that national identity does relate to being a european. Amway there is a sweet spot level of respecting the tribalism of white people for non whites too. Non whites should also respect and share the idea that a) white groups have certain national group rights b) non white groups have certain national group rights.
This idea can exist for different groups as the prevalent idea if we push for it to exist. And it did exist more so in the past, but has been eroded by far left antiwhite racists and ethnic tribalist for certain ethnic groups (like in your case the Jews with their organizations being quite important at that) who have excess tribalism for themselves and allow too little group rights for their hated white Christian outgroup ethnic groups. It still exists to some extend in certain european countries and of course among non europeans for themselves.
And this can coexist with the existing framework of international justice which does exist and there are laws for this and should be taken more seriously. Mass migration for example violates the rights of the native peoples. And really same applies to the general cultural marxist agenda which does include always extreme nationalists of the non white variety to the extend their nationalism targets the mutually hated outgroup.
Is changing the pervasive ideology of societies possible? Obviously. Although some societies today are already closer to what I advocate than what you advocate.
Like society can tolerate and promote the current ideological mix, it can promote a different and saner one too. But this would require both people who can't be reasoned to what are their tribal motivations and pretend to be motivated by more universal goals (they really are treating certain groups as utilitalian monsters and others as not deserving jack shit) stop being entrenched in institutions and their ideology not tolerated. Then there the other people who have more genuinely absorbed the false belief that they are virtuous and can do no wrong (the Trotskyist idea that revolutionaries can do no wrong) and demonize others to facilitate this to accept the bitter pill that they have been some of the worst racists of history who have done to their ethnic outgroup, sometimes including their own ethnic group by ancestry, a great evil.
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You know I’ve been waiting for a good time to talk about this, but I am usually hesitant because by now these discussions don’t ever lead anywhere and no one’s opinion is ever changed in any meaningful way, but I guess now is as good a time as ever.
At one point I would have considered myself a white nationalist, although only in the way a nineteen-year-old university student would consider themselves a Marxist. Just as I was reaching my twenties I got caught up in the counter-cultural alt-right sphere in 2016, and adopted many of the worldviews that were congruent with the political atmosphere of the time, including Ultra-nationalism, Antisemitism, and extreme social conservatism.
It is important to note that one does not become an ultranationalist following a genuine reading of Evola but comes about almost exclusively as a reaction to the failures, dishonesty, and excesses of modern progressivism. It is almost a meme at this point to talk about Anti-white propaganda that is constantly espoused from the left and influences their legislative policies and cultural creations in every aspect of society. It is difficult to ignore this when every social message from every institution is categorically opposed to your very existence in a very genuine way. It is not ironic or subtle, and it is very difficult to take criticism of racial prejudice seriously when the culture at large only considers discrimination legitimate when against ‘approved’ groups.
This is coupled with a domestic policy that also reflects those values, and actively promotes immigration programs that are intrinsically designed to weaken the amount of social and economic power that the majority holds. It is not fallacious to say that western governments are actively supporting causes and ideologies that are inherently anti-white. It is always in the back of people’s minds that their societies have gotten successively worse over the last twenty years and in the minds of the radical right this is correlated with the rise of multiculturalism. We have been so ingrained with the idea that it is morally wrong to even* conceive* of a nation strictly composed of a white majority that It is no surprise that it leads to strong political reactions such as white nationalism.
While I could go on infinitely about the failures of modern liberalism, the point of this thread chain is about why white nationalism is not a viable solution to the greater social trends we are currently seeing, or specifically why I became disillusioned with white nationalism.
The greatest problem I had with entire community is one of unspoken beliefs. Much like Marxists (who have legitimate grievances with neo-liberal capitalism, ones that they are correct in pointing out can not last without complete disaster), they hold beliefs internally that are completely malevolent. White nationalism is centered on a goal of a homogeneous nation that is composed of an ethnically white majority. While I do not consider this inherently immoral (much like how I wouldn’t consider nation such as Japan, India, or China's homogeneity as immoral), the reality is that due to modern immigration policies over the last thirty years, western nations hold a large number of visible minorities. Underneath many of the public facades of ultra-nationalists there lies a reality that is invisible under the surface. Ask a white nationalist what they would do to minorities who would refuse to leave the nations in which they have built a foundation for the future, and they will give you ambiguous solutions that never really sound satisfying to either you or them. They will deny this to no end, but If given complete political authority, they would do many of the things that leftists would accuse them of doing. In order to reach their preferred racial demographic goals, they would have no qualms in deporting, imprisoning, and ultimately murdering hundreds of thousands if not millions of people given the opportunity. Much like the far left in which they criticize, their public personas do not actually reflect the values in which they hold in their hearts, and the practical reality of their governance would result in a large amount of innocent bloodshed, which I do consider immoral.
White nationalism does not have an adequate plan for the future and their proposed solutions to problems will not simply vanish if given political control. Since I have explained that white nationalists come about primarily as a reaction to the excess of progressive ideology, they don’t really have a thought-out plan for the future, only the destruction of what is currently politically popular. Destroying a current political establishment, and actually governing are two completely different things, and they are often in sharp contrast with one another. It would not surprise me if they achieved political power that it would not last particularly long, because the modern world does not share the political realities of the interwar period. They seem to have this idea that the only thing stopping western nations from their previous economic and technological superiority is simply the racial makeup of the country. Now while it can be strongly argued that the social benefits of homogeneity would lead to better educational and economic outcomes, by no means is this guaranteed. Modern nation states are in constant competition with one another in all kinds of ways that are not obvious on the surface. They seem to have this opinion regarding almost all facets of society, that simply making western nations homogeneous will solve almost all of their political problems. This is not apparent to me. There are many serious issues that demographics don’t seem to solve. The birthrate for example, would seemingly skyrocket the moment western nations are ethnically homogeneous, never stopping to notice that these problems are worst within nations that are ethnically homogeneous, such as China, Korea, or Japan. The modern world has become far too complicated for such simple solutions, and in many ways White nationalist’s delusional world is only a reality within their minds.
This is not to say that modern liberal democracy is inherently better, as I would prefer almost anything to what we currently have. I believe modern progressivism to be a political and cultural dead end, and one that white nationalists correctly diagnose as being inevitable to die, either due to political revolt or societal collapse, given a long enough time frame. The dissident right has emerged as an evolution to this type of ideology and is a little more realistic in their goals and slightly more aware of the moral problems that come about as a result. White nationalism is an equal dead end, at least the fantasy of it that the adherents hold to in their heads.
This seems to me a quite bad refutation of white nationalism. The meat of your objection is that wignats would have to use violence to achieve their policy goals, but apparently you've never had a frustrating conversation with a libertarian. That's true for every political movement ever. Whether we are talking about ethnic cleansing of hispanics or civil rights laws for blacks or motor vehicle registration for your SUV, the enforcement of policy ultimately rests on an escalating sequence of consequences that end in non-compliants being gunned down by police in the street.
Yes, making an ethnostate would require reprisals on people who don't want to obey. This is equally true of patrolling borders. China, Korea, and Japan are not "naturally" homogenous today. They are homogenous because they have continued to enforce a threat of violence against border crossers who do not meet their preferences.
This post could be rewritten to condemn any political movement that is not in power, save ancaps.
I disagree. My objection is not that they would use violence to achieve their goals, but that mass violence is *inherent *to their political goals. I understand violence is necessary for any political power to hold on to their positions of authority, but it's not simply a matter of political subjugation.
The consequences for non-whites who subjugate themselves to a ruling class of White Nationalists would be identical to those who don't, because it is not their consent that is contentious, but their existence itself. The use of violence is therefore used not as a contingency for non-compliance, but as a tool used towards those who don't have the desired characteristics. There would not be 'reprisals,' because that would imply causation.
Yes, I agree, and I would prefer the West to have the same type of policies, but the reality is that they don't. The question now remains, how you would reverse the effects of mass immigration without the overwhelming use of political violence? Comparing the use of force for the displacement or extermination of millions of ethnic minorities to registering your SUV is extremely disingenuous.
Kuwait deported a quarter of their population in a week during the aftermath of the Gulf War with little to no bloodshed - I’m sure any Western country could easily deport a single digit percentage of its population with less fuss than Covid restrictions especially if that population used state benefits at a higher rate than the native population.
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It's not their existence that is contentious, it is their location. They are free to exist elsewhere, and if they choose to stay they can be forcibly removed, as Pakistan deported hundreds of thousands of Afghans. It's absurd to say that the very existence of those Afghans is in contention, it is their location that is the problem and it was their location, not existence, that was corrected.
I particularly hate this use of "existence." It's manipulative and dishonest.
Yes, in theory, but In practice that's nearly identical. I find the distinction between existence/location to be marginal at best. Just in the same way I don't wish for all mice to be eradicated off the earth, I would kill all of them that are in my house, for the very same reason that I don't like their location.
Exactly my point. Think about the practical implementation of these policies. Force them where and how? Tell them all to pack their bags? Send them to other nations that don't want them? What if these nations refuse to take them in? What if these minorities refuse under all circumstances? What about the large proportion of minorities that are second or third generation immigrants who do not have a place to go if displaced? What starts out simple in theory quickly becomes murderous in practice.
The perpetual counterpoints I bring up to these sorts of points, and the equation of country breakup and ethnic sorting/relocation with "Balkanization":
The post-WWII relocations of ethnic Germans
The "Velvet Divorce" of Czechoslovakia
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Probably back over the Mexican border, since the vast majority of them came in through that avenue. As for how, the same way the state does everything else: with the threat of uniformed men with guns.
That would be first, and easiest, solution and was actually proposed by a Republican candidate for President in my lifetime. He referred to it as self-deportation.
Yes, exactly.
We lean on them, the same way we do to get our way all the way around the world in a thousand different ways. Starting with sanctions, probably, or withholding of aid. Or we simply move the people across the border and present it as a fait accompli.
It depends on how intermixed they are, first of all, but anyone who has been ethnically distinct for three generations in America gets little sympathy from me and can be deported to where their grandfathers came from.
You keep raising these logistical issues as if they are the moral issues but they simply aren't. Removing them is a logistical issue, and it can be resolved using all of the regular tools we already have, once the decision has been made to do so.
I don't get the reticence. How has any state gotten anything accomplished at any time in history? By deciding to do it and marshalling their resources to the task. This is no different.
Your example is specific to a certain type of Mexican immigration in the United States. Whether you're looking at something logistically or morally are completely different issues. There are 10.5 million Mexicans currently in the United States, which is 5x larger than the largest standing army in the world. How would you do that logistically without causing an all out civil conflict? Once again I'm arguing that whatever way you think that will play out in theory will not play out that way in practice. Even if you want to pretend that it's not a moral position, it absolutely is, and you will have to morally justify that to a large portion of the United States population that will not be in favour of such drastic policies and will risk losing a large portion of your support to the immigrants you are attempting to displace.
I'm not even American btw, my thoughts on this are based on Canada where I live who don't have such easily displacable immigrants. How would we get rid of millions of immigrants from places like China and India? Send them down to the United States border? Have a centralized agency responsible for the displacement of all non-whites over a 10 million km radius?
Operation Wetback led to the departure of over a million Mexicans from the United States, using less than a thousand federal agents. Most of them weren't even arrested; hundreds of thousands simply fled the US to avoid arrest and formal deportation proceedings. And that was in an era with a much weaker state apparatus and no significant tracking capabilities, at least none comparable to what we have now, let alone the means and ability to punish domestic sponsors of illegal migrants. Modern Western states are vastly powerful in ways most people cannot even imagine; what cripples them is democratic restrictions on exercising their powers. I don't think the illegals hanging around outside Lowe's are going to take up arms against the government if they hear that the US is deporting all Mexicans or Central Americans - like their forebears, the odds are that they'll simply pack up and leave, or they'll hang around hoping they're lucky enough to avoid getting swept up. "Civil conflict" is an absolutely minor and irrelevant possibility. It's not a question of logistical ability - it's a question of political will.
Yes, ultimately this is the only real obstacle to effective border security and demographic policies, which is why I have little sympathy for liberals who wring their hands over the election of right-wing anti-immigration politicians in Europe - if your position is that democracy is necessarily a racial suicide pact, you should not be surprised if people emerge who are not as beholden to democracy as you.
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Not to tread old ground here, but I once again find myself curious about the tricky edge case of the old-stock American black.
(I'll take the former Georgia colonial territory circa the 1770s if you're offering it though.)
Is that even an edge case? Seems like a pretty central example.
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Not that the partition of India was clean and easy, but we're living in a world where such a partition happened last century. The model is there, so mostly what I'm bemoaning is a lack of imagination.
From the (Mississippi) river to the sea*?
*Ocean
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The best refutation of white nationalism is fact that there is no such thing as "white nation", that all the hundreds of millions of pale skinned people all over the world (white nationalists themselves vigorously disagree all the time on the basic issue who exactly should count as "white") do not see themselves as "one nation" and do not see any stranger with the same skin color as their brothers or sisters.
White nationalists have to build their nation out of nothing, have to organize, educate and agitate on unprecendted worldwide scale, have to persuade, for example, Balkan and Eastern European peoples to put down their mutual grievances and see each other as fellow white comrades.
Do you see any force capable of such monumental task? I don't.
I remember reading a couple of discussions online following the first Black Panther movie and the first season of Bob Hearts Abishola, respectively, making a parallel point about "black" — that things like "Pan-Africanism" have always been primarily phenomena of "diaspora" blacks (Erik Killmonger, Gloria Tyler), while Africans have their own particular national and sub-national identities, rivalries, and enmities.
(This parallel also provides a good rejoinder to the 'if you, a "white" American, want to live in a "white ethnostate," just go back to Europe, bro' argument — how's Liberia been doing?)
But note that while the above militates against a global "black" identity, it doesn't remove the salience of such an identity in the American context; hence the increasing ADoS discourse. There's no "black nation," but there's quite arguably a "black American nation." Ethnogenesis is a thing.
And the parallel goes for white Americans… to a degree. For various reasons, including, but not limited to, the "break" from the "old country" and its culture being less extreme for (mostly, to varying degrees) willing immigrants versus slaves brought in chains. The "melting pot" did a lot, but so did "Albion's Seed," as it were.
So there isn't even one "white American nation" — there's at least two, and they're increasingly hostile. A lot of times, when a certain type of "white person" goes on about how awful "white people" are, they don't mean themselves, they mean the other tribe. As I've put it to people before, I'm not a "white nationalist," but I am, perhaps, a Borderer nationalist. And "build[ing] their nation out of nothing… to organize, educate and agitate" on that much smaller and more homogenous scale would indeed be an easier task than "convincing Balkan and Eastern European peoples to put down their mutual grievances and see each other as fellow white comrades" — consider, for example, why quite a number of "white Americans" with no historical, familial, or geographic ties to the South will display a Confederate flag?
Except, I, for one, don't particularly see trying to carve out a Borderer ethnostate as much of a path forward either, even if the "tribes" are increasingly segregating geographically. Instead, I see the best path forward for my people to lie outside the (increasingly outdated) Westphalian nation-state model.
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I hate to state the obvious, but just because Jimmy Carter and Joseph Stalin both used "violence" to achieve their policy goals does not mean I can't prefer Carter for killing fewer people and pursuing better policies than Stalin.
/u/TheBookOfAllan is making the entirely defensible claim that the cost of deporting/imprisoning/killing millions of Mexicans is incredibly high compared to typical policy goals and compared to the benefits. It's not helpful to respond that it's no different than enforcing vehicle registration.
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Are you going to link the article this is from? It appears to be a comment on this article.
Edit: clarity
Just like the last alt used to (“motteposter”). I think he decided to move on to the next one, he isn’t maintaining kayfabe, this is far from his usual pearl-clutching progressive persona. Witness this, DR doubters, @coffee_enjoyer , @FirmWeird , so at least your priors will be in the right place when the next game begins.
edit: Might want to rethink what you thought you knew more generally. If you fell for this, it could be that most of the arguments you thought you won decisively was just one of your own letting you win to boost your confidence. Your ideology should pay for deceiving you and others by projecting this fake image.
Where are the people arguing against (white) nationalism?
There seems to be a general refusal to ever defend multiculturalism as the Western world spends billions refereeing border disputes between people one can hardly tell apart.
You don’t see many naive defenses of multiculturalism or calling anything to the left of stalin, nazi, here, but one side’s specific argument being absent or even proven incorrect, does not make white nationalism, as advocated by DR-aligned posters, correct. You see a lot of hypocrisy type arguments here ‘if oppressed identity politics are legitimate, then so are white/oppressor identity politics’, which, yeah, I more or less agree with. But after that, they start to resort to the same postmodern tricks as their opposition, calling whites’ ‘false consciousness’ the result of manipulation by (((elites))), or of some inherent mysterious quality of whiteness, which somehow makes them both flawed and superior.
Anyway that’s not the point: if your worldview, whatever it might be, has been corrupted by deception, then when the deception is uncovered, your worldview should be corrected, even over-corrected (to account for as yet undiscovered deceptions), back to an original pristine state.
What does that even mean? What is the original pristine state?
I don't think anybody actually formulates a worldview based on null hypothesis or something like 'out of all Y arguments, X have been disproved, therefore I only retain as true Z until disproven'.
What do you even mean by deception? Is the socratic method deception?
I have met plenty of white nationalists but I don't think I've met a supremacist. While some will argue that white people are superior due to X, Y, Z, they usually concede that they are not flawless, that they are currently as a people on the backfoot of history, a shadow of their former glory. Hence the need to organize as a group 'white people' or whatever other denomination they may give themselves.
They usually look to the past (RETVRN), to some previous state of existence of 'white people' as a group that was superior to what it is now. Plenty of them are also able to acknowledge virtue in members of other groups, whether they call them 'honorary aryans' or 'one of the good ones', or even acknowledge an entire group (ie Jared Taylor is fluent in Japanese and has cordial discussions with Japanese people who agree with him that huwyte people should be able to live in homogeneous groups if they so choose).
It's kind of a flavor thing, some people like vanilla over chocolate, does not mean vanilla or chocolate are objectively superior.
What do you think we are we talking about? "jewdefender"'s lies. He manufactured hundreds of fake, low-quality debates here that were designed to look like the WN side won. If you bought into this, took this as evidence of the quality of WN arguments, you have been deceived. He also tricked you into reading way more WN lit than you would have if he’d been honest. The original pristine state is when your opinions come from observing real debates and reading stuff organically. We all heavily rely on the honesty of others to form an accurate view of the world. Socratic questioning does not impair this process, JD's lies do.
He didn't really manufacture anything as from what I recall he never really bothered replying to comments. Somebody who only drops links or excerpts of other people's opinions with one line of 'what do you guys think of this literally-who-WN I just fished, aren't WN bad?' strikes me as prime 'low effort' posting. As far as I know, the guy hasn't even expressed a single opinion. Just noise. What's interesting is when people who put a little bit of effort reacted to the material, but there's not much to go from.
Where are the real debates including white nationalists? Where are the lie-free sources?
It seems to me that democracy is about caring about what the billionaires who own the media tell us to care about, and to rubberstamp these billionaires' point-of-views.
There is no pristine state in such an environment.
I saw him get into an extended conversation with SecureSignals. You can't verify that though, because he was deleting all his comments after a day or so. Not something typically done by low-effort but well-intentioned posters, if you ask me.
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DR doubters? Dissident right? I mentioned previously that it was an open question, and it was given that people were actually talking about it and discussing it. Here he just straightforwardly includes "we" when talking about white nationalists which really gives the game away and closes the question, but it isn't like this is particularly surprising. The main argument I had in my head against him being a troll was just that he was particularly bad at it (if I was going to troll under the name "JewDefender" I'd just be an incredibly obnoxious pro-Israel partisan with insanely obvious double standards, and who makes arguments with big glaring flaws that strengthen the WN cause when defeated).
I'm not rethinking what I know generally because I followed the rules and mores on this forum about assuming hidden intentions on the part of other people. You also don't seem to know what my ideology is or who counts as "one of my own" - I'm only an antisemite in the sense that I don't support Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and think that a lot of the things they've done are utterly heinous (white phosphorus usage in civilian areas is something I will very consistently condemn). That said, most of my arguments on here tend to be on the topics of Trump, environmentalism and EROEI more than anything else.
If you think I won any arguments because the other side let me win to boost my confidence, please let me know and point these arguments out - I don't have my profile locked down, you're free to go looking through my history to find instances of this happening... and I'm going to expect you to actually do so if you're making an accusation like that.
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“You were potentially deceived by a poster trying to manipulate the forum, therefore it was your ideology that deceived you” is an impressively silly thought.
I don’t know what’s going on with the OP poster. The world’s worst crypto- white supremacist? The opposite, attempting to get the topic banned? Someone doing “intelligence gathering” on users who agree with this or that? Whatever it is, it’s obviously annoying. Maybe mods should start using AI to check posting styles and ban the next alts.
He did it for your ideology, so yes, your ideology did it to you. If you valued the truth more than your ideology, you’d make it pay. But more important to me than the relative worth of random ideologies is: if we all counted his dishonesty as a demerit against his WN ideology, he would finally shut the fuck up (since his motivation is to make it look good).
This itself opens up an obvious attack vector.
We’ll cross that vector when we reach that plane. He has successfully promoted his ideology by abusing the sub’s charity so far. We are way out of balance, too trusting, and he has been defecting at zero cost. Of course if you let in a defector in a theoretically curated always-cooperate club he’s going to make bank. We don’t need to condemn his ideology all equally and unequivocally for it, it would be enough if we imposed enough costs that he would be unsure whether his actions help or harm his ideology.
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This is non-sequitur and nonsensical. Ideologies are true or false completely independent of any random bad actors on random forums. Someone “doing something for your ideology” does not negate an ideology, not even 0.0001% of its validity or lack thereof.
And what makes you think he isn’t anticipating this?
So far he has only succeeded in annoying the user base, making them more reluctant to post and engage in anything WN-related. If he were actually invested in promoting WN he would immediately stop posting and just upvote SS or something.
I'm not talking about some alabaman WN who’s never heard of him, I'm talking about you, reader of this forum. Your view is shaped, in this case corrupted, by what you read here.
Because it isn’t what happened the previous eight thousand times he did this.
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But you'd be throwing the baby out with the bathwater - this approach is bad and leads to bad outcomes even when people aren't actively fucking with it. You're giving random bad faith actors an opening that grants them astonishing amount of power and influence over what you believe.
If you disagree, let me know - "fuckduck9000defender" seems to be an available account, and if you think people acting like shitheads in support of one particular ideology is a mark against that ideology, you're going to be changing your mind on everything real soon.
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I think it would help if we could identify users with a private profile and habitual post deleters without having to click into their profile.
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Discussions of white nationalism do not always feel the need to mention rejecting violence. Just go to 4chan, you will see plenty of people calling to forcibly expel and/or kill non-whites.
White nationalists who are a bit more peaceful-minded probably often feel the need to distance themselves from that crowd and also distance themselves from the common public stereotypes of what white nationalists are like. And many of the white nationalists who are violence-minded feel the need to pretend to be peaceful-minded in order to argue successfully "in polite company".
One problem with many (though far from all) white nationalists is that that they both believe that whites have certain characteristics that make them superior to other races and also believe that whites should act more like those other races act. It is a bit contradictory to have the mindset of "we are better than those savages but you know what, we should act more like they do when it comes to matters of race and immigration!"
Liberalism is largely a white invention, I would say one of the greatest of all white inventions. It is great not just by ideological standards, but also by pragmatic standards. I cannot imagine whites having had the enormous success that they have had for the last 500 years had they not become liberal and cosmopolitan. Capitalism itself is liberal by nature, it is the social mode of cosmopolitan traders, not of ethnic chauvinists.
Today's liberal white cosmopolitanism opens itself to all races, but I think that one can trace its roots to the nature of the cosmopolitan community of white Christian Europe hundreds of years ago, when an upper class white would freely travel from one European capital to another, having more in common with the upper-class white men of other countries than he had with the lower classes of his own country. Not that there weren't similar things in Asia and the Muslim world, but Europeans really took that ball and ran with it. They coupled the cosmopolitanism with the scientific/technological revolution, and each of the two amplified the benefits of the other.
If one takes the long view, one can argue that nationalism was actually a brief aberration in European history, one which lasted roughly from the French Revolution until the end of World War 2. The more common social pattern of white people, going back to the the times of Greek trader colonies, Hellenization, ancient Rome, and so on, was a far-flung cosmopolitan imperial pattern, rather than ethnic separatism.
One paradox of white nationalism is that to cast aside liberalism is to cast aside one of the greatest achievements that white people have ever made.
Modern Liberalism is not an achievement of white people and is infused with racist authoritarian far leftism and the legacy and influece of marxists but also of black and Jewish identitarians and groups that identified with their sex and other minorities. The anti-tribalism of liberals is a falsity since they promote racist policies and entrench hate speech, while pathologilizing all opposition.
The reality is that the enlightnement in addition to promoting good things, also promoted the Jacobin mentality. There is a legacy of modernity of far left extremism that is negative and destructive from the french revolution to today and which also enabled and sided and used by foreign ultranationalists.
Also, while it preexisted the enlightenment, the enlightenment produced also nationalism as an ideology. It really hasn't just produced only one thing.
Things associated with liberalism can be good when they coexist with conservative and native nationalist principles. And that has been the historical west. A society that enforced conservative moral mores but also that coexisted with some liberal mores. That promoted its own native interests but also there was an internationalist ideal.
Liberalism absent the restraints and influence of conservatism and pro native nationalism with the double standards of the left, becomes the far left. And that is the agenda that modern liberalism promotes.
An agenda of treating white people and other groups as pathological and other groups as groups that can do no wrong and whose tribalism should remain entrenched and not questioned. Part of the hostility to white identitarianism has to do to its opposition to excessive tribalism for non white and its opposition to anti white racism. And part of it also has to do with a nation destroying agenda that destroys something good, oppresses good people and results in the Trotskyist mentality of the destroyers who believe that they the people of revolution can do no wrong.
No, the people of this mentality are not "goodguys" as they believe, but the opposite.
So in conclusion, liberalism is flawed, but also deeply erroded by far leftism and today's liberalism is an ideology that isn't consistent about antitribalism but concern trolls and marxist and liberal nationalism and tribalism for left wing associated groups and the progressive stack is the dominant aspect of modern liberalism in both rhetoric and deed. It is an act of siding with this to pretend otherwise when only criticism can save modern liberalism from itself. The legacy that made the west great has not been liberalism but the coexistence of liberalism, or rather aspects of liberalism with other ideologies like conservatism, religious morality, national consciousness. However, the mentality of purity spiral in the liberal and left wing direction lead to utterly terrible ideologies getting influence which are destroying the west in a manner that we see play out. Indeed becoming South Africa is an obvious end point of modern liberalism. Although things could progress even worse than that. To make the west great again, removing far left extremism from institutions and fixing the dominant ideology to not include the extreme elements of liberalism is the way to go.
One of the key problems of modern liberalism is the fanatical purity spiral idea in favor of its own legacy and intolerance to what is valuable outside liberalism that liberalism can lack. Even more so when talking about modern liberalism which really has been erroded too much by far left and is inconsistent and lacks even the virtues of liberalism. Modern liberalism is not an ideology that promotes equality under the law, neutrality, objectivity, and certainly while it can be flawed, to an extend some lack of tribalism can be good (but too much is bad). Modern liberalism does not do that. It is a dishonest ideology which is about being racist for your favorite tribes but pretending to be antiracist and concern trolling your ethnic outgroup. To the extend it affects people to have this preference at the expense of their own group this is to such an extreme degree to be fair to consider it to be promoting the treasonous mentality. Its a destructive ideology for the civilizations that are cursed by fate to be ruled by it.
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Would you say that the invention of liberalism would make one people 'supreme'?
Conversely, isn't it a bit contradictory to have the mindset of "we are better than those savages who did not invent liberalism and live violent, backward lives filled with sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, but you know what, we should let them all in and then complain when they act exactly like they did before we invited them in"?
Oh and one more "we are better than those savages who do not believe in liberalism (white nationalists), therefore we should ban them from participating in all the liberal institutions".
This converse you are talking about is not the position of the liberal consensus that white nationalism is up against, though; rather, it sounds like some form of straw "anti-white nationalism". Consensus liberals reject the idea that liberalism or other desirable qualities have anything to do with racial or genetic background at all, and instead consider them entirely cultural, and moreover believe in the missionary quality/persuasiveness of their own viewpoint. Admitting people from illiberal cultures into their midst of therefore good, as it will make it likely that those people or their descendants will convert to liberalism; also, shunning white nationalists is good, because these people carry some rare set of memes that evidently conveys resistance to conversion despite exposure to liberal ideas.
Compare how medieval Christianity, despite being convinced of its superiority, travelled around the world and sought to deepen its relationship with pagan peoples (whether by trade or colonialism), effectively bringing them into its cultural fold, while at the same time treating internal witches and heretics harshly.
I think you're referring to Roman Catholicism, not Christianity which was able to live along with Muslims, Jews, pagans in relative peace for centuries and still to this day in the Middle-East.
Liberalism is a product of Roman Catholicism, or perhaps the new version of it, in which propagating the imperial ideology is more important than each individual's actual salvation/well-being.
Is that the actual liberal position on white nationalism?
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Rhymes with "Yahtzee". The last notable time white nationalists gained power did not go so well, and it is generally agreed that it did not go so well, so people with opinions that resemble that generally want to clarify that their viewpoints do not end up in that generally-agreed-to-be-bad place.
As to why the same isn't true of e.g. communists? Honestly I have no clue, but I think that indicates a problem with the communists.
I mean, in part because we're much closer, politically, to communists than we are nazis. The idea of uplifting the poor, equality for all, the will of the people, etc, are things that modern americans and communists share. Whereas the nobility of war, a duty to serve the state and its leader, the superior races pushing out the inferior, jews being bad, etc, aren't something we share. Communism is noble but misguided in practice, naziism is evil.
This means communism 'goes down easier' than fascism, so people have a much stronger visceral reaction to fascism. The fascist then has to compensate for that, e.g. by rejecting violence
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The nazis murdered a lot of europeans who they painted as threats, so they were much more German supremacists than white nationalists. Those european countries targeted were actually run for the most part by european nationalists who did support their people's continued existence, that is peoples who were white. Most victims of the nazis were in some regard european nationalists. So you need to be very careful here, as it becomes ghoulish and genuinely offensive to use nazism that harmed so many Europeans and their nations to double down on harming Europeans.
Let me provide a comparison. The Japanese imperialists who were Japanese supremacists also promoted the idea of pan-Asianism and that they were those fit to lead the Asian race against European colonialism. But of course they also were rather racist against particular Asian groups and commited nasty attrocities. And the existence of the Japanese imperialists does not justify screwing Asians from their homeland because the Japanese have done atrocities to both Asian and also the whites who fought them in WW2. It was also better that the Japanese were not taught to hate thier nation as was done to the Germans. Japan after WW2 respected it self and avoided attrocities against non Japanese. Win - Win. That they did not engage and "face" with their WW2 history is probably better than the German alternative. Like South Africa's "truth and reconciliation" what we get is neither truth nor reconciliation.
The nazi card being used against Europeans who suffered under both Bolshevism, Nazism and now cultural marxism is diabolical.
Those who fought the nazis fought for their people against an enemy, not for them and their descendants to be treated as nazis which is extremely immoral and an enormous betrayal.
One could claim that extreme antinationalism towards groups painted as threat that disallows their existence is the pervasively dangerous ideology instead and one you are helping perpetuate. Not respecting other nations having a homeland. This genocidal imperialism then as an ideology comes in many forms.
If anything, the more dominant white nationalist ideology has been in the anglo sphere.
Nationalists concerned about their native groups prosperity have ruled over many countries including european ones, including at the time of nazis and opposed them, and afterwards. In europe post WW2 has worked well actually with modern european nationalists who opposed migration having countries that avoided both the violence and hatred at expense of their people.
They are nationalist enough for this ideology not to be tolerated by the modern liberal left and people like Soros and similar.
So moderate nationalism in general that has an element of respecting the golden rule works well and a necessary aspect of the only sane internationalism that worked. Nationalism that is greedy and does not respect the rights of others doesn't work well for humanity. But the nationalism of this form that is more dominant today is not white nationalism, but nationalism of groups of the progressive stack.
Indeed even in the USA in part decades there have existed people who identified with their white group who even thought southerners were too tough on the blacks.
What is going is that far leftist extremists and racist tribalists for other groups did take over certain institutions.
And the right which did have some more hardcore views (hell the national review supported seggregation originally) adopted increasingly their framework.
Now, nationalism as I have argued can go too far and there is that element too, so I do think due to this fact and yes history too, it would have made sense to put limits on white nationalism, just like it should be doen for non white nationalism and the marxist nationalism that has infected liberalism is an example of this extremism. In fact, perhaps the movements that are moderate on nationalism do not actually call themselves nationalist. That might be one way to see it.
But we don't have a movement that is about just opposing extremism here. If we had that, I would be more in line to respect it, although such a movement should focus today much more about other extremisms than white nationalism like for one example the black nationalism not only of blacks but even promoted by non black liberals. Which relates to the attempt to promote afrocentrism and promote narratives about black romans, black English in history and so on.
This agenda was imposed by those who marched in institutions and by force. Its not a mystery why there isn't objection to it, its because the far left promotes deliberately the association of nazism with anything that isn't far leftism and pathologizes opposition to the far left as extremism. Even though plenty of those who oppose it aren't extremists and even supposed extremists can and did oppose bad far left extremism too.
Those who have compromised too far with certain racist ethnic lobbies and the far left, do not represent a moderate reasonable center. A moderate reasonable center will include space for white tribalism, but would also put limits to it, and would do likewise with other tribalisms.
It would also definitely focus to punish the "nazis/slavery/confederacy/colonialism/holocaust happened so your group have no national rights" ideology and those perpetuating it, and focus to promote a history that is more nuanced rather than one sided blame game against particular ethnic groups or the political right. There is in history enough facts against this falsity. The milking of history to paint certain ethnic groups as eternal oppressors is the kind of thing that is the most potent poison to our discourse.
So I would teach first about this movement and how it is a bad one, and how we should not allow them manipulate us by respecting their act of milking history as a respectable endeavor. However I would also frame nazism, slavery as bad things. WW2, slavery, etc are not the only things of history that matter and in fact the movements that have milked them are far more relevant to us today than them and remain actual entrenched factions that keep doing this trick. It only works if we accept their attempt to milk history and use it as a winning card against their outgroup. So we should care far more about the activists promoting this than any of the groups that operated 80 years ago.
We should definitely make the "more holocaust/slavery/left wing victimhood narratives" a taboo. We need much less of that in fact. So yeah, I think the way to fix the damage done by these movements and reach behavior that is closer to the sweet spot is intolerance to the "truth and reconciliation" supporters. The influence of shaming native nationalism for Europeans has been so much and the influence of respecting the rights of others so pervasive among say groups like the French who a) oppose what happened in France with mass migration, and believe France should stop it. b) still oppose fascism, that the end result of removing those who perpetuate these narratives from influence would certainly be more moderate than what we got now.
Edit: I do think that pan whiteism and Pan asianism and universalism imperialist can bring actually genocides against groups. But the threat should not be utterly focused on those outside, as is convenient for anti-europeans. There are ethnic differences among broader groups too that rise the question of how those who aspire to lead the whole group would behave. Communist genocides do relate to the elite there finding certain ethnic groups to be obstacles and finding their nationalism a threat to the project, and the general antinationalist extremism. In the case of nazis their idea of being the leaders of Europe was not incompatible with extreme racism against certain europeans and Japanese with Asians against Asians So that is another lesson to take from WW2 that doesn't fit the narrative of the one sided promoters of particular guilt. But it is an important one. This idea that you should unite either the world or a race under your leadership can of course lead to such problems.
The people who claim the aspersion of lack of tribalism (whether universally or towards people of their own race) can find it easier to mistreat other ethnic groups under their rule than they claim. The wise issue of national self determination arises in WW2 as a relevant. I recall reading a quote by Eisenhower who thought that lack of homogeneity in Europe was related to WW2 as a conflict by the way.
I mean this is a way to see things that isn't popular among hardcore white nationalists neither, but it is actually one of the insights one can get from WW2 if they don't see it from particular partisan glasses. Now, what about the EU? Well the EU can do attrocities out of a more cultural marxist lens, which still relates to an elite who don't identify with an ethnic group mistreating it due to seeing them as threat, but now for muslims, or blacks or Jews, or for the tribe of "antitribalists". As a union of European nations, if lead by moderate nationalists who respect their general heritage but also their specific nations, and don't have a predatory mentality towards the worl it is more likely to work well for everyone than by the cultural marxists who mistreat Europeans and have a problem of antieuropean racism. If it lead by groups like the historical nazis, attrocities against certain Europeans and their nations would be a likely scenario. So this is an example of taking correct lessons of history, instead of being manipulated by one of the guilty factions such as the cultural marxists.
One of the ways to break the spell of "nazism milking" used by anti european racists, is to realize how much harm nazis did to europeans as well. But of course that harm was 80 years ago, and others are the more primary perpetrators of harm afterwards. And the victory of this racist anti european faction can feed into a certain grass is greener effects by some looking at ww2 history.
That still doesn't change the utterly obscene nature of using the nazis who murdered so many europeans and had an authoritarian culturally genocidal agenda (they explicitly were against nationalism by said nations) towards many non german european nations, as the way to support cultural genocide, extinction and racism against europeans today. We need to punish pathologizing moderate nationalism that is so tied to the legitimate rights of existence and non mistreatment of ethnic groups and the nazi comparisons are deserving of ire most of all.
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A suggestion from a video interview with Tom Holland on his book "Dominion" was that the Communists were equal-opportunity murderers; they didn't pick you based on skin colour or perceived ethnicity, while the Nazis had a very clear plan in place about that. So Communists are seen as slightly less awful.
Then working backwards from that, Communists don't feel the need to disavow violence because (1) well it's revolution, comrade, can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs and (2) hey, at least we're not Nazis!
They picked you based on perceived social class instead.
Indeed, but they didn't care if you were white, black, brown, yellow or red as they sent you to die in the Gulag! So they're just a teeny bit not as bad as the Nazis! So they don't have to disavow violence, comrade!
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I think it’s power dynamics. The Nazis lost badly and had no institutional support after the war. So they were held to account by their enemies and every crime was exposed and recounted in mass media. Nazis were tried publicly for their crimes. Communism has institutional support in government, in media, and in the academy. They never really lost. They faced no public reckoning for their crimes. I think if you reverse that, have the communists lose badly in a war, lose institutional support, and the leadership face a media backlash exposing everything that went wrong, they’d have the same need to distance themselves from Soviet era communism.
This seems plausible to me.
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If you can't offer a rebuttal does that mean that you agree? In that case why are you not a 'white nationalist'? Why do you care so much about white nationalists when they are such a fringe movement at this time?
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You can't escape from the problem of low-effort posting by stroking everyone's ego. (I don't think most people on this board are actually all that smart, we just have diverse interests and collectively can come up with some interesting conversations.) This is not the board that is going to enforce Liberal Orthodoxy and provide apologetics for why something on the Internet is Problematic.
If you read something that seems incorrect to you, but you are having trouble putting your finger on it, then explain what exactly (with your own words) you think is most convincing about the article and then give reasons why you think it might be wrong. (link to the article, do not copy/paste it.) Maybe it does not correlate with your personal experience. Maybe if you accept the argument you need to throw out some other component of your mental model of the world.
Or, if you cannot give a reason for it being wrong, defend it. Steelman it as best you can. That is the only way to get a strong rebuttal.
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User jewdefender has been banned. Discussing with other mods right now.
A few of us have high certainty that they are a troll of some sort. We just haven't been willing to ban, because it is not 100% certainty.
But they are also single issue posting and copy and pasted a comment from elsewhere to originally pass off as their own writing.
Edit: mod consensus is that this will stay as a permaban
Edit2: adding comment quote for posterity
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I think this forum should disable/remove the downvote button. It's a legacy holdover from Reddit but it really doesn't fit the theme of the motte. Downvoting increases the intensity of heat while doing little for light. Humans are hard-wired to care about the popularity of their ideas, even people very low on the agreeableness spectrum (which I'm sure accounts for the majority of posters here). People who are routinely downvoted are much less likely to post, intensifying the echo chamber effect.
If a post breaks the rules, reporting it is still the best solution.
If a post is just using bad logic, it's much better to refute that logic with a response than to downvote. There's nothing I find quite as aggravating as making (what I think is) a good point, only to be downvoted with no responses. This doesn't happen nearly as often on this forum as it does on Reddit, but it's still a nuisance when it does occur.
Voting has always been one of the worst functions of Reddit and should have been discarded with the offsite move. I voted on one comment in my decade plus on Reddit, and it was a technical solution to a video game bug buried under dozens of useless comments with bad advice. As a subjective “I agree/disagree” button, which is what it morphed into on Day 2 of Reddit going live, the philosophy of its inclusion is counter to the Motte’s explicit rule against consensus building.
Let ideas stand on their own, without the peanut gallery’s worthless input. Motte monkeys are often not nearly as informed as they believe themselves to be, either, outside of their favorite subjects of “computer science careers” and “why girls don’t think programmers are alpha males.”
Dial down the antagonism, returning-alt-with-a-grudge-against-the-Motte.
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Vote counts should at least be hidden for longer. Perhaps a week. The impulse to focus on upvotes is a siren song.
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I think we should remove both. "Bad post got upvotes" complaints are as bad as the "my post got downvotes" ones. The only function of votes, as others mentioned, is a sink for low effort comments, but if the mods are up to it, I'd say just start banning for low effort. Unlike some of the more esoteric rules, this one is pretty easy to understand, and to apply in a relatively objective way.
You want to give the mods more control over the conversation? Who are you and what have you done with Arjin?!
I was always in favor of civility norms. I'm not really that much into demanding high effort, but it might be worth it, if it frees us from the hand wringing about up/down votes.
It sounds like a pyrrhic victory to me. You get rid of the, what, quarterly bitching about upvotes and downvotes, but in doing so you take away one of the public's few methods of influencing the discourse and put it on the mods, who are overworked already.
Problem is that people who shouldn't get influenced by votes (completely fine posters with a minority opinion) are, and people who should (trolls) are not. I sympathize with mods being overworked, which is why I said "if they're up for it".
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The complaints are the worst part, because sometimes yes it is a bad post, but other times it's "that's your opinion based on your views which don't agree with the content of the post".
I don't care one way or the other about up votes, down votes, sideways votes. I get bans because a mod said so or somebody went running to teacher to complain. I don't ever recollect knowing or caring was the 'offensive' comment upvoted or downvoted.
If people want to keep them, keep them; if the majority want to get rid of them, democracy rules, baby!
As opposed to a random user banning you? If that's happening the code base inherited from rdrama must be more interesting than I thought.
I wonder how much bearing that has on whether the complaint was valid. Certainly the gangsters or mafiosos declaring "snitches get stitches" aren't saying so because of their wounded pride from being falsely accused. You did call me a goat-fucker lol.
I do wonder what a system entirely run off user reports might look like, plenty of social media platforms, Reddit and Facebook/Insta included, have that to a degree where a sufficient number of user reports gets things auto-removed. They still have humans in the loop somewhere even if they don't act in every case. Not that I expect this to be a good idea, or work very well if at all, l just want to see novel forms of dysfunction at times!
No, that was 'high decoupling consideration of hypotheticals'. I wasn't saying you, self_made_human, was a goat-fucker, I was saying hypothetical general you who may want to defend goat-fucking.
But that's what amused me about it; suddenly all the silly low decouplers who were getting het-up over simple thought experiments unlike cool brainy people who could distinguish between "suppose I want to fuck goats" and "you're saying I want to fuck goats? that's a lie!" - suddenly you were sounding just like one of them 😁
Eh, some mod decides I said something too much and hands out a ban. I may fight that one out, but generally I just shrug and take my lumps. They have their view of "that was needlessly antagonistic" and I have mine, but they're the Benevolent Dictators of this place so what they say goes and arguing with them isn't worth it. Often I just get overheated, and then the cage comes down.
Uh huh..
https://www.themotte.org/post/760/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/159366?context=8#context
You had plenty of opportunities to state that when I told you I had no desire to fuck goats, or either brand of "kid", but such a considered, nuanced intent was lacking.
At any rate, it's water under the bridge, you took your lumps.
I must hold my hands up to this fault, I was poking you since it did amuse me to see the reality of "talk about high decoupler behaviour and finger wag at low decouplers, then become a low decoupler when it was my ox that was gored" (or goat that was fucked, if you like).
So the mod(s) were in the right to smack my wrist there. However, I was not trying to intimate that you personally wanted to fuck kids (caprine) or kids (human).
That's close enough to an apology for me, while we certainly have our disagreements or outright arguments, you're not remotely as intolerable as some I could name here, heh.
Oh, just wait for the next fight I get into! 😁
If I were any good at this prediction market lark, I'd be able to start one on "When will FNE get their next ban?" and I'd clean up, I tell ya!
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Not if the moderators decide to not do their job because they like a troll poster, or want to encourage similar troll posters for "forum diversity." Very few posts that make good arguments are ever downvoted, and it gives the forum population a voice to deal with spammy agenda-posters (or hock-posters) that doesn't rely on the mods.
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Can you give examples where it happened undeservedly? (Reddit-grade jokes or trolling or blatantly bad posts or -1 buried deep in some 1 vs 1 thread do not count)
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Slashdot meta moderation
This is part of what I'm slowly approaching with the volunteer system, although I have had no time to work on it lately :/
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It is hidden for a week. It is a good compromise. And downvotes are the best way to signal to the trolls.
Vote counts are definitely not hidden for a week, at least on most posts.
If you define troll as "genuine rulebreaker", then reporting is a better option
If you define troll as "person who disagrees with me", then "signalling" should really be done with a proper response.
They're hidden for 24 hours
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Is it really that aggravating to get a secondary signal for your post quality?
This forum is extremely well-mannered when it comes to downvotes. Everything I've ever seen under 0 deserved it.
It's not a signal for post quality. I make posts which meet quite a few quality standards, but they get downvoted for making left-wing arguments.
I have seen that happen, and many of my posts have been downvoted because they also went against the hive-mind.
Very rarely do they drop below zero, though. More likely, they are "ratio-ed" by simplistic quips that align more with others.
From my point of view, compared to the perpetual abuse of fucking idiot pre-teens on Reddit and inevitable negative karma, this is still a big step up. It's, of course, easier said than done, but if you don't view votes as a symbol of quality, you can just ignore them instead of the site being changed for it.
My posts do go below 0, especially if I make my kind of arguments. I don't know what specific arguments you're making that get you downvoted, but it was a consistent pattern in on Reddit that left-wing arguments took hits only on the basis of their position.
I would argue that downvotes don't help us - they encourage people to signal their approval of an argument instead of actually engaging with it. Better to remove them and force people to respond or move along.
I will chime in and say yes, sufficiently blue opinions are more likely to get downvoted.
But I’m still tentatively in favor of keeping downvotes. My reasoning is that expressing disapproval is going to happen, and it’s better done through (initially hidden) downvotes than through reports. I’m not very confident in this; vote buttons do feel pretty tribal, which is reason enough to be suspicious.
Abuse of the report function can also be modded. Reddit, for example, bans people who abuse the Sucide Prevention Bot. Set a few examples and people will learn.
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I'm sorry to report that I could not resist downvoting this post, but will make amends with a comment.
Also - I think the downvote is useful, it's interesting sometimes to see the tally of up and down votes. Highlights contentiousness in an interesting way
Don't worry, I downvoted your reply as well.
Could still be done indirectly by looking at upvotes on original post, and upvotes on the replies.
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Since we don't use it to order or hide posts (I think?), I don't think having downvotes hurts too much. What I'd like to see are additional or replacement dimensions. LessWrong added an "Agree/Disagree" vote, which I like, with the original upvotes indicating quality alone. That can make it easier to get the highly upvoted, highly disagreed with posts that are really the ideal.
i don't really see the point, i think it'd likely just be as abused as upvote. it'd just be that "quality post" would be the new upvote and "not quality" would be the new downvote where "agree" is just a weaker form that would be uncommonly used.
i think it would be neat to see some indicator of controversiality though.
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Downvotes are a feedback mechanic and I think a good one.
I understand that it was abused pretty heavily on reddit but karma isn't really a thing here, votes are hidden for a day, popular sorting isn't that useful here, ...
You mind giving an example or two?
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You can't remove the impulse and behavior by removing the button, as YouTube and twitter learned the hard way: people just start "ratio"ing each other instead.
This would be a purely cosmetic and ideological change. So I'm against it by default.
Ratioing on Twitter takes a significantly larger amount of effort than a simple downvote and requires lots of participation to distinguish it from random noise. The Motte also has rules against written downvotes so that would make it an even bigger hurdle.
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Being a Metafilter exile, from my experience a lack of downvotes serves to push would-be downvotes to become upvotes for the nearest antagonistic reply. This has the effect of giving upvotes to whoever can write an opposing comment the quickest, regardless of the logic of the response.
Transforming downvotes into upvotes on replies is something I've seen, but that seems like a good change to me. I've not seen the downvotes go to low-quality posts, at least not once a few higher quality posts have been made.
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Then get rid of upvotes too.
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It is easier to create bullshit than refute it. Therefore refuting bad posts with good logic is a losing proposition.
Unlike responses, downvotes are typically not moderated, so if a post is so bad that the proper response to it would be moderated, a downvote is the best answer.
The Motte is past the size where mods can be expected to read every single comment. At most they can respond to reports, and even then there's usually a lag time of hours involved. I also personally don't expect the mods to commit themselves to sitting down and personally addressing every bad argument that gets deposited here like a turd on a doorstep.
Sometimes a comment is such utter bullshit that accurately/vividly calling it out as the bullshit it is can stray past the threshold where the reply itself violates the rules here. And that's leaving aside the emotive states where you're tempted to leave something more minimally inflammatory than theoretically possible, at which point just downvoting and moving on is better for you and the forum.
Don't ask me how I know the latter.
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It's not against the rules to post bullshit, at least provided the bullshit is in long-form prose.
If someone posts bullshit and someone else posts "Bullshit." in response, the second person will get moderated. If they merely downvote, the second person will not be moderated.
We need a rule against long-form bullshit then.
If we're not thinking of the same people, then what does being able to down vote accomplish?
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Typically? Downvotes are never moderated. (As far as I know, we can't see who upvotes or downvotes a post even if we wanted to. I suppose Zorba could build that capability, but I know of no reason to.)
On reddit you couldn't see it,though AEO could and sometimes did take action based on it. Here, Zorba has control of the codebase so can certainly see it if he wants to.
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Unless the content is nearly universally considered bad, downvoting things you disagree just ends up looking like "they hated him because he spoke the truth".
That is, a downvoted post be such due to it being wrong, or due to it being heterodox with regards to the majority opinion on this site. A non-narcissistic person will be able to consider the possiblity that she is mistaken and that when community with as high an average IQ this one forms an consensus, indicated by mass-votes is correct; while a crank considers disagreement a sign of suppression and persecution.
[1]Apocryphally:
The assertion that The Motte can or should be building consensus, let alone good consensus, is laughable on its face. The “high IQ” citizens of yesteryear’s Motte were in universal agreement that sub-100 IQ people were physically incapable of understanding hypotheticals, which is obviously false to anyone who actually interacts with idiots, and not insulated morons subsisting exclusively on a social diet of nerdy coworkers and college friends.
No, they weren't. Many people pushed back against that claim. The Motte never comes anywhere near "universal" agreement on anything.
You worded this as an unqualified absolute just to troll all of us who disagree with it at that extreme, didn't you?
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this comment has a nice "to be fair you have to have a high IQ to understand themotte" type vibe to it, which comes across as pseudointellectual at best.
more seriously though, just because a comment is highly downvoted doesn't necessarily mean it's inherently garbage or that it was a "low IQ" opinion. a lot of very smart opinions or ideas were not deemed to be very popular in the past, and I think it'd be foolish to think that what we think is objectively correct.
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just 100 years ago, high IQ people had consensus that smoking was good
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I'd say I covered that with "Unless the content is nearly universally considered bad".
Strong disagree. Even if you're right about the IQ and what it means (I personally lean to us not being as smart as we think we are), high-IQ does not mean unbiased, and so we are not a representative sample of all high-IQ people, which means we are perfectly capable of downvoting comments just because we don't like them, rather than them being wrong.
To expand on that, a +35 comment is easily in the top 10% of most-upvoted comments on any given thread. Most comments are +10 or less. Community consensus with such a small group means very little.
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Downvotes don't refute BS to any meaningful degree. Most trivial BS can be refuted by knowing basic fallacies, and prolific BS'ers will get modded for low-quality posts.
Downvotes in practice are just like people writing "You're wrong" without elaboration.
Having a bunch of people answer BS with "you're wrong" without elaboration is better than allowing it to stand unchallenged. Downvotes are more efficient at that than actually posting "you're wrong", and attract less moderator ire.
You're wrong.
I don't have vast swaths of time to devote to responding at length to certain posts, even when I want to, and on the occasions when I do the iron is often no longer hot, as it were. I don't see a problem with downvoting and moving on.
This assumes your agreement or disagreement on its own is important or worth sharing. It isn’t.
Oh? And why isn't it? Presumably we aren't all conversing in a vacuum, nor is the detailed articulate response of every single person necessarily desirable, even for the most riveting posts. I don't agree generally with you about what you term "Motte monkeys," however, so I don't imagine we'll end up in agreement.
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Im a little drunk on thanksgiving. Can someone tell me the pope having lunch with transgenders is false.
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1727444933207056730?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
This was low effort. I think a 7-day ban is too much. But this is still something where as a Catholic you would be like what I’m seeing has to be wrong. I will eat it. This isn’t an unworthy culture war post if it fact checks which from Hannania I assumed he did.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries. But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.
But I don't give Christianity a pass. When people tell me that they are Christian, I have pretty much the same reaction as I have when people try to convince me that a trans woman is a real woman. In both cases, I think that their beliefs are ludicrous and deeply irrational.
Unfortunately, your atheism is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as either. You are personally as irrational as the trans ideologues, but you give yourself a pass out of pure self-serving smugness. From whence comes equality between methodological constraints of science and metaphysical theory of ontology? It's nothing but really old and really popular and so it seems "normal". You probably like the cultural/political connotations, and you may have been raised to believe such irrational things. If you're going to act like anyone is "given a pass", it is you, and every time you pull this schick, it eats away at the detente that the mods claim to believe in/enforce. The result of you continuing to break down the detente is that, unless the mods continue to protect you, your irrationality will no longer be given a pass. It'll be made clear that you're no different than trans ideologues.
That's a relatively new one in these parts eh? Leave aside arguing why my ideology is superior, let me claim that yours is just as bad. I can see this is an immensely convincing argument.
There is an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that the universe operates according to a mechanistic evolution of relatively simple laws of physics, with no external intervention at all.
To people like Goodguy, the only point is to hear himself call his ideological opponents irrational. That is the ground where the battle has been declared.
What experiment have you conducted which demonstrates equality between methodological constraints of science and metaphysical theory of ontology?
EDIT:
Also, it's telling that you didn't come to say that... to Goodguy, who, after all, did nearly nothing but say that someone's ideology is just as bad as another one. Big oof by you, but telling of the fact that you're far more critical of things you're predisposed to disagree with than things you're predisposed to agree with.
What exactly is it telling of? If you wish to call it hypocrisy, feel free, but I can wholeheartedly assure you that people will leap to the defense of things they care about/prefer more than those they don't.
I am on record defending particular ideologies/movements I strongly dislike from false accusations.
For a recent example, when another atheist reclaimed religion as innately irrational, I strong disagreed, there's nothing wrong with the concept of religion from the standpoint of rationality, it's the belief in it in the face of the monumental amount of evidence against the supernatural elements seen in believers that makes them irrational. Belief in the supernatural ceases to be irrational when there's net positive evidence of supernatural events.
I see nothing wrong with claiming that religion/Catholicism is as bad/unfounded as trans-ideology and Wokism, or at least comparable in terms of harm, certainly in terms of the basis of their claims where it pertains to empirical reality.
My objection to you is that you didn't submit anything more than post-modernist nonsense about how, since atheism makes metaphysical claims, it's just as unfounded as religion. That is not the stance of anyone who has more convincing examples to show me, and believe me plenty of religious people try to do that, I and many others are atheists because such evidence is utterly inadequate for the magnitude of the claims
People will obviously engage more with topics that they care about than topics they don't care about. But you specifically raised a concern with what you perceived as the form of an argument. We can go back to antiquity to find good reason to think that one should consider the form of an argument apart from its particulars.
Huge ROFL. I've never said that. Just not even. Double ROFL in thinking that it's anything post-modernist. Instead, it's like, core classical philosophy. I've seen some kind of ridiculous misunderstandings/misaccusations about post-modernist philosophy, but this is a new one. Just comically off the mark.
For reference I said:
Quoting you saying:
Hmm.. Did you happen to notice that @Goodguy was claiming that trans ideo was comparably awful to Catholicism, while condemning both? And not being an adherent of either?
And that my gripe with you is that you are presumably a Christian or at least religious, and your sole argument in that specific comment was claiming atheism is just as unfounded as religion, while being religious?
In other words, "both of you suck" versus "you suck just as much as I do". The former is, well, a just a value judgement, whereas the latter is what I expect someone to jump to when they've got nothing else worth saying.
You do you, but I'm leaving, my time to pointlessly quibble here is limited since I have no expectation of an eternal afterlife, or at least one not of our own making, and it's not here yet.
I see. You seem to have just imagined me saying something about my personal beliefs. Moreover, you have some weird post-modernist idea that your perception of my beliefs/identity has some bearing on the validity of the form of my argument. Also, you struggle with "greater than or equal to".
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"Christianity is wrong and irrational" is not a moddable offense. Neither is "No it isn't." What is this "detente" that you claim is being broken and which we are not enforcing? (ETA: Okay, this one. Yes, that still pertains. You can criticize beliefs, but do it without sneering or personalizing it or trying to evangelize/recruit for a cause.) People are allowed to argue for/against religion and for/against atheism, no matter how tiresome and repetitive such arguments become (but in fairness, so is most well-trodden ground here).
@Goodguy hasn't been "protected" from anything. He can say your beliefs are irrational, and you can say his beliefs are irrational. What we would prefer is that people offer serious arguments rather than "Uh huh!" "Nuh uh!" back and forth. And what we would definitely prefer is that you refrain from trying to personalize it in the antagonistic manner you're doing here.
Any stick'll do.
What point do you think you are making? I repeat: you are allowed to say Christianity is wrong and irrational. You are allowed to say atheism is wrong and irrational. This is consistent with everything I have said in the past.
Mod hat is as mod hat does. Praise be to mod hat!
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Metaphysics is not physics, hence it's not amenable to exploration by such means. But religions are not exclusively metaphysics, almost all of them, and certainly Christianity, claim tangible effects in the real world that is tantamount to a divergence from mere mechanistic evolution of physical processes. They certainly have apologetics by the bucketload for why such interventions are beyond the ability of scientific empirism to evaluate in terms of plausibility.
A religion stripped of physical implications or supernatural influences on reality is simply a philosophy, and those can only be adopted or denied, not proved or disproved.
Phenomenal, pun intended. Where in this nomenclature does atheism fall?
The null hypothesis. To recycle a very appropriate quip, atheism is no more a religion than a TV's screen being off is a television channel.
It is inherently an aspect of any metaphysical system that doesn't have explicitly claim the existence of supernatural elements, at the very least those that imply any interference, past, present or future, with the evolution of the world.
So, you're saying that it's a metaphysical system? Or that it's a component of a metaphysical system? Something like that?
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Okay, I’ll bite the bullet here. There’s plenty of evidence to support that Jesus Christ is the son of God and that he rose from the dead. For the benefit of others here who might read this…
Jesus Christ was (to my knowledge) the only founder of a major world religion who claimed to be the son of God. He was put to death not because he performed miracles but because he made this claim. Why would someone make such an outrageous lie if it meant their death? Jesus Christ was not merely a good moral teacher, he claimed to be the son of God so those who admire his virtuosity (but not his divinity) will have to answer to why they admire a liar.
Jesus Christ fulfilled many prophesies written by people hundreds of years before he lived. Many of these prophesies, as well as the account of Jesus’ acts, are verifiable by eyewitness accounts (reproduced in thousands of manuscript segments carefully copied and preserved over thousands of years). There is more scripture authenticated and verified from the New Testament than texts of many Ancient Greek philosophers whose authenticity is never questioned as rigorously. The letters of the New Testament have been subjected to lexical analysis and found to be internally consistent by author and authentic. There are no contradictions in the Bible, unlike the contradictions inherent in other belief systems such as transgenderism.
Jesus Christ rose from the dead—he was observed by over 500 people over a 40 day period after his resurrection. His empty tomb was first discovered by women—not the most credible source in ancient times if you wanted to fabricate a story. We know that he died because the Roman soldiers punctured his side and drew blood after the crucifixion, a mortal wound that the soldiers had believed was conclusive.
I could go into more detail, but belief in Jesus Christ as the son of God, who died and rose again has a lot of rational merit. There is ample evidence to support this belief, but it isn’t proof so ultimately you must choose whether to believe it or not.
I do love an opportunity to relive my atheist debater glory days.
Jesus was put to death as an insurrectionist against Rome. This is why the sign over his head said "King of the Jews" and not "son of God."
According to the books written by his followers, yes. In a lot of places you can see how the Gospel authors are working overtime to fit prophecy to reality, like Matthew's story of Jesus entering Jerusalem on both a colt and a donkey, to fit the prophecy of Zechariah. Or the two very different nativity stories in Matthew and Luke. And a lot of the supposed prophecies fulfilled by Jesus aren't even prophecies, like Psalm 22.
Even by Christian tradition, neither Luke nor Mark was an eyewitness to the ministry, death, or resurrection of Jesus. Matthew was very clearly not written by the Apostle Matthew, since it plagiarizes about 90% of its content from the Gospel of Mark (a non-eyewitness), including and most inexplicably, the story of Matthew's own call to be Jesus' disciple.
Paul refers, in an offhanded comment in 1 Corinthians, to an episode which is elaborated upon nowhere else in Paul's writings, nor elsewhere in the early Christian canon, in which the risen Christ was supposedly seen by 500 people at once. No details are presented, nor does any account of this appearance exist. It's no more convincing than that video from like 2010 where a crowd in Alabama believed they'd seen a leprechaun. Actually less so, because there's video evidence of the leprechaun crowd. The resurrection narratives in the gospels contradict with other on a number of points which makes their historicity doubtful at best.
IMO the empty tomb story is probably a later fiction. "Translation fables" in which bodies went missing from tombs were extremely common in the Mediterranean literature of the time. It was a literary shorthand to indicate that a righteous person had been assumed to heaven and been deified. It would be special pleading to assert these other contemporary stories are false but the story in the gospels is true.
I feel like I'm back in 2012 just typing out the words, "you can't use the Bible to prove the Bible," but...it's true. Yes, this is what happened according to a story in the gospel of John, and the reliability of the gospels is the issue in question.
For a lot of these you are misrepresenting @Cirrus's points in order to rebut a weaker and less evidence-based claim than the one he actually made.
Notice you said "as" rather than focusing on the actual "why", because the "why" (which was the claim in question) is a much softer and more difficult point to rebut. There were many insurrectionists; few were put to death. Jesus was betrayed by the Jewish leaders because he claimed to be the son of God, and this is why he was executed. The legal pretext is a separate matter.
I wouldn't say this is "very clear" at all--it seems to have been written decades after the actual events, with an eye to maintaining consistency. Also, "a few people were not eyewitnesses" is not exactly a very strong counterargument for "there were eyewitness accounts."
I find it funny that you focused on this rather than "There are no contradictions in the Bible" which is so much easier to counter.
I agree here, the only reason to trust a one-off mention like this is if you have strong prior reason to trust the author's original account, and trust that nothing has been warped/miscopied/mistranslated/deliberately altered from the original account.
That’s not true. The Romans crucified rebels all the time. They crucified two right next to Jesus. Jesus would not have been crucified if the Romans didn’t want him dead, because the Romans were the power in Judea. The Sanhedrin were handpicked puppets.
Huge swathes of Matthew are copied word for word from Mark.
If the gospel authors weren’t eyewitnesses, then we have no eyewitness accounts.
I didn’t address this precisely because I didn’t think it was with addressing. Yes there are a lot of contradictions in the Bible, but arguing about them is usually fruitless.
What I said was that there were many insurrectionists and few were crucified; this is compatible with the claim that they were crucified all the time. The point is that only a small proportion were crucified.
The two crucified next to Jesus were thieves according to the Bible; do you have some other source of information on that?
The Romans can obviously want him dead for many reasons, one of which being that their handpicked puppets were whining about him. It's not like those puppets are literal puppets--they were still Jews, chosen for (among other things) their ability to lead other Jews.
I thought it was clear I was aware of this based on my response. You are vastly overstating scholarly consensus on this. Many think Matthew was written before Mark and Mark copied Matthew; others think they both copied some other Gospel. Given how long ago this happened, our strongest evidence either way is still pretty weak. Even if Matthew did copy Mark though, as I mentioned, it's really not too strange to just imagine Matthew, the apostle, copying Mark's account to maintain consistency about events he may not now remember in quite as much detail decades after the fact.
John appears to be an eyewitness account, Mark and Luke are based on eyewitness accounts, and Matthew appears to be an eyewitness account.
Metatron did a video about the arrest of Christ, looking at the 'original' Greek text of the bible. Very interesting look on the matter, and going by the various gospels, it's heavily implied if not out-right stated that Jesus was crucified as an insurrectionist/rebel, alongside the other two.
This I would disagree on. My interpretation of the trial of Jesus by Pontius Pilate is very much a case where Pilate is having to deal with politically charged Pharisees hell-bent on seeing Jesus killed due to his teachings. Going by the Gospel, Jesus literally argued his case with Pilate so well that Pilate was begging the Pharisees to allow Pilate to declare Jesus guilty, so much so that he offered them up the choice between Jesus and a man accused of murder.
And we know who they picked.
Right I was already aware of this, that's the legal pretext I was talking about. If you're talking about WHY he was executed, I think it makes the most sense to talk about the proximate cause, i.e. the reason he was executed when others in the same reference class were not. Many others who were about equally anti-Roman were not executed. He was executed, not for insurrectionist beliefs, but for claiming to be the Son of God, which earned him the enmity of the Jewish leaders, who created the legal pretext of insurrection in order to execute him.
Interesting that the other two were also possibly executed as insurrectionists. Honestly not the sort of thing that is very significant to me, so I won't be looking into it too much, but I wish that kind of info was easier to find.
I think I'm missing something here; this sounds like you're agreeing with me. The Pharisees can exert some pressure on the Romans to execute specific people.
Did you miss a word? Pilate wanted to declare Jesus innocent.
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First century Palestine is not especially well-recorded, but even so a number of rebel leaders are known (Judas the Galilean and his sons, Simon son of Giora, Theudas, “The Egyptian,”). All of them were killed by the Romans, though they weren’t all crucified.
I don’t read Koine Greek but my understanding is that the word usually translated as “thief” is more like “bandit,” and it has a political connotation. Crucifixion was not normally a punishment meted out for run of the mill robbery or even murder, but generally for sedition or treason. Barabbas, who is part of the same ‘batch’ of prisoners slated for crucifixion before his pardon, is explicitly identified as being one of a group of rebels arrested for having participated in “the uprising”
If Jesus’ Jewish enemies had wanted him dead for breaking some Jewish law, they could have disposed of him on their own terms, whether through stoning or just whipping up a lynch mob. There would have been no need to get the Romans involved. The fact that he was crucified at all suggests the primary instigators of his execution were the Romans, regardless of whether or not a lot of Jews also wanted him dead (I’m sure they did) and that the main reason for his death was that he was perceived as having committed some anti-Roman act. Claiming to be the son of some obscure regional deity, or even the deity himself, was not, but claiming to be a king would have been.
Markan priority is about as established as anything in the field. I can’t call to mind any currently active scholar, even in the most conservative institutions, who hold that Mark is dependent on Matthew. There may be two or three. I do know there are a lot of Bible-believing, Nicene affirming, “Jesus-is-the-only-way,” even inerrantist, conservative scholars who still won’t defend Matthean priority, which IMO says something in itself.
In almost every instance of a deliberate difference between Mark and Matthew, the change is one that would make a lot of sense for Matthew to add to Mark, but none the other way around. For example, it makes a lot of sense that Matthew would add birth and resurrection narratives to Mark, which lacks them, but it’s hard to see why Mark world cut them out of Matthew.
It doesn’t make any sense that Matthew, an eyewitness, would copy most of his gospel from a second-hand source (including, again, the story of Matthew’s call, surely the most important moment of his life). Cross-checking a thing or two, sure. Copying most of it wholesale? Highly unlikely.
The internal anonymity of the gospel of Matthew is also a problem. Ancient authors rarely failed to cite firsthand knowledge of the events at hand if they had it (why would you?), but nowhere in the gospel does the author even claim eyewitness status.
John is the only gospel for which I think one could, in principle make an argument for eyewitness testimony.
I doubt it, primarily for the reason that neither bothers to cite the eyewitnesses they consulted by name, which there would be little reason not to do. There are also significant and (in my view) irreconcilable differences in the narratives, particularly in the resurrection narratives, the most important part of the story, which precludes them from being accurate and mostly reliable accounts of historical events.
I doubt it, for the reasons above.
We know Jesus was executed for insurrection due to the Bible, which is also what tells us that this was just a legal pretext. Guessing at what you think the most likely alternate hypothesis is--it's common knowledge that Jesus was executed for insurrection, but the authors of the Bible constructed an alternate story where that was just a legal pretext? I find this highly unlikely--the Bible basically says nothing at all about independence from the Romans. I think anyone likely to know Jesus was executed for insurrection, and need an explanation for that, would also have some inkling that he actually was a rebel if that was what he was.
Also, all of those people actually ran rebellions, complete with military action. I really don't think they're in the same reference class as Jesus, barring totally baseless conjecture.
The Bible says they were worried about the response from the people. They did have to maintain power after all, which means maintaining popular support.
It also does mention a few lynch mobs which Jesus manages to escape from, such as in Luke 4:28-30. Since this actually did happen, by your logic, Jesus' Jewish enemies did want him dead.
They couldn't stone him--capital punishment was restricted to the Romans.
This is early Christianity, citing someone by name would mean threatening their life. I don't think irreconcilable differences are incompatible with eyewitness accounts--these were written possibly decades after the fact and people may simply misremember the details. Eyewitness accounts are not infallible of course, especially back when mass hysteria was more of a thing.
I strongly disagree that irreconcilable differences between the accounts "[preclude] them from being accurate and mostly reliable accounts of historical events." At worst this means they cannot both be accurate accounts.
As far as the rest, what you say sounds perfectly logical. I can't trust it though, because when you talk about stuff I know anything about it seems obviously wrong to me. Clearly I have a lot to learn though.
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You might consider that you don't have a very solid grasp on what Christianity is, if that's your definition.
This is also my understanding of Christianity. What do you understand it to be?
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What is your definition? The one I am using is part of the Nicene Creed.
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Old = worked for 2k years as civilization exploded.
Worked is not merely debatable, it is debated even among Christians to this day. It isn't very hard at all to point at times when it did not in fact work, and caused much grief to both its adherents and victims.
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Astrology worked at least two millenia more, and all modern problems began when arrogant modern "science" rejected ancient wisdom of the stars. Good that modern people are RETVRNING to tradition.
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Ancient Greece and Rome did fine without Christianity and were recognizably Western and civilized to modern observers, compared with Early Modern Europe. Trade extremely violent gladiatorial games for extremely violent religious wars, slavery for serfdom...
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As @Cirrus explains below, there is plenty of evidence. Thousands and thousands of eyewitness accounts, prophecy, et cetera.
Not to mention the very cultural/political connotations, history and tradition are themselves evidence compared to transgenderism. Just evidence that points to a conclusion you really don't like or can believe is true.
I'm not trying to be antagonistic here, but your strong claims against Christianity show a clear bias and lack of clear eyed, Bayesian priors. I think you need to reassess your own 'objectivity' before you start claiming a high horse.
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That's an interesting comparison. While the historicity of Jesus is debated downthread, the Gospel accounts IMO have a very valid purpose: they can teach the reader how to be a
charismatic psychopath who motivates his followers!devout leader of a church: (1) Gather some small number of people who worship the predecessor religion, which contains some prophesies. (2) Find an interpretation of the predecessor religion or religious text in which the prophesies refer to things that happened to you and your group. (3) Act and teach as Jesus did in the Gospels, with a focus on the corruption of and persecution by The World (4) Die according to your prophesies and (5) be rememebered forever!Experimentally, we have evidence this works for many groups. Most of them don't make it to (5) because they don't make new prophesies of their own, but some do.
So the natural place to go here from gender ideology is to ask whether gender ideology provides a sufficient set of social tools to build a movement, or whether the ideology sources those externally.
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I don't think this is a fair comparison.
One is an empirical claim about the actual literal nature of reality, the other is a normative semantic claim about how we should draw category boundaries on a word (and cultural/legal/etc category boundaries as a society).
Even if they were both equally silly, one is a mistake about the actual physical nature of reality, the other is just a request to do language and culture differently.
The latter can be dumb but it can't be wrong in the same way.
I agree to some extent with this. Yes, they are two different kinds of claims. But I find them to both be irrational, just in different ways. When I say that transgender activist claims are unbacked by evidence, what I mean by this is that I think a neutral and unbiased observer (like an alien visiting earth, for example) when looking at a trans woman, even a post-transition one, would find more physiological similarity with the the male side of the gender spectrum than the female side. Perhaps also when looking at the behavioral similarity, although I am not sure about that one.
My understanding of the typical trans activist position is that to them, it is not that trans women are women by a new definition of "women", it is that they are actually women by the old definition. I could be wrong about this, though.
Re: aliens, I guess it would depend on whether they're dissecting people and judging internal organ structures, or looking at them as they interact with society and judging based on that.
An alien that only looked at physical traits and no social interactions would think that money is just meaningless scraps of fabric and that it must not be very important to human society. Such an alien doesn't actually have much insight to offer on human society and culture and isn't really a useful arbiter of anything in a thought experiment on those things.
And yeah I think an alien looking at social interactions would classify most post-transition trans people as their chosen gender, there's a lot more signifiers in agreement with that conclusion than against it.
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Trans people make an impossible empirical claim as well. The claim that undergirds their requests are that they are actually able to tell that they are the opposite sex. That is to say they are claiming to be able to distinguish between the experience of "being a male who correctly thinks they have the internal experience of a female" and "being a male who mistakenly thinks they have the internal experience of being female". This is epistemically impossible as we each only have one experience and cannot triangulate reality.
Why do you think that there's such a thing as a unitary 'internal experience of a female', or that trans women think they have it?
Obviously every human has a different experience, I'm not really sure what your claim would mean.
Anyway, it sounds to me like you are adding circumlocutions to the whole thing. The claim is just 'trans women are women, trans men are men.' I'm not familiar with the specific extended claim you're making here being a common one, aside from in the again semantic sense of 'my experiences are a woman's experiences because I'm a woman'.
There being such as thing as being a woman separate from biology is foundational to trans people being a coherent concept. If there is no such "woman" qualia how can you actually explain dysphoria? A miss match implies a correct match which implies some category.
'Money' is a thing separate from the pieces of green paper and yet it's not a unique qualia.
This is what a 'social construct' is. Social constructs are very real and important, they basically make up the majority of our thoughts about and interactions with society, culture, language, and each other.
There's a social construct of 'woman', it is applied to some people and not others, trans women would like it applied to them. They experience dysphoria when their own self-image or self-understanding is not reflected either in their own form and appearance or in how society treats and interacts with them.
Unique qualia are not needed for any of this. The experience can be and is built from a complex structure of normal qualia, just like most experiences.
We didn't socially construct the female sex. Females do not have higher estrogen, wombs, larger breasts ect because society decided they should. The gender "woman" is built up around the reality of a sexually dimorphic species which must deal with the reality that half of the population has meaningfully different abilities and reproductive role. The qualia of womanness is the internal female experience.
There is a claim that tran women have this qualia and not the compliment male internal experience. The mismatch in these qualia is what causes dysphoria.
Maybe you have some other justification for the existence of trans people but it is tiresome to have the same behavior explained by dozens of different just so stories that all seem to fall apart immediately upon examination.
Yup, and many many people who do not meet some or many of those criteria would be called women by you.
And by me.
I think maybe you are just using the words 'qualia' and 'experience' interchangeably, which they very much are not.
But if you just mean 'experience', sure, the vast and imprecise and fuzzy-bordered and non-exclusionary category of 'woman' includes some things about thoughts and experiences. No two women will have the exact same woman-related thoughts and experiences, and woman who don't have central ones aren't excluded from being women, and etc etc. But whatever, sure, lets stipulate something like that vaguely exists.
You seem to be saying that we can't know what experiences other people have (and therefore can't meaningfully claim to have similar experiences to another person) because we're not psychic.
But we are psychic.
I'm taking thoughts in my head, and using an external signal to put those thoughts into your head. Right now.
Our modern forms of telepathy do not have infinite bandwidth or fidelity, sure. But we use them to share information about what we are thinking and feeling and experiencing all the goddamn time, that's like a huge part of what art and culture and just talking to people is. And in other categories we do not question or reject claims like 'yeah I've felt that way before' or 'I agree with you' or 'oh yeah I recognize that feeling' or etc.
These are normal kinds of conclusions to draw about similarities in experience between people based on them just describing their experiences, and rejecting that method only here is an isolated demand for rigor.
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Hmm? I disagree that self-assessment is the be-all and end-all in gender, you have to pass as the opposite sex, but your analogy doesn't make sense to me.
Consider someone with phantom limb syndrome, say it's present since birth despite them lacking an arm (I know that's not how it works, bear with me). Are they allowed to claim that they are correct in having the sensation of a missing limb? They never had one in the first place. Or more prosaically, someone left-handed and raised right-handed who always felt that something was off, until they learned about dexterity or learned that in many places, it's a benign quirk that is easily accommodated instead of squashed.
I have also heard accounts of children who were raised as the opposite of their phenotypical/genetic sex, be it by an insane mother who wanted a daughter and made one out of her son, or a child with ambiguous genitalia or who had their penis botched around birth and were reshuffled off as female. Quite a few of such cases had the kids rebel against the perceived gender roles they were made to follow, even if that's how they'd been raised.
That's not to say that trans people are all like that, I think autogynephilia and a delusional memetic contagion account for most of it, so I'm arguing with the given reason for your conclusion even if I agree with the conclusion itself, mostly.
If I reduced transness to desire to undertake hormone therapy with no justification needed or given with no further implications what percentage of the trans activist community(or trans community writ large) do you think would sign onto it? What percent do you think would call me a transphobe?
That's entirely orthogonal to my point, I'm saying that the standard you're using invalidates far more than just claims of gender dysphoria. I don't deny that what you describe wouldn't be palatable to most trans activists.
One can attempt use of both the left and right hand. One has other limbs to compare the feeling of missing a limb to, or if a quadraplegic at least a plausible biological explanation for the sensation. The Reimer story you reference is packed with alternative explanations besides internally felt 'gender' being real.
I was trying to avoid getting bogged down in the weeds of examples because I think your understanding of this, while I also think is wrong, is not representative of the trans movement at all. It's the rickety motte inhabited by you and two other people surrounded by a kerosene soaked Bailey filled with people who make claims like "we can tell a 2 year old is trans if they don't like wearing a certain type of dress."
Attempting to use one's right hand isn't the same as being right-handed! A person who is left handed can very well claim that they're so, without anyone asking how they're quite so confident in that fact, since they've never experienced the internal qualia of being right handed so they can claim that they somehow know that's not what they're feeling in the first place.
It's not news to me that this isn't the stance or primary concern of trans ideologues, I oppose them myself after all, it's my specific objection to your use of the fundamental inability for us to inhabit many counterfactual mental states as the primary criterion for denying the existence of innate senses of gender, regardless of whether that's a real thing. It has far too much collateral damage at the very least, as I've attempted to show.
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... if you actually intended to allow that and grant legal recognition and full rights and no persecution or mockery? I think most would be fine about it.
The reason for all the more complicated narratives is to try to come up with something that will convince conservatives to give them rights and leave them alone. The gay rights movement went through the same thing with Ellen and 'born that way' and etc., it's all politics.
Legal recognition of what? Which rights are people missing? To go with the gay rights metaphor I was in favor of taking the state out of marriage and building out civil unions to be the state equivalent with no reference to gender. I'm deeply suspicious that what you're implying is you want to use the state to enforce some views you have on gender and sexuality and not just as a meditating body for letting people live peacefully with those who disagree with them.
I'm not talking the modern real world, I'm responding to the hypothetical you're proposing.
Yes, trans people do have most relevant rights today in real-world USA, the world in which they used the tactics I'm outlining (and which I think you're objecting to? Kind of hard to parse) to get them.
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To use an analogy: Richard Hanania has written about how civil rights law is the origins of what is called "wokeness." I've seen others talk about how American colleges and universities only started valuing "diversity" after the Supreme Court struck down one form of affirmative action, while signposting other forms of affirmative action that would be acceptable.
All of that to say, is it possible that the "empirical claim" that trans people make are more motivated by "what actually works" legally and culturally in our society? That they're falsifying their preferences, in an attempt to justify the way they want to live their lives to the gatekeepers and the masses?
Obviously, their efforts don't work for you and other trans skeptical posters on this forum, but imagine you found yourself in the following life situation:
You are a man, and you want to be a woman. It doesn't matter if that desire is caused by an intersex brain, or a paraphilia or is a whimsy you picked up as a result of your life experiences. You have this desire, and it is strong enough to make you want to do something about it. Maybe it has become what Scott Alexander calls a trapped prior - a nearly unchangable belief that doesn't respond to new evidence, like a phobia or an OCD obsession. You know that you can't become exactly like a typical woman, but you believe that with hormones, surgery and vocal training you can get close enough for your own purposes, at least physically. Heck, maybe you'll even get lucky and pass so well that for the vast majority of the people you interact with, you will be indistinguishable from a typical woman and you'll be able to live your life.
Either way, you need to convince society that they should allow you to get the hormones and surgeries, and that they should treat you in all ways like a woman, despite whatever doubts members of society might otherwise have about your claim.
I put forward that the "typical trans narrative" is like water filling the shape of the society it is arising from. All of the philosophical and metaphysical arguments are a smoke screen. They don't exist to get cis people closer to the truth of understanding what it is like to be trans - they exist to get enough important gate keepers in society to let the trans person live the life they want to live. Maybe parts of the "typical trans narrative" are close enough to being true for many trans people. Maybe they were gender non-conforming as a kid, or didn't fit in with other kids of their natal sex, or they couldn't cut it as an adult of their natal sex, but it is also the end-point of a long process of memetic evolution, where trans people collectively discovered the set of secret words and shibboleths they had to say to get what they wanted.
I think the modal trans person wants to look like, live as and be treated socially and legally as a member of the opposite sex. Whether that is a result of nature or nurture, or whether we realistically have any way of talking a person out of this once it has become a trapped prior for them, all other aspects of the "typical trans narrative" grow out of this simple truth. Because they want to live as and be treated as the opposite sex in all ways, it behooves them in the current cultural environment to make certain impossible-to-verify empirical claims about their internal experiences, about "feeling like a woman" or "knowing they were a woman."
That's how they get doctors and lawmakers on board with their desires, and after that it is a matter of keeping their heads down (if they pass), or cultivating cultural norms that minimize the friction of the way they're living their lives (if they don't pass.)
Long story short, while I'm sure many trans people actually do believe empirically unverifiable things about themselves, I think that in most cases those things matter much less than the simple pragmatism of saying whatever reduces the friction between them and the things they want out of life.
Sure, I think and have long thought this is the truth. But the commons they burn with the lies they live doom children. They are trapping the priors of others.
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In theory yes, in practice no. Your parents dragging you as child to church for dunking in cold water or to gender clinic for gender affirming treatment is one big difference.
Because Christianity is no big issue here, because only arguments for Christianity usually presented here are: "it is ancient" "it is our tradition" "churches are beautiful" "church music is inspiring" "if you are lonely, you will find friends in church" "you must believe in something, why not Jesus" etc...
If poster, or group of posters tried to preach, evangelize and missionize here in noughties hardcore style, if they came and argued for literal existence of God, literal truth of the Bible and literal bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, they would not be given any "pass", they would face strong opposition and generated lots of interesting discussions full of heat and light. Anyone who does not remember the great Atheist-Christian war of the noughties, missed internet at its best.
There were those who made themselves eunuchs for Christ. Not really that popular any more, for some reason.
Okay, the context for that quote is Jesus saying "Divorce is a no-no"; Matthew 19:
Now, who or what were the "eunuchs who have made themselves so for the sake of the kingdom"? Because this is during the ministry of Christ when He is still alive, and before Christianity became differentiated from Judaism. So does He mean literal 'guys who chopped off their balls' or 'guys who are living celibate lives without marriage or sex so they won't be distracted from the mission'?
I don't think I've ever seen exegesis of this passage, and I should go look it up. Off the top of my head, the only case of an early Christian doing literal castration was Origen, and he's considered A Bit Odd.
Though seemingly there were pro- and anti- sides on this!
Justin Martyr, First Apology, AD 155-157:
But by the fourth century, there was a problem; seemingly an ascetical cult which practiced castration had grown up and become influential:
My understanding is that he meant the former, since the language they were speaking definitely distinguished between the two. Indeed, in context it makes no sense. Why would he say 'eunuchs made by men' (clearly meaning castrated men) only to immediately say 'eunuchs by choice', only this time using the word metaphorically and not literally?
Well, I find the distinction interesting because if you're volunteering to have your balls chopped off, you are still being made a eunuch by men. Now, there is indeed the difference between "castrated as a child/taken as a prisoner or slave and castrated", and "volunteered to be castrated", I recognise that, but there is also some possibility of "voluntarily abstaining from sex, by choice, as if one is a eunuch".
The entire discussion is in the context of marriage, and how it's hard to abstain from sex, which is why those who do so by choice do it "for the sake of the kingdom".
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Posters do come and argue for literal existence of God.
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It might surprise you that (as far as I know, at least) there are several regular users who do believe this, largely or entirely, and discuss it regularly. They are generally pretty welcome.
Have any of us ever argued for the literal truth of the first 11 chapters of Genesis? I believe I have made posts about the theory of mind of literalist YEC's, and that we have a few posters who will point out that it doesn't hurt anyone in practice to have a large percentage of the population believe it, and that that is more or less the closest this forum has seen.
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It has much more of a track record of encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions though.
I mean yeah old things have more track record than new things?
That said, trans ideology has gotten me a lot of good youtube content and podcasts in only about 15 years, at that age Christianity hadn't produced much more than a single carpenter in Galilee.
I'd say trans ideology has a lead in the Time Trial rules. Of course it has a long way to go.
(and, more seriously, lots of non-Christian places have had adaptive behaviors and institutions, so attributing those things to Christianity just because they happened in Christian nations is a nontrivial claim)
It’s actually extremely plausible that Christianity is the main reason western Europe and not other high-IQ regions took off. Christian ‘lifestyle rules’- monogamous, free choice exogamy in particular, but also monasticism- contribute meaningfully to modernizing behavior and you will note that East Asian societies attempting to modernize by force imposed monogamous exogamy.
How much of that came from Christianity itself and how much came from the Roman Imperial substrate it grew in? Rome is uniquely the source of a lot of Western legal traditions, democracy itself is Greek and republics are Roman. I don’t know but I doubt a place as cosmopolitan as the Roman Empire was inbred. Even after Christianity came to dominate Greek and Roman Philosophy were taught in schools. I think Christian apologists tend to overestimate the influence Christian ideas had on making society what it eventually became mostly by portraying the Romans as idiotic barbarians who were completely backwards.
Having read a lot of the philosophy they produced, the Romans were a sophisticated civilization that believed in virtue and reason and that ideally laws would serve the public good. The Stoics are halfway to being Buddhists and there was a strong sense of duty and helping your fellow man. They were nearly modern in their thinking, and very pragmatic.
The one thing Christianity brought that didn’t exist before was Missionaries. They’re the first religion that had as a major tenet to convert the world and that if you weren’t specifically a Christian (and an orthodox one at that) you were damned to eternal hellfire. The Judaism that Christianity grew from wasn’t missionary, and still isn’t. They believe that their religion is for them and that others are not expected to become Jews. Buddhism sees itself as one choice among many. Only Christianity and Islam really push the idea that if you don’t become part of the religion, you’re damned to hellfire. This gives a lot of push to recruit, and conversion of the Indians was a driver to get people to the new world. And since the west developed the mindset of “our way is correct, and everyone should adopt it” you can create more westerners by conversion to our ideas.
Sure, lots of scholasticism is based in greco-roman intellectualism. That part's true. But universities specifically grew out of church-run schools of the sort that Greece and Rome didn't have. Stoicism in particular had a few proto-enlightenment ideas but was actually suppressed by Christianity; Christian metaphysics and philosophy is mostly Aristotelian.
Now as far as marriage customs, Roman marriages(monogamous, limitations on domestic violence, exogamous) do look recognizably more Christian than other ancient marriage laws- including Ancient Greek marriages- especially in manu marriages. But there's some striking differences; the Roman concept of marriage takes for granted that divorce for a better deal was a common occurrence used by both parties, remarriage was mandatory, the bride didn't have to consent and was often betrothed years ahead of the actual marriage for physical reasons, and a married couple was part of and under the legal control of the groom's father's household rather than being legally independent. Now in some ways Christian marriages might have looked notably morally strict/reactionary with a few eccentricities to educated Romans- the harsh restriction on divorce and short betrothals, for example- a bit like how Mormons are seen today, but classical Rome was simply not a society which practiced those things even as a relic, any more than calling cards are part of courtship today.
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Did Christianity have a better record after ~40 years of existence?
I wonder what a dozen intelligent AGPs would have been able to make out of trans ideology if bound by a common Church and actual vigorous oppression. Even stuff like this is fairly compelling, in a demonic sense. And I probably know a dozen online characters who could do better…
Well they’d probably just do what smart AGP who want to push the cause among skeptical people already do (as you’ve noted) which is to claim it explicitly as transhumanism rather than a sexual fetish. And from transhumanism, presumably, one can fashion some kind of quality millenarian religious ideology.
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In 70 AD Christianity was certainly led by people trying to encourage adaptive behavior, that's basically the plot of the Pauline letters.
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Pretty sure even at the beginning it was encouraging people to get married, and start families, and avoid various forms of hedonism, so yes?
I thought it was very explicitly 'leave your families and follow me' at that point?
After ~40 years of existence?
I think that was supposed to be in his mid 30s, so, pretty close? A biblical scholar might have more info.
I wasn't aware he proselytized right out of the cradle.
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Even contemporary pagans remarked on the exemplary sexual ethics of the early Christians.
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That's highly dependent on how people interpreted it. A fair few people castrated themselves, and more went into the desert to pursue lives of extreme asceticism. Remember that early Christians were like, a millenarian cult that believed that Jesus would be back in a few decades... Then a few centuries...
If you just take the Pauline letters as the orthodoxy in the early Church, which it was and still is, there's virtually nothing disagreeable (modern progressivism notwithstanding)
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The weird apocalyptic stuff coexisted with more prosocial messages (Paul allows for marriage for those who can't be celibate, attacks the use of prostitutes).
There is a legitimate question of when they fully got it out of their systems. 40 years is...tight. The Gospels fit around that time and they have prosocial messages and hints of anti-family stuff.
By the standards of the age, it's not really prosocial at all, which is why the Romans hated it so much and tried to suppress it. I think it ended up being more prosocial and Christian Europe was in some ways morally better than the Roman Empire, but someone walking around in 100AD probably would have looked at these weirdos celebrating a guy that got horribly tortured to death, living lives of asceticism in the desert, rejecting all of the dozens of sects and cults that existed mostly harmoniously in the Roman Empire, rejecting the entirely proper worship of military power and violence in favour of humility and peace, and they probably would have reached a fairly similar conclusion to a modern conservative looking at trans people - 'these people are freaks and a threat to our society'. Tell me, when the time comes for war against the Parthians, who's going to get the job done? A bunch of flaccid cheek-turning monks, or our red-blooded Jupiter-worshippers? If we don't make our ritual sacrifices, who's going to guarantee us victory in war and calm seas in travel? If this God of Jesus is so powerful, why didn't he protect him? I'll put my faith in whoever the Senate declared a God last week, thanks.
The Senate deified Julius Caesar. Rome's track record of having gods powerful enough to protect themselves from their eventual killers (who would then go on to declare them gods) isn't exactly stellar.
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Honestly, does this matter? If it takes 1000 years for a belief system to mature enough to perform well, then that's even more reason to stick to established systems.
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If Christianity is not true then I don't care about what kind of record it has at encouraging adaptive behavior and institutions. I don't want to build society on a bedrock of delusions.
That is a value judgment (arguably a very Christian one) you're entitled to make. It's not just a fact.
I'd prefer a non-deluded, rational secular humanism where we dispense with all superstitions and life is improved in every way by it, as was promised to me by Dawkins and Harris (PBUT) at a formative point in my teens.
But I'm no longer certain that truth and value are the same (especially when it comes to an individual life). And I'm not sure that option is available. What I see in that clip are dueling "delusions", except one has a longer track record of encouraging kids and pro-social behavior.
Humanity is not stuck in the ridiculous position of having to choose between the rock of trans-ideology and the hard place of Christianity. Choosing these two specific species of insanity is eliding the fact there are plenty of less insane alternatives.
Your use of that metaphor is telling, we need hard objects to cling to, we need something to serve as an epistemological bedrock. Something is going to be unquestionable in whatever worldview we eventually settle on, and so far us/the secularists haven’t done a good job building something on top of the bedrock of rational observation.
Who's "we", white man? Jokes aside, I am personally entirely content with having my subjective goals and desires be the bedrock on which I build my existence. I don't aspire for more because it's not possible to have an "objective" morality or foundation in the first place.
What policy preferences or cultural peccadilos a society has doesn't particularly matter to me, as long as the central tenets don't violate our best understanding of the laws of physics, as Christianity does, or biology, as Wokism is guilty of.
The problems crop up when someone else wants their subjective goals and desires to be fulfilled, and you are standing in their way. How does society's institutions satisfy you both? If they can't, who wins? That's where we get the Progressive Stack. On what do we base 'this is how we run things so that as a whole we can muddle along'? Great, we've settled the law of gravitational attraction, but how does that apply to deciding if Sparklina-formerly-Bob can now take your stuff because xe is the mostest oppressed and you owe xer, cis scum?
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It's true that there are lots of society-wide ideologies to choose from with staying power, but none of them are liberal rationalism.
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No, it's going to be some flavor of insanity because it's purity spirals all the way down. The so-called less insane alternatives are just stepping stones between there and here.
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Name a less insane society organizing religion then.
We know what the cult of reason begets, we tried that one pretty thoroughly since 1789. Positivism turned out a lot more insane than Abrahamism.
You're not going to get out of the need for a metaphysics. Better men than you have tried and they all failed. Religion is, for better or worse, not optional. The very rise of the Woke is proof of it.
I deny the need for religion in the first place. Or if there's a "need" for it in the psyche of the average human, poor thing, it needs to be excised, not fed.
I obviously disagree, even if Wokism has plenty of traits of religion.
I simply can't think of any society throughout the history of man that has lacked a religion, in the sense of a shared metaphysics.
It seems to me you're arguing for something that's categorically impossible, so please explain.
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If you’re looking for alternatives, I’d point to Buddhism, Confucianism, and possibly Zarathustrianism. They all have decent track records of producing high civilizations.
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Okay, I was inclined to be snarky, but if this is your basic problem with it, then I have to respect that. I too much prefer "is it true or not?" than "is it prosocial or not, even if it's a heap of bullshit?"
An honest atheist is a more worthy opponent than all the patronising "of course it's dumb as a description of reality but if you look as it as early sociology..." rationalisations.
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Neither do I, yet I note that much that replaced Christianity as social bedrock has been quite explicitly delusional. Secular Materialism talked a good game, and then when people actually committed to it, they went utterly mad. Meanwhile, us Christians continue to chug along, succeeding by the Materialists' standards as well as our own.
Some variants of secular materialism went utterly mad. Stalinism, for example, or the Khmer Rouge. But Western society as a whole is not mad, at least not by the standards of the typical society throughout history, and it is chugging along just fine for the most part.
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I'm always baffled when this accusation comes up. We understand that there are Christians among us and we don't poke that sore spot unprovoked. But it's absolutely not the case that we let reasoning from religious conviction go without critique. There are trans people here, when they argue topics that aren't about transness I don't, or at least attempt not to, let the fact that I have some disagreements on one topic come up in the other unless it's invoked.
Can you actually point to instances where someone used their belief that Jesus was the literal son of god when arguing for some policy without brooking opposition?
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We live in a society that has figured out, long ago, that we should have religious pluralism where Christians can worship as they please, but can't enforce their religion on society. So I don't care how irrational they are.
We have not figured this out for trans people.
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Islam is in dire straits and has been for a while now. So people often wish for a singular Caliph to show up and just wave a wand and bring it to some reconciliation with modernity.
On the other hand...
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What is fake? What is real? Are we living in a simulation? Or just the AI version of what is passed around as news?
As far as I know, yes, it's real. Jesuits, eh?
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You probably did not notice, but there is potential schism brewing inside the Catholic Church. The theological debates are interesting, they revolve around ecumenism post Second Vatican council and it seems that current Pope takes them very far with messages like
As a former Catholic myself just briefly investigating this over last few months I am convinced that the pope is probably either an apostate or a heretic. The church also has to deal with day-to-day subversion from the left as with the rebellious bishops from German Catholic church that decided to bless LGBT unions. And on top of that there is some strange relationship between Pope and Davos types around wide variety of topics such as climate change or strange messages like this openly mentioning return of catholic integralism, which may be the way how some of the critics of Vatican II were placated.
It really is strange and pope Francis himself seems to have interesting enough background to generate controversies ranging with his embrace of socialist version of catholic teachings endemic to Latin America called liberation theology with openly communist figures like Hélder Câmara whom Pope calls as that holy bishop. Add in a very strange way of how Francis got elected - while previous much more conservative pope still lived and you have anther leg of the controversy.
So yes, Catholic Church is not safe from culture wars, if anything they are waged even on larger scale given that Catholic Church is a vulnerable institution. Now it is not as if there was not a problem with Catholic Church before, there were antipopes and murderous popes like Stephen VI and so forth, this time may not be different.
Relatedly: https://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2023/11/pope-francis-as-public-heretic-evidence.html?m=1
It should be noted that rorate Caeli is very influential among right wing clergy and that the author is not simply a rando, but also that it’s unclear what his call would actually look like and that pope Francis is an 87 year old man with cancer and at least two previous heart attacks, while the opposition are likely very cautious because high ranking clerics in the RCC are almost definitionally old and high-IQ.
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Not again! You mean like 1054? or this entire list of breakaways before, during and after the Reformation?
I think this is just more rumblings on of the Spirit of Vatican II. A heavier hand should have been taken with the likes of the German bishops, but that's just my opinion. The main problem is the increasingly secular society of today, and the shockwaves of the abuse scandals - Ireland has become unrecognisable in social liberalisation during my lifetime, and that's something I've observed over a period of forty years since my late teens to today. Even those still going to Mass have a very vague notion of what the religion is about. There's a ton of cultural Catholicism, but even expressions of that like processions etc. got washed away very fast in the 90s onward.
So as far as doctrinal issues goes, there is the perennial problem of "how much accommodation to the Spirit of the Age do you do?" Benedict was my pope in a way Francis will never be, and I admired his attempts to go back to more reverent and more traditional liturgy and displays, but there is too much inertia and too much ignorance built up over the decades. We can't go back. Francis is very much imbued with the notion of pastoralism - that you go out and search for the lost sheep without worrying too much over the jots and tittles of what the rules precisely say. And he's having to deal with "how do you prevent the Church from being hollowed-out, from losing any young people continuing to remain Catholics, from becoming a museum piece where churches are just tourist attractions and not houses of worship?"
You can't go back, so how far do you go with the ways of today?
The other vision for the future of the church, that the Trads like to point out, is radical downsizing and refocusing around the core of conservative believers with a positive birthrate, instead of chasing wishy-washy modernists leaving the church for the religious experience of protesting anyway. While this would ensure slow-but-steady positive growth, it would also entail becoming a peripheral pseudo-ethnicity minority religion in many lands, like the Copts or Mormons. The only difference is their leader would still technically have an itty-bitty country to run.
This would also make the Pope less of an Important World Leader all the presidents shake hands with, and that the Church would have to sell a lot of its very nice things, a terrible fate in the minds of reformists (and many conservatives too, which is why they don't talk about those parts being necessary as much).
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Don't do low effort top level posts.
7 day ban for making me deal with this on Thanksgiving
I'm having a hard time deciding what a reasonable ban duration for drunkposting on a holiday should be. I keep defaulting to 1 day, but that only functions like throwing someone in the drunktank until they're sober, and that only works if you catch them in time. OTOH, more than 3d feels excessive, unless there's an existing pattern. But in this case, 4d would keep them in the drunktank until the next thread... Ugh, it's good I'm not a mod.
A 7 day ban for this is incredibly excessive. This user is clearly a good contributor, despite drunkpoasting one thing on a holiday. Banning people like this also deprives other users of good discussions. One day would be both appropriate and also funny, and not punish everyone else.
Unless this person has some history of this and bans: this is a ridiculous response.
Apparently the mods don't believe that low effort, low quality posts can prompt high effort, high quality responses despite ample evidence to the contrary.
I've been banned repeatedly, and while I surely earned some of them, the majority have been what I consider tickey tack and unreasonable curtailing of reasonable discussion. This is right according to profile from my perspective.
I think it's a reasonable case of being concerned about moral hazard. If you let low quality posts because they can lead to high quality posts then you may find yourself with a flood of low quality posts so unworthy wading through that you scare away the high quality posts. There is an experiment on this, CWR.
Yes, but the repeated requests for the bare link repository indicate that there is demand and interest in discussing more than what gets brought up, but the purposefully high barriers to entry prevent those topics from even being raised at all, and thus no responses can be prompted, regardless of quality.
I'm not convinced the repeated requests for the bare link repo aren't just the same three or so people repeatedly bringing up the same request. I'm indifferent to it's return.
I am in deep, passionate, unrelenting agreement with your indifference.
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They are not a great contributor. They have a history of low effort posting.
An improvement to these things (which seem heavy handed) would be to include this history when you take these sorts of drastic actions.
Because from the outside it seriously just looks like power tripping/petty.
Normally that is something that I would include. I'm away from my computer, right now because it's Thanksgiving, and busy hanging out with family. It is more time intensive to construct those lists on mobile.
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The user had twelve warnings and temp bans in their mod history. I didn't even add my most recent one.
This is not a stellar user that drunk posted once on holidays. It's a crap user that also posted drunk on holidays.
My willingness to compile a list of bad posts during a holiday is low.
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Charitably: the pope is trying to engage with sinners and help them return to the light.
Christ didn’t hang out with prostitutes because he thought being a prostitute was a good thing.
Mark Chapter 2:
Some people want their Mark 2:17 without Mark 2:16. Even more people want their Mark 2:16 without Mark 2:17. They need to be taken together, but they almost never are.
Things you’ll never hear Pope Francis say: “These people are sick and should stop sinning in these specifics ways.”
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