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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24625 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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Did the alt-right ever even exist? I remember when Trump first came on the scene and people were freaking out, there were articles everywhere and people making tons of YouTube videos about the alt-right and how they were recruiting people. Nobody ever asked the question recruiting them to what? Could you even join the alt-right?

Seriously, from what I can gather, the alt-right was basically some podcast networks (TRS) and then Richard Spencer's tiny organization. His NPI conferences had maybe 500 people. Other so called members of the alt-right like Jared Taylor had already been around for decades with American Renaissance. Even when they got together at their biggest event with Unite the Right in Charlottesville, there were barely 1,000 of them and they were vastly outnumbered by counter-protesters. And a bunch of these were old school white nationalists like David Duke who came on the scene over 30 years before that.

As far as I can tell, nobody has ever seen or heard of a gathering of more than 1,000 of them together at one time. There is no alt-right to join or be recruited to and is not an organization. It has no leader or leaders. It basically doesn't exist. The mainstream media and Democrats basically made it up either as a psyop or just convinced themselves that it exists. It's probably a mix of both. This wasn't like recruiters online targeting vulnerable Muslim kids to go fight for ISIS where you could go literally join ISIS which was an organization that actually controlled land and had an army. You join the alt-right and do what exactly? Shitpost on 4chan and post edgy memes on Twitter?

Their strongest argument probably is that there were some lone wold terrorist attacks. But there were already lone wolf white nationalist attacks before Trump like the OKC bombing. And none of the closest things to leaders of the alt-right had ever committed and violence as far as I can tell. And I would argue that the mainstream media's reporting on this issue did much more to create lone wolf shooters who they gaslit into thinking we were on the cusp of a race war and gassing the Jews than any alt-right "recruiters" did.

Am I crazy here? My theory is that the Hillary Clinton campaign saw they were a good boogeyman to scare people about Trump and then the media ran with it and people convinced themselves of something on a societal level that never even existed. It's actually insane if you really think about it.

The alt right was a weird thing. When I first heard of it the term was already being applied to tons of what we now call heterodox content creators, especially in the area of gaming. At first glance I thought it was referring to a version of the right that was breaking with the religious fundamentalists and mostly just directly pushing back against what at the time were called SJWs. I don't think this interpretation from potential members on the ground was that unusual and I suspect genuine misidentification was probably leading to a lot of the hysteria that thought young men that just didn't like being scolded in a manner they felt unjust.

Everybody always brings up the Charlottesville rally in this context, but nobody ever brings up the Pikeville rally, which happened a few months earlier, with pretty much the same political groups present on both sides. Which is understandable, because nobody remembers it. Down the memory hole it went, because there were no deaths, no altercations, no incidents at all. You know why? Because the riot police was deployed, and was actually ordered to do the one job they have, which is separating groups of violent protesters from one another. Which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the political reality of the Charlottesville rally.

It was a big deal in 2015-2019 online especially, but like a lot of things of that era, it fizzled out. The peak was 2017 , before the ill-fated Unite the Right rally, as you mentioned. It has been replaced/subsumed by the civ-nat/trad people on Twitter, who tend to reject the paganism or secularity of the alt-right, while still being anti-left. This is higher status too. The alt-right was damaged by being low status and being associated with LARP-ing behavior.

Even when they got together at their biggest event with Unite the Right in Charlottesville, there were barely 1,000 of them and they were vastly outnumbered by counter-protesters.

That is typically what you would expect for a movement that is mostly online. Considering that attending such an event is not without risks (like being assaulted or loss of employment), this is an underestimate of actual support.

Personally, I consider myself alt-right. I consider TheMotte overall alt-right. Everything and anything can be the alt-right. The one group missing for the alt-right would be Neil Strauss - TheGame - and all the pick-up artists. The psychological insights merged with some writers and ended up on the manosphere which eventually lands you in the Proud Boy ideology.

I would consider the alt-right to be primarily the intellectual counter-arguments against the new elites ideology. So anything against modern feminism, blank-slate race views, woke, sjw, modern Marxism (ideology I would attach to blm).

I would consider the arguments Bill Ackman is making to attack Harvard and Dean Gay as fairly core alt-right arguments.

I also would agree that the left successfully labeled the alt-right as literally the KKK so it’s a dead label. But how I understood the term in 2014-2020 would have been the intellectuals of the right against modern leftists assumptions while dropping the religious arguments of the rest of the right.

The alt-right often uses evolutionary biology arguments to replicate the views of the traditional conservatives on a broad swath of ideas/policies.

I never would have associated the old school kkk types as alt-right because they were in fact old-school and old-arguments.

I consider TheMotte overall alt-right.

Interesting. Our foundation is supposed to be

to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs.

From "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle" by Scott Alexander:

The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.

Same phenomenon you see in r/PoliticalCompassMemes. In fact, "Seven Zillion Witches" was considered as one of the possible names for what would eventually become The Motte, though I can't find the thread right now.

The alternative explanation would be that HBD and PUA are correct, so any place which allows uncensored discussion of those topics will eventually convince people to believe in them, and believing in HBD and PUA is sufficient to qualify as alt-right.

The only problem with the PUAs are the absolute degeneracy of it all. They are half-right about a certain group of young materialistic women. A good chunk of the alt-right as it exists rejects the PUA community on grounds of degeneracy.

I'm referring more to the epistemic aspects of PUA than the instrumental ones. As long as you agree with the PUAs about female nature, you are off the reservation even if your response looks more like "make women property again" than "enjoy the decline".

The alternative explanation would be that HBD and PUA are correct, so any place which allows uncensored discussion of those topics will eventually convince people to believe in them, and believing in HBD and PUA is sufficient to qualify as alt-right.

No, the alternative explanation would be that progressives are less willing to put up with crimethink for the sake of a good discussion than others. ‘Any uncensored online discussion inevitably becomes far-right’ is not an accurate description; any uncensored online space becomes full of things that are generally considered offensive, and racial slurs are one of those things, which shapes the tenor of political discussions there but, you know, 4chan is still mostly porn. It’s just that porn drives the far right out less than racism drives the left out.

As far as the motte goes, we have people preaching very offensive things here. There’s the pedofascist guy, our resident neo-Nazi, and then the bevy of white nationalists and hardcore misogynists. This drives out progressives because they’re used to seeing such things censored; right wingers don’t seem to mind as much.

He gave you a fairly good softball pitch for this posts.

I wrote a short reply and deleted when I saw you did it better but it was well set-up to just link to Scott.

Yes, if you found your space on Free Speech you'll attract seven zillion witches. And if you ban witches on sight you won't.

But that post doesn't say that those are the only possible options, probably because slatestarcodex.com was a clear alternative where discourse across the political spectrum occurred all the time.

So yes, the fact that TheMotte became "alt-right" was entirely predictable, but no, it was not inevitable.

Discourse across the political spectrum given that the really contentious issues are not broached. Freedom to discuss only matters as far as you apply it to topics that make your blood boil and no, SSC did not have a solution for that.

But that post doesn't give that a the only possible options, probably because slatestarcodex.com was a clear alternative where discourse across the political spectrum occurred all the time.

And was then nuked from orbit, or at least Manhattan. Q.E.D.

QED what? Make sure your mods are anonymous?

If you're implying that you've demonstrated "it's impossible to have a healthy community with diverse viewpoints", then I disagree.

Making the mods anonymous doesn't work. SSC stayed together because the community -- both leftists and rightists, but especially leftists -- trusted Scott as moderator. So leftists flouncing out because there were too many witches (as has happened over on Data Secrets Lox) didn't happen. An anonymous moderator couldn't really achieve that.

Agree to disagree I guess. I don’t think there is a lack of trust in our mods.

I trust that they honestly wish the foundation would actually happen. I trust that they’re doing their best to apply the rules impartially.

I just disagree with them that the rules, as they are actually enforced, will achieve the foundation.

It didn’t get nuked, the NYT doxxed him and he got scared and pulled the plug. There’s an alternate universe where it’s still going in the original.

Perhaps the type of people that would want to host a healthy community with diverse viewpoints, keeping away crazy radicals, are also those for whom the prospect of getting named and shamed by the NYT is a serious deterrent?

Organizing places where heretics can discuss their views unhampered is itself heretical.

The label is defunct, sure, but I don’t think the label makes a scene any more than a uniform does. The alt-right describes a scene associated with a memeplex. Some ideas are more core to the scene than others, but I don’t think you’re required to believe everything in that memeplex to be considered at least adjacent to the alt-right.

Nationalism, traditionalism, capitalism and to some degree ethnic nationalism (for whites even if not white) seem to be the big four of the memeplex. And while not everyone is going to buy into the entire thing, most will agree on those 4 points, and have at least a healthy respect for evolutionary psychology. If you’re there, you’re part of that scene whether you admit it or not, or whether you choose a different label.

It seems that a lot of them ended up in the Republican Party and are having at least some impact on the platform.

I would consider the arguments Bill Ackman is making to attack Harvard and Dean Gay as fairly core alt-right arguments.

he is the opposite of the alt-right. The alt-right would hate him and Gay. There is nothing inherently alt-right about exposing a plagiarism scandal that undermines the integrity of a left-wing institution.

The reason I am including Ackman as alt-right adjacent is because he’s basically a Jew whose realizing Great Replacement Theory is being applied to his group now. Jews have become white and the oppressors in the oppressed-oppressor ideology of the left.

3 of the prior 4 Harvard Presidents were Jewish. The fourth I can’t figure out but her husband is Rosenberg and that sounds Jewish to me. The current President is an obvious affirmative action hire whose a full bred black women of color (though of course not ADOS and appears her family is wealthy). Maybe I’m confusing dissident right with alt-right and just combining them but a lot of his tweeting just sounds like the stuff lower class whites have been complaining about for two decades. And I’ve seen things where Harvard is trying to lower Jewish representation at Harvard.

Yes the Charlottesville people wouldn’t have hated him since they did chant the Jews will not replace us but in the 2020’s they are finding themselves similarly situated.

Generally speaking, I despise the right as much as I despise the left, so it would be pretty funny for me to be considered alt-right. Rejecting wokism does not necessarily make someone right-wing.

The only use I have for social conservatives is for them to be a counterweight that balances out radical leftists and prevents those from seizing a hegemonic position of power. I would much prefer some kind of different counterweight, since I fundamentally disagree with social conservatives about almost everything other than simple matters of fact, but you have to work with what you have.

The one group missing for the alt-right would be Neil Strauss - TheGame - and all the pick-up artists. The psychological insights merged with some writers and ended up on the manosphere which eventually lands you in the Proud Boy ideology.

If somebody wrote an accurate book about the evolution of the pick-up-artist scene and then the manosphere, I would read it. From what I remember, the original pick-up-artist scene, up until the early 2010s I would say, was pretty a-political. It was results-oriented. Figure out what gets you laid and do it. No whining. No excuses that would stop you from taking action. You'd be called a keyboard jockey and mocked if you just sat around complaining about what women are like or about politics.

The manosphere, on the other hand, has a lot of whining about how women should be different than what they are, how politics is against men, etc.

I can certainly see how the manosphere is in part derived from the pick-up-artist scene, but it is interesting that it became so different in a fundamental way.

The manosphere was pretty much a loose knit movement for the promotion of men's interests that rose in reaction to the dominance of feminism in the social and political zeitgeist.

The knowledge was spread around the internet but didnt really reach critical mass until the Eternal Summer brought enough normies online to create larger communities. It coalesced around forums and blog comments and sometimes branched out into real life meetups (although this was largely only a PUA thing with the rise of 'lairs' in major cities).

The manosphere acknowledged modern female behaviour (and its facilitating cultural attitudes and legislation) as a problem, but the answer to the problem is where they differed.

Mens rights activists wanted the rights of men renegotiated in light of the new deal that feminism had negotiated for women. Things like creating a presumption of shared custody of children in the event of a divorce, legal paternal surrender and the end of alimony.

The PUAs wanted to exploit the sexual revolution to extract sex and companionship from women, generally (but not always) without engaging in relationships which would expose them to feminist laws (like defacto relationship laws splitting wealth after a period of cohabitation)

The Men Go Their Own Way crowd generally just shrugged their shoulders and wanted to minimise their engagement with women. This group was made up of sour grape incels, but also men thay had legitimately had horrible experiences with women and the legal system (divorce raped of assets and child custody for instance).

On top of this there were trad men (eg Dalrock's blog) promoting traditional relationships, as well as the rise of The Red Pill which promoted a 'realist' approach to modern female behaviour.

The manosphere eventually declined for a variety of reasons as others have said. For instance, PUA generally died a slow death as dating apps tòok hold of the sexual marketplace and live venues declined as a place women went to be available for casual sex.

Many of the manosphere ideologies remain perrenial though and will continue to be repackaged by modern influencers (eg Andrew Tate pushing Red Pill ideology).

I can't speak for the pick-up artists scene, but the manosphere finally found it's outlet on the Internet for a lot of pent up anger and frustration that's been building up for decades now. For those who were born a decade or two shy of the millennium, many of the people I saw around my neighborhood grew up the first fruits of the generation of burn your bra and women's liberation after their decisive cultural victory in the 60's, and knew of no other mentality. Those people then became parents.

I 'frequently' saw households full of children growing up that resented and hated their mothers, weak fathers who found themselves unable to evoke some much needed harsh discipline on their daughters, and general domestic politics in the household that were a non-stop battlefield for all the people living there. Now that generation of kids have grown up and the Internet is now available for their voices. I assure you, the manosphere didn't arrive out of nowhere. It's been bubbling up for a 'long' time. What you're hearing now I remember hearing and seeing before the Internet even went fully commercial.

Fathers' rights groups and men's advocacy groups have existed for decades. They may have been marginal and small, but they still existed. The online Manosphere, which is by now also largely gone due to multiple factors, mainly stems from them, and, I think, was mostly a reaction to feminist agitators consciously ramping up their culture war rhetoric after Obama became president.

Is the PUA-scene still a thing?

My understanding of it was that the main message was: Go outside (touch grass), talk to as many women as possible and then you'll catch one or several. Wrapped up with some lingo, florid description, esoteric psychology, and with additional tips for managing multiple relationships/women. Nothing groundbreaking.

I think it did work for the average guy, until Tinder and other apps destroyed the market.

I would expect Covid to be the final nail, what with going outside literally being made illegal in many places.

I'm sure there are still coaches, but even back then it already seemed like too much effort, I can't imagine the sales speech to convince guys to make getting laid their 2nd job.

Online Dating optimization stuff does exist from what I've seen, but I think it's a bit more balkanized since there's more stuff like 'Profile coaching' and 'Profile photoshoots' as opposed to the more direct-line PUA stuff.

You're right, it's pretty much dead, partially as a result of suppression by the mainstream.

Another aspect is that most of the PUA material the curious are familiar with was written before smartphone use became common among Western women, before Instagram, Facebook, TikTok etc. even existed, and as such, it is by now largely useless.

But I'd say the main factor responsible for the decline of PU Artistry is the combined effect of stringent laws around "enthusiastic consent", the #MeToo and #KillAllMen campaigns, plus (and I don't care how offensive this sounds) the general decline in the human quality of Western women, due to the spread of radfem views, the opioid epidemic, rising rates of alcoholism and prescription pill addiction, the normalization of fat acceptance and mental illness etc. In other words, the overall risk of engaging in PUA is rapidly rising, whereas the potential return on your investment is ever more marginal. Social reality cannot be ignored.

I mean, as long as there's an agreement on the decline of Western men as well.

What's happened is the end of the middle in both genders. People who would've been, to use the 1-10 scale, many, many 4-7's in 1985, and been perfectly happy either got fat, hooked on Oxy, stopped going outside, got hooked on the Internet or got absolutely ripped/in-shape doing yoga, can do much better makeup/dress better, and so on, and can be seen by more people because of social media. Like in many thing is in life, there's now much less of a middle.

Like, there are random side characters in CW dramas of both sexes that would've been top-tier heartthrobs in 1987.

I believe the sexes evolve in a tandem, basically, with the caveat that, due to the reality of hypergyny / female hypergamy, the behavior of the bottom 80% of men generally has negligible effect on women’s perceptions, at least in the short run, due to them being sexually invisible. When female quality declines, it has a demoralizing effect overall on all men who otherwise would make conscious or unconscious steps to get prepared for the role of the eligible husband. This, in turn, has a similar effect down the line on all women who would otherwise be open to assortative mating, which, obviously, in turn demotivates men even more etc. It’s no wonder we hear so many complaints, with mainstream society’s tacit approval, about there being so few eligible men around, especially in underclass communities. Well, duh. Back when the patriarchy existed, it basically functioned as a sort of life insurance policy for midwits and average people in general, by providing them with mates. Now this is gone, and the long-term consequences are visible.

On a different note, what is a "CW drama"?

Eh, this whole talk of 80% of men being sexually invisible is incel/PUA bullshit. Again, if you look at actual studies of this stuff, yeah, the top 20% are having a lot more sex, but it's with each other. Which hey, be jealous, but this hasn't really changed since the 60's when the Pill was invented. This idea of some random guy with a six-pack swiping right and banging a a homely girl with a low body count who'd be married to a normal nerdy guy if only society was framed differently, doesn't exist, except in very anecdotal evidence. 80% of people continue to have, I think, less than five partners lifetime and that's both sexes (so in that sense, 80% is invisible, but it's 80% of women too), and if we look at the kind of bad data set of the GSS, the percentage on younger people having sex is back to even between the genders after a few weird years probably caused in part by #MeToo backlash, younger single women being more COVID-averse, and frankly, probably some not great data.

I think what's happened in the middle is what has happened with both genders - there's easy access to entertainment that's better than dealing with a bad match. On the male side, why waste a night going out, buying women drinks, to end up with a girl who will be a dead fish in bed who you're not overly attracted too, than who will still either ghost you or be clingy, when you can play Baldur's Gate for 6 hours, then masturbate to high quality OnlyFans/amateur HD porn of any kink you have. On the female side, why waste going out, getting hit on by a bunch of weirdo and douchey guys, maybe end up going home with somebody who won't try for an orgasm or will only not last that long, and then either be really weirdo clingy or stalker-ish afterwards, when you can just watch six hours of Real Housewives, then pull up some Amazon Kindle smut and get off with a really high-quality sex toy?

As far as the CW goes, Second-tier network that was full of dramas full of pretty people - it was the home of Gossip Girl, Riverdale, all of the DC Comics superhero shows, Supernatural. If you were insanely good-looking but mediocre as an actor, it's where you ended up until recently when many of those shows ended due to a change in ownership. As another example, look at Hallmark Christmas movies - all very pretty people, many of whom are objectivally better looking than many celebrities were in the 70's and 80's, because they all do yoga, don't eat steak five times a week, don't smoke, et al, but they also aren't giant stars, the same way a relatively untalented, but very pretty person like say, Farrah Fawcett was in the 70's.

This idea of some random guy with a six-pack swiping right and banging a homely girl with a low body count who'd be married to a normal nerdy guy if only society was framed differently, doesn't exist, except in very anecdotal evidence.

Well, yes - if you add a total of 4 rather important qualifiers to a single sentence, it's easy for it to be true. But it's also sort of irrelevant.

Anyway, let's clarify what words exactly mean here, because it seems to be necessary. "Sexually invisible" means "not noticed as an object of lust/desire", "not perceived as a sexual being", basically that women do not grok your existence as a sexual being. As a consequence, whatever amount of sex you do end up having, will be sex that is, in effect, transactional. That's what it means.

And if you tell me with a straight face that 80% of all women are sexually invisible, I won't even know what to tell you, and I won't bother to respond, because such a statement is that absurd.

And I still don't get what a "CW drama" is supposed to be. Anyway, if your argument is that overall beauty/hotness standards for American TV actors have risen as a result of, I suppose, the Sexual Revolution, than that is something that merits further discussion, I think, but frankly I see no visual evidence of such a trend. Then again, I may have my biases.

I feel like this is just a haze of unrelated grievances rather than an actual cause of PUA dying.

general decline in the human quality of Western women

By any metrics you're claiming, compared to the early 2000s, there hasn't been that much decline, it's been a slow downtrend since the 1960s at least.

rising rates of alcoholism and prescription pill addiction, the normalization of fat acceptance and mental illness etc

Alcoholism hasn't really risen since the 1990s, pill addiction is present in a small minority of the population, 'fat acceptance' has little to do with the actual rise in obesity caused by diet which, itself, was already quite high in 2000, 'mental illness' is rising more as a consequence of greater prominence of diagnosis and therapy than anything else.

the combined effect of stringent laws around "enthusiastic consent"

Ehhh. The laws around enthusiastic consent govern university campus standards for sexual assault, and are (as far as I can tell) not actually enforced enough to entirely change the culture.

note that I didn't address your points about #metoo or the smartphone and internet, which may or may not be true

I wasn’t referring to rates of alcoholism etc. overall, I was referring to rates among women, especially young/single women. And no, I definitely don’t believe that only a small minority of them are abusing prescription pills, anti-depressants etc.

Enthusiastic consent, as far as I know, is already state law in California and elsewhere. It doesn’t just apply to campuses, but even if it does, it doesn’t matter. Saying that it is “not actually enforced enough to entirely change the culture” is, pardon me, nothing but a cope, even if it’s technically true. It’s the cultural environment and signalling that matters. The hard fact is that the doctrine of enthusiastic consent is getting open and unilateral support by the priestly caste in mainstream culture, and any persecution of innocent men due to false allegations is treated as a negligible side effect.

Among women, it still seems to be decreasing?

I wouldn't put the % abusing pills above 10%? This site gives 5% in past 12 months.

enthusiastic consent

I was only able to find laws in California about enthusiastic consent for college sexual harassment policies eg here. If it's the law for sexual assault in general I might be wrong, but what law specifically is that?

Saying that it is “not actually enforced enough to entirely change the culture” is, pardon me, nothing but a cope, even if it’s technically true

Well, we're discussing the material causes of the decline of the PUA scene, so I think the law has a lot less of a chance of causing the PUA scene to decline if it isn't enforced enough to matter. It can be somewhat taboo to do PUA stuff and it can still work.

Maybe I misremembered and the legal term is "affirmative consent" instead. Anyway, it isn't important.

The average citizen doesn't know how often and how severely any particular law is enforced. What is known is that legislation is also downstream from culture, so the very existence of such a law is definite proof of overall cultural trends.

I am not sure how "suppressed" you can claim it is when there are still large communities and people still talking about it, even if mostly negatively.

Another aspect is that most of the PUA material the curious are familiar with was written before smartphone use became common among Western women, before Instagram, Facebook, TikTok etc. even existed, and as such, it is by now largely useless.

No, it was already becoming played out before then.

I actually read Neil Strauss's The Game (published in 2005) and one of the things he describes towards the end is how over-franchised PUA material was, until women in all the hot spots like LA and Las Vegas were just openly laughing at PUAs because every dude was using the same sad routines and they all knew the game by now.

large communities and people still talking about it, even if mostly negatively.

So you mean mainstream online feminists and their normie hangers-on, basically? Because that, i.e. when an entire cultural phenomenon (let's call it that) is only permitted to be openly discussed in mainstream culture (without repercussions like cancelling, that is) only by culture warriors dedicated to, or at least sympathetic to, its suppression, delegitimisation, cancellation and banishment, is how social suppression normally works.

So you mean mainstream online feminists and their normie hangers-on, basically?

No, I mean pretty much everyone except the PUA community. If a "cultural movement" is widely unpopular, it may be because there is some vast feminist media conspiracy against it, or it may be that it's...unpopular, because of the people in it.

That's not how any culture has ever worked.

More comments

Generally speaking, I despise the right as much as I despise the left, so it would be pretty funny for me to be considered alt-right. Rejecting wokism does not necessarily make someone right-wing.

I feel the same way. I hate the left and the right (although I hate the left more, mostly just because I'm surrounded by them, and therefore they're in my face all the time with values contrary to mine that I can't openly argue against). However, I do believe that most leftists these days, at least, would believe that rejecting wokism is enough to make you alt-right. They may not even say it in those words exactly, but if you ever say anything around them that goes against any tenet of wokism, no matter how innocuous might seem to you, like "women are not oppressed" or "structural racism isn't real or isn't a helpful lens", I know of no leftist who wouldn't immediately believe that you are a white supremacist who's either dog-whistling or waiting to happen. I don't know that the left's definition of what the alt-right is should matter the most, but it seems most relevant to me, at least, because I am stuck in a leftist world.

My guess is it was Neil Strauss book that got the pick-up scene to add a more intellectual aspect online that eventually found a place in the dissident/alt-right. Then you had people who read books thinking about their ideas. RooshV started blogging in that space; chateau heartiste begins read in the pick-up community to explain why many of the tactics they used worked intellectually.

RooshV is one reason I like to combine these groups into one bucket because many of them do jump from one adjacent space to the next. He begin in the pick-up community and now has turned trad-religious. Tucker Max went trad family oriented.

Edit: one thing I would add is the pua material was a lot more ground breaking than you give it credit for. Average dudes were not taught by society to do those things. It might even be worse today.

I'd love to read that book.

My impression is that PUA quickly ran into diminishing returns: it identified some general principles or strategies that worked, and there's only so much benefit you can get from further elaboration of them, with practice trumping theory 99% of the time. This led to a kind of evaporative cooling, with the people left "developing the theory" were less focused on pragmatism and more on critical analysis/social theory (except swapping evil women for evil men).

I think what you're referring to is the "dissident right" or "intellectual dark web", which are distinct.

The phrases "alternative" and "dissident" basically mean the same thing in the political sphere.

I thought the dissident-right was just rebranded alt-right.

The Breitbart guide quotes the Alt-right as being intellectual and specifically cites a geneticists like Razib Khan. And includes a broader less-wrong intellectual group.

But sure that is the hard thing with words in general. People can have vast different opinions of what a term means. I define alt-right is like basically any non-normy view especially when held by IQ>120 people.

If I felt like having a little fun I could define the ADL as alt-right due to their ethnostate support of Israel.

The dissident-right is just alt-right lite. And I don't consider the "intellectual dark web" to be a real thing. That phrase is basically a marketing term cooked up by some news boomers.

My memories circa 2015 was that the "alt-right" was huge. But it was also a big tent. It was everyone who ever complained about RINO's in congress. It was every conservative who found themselves alienated by the GOP's inability to actually move the football in their direction, no matter how much the voter's rewarded them with extra seats and positions. It was a large group of people self identifying, and proudly supporting Trump as an outside candidate, because "alt-right" sounded cool. Like alt-rock.

Then the reveal/hit pieces went out about how Jared Taylor coined the phrase and was trying to own the movement and claim it was all about white nationalism. And it all evaporated like a fart in the wind. Nobody changed their beliefs, or support, IMHO. But when the movement was explicitly made about white nationalism, people just wandered away from the label and never came back.

Even with the Unite the Right rally, I remember seeing a lot of chatter telling people to stay away. There was the element of it being a protest to preserve history, but also the much darker side of it being about white nationalism. A lot of influential conservative accounts told people not to go because of that. There were accusations even then it was a psy-op to tar and feather all conservatives as white nationalist.

Ironic that it happened regardless.

I don't know how much of this is backed up by any record. These are my personal recollections based on people I saw on social media, and memes getting flung around.

how Jared Taylor coined the phrase

Except that he didn't. Paul Gottfried did.

This matches my memories closely. Absolutely infuriating how effective wignat association is at disrupting a nascent movement.

There are alt-right and adjacent groups you can join- the proud boys and patriot front, for example. I agree that it’s exaggerated from the perspective of ‘is this a real thing’.

For me, the alt-right was the Tea Party, opposing bank bailouts and obstructing big government from a libertarian perspective. This was not the old Moral Majority focused on respectability but instead bomb throwers fed up with the status quo. This well predates the rise of Trump and emergence of Richard Spencer.

The term was an amorphous label that could be placed on a wide dispersion of groups that harbor major mutual disagreements.

The alt right was always a vague term ambiguously used to describe either anyone who voted for trump but also interchangeably with neo nazis. However the Establishment Conservative’s Guide To The Alt-Right is relevant here.

I recall the term being thrown around in survey of niche articles in right wing publications circa 2014-2015 to refer to a concept vaguely like "Right Wing but Irreligious," a conservatism that did not center evangelical Christianity, with a listed cluster of guys I had never heard of who argued different versions with the similar theme of right wing but leaving lame-o evangelicals behind. This included both Richard Spencer types who wanted to refocus conservatism around the white race (or hatred of the Blacks), and Rand-ian objectivists. I was never under the impression this was much of a movement, just an intellectual argument that was somewhere in the vague fever swamps that lay to the right of The American Conservative to which I subscribed at the time. Guys like Rod Dreher and Daniel Larison would mention the concept, and associated figured and publications, as a line item. My impression was that the concept was largely aesthetic, about appropriating a disrespectful anti-authoritarian, "alt," hipster aesthetics rather than lame wal-mart corporatism, punk rock not christian rock, etc.

It wasn't until the Clinton campaign elevated that discourse that I started to have any real familiarity with it, and what it refers to. I don't know to what extent we can trace any real influence the "alt right before it was cool" had on the broader alt-right movement of today.

I recall attending a conference on "agile" corporate structures at a business school, and in the typical form of these lectures by professors I half remember exactly one line and little else. He talked about how as a young college student in Europe in the 70s, he was involved in campus marxism, and the goal for everyone at the time was to be a "number" who got arrested or infamous for some act of protest: the Munich Six, the Birmingham Nine, etc. And he talked about how at the time, he could tell the difference between like nine kinds of communist, and could clock someone within seconds of meeting based on small aesthetic cues or minor vocabulary choices. He could tell a Marxist from a Leninist from a Stalinist from a Maoist from a Trotskyite from an anarchist from a third-world-ist etc. But for the rest of the world these differences were unimportant: those are all communists.

In the same way, those on the Right can tell the difference between fourteen kinds of right-winger, and the natural tendency is to giggle at normies who confuse Richard Spencer with Curtis Yarvin, or think either of them have anything in common with Mitt Romney. But for normies their coding isn't that strong. So the "rise of the alt right" has less to do with whether anyone in particular has so many followers, but more to do with alt right rising as a blanket classification for every right winger in skinny jeans.

I agree with @coffee_enjoyer, the ‘alt right’ became the ‘dissident right’ becuase the altright term was too tied up in Richard Spencer’s specific milieu, but otherwise stayed the same.

And as @MaiqTheTrue says, it’s a movement or loose ideological association rather than a party or program, people under the term have no coherent politics beyond general sympathy to (loosely or narrowly construed) white identity politics, opposition to mass immigration and a desire for radical political change.

So you have BAP and Fuentes, who hate each other, you have Woods, who’s more of a particularist with some third worldist sympathies, you have the Catholics and the pagans and the atheists, you have the Sinophiles and those who hate China with an almost neocon fury. People who are arch-misogynists and those who think the woman question is irrelevant compared to their view on race, and vice versa, varying views on promiscuity and marriage (see ‘longhouse’ debate). They disagree on Milei for now.

There isn’t much coherency. But I think it’s broadly the same very online movement. That said, Twitter makes niche things look popular, I doubt that out of ~450m in the Anglosphere more than one or two million (quite possibly far fewer) are even loosely connected to it, unless you stretch the definition to Tucker and Musk.

It's also called the "North American New Right" by their more prominent intellectuals. You have Ron Unz, Jared Taylor, Samuel Francis, Greg Johnson, Alain de Benoist, Lana Lokteff, Alexander Dugin, plenty of them all share similar views. White Nationalism, anti-immigration, natalist, international multipolarity, etc.

The “alt right” was hyped up as a threat, but they did exist and today you can see their influence all over — in the normalization of anti-Judaism on Twitter, in people like Jackson Hinkle, in the reblogs of Elon Musk, in Vivek Ramaswamy posting about a mysterious “they” preventing candidates from winning, in Tucker Carlson’s writers, in the trending trad Christians, in “14% memes” getting 200k likes on tik tok, you name it.

There is no centralized alt right superstructure because the Feds and Media Apparatus in their Infinite Wisdom shut down or infiltrated or had propped up most of the orgs that attempted to do this. And that ensured an organic and implicit cultural cell structure developed in its place, which plays out in tens of thousands of boys’ group chats or discord groups or college republican parties or whatever across the country, with its sole hierarchy being memes / ideology that go through thousands of unique points of evolution and divergence and are consequently filtered into mainstream culture as it has been since 2008 4chan.

So while the alt right does not exist as some kind of third space pseudo-paramilitary group of young men (for very good reason, this would be bad for everyone and pose a threat to the state), it existed and continues to exist as organically-grown ideology factories that affect the mainstream in mostly indirect ways, using nothing but the power of Pepe and persuasion.

Largely agree, though Hinkle seems as much an ideological descendant of the anti-war left as he does the alt right, most of his posting is indistinguishable from what conspiratorial leftists were posting in the late 2000s.

In general a lot of understanding of this movement seems incomplete without an acknowledgment of the often very popular anti-Iraq War anti-Bush 9/11-conspiracist peak oil sphere that was publishing 15-part ‘documentaries’ on YouTube back in like 2007. Alex Jones also grew in this world, which was itself related to more out-there conspiracies of the David Ike variety but which also pushed Rothschild and Soros conspiracies very heavily and was often very much anti-Zionist, and was sometimes relatively close ideologically to the ‘just asking questions’ kind of Holocaust revisionism. This crowd weren’t white nationalists, typically, and may even have identified with the left. But they represent part of the history of the DR that’s often overlooked.

incomplete without an acknowledgment of the often very popular anti-Iraq War anti-Bush 9/11-conspiracist peak oil sphere that was publishing 15-part ‘documentaries’ on YouTube back in like 2007. Alex Jones also grew in this world

We could say that the 2007-2011 Zeitgeist began with Zeitgeist the documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist_(film_series). This was very influential at the time.

Hinkle seems as much an ideological descendant of the anti-war left as he does the alt right

IMO the “original” alt right was not pro-war. Back in 2011-13 there was criticism of Obama’s influence in the Middle East and lots of defense of Assad.

Yeah agreed, I was definitely thinking of that whole Zeitgeist era. Agree that the right during the 2011-2013 phase was often pretty isolationist, although so was a lot of the left, war had become a centrist thing by then. Not to necessarily go full neocon, but I also think that at least some of the more left-aligned peak oil antiwar stuff was directly funded by the Iranian government, Ahmadinejad was prescient with a lot of this and had a good understanding of the western public, started various film festivals to which were invited various Western conspiracists, started and then hugely expanded PressTV in the West, which gave a platform to a lot of those vaguely dissident voices and so on.

For me, the idea of theAlt Right kinda blurred together with NRX via the SSC comments section and the various articles playing 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon with various Rationalists and various flavors of White Supremacism / Nationalism / HBD / whatever. The key difference was established by Richard Spencer doing the Nazi salutes toward Trump, whereas NRX tended to treat Nazis as merely the flavor of totalitarian Leftism that lost the war. So the alt right I guess felt like it was discount Reaction meant to appeal to people less likely to read Moldbug and more likely to hang out on 4chan.

Maybe my memory is faulty, but I remember all this being established before Hillery Clinton and Richard Spencer elevated it to national attention. I distinctly remember posting on Facebook after the Unite the Right incident that I was surprised to learn there were apparently actual Neonazi slogans and styles involved, because of the Boy Who Cried Wolf effect getting me use to "Nazi" basically meaning "someone I hate", and having associated the Alt Right more with the kind of talk from SSC commenters than Richard Spencer.

There were always (well, since the war) ‘Neo-Nazis’, think The Believer with Gosling in 2001. Online neonazi communities had existed since the first wave of internet communities emerged in the late 80s and early 90s. But it was a pretty low status thing, a lot of ex-cons, blue collar or underclass whites. Heavy association with KKK larpers, prison and drug gangs. There were always some more intellectual members, some academics especially those associated with Holocaust denial, but it was overall pretty lowbrow.

And the thing about that ‘movement’ is that it still exists. So what happened in Charlottesville and elsewhere is that no matter how hard the Richard Spencer types try, the meth addict ex-cons with arms, neck and sometimes face covered with swastika tattoos are going to show up. And of course the press is happy to photograph them when they do.

Thus the obsession with ‘optics’. The problem is that they’ve so bought into the ‘no enemies to the right’ meme and unironic Hitler shitposting on DR Twitter that they can’t actually police these people without thinking they’re ‘cucks’, so they’ve largely abandoned real life events now, other than some vaguely associated with the Dimes Square/RedScare/BAP scene.

Regarding your last period, I agree, and I think it is noteworthy to say that the "no enemies to the Right" works way less for the Right than the Marcusian "no enemies to the Left" works for the Left. No amount of red terrorism, entrenching with Stalinism and Maoism, online furry and trans communities and femcel feminism has been enough to damage the left-brand among the western upper-class.

At least in the Anglosphere, and excepting the relatively minor Weather Underground type stuff in the 70s, there hasn’t really been a major wave of far left terrorism in over a century. No Anglo country has ever come even remotely close to falling to full socialism, the closest was probably the US in the early 30s and the UK in 1926, and both of those weren’t actually close at all. In parts of Eastern Europe associating with Soviet / ML aesthetics is low status even among progressive liberal elites, but they’re a lot closer to that history.

Of course, that same distance also applies to the radical right, but I think there’s almost an inherent understanding that the reactionary message is more compelling to much of the population (especially in a diversifying society) than the socialist message - and that’s true on both sides. There’s a reason no rich countries ever fell to socialism except for East Germany and Czecheslovakia, and in both those cases it happened at the end of the barrel of a Soviet gun.

No Anglo country has ever come even remotely close to falling to full socialism, the closest was probably the US in the early 30s and the UK in 1926, and both of those weren’t actually close at all.

The UK elected a socialist government in 1945. The Atlee government nationalised about 20% of the economy, and had plans for further nationalisations if they had won more elections. They were voted out because they didn't make abolishing wartime food rationing a priority - it isn't entirely clear if this was an ideologically-driven choice, but modern leftist lore is that food rationing was an accidental socialist success and that poor ate better under rationing (and the associated price controls).

That seems unlikely, given the abolition of food rationing was a very popular and core part of the Conservative campaign strategy in 1951, along with the reversal of unpopular nationalizations like haulage and buses.

2020 definitely felt close to a Revolution in America and had plenty of left wing terrorism. The Cathedral seemed to have bought into cultural Marxism at all levels. While we weren’t likely to go full economical Marxism it did seem a form of it was in full control. There were no gulags but dissent meant unemployment and deplatforming.

The only thing that seemed to have held at the time is America has different power centers. The electoral college maintains rural governing advantages both in the Senate and the Supreme Court takeover. Then Musks saved the media and opened up a platform. If America had a slightly more centralized political power it seems to me that the Marxists could have completed the conquest of the Capital (Russia for instance was always authoritarian and ran thru Moscow).

COVID was quite minor. If we had a real crisis I’m not sure if the other power basis would be able to counter.

Of course, that same distance also applies to the radical right, but I think there’s almost an inherent understanding that the reactionary message is more compelling to much of the population (especially in a diversifying society) than the socialist message - and that’s true on both sides.

Obviously history tells us a lot about the kinds of dictatorships that pop up in wealthy countries, but can you expound on this point? Are you saying that the left gets away with ‘no enemies to the left’ because the elites know there isn’t about to be a commie regime and so aren’t scared off by Unironic Marxists?

Yes, I think that’s true. I also think the experience electing conservative populists in the developed world suggests the people are drawn more to that messaging than leftist populism - Trump became President, Bernie couldn’t even beat Hillary in the primary. Corbyn bombed with the public, who mostly hated him by the time he was on his second election. Melenchon didn’t go anywhere in France. Leftist populists do better in poor countries, principally in Latin America.

Or rather, the steps for a reactionary populist coming to power in the US - if you’re a progressive elite - look something like Tucker Carlson winning a presidential (or maybe just being the trusted advisor to someone more competent than Trump who does), the GOP controlling both chambers (happened in Trump’s first term) and a conservative majority on SCOTUS (currently extant). Sure maybe the deep state still stops him, and obviously we know Carlson’s not a fascist really, but from their perspective that’s a risk.

The steps for an actual honest to god socialist coming to power in the US involve what, the total implosion of both existing parties and a nationwide movement of such strength that it could rewrite the constitution, pack the court and reshape American political economy? It seems unlikely, to say the least.

Or rather, the steps for a reactionary populist coming to power in the US - if you’re a progressive elite - look something like Tucker Carlson winning a presidential (or maybe just being the trusted advisor to someone more competent than Trump who does), the GOP controlling both chambers (happened in Trump’s first term) and a conservative majority on SCOTUS (currently extant). Sure maybe the deep state still stops him, and obviously we know Carlson’s not a fascist really, but from their perspective that’s a risk.

Or maybe just Trump being more interested in tweeting than governing while his more-capable advisors run the country. I think we're the right majordomo away from that scenario becoming reality in early 2025.

Trump doesn’t have the humility. Can’t see it happening unless it’s the VP and Trump dies or resigns.

More comments

Bernie couldn’t even beat Hillary in the primary

We'll never know if he could've beaten her, as the Hillary-funded DNC fixed that race.

I mean it’s probably closest to a scene like hippies or new atheists or trekkies or bronies. A loose confederation of likeminded people who shared a broad set of ideas and had similar influences rather than a formal organization with a membership list and a newsletter. I don’t think you could get 1000 bronies in a room together simply because that’s not how bronies work. That doesn’t mean there are no bronies, it just means that they aren’t a formal group.

I don’t think you could get 1000 bronies in a room together simply because that’s not how bronies work.

Hippies, new atheists, trekkies and bronies have all had conventions that had, at least, an order of magnitude more attendants. Multiple conventions even.

Also, there was (IDK if there still is) an official Star Trek fan club, complete with a magazine that they published.

Fanzines and their related infrastructure would go on to play an outsize role in the BBSes and early Internet. Turns out providing a common interest for the educated, reasonably wealthy class gets some serious investment.

It originated a bunch of fan culture. Like the use of “slash” to describe erotic fiction, as in “Kirk slash Spock.”

I’m sure its descendants still exist.

The steelman is that the “alt-right” were basically conservatives who were very loudly anti-immigration and anti-pc in ways that the establishment Republican Party was not (e.g. I remember people on /r/TheMotte itself lamenting that no party would ever reduce immigration).

It is clear that being loud and proud that “we don’t care if the left calls us bigots, stopping immigration and keeping trans advocates away from our kids is super important” is now very prevalent at the national stage in a way that it wasn’t in 2015, and that Trump demonstrated a clear departure from historical norms. Whether you want to call that “the rise of the alt right” or not is a narrative question more than a factual one.

Yes I agree with this basic definition.

I was a member of different online groups that either directly named themselves 'alt-right' or something adjacent, so I do believe the 'alt-right' was some kind of community.

People I talked to in person had the following background : former libertarian, former communist, pagan, religious in some really quirky denomination, atheist, former or current alcoholic/drug addict, rich, poor, middle-class, college students, divorcees...

I would say one of the biggest commonalities was that they wanted to be able to joke about certain things, say the n-word, and have fun with people they have stuff in common with.

I would explain the emergence of the alt-right with the following coincidences:

  • internet content started to get monetized hard. It wasn't simply infrastructure for corporate transactions, shopping, game servers... Suddenly everybody's eyeballs were on a screen and there was a real chance that any given person could be reached by your message. And that was a thrill. Still in 2022 lol. People started making real money talking in front of a camera, and far-right content creators started popping up on YouTube, Facebook and other platforms, after decades of obscurity for white nationalism and other fringe ideas.

-as the internet expanded to everybody and their grandma, the government (the feds, the glowies) and their media arm took notice. There was gamergate, and the young men who only wanted some gamer time start getting targeted as if they were guests on a late-night show. Jokes, innocuous comments, banal opinions start getting removed, accounts get banned, anti-harassment, anti-humor TOS established...

The last safe space for juvenile white fun is under siege. From edgy users to thought criminals, an entire ecosystem of anti-corporate, anti-government memes blooms.

-video media became ubiquitous. While FBI crime statistics may not convince somebody, the repeated exposure to the audiovisual facts of a white boy beaten up in a school bus in a hundred variations is sufficient to help even the most sheltered individual question the plot of the average Hollywood movie.

-between terrorist attacks and huge waves of immigrants from Africa in Western Europe, in the US anti-police riots, drug and homelessness epidemics, obscure far-right writers appeared as prophets, with for example the Camp of the Saints coming back as a best-seller.

While this massive energy was converted into the physical form of Trump and the victory of 2016, it ultimately did not deliver a phantasmagoric 4th Reich. Those who perhaps wanted to overturn the 2020 elections inadvertently forgot their guns at home when they toured the Capitol.

Now, the hardest of white supremists are probably rethinking their ambitions, hoping perhaps for a slice of territory post-civil war. The content creators that persist have mostly evaporated into grifters, as the serious ones have been so thoroughly deplatformed that they faded into obscurity, or were simply jailed or sued to bankruptcy, or perhaps they just moved on, with no practical path to political action.

Both sides have learned a lot from this. The government/media hydra have refined their control over basic infrastructure. Right-wingers are learning to go underground, to play the game and take any small win before going all-in, and perhaps we will see more Gaza-style tactics in the future, who knows.

No, you aren't crazy.

The most plausible explanation is that Hillary's campaign staffers in 2016, most of whom were probably single and childless cat ladies already caught up in the cycle of online feminist radicalization for years, convinced themselves that "Berniebros" (who actually never existed anywhere but the imagination of Hillary's propagandists and were simply a mirage), "Nazi" 4chan trolls and toxic male Trump supporters represent a worthy political target somehow, and thus convinced Hillary that it'd be a good idea to radicalize her own base by rallying against the "basket of deplorables". I imagine it wasn't her own idea actually, and most of this was simply about her staffers wanting to feel good about themselves.

Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is.

I claim no particular expertise in the minutiae of what Richard Spencer or whoever said or theorised in the late 2010s - this is just going to be a comment from the outside.

As it seemed to me over the last few years, 'the alt-right' never really existed at all. There may have originally been a small minority of nutjobs who claimed the term (re: Spencer), but if so they were very few and for all practical purposes insignificant. Rather, what 'alt-right' came to mean was an amorphous, never properly-defined category term similar to 'far-right' or 'right-wing extremist'.

What the term meant was 'right-wing but beyond the pale' - it became a term for people who are unacceptably right-wing. It means right-wing-but-kooky, or right-wing-but-not-respectable. As such it never had clear referents, but always mutated in the moment to mean politicians or thinkers on the right that the speaker happens to believe are crazy or extreme. Thus for example, here in Australia, I remember hearing American commentators suddenly saying that Clive Palmer is alt-right (he's certainly a rich clown; does that make you alt-right?), or that Pauline Hanson is alt-right (she's an insurgent anti-immigrant politician; does that make you alt-right? does it make a difference that she's been doing it since the 1990s, with minimal change?), and it was very clear that 'alt-right' is not an organic category. It just means being on the right, but without notional legitimacy.

Is there a word for how political labels tend to expand over time? Definition inflation? I feel 'alt-right' is an example of that. Perhaps once it just meant whatever it was that Richard Spencer was on about, but that group was small and irrelevant and no good as a bogeyman. So it expands to mean something like 'whatever it is that Donald Trump is on about' or 'anti-establishment right' and it comes to mean almost nothing.

It just doesn't seem like a term with much practical use any more, if it ever had any.

I agree with you, but an important factor is also that when people say "Alt-right" they are associating them with the White Nationalist type, even if they are just the "not-respectable-right" type. So in the eyes of the public, the single-issue Pro-life voter (who often would otherwise have been a Democrat!) is now associated with white nationalism, and the number of Nazis has surged from <1% to a significant number. Conflating these two serves the Left just fine, as they get the satisfaction of a good righteous fight against Literal Hitler by doing something as easy as punching Alt-Right Uncle Joe at Thanksgiving.

I only first heard of the alt right and Richard Spencer when Hillary Clinton mentioned them in one of her public speeches in 2016. After looking them up, then I first got exposure to the cast of characters. It seemed they never had a strong network or domestic infrastructure behind them, apart from right-wing publishing houses like Arktos and Counter-Currents. People like Jared Taylor and AmRen have been around for a long time but unsurprisingly never made it into the mainstream. The closest you had to that was Charles Murray when The Bell Curve was published, and he resurfaced again and interest in his work was rediscovered when he appeared on Sam Harris podcast.

To your point about it always teetering on the balance of being nebulous and fringe, there's an established literature out there that's explained why these kinds of movements always stay on the sidelines and never break out.

The press loves to imply offensive right coded groups are much larger than they are. The Westboro Baptist Church peaked at 40 members.

Very few far right groups can get 50 people to a rally. Even in Charlottesville most of the people there were for the rally to stop removal of monuments, not for any broader objective.

The online alt-right movement was real but it was based on the idea that the right had to accept that racial identitarianism was the future and there was no choice but to organize a white identity movement.

Trumps victory changed things. Particularly the intense pushback from the GOPe.

It turns out that Paul Ryan wasn't a weak coward. He just loved big donors and hated Republican voters.

So the people who were reluctantly toying with white racial identitarianism switched gears. Replacing the GOPe feels better and is a much more achievable goal, even if it is difficult.

The press loves to imply offensive right coded groups are much larger than they are. The Westboro Baptist Church peaked at 40 members.

To me that's more of a failure of people to understand how news gets reported. If it turns up on the TV there's little to worry about, because if it was a standard phenomenon it wouldn't be 'news' to anybody.

I remember during Romney's president bid, the news stories were flying around about the evils of private equity companies in the economy. Not that there aren't any, I essentially work for one that I'd love to see go under, with my stick and marshmallows in hand, but it doesn't generalize. Private equity is a lot like plane crashes. When you see and hear one, it's all over the news, but nobody pays attention to the many companies private equity has had a successful time of turning around and fixing. It's also why 'doom porn', populates the infotainment circuit so much. It's great entertainment and brings in the audiences, but it's garbage news.

Hradzka has a good bit on what he expected Richard Spencer was trying to do with the term to start with, and what a lot of progressives were doing as well. Or see this New York Times piece (by Singal, of course) that separated the 'alt-right' from the 'alt-light' -- and contrast, even contemporaneously, other pieces.

There's a lot of if-by-whiskey, where sometimes the alt-right was just the nutty white nationalists when defining their ideology, others where it was people who hadn't denounced them heavily enough, and then other times the alt-right was pretty much everyone to the right of Mitt Romney. And to a lot of the progressive and leftist movements, the difference was kinda marginal : if you think Mitt Romney was a white supremacist, you're worried about all of them.

I'm glad that some posters mentioned Romney in all of this. The unbelievable leftist smear campaign against him in the 2012 campaign season, which was clearly motivated by nothing else but the sense of urgency to prevent the nation's first glorious African-American leader from going down in history as a one-term disappointment, was an obvious wake-up call to many otherwise moderate rightists, and convinced them that, unlike in 2008 and 2012, the GOP should actually try running a candidate who stands a chance and isn't a cuck. This had an obvious galvanizing effect on dissident right-wing politics, I think.

To be fair to the Democrats, they had no moral reason to fight fair after Kerry got swiftboated in 2004. Not that either side cared much about morality to begin with when it comes to campaigning, but my point is that this is a long story and both sides have been pulling dirty campaign tricks since the parties came into existence. There is nothing new about what they did to Romney, and that kind of dirty campaigning is not at all unique to the Democrats.

To be fair to the Democrats, they had no moral reason to fight fair after Kerry got swiftboated in 2004.

Weird example. Kerry was a worse candidate than Hillary, and he hoisted himself on his own petard by trying to run as a war hero when he was anything but. There was nothing shifty about swiftboating, unless using a candidate's own words and actions against him is now somehow sus.

He at least actually served in Vietnam, but he got railroaded by the campaign team that was fighting for a guy who spent the war safe in the US. Whether Kerry was a war hero or not I don't know, but Bush didn't even show up to the war.

Kerry was a better candidate than Hillary, and by the fundamentals, is the best 'losing candidate' (not counting 2000 for either side) in recent political history. Remember, the War wasn't unpopular yet, the economy was still fine, and Dubya still barely won. Honestly, the GOP should've seen that as a problem back then that John Kerry almost beat them, as opposed to treating it as a mandate and trying to privatize Social Security.

trying to run as a war hero when he was anything but

I can't believe I'm leaping to Kerry's defense, of all people, but based on my memories of reviewing his service record, he's much closer to war hero than pretender.

They really did him dirty.

I’ve just read the Swiftboat Vets article on Wikipedia and their own website. I can see where both sides made points and both left out details. One point which seems pertinent to me is how the Swiftboat Vets group claims they include people who were his peers and superiors, while the vets who joined Kerry’s campaign tour were his subordinates. But never having served myself, I can’t evaluate the events some fifty years ago other than as a civilian citizen hearing everything thirdhand or worse.

I don’t disparage vets for their service, but Kerry did after he got back, and that’s the part I can’t fault the Swiftboat Vets for emphasizing.

I mean we're talking about the same John Kerry that threw his Vietnam medals over the Whitehouse fence but magically had them back to display on his office wall in Congress, right?

Did the majority of the mainstream media join in the swiftboating, or was it just basically Fox News, talk radio and right-wing blogs?

To be fair to the Democrats, they had no moral reason to fight fair after Kerry got swiftboated in 2004.

I used to generally agree with this in 2012, but I changed my mind since. From a moral standpoint, dishonestly smearing someone is wrong, even as part of a tit-for-tat response.

But more strongly, I've come to realize that, for purely selfish reasons, Democrats should have fought fair then and should always fight fair. This applies to the Republicans just as much, of course. This is because the reason that I am a Democrat, and the reason I believe most Democrats are Democrats, is that I honestly believe that there's something morally/ethically/economically/etc. better about the Democrats than the Republicans. Which means I have a selfish motivation to make sure that the Democrats really are better, so that I don't suffer the shame of having backed the wrong side.

Now, a minor implication of this is that Democrats being dishonest is, in itself, something that calls into doubt their moral superiority. But Republicans are arguably (evidently?) just as dishonest just as often, so that's not that big a difference maker*. The bigger implication is that if Democrats are using dishonesty to win people over to them now, then that calls into question how I was won over to them in the past. So out of purely selfish reasons, I want the Democrats to prove to me that they have a commitment to honesty, so that I can be more confident that when I was won over, then I was won over honestly rather than being duped.

One argument I used to buy into was that the Democrats had a moral duty to win. I've since come to believe that that was motivated reasoning on my part. Given that I prefer the Democrats, my belief that the moral disaster of Democrats losing is so high as to justify underhanded tactics to prevent it is not just suspect, it's meaningless. And if winning requires such underhanded tactics such that I lose confidence that our side really is the better side, then that removes any satisfaction from winning; I want the correct side to win, not my side to win - I try to align those by changing what "my side" is to be the "correct side." And I can't get those aligned properly if the side I want to support is dishonest.

* There's a small issue here that I can't be trusted to have an unbiased view of the situation. I like Democrats and dislike Republicans, so if I perceive Republicans as being more dishonest, then that tells us nothing about if they really are more dishonest. And if I perceive a similar level of dishonesty, then almost certainly the Democrats are being more dishonest, since I'm far more likely to unconsciously gloss over their immoralities than Republicans'. I've just given up and decided to be aggressively agnostic on their relative dishonesty.

"All is fair in love or war."

Especially when both parties believe the future of the country is at stake, conscience and fairness are a nuisance that only gets in the way of seeing the "big picture." If playing by moral and ethical rules always puts you at the disadvantage of losing, it's it's always unreasonable and inconsistent to prefer the righteous team/candidate.

If playing by moral and ethical rules always puts you at the disadvantage of losing, it's it's always unreasonable and inconsistent to prefer the righteous team/candidate.

This gets into what I'd consider to be a more fundamental question underlying this, which is something like, if winning requires that you throw away any meaningful confidence you have that the world isn't, by your own standards, made a worse place because you won, then is that tradeoff worth it? I could see the argument for either, but push come to shove, I'd say it isn't. I believe there's actually something better about supporting something with some level of confidence about the goodness of that thing compared to supporting something just because it's my team. I'm sympathetic to the former choice, since winning feels good, and it often translates to direct, tangible positive consequences to someone's well-being, and that can be worth making the rest of the world a worse place for everyone else. But I'm completely unsympathetic to anyone making the former choice while claiming that it's a necessary evil to give us the better future that we deserve; that evil act corrupts our very ability to judge that us winning would make the future better than the counterfactual. If more people just baldly stated, "I don't care if politicians on my side actually make society/our lives/the world/etc. better; what matters is that it's my side, and I want my side to win," that would be worthy of respecting.

Plenty of people will say the ends justify the means. Or to adopt the position of some leftists a number of years ago who used to say, "there are no bad tactics, only bad targets." After all, why even waste your time being in the game if honest actors have no hope of winning it? Darwinism applies just as much to the political sphere, and it's survival of the fittest, win at all costs, because that's our system. We don't have proportional representation here, only the winner walks away with the keys to the kingdom.

For better or worse, no matter who gets into power, getting 'anything' done in politics is actually very difficult. It's a worthwhile debate to ask if it even really matters who becomes President. I'm undecided on the issue, but I agree with Andrew Breitbart entirely when he said politics is downstream from culture. You start locally and expand your sphere of influence.

I agree with Andrew Breitbart entirely when he said politics is downstream from culture.

But is it downstream from the culture of the people or the culture of the elites? These are two very different things.

Arguably, democracy is merely a way for people to have some influence on which elites are in power.

More comments

That mitt romney article reminds me of one from the bush campaign where they claimed that the John Kerry kids were awful and rude and used slurs and a bunch of other bullshit.

His kids at the time were two-four years old. People will write literally anything during campaign years, so long as it makes the other side look bad.

This is what mystifies me about how large the supposedly beyond the pale attacks on Romney during the 2012 campaign are such a huge theme on this forum, popping up time after time after time.

My understanding of American presidential elections is that they have always pretty much been a no-holds-barred cage match, behind the scenes, with both parties (not their ticket headers but lower figures) continuously accusing the other party's candidate of everything under the sun and negative campaign galore being the theme of the day.

However, there's now a suggestion that in this particular election, with this particular candidate, the Dems should have refrained from all this and, in effect, fought with one hand behind the back, that there was something particularly ungentlemanly about going after Romney in the typical way. And the people claiming this don't even really like Romney all that much!

The articles on Romney painted him like he was a cross between Giga Hitler and Satan, while he's a bog standard conservative who mildly disliked the gays. He is the very definition of milquetoast.

I wasn't even a conservative back then and even I saw the absolute bullshit that was going down. If he being such a nobody got the treatment he did, there was literally NO upside to trying to be moderate.

So, despite what the other people are saying, I think what upsets the sort of anti-anti-Trump person that talks about 2012 the most isn't the just-so story about Romney being this honorable man the evil Democrat's attacks, that were so wrong and beyond the pale.

It's that 2012 was the first time the Democratic Party realized they had a national majority and acted that way in a national campaign. The reality is for the previous 30+ years, from Carter on, the Democrat's basically agreed with the Republican prescription of things, they just wanted a slightly kinder way of doing it - yes, crime is out of control. Yes, welfare is bad. Yes, government is too big, but the GOP are run by crazies who won't cut the right things. That was basically the Dukakis/Bill Clinton/Al Gore/even John Kerry argument.

Obama shifted that, but 2008 wasn't much of a nasty election because McCain liked Obama and vice versa, and people realized the GOP were doomed. But, in 2012, the Democrat's did thing they hadn't did in deciades - talked about how maybe, very rich people weren't perfect ideals of greatness who deserved all the credit for everything.

It helped that Mitt Romney said he liked to fire people, had shut down companies to get rich, and attacked half the population as well, basically 'deplorables' (unlike Hillary, who only attacked half of the Trump voters, so about 25%). People also forget in the post-2012 election, he basically blamed his loss on people (specifically minorities) wanting free stuff before he calmed down.

Now, I know the pushback will be "well, liberals love him now," and as the resident left-wing partisan Democrat, we don't love Mitt Romney, we just accept a right-wing neoliberal is better than a wannabee fascist, and Romney's one of the last Republican's who have actual ideas. Plus, 2012 Republican Nominee Mitt Romney wasn't really what Mitt Romney wanted to be, and he'd admit that to you today. He just couldn't run and win a primary as either 2006 MA Governor Mitt or current day pro-BLM pro-child tax credit anti-insurrection Mitt. I still don't think he's a good guy, I think his wealth should be taxed, and in a perfect world, his many, many children would not get much inheritance from him.

As for the rest, the petty BS people get hung up on happens in every Presidential election - Carter almost lost because he was slightly honest in a Playboy interview, the supposed liberal NYT turned Gore into some serial liar, and peopel already went over the Swift Boating of Kerry.

I also don't regret stopping him from massively cutting people's taxes, passing right-wing social policy, and so on. Be better than the petty wannabe fascist doesn't make you good. Respecting the will of the people isn't a high bar to clear, so I don't need to give him cookies.

But yes, to a certain brand of conservative who was used to the Democrat's being the Washington Generals, where they got most of their policies passed even when the Democrat's won, 2012 was the first time in their political memory the Democrat's actually punched back, and they've never forgiven Obama for doing so, which is why they'll talk themselves into supporting Trump, again.

Romney's one of the last Republican's who have actual ideas.

Your chauvinism is showing. What makes an idea "actual", besides it "actually" being a Dem policy position?

No, like JD Vance & Josh Hawley have ideas, too. They're dumb ones, but they do.

But, folks like Tuberville, MTG, Boebert, and the rest of the newly arriving Trumpian Senators and Representatives just don't. Like, at the top of each party, the knowlesge level is similar, bu even the most down the line hacky Democratic politician could tell you a decent amount about their pet policy, whether it's ya' know, health care or child care or taxes or whatever.

Ah, so plenty of Republicans have "actual" ideas. You just think there are some loonies on the fringe. And of course, you can't find any loonies on the fringe of your own party. Yeah, that's not the same perspective that's been expressed by partisans on both sides since, well, forever. Yawn.

The reasons that Romney was a clear escalation are many:

  1. He wasn't close to winning, so why do it at all?
  2. It was his family as well, mostly his children and sick with MS wife.
  3. The attacks on him were so incredibly deranged, like the binders full of women one.

Overall, the Romney attacks exposed a pathological desire to grip power that was like Nixon on steroids, except without the real enemies.

This is what mystifies me about how large the supposedly beyond the pale attacks on Romney during the 2012 campaign are such a huge theme on this forum, popping up time after time after time.

Centrist types frequently argue that Trump is a person of bad character, and that his bad character should be a matter of concern to his supporters. Romney is brought up as one-half of a refutation of this argument (the other half being noted rapist Bill Clinton), demonstrating that any Republican will not only be accused of bad character, but that the accusation will stick, regardless of their actual character, while any Democrat will be presented as heroic and that presentation made to stick, again regardless of their actual character. Romney is the Republican example because he was widely perceived to be the cleanest-cut, most virtuous candidate Reds could possibly have gotten, probably the most virtuous candidate either party has had in a generation or more, and it made precisely zero difference and arguably handicapped his ability to fight and win. It follows that such arguments should not be taken seriously, either now or in the foreseeable future. Good-faith conversation about the character of the candidates is impossible, at least across the aisle, and probably at all, and those who think otherwise are either ignorant or deceiving themselves. The fact that, having smeared him, Blues went right back to pretending they preferred him is merely the icing on the cake.

This argument does not rely on liking or supporting Romney in any way. I think it's a decisive argument, and I voted for Obama.

More generally, this is one of a class of arguments demonstrating that the basic assumptions civil society is built on do not hold, and that cooperation across the tribal divide is not positive-sum.

This is what mystifies me about how large the supposedly beyond the pale attacks on Romney during the 2012 campaign are such a huge theme on this forum, popping up time after time after time.

Some of it's literally just me, and just used as an example over other cases like Palin or Dubya because Romney's more recent.

That said, just because it looks like harsh weapons sometimes get used doesn't mean that there are no rules, or motions about rules that people 'should' follow. LBJ's famous (alleged) pigfucker politics weren't exactly shared as aspirational goals -- note this summary is from a clearly progressive partisan Dem! And we do not see many serious attempts to call random politicians literal pig-fuckers today, and indeed that progressive partisan Dem mostly does not highlight statements from either serious politicians or their cutouts.

Part of that's because 'no one would believe it' (uh...), but the bigger part is that after a certain point this is the sort of thing that gets the Wohl's convicted or Project Veritas driven to bankruptcy. There are rules, as arbitrary and ill-enforced as they might be.

More critically, there's a point where the published violations of those rules would be more costs than the benefits might hold. It's like the people who wonder why Peter Thiel doesn't just hire private detectives to ruin the lives of everyone who pisses him off: the very act of trying to hire them would be a far bigger story than anything they could come up with would be, in ways that would undermine anything they could come up with. Scott Alexander might call this a specific form of bounded distrust, and while I don't particularly agree with his analysis, it's not completely wrong, either.

The flip side to 'Bounded Distrust' is that, even assuming it to be true, those bounds are not set in stone or engraved into golden plates, and the 2012 election was either a major shift or the revelation of a major shift, here. People point to the 2008 Swiftboating of Kerry, and maybe th at was another shift, but it was one where a rando PAC made allegations. We did not have a handful of plausibly connected cutouts claiming Romney would put "Black people back in chains"; we had the sitting vice president of the United States do it. We did not have some sketchy tabloid mag claiming Romney did not pay taxes; Harry Reid stood on the Senate floor and made his case.

But probably the more damning bit is that Romney made no small part of his public persona his decency. There's a (fair!) argument that this was always skin-deep: 47%, and all, and I've got a draft post I've been working on pointing out how much he was just as prone to snickering about his opponents as Trump was, just behind their backs rather than to their faces. Yet he made a large number of costly commitments to that skin-deep 'decency', while no small number of partisans on both sides were talking up how vital it would be both for the Republican project and for the American democratic project as a whole to elevate discourse.

The thing is that the romney campaign didn't reciprocate with those punches, and instead held their tongues.

It reminds of that utterly lame-ass attempt by the McCain campaign in 2008 to attack Obama by bringing up his association with Bill Ayers, of all people. Very obviously it had to be a white dude in any case.

The attacks on Mitt don’t seem particularly out of bounds, but the attacks on his family were a major escalation from previous norms and there’s definitely some 2012 campaign issues that play into it.

You're right, you wouldn't expect any different from the campaign and the partisans. The difference was the way the media treated it, the nauseating network of "fact checkers" and "journalists" who willingly, even gleefully participated in the smear job. It was no campaign worker but a "journalist" who used the debate forum to harangue and "correct" Romney's facts - erroneously! It was not just the Obama campaign and the DNC that mocked Romney for saying that Russia was the top geopolitical foe, it was also newspapers, magazines, late-night shows, and even straight news programs. What the Romney stomping clarified is not that Republicans would be subject to completely unfair smears from their opponents. It clarified that the media was also an opponent, and one so powerful that it could not possibly be defeated without attacking it directly. That is what Trump was not afraid to do, and that is why he won.

This is what mystifies me about how large the supposedly beyond the pale attacks on Romney during the 2012 campaign are such a huge theme on this forum, popping up time after time after time.

Because they refute a common talking point -- that if the Republicans would just run someone Respectable, their candidate would be treated with respect by the media. Sometimes Romney is even given as an example.

if the Republicans would just run someone Respectable, their candidate would be treated with respect by the media

Oh, yeah. Now Romney is the Only Good Republican because he criticised Trump. All the "Why don't the Republicans run someone like Romney?" stuff makes me choke, because we saw exactly what happened when they did run him.

I mean, you couldn't get more bland milquetoast than Mitt, and the more I think about him, the more I think that he was the Republican version of Barack Obama (wait, don't run away, I may be crazy but I'm going somewhere with this): the young (in political terms) guy with the aura of hopey-changey who was going to do all the right and good things for the country and would be a change from the existing political structure. First Mormon Ever, as a parallel with First Black Ever. And what happened?

Binders full of women as a talking point about how he was a sexist misogynist (years later, this was quietly rowed back on as what he meant it in the first place, but that was after he was well beaten and a new bogeyman had replaced him)

Animal cruelty to poor doggie-woggie

Going to establish a Mormon Theocracy (just like JFK was going to hand the White House over to the Vatican)

Monstrous capitalist eater of the poor (the unfortunate 47% remark plus Bain Capital connection)

Op-ed in British newspaper from progressive think-tank member about how he was not only a bad politician but a bad person

So yeah, tell me again about "if only the Republicans would run a Nice Guy". And I don't even like Mitt, or think President Romney would have been anymore than a mediocre not terribly bad, not terribly good president.

Sometimes it's even the exact same people.

I have, in my life, a mainstream progressive democrat, who occasionally complains that the GOP won't run someone who she disagrees with but can respect, "like Mitt Romney". She gets quite upset when I point out that I have screenshots of her saying that she would "never vote for a dog murderer" and never quite squares that circle.

It doesn't matter, though, because she develops amnesia again a month or two later and says the same thing.

And the people claiming this don't even really like Romney all that much!

I would guess that most of the people complaining are more concerned about who he was running against. And for some of those people, more specifically the race of that person.

  • -27

I would guess that most of the people complaining are more concerned about who he was running against. And for some of those people, more specifically the race of that person.

The resulting comment chains to your statement is yet another example of the problems caused by using words such as "most" and "some" because those words are vague and can be interpreted in so many ways.

At this point, I say you should put a percentage estimate with your confidence on that estimate (e.g. I am 90% confident 5% of Romney voters voted for him because they didn't like Obama being black) and this should reveal what you really think about the matter. And if your estimate is reasonable it should take some heat off your back.

As I said earlier, I am 100% confident that some Romney supporters voted for him out of anti-black animus, and some Obama supporters voted for him out of anti-white animus. The numbers are probably quite small in both instances. But I disagree that that is the source of the heat.

  • -10

You haven't actually done what I suggested.

What percentage of people that voted do you think did with that as their primary motivation to do so? 0.1%, 1%, 5%, 20%, 50%? You can even give a number range, like 1 - 20%. If you can't do this then you're speaking with no conviction in your thought.

You might be thinking why does this matter? Well, it matters because it reveals your motivation for making that statement. If you think 50% of voters did so with racism as their main priority, it tells me that your view of the world is flawed and I should view any argument/statement you make with more scrutiny. If you think it's 0.1% of the voters, then why did you even bring up the point? It's so miniscule that it's irrelevant. You failed to provide any other reason for why people might be against the opposition candidate other than the race factor so it's reasonable to assume that you think racism is a significant enough contributing factor.

When you're providing an explanation for something but that explanation is like the 8th or 9th in the list of reasons that matter and you provide no other reasons, and nobody else has provided the more likely reasons, well it seems to imply you have some kind of agenda or you want to push some kind of perspective. It's poisoning the well, and it's not conducive to a productive conversation. There probably is something interesting and insightful in the point you brought up, after all I've seen some amazing conversations here based on disagreements but the resulting comment chain so far has not been enlightening on anything of substance other than the nature of your character at this moment in time.

The charitable view is that you just some off-hand remark you made without giving it much thought, but the fact that you continue to argue rather than saying it was just some careless wording on your part seems to suggest something else. I get that it's human nature to get defensive, especially when you get piled on like this, but it's not doing you any favors here.

So I'm defending Mitt Romney (God help us and save us) because I'm an anti-black racist? Good to know!

As I said, only some people who are defending Mitt Romney are possibly motivated by anti-black racism. Just as some people who supported Obama were anti-white racists.

You can probably find someone who voted against Obama because "I don't want no nigger president" or something of the sort. But, you know who the only candidate who managed to (briefly)bump Trump out of his frontrunner spot in the 2016 primary was? Ben Carson. You know, the sleepwalking black brainsurgeon. Herman Cain was a grassroots star, too. So was Allen West. Yes these people were crazy, but the tea party loved them. On the other hand there were lots of white liberals and rinos that they hated.

Everything we know about the backlash to the Obama administration points to it being driven by traditional values, tribal dynamics, and the rural-urban divide, not anti-black racism. 'Obama is unamerican' was a sentiment driven by him being a liberal(how many times does Trump say 'Americans vs socialists' or something similar? It's a lot) who grew up in Indonesia and was married to a woman who openly said she'd never been proud of America before.

I would guess that most of the people complaining are more concerned about who he was running against. And for some of those people, more specifically the race of that person.

Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is. Especially when that group is "this forum," please.

I didn’t say anyone is "bad." I was describing their possible motivations, not their moral value as people. For example, Trump was right to say that there were "very fine people on both sides" at Charlottesville; in fact, the vast majority were probably perfectly fine people. Even James Fields's actions were perfectly understandable, even if they were morally wrong. I have known of ]gang members who have done terrible things, but who are not terrible people](https://oaklandvoices.us/tag/lam-vo/page/2/). Whether a person's actions are wrong does not mean that the person is a "bad person," and indeed with some exceptions, claims about the moral worth of individuals are meaningless, at best.

  • -14

I didn’t say anyone is "bad."

I didn't say that you said anyone is bad. I modded you for violating the rule against weakmanning. Since you were apparently confused by the shorthand, here is the rule in its entirety:

There are literally millions of people on either side of every major conflict, and finding that one of them is doing something wrong or thoughtless proves nothing and adds nothing to the conversation. We want to engage with the best ideas on either side of any issue, not the worst.

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.

Avoid posting solely about gaffes, misstatements, or general bad behavior from prominent people. Discussing policy implications is always fine, and concrete criminal or impeachable offenses are also fair game. For example, "Look at Congressman Jones being a jerk" is not OK; "congressman Jones is under suspicion of taking bribes" is fine, as is "congressman Jones's employment law is bad for these reasons . . ."

Sometimes we get good discussion about the consequences of gaffes, misstatements, or general bad behavior; for example, "here's Congressman Jones being a jerk, let's talk about the underlying reason why congressmen do this sort of thing regularly". In most cases, these should stand as valuable posts regardless of whether they refer to Congressman Jones or not.

Links to news stories should generally follow the above rules, although cannot be expected to adhere to them exactly. For instance, a news story which uses an anecdote to introduce a concept is OK (this is a very common framing discussion), a news story which is about tweets from non-prominent people reacting to some event isn't ok.

You broke that rule, and in particular the group under discussion was this forum, which I am particularly protective of, as we have discussed.

Don't.

I didn't say that you said anyone is bad.

Yes, you did: "Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is."

If ascribing motives to people who post here is considered against the rules, fine. But I suggest clarifying that in the rules, because the rule you quote explicitly endorses ascribing motives to the common behavior of groups: "let's talk about the underlying reason why congressmen do this sort of thing regularly".

More comments

It's only weakmanning to show how bad a group is if you assume that Gdanning thinks there is something bad about disliking Obama for his skin color.

I haven't assumed anything. But if you're suggesting that Gdanning should have been modded under "speak plainly" instead, your suggestion has been noted.

... do you have an example person you're highlighting, here? Because that's a pretty serious charge to just be throwing out for The Implication, especially given the previous poster was specifically talking about people on this forum.

It's extremely interesting how your go-to response to any claim you dislike is to demand evidence, or else discard it as invalid, but have no issues with divining the true motives of people you never even debated on the subject.

If you really know what is the point of bringing up attacks on Romney, even if you don't like him, it's to argue against the claim that attacks on someone more populist are justified. Any Republican will always be literally Hitler.

I have evidence, because I have been on here a while, and just as there are some commenters here who clearly have issues with Jews, there are some who have issues with blacks. Not all, nor even a majority, but some.

And, for the record, I demand evidence for claims that I like. I am not a fan of Justice Alito's jurisprudence, and so it would be great to dismiss him as a "partisan hack," but alas I can't, without evidence. Do you form your beliefs in a different manner?

I have evidence, because I have been on here a while, and just as there are some commenters here who clearly have issues with Jews, there are some who have issues with blacks. Not all, nor even a majority, but some.

Normally I wouldn't do it, since I find these sort of requests disingenuous, but since you insist the above is a valid approach, can you please link the evidence that the same people objecting to how Romney was treated are the same people who have expressed a problem with black people?

And, for the record, I demand evidence for claims that I like. I am not a fan of Justice Alito's jurisprudence, and so it would be great to dismiss him as a "partisan hack," but alas I can't, without evidence

That doesn't mean your demands for rigor is in any way balanced.

Do you form your beliefs in a different manner?

Of course, evidence is just one of the factors that shapes my beliefs. I think very few people base their beliefs solely on evidence, nor do I think it's healthy to do so.

  • I think very few people base their beliefs solely on evidence, nor do I think it's healthy to do so.

Perhaps, that is a red herring. The issue is whether it is unhealthy to base belefs on a complete lack of evidence, or on things that purport to be evidence, but are not.

More comments

Part of it is probably that Scott Alexander wrote specifically and eloquently about how unfair the attacks on Mitt Romney were, so their unfairness has become fixed as a fact in our minds more than potentially similar attacks in previous presidential elections.

At the time, I thought some of the enthusiasm for Obama was way more embarrassing than any attacks; tingles up legs and Indigo Star Children Light Workers? 🙄

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