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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24594 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.

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?

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