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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25949 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024

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The Redpilling of the American public intellectual?

Being extremely online, using both X and Substacks and having used them for several years, I cannot not notice a process of redpilling of many US-opinion makers, both blue and grey tribe members.

Elon Musk and Marc Andressen are the first obvious examples, with both of them having directly followed and quoted members of the Dissident Rights (Andressen some days ago tagged Covfefe Anon in a post). Musk in particular speaks often with figures like Indian Bronson, Cremièux and Hanania, all of them supporters of the HBD and "liberal-racist" or "liberal-realist" (still fun that we are talking about an Indian, a Jew and a Palestinian).

Then we have the old New Atheism and IDW intellectuals gang like Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt and others. Their contribution to progressive criticism is not new, but from what I see on X, on the wake of the Harvard controversy, they are talking an harder turn. I cannot confirm because it is only an impression from who they interact with on X.

We have the "Silicon Valley Galaxy", the network of Musk-supporters based in California, with people like Mike Solana (another gay man) exorting the virtues of nationalism and communism-bashing on his wildly popular newsletter.

Nate Silver is a very fun example. A gay Jew who, in the last year, took an hard turn against progressivism because of Covid criticism and the purges that came from it, and now on his substack is attacking the left at every turn, attracting the very entertaining hate of the academic crowd on every post.

Also an individual like Noah Smith, while still completely faithful to the Neoliberal project, began to heavily criticize the progressives, saying that they are way more dangerous than the right.

I am sure that there are other names I forgot.

All of this to say that I see a change of opinion of public figures that, in the year 2016, would have been for sure allies of the Democrats against a Trumpian state. Obviously the change of opinion of twitter-based figures, online characters and academic eretics is not a change of opinion of the PMC at large, but for sure is more that the Dissident Right could have hoped for some years ago.

There is the entire milieu of alt-middle/center online. Musk, Andreessen, Pinker, etc. have been critics of the left for a long time. Pinker especially. But there are new entrants like @cremieuxrecueil , @wil_da_beast630, and @eyeslasho who espouse HBD and gained popularity after being boosted by Musk. This has always been a good niche because you get almost the entirety of the right-wing audience, plus some on the left and middle, but with less risk of being cancelled or de-platformed. Noah and Matt Yglesias, although part of the left, are effective liaisons between the center-right and the centrist/center-left, and are outspoken critics of the far-left. And then there is someone like @RichardHanania who found huge success with an anti-populist, pro-hbd message, which was an underserved niche and the opposite of the economic populism of trumpism that otherwise dominates online.

Between covid bankrupting hard-left claims about uplifting the poor and promoting civil liberties, and the racism of the antisemites bankrupting hard-left claims of opposing racism, I think I have a good understanding of why these intellectuals should, and are, switching sides. It's basically the same reason I did, just much later (for the former, I figured that out in 2020, not 2022. For the latter, Corbyn already revealed this among UK progressives in 2015-2019). I would be most interested in hearing a steelman over why these intellectuals should not switch sides. Has anyone attempted that, or are articles responding to them all just tribalism?

Thing is, they can't make a clean break. There are only two coalitions, and they're going to stick with the left one come hell or high water. Even if it disowns them. And they and their followers will always vote for the Democrat.

And they and their followers will always vote for the Democrat.

Yes, but what that means is changeable. I know the "democrats were the party of slavery" line is a little played out, but they were. And a fairly big shift happened within the party without the party ever having a clean break.

The parties in the US are more like coalitions elsewhere, the coalition building just happens before the election rather than after, as would happen in a parliamentary system. There's a ton of factionalism inside them. Democrats holding these views aren't useless to one who isn't a democrat. It means, eventually, democrats with those views running for office. And, at worst, a whole bunch of extra in-fighting happening before things that non-democrats don't like being voted on.

If you're not a progressive democrat, you should probably like what you've described. Control of a few senators and representatives is probably what's going to prevent really strong legislation you don't like from passing next time the democrats have the trifecta.

Musk in particular speaks often with figures like Indian Bronson, Cremièux and Hanania, all of them supporters of the HBD and "liberal-racist" or "liberal-realist" (still fun that we are talking about an Indian, a Jew and a Palestinian).

In general, Indians, disregarding our general societal conservatism, are very much "race realists".

Hell, someone asked me if I'm an alt for Indian Bronson. Which I am not, for the record.

The only reason this isn't particularly obvious is that there are very few other "races" in India, it's mostly Indians of different ethnicities with the odd African student going to college.

But that stance does carry over when we move to the West, Indians can have quite negative opinions of other races, especially blacks, though the liberalised UMC 2nd gens have that covered up their integration into the Social Justice memeplex. Certainly in the women raised that way, less so the men.

My relatives in the UK always told me to keep an eye out for congregations of black youths, and to keep my phone in my pocket if I spotted them.

We do however, have sincere appreciation for the local Whites, and other "Model Minorities" like the Asians, even if Hispanics are a bit iffy they're not unbearably so.

The only reason this isn't particularly obvious is that there are very few other "races" in India, it's mostly Indians of different ethnicities with the odd African student going to college.

I thought it was due to the scheduled caste/affirmative action in India being so very strong that the majority of Indians who end up in the West have a bone to pick with the concept of it.

I wish.

A disproportionate number of immigrants to the West (especially the US) are upper caste, so that's certainly one of the reasons they're unhappy with things, let alone when they find out that being (South) Asian means they're going to be discriminated against again in the States, when it comes to education at least (and woe upon anyone who comes between an Indian and his kid's education).

But Indians, in India, are quite prone to casual racism, especially against Blacks, East Asians, or the North-Eastern citizens of India who look more Nepali/Bhutanese/Thai than they do what you typically think of as "Indian". I will note that by "racist" I mean muttered comments, crude comparisons or questionable/insensitive wording. Africans or African-Americans get the worst of it, though the Indians in the US are usually savvy enough to keep their opinions shared solely within their cliques.

Honestly from having a close friend/old housemate who's very high caste Indian back in the motherland (Father a very high ranking Air Force figure, grandfather owned a ton of stuff), it was always hilarious listening to complaints about bias or stratified society in context of what their family had gotten up to.

As I've said before, I'm not upper class. In fact my descent from my father's side makes me just above the cutoff for explicit AA as extended to the lower castes.

If that has ever advantaged me, I haven't noticed, and it has glaringly disadvantaged me when it came to the AA quotas for higher education, it's at something ridiculous like 66% now, maybe 80%.

Hell, I didn't even know my caste till a biology teacher asked me in high school, because she wanted to pray at a temple for her students and that was somehow relevant. Some on /r/India would claim that's a sign of privilege, but fuck them.

It might be different in the military, which still is a bit of an Old Boy's club, but in general India is quite meritocratic. I am modestly confident that the success of the upper castes stems more from HBD reasons than the system being stacked in their favor, whereas it explicitly is for the lower ones and they're still not closing the gap.

The outcome of the chaos of the 70s and the 80s liberalization under Reagan, Thatcher etc was that the PMC essentially established a happy ‘equilibrium’ of free markets, higher-than-before inequality, well paid white collar jobs, cheap blue collar labor, high levels of outsourcing and offshoring for non-credentialed labor, cheap borrowing and rising asset prices (benefiting above all homeowners and those with equity portfolios).

The problem is that a lot of ‘woke’ does directly destabilize that lifestyle. The cities into which the PMC poured as crime rates fell in the 90s become once again dangerous and high-crime shitholes, extreme DEI stuff threatens them at work, the mob’s demands eventually become less and less easy to placate. Most dangerously of all, the era of comfortable political ‘moderates’ who do nothing to upset the status quo too much appears likely to draw to a close, presaging an unpalatable choice between far left (economic defeat) and far right (cultural defeat).

Far better, in such an environment, to make a few concessions. Of course, some would say that was Moldbug’s game all along.

I don't see how woke meaningfully threatens that equilibrium. More well-paid white collar jobs in the form of DEI officials. Cheap blue collar labour from mass immigration. To the extent that they have a position on the issue, they seem to not mind firing up the money printers and not doing anything to counter it with interest rates, so cheap borrowing and rising asset prices.

More well-paid white collar jobs in the form of DEI officials.

This only kicks the can down the road, though. Whites can squeeze out one extra generation of PMC jobbing by jobbing specifically as agitators for their own replacement, but when their children come up against a hiring agent thoroughly steeped in the parents' propaganda, there'll be no cushy jobs for John Jr.

their children

Well, they’re below replacement rate on that, too. Something about their parents poisoning the well for the future and then peace-ing out is their standard excuse for not doing so; assuming they’re correct about that, well, apple didn’t fall far from the tree in those cases.

The cities into which the PMC poured

From where? The suburbs? Small towns? Are you referring to all the normally childless hipsters and other white PMC who usually move into gentrifying urban areas?

The true blue progressives- not their moderate hangers on, not the liberals, but the hardcore DSA people- are like actually crazy. That’s been apparent for a while now, but what changed was 1) it became apparent that their actually-crazy ideas have real world consequences 2) the general public doesn’t consistently distinguish moderate from hardcore progressives 3) hardcore progressives won’t moderate. Now could I have told you that soft-on-crime DA’s were a terrible idea? Yes. I could have. But it seems like the mainstream liberal consensus was legitimately that it would blow over before there were any serious consequences.

Gaza is probably the other elephant in the room. Whether you support Israel or not they’re patently not carrying out a genocide, support for Israel is a high-salience issue dividing the hardcore progressives from everyone else, and shenanigans like blocking highways are a pretty big deal that they’ve been allowed to get away with for a while on other issues.

The true blue progressives- not their moderate hangers on, not the liberals, but the hardcore DSA people- are like actually crazy.

This is hyperbole about your outgroup; DSA ideology might be mistaken or even disastrous, but I don't think you're arguing that it's a mental illness, so claiming it's "like actually crazy" just adds heat without light. I get the general thrust of your argument and think it's valuable, but so is keeping things civil. Turn it down a notch. ...Checking your record, I see a pretty even mix of AAQCs and warnings. My advice would be to put a bit more thought into how you come across to your opposites in the future.

Whether you support Israel or not they’re patently not carrying out a genocide

Israel definitely wants to genocide Gaza and the West Bank

For such an obviously contentious and inflammatory claim, you really need to provide more argument than simply asserting it.

That's an obvious lie, neither Israel (as an official policy goes) wants it nor it's doing it. With overwhelming power superiority Israel has, if they wanted to massacre a million people in Gaza, or West Bank, that would have already happened. There's literally nothing that could prevent Israel from doing that, militarily. But Israel does not want to do it, and didn't.

And please, spare me out-of-context quotes from early 90-s where some Israeli politician said something like "I'd be happy if all Palestinians went to hell". It's not policy, and if you think it has anything to do with the official policy, you are not qualified to have any opinion on any Middle East policy at all.

With overwhelming power superiority Israel has, if they wanted to massacre a million people in Gaza, or West Bank, that would have already happened.

Israel isn't going full auschwitz solely, by what I can see, because of goy morality and power. Without that all non-Jews would be either killed or cleansed into outside borders - whichever is more pragmatic. Any honest assessment of sympathy for goy/Palestinian civilian life in the greater Jewish/Israeli public results in basically nothing. They want these people gone and have zero interest in cohabitation. But even with Jewish subversion of the American government, a hostile USA and/or "West" would be an apocalyptic disaster. So PR still matters. Getting the South Africa treatment alone (even though they are objectively worse) would be catastrophic. If they only had nuclear arms alone to make an argument against Turkey curb stomping them, or even worse, a total unified middle east, it could be all over. Right now is a balancing game in how far they can go without critical consequences, with a heavy experimental lean towards killing as many men, women, and children as possible, while maximizing destabilization.

Now personally, I find the word "genocide" tiresome. It's overly political (in a bad way) and basically amounts to a modern version of what excommunication was in the middle ages. With all the subsequent pointless theology and dishonest motivated reasoning that comes with such.

That said, if we call the Armenian Genocide a genocide I don't see what is so different about Gaza. Only time and, again, the morality/power of the non-Jewish side of the USA is preventing it from even greater realization of the logical conclusion of their deliberate actions. Will they take responisbitly for a food/disease crisis they have created? Will they allow the rebuilding of hospitals? And if they drag their feet to x degree exactly how many statistical deaths will that result in? Time, and power politics within the USA will tell.

Israel isn't going full auschwitz solely

That's a libelous statement by itself - Israel is not going not only "full auschwitz", but neither 1% or 0.001% of it. There are no camps designed for massacring any Arab population, there are no official program of eliminating Arab population, there is nothing of the sort. There is a war, truly, and a war among dense built area where the other side doesn't bother with conventional things like uniforms or military identification (a war crime by itself, but Hamas is committing every war crime in a book, none excluded, so of course they do this too) and using schools, mosques and hospitals as military outposts - of course it will bring some casualities, and given that, as I mentioned, the only figures are coming from Hamas, and they don't bother with formalities, everybody except senior leaders which are officially known as Hamas are called "civilians". Hamas membership is not exclusive - it's like being a communist. You can be a doctor and a communist, a journalist and a communist, a truck driver and a communist. Only with Hamas, you can be a doctor in the morning and keep Israeli hostages in the evening. You can be a "journalist" in the morning and a drone operator in the afternoon. You can be a farmer and one of you farms would host rocket launchers shelling Ashdod and Tel-Aviv. That's all "civilian" population and that's what the IDF is dealing with now.

Any honest assessment of sympathy for goy/Palestinian civilian life in the greater Jewish/Israeli public results in basically nothing.

If by "honest" you mean "completely false and libelous". Nothing can be further from the truth - a lot of people in Israeli society are bothered with Palestinians, and presenting Jews as some kind of genetics-obsessed community that treats everybody with wrong genes below animals (there's an active animal rights community in Israel too) is an utter bullshit. The level of blood libel bullshit. You obviously know absolutely nothing about Israeli society and what the dominating opinions there are. Yes, Israel population supports war with Hamas. No, nobody in Israel talks in the terms you are implying.

That said, if we call the Armenian Genocide a genocide I don't see what is so different about Gaza.

Everything. Armenians did not attack Turks and did not gruesomely rape and murder thousands of them, Hamas did. Turks did put as their goal destroying Armenian population, Israel does not. Pretty much every aspect of what is happening in Gaza, bar none, is different.

But even with Jewish subversion of the American government

Oh, you are one of those people....Basically, everything you ascribe to the evil Jews, you'd see in a mirror - it's you who are obsessed with racist genetics and view everything through the lens of the ethnic conflict. And of course, you are possessed with irrational, but flaming hate of Jews. I am sorry I just noticed it now. I am done spending time on you.

Please be proactive when making an inflammatory claim. That means providing stronger evidence.

with a heavy experimental lean towards killing as many men, women, and children as possible

Except Israel hasn’t been doing that- their civilian deaths have been a lot more like the USA’s than Russia’s.

Their goal is to get all Palestinians to leave to other countries they have no interest in a 2 state solution (settlements etc) and are trying to displace them in their own territories. Israel is a genocidal project by definition the only reason they haven't genocided them is because they can't.

That is an obvious lie, Israel spent a lot of effort, lives and diplomacy to implement a separation solution. There would be absolutely no reason to do all that - from Oslo agreement to Gaza evacuation to creating Palestinian Authority to other measures - if Israel indeed wanted to eliminate Palestinian presence. All these measures - which constitute Israeli policies for three decades now - are completely contrary to that goal. You basically ignoring everything that actually happened in service of your insane hatred.

Israel is a genocidal project by definition

The definition of Israel is a state of Jewish people. There's absolutely nothing "genocidal" in it, you lie again.

I have no doubt that the right Israeli election cycle could deliver a government that would just slaughter the Palestinians if they thought they could get away with it. Really I won’t even dispute that the likud under Netanyahu would if he thought he could get away with it, exterminate the Palestinians.

But the fact of the matter is they can’t get away with it, they’re not doing it, and they’re not about to do it. Even the ‘deport all the Gazans to Congo’(as if Congo needed more violent savages) isn’t genocide, except possibly on whatever unfortunates they side against in Congo.

They could send them to Uganda so we could come full circle.

Whether you support Israel or not they’re patently not carrying out a genocide

Funny, when I first read this I misread it as "they're patently carrying out a genocide" and I was very surprised to see someone expressing an opinion like that here. I only noticed my mistake now.

Is it surprising? The only thing that would stop me from openly expressing an opinion like that is that I actually have to go there for professional reasons sometimes (and even more so to its occasionally protective big brother), and I would like to not leave anything on my digital record that could be caught by a very crude crawler after some unlucky accident correlating me to my Motte account and cause me problems at the border.

(Being catchable by a more sophisticated crawler is less concerning because at that point so many people would get caught that a "reject them all" policy may not be sustainable.)

The real question imo is whether the "centrists" will vote for the GOP or if they will still continue to give the progressives they disagree with more power. I'd be a bit surprised if any of them aside from Musk ended up doing so.

Depends on who the GOP nominates.

California used to have enough of this contingent to elect Arnold even when it went +20 for Obama.

I'm sure Arnold isn't acceptable to the GOP base nationally (nor should he be, he was a made-for-CA-only guy) but it's hard to dispute that whether or not moderates vote GOP depends heavily on the kind of candidates that party fields.

DeSantis is probably the most "anti-DEI" candidate and he faced a huge amount of backlash and got into a weird tiff with Disney for no reason (or cause Bob Iger wanted it)

Things may just be more polarized.

It's a question of threat assessment. You can either give the DSA-types more power, or you can give creationists and BAP/lots-of-posters-on-this-forum-style explicitly ant-meritocratic racists power.

It's not at all clear that choosing the side with DSA-types is more damaging. In the last 8 years in the US, the Democratic party in particular has done a much better job of denouncing its extremists. Just look at the most prominent recent examples: if you look at NT Times articles/their comment sections, you can see that the mainstream left's reaction to pro-Hamas protesters or the whole Claudine Gay affair has been pretty condemnatory.

Trying to make the same check on the right for strict abortion restrictions, someone like Stephen Miller being put in charge of immigration policy, etc does not present a compelling case to to change your vote. You can even make a very unflattering comparison by just reading this forum for a bit and seeing how much support explicitly anti-meritocratic and anti-individualistic racism has in even the more intellectual part of the right.

Just look at the most prominent recent examples: if you look at NT Times articles/their comment sections, you can see that the mainstream left's reaction to pro-Hamas protesters or the whole Claudine Gay affair

I think your examples of "the left policing their own" are not examples of that at all. Both of these are better understood as examples of the Israeli lobby policing US speech, not as examples of the mainstream left policing its own extremists.

Mapping the Palestine question as a typical intra-left issue and then generalising it to infer that the mainstream left is broadly reining in the extremists is a bad model. More convincing would be some prominent examples of BLM types or authoritarian covid-safetyists or mass immigrant activists, getting overruled by moderates. But I don't think you're gonna find 'em.

What's wrong with giving creationists more power? Defending evolution does not seem to be very popular. The top post is about American public intellectual slightly adjusting toward 'HBD' which is in essence the belief that human evolution does not stop at the neck. The Dr Watson position:

he's "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours--whereas all the testing says not really." He went on, reports the newspaper, to say that "people who have to deal with black employees find...it is not true" that all humans are equal.

Another popular one from a previously resigned Harvard President :

"even small differences in the standard deviation [between genders] will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out [from the mean]". Summers referenced research that implied differences between the standard deviations of males and females in the top 5% of twelfth graders under various tests. He then went on to argue that, if this research were to be accepted, then "whatever the set of attributes ... that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley ... are probably different in their standard deviations as well".

Which political movement is defending these science-based, evolution-grounded positions?

Not to mention the contemporary dualist belief that some people's souls get mismatched to the wrong body and hormones. Nobody ever explains who creates these souls and how this works from an evolutionary point-of-view, but this is apparently the Science.

What's wrong with giving creationists more power?

That we are in 2024, not 2004 and this Dubya era cause of teaching creation science/intelligent design is as defeated as any political cause can be? Read wish lists of most radical conservative wishful thinking, you will not find there any notice of this thing.

And as for BAP - he is troll and shitposter, who does not have any actual political demands and proposals here and now (what could these be? compulsory fitness training to make the nation more muscular? this would be massively unpopular, most of all among the conservative base).

Real reason why even moderate centrist people who hate wokeness and DSA types and who would appreciate less immigrants and more law and order balk at voting R is, outside of raw classist disgust of rednecks and their unsightly pickup trucks, in most of the cases, abortion. They fear giving right-to-lifers-from-conception even morsel of more power.

That we are in 2024, not 2004 and this Dubya era cause of teaching creation science/intelligent design is as defeated as any political cause can be?

Well we were talking about hypothetically picking between 'DSA and creationists and BAP/lots-of-posters-on-this-forum-style explicitly anti-meritocratic racists'.

I don't see racists as anti-meritocratic, as per the top post, modern racist intellectuals are a pretty diverse bunch :

Indian Bronson, Cremièux and Hanania, all of them supporters of the HBD and "liberal-racist" or "liberal-realist" (still fun that we are talking about an Indian, a Jew and a Palestinian).

Whoever can hack it will find a spot in the racist coalition, no matter where they come from.

abortion. They fear giving right-to-lifers-from-conception even morsel of more power.

Why is killing their own child so central to some people's life? Especially funny in light of recent events. Whether we're talking about beheaded babies or bombed hospitals, a thousand voices will raise in indignation and condemnation. Not to mention the hysteria around people that dared to expose others to their breath.

But the mere suggestion that perhaps one should avoid certain practices instead of murdering their own child. Beyond the pale.

It's not at all clear that choosing the side with DSA-types is more damaging. In the last 8 years in the US, the Democratic party in particular has done a much better job of denouncing its extremists.

The Democratic Party, absolutely. The few remaining normie Democrats and the Black Church Lady power base rigged the game in favor of boring normie Biden, and managed to keep the PMC libs mostly out of power.

The old Democratic Party is losing control though.

It's not at all clear that choosing the side with DSA-types is more damaging. [...] You can even make a very unflattering comparison by just reading this forum for a bit and seeing how much support explicitly anti-meritocratic and anti-individualistic racism has in even the more intellectual part of the right.

As a meritocratic individualist, I completely disagree. The anti-meritocratic hereditarians here might hate mi abuela, but they still treat me with respect and state their points clearly. Dealing with DSA-types has been an exercise in frustration - try to argue with them fairly and they posture, form social alliances using whisper networks, make emotional appeals, play status games, etc.

I know I will be passed over for promotion due to my race. This isn't due to white nationalists, it's due to DSA-types.

There are people in the HR department who would gladly fire me. This isn't due to white nationalists, it's due to DSA-types.

My ability to earn a paycheck is affected by PMC white liberals in a way that it isn't by white nationalists.

My ability to earn a paycheck is affected by PMC white liberals in a way that it isn't by white nationalists.

This is a very strong counterpoint, and I definitely understand that my point here is not going to be very compelling to the stereotypical Motte user working at a Bay Area Tech company where they are only exposed to the excesses on the left.

Just beware of the free speech example here. I'm going to make an assumption that you haven't lived in parts of the country where the bias goes the other way and dealt with their orthogonal set of excesses that are even worse (though I would be very interested if that assumption is wrong).

As a meritocratic individualist, I completely disagree. The anti-meritocratic hereditarians here might hate mi abuela, but they still treat me with respect and state their points clearly. Dealing with DSA-types has been an exercise in frustration - try to argue with them fairly and they posture, form social alliances using whisper networks, make emotional appeals, play status games, etc.

I'm very surprised by this. I've spent significant time in some of the most infamous universities in the country and I've had a very, very different experience. As long as you can play an elaborate game of taboo---never explicitly saying words like "meritocracy" and instead directly appealing to the core values of MLK-style egalitarianism, I've found those on the left extremely pleasant and rational. I can very easily argue about how standardized tests are good, Harvard's affirmative action policy was bad, Claudine Gay was incompetent, etc. It very much felt like talking with people who had all the right values but were just very confused on some correctable factual points.

Conversely, trying to discuss anything with right, for example on this forum, generally means dealing with many unjustified personal attacks from people very explicitly not on board with individualism and meritocracy. Discussing with the right is useful to do to keep my perspective broad enough, but it is far, far more unpleasant.

  • -10

Just beware of the free speech example here. I'm going to make an assumption that you haven't lived in parts of the country where the bias goes the other way and dealt with their orthogonal set of excesses that are even worse (though I would be very interested if that assumption is wrong).

I live in a red state, and I work for an enormous faceless company. We have our HR zampolits imported from the mothership.

I've seen red state "censorship", which usually involves a governor preventing some state employees from saying something. This is an entirely different scale of problem compared to all the major tech companies conspiring to censor the Hunter Biden laptop, which likely caused the election to flip. This is an entirely different scale from the HR departments of all major corporations making sure everything you say is AWFL-approved. or you get fired.

Perhaps you don't remember 2020. I do. I remember that you could set a building on fire and that was free speech, but if you said the virus came from a lab that was violence and you got fired. I remember the outdoor mask mandates, the tech companies conspiring to get their candidate elected, and DEI struggle sessions. Like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, I got "redpilled" as the cool kids say.

The DSA types (but not the Democratic Party, I stress), are a direct threat to my ability keep my job, my children's ability to get an education and get a job, and my ability to speak and live freely.

The right? Sometimes they tweet stupid stuff.

I'll care about them when they run the HR departments, the university admissions, and the other gatekeepers of middle-class life. I'll care about them when they set my downtown on fire.

I'm very surprised by this. I've spent significant time in some of the most infamous universities in the country and I've had a very, very different experience. As long as you can play an elaborate game of taboo---never explicitly saying words like "meritocracy" and instead directly appealing to the core values of MLK-style egalitarianism, I've found those on the left extremely pleasant and rational. I can very easily argue about how standardized tests are good, Harvard's affirmative action policy was bad, Claudine Gay was incompetent, etc. It very much felt like talking with people who had all the right values but were just very confused on some correctable factual points.

Perhaps you were around the the last few techbro-adjacent normies, and even then you had to play elaborate taboo games.

Not my experience at all, but the DSA-types I (used to) have in my social circle tend to be young, white, female, and single - usually girlfriends/sisters/etc. of my friends. They're shrill, unreasonable, and emotional, and like everyone else I avoid them for my own safety and the safety of my family. Ironically for the white supremacists here, the wokest people I know are all white, and the most reasonable Democrats I know are your usual "Normie Middle Class Black Guy" you find in this part of the country. Hell, I'm technically "LatinX" (ugh) and before 2020 I was a Normie Democrat myself.

I was told "it's just a few kids in college", "it's just the HR department keeping the lawsuits away", and then 2020 happened and we let HR, the health bureaucracy, and universities run the country for a bit, and like everyone else, I got redpilled.

Just beware of the free speech example here. I'm going to make an assumption that you haven't lived in parts of the country where the bias goes the other way and dealt with their orthogonal set of excesses that are even worse (though I would be very interested if that assumption is wrong).

Name these orthogonal excesses and the parts of the country that are prone to them.

It's very clear siding with the DSA types is more damaging. Precisely because they control most of the power already. The mainstream left has been ignoring the blatant anti-semitism on their side for years because they pretend Zionist makes it all better. As if the GOP would proudly stand by the KKK if the KKK just said they wanted to kill all negroes rather than black people. Trump got party-wide condemnation for having Kanye in his house compared to Dems not even being able to condemn the squad. To say nothing of them championing the rot of higher education because it provides "experts" who they can use to push their authoritarianism ever further. You'll note Claudine Gay was not fired. She was defended by every power structure in academia even after she resigned. Putting somebody like Stephen Miller in charge of immigration means the entrenched bureaucracy might get some pushback in the other direction finally. And considering the anti-merit/anti-individual Right has 0 power, compared to the same on the Left which is in place nearly everywhere and backed by the power of the law, I absolutely would say it is safer to side the the Right there even if I don't agree with them.

It's very clear siding with the DSA types is more damaging. Precisely because they control most of the power already

This is an interesting consideration. However, I think it presupposes that the badness caused by extremists on the left is somehow balanced and counteracted by badness caused by extremists on the right.

I think it's more accurate that the badness on both sides is orthogonal so this sort of "we need to push the unbalanced scales the other way" logic doesn't quite apply. The example of free speech seems instructive: there was a general perception around here that the left having too much power caused a lot of unjustified censorship of the usual topics. However, while shifting power towards the right did sort of fix this, this was only at the cost of even more extreme censorship of completely different topics (evolution, gay relationships, etc.)

Unfortunately, one side's extremists aren't going to save you from the other's---the only way out is to get both sides to police theirs effectively.

Uh, there hasn’t been censorship of evolution or gay relationships.

Something about 'Ron's book ban'.

This morning I read an article about a Florida school district removing some dictionaries because they included definitions on the word 'gay'. Wether you think this is a sincere attempt to avoid litigation or an insincere stunt, I leave to the audience.

You can either give the DSA-types more power, or you can give creationists and BAP/lots-of-posters-on-this-forum-style explicitly ant-meritocratic racists power.

What about HBD liberals? There are a lot of people somewhere in between Scott Alexander, Steven Pinker, Charles Murray, (much closer to the edge) Steve Sailer, etc. Or like Cremieux. The first three aren't at all anti-meritocratic racists. You could argue (but it's a bit tortured, and there are deeper causes for far-right growth imo) that the wokes disempowering people like that enables the far-right to grow.

It's a question of threat assessment. You can either give the DSA-types more power, or you can give creationists and BAP/lots-of-posters-on-this-forum-style explicitly ant-meritocratic racists power.

It's not at all clear that choosing the side with DSA-types is more damaging.

I agree it's not at all clear, but I also think it's quite clear that the side with the DSA-types is already the much bigger threat, because that's the side that has proven to be willing and capable of using metaphorical ICBMs, while the BAP-side seems to be struggling with understanding what wooden spears are. I think both would do bad things if given the power, and the latter is far worse than the former, but we'd need to give quite a bit more power to the latter before the it became a threat approaching the former.

You just have different standards for Democrats and Republicans. The Democrats tried to hand out debt relief to farmers but white farmers were excluded. It wouldn't even be conceivable for the Republicans to create a relief program that explicitly excludes blacks. But when Democrats do it it's just business as usual and not considered to be extreme.

https://www.fsa.usda.gov/state-offices/California/news-releases/2021/in-historic-move-usda-to-begin-loan-payments-to-socially-disadvantaged-borrowers-under-american-rescue-plan-act-section-1005_rel001

It took decades for Left Inc to finally 'police its own' and issue denunciations when some of them unapologetically stated they had no issue with the externination of Jews - despite this strain of antisemitism being loud and obvious to anybody paying attention and who wasn't wrapped up in the coalition. And this just so happens to coincide with wealthy donors shutting their purses. Sure.

Ditto for the insistence that elite higher education was essentually unassailable, had no duty to accountability or obligation to explain itself to the plebs, and only caved when the extent of Ms Gay's fraudulence became too much to ignore - after bravely standing to her defense with a super-serious official Harvard letter and several weeks of articles accusing her critics of being anti-black.

Compared to the reflexive denunciation ritual every Republican or conservative has to partake in when somebody points to a Nazi and accusingly asks "DO YOU HAVE A COMMENT ON THIS?". Nope. You don't get to casually claim superiority on that front. Perhaps you are saddened that you see less of those denunciations 'over the last 8 years' than before, but it's obvious to me that this fruit doesn't have much juice left to squeeze, and that is entirely your fault.

EDIT: I don't know how I could have written that bit on Claudine Gay and completely whiff on the most odious part of her case: that her fraudulence went uninvestigated, unpunished, and was generally rewarded due to political interests in an institution that is supposed to value academic excellence (ha ha, I know, at least 'on paper'). Gay isnt a bad actor operating all on her own. She gets to her position with the aid of a corrupt system that will crow about their prestige and integrity every day of the year, right before they pivot to "actually, this is pretty normal, and uhh... we don't really need that kind of pedigree for something as boring and unserious as college president". And you consider her an 'extremist'? She's very normal to me, and my only surprise (which isn't, really) is that some Dems are belatedly unhappy with or embarrassed by a creature that is their own making.

Do you have a right-wing closet Nazi analogue you'd like me to condemn? Somebody who isn't a Substack writer, or a third-rate grifter on a platform thats probably throttled to hell and back if it hasn't been outright banned from the Play/Apple store?

It took decades for Left Inc to finally 'police its own' and issue denunciations when some of them unapologetically stated they had no issue with the externination of Jews - despite this strain of antisemitism being loud and obvious to anybody paying attention and who wasn't wrapped up in the coalition.

It has never been loud and obvious to me in all my years of paying attention to politics. I have seen many far-left calls to destroy Israel, sure. But not to destroy Jews as an ethnic group. I mean, I often spend time in far-right online spaces where people call to destroy Jews as an ethnic group and I do not recall having ever seen anything similar in far-left spaces. Maybe there were coded calls that I missed, but in any case nothing loud and obvious.

Please avoid personal antagonism. If you’re going to call people liars, you need to be very careful about bringing the receipts.

Fair, and I should have known better.

I never know what the etiquette is for editing out sections of prior posts. Obviously, I said what I said and I meant it. And even though I shouldn't have, deleting it afterwards feels like a cover-up.

I'll take it out since it's not like it was entwined with any brilliant insights.

I would be content with you using strikethroughs, and then acknowledging your error.

In the last 8 years in the US, the Democratic party in particular has done a much better job of denouncing its extremists.

This is an incredibly risible claim. In 2020, during a period of mass rioting and looting, the Vice Presidential candidate for the Democratic Party used her social media platform to raise money for bail for the protestors. Black Lives Matter, an explicitly Marxist police abolitionist organization, is inextricably enmeshed with the funding apparatus of the Democratic Party. The Biden administration is overseeing the largest influx of unfettered immigration to this country in over a century - something infinitely more “extreme” and widely unpopular than anything you can credibly accuse Republican “extremists” of supporting.

In 2020, during a period of mass rioting and looting.....

It's a matter of comparison---the most direct analogue is the literal president of the US encouraging an attempted violent overthrow of the legislative branch.

Black Lives Matter, an explicitly Marxist police abolitionist organization

The analogue here is explicitly hereditarian and anti-meritocratic authors like Moldbug/BAP/some parts of the Claremont Institute being inextricably enmeshed in the intellectual foundations of the modern right.

The Biden administration is overseeing the largest influx of unfettered immigration to this country in over a century

This is also not necessarily so objectionable to people who value meritocracy over hereditarianism like most of the "centrist" authors in the original post. Skilled immigration is definitely not---even the most ostensibly right-wing, Elon Musk, supports dramatically increasing skilled immigration. Increased illegal immigration is getting huge amounts of pushback from the mainstream left and the numbers for that are always more about economic conditions than actual policy.

This is an incredibly risible claim

From your postings here, you are quite hereditarian and anti-meritocratic. Of course the comparison I'm making would therefore feel risible. From the point of view of the listed authors, who have much more mainstream American values, it makes a lot more sense.

  • -15

Having skimmed the Colorado ballot decision, it looks like the strongest evidence on offer of Trump encouraging violence is using the word “fight.”

If that’s not an isolated demand for rigor, I don’t know what is. Is there a single federal politician who hasn’t promised to fight or encouraged supporters to fight?

The Colorado court basically replaced the Brandenburg test with a new "bad actor" test where if you've used violent language and/or encouraged violence before (e.g. wanting to shoot looters), your words can be interpreted as being directed towards inciting imminent violent action even if they're entirely milquetoast and some other similarly-situated person could say the same words and received the full protection of the First Amendment.

It's a matter of comparison---the most direct analogue is the literal president of the US encouraging an attempted violent overthrow of the >legislative branch.

Didn't the Speaker of the House say there should be "uprisings all over." That means when a police station in Fort Green Brooklyn was overrun by a mob, and their vehicles torched with molotovs, it was a violent overthrow of the normal functioning of the judicial branch.

I just think leftists only apply this histrionic analysis in service of their own political goals, you are a great example.

Noah Smith has been a figure so repellent ideologically to the right, and hostile to it, that I am actually curious about what he said.

So, there are figures that can be friendlier to the right. But as for some left wingers who are rather prejudiced towards right wing associated groups and see their rights as illegitimate, and identify more with groups associated with the left, and support mass migration and tend to see opposition to them as immoral it would be a repeated mistake from the past to put too many hopes on them.

The generally reasonable dissident right figure Auron Macyntire is correct about liberals. That a subset of them when other progressives are unwelcoming, or they disagree on their pet issues like say Israel, they turn to the right but they don't think they have done anything wrong. They want to run the right in accordance to their own values while looking down on right wingers. And of course they start gatekeeping and deplatforming actual right wingers and preferring people like them.

Similarly we get heterodox academies of Jonathan Haidt whining about intolerance of heterodoxy, while their organization and groups are made almost exclusively by liberals. Or forums like motte, which as far as I am aware, all moderators are liberals, but is supposed to be a neutral forum, and the ideology of those who moderate is unrepresentative of the posters.

We also see these figures try to do the same with "centrism" and define themselves as the only moderates and centrists and everyone who disagrees with them as an extremist. Even though in practice their social views, or views on immigration, or on how much they sympathize with various identity groups are far left. Even if some other progressive extremists are further left than them. If you don't define what is centrist by the last couple of years, and by what leftists who run media define as centrist and moderate and what they define as far right. Any longer term outlook realizes that actually the dissident right, part of what they are pushing were more pervasive and dominant in the past, and we have had a radicalization in the recent past. It would be a welcome development for that to be corrected. Moreover, we should also care about how some trends in politics that have been in influence for a couple of decades have evolved today, and their observable effects.

Elon Musk and Mark Andersen although not dissident rightists do seem to have been influenced more so, or share an agreement with several issues promoted by the dissident right that are valid.

In general, I like the more moderate figures of the actual right, and dissident right like Auron Macyntire, while for the general faction, I think they are pushing in the right direction and society is too lopsided in a left wing and antiwhite direction, but I don't agree with the ends that some dissident rightists wish but have a more moderate preference. Meaning if the more extreme dissident rightists were the dominant part of society I would dislike them, however I do find the more moderate figures to be more moderate than the liberals and Ben Shapiro types too. And that the liberals are the dominant faction makes it quite wrongheaded to not prioritise them. As for the neocons, there isn't really that substantial difference with many liberals and the sweet spot of where to be on such issues is not attained by neocons. Not by a long shot.

I do think I have been influenced too by some of the figures of the dissident right and their views, and seeing that they got things correct.

But I was also influenced by the past religious right now, in a way I wasn't in the past. Frankly, it was mainly the liberals as a group, and their key politicians and political organizations and how far they have pushed and how that they behaved that played that role. And when talking about liberals a key part of the issue are how beholden and key part of it are various identitarian extreme lobbies of the progressive stack alliance of intersectional identities.

The right wingers who have been warning and being cautious and were defamed as being uncharitable, and unfair, were in fact correct. Part of that correctness relates to the skepticism towards liberals/progressives who are willing to sometimes criticize progressives. Of which even Obama has done so, in his quote about how the world is messy, but this doesn't change that Obama's influence lies after and before such statements. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/31/774918215/obama-says-democrats-dont-always-need-to-be-politically-woke

As president he helped push things in the woke direction. He certainly is supportive of the even more extreme Biden administration. And quite recently played a key role in a film with antiwhite racist rhetoric. https://www.foxnews.com/media/obama-produces-first-fiction-movie-netflix-gave-extensive-notes-director-cyberattack-plot

Biden's and that general faction's extreme policies, of open borders, of authoritarian persecution of political opposition, on purging non woke, or following the progressive supremacist party line, are in fact alienating people. For that to count as winning, we should have to see a lot more than that and policy changes as a result of opposing faction/coalition exercising power. And of course, we shouldn't actually care too much about people who are part of Biden's faction but make some limited criticisms. It would be detrimental actually, in that it disincentivize caring about an actual opposition. The right has had a lot more rhetoric about winning, when it hasn't been winning, while the left pretending they are the underdogs, where they aren't, hasn't been detrimental to them. So, we should be realistic.

Or forums like motte, which as far as I am aware, all moderators are liberal

I'm certainly not a liberal of any variety.

Wait, you are a moderator too?

Among the new individuals, I noticed netstack, selfmadehuman and another individual which is liberal. I would have to update then. So at this point what is the ratio of non liberals, to liberals? Are you comfortable being so outnumbered, that the process has been fair and balanced?

Naraburns is another case that is a little interesting as he opposes liberals on some issues but self identifies IIRC as liberal, and supports mass migration for western countries while opposing it for Israel. Is there also anyone who opposes zionism among the moderators and sympathizes more with the Palestinians than Israel?

I wouldn't say you aren't a liberal on ethnicity however. My impression is that you seem to oppose ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them, but oppose the liberal tribe for supporting doing this for their own preferred groups. So you are more consistent than them on that, but still take an ideologically more left wing perspective. Even if the actual left, especially the modern left has as key part of its dna applying it inconsistently.

Of course, my own perspective that it is legitimate for ethnic groups to identify with their own group (well not always, immigrants should be in limited numbers and identify more with the interests of the natives than if they lived in their own separate homeland), and to pursue their well being and legitimate interests and rights but do so in a manner that is reciprocoal with the legitimate rights of others. Which is affected by others behavior of course. To be fair this perspective also has existed among parts of the historical left, being a pervasive perspective in general. But the left wing faction that opposes this, and especially opposes it in a motte and bailey manner against their ethnic outgroups has been the most influential in pushing things in its direction. Plus my perspective has also existed and exists even more so outside the left.

Naraburns is another case that is a little interesting as he opposes liberals on some issues but self identifies IIRC as liberal, and supports mass migration for western countries while opposing it for Israel. Is there also anyone who opposes zionism among the moderators and sympathizes more with the Palestinians than Israel?

Er... I'm "liberal" in the classical sense, most Americans would not identify me as "a liberal" but maybe sometimes as "a libertarian." Even then I am a little too comfortable with government action for the tastes of partisan Libertarians. My progressive friends tend to think I'm too conservative and my conservative friends tend to think I'm too progressive so I don't think it would be wrong to call me a centrist, even though nobody ever does. Maybe it would be better to call me a "skeptic."

Like @Amadan I don't remember making any statements regarding mass migration specifically, in Israel or anywhere else. Even the political philosopher John Rawls (who was liberal and probably also "a liberal") believed that nations possessed qualified rights of exclusion (though I don't know if he ever elaborated on the qualifications). As a classical liberal I am skeptical of the wisdom of ethnostates, but I also see examples in history where soft ethnic cleansing seemed essential for long term peace (e.g. Greece/Turkey) and also where mass migration has collapsed empires. I conclude that I should therefore be neither "for" nor "against" mass migration, but merely open to understanding its likely impact in specific cases.

Naraburns is another case that is a little interesting as he opposes liberals on some issues but self identifies IIRC as liberal, and supports mass migration for western countries while opposing it for Israel. Is there also anyone who opposes zionism among the moderators and sympathizes more with the Palestinians than Israel?

I won't speak for @naraburns but I do not recall him ever self-identifying as a liberal and I don't recall any such statements by him about mass migration. Maybe I missed something. That also wouldn't describe my position, though. Even though I do self-identify as a liberal.

Your litmus tests are pretty silly. Moderators aren't selected according to how we align on various issues. If you really wanted to run a poll, we'd probably fall at various places on the spectrum regarding "Zionism" and the Palestinians (personally, I don't give a shit about "Zionism" and I have little sympathy for either Israelis or Palestinians as a people, though I always have sympathy for civilians suffering war and other atrocities), but I mistrust your definitions. You wrote a lengthy rant below about "far leftists" but ironically, for being a complaint about the impossibility of centrism, I cannot see where you would allow for the existence of a genuine liberal who is not a "far leftist."

Among the new individuals, I noticed netstack, selfmadehuman and another individual which is liberal.

I'm a liberal? That's news to me!

On political compass quizzes, for what it's worth, I am dead center. In terms of self identification, I call myself a classical liberal with libertarian tendencies, and that is very much not what just "liberal" means these days, sadly.

In that whole post a decent amount of space was taken by me articulating how left wing certain conceptions of centrism have been. A key part of left wing propaganda, especially starting in the 90s with Tony Blair and even the Clintons was to pretend to be centrist while being radical in a left wing direction. This conception of centrism and moderation is a falsity. It doesn't represent being at all in the middle on the most important issues. Nor even having a centrist position in how one treats different identity groups. Nor even on how one responds on problems.

For example, if ones response to massive fertility crisis is to not give a shit, and to worry about not going too far with social conservatism, that isn't a centrist position. Maintaining an ideology of very limited criticism the left wing social revolutions is what actual in real life leftists I know do. Easy to get several of them to say how they oppose feminazis but a toned down feminism is good actually and so on, and so forth.

As I said:

The generally reasonable dissident right figure Auron Macyntire is correct about liberals. That a subset of them when other progressives are unwelcoming, or they disagree on their pet issues like say Israel, they turn to the right but they don't think they have done anything wrong. They want to run the right in accordance to their own values while looking down on right wingers. And of course they start gatekeeping and deplatforming actual right wingers and preferring people like them.

and

We also see these figures try to do the same with "centrism" and define themselves as the only moderates and centrists and everyone who disagrees with them as an extremist. Even though in practice their social views, or views on immigration, or on how much they sympathize with various identity groups are far left. Even if some other progressive extremists are further left than them. If you don't define what is centrist by the last couple of years, and by what leftists who run media define as centrist and moderate and what they define as far right. Any longer term outlook realizes that actually the dissident right, part of what they are pushing were more pervasive and dominant in the past, and we have had a radicalization in the recent past. It would be a welcome development for that to be corrected. Moreover, we should also care about how some trends in politics that have been in influence for a couple of decades have evolved today, and their observable effects.

If you are a centrist, then that leaves little room for actual centrists.

Maybe I should have had a line or two about how these people who present themselves as centrists tend to also often try to reprsent themselves as anti woke liberals.

The point articulated is that your differences with other leftists aren't sufficiently important on some very important issues! That there is still isn't enough representation of a different perspective than that. It was right there in the post, so you should have respected that. Unless you try to censor this view and in an authoritarian manner try to impose the view to accept your claims of "centrism" even though you claim to be a type of liberal.

The liberal agenda is to support replacing western nations and treating them as illegitimate. This is a far left ideology. One that the disagreement against is either the dominant view of right wing base, or as in various european countries is the dominant view of the people of the country.

If different varieties of cultural marxist ideology is pervasive in certain circles, those who belong in groups that show such groupthink should admit that there is an echochamber problem when criticised on those grounds.

You support mass migration and you go along with that. Say you will be voting the Democrats which are extremely far left on culture/identity. Dehumanized Palestinians and supported their destruction which isn't really classical liberalism nor shows any real libertarian tendency. Neocons are however firmly a part of the liberal tribe. Part of modern liberalism is this machiavelianism.

In actuality the ADL type of progressive who is a Jewish supremacist, is one of the ways to be a progressive and the more establishment friendly type in the USA. You align close enough to that, even if you don't go as far as people like Jonathan Greenblat. Although considering your willingness to support extreme violence against the Palestinians, we shouldn't take at face value any claim of you respecting rights or freedoms. Just like you do that on the basis of your view of Jewish superiority, an ideology of Jewish superiority over white working class, can lead to someone like you articulating taking more of their rights, or hate speech laws.

In terms of ideology, classical liberalism didn't exist in the way modern leftists say it does. Historically supposedly classical liberal societies had laws against indecency, and were societies that tried to balance promoting a moral order, conservative and pro religious norms, obviously nationalism of some kind is a key aspect of any society that is made by a people with some liberal mores and political liberalism.

Hell, many of the people using that term classical liberal aren't even classical liberal in the term of willing to tolerate and support institutions showing genuine neutrality, and promoting equality under the law. They are unwilling to support the removal of say civil rights act. They tend to be simply leftists who want a limited hangout to aspects of the most recent far leftism and are unwilling to dismantle the current system which is one which acts as a hateful foreign conqueror in that:

It discriminates against a people. It spreads propaganda that defames them while elevating other ethnic groups and their grievances. Resentful Indian grievances are part of this It treats their rights are illegitimate. It renames their heritage, their monuments, their schools. It removes them from their own history, and in both present and past replace them.

To be fair, at some point the dinstiction between leftism or neoconservative is hard to define. Since people like you, who fit more under the neocon label both have far to the left views and are part of this but also tend to combine some views that are more associated with extreme far right. Someone who defines himself as a liberal and calls for the replacement of the white working class such as Bret Stephens still tried to promote HBD in New York Times. A certain racial supremacist ideology, can be compatible with supporting a left wing globalist empire, if one doesn't buy into the false notion that such people are consistent anti-racists. Resentful people who hate others and like their favorite groups have been a key part of the left wing project.

The reality is that there is enormous crossover between progressive, neocon, liberal, and you fit mostly in the neocon category. It misleads rather than provides understanding to see a hard distinction between these. It rather creates irrelevant debates between people who aren't sufficiently different and manufactures consent to a cohesive ideology that is shared by promoting a very limited overton window.

It is a fiction and grossly misleading to buy into you being a classical liberal.

It is true that you have some differences with other progressives, but these tend to be either a limited hangout, or a case of you aligning more with one faction of progressive far left extremism and helping them perpetuate their code switch propaganda of presenting themselves as moderate, as a means of isolating that type of the left and controlling it, while also controlling the opposition to it. We also see people who are extremely racist in favor of Jews and destructive against non Jewish ethnic groups to try to define moderation to be about having this racist ideology. In general the ADL it self and others who do have this ideology often pretended to support freedom of speech but weren't honest about it. Why should I take someone who supports such extreme destruction of an ethnic group of Palestinians because of your sympathies of the Jews, as someone who will at all oppose anything directed against other groups that Jewish supremacists hate?

On some of the most important by far issues, there is group think dominating. And it seems to be the case with zionism as well. The reality is that when you try to shut down and don't encompass at all any reasonable views associated (in a media landscape dominated by left wing extremists) with the far right, you have this group think.

And if you try to incorporate into your liberal ideology the idea of the supremacy of the Jews and that colonialism can be good, this neocon ideology is fully in line of a global left wing american empire and much of progressivism. By incorporating into it fucked up unreasonable aspects of far right ideology in this manner, you actually aren't acting inconsistent with the history of leftism. Which did share elements of extremism with non leftists, including extreme nationalism for their favorite groups while selling extreme antinationalism for their disfavored. So this was in a left wing direction.

It represents one faction of it in fact. For it is also a mistake to pretend that the ADL faction represents "liberals" while the faction that is more hostile to Israel and see Jews as also white oppressors, represent "progressives". It is substantially the same ideology with a different who/whom. In your case, you seem to be even more of an HBDer and yes less far to the left than ADL, but not sufficiently so for your representation to break the group thing, rather than reinforce it.

To conclude, as i said in my original post for the general phenomenon, not just on motte differences exist, but not sufficiently so for there not to be exist a dominant strain of liberal ideology. There is one who does have a different ideology that breaks from this. Any space that has a mixture of neocons, progressives, supposed libertarians who seem libertarian on the outside and neocon on the inside where push comes to shove (to contrast with a Ron Paul type of libertarian which is a more right wing type), do not show sufficient dissent to the globalist american empire ideology and of the liberal consensus. Especially if people fit more with a specific subgroup of said liberal faction.

Since there has been an attempt by left wingers after expelling right wingers from institutions and discriminating from them, to define their views as moderation, this is also something to be recognized here. A general culture of being too prideful about any dissent from the left has also developed. Either one sides with this attempt to deceive the public and buys into a false view of the world, or takes both a more long term outlook and an outlook that focuses on actually examining how far someone aligns with or against various groups, or positions. It isn't just a definition game. Conservative parties when liberals got control of them, while treated by people of different varieties of liberal as moderates, have in fact promoted far left policies. The most typical example of this are the British Torries after Cameron, but the template continues to be followed in other cases. Recently in Poland we have seen predictable authoritarianism. Moderation is not something that can be trusted, but we have observed the opposite. That repeated observation tells us what to expect instead. And what a faction ends up doing and behaving like, and even some of their rhetoric, tells us more accurately what they are about than how they sometimes frame themselves in a more moderate direction.

The very existence of any alternative that is moderate or gasp right wing, requires accurately understanding reality and how much of a commonality and extremism there is among different shades of liberals.

I don't really care enough about what you wish to call me to really unwrap the tangled knot of your reasons to think that vastly different classes of people who consider each other mortal enemies are all plausibly lumped in together as liberal, even if I think it's stupid. We're not even talking about Stalinists vs Trotskyists here.

In your case, you seem to be even more of an HBDer and yes less far to the left than ADL, but not sufficiently so for your representation to break the group thing, rather than reinforce it.

Really? What exactly is the criteria for when advocacy for HBD makes someone "break the group thing". If I join 4chan in their advocacy for "Total Nigger Death"?

If I float, I'm a liberal. If I sink, I'm a liberal, and apparently I need to hit the bottom of the pond at terminal velocity for it to count in your eyes.

Resentful people who hate others and like their favorite groups have been a key part of the left wing project.

People can and do have very different reasons for "hate". America and Russia hated Nazi Germany for rather different reasons.

We also see people who are extremely racist in favor of Jews and destructive against non Jewish ethnic groups to try to define moderation to be about having this racist ideology.

Is this somehow relevant to the moderation of this forum? I am unsure if it is, or if you're speaking more broadly.

As I've said on record, I like the Jews in Israel or at least much prefer them to the Palestinians or the rest of the Middle East. I am less positive on the Jews in the US, who are a very sizable number, because they self-sabotage and raised the leopards that are eating their faces.

Why should I take someone who supports such extreme destruction of an ethnic group of Palestinians because of your sympathies of the Jews, as someone who will at all oppose anything directed against other groups that Jewish supremacists hate?

The relevant reason for why I dislike Arabs is not because they're "anti-Jew". It is because they are backward religious fanatics who can't even point to having achieved anything of importance that wasn't off the back of their luck in having liquid gold beneath their sands.

And "non-Jewish" ethnic groups comprise uh, 99% of the rest of the world? You'll find I am very neutral to them.

Who else are they supposed to hate? The Romans? Christian Evangelists? Black Israelites?

It rather creates irrelevant debates between people who aren't sufficiently different and manufactures consent to a cohesive ideology that is shared by promoting a very limited overton window.

We have a very wide Overton Window here, with everyone from open pedophiles to those who want to shoot them, Jew-Defenders to Palestinian supporters, and everything in between.

As far as I can see, you prefer to lump everyone to the left of you, or even directions entirely orthogonal to the right, as "liberals", or carrying-water for them. All well and good, you're welcome to your opinion, even if I think it is entirely absurd to class me as a lib.

The moderator team is small enough that ratios of views barely matter.

1 vs 3 just feels very different from 100 vs 300.

Zorba is also still ultimate dictator. He is happy with where things are so you don't notice him. If he was not happy you'd probably notice.

Hlynka was a mod at one point, probably the farthest "right" that any moderator on this forum has been. I think hlynka would call your ethnic thinking leftist. He was always a very controversial mod. I think the controversy was more because of his personality than his opinions.

We routinely have to mod posters that we agree with, for saying things in a way that breaks the rules. Some mods find this difficult. I find it easy, because I don't like seeing my positions ineptly defended. So don't be too quick to think that viewpoint alignment with a moderator is always going to help your case. Hlynka most often butted heads with other right wingers.

HoffMeister probably would have become a mod if he’d wanted the job and amadan certainly isn’t a liberal. In fact none of the mods seem conventionally progressive to me.

They don't even seem "liberal", in the American sense of the word.

Wait, you are a moderator too?

For better or worse, it has indeed come to that.

I wouldn't say you aren't a liberal on ethnicity however. My impression is that you seem to oppose ethnic identifications, but oppose the liberal tribe for supporting it.

I'm willing to live in peace with people who are willing to live in peace with me. I don't think ethnic conflict is necessary or inevitable, and I'm willing to make sacrifices and accept losses to try to keep the peace. I think a considerable portion of Blacks problems are cultural, since we have records of them having better outcomes in the past. I think racial essentialism is stupid, and the strong version of HBD at least is foolish and destructive. I also do not believe that white Progressives' ethnicity makes them somehow less my enemy.

On the other hand, I think that it's okay to be white, and that the general liberal consensus on race has completely failed on its own terms, and that what remains of it is held together by active deceit. I'm not optimistic that any of the problems facing blacks can realistically be solved in the foreseeable future, and I'm militantly opposed to my tribe accepting blame for them. I think white flight and economic gating are reasonable responses to the dysfunction of the black underclass. I oppose mass immigration, and generally think that the proper response to mass-importation of voters is to reject and dissolve federal authority.

Make of that what you will.

I am more interested in ethnicity than race. Which is in fact related to ethnicity, but the later is a more exclusive category. When a race is attacked in an immoral manner to be oppressed or destroyed as a group it makes sense, not only for them, but righteous in general to oppose this attack.

I do think white as a primary ethnic identity is completely legitimate for white Americans and I find the whole taboo to be remarkably irrational. For other white people, their primary ethnic group is different. Although even for white americans, it also comes with specific ethnic characteristics along. Especially historically.

To begin with, the ethnic identity of white groups of which their race is an aspect of their ethnicity is legitimate. But when white is the ethnic groupping used for the group, then it becomes also a legitimate category as the primary ethnic category. I always think about this question, that whatever ethnic group anyone is primarily called as, is inherently a legitimate category for them to identify with as an ethnic community.

This isn't racial essentialism, and does not require HBD which is true, to be accurate. I am not a racial essentialist if you define it to mean race is everything. I oppose mass migration of foreigners of the same race. I also would object to all white people trying to identify primarily with the general whiteness as a primary ethnic category, over seeing their white identity as a general category they have in common, because this would undermine and dissolve their particular ethnic characteristics. But it makes sense to unite against being attacked as a group on that basis, without dissolving their particular ethnic distinction.

Race is quasi ethnic, and an aspect of ethnic identity. And in multiracial societies tends to become the ethnic identity. And some groups like blacks, can be said to have a very strong sense of black identity in their diaspora in the west that it is in fact their primary ethnic identity in comparison to the european natives.

I also oppose people using HBD to justify destroying foreign ethnic groups. HBD should be an add up to how people view the world, not the primary lens. Ideally it can be used as a weapon to oppose bad policy and to accurately understand the world. Mostly, I see it as helping reinforce opposing things that are bad on other merits and I would oppose anyway such as mass migration and affirmative action policies, and blaming disparities on racism.

I also do not believe that white Progressives' ethnicity makes them somehow less my enemy.

But are white progressives genuinely white ethnically in the same way?

Moreover, USA can not be said to be a free country that allows its white ethnic group the rights to identify with its own community and have representation, when in fact there is a totalitarian system of persecution, blacklisting and character assassination.

Personally as a non American I am interested in how the same logic is used against ethnic groups in European countries and elsewhere too. The logic of America is used to lead to the destruction of european countries as well.

There are various historical episodes of a people under a foreign occupation that mistreated their own where a percentage of their own people supported the regime.

Cultural marxism has the nature of behaving and following the logic of foreign conquest and siding with foreign nationalism at expense of its own people.

Therefore, like those other historical situations of groups that have identified more with a foreign tribe, despite by ancestry and even customs often belonging to a different group, their position ethnically is more complex than to say they are clearly on your own side.

Moreover, if you actually investigate the rhetoric of people who are further right than you, and have a view in favor of white identity, many of them are willing to treat white progressives as enemies.

White progressives tend to think they are white but that white identity is illegitimate and evil. So they aren't clearly not white ethnically either. It isn't as if their perspective invalidates white identity because nobody identifies with it, it is more that they consider it illegitimate, while still being their group. This fits with the framework of parts of an ethnic group oppressing their own while siding with foreign ethnic groups. And of course some progressives that might be called white, might identify primarily as a different ethnicity and hostile to those who identify as white, because they see them as a threat to their ethnic identity. Which should be more clearly excluded from the white ethnicity category. While say someone like Amy Wax, clearly thinks that the white category in general are her people.

I don't actually object to you seeing blacks as also Americans and defining your country as not just a country for whites. Although, the current type of multiethnic USA is a massive compromise and a result of mass migration. Which is a huge problem to how to define a country based on a historical people and where other groups existed but tended to be excluded, but then was subject to mass migration. Without said mass migration it would be easier to define it as mainly made of a particular people but multiethnic too.

On the other hand, I think that it's okay to be white, and that the general liberal consensus on race has completely failed on its own terms, and that what remains of it is held together by active deceit. I'm not optimistic that any of the problems facing blacks can realistically be solved in the foreseeable future, and I'm militantly opposed to my tribe accepting blame for them. I think white flight and economic gating are reasonable responses to the dysfunction of the black underclass. I oppose mass immigration, and generally think that the proper response to mass-importation of voters is to reject and dissolve federal authority.

Well, it is fair to say that you do differ on a lot of issues with liberals.

Can you clarify what you mean that it is ok to be white? Would you ban NAACP, ADL and similar organizations if you were in charge? Would you stop the one sided taboo by allowing white identity groups to operate on the same basis as others? Would you enforce a taboo against racial ethnic community for blacks, or Hispanics?

But are white progressives genuinely white ethnically in the same way?

So blond and blue eyed lifelong Democratic voter who hates Trump and despises the flyover rednecks, who never fired a gun and would rather die than be seen driving a pickup truck is not "white". So "whiteness", as you see it, does not have any correspondence with actual skin color.

Then, why call your ethnic identity "white"? If it is not only about skin color, but about values and beliefs, then what would you do when large part of "white" people actively reject these values and beliefs?

Just drop the race thing completely and say: We are ancient Redneck nation, we want end of our oppression and persecution, we want freedom for our occupied Redneck lands, we want our national self determination.

There are various historical episodes of a people under a foreign occupation that mistreated their own where a percentage of their own people supported the regime.

There are even more historical episodes when "nation" wanted to force into ranks of "their people" masses who had zero interest to be part of this club. Just one example, like you claim to speak for all "whites" Russian nationalists always claimed to speak for all Slavs, even when these Slavs strongly disagreed. Hadn't ended well.

This is a strawman, although I edited my post so maybe you missed part of it.

The basis of white ethnic identity is race. But is not sufficient. I said that the white progressive both is on some sense white ethnically, and in another not.

If they are against white ethnic identity as illegitimate, their behavior is not the same as the kind of people that fit more clearly to an ethnic identity.

If they are progressive otherwise but not against white as a legitimate ethnic category, this doesn't apply.

A common ethnic consciousness tends to be an important characteristic for an ethnic community. And foreign nationalities trying to oppress an ethnic group try to undermine and not allow them to have such common ethnic consciousness but to submit to their supremacy.

The typical white (American) progressive sees themselves as white but also thinks it is a bad thing for whites to identify with their own community, nor sees it as legitimate. This counts as a betrayal and oppressive hostility. This type of self hatred and self denial, does change how such person should be identified as.

There are even more historical episodes when "nation" wanted to force into ranks of "their people" masses who had zero interest to be part of this club. Just one example, like you claim to speak for all "whites" Russian nationalists always claimed to speak for all Slavs, even when these Slavs strongly disagreed. Hadn't ended well.

This is a gross misrepresentation. I didn't call to unite whites under my leadership, or ethnic group. Quite different. I even called against this. The slavic analogue would be to allow slavs to have their own ethnic communities. Not to be dominated by the Russians uniting all Slavs. Which I approve different slavic nations. I think even Yugoslavia was a bad idea and indicative of the problems of multi-ethnic constructs. I do think that people of different ethnicities but a broader civilizational or even racial category should unite in opposing being attacked unfairly as a group however. For example if some group is trying to destroy all Slavs, then all Slavs (and not just Slavs) should especially unite to oppose this.

Opposing your mistreatment is not dangerous, it is the reversal of reality. Not opposing it is dangerous and immoral.

It is in fact the progressive side that tries to force whites to not exist, and supports what will bring their nonexistence to reality through mass migration and ethnic and racial replacement, and through making their ethnic communities taboo and persecuting those who dissent. Which has in fact not only its own ugly history of persecution, but also goes more along with the modern example of Russia trying to dominate the Slavs. Not tolerating the existence of ethnic communities you dislike in their own homeland and supporting those who side with foreign conquerors is also more compatible with the bad behavior of the worst regimes seen as far right.

You are reversing the situation when it is progressives who deny representation of the interests of white Americans.

Do I respect people who aren't gang ho about their nation oppressing others? Sure.

Do I respect self hating ideology and supporting your own people's oppression and destruction? Not at all. It is a dangerous and extreme ideology that isn't respectable. But that only necessitates a lack of self hatred and extremism against whites. You can still oppose plenty of things in a manner that would be respectable, like one ethnic group of whites trying to dominate the rest, or whites colonizing the rest of the world.

If you want to play the "choice" card, progressives and others should remove their persecution first.

But in any case, a group that already exists is inherently a legitimate ethnic community. The idea that it is evil to identify with your own ethnic group and it's well being if that group is a white ethnic group in general, or in particular, is an immoral racist idea. Especially in a country that treats ethnic categories for other groups, including racial groups as perfectly legitimate. Including by conservatives.

Just drop the race thing completely and say: We are ancient Redneck nation, we want end of our oppression and persecution, we want freedom for our occupied Redneck lands, we want our national self determination.

I am not aware of the redneck nation being the primary group category that white Americans are called by. In fact, they are called whites constantly, both for condemnation, and in neutral identification. And in positive terms by white Americans. It is also how they are discriminated against in policy, in a systematic manner.

Part of the reason that their collective identity is delegitimized is divide and conquer, incidentally. Directly related to hateful rhetoric and policy at their expense to discriminate and replace them. As a certain rabbi said without antiwhite menace (unironically, I don't have a particular problem with him) in a video, there is a reason why hollywood targets whites but not Jews, blacks, etc. It is because the whites don't have their anti defamation leauge, and other organizations advocating against negative potrayals.

So in your perspective, while whites should be a redneck nation in particular and blacks, hispanics, Jews, Asians and others can be a seperate entirely category that is allowed. Which is what expressing selective outrage means.

How about, no. Your prejudices of targeting particularly white Americans is not a fair demand that should be listened to. It is in fact a racist demand.

Actually, I might eventually make a post in the future about why the ideology of liberals and liberalism, and the general cultural marxist framework is completely unsuitable for multi-ethnic societies. Their ideology is of course destructive for homogeneous societies too and part of that leads to them becoming more multiethnic. But for multiethnic societies, it is difficult as it is to keep the balance and different ethnic groups from dissolving things and from conflict.

But what they do once they have transformed societies into multiethnic? They don't try to keep the peace, and ethnic conflict at bay by promoting (which will come with some authoritarianism) some mutual respect among groups. They pick the native formerly majority group to treat as illegitimate while treating the foreign groups as legitimate while promoting arguements about how the native group's nationalism is such a threat. And do this both directly and by just one sidedly promoting criticism towards their ethnic outgroup and its identity.

This is not how you run any multiethnic society if your goal is to avoid conflict and respect the different groups that comprise of it.

It does relate to a strategy within multiethnic societies to avoid conflict eventually by one group dominating and destroying the others. Which is obviously very destructive and will cause conflict. But even if that goal is achieved then the other groups of the progressive alliance will find their own alliance that is about uniting towards a common outgroup more difficult to handle. Moreover, such societies wouldn't had become multiethnic without the progressives policies.

So why not the left to promote "intersectionality" but actually have a room for white Americans, Christians, or men? It wouldn't be the ideology of intersectionality any more, but it would work based on principle of seeking compromise based on different identity groups. Of course then there is also a question in regards to numbers, and there are still huge things up to debate.

In certain ways itself would be a massive compromise when considering American history.

But what has happened here which is the progressive side and those who conformed, to promote both the demographic replacement of their outgroup, and to treat it as completely illegitimate, while also treating their side as the anti-racist one is just remarkably extreme.

I wouldn't say you aren't a liberal on ethnicity however. My impression is that you seem to oppose ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them, but oppose the liberal tribe for supporting it. So you are more consistent than them on that, but still take an ideologically more left wing perspective.

If I understand you correctly, your claim is that:

  1. Progressives support 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them.' I assume, specifically minorities.
  2. Liberals oppose 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them'
  3. Inferring from the fact that you don't think FC is 'right-wing' on this issue but rather liberal, true conservatives/'right-wing' people also support 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them.' I assume for white people?

Is this accurate, or would you like to correct my interpretation?

Liberals as a tribe has the issue of playing a motte and bailey between opposing ethnic nationalism in general and calling identifying with it as racist, and also actually do support tribalism for their own favorite groups. They also do this for sexes. They see the nationalism for their preferred groups such as blacks, Jews, Palestinian as legitimate, while they inconsistently promote the ideology against nationalism. This inconsistency doesn't change who pushes the motte.

To take a position that is anti-ethnic identity is still in line with a left wing tradition and ideology. Whether promoted by communists, marxists, and others. The left has also promoted this ideology against any other collective identities than those defined by the left, or doesn't prioritise what they care about. The collectivism of individualism ideal, is a left wing ideal, not a centrist ideal and not a right wing ideal.

But even that part of the left had those who made a different evaluation of oppressor ethnic groups and oppressed and that related to how the left evolved.

Even if one pushes consistently an opposition of ethnic, religious, group identity, this is in fact a left wing ideology. Even if the left/liberals as a faction are in fact as a majority, and as their pervasive perspective not consistent.

Inferring from the fact that you don't think FC is 'right-wing' on this issue but rather liberal, true conservatives/'right-wing' people also support 'ethnic identifications and communities identifying with their group and interests and pursuing them.' I assume for white people?

Supporting ethnic nationalism only for white people as legitimate, I would consider as extreme far right. Not of course equally extreme, or even necessarily extreme for someone to prioritize white rights and be a white advocate.

In general, for any groups I do think too intense activism should be assumed to be typically immoral if your group has been getting substantial victories in favor of it at expense of others.

While to oppose nationalism only for white people should count as the extreme far left. No matter how many people who identify with this want to frame their perspective as moderation. Which unfortunately, even I rhetorically understate sometimes, due to its pervasiveness among current liberalism/leftism. As well as the fact that you can get in trouble if you are too blunt. An extreme faction becoming more influential does not change its characteristics. The USSR as an example was not a country run by moderates when the Bolshevics were the only game in town. We need to actually evaluate whether the perspective is lopsided in one, or another direction.

It is both moderate and right wing to think that white people have legitimate ethnic communities too. But in terms of identification, it tends to attract people who identify more as right wingers in certain countries. But is in fact the moderate position.

If we have to rate things on a slider from oikophobic to overly nationalist, a perspective that tolerates ethnic communities is not a controversial perspective. And also when it is inclusive of Europeans too.

It is those parts of the left I mentioned that have had a strong objection to that while others compromised with them when they went along. And of course, there are also people who oppose what I argue and oppose rights for their right wing ethnic outgroup from an explicitly ethnonationalist perspective who know they are being machiavelian about it, or actually fit more with the right in their own country.

But such populations can still support the left when abroad.

This shows the limitations of the political spectrum when it comes to nationalism, since someone's ethnonationalism for their own country which fits more with the right there, can be more compatible with the left in the context of foreign politics.

Thanks for taking the time to explain.

It is both moderate and right wing to think that white people have legitimate ethnic communities too. But in terms of identification, it tends to attract people who identify more as right wingers in certain countries. But is in fact the moderate position.

What, concretely, do you mean when you say white people have legitimate ethnic communities? As in, there are physical communities in the USA that should be able to exclude non-whites? Or even non-physical communities/cultural...events, or what-have-you that are necessarily white rather than race-blind mainstream American?

To lay some cards on the table, what you're arguing seems to be that most conservatives are some flavor of white nationalist. I assume at the mild end of the spectrum you describe, this is less blood and soil rhetoric and more 'it's okay that my tabletop game club is made up entirely of white men' or 'the president should be white as the USA is a majoritarian white country.'

While to oppose nationalism only for white people should count as the extreme far left. No matter how many people who identify with this want to frame their perspective as moderation.

I just don't think it is true that progressives or liberals oppose nationalism specifically for white people. Japan may be a fargroup for progressives in the US and as such doesn't receive much attention, but I've certainly heard people express discomfort at their attitude towards foreigners/non-Japanese and a national identity built on race. Any kind of nationalism built on race makes progressives and liberals deeply uncomfortable.

Furthermore, I don't believe that conservatives writ large support carveouts and national-identity/community building based on race. Perhaps I'm typical minding, perhaps my mental model is wrong and you're right - I'd honestly encourage you to tighten up your argument to something more concise and write a top-level post to see what people think so we can get more data.

If most conservatives do explicitly believe in nation and community building based on race, would you agree with progressives that call them white nationalists? And your argument is simply that being a white nationalist isn't a bad thing, because to you progressives are black/asian/hispanic nationalists?

What, concretely, do you mean when you say white people have legitimate ethnic communities? As in, there are physical communities in the USA that should be able to exclude non-whites? Or even non-physical communities/cultural...events, or what-have-you that are necessarily white rather than race-blind mainstream American?

That there should be white organizations representing whites interests. That, in the USA non explicitly white organisations and people not representing whites in particular, should see the white American ethnic community as a core group, which is interests are legitimate and important part of what they ought to represent.

Outside the USA that should also be the case.

That the idea that this is evil should be taboo and treated as racist. The hysteric reactions and cancel culture on the issue should simply not exist. There also should be more intolerance for antiwhite ideology, including of this type.

That extremely antiwhite ngos should stop be tolerated to remain as pervasive as they are. How this ends up being done can be lead to discussion, or your imagination.

In general both the white and non white organizations and general organisations representing the interests of any groups should not be as extreme as say the ADL is today.

That race replacement in media depictions should stop.

That immigration should be opposed openly on the basis that it replaces white people (and also others like blacks). I also think white Americans in particular are key part of the historical american nation, and this should be recognised. That there should be an attempt to raise birth rates of historical American nation, and others of historical USA,so they don't become extinct in their own country. Also mass deportations of illegal migrants.

Frankly, as a country that has had already plenty of migration the identity of historical nation and the identity of newcomers is hard to create a common ground.

This isn't antithetical to in addition to the ethnic identity that there would also be a common American identity. But it can not be expected to be an one sided affair and would require non whites to respect whites, as well as white progressives to respect their own ethnic community.

This idea that tribal identity is an obstacle to a common identity but only for a particualr people is bankrupt. The USA is already a multiethnic country that promotes that the cohesive whole is part of multiethnic.

I generally have stronger views for european countries, which is not necessarily unrelated to not being American. Agency problems are real with nations. However part of it is that for most of them most mass migration is very recent and much of it from illegal migrants. I am not the man of all solutions of everything that must be done in the exact detail but I can certainly tell in a broad level that whites as a legitimate category of ethnicities rather than being designated by amnesty international as non indigenous is the more moral path.

Maybe some of the details of how far that entails can be debated. But it is definitely the case that targeting them to deny them such rights is a very destructive path.

What organizations like amnesty international are doing claiming that europeans are uniquely not indingeneous people is an agenda that leads to genocide, meaning extinction. It leads also to mistreatment and people becoming hated minorities in their own countries, while the foreign population boasts of conquering them.

If most conservatives do explicitly believe in nation and community building based on race, would you agree with progressives that call them white nationalists? And your argument is simply that being a white nationalist isn't a bad thing, because to you progressives are black/asian/hispanic nationalists?

Since you have been asking questions and asking if it is fair for progressives to be calling others as white nationalists, let me ask my question in the same manner.

Do you think that progressives who have massive double standards and might in fact support making minorities or even the extinction of white people, are not racist? Couldn't such agenda be accurately labeled as anti-white racist supremacy?

Is someone who either supports or tolerates the existence hateful identitarian organizations, and mainstream organizations that promote the same agenda and large double standards and stigmatizes whites in particular, not in fact nationalist to an extreme degree for various progressive identity groups?

If most conservatives do explicitly believe in nation and community building based on race

It is not the case that conservatives will choose race to be what nation and community is based upon. Ethnic communities that see their group as legitimate to pursue their interests in their favor are already treated as a core part of the USA. Race is already what ethnic communities are based upon, and are treated already as a legitimate basis of American identity. Especially non white groups. Hell, in a schizophrenic manner this applies to a very limited extend for white identity, since it is both allowed and not allowed. Both a group, but also it is bad for it to be a group. And it was the basis of white American identity even more so in the past. America is already a nation that understands it self as separated and comprised of different ethnic communities based on race. It is just the main one is not allowed the same rights and treatment than the other ones.

If most conservatives do explicitly believe in nation and community building based on race, would you agree with progressives that call them white nationalists? And your argument is simply that being a white nationalist isn't a bad thing, because to you progressives are black/asian/hispanic nationalists?

Absolutely not. I think progressives calling others white nationalists as pejorative towards any legitimate white ethnic identity should be treated as an example of them engaging in extremist racism and this behavior ought not be tolerated. It is an uncharitable conduct that stigmatizes white ethnic groups in particular and their advocates.

It is a slur as it is used, so it shouldn't be tolerated.

If the term is used in sufficient number in a non charged and abusive context, then it might become more legitimate. But it is bad conduct to be used in this manner.

This framing of white nationalism can justify destroying all european countries/people. So if someone opposes it and think their people shouldn't go extinct and shouldn't become a minority in their own homeland they are just called a white nationalist under an one sided culture of critique.

When actually it is the more moderate position, and was more so before the progressive's fait accompli due to mass migration happening. Although for european countries it is easier still for most because most mass migration is recent and less rooted. Some like Denmark have been succeeding in paying them to leave, as well as cutting. But of course the Danish had been ruled by moderate nationalist variety of parties, including a social democratic one. Describing them as such is less charged than calling it white nationalism. The connotations more accurately fit what the Danish are and did.

White nationalism as a term has been poisoned too much by abuse and hateful intolerance towards the legitimate human rights of white ethnic groups to allow progressives, or others who use it as a pejorative to throw the term around to characterize others who support the human rights of Europeans.

Moreover, I don't actually support limitless nationalism. Nationalism as a movement can results in excess, while opposition of nationalism and intolerance of said nation as a movement results in excess against said nation. Nationalist movements can be extreme or associated with it. White nationalism is especially uniquely stigmatized with extremism and it is also why it would be erroneous to label it as white nationalism because the connotation is that promotes an idea of a world of rights for whites only which isn't what I am advocating for. This isn't to say that all people who do self identify with the term are white supremacists in the way the later is associated with white nationalism.

The reality is large % of people support their continuing existence as a people, and this has been even more so in the past. And applies even more in European countries. These people tend to also not like fascism. The associations that the term white naitonalism has been used to be associated with and their ideology are different.

Nobody is calling anybody to implement the full agenda of the most extremist weakman you can find.

Fundamentally, I would rather different nation states which are homelands of their ethnic groups continue to exist, and have a perspective that see it as justice to oppose the destruction of even foreign nation states. Ideologically, I am pushing for treating as legitimate the interests of your own group. For you to prioritize your own group. But also to treat other groups same interests as legitimate.

This also applies in the case of the family unit. People should prioritise the interests of their own direct family and work for their well being and prosperity. Nothing unjust of ist for doing that, even if the family also has been under attack. Which also entails property rights to be respected and not allowing everyone into your home. Good fences make for good neighbors. Simultaneously they should recognize the same rights of others and try to seek their own prosperity not by acting like the mafia stereotype of destroying others in a predatory manner.

Many europeans do think on the way I frame things, against their extinction as a group.

American conservative base oppose the great replacement and are part way there in the way I advocate but have been influenced in part by the cancel culture on the white issue. There is still a substantial difference between much of the conservative establishment which doesn't oppose it, actual conservative base that does, and progressive/liberal movement that supports the anti white agenda, including replacing their white outgroup. It is also true that American conservatives who are pro white are less racist than progressives in terms of how much they respect different group rights. The agenda to replace and discriminate white people is the racist pervasive agenda of our time. While opposing this is the moderate option.

Progressives in the broad sense should stop throwing names around towards those rightfully opposing their extreme destructive double standards and be self critical of the extremism of their own position. In fact in terms of how much bias they have for their preferred groups and against their white outgroups, their position is the destructive and extremist one, if we compare and contrast.

Since you have been asking questions and asking if it is fair for progressives to be calling others as white nationalists, let me ask my question in the same manner.

Brother, you can ask me all the questions you want. Generally I don't volunteer my opinions that often as they rub people the wrong way, but if you're polite I'll probably answer anything.

Do you think that progressives who have massive double standards and might in fact support making minorities or even the extinction of white people, are not racist? Couldn't such agenda be accurately labeled as anti-white racist supremacy?

I don't believe that progressives are calling for white genocide. You can probably find some people on twitter making jokes about how they hope all white people die in a fire, which I frown upon, but I don't think it's the same thing. Assuming you mean something along the lines of demographic trends and immigration meaning that white people will be a minority in America at some point this century, I don't believe it's an explicit agenda a la Great Replacement Theory. I agree that some people would cheer at those trends which I also find distasteful.

The phrase 'anti-white racist supremacy' doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But sure, if you come up with some other negative term to describe people cheering on white people dying or being outbred then I would likely agree with using said term.

Is someone who either supports or tolerates the existence hateful identitarian organizations, and mainstream organizations that promote the same agenda and large double standards and stigmatizes whites in particular, not in fact nationalist to an extreme degree for various progressive identity groups

No, I don't think they are 'Black nationalist' in a meaningful way. As far as I'm aware, the vast majority are not advocating for an exclusive 'Black America' based on race, they are advocating for equality of outcomes in (what they see as) a biased system. I also would dispute the language you use to describe them, although without examples (beyond the ADL) it's difficult for me to say.

But yes, I would denounce someone who supported the black equivalent of the KKK or stormfront.

Absolutely not. I think progressives calling others white nationalists as pejorative towards any legitimate white ethnic identity should be treated as an example of them engaging in extremist racism and this behavior ought not be tolerated. It is an uncharitable conduct that stigmatizes white ethnic groups in particular and their advocates.

The word 'faggot' was a pejorative for a long time, until it was reclaimed. Whether progressives consider it a pejorative is orthogonal to the actual definition of the word and whether you think it accurately describes the worldview you're describing. If you think 'white nationalism' doesn't accurately describe your views, then what view would constitute white nationalism and what would you call your views instead? But I assume you do agree with the accuracy and just object to the fact that most people think white nationalism is a bad thing based on:

If the term is used in sufficient number in a non charged and abusive context, then it might become more legitimate. But it is bad conduct to be used in this manner.

I had always been skeptical when progressives called conservatives and the MAGA crowd white nationalists, but here you are, espousing views that I think broad, bipartisan swathes of America would call white nationalist. I suspect that the vast majority of American conservatives disagree with your worldview, and in the old place, when this topic was discussed, the defense was invariably that 'no, conservatives don't actually believe those things.'

This framing of white nationalism can justify destroying all european countries/people. So if someone opposes it and think their people shouldn't go extinct and shouldn't become a minority in their own homeland they are just called a white nationalist under an one sided culture of critique.

I disagree with the base assumptions of this statement on multiple levels, as well as most of the rest of your post, but this is already getting too long for both of us.

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To lay some cards on the table, what you're arguing seems to be that most conservatives are some flavor of white nationalist. I assume at the mild end of the spectrum you describe, this is less blood and soil rhetoric and more 'it's okay that my tabletop game club is made up entirely of white men’

I am possibly misunderstanding you here, but it sounds like you are saying you would consider “it’s okay that my tabletop game club is made up entirely of white men” to be a mild form of white nationalism. If so, and if that is the standard liberal view, the inferential gap between liberals and conservatives on this subject is frankly too large to overcome. No conservative I know would have the slightest problem with an all-white group of friends hanging out; they wouldn’t consider it racist, wouldn’t consider it an example of white nationalism, and would most likely think of anyone who disagrees as the genuine racist.

As far as I can understand, he would call that the moderate position, no?

It is both moderate and right wing to think that white people have legitimate ethnic communities too. But in terms of identification, it tends to attract people who identify more as right wingers in certain countries. But is in fact the moderate position.

I'm assuming that tabletop community would be a 'legitimate ethnic community.' But even that is fraught - if it's recognized as a 'legitimate white ethnic community' and a black person wants to join, what happens? If you just happen to have a board game group that happens to be all white I think progressives would ding you on not being inclusive enough but not call you a white nationalist, if you happen to have a white ethnic board game group that would actively exclude others based on race, then I think you deserve the label of either racist or white nationalist, no?

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Or forums like motte, which as far as I am aware, all moderators are liberals, but is supposed to be a neutral forum, and the ideology of those who moderate is unrepresentative of the posters.

How do you know this? Can you accurately describe my ideology, let alone that of the other mods, and how do you know what the modal Motte poster's ideology is?

All moderators are definitely not liberals, but I'm always curious how those of you who think we're only enforcing the rules in favor of our ideology think a "neutral" forum should be run. (Sometimes the answer is basically "Don't mod at all except when people post actually illegal things," but that would be an entirely different kind of place from what most people here want.)

If you don't want to be called the L-word you must turn in the janitor badge. Anyone based enough to have cool opinions would never consider the job of internet moderator.

You misunderstand. I, personally, will still own to being a "liberal" (though obviously I'm a heterodox one). But we frequently get told that all of us are liberals, and that is not the case (and was not the case even before @FCfromSSC joined the team).

These comments are legitimately hilarious. I welcome my new status as boring, moderate and milquetoast.

"mod"erate

That a subset of them when other progressives are unwelcoming they turn to the right but they don't think they have done anything wrong.

I've spent about 60 seconds on this sentence and I'm still not sure I understand. For clarity, do all 3 theys refer to the same group, that subset of liberals?

Yes, the liberals who turn to the right don't think they have done anything wrong. I also mean by saying other progressives that the dinstinction between liberals and progressives as a tribe is false, and there is in fact enormous crossover.

Part of the advantage of liberals as a tribe, is this false sentiment of neutrality, of moderation, of centrism, when they are creatures of the left in reality.

Part of the advantage of liberals as a tribe, is this false sentiment of neutrality, of moderation, of centrism, when they are creatures of the left in reality.

I'm probably first and foremost a classical liberal, extremely libertarian, with sympathies to anarchocapitalism. I oppose nearly all progressives in some form, though they're not necessarily wrong about everything. Mainly to the extent they want to intrude upon or eradicate classical liberalism.

As a young teenager, I had a vague notion of progress, from barbaric wars to slavery to racism to the color blind attitude I embraced wholly in the 1990s. Clinton was cool, Bush and Reagan were evil empire.

But I had a libertarian history teacher who was great with insights and making conceptual connections, and read some Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman before college. Then Rothbard, Hayek, Mises. Then 9/11 happened and I moved rightward in a couple dimensions.

Am I the exception that proves the rule? Or a creature of the left?

All this to say, it's an interesting idea, but I don't buy the conclusion. I think liberalism is a concept prior to left/right, and while the left/right spectrum is useful, it fails to illuminate the nature of liberalism.

While I think there is a general right turn going on in the Western society at large, in these cases it must also be said that "lefty when younger, trending conservative when getting older" (everyone knows the ostensible Churchill quote about hearts and brains, after all) is one of the most classical, even cliche, progressions for a public intellectual to take.

In almost every sense that matters, to my eyes, the parties considered "left" have become the same incumbent authoritarians that we fashionably rebelled against when we were young, in the sense that their declared agendas amount to "we would like to prescribe and proscribe more things, but the antisocial forces of chaos aligned against us prevent us from doing so".

Somewhat related, but recently one poll showed Trump with a yuuuge lead (20%!) among voters under 35. The poll is such a outlier that I would take it with a grain of salt, but it certainly updates me in the direction of young people actually preferring Trump to Biden.

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-poll-joe-biden-washington-post-1829608

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