This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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:
Another popular one from a previously resigned Harvard President :
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.
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.
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 :
Whoever can hack it will find a spot in the racist coalition, no matter where they come from.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
Name these orthogonal excesses and the parts of the country that are prone to them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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
More options
Context Copy link
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 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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link