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I may kind of qualify?
While I appear on themotte: I have limited amount of time that I can spend on "someone is wrong on the internet".
And there is only so much that I will spend on arguing with handle abbreviated to SS about holocaust denial. It can be sort of interesting but only in low doses. (the same goes for other witchy topics)
Many other topics seems to be equally witchy in noninteresting way, where I have no competence or interest or are extremely USA-specific in a boring way.
And when something is on topic, it is often of so low quality that it is eyerolling.
Yeah - like, there's an argument on this thread about leftists not wanting to argue.
But, this isn't true - go to a Democratic/left-leaning well-educated group of political types and ask them about health care, taxes, etc. and they'll be a bunch of different ideas thrown around.
It's just yes, I don't have much interest in arguing about why the 2020 election wasn't stolen, why the Jew's don't actually control everything, how smart or not specific racial groups are, and how much we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, and start having them earlier.
Note, even controversial stuff is fine if it's based in actual reality - if somebody wants to argue we should stay out of Ukraine because America shouldn't involve itself in European power politics or something like that, OK. But, if it's arguing about how America helped an illegal coup in 2014, and Ukraine is full of Nazi's, then yeah, there's not much to talk about.
Same thing on immigration - if you want to talk about economics versus culture, or criminal rates or whatever, again, we'll probably disagree heavily, but there's something there. If your belief is well, immigration has basically been too high since anywhere from 1830 to 1970 depending on the poster, and our racial mix has been terrible since then, then there's not much to talk about.
In general, when I try to get involved here is when something is insanely wrong on a basic thing, when I think the actual left-wing view is being wrongly thought out, or something like that. But in general, this place is less interesting, not because it's more right-wing, but I already know the responses to anything the moment an issue or story gets brought up.
Which, I'm sure one could say about left-leaning forums or arguments, but y'know, we're right and you're wrong. More seriously though, on the issues I care about and don't have 100% firm opinions on, like health care, taxes, spending, foreign policy, and so on, there are plenty of conversations going on in left-wing, center-left, and centrist spaces. But, if you're only interest is proving social freedom of women has gone too far and we need to IQ test everybody to put them in their proper place in society, then yeah, left-leaning spaces probably do similar.
This is part of the issue. There's an extent to which I'm willing to engage in fruitless internet debate, and yell at brick walls about how perhaps a certain group of people aren't the source of all evil, but only an extent.
In general what I want to find are thought-provoking, interesting ideas that I couldn't have predicted or would not have otherwise considered, or perspectives from people with life experiences and areas of knowledge far outside my own. But some of the Motte's most popular hobby-horses are the opposite of that - ideas that are predictable, tendentious, and frankly just not very interesting.
It's not about perspectives being right-leaning, necessarily. I hang out and chat in a number of different right-leaning spaces, and they're all very different. The Motte leans more in the nerdy-libertarian-alt-right direction - very few traditional conservatives here, but a lot of people from over-educated progressive backgrounds who are interested in 'heretical' viewpoints, and as such end up constructing big yet idiosyncratic intellectual frameworks for things, and are usually way too online. By contrast, when I hang out with 'normie' conservatives, God-and-guns-and-low-taxes type conservatives, they usually have a wider range of interests, are much less interested in systematising, and have more straightforwardly anti-authoritarian politics. Or for another, when I hang out with religious conservatives, the ones involved with church and activism and doctrine and so on, again the culture is quite different, with its own language and interests. Notably both the normie-conservatives and the religious-right-types would, I think, utterly hate the Motte. I can just seem them in my mind's eye - the former would call the Motte a bunch of pretentious racists with their heads up their own assholes, and the latter would call them un-reconstructed neo-pagan sophists. The right, much like the left, is full of factions and disagreements. The Motte isn't 'right-wing' simpliciter. It leans in the direction of a very particular type of oddball who has been externally characterised as on the right, but is not really at home there.
We have prolifically-posting religious right motteizeans who get AAQCs and have good moderation records. It's certainly true that we have relatively few conservative normies, however.
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I think this is a pretty heterogenedous collection of topics in terms of how debatable they are.
I think that the 2020 election almost certainly wasn't stolen and I have not seen any good evidence to the contrary. I think the legitimacy of the 2020 election is debatable, but not very.
The Jews clearly don't control everything, that is not debatable. Jews are obviously heavily overrepresented in elite positions compared to their population size, and it is interesting to talk about why that is. But the idea that the Jews control everything is not debatable because it is simply ludicrous.
How smart or not specific racial groups are is highly debatable. It is obviously true that different racial groups differ significantly in average intelligence. I don't think there can be any reasonable debate about that. However, there is a lot of worthwhile debate about why they differ in average intelligence, what the detailed nature of the differences is, and how easy the differences are to change going forward. Nature vs nurture when it comes to intelligence seems like a pretty interesting and worthwhile debate to me. People who lean on the "nature" side of things aren't necessarily frothing racists who want to hurt other ethnic groups, although many are.
As for the idea that we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, this one basically boils down to preference. I personally consider people who want to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies to be disgusting, and I mock them wherever possible. However, my point about preference is that unlike the previous three topics, this one does not boil down to a disagreement about facts. It boils down to largely irrational preferences and matters of taste. Liberalism vs authoritarianism, for example. Hence, it is in nature different from the previous three. I personally am more liberal than the majority of people here, but I also understand that I cannot argue people who do not fundamentally find authoritarianism objectionable out of their authoritarianism by using facts any more than I could argue someone out of thinking that a particular kind of food tastes good. So, while I deeply loathe authoritarian social conservatives and find them repulsive on a fundamental level, nonetheless I can see that the core of the debate that I have with them boils down to preferences rather than disagreements about fact. It is thus a very different kind of debate than the debate over whether the 2020 election was stolen.
I don't understand this part. I mean, we can debate the extent to which America helped the 2014 revolution, and the answer might indeed be "very little", but to me it seems hard to dispute that America at the very minimum stood by and cheered for the revolution. And cheering counts as helping, even if on a minimum level. In reality, I find it hard to imagine that America, with all its three letter agencies, did nothing except cheer. I don't necessarily think that America instigated the revolution, but I would be surprised if it did not at the least jump in and try to take advantage of it once it started.
Is it the "illegal coup" part that you specifically disagree with? As far as I know, the legality of what happened is disputable, but to me it seems that at the very least one can make good arguments that what the revolutionaries did amounted to an illegal coup. It being illegal does not automatically make it immoral, of course. That is a separate debate.
Yanukovych was legally elected, inasmuch as anyone in a corrupt country can be legally elected, in an election considered fair by international observers. He then fled the country during massive violence between security forces and revolutionaries, with both sides blaming the other for having started it.
Whether it was an illegal coup is up for debate, but I don't see why you would automatically assume that anyone who considers it one is unworthy of talking with.
People who consider it an illegal coup aren't even necessarily against it, although most are. I'm sure that one could easily find many intelligent Americans who believe that the American revolution was an illegal coup, yet also a good thing.
Or is it more the "full of Nazis" part that you find objectionable?
Not the same person, but I would not be really interested in "how America helped an illegal coup in 2014, and Ukraine is full of Nazi's" discussion as for me indicates that person is overestimating importance of what USA did and denying agency of people in Ukraine. Either because they are hilariously USA-centric, pushing Russian propaganda or using this to engage solely in tribal warfare.
And we do not have any useful info how much USA helped but no indication that it was really significant. So we have simply no real material to discuss.
"illegal coup or something else" focuses on definitional warfare which is the least interesting type of topic.
"and Ukraine is full of Nazi's" pushes me toward "Russian propaganda repeater" (and no, I am not denying that they have some Slavic people dumb enough to propagate failed ideology that supported extermination/enslavement of Slavic people - or use nazi symbols as lame contrarianism or for trolling reasons or due to massive stupidity). But "Russia denazifies Ukraine" take is just so bad that I would need to be really bored to engage.
So Ukrainian war is interesting, but I am more interested in say evolution of drone warfare (I am listening to Perun presentation right now), first-hand accounts (I have read recently interesting interview about Polish volunteer with some stories about various pathologies in Ukrainian command), geopolitical implications, analysis how much stored materiel Russians used up already based on satellite imagery (bought by random civilian!) and so on.
Not definitional tribal warfare.
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Do you not see women having fewer if any children as an issue or do you simply disagree on the solutions offered? Do you think the people who agree with you politically see it as an issue? If yes, what kind of solutions do they offer?
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As another left-leaning poster, this is the answer I would give to the top-most comment here about why I didn't post any pushback on the comment they were referencing. The topic is something that's so far out of my wheelhouse and expertise that I just have nothing to add or push back on in a meaningful way.
But I think the point about leftists not wanting to argue is less about actually having a desire to argue about this kind of stuff and more about tolerating arguments about this kind of stuff. I'm really, really glad that I get to participate in a forum where people with opinions like that post or the points in the part I quoted above feel free to state such opinions openly. Partly because someone expressing their opinions is, in itself, a good thing, partly because I want the opportunity to learn from the arguments of such people who might even respond to my own comments in other topics, and partly because I want people with such opinions to explore their opinions and collaborate with each other to create better, stronger versions of their arguments which then provide me greater opportunity to learn from them. I can appreciate and even benefit from all this without ever wanting to actually argue with them. And I think it's a shame that most mainstream leftist spaces that I know of just don't have this kind of tolerance.
I mean, I think it's fine to have open discussion, but not everywhere has to be an open discussion. If you have a forum with lots of women, minorities, LGBT people, or whatever, and don't want to deal with people asking about IQ, Jew's, or the 2020 election.
Now, sure, actual prominent people should know right-wing arguments and be able to push back against them (Mayor Pete is actually really good at this), but I don't really care if the forum x that happens to have a politics section doesn't want a long argument about whether the Civil Rights Act was good or not. The other reality is most arguments in reality are both people with actually bad arguments with incorrect information - which is fine, mostly, because an argument on Facebook or your cousin's BBQ is not the end of the world.
Again, I'm fair about this - if some pro-life Facebook group doesn't want pro-choice people arguing in the comments, that's A-OK.
I'd also point out when you see people make better arguments than you can on topics, and nothing shifts, there's no reason to further argue. So, when the people with the 93 annotated links and actual statements from various court decisions can't push away somebody from various ideas about 2020, what am I going to do?
Oddly, those other forums, even when they have plenty of white people, don't seem to have problems with people complaining about white "privilege" or the duty of white people to alleviate it. Only women and minorities can reasonably expect their sensibilities to be protected.
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Sure, not everywhere, of course. I don't think anyone is claiming that it has to be everywhere. I don't think the population of women, minorities, LGBT people, or whatever, is what's relevant here, though; it's the population of people who are intolerant of such issues. Many women, minorities, LGBT people have been pushed/pulled toward a belief system that causes them to choose to take offense at such issues, but there's nothing intrinsic or fundamental about those people that makes them intolerant.
Most internet arguments don't end in any arguer's belief apparently shifting and conceding. That's generally not the point of internet arguments. This doesn't mean that their beliefs didn't shift, and it also doesn't mean that some lurker's belief shifting. And for me, personally, simply learning the way that someone I disagree with (and continue to disagree with) chooses to structure their arguments in an apparent good-faith effort to get me to change my mind is something I find value in.
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These are not "arguments". They are discussions about technical policy implementation details; discussions among friends who already agree on the underlying foundational political issues.
You know you're in a political argument when you feel like you've got skin in the game. It's a fundamentally anxiety-inducing process. If there's no anxiety, then you're dealing with policy, not politics.
Politics is that which you can't afford to get wrong.
These are, in fact, exactly the sorts of issues that lead to political arguments. The fact that you are explicitly claiming that you have no interest in discussing these topics is further confirmation of the thesis that leftists are not interested in arguing with rightists.
I don't particularly begrudge you for this. But, either way, it is evidence for the point being made. It's not evidence against it.
If you don't think there's any anxiety in intra-left/center-left arguments about health care, I guess you weren't around those arguments in the mid-to-late 2000s.
But regardless, the issues you care about are real and true and matter, while yours are fake and just surface level.
Now, it is true that no, if you truly think we need to limit women's ability to get a college education/heavily tax childless people or think it was a bad idea to let the Irish or Italian's in, or the only people correct about the 2020 election are people who support Donald Trump, then yeah, I don't want to argue with you about this. But, I do actually wish those people had louder voices, because as we're seeing with abortion, the actual right-wing view on these issues - not even the Trump view, but the actual hard-right view is highly unpopular amongst normie people. It's why for example, in states where even the GOP did well, pro-"2020 was a stolen election" candidates for offices like Secretary of State ran behind basically all other GOP candidates.
Sometimes, the best argument is just letting people put forth their actual views, and letting other people react accordingly.
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