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Notes -
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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