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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25290 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Underclass whites are feckless normies without aspirations or desire to affect or own the world around them? Shocked, I am shocked I say.

Does anyone out there even know the specific white nationalist who wrote that essay? Did anyone come out and vouch for his supposed reputation back then? The essay set off my intuition that it was a psy-op, especially with its traction on Twitter, manicured writing style, and intended takeaway. It’s something I would write if I were paid to persuade people against identifying with their race.

The two essays that I read by him seemed very credible to me. He writes in exactly the sort of highly excited nerdy style one would expect from a young right-wing memelord intellectual who participated in the great meme war of 2016. His description of those times ring true to me as someone who spent a lot of time on 4chan back then. His use of highly online slang is accurate and would be difficult to fake. And you can find his right wing Disney musical videos online. It's possible that he was a genuine white nationalist who was later bought off by some group, but at the very least I don't think that his entire persona is a hoax.

Walt's videos were big in 2016, to the point they were even referenced in left-wing countermemes. I think it would have been hard for someone around the alt-right "scene" at that time whether on reddit, 4chan, or twitter, not to have at least passing familiarity with his stuff.

Why are you asking that as a top-level post instead of responding to @Hoffmeister25 directly?

So far, you have deleted everything you post, including all the top-level posts you use to start threads with. And your posts mostly look very much like trollbait.

At this point, I am convinced you are posting in bad faith. I am banning you, effective immediately, but if you would like to DM the mod team and explain yourself, we will hear you out.

I agree that top-level posts shouldn't be able to be deleted as that shuts down an already existing conversation. Maybe deleting it could remove it from that person's posting history, but it definitely shouldn't remove it from view for everyone.

That said, the rest of his post here doesn't really justify a ban. I agree it might be borderline, but swap the valence from left to right and his post would look pretty close to any other fare here, including many posts that end up being QCs.

This post alone is not the reason he was banned.

replies suggesting that the history of slavery and Jim Crow might have something to do with black underperformance

Even during slavery, African Americans had the highest literacy rate of any SSA group. They had a greater attainment of complex skills as a consequence of being skilled slaved and/or freed in the North. How do you reason that it’s possible for slavery to cause black underperformance, when we know that their skill level was worse before slavery? Lastly, if I enslaved you to work all day and inflicted corporal punishment whenever you misbehaved, and I did this for a decade, do you think after the decade you would be a better or worse worker? When a slave from the south was freed in the north and went on to work a productive life as a blacksmith (or something), what caused him to be unhindered from slavery that hindered the others?

I would expect a worse worker. You have removed internal motivation.

But Indian and East Asian authoritarian/disciplinarian parenting styles — at their most extreme — result in physical punishment and shaming without regard for “internal motivation”. Yet this produces the highest performing capitalist worker bee cohort. Marine training is also externally-focused, yet military science tells us this produces good soldiers and common wisdom tells us this results in disciplined young men after service. Having food to eat and a roof over your head is also intrinsically motivating as is, we are talking about the late 19th and early 20th century where there is no welfare state, but in the case of slaves their habits are optimized for productivity.

Internal motivation is probably a meme concept. Do we mean, “has the skill of foreseeing the positive versus negative consequences of their current behavior?” This is instilled by slavery, where reneging of daily duty results in salient physical punishment, and fulfilling the duty in abundance may result in greater rewards. The difference post-slavery is that the foreseeing of reward/punishment is applied only to money and the consequences of money, so it is a little more delayed in consequence, but it’s the same neural circuitry.

There's also Russian and Chinese governance in the 18-20th century - pretty unpleasant! Russian serfdom and Chinese landlord control were roughly equivalent to American slavery, often worse at times.

Yet Russia and China still turned out pretty well, in terms of performance.

But Indian and East Asian authoritarian/disciplinarian parenting styles — at their most extreme — result in physical punishment and shaming without regard for “internal motivation”.

I'm pretty sure they are still associated with considerably more internal motivation than slavery.

Well, why do you think so?

Because slavery is done for the interests of the slaveowner and at least in theory, authoritarian parents are acting for the long term benefit of the children. And even callous authoritarian parents are not going to be as callous as slaveowners.

Kids are not, generally, capable of understanding the distinction.

Because slavery is done for the interests of the slaveowner

Reproduction is done for the interests of the parent.

Kids are not, generally, capable of understanding the distinction.

No, I think they understand the distinction perfectly (in that there is none). "Slavery" might be a loaded term (parents and adults more generally will take reflexive offense to children calling it this, even if you ignored that it's an insult to their legitimacy on its face because it is loaded, something children also are well aware of), but in their defense it is a perfectly accurate description of the situation.

[Mistake-theory description of biological reality below]
Children are, by their nature, property; something they have in common with women. Scalable primary resource extraction is difficult to impossible to establish for them. Thus, sons work for you until they become too large to physically dominate (which is the definition of "adulthood" for men), daughters you sell at physical maturity (the definition of "adulthood" for women) to the highest bidder (they're a net loss otherwise), and your wife is such a purchase.

Now, this isn't to say that some fathers treat that property very well- as if they didn't own it, almost (and property that has 2 legs needs to be motivated pretty strongly to stick around; you can do that through love or fear, fear is easier and always your fallback option as a father but it's less productive in the long run so generally worth putting in the effort to not do that)- but that doesn't make the balance of power any different and selfishness on the part of the parent (or the surrounding society- like Asian nations and their ludicrous education systems, or certain US states where the State will punish you if you're let outside) will always push that balance towards fear.

Really, at the end of the day, we're just haggling over the price. For example, something that can break this reality is if scalable primary resource extraction in terms of a man's body is completely obviated by mechanization/technology/market forces- if that happens, the bride price goes to infinity, and with that men can no longer meaningfully own women. This happened to children at the same time for the same reasons, so you had a lot of effectively-emancipated "teenagers"... until the Great Depression put a so-far-permanent end to that (with a slight rebound for them around the '60s).

Chains that set lightly upon you are still chains; what harm does noticing them do?

Why would the knowledge that a parent has been acting for longterm benefit increase a person’s internal motivation regarding longterm planning and delayed gratification?

And even callous authoritarian parents are not going to be as callous as slaveowners

But there are no shortage of high performing Asians who genuinely feel that their parents were callous in their adolescence, showing no love, driving them like a slave.

When they say they were driven like a slave that's metaphorical. It isn't actually the same thing as being driven like a real slave.

If I had to describe my race politics in a word, I would probably pick 'color-blindness'.

Also, I do not vote on comments up or down, and do not think that giving people unlimited votes will result in voting patterns which give useful information. My suspicion is that when the motte was on reddit, there were a lot more non-racist lurkers with a reddit login which voted comments up or down.

Someone is wrong on the internet is not enough to get me to write a reply. If someone claims that ethnic Nigerians can never become "real" Americans, I tend to just shrug and get on with my life.

White nationalism seems silly to me. Classic historical ethno-nationalism is typically much more exclusive than just saying "if your skin is white enough, you are in", and instead select much smaller ethnicities like Romanians or Danes. Of course, anyone who wants to turn the US into a white ethnostate should consider if they might not be better served by emigrating to whatever country has the lowest non-white population. Russia looks pretty white to me, just saying.

The most successful states of their time were rarely ethnically homogeneous. Take the Roman Empire or the US. Functioning as a multicultural society seems kind of a superpower.

Russia looks pretty white to me, just saying.

Russia is only about 70% ethnically Russian, from memory. Eyeballing it, at least half of the countries in Europe would have a higher % of their primary ethnicity.

Russia is only about 70% ethnically Russian

80.85% of those who declared ethnicity at 2021 Census.

If you are an American and want to only live around white people, Maine exists.

Very nice and extremely white places(Maine, Iceland, Denmark) aren’t hard to find. If you’d like to maximize your purchasing power I hear Argentina is like 90% light skinned, unlikely to go to war anytime soon, and eager for American dollars to be spent there.

If you’re looking for the actual literal whitest country in the world, it’s probably Latvia or something- absolutely no one moves there(unlike Russia, the US, Germany, etc) and there’s no native non-whites unlike in the US or Russia.

If of course you want a place to live that’s upper 90’s percent red tribe white, that’s West Virginia.

White nationalists mostly don’t live in or move to any of these options, although a few move to Orania I think all of those already lived in South Africa.

Comrade, if you wish to practice your unique way of life, you may move to your autonomous oblast! Sure, it’s far away from any industry, but…

An individual white nationalist does not have any influence over where jobs are, or how expensive the housing market is. You might as well tell them to move to remote Alaska. Iceland and Denmark are silly because, were they accepting many immigrants, I bet white nationalists would move there. Maybe even Latvia, too.

A white nationalist isn't someone who merely wants, personally, to avoid contact with non-white people. If it was, they could achieve that by never leaving their own home, which would also be about as politically effective as moving to Latvia.

Have you considered why white identitarians are not moving in greater numbers to white European countries?

I will use myself as an example. Right before Covid, I started looking into the possibility of becoming certified to teach English abroad. I was trying to figure out a way to get out of the U.S., at least temporarily, and to make a decent living while doing so. It seemed like one of the few ways for a non-highly-skilled immigrant to Europe to contribute positively, in a way that would not actively compete with or take jobs away from local citizens; my English fluency was something I could bring to the table that the average Eastern European can’t, and I could contribute positively to a local economy and culture.

However, the Covid lockdowns and their effects on travel decimated the TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) industry, and even if they hadn’t, the reality is that very few Americans can successfully get long-term well-paying jobs in Europe, due to EU labor regulations. I would have had to have invested in a Master’s degree in Education to have any hope of earning a stable and long-term salaried teaching job anywhere in the EU; without it, and without an established background as a professional teacher in the U.S., my job prospects in Europe would have been pretty entry-level. This is fine for recent college grads taking a “gap year”, or people who are just that desperate to get a chance to live abroad, but for someone like me, in my thirties and needing to earn a real living with the opportunity to save money, it just wasn’t financially realistic. And of course it would have been even less realistic if I already have a family and kids that I needed to bring over there and support.

There is also the issue of having nearly no established English-speaking expat community in many of those countries. The prospect of becoming fluent in Latvian, or Slovak, or Serbian, at this point in my life is quite dicey; I would be a very obvious foreigner, too late in life to truly assimilate into the local culture, for the entirety of my life in whatever country I’m moving to; if my entire stance on immigration is that it’s bad for people to move in large numbers to a country, despite not speaking the language and not being able to assimilate, it would be pretty hypocritical for me to then go and be exactly one of those immigrants.

And if Latvia did decide to open itself up to large-scale immigration by Americans, and to make its culture more accommodating to such people, the types of people who would come would be, overwhelmingly, liberal cosmopolitans who would immediately set about dismantling what made Latvia so functional and appealing in the first place. I was always aware that by coming over to Latvia to teach their children English, I would, as a matter of practical reality, be giving those children the tools to move away from Latvia, or to open their minds up to the poisonous ideology emanating from the Anglosphere and to sever them from their roots. In one sense, I would be selling them a valuable product that they desire, but in the other hand I would consider that product quite likely to be deleterious to them and to their native culture in the long run; I’d be little better than a pornographer or a drug pusher.

For white racially-aware individuals to start moving to European countries en masse, there would need to be clear reasons to believe that this would not lead to them being a ghettoized and distrusted population in those countries. Perhaps some right-wing European billionaire (do any such people exist?) could open a bunch of schools that would teach European kids English, but at the same time also teach them conservative Eurocentric values? This could maybe employ some smart DR guys like me who are temperamentally suited for teaching, but it’d still have to find some way to pay us a decent enough salary to make it worth it. Past that, I just don’t think the jobs are realistically there for most of the guys who’d be theoretically interested in them.

A couple of points: first, in terms of English proficiency being a cultural solvent - English already is the lingua franca of Europe, as it is in many other parts of the world. When an Italian meets a German, 9 times out of 10 they will speak English. When a Finn meets a Spaniard - English (although the Spanish are generally pretty bad at English). And so on.

If Europe is to achieve some manner of proper confederation and thereby preserve itself as anything other than a relic over the next century or two, it needs a language with which to do this. English in Europe (and remember it is after all a European language) doesn't just mean Americanisation, it also means the coalescing of pan-European consciousness.

So English proficiency is not purely a malus, or purely a tool of globohomogenisation.

Secondly - I know you're talking about Latvia as a long shot in terms of migration and integration, but actually its neighbour just to the north, Estonia, explicitly is pursuing a strategy of welcoming ambitious foreigners from the likes of America. They've set up an E-residency scheme that's kind of notoriously open to abuse, but it's meant a lot of foreign tech setting up shop there. Estonia is a more reasonable shot for someone of your profile to move to and integrate into, if you're interested

Oh believe me, I did plenty of research into the different countries that would be realistic destinations. I’d looked everywhere from Estonia to Macedonia and everywhere in between. I’d actually eventually settled on focusing my efforts toward non-EU countries like Serbia and Montenegro, just because of the greater ease of getting a job as a non-EU citizen.

Ultimately the issue is that English teaching in most European countries simply does not pay enough to make a living, and the long-term prospects of the industry on the continent seem to be very dire due to technological advances. I am certainly still interested in moving to Europe, but I’m likely going to need to rethink my path there around something other than TEFL.

I presume that white nationalists are attached to the places where they live- you live in SoCal IIRC and are a white nationalist. There are few places in the US you could move to that would be less white; I assume that you did not select SoCal as a place to live on the basis of wanting to only live around whites.

The point was that white nationalists obviously have a program beyond just ‘not have to see brown people’, because that option is available. I was addressing the ‘why don’t they just move to Russia’ idea floated in the post I was responding to.

I assume that you did not select SoCal as a place to live on the basis of wanting to only live around whites.

I didn’t choose SoCal at all - I was born here, and have lived here my entire life. Certainly I would not have actively selected it, given my current views, had I been born elsewhere. (I also dispute your description of me as a “white nationalist”, although I doubt you would find my protestations about that term persuasive.)

But yes, obviously any individual white nationalist/white identitarian/race realist/etc. will have other desires and life goals competing with the desire to live exclusively among other white people. Nothing is stopping me from moving to rural North Dakota, except for the weather, the lack of jobs, the generally poor lifestyle, the fact that I don’t know anybody there and would not be even close to anyone I know or anything I care about. And those same complaints apply doubly to moving to a country where the people don’t even speak English or have any cultural reference points in common with me. Now, would I still rather live in Latvia than in, say, Jackson, Mississippi? Yes, certainly, even despite all of the issues I’ve just listed. But there are options in between - like moving to a college town or affluent suburb in a relatively white and conservative state - that achieve most of the same goals without presenting quite so many obstacles and tradeoffs. And racially-aware whites in this country are in fact making this choices in great numbers right now. I plan to do so myself in the near future.

I didn’t choose SoCal at all - I was born here, and have lived here my entire life. Certainly I would not have actively selected it, given my current views, had I been born elsewhere.

Given that you are in your thirties, you chose to live there even if it was the default choice. You could easily have moved to Kansas City or Tulsa or whatever.

(I also dispute your description of me as a “white nationalist”, although I doubt you would find my protestations about that term persuasive.)

Then, uh, what are you?

I think your point is fair, but I would not describe either Kansas City or Tulsa as great havens for white identitarians. Both have longstanding racial strife. I’m actually not sure where such a person would want to go, if being around white people were the main concern.

Maine, as I pointed out in the beginning of this comment chain, has a negligible non-white population. If you're less committed to the US and can work remotely, Argentina has decent quality of life for American remote workers and a fairly relaxed visa regime, while being overwhelmingly white with a completely negligible black population. If you're less committed to living in a non-shithole, all the nonwhites left Ukraine when war broke out and the only new ones who arrived are serving in the Russian army.

Vermont or New Hampshire?

Given that you are in your thirties, you chose to live there even if it was the default choice. You could easily have moved to Kansas City or Tulsa or whatever.

Kansas City is over 25% black - for comparison, San Diego is less than 6% - and has a very significant black crime problem. Tulsa is only 15% black - so, again, still nearly three times as black as San Diego - and also has higher rates of both violent crime and property crime. Moving to either city would not be an upgrade in any of the QOL issues I’m concerned with, with the possible exception of housing costs.

As far as I’m concerned, the central sociopolitical conflict in America is between white and black. The other racial groups in the country are, at best, big players in the centuries-long psychodrama that has always existed between whites and blacks here, since long before the United States was a country. As I’ve explicated many times in this community, I believe that if blacks were to peacefully separate, both politically and geographically from whites, America could pretty much deal with the remaining non-white groups without too much issue. The removal of blacks from the political picture would also almost necessarily mean the dismantling of the Civil Rights Commission infrastructure and the resulting racial spoils system; without any strong pragmatic incentives to define themselves as separate from whiteness, non-whites in this country would, I believe, assimilate quite effectively in time, assuming immigration numbers can be swiftly brought under control and a restoration of the once-default expectations around the cultural/political hegemony of European-descended people is achieved.

I do not seek the creation of a purely-white ethnostate on American soil, both because it would be impossible to achieve, and because it would be unnecessary and would exclude and alienate a great deal of valuable human capital. The situation in Europe is quite different, and I would like to see European states remain >80% white for the foreseeable future.

About that.

Mills’ office said the goal is to figure out the best way to harness the economic potential of New Mainers and it has set a target of attracting 75,000 new workers by 2029.

Fifty years ago you would have all of western Europe, now you're saying it's just down to Iceland and Denmark. Running away to increasingly remote places every few years isn't a winning strategy.

I think it would also be fair to say that the US has moved to the right. Part of this was because of failures on the left but I also say Musks buying twitter was a big boost and COVID had a great deal of just be nice to the crazies thru the pandemic. It’s not just Motte going right. Maybe I’m in a bubble but I’m basically expecting as close to a landslide for Trump as possible for tribal America.

A second point for violent crime isn’t a real risks is it negates all of the costs society bares to mitigate violence in the US. We spend a lot of money on prisons. And a lot of money trying to boost black schools. Chicago’s economics would be a lot different without these costs. You also would not have had the ghettoization of the southside of Chicago. More urbanization does increase agglomeration effects. If America never had slavery I am fairly certain we would have universal health care. I don’t know if on net this would be a good thing because I think we would be less FU capitalist which probably hurts growth in other ways. Without black people American politics would be a lot more like Canada, but a super power.

I think it would also be fair to say that the US has moved to the right.

Anything recent that seems to be the US moving to the right is a special case that bypassed the obstacles that keep the right from gaining any power. Supreme Court rulings are the biggest example, but Musk buying Twitter is another. We never see the US move to the right because those obstacles have actually gotten weaker, so I'd say that they are one-offs and don't mean the US is moving to the right.

as close to a landslide for Trump as possible for tribal America.

Which is not a landslide at all. Trump's cap is at best 322, realistically 312 (MN the difference), hardly above Biden's 2020 result. To go any higher he'd have to start pulling some pretty preposterous states out of the bag. In any case, Trump's polling margin even in true swing states is low single digits, the economy has 6 months to get even better and Trump still has his trials to contend with. It's way, way too early to predict a 'landslide'. A week is a long time in politics, six months is an eternity.

Hijacking latest comment to repost the deleted comment from nowimjustcurious:

Observation: TheMotte is considerably more rightwing than it was on Reddit.

A couple of three recent comments serve as a demonstration.

Several days ago, I wrote a post summarising an essay in a leading white nationalist magazine. Replies were relatively diverse, but the net upvotes tell the story of which way TheMotte leans ideologically. To wit, the most upvoted comments argue that "Americans" should not include non-white people, and that desegregation was a mistake, and that you shouldn't let black people watch your children (really?).

Likewise, in an attempt to play devil's advocate, I made a recent comment about the "suffering" of white people in response to the HBD post from @PresterJohnsHerald. It's currently sitting at 10 upvotes, and even more interestingly, there is only one reply! I anticipated there would be a lot of rebuttals, like the fact that crime is overwhelmingly interracial, that far more black and white people get along than hurt one another, that your chance of dying from a homicide is statistically negligible, and that the solution obviously can't be segregation. Conversely, replies suggesting that the history of slavery and Jim Crow might have something to do with black underperformance are sitting below zero votes.

I guess what I'm asking is: where the liberals at? Or alternatively, why has the proportion of racists increased dramatically since moving off Reddit?

I wonder if there should be a formal mechanism for preserving top level posts, or other important contextual bits.

On a slightly related note, what is the preferred way to request the mods to check an account for suspicious activity? It seems like there have been an unusually large number of new accounts dropping in, concern trolling/making low effort posts, then ghosting recently. Though brigading or getting linked from somewhere else seems plausible as well.

On a slightly related note, what is the preferred way to request the mods to check an account for suspicious activity?

Report the post. That said, we notice more than you think we do and it's likely we have already noticed and/or are discussing a suspicious-looking poster.

“Where are the liberals at” The liberals are on the entire rest of the internet. The whole reason it’s the Motte and not R/the Motte is that R/the Motte was worried about getting banned off of Reddit. If someone’s opinions are broadly in line with the liberal consensus there’s a million other places they could discuss things instead. We’re like the American colonies during the English Civil War: People come here because they risk getting beheaded elsewhere.

Violent crime is the biggest converter from lib to con because it disproportionately affects affluent urban liberals (who are more likely to live in big cities, donate to political parties, be involved in politics, be involved in media etc).

If you live in a distant outer suburb of Dallas or Phoenix it’s unlikely that the Summer of Floyd had much personal effect on your neighborhood, which had no homeless people or significant crime before and after 2020.

If you live in Manhattan, or Georgetown, or Santa Monica, or the Mission, or in the Loop, you will 100% have seen a significant decline in the ‘social fabric’ / urban quality of life since 2020. There are many reasons for Reagan’s landslide victories but a part of them were that rich urban Democrats had gotten very fucking tired of decay. Sure, Mondale still won NYC (although not the state), but Reagan got 40% of the vote in the city.

Even in Manhattan Reagan got close to 30%, Donald Trump got 9%. And Reagan wasn’t merely charting the decline of the GOP in NYC; he got like 50% more of the vote in Manhattan than the several previous Republican candidates. And that discounts the big shifts the Dems made on crime too.

Hanania has written about this, but big cities becoming shitholes is one of the surest ways to shift the country to the right.

Yet, Biden won the 2020 election, did much better in the midterms, the Democrat's have continually won special elections, and so on.

Now, it's true cities have shifted to the right some (even though that's somewhat overindexed by people online). Eric Adams replaced DeBlasio in NY, various other more center-left/centrist Mayor's got elected in Phiadelphia and other major cities. All these people won fairly easy - it was a little tougher for Adams, but RCV is made to create a close final round. In a typical two round system with an actual campaign, he probably wins 55-60% initially.

But, any politicians rightly or wrongly, actually perceived as just Republican's in sheep's clothing will lose. Eric Adams, the woman in Philadelphia who won, etc. were all able to basically run as "Democrat's who understood crime was bad," and had progressive policy positions other than that. Like, Eric Adams has had some wacky ideas and endorsed Bernie in 2016 after all!

On the other hand, in Los Angeles, Rick Caruso was basically a rich centrist who got coded as Republican be he was a developer, was white, and went a little too far on some issues, and also, his opponent, Karen Bass was a normie center-left Democratic congresswoman, which mean she got massive support from every elected Democrat in California.

Then, in Chicago, it was even worse, because Paul Vallas, who worked under Obama and whatever, seemingly got deep in the same pool of stuff that shifted formerly centrist people right, and said a bunch of dumb things on radio shows and in campaigns, that allowed a black self-described socialist to beat him, despite the crime issue htere.

The actual problem for this idea of a right turn in the cities overall is things are worse than say, 2015 by some measures, but in many cities, things are already better than they were in 2020, and nowhere got close to the 80's and 90's numbers that allowed right-leaning Mayor's to actually win power. In 2024, even our criminals are lazy and don't do their jobs.

Plus, there are other factors - the Republican Party is a more conservative party socially, and it's more of a nationalized political space. In 1989, you could be a fairly liberal New Yorker, but throw a vote to Rudy, because hey, he's a prosecutor, but he's socially liberal, etc. Now, any right-leaning candidate has to deal with the fact that his base base of 10-20% Republican's in a major city have been radicalized, the median urban voter simply does not trust Republican's and has never voted for one in their lives, and you not only have to answer for whatever wacky things Republican's do in Alabama or Texas, you have to denounce it, or lose those votes.

So yeah, in 2022, there was a shift in NY & CA, especially among Asian & Latino voters for two reasons - the abortion issue was strongly off the table, and crime was a major issue. In 2024, I question whether we'll see the same shift. Yes, Trump will do better than he did in 2020 because of electoral polarization, but I simply don't buy the polls showing the greatest racial realignment since Civil Rights (I also don't believe Biden is suddenly winning older whites either).

Racial realignment is often swamped statistically by how Hispanics vote, and many Hispanics seem to be swing voters (see huge bush gains between 2000 and 2004, Trump’s fluctuating polling among Hispanics etc).

I don’t anticipate a black-white realignment for the same reason I don’t anticipate white South Africans suddenly voting for the ANC instead of the DA. Black voters (disproportionately middle aged and older women who are part of established Christian communities in the South) have their political machine, like many other American tribes historically, and it’s part of the Democratic Party. Some edgy black podcast hosts might entertain Trumpism, but young black men are the least likely to vote of any demographic in the US (iirc) and they’re unlikely to start doing so in great numbers soon.

That's the other thing - the most movement is among basically, the exact profile of people most likely to not vote.

As I said, according to Catalist, which is the best voter database showed Biden got 62% in 2020 and Democratic candidates got 62% in 2022 among Hispanics - if that number is 55% or 57% in 2024, would not be a huge shock. I just don't think the polling showing Trump winning Hispanics by 15 or 20 pass the smell test.

But, as been pointed out by many, because of the actual demographic makeup of voters, if Biden does a point better among white voters because college educated whites move even more in his favor as a result of Dobbs and Trump focusing on 1/6 and 2020, that basically evens out, and ironically, probably helps Biden more in the blue wall states of WI, MI, and PA.

I am in Argentina now for a bit. And being here makes me more racists. Salaries are down like 20% in a few months in real terms and farther away from where I am at I am fairly certain there is real poverty. Yet things feel chill and feel safe. I see far fewer cops than I would in any major city in the states. In the states I have had lunch with literal army vehicles and national guard on the street corners. It keeps making me think is this what society would be like in a 100% European ancestry country.

From a HBD perspective it seems safe to say Italians have proven themselves to be incapable of managing a central bank.

Looking at Argentina homicide rate, 4.62 in 2021, only slightly below pre-Floyd USA.

Why would this make you specifically racist? To me, this outcome is likely more driven by cultural/racial homogeneity than this homogeneity being of a certain race or not.

In the states I have had lunch with literal army vehicles and national guard on the street corners.

Where are you seeing this? It's not at all common in the US, excepting major disasters where the National Guard gets called out. Admittedly, New York sees the state of the subway as such a disaster currently, but my American sensibilities are always thrown when I've come across gendarmerie in Europe: our cops mostly don't dress in camo or bring out long guns unless they're actively using them. But uniformed soldiers patrolling airports and tourist hotspots is common in other First World countries I've been to.

our cops mostly don't dress in camo or bring out long guns unless they're actively using them

Honestly, that was a bit of a culture shock when I went there; I wasn't expecting to see someone standing around with a rifle at what I'd consider low-ready in the tube stations or just casually walking around, but the English and the French (at least; I'm pretty sure this is normal for everywhere inland) are armed to the fucking teeth. Some of them are subtle, like "this person isn't distinguishable from a normal guard, but the gun she's carrying was never made only in semi-auto... so what the fuck's so important back there?".

It's kind of disingenuous to say "yeah, British cops don't have guns" to New World audiences, because New World countries don't have soldiers on the streets whereas they're so common in Old World countries that their residents find it completely beneath notice.

Maybe I draw more of a distinction on the presence of pistols vs. rifles; pistols are defensive weapons that aren't front and center in any interaction you have with someone carrying one (there's an assumed continuum of escalation there where the cop has to pull it out first), rifles are very much not (they can't be carried in as neutral a manner). Serve and protect vs. seek and destroy.

In the British police, firearms units are seen as a plum job because you don’t have to spend as much time dealing with the public and doing shitty regular policing. In London there are hundreds (if major event) or dozens of police who sit around in vans with machine guns 24/7 so that in the event of a ‘marauding firearms’ (the official term) terror attack they can have a sub-7-minute response time for a unit whose entire training revolves around killing terrorists.

Honestly it’s a totally different mentality. In the vast majority of the USA I can walk around with a pistol on my hip after a greater or lesser degree of paperwork; the same thing the cops carry quite literally if I desired to do so. We’re simply much less used to the idea that the cops are armed and we aren’t- sure, the police have ar-15s and shotguns in their squad cars and there’s special squads with machine guns, but when you see police working security or standing about on the street they’re usually not much more heavily armed than the civilians can theoretically be.

seek and destroy

It's more remind and dissuade.

With one very notable exception, public violence in the US and Canada tends to be criminal rather than terroristic, and when it's terroristic, it's usually a lone wolf. At least for now (until cartel or jihadist violence significantly rises), criminals and criminal organisations there are not exactly geared for high level violence. And for those organisations, public violence is not a smart solution anyway, it attracts too much attention and it's bad for business. Cops with pistols are plenty enough to intimidate them into avoiding public violence. And while lone wolves can buy fancy weapons and equipment in the US, they're by the nature of being "lone" wolves, immediately outnumbered as soon as two cops or armed civilians show up. Europe has more of a problem with jihadist groups with international funding and sometimes high end equipment, a disregard for their own lives and a mission that makes public violence a goal in itself rather than an unfortunate detour to another end. A group of 5-10 of them can outgun and outnumber the police on the scene for enough time to do a lot of damage. These people are not intimidated by a cop with a holstered pistol, they need to be reminded that the country they're thinking of attacking has a military, and that this military is close enough to respond quickly.

A nice secondary or tertiary benefit about spending time in a LatAm country is experiencing the relative lack of pro-black and pro-latin(x) (ironically enough) propaganda, and relative lack of anti-white and anti-Asian propaganda. It’s a breath of fresh air.

Buenos Aires had a homicide rate about the same as NYC in 2022 (so post-Floyd).

From a HBD perspective it seems safe to say Italians have proven themselves to be incapable of managing a central bank.

One of the truly interesting things about Argentina is that they actually got many more of the good kind of Italian (northern) than the US did. Only about half, possibly far fewer, of Italian Argentines were from the South - more than 40% were from the north, 10% from the middle. Meanwhile almost all Italian Americans are from Campania, Calabria and Sicily.

It’s Italian-Americans who, if you look at the regional performance of Italy, should be in the shit. Yet the Italian Argentines, many of whom are descended from northern farmers and merchants who left in the mid-19th century, seem to have been unable to arrest the decline of their country.

The Spanish genetics are also broadly from the highest quality regions of that country (still with the highest incomes), like the Basque Country. Argentina doesn’t merely have mediocre PIGS EU handout genetics, it actually has cradle-of-the-Renaissance, competent-Milanese-industrialist genetics. It shouldn’t just be first-world, it should be rich.

HBD starts to quickly break down as a predictive theory once someone tries to use it to make predictions that are anything other than the most basic and obvious, such as "all else being equal, a civilization made up of whites will tend to outperform one made up of sub-Saharan Africans".

HBD doesn't explain, for example, why Northern Europeans went from being primitive forest-dwelling villagers to the world's intellectual elite in only 1500 years. There are some hand-waving theories about Christianity reshaping incest rates and so on, but they all have the feel of someone trying to cherry-pick ideas in order to try to make HBD seem more robust than it deserves.

HBD also doesn't explain why Han Chinese still didn't know that the Earth was round more than 1500 years after Europeans figured that out, even though today they have very similar measured IQs to Europeans.

However, with all that said, the reality is that Argentina is much less white than Italy. The average Argentinian has more non-European blood than the average Italian does, and a lot of the average Italian's non-white blood is probably from various MENA groups that, historically, far outstripped native Americans in terms of technological development.

Argentina has so mismanaged its economy for structural reasons that it cancels the whole thing out, though.

If Milei ends up building a durable political coalition my guess is the country becomes very talked about in right-wing circles. It’s big weakness is geopolitically its very isolated.

I have been thinking about how would this country develop in the global economy of the 21st century as it is a country that HBD models would predict to be rich but is not. It does fit the communists exception to the model in a lighter firm of Peronism/Kirchnerism.

For what I know about trade economics though it’s not in a good place. They speak the wrong language for entry into the elites of the global market - English. Geographically isolated so it is difficult for them to plug into a larger industrial clusters (Poland entering the German industrial machine). Commodities only get you some wealth and they aren’t as well positioned as Australia to be a Chinese mine. Time zone does seem to be an advantage. Probably not enough true Brahmin types to compete in big tech or chip making which are industries where geographical location matters less (not bulky). Northern Italy does plug into the larger German industrial base and has a lot of machine tooling industry.

The country still feels like it should be carving out niches in the global economy and perhaps this will happen if the politics are truly changing. One or two Skype level tech firms would make a lot of sense. Something like a high-end state consumer good company too. A firm comparable to Sub-Zero.

The isolation is an excuse, come on. Singapore is rich despite being surrounded by much poorer countries, a rich and competent Argentina would have replaced/supplanted Miami as the center of Latin American finance, all global corporations in the region would have their Spanish-world HQs there etc. Uruguay is in a tough spot because it’s small. Argentina is large enough to do well.

Isn't the point that Singapore is the opposite of isolated? It's in one of the most strategic locations on the planet and is a massive shipping hub on the way to very wealthy places. Argentina is on the way to where? Miami is the Latin American finance hub because it's on the way to... in the Estados Unidos.

Miami is the hub because it’s the only Latin American city that’s a nice place to live. It’s actually not geographically more efficient that deals between, say, a Colombian and a Peruvian investment fund needs to be conducted via Miami than that they should be conducted via Buenos Aires. The problem with LatAm is instability and a lack of places the global PMC want to live, which is why Miami is the capital of Latin America. It’s not that it’s in the US except in that the US is safe and stable; if it was about the US market or access to Wall Street they’d be based in NYC, but they’re not. They wanted a Hispanic city that was nice (and Spain was too far).

It shouldn’t just be first-world, it should be rich.

And North Korea should be South Korea.

The difference is that NK has been under one management since (effectively) 1945. The East German effect is well known, even if Korea is the most extreme example.

Argentina has had many governments, many skilled and intelligent senior officials who have genuinely attempted to transition to a prosperous market economy even if stymied by various longstanding political movements and interests. That they’ve all failed to arrest the catastrophe is kind of unique. Everyone knows communism is retarded, the conundrum with Argentina is that even economic mismanagement in the first world (see Greece and Italy pre-Euro) shouldn’t lead to Argentina-esque conditions for 70+ years in a row.

Everyone knows communism is retarded

No, they don't. Lots of people think communism is great. Poor people, in general, think Communism is great. Intellectuals think Communism is great (though many are smart enough nowadays to not call it that). Venezuelans think Communism is great. The big exceptions among the poor are Cubans and many Eastern Europeans, and some right-wing Americans.

To your mind, is there no difference between the various flavors of social democracy and communism? Because:

Intellectuals think Communism is great (though many are smart enough nowadays to not call it that).

simply isn't true. Most leftist intellectuals would support various levels of welfare, various levels of socialization of the healthcare system and so on but aren't interested in a centrally-planned economy, one-party rule, state-run media, etc.

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Yep. For poor people in societies that have limited social mobility, such as early 20th century Russia, communism actually is kinda great. It's not just a delusion. The reason is that for really poor people, it makes more sense to roll the dice and risk a small chance of getting killed during the revolution and subsequent communist regime, as opposed to just accepting a 99.99% chance that they themselves and their descendants will just continue to indefinitely be really poor.

It's in societies like modern America, where even the poor have it not too bad and social mobility is a bit better than in early 20th century Russia, that one can argue that communism is probably a bad idea even for the poor.

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Ok, among widely-reputed non-Marxian economists, Argentina is interesting because even bad economic mismanagement, in a market or quasi-market economy, shouldn’t result in a disaster of Argentina’s scale. No mainstream economist is confused as to why Venezuela’s a shithole. Argentina is genuinely a mystery. None of the usual explanations work, even a series of terrible governments shouldn’t do this much damage.

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One of the truly interesting things about Argentina is that they actually got many more of the good kind of Italian (northern) than the US did.

They even got a pope out of it! 😀

where the liberals at? Or alternatively, why has the proportion of racists increased dramatically since moving off Reddit?

Lack of external pressure + Evaporative cooling + community sentiment

On Reddit, there was some degree of pressure on both the mods and the users to avoid the attention of the admins. Leaving Reddit meant that they were no longer bound by those restraints and the least motivated posters were left behind. That in turn drives more people away who don't want to spend all their time debating HBD, etc...

Community sentiment has an effect of its own. To quote someone from the post-mortem on the SSC sub:

When the topic comes round very often to "Shall the Foo-men be castrated, drawn and quartered? I think maybe yes," it eventually dawns upon the Foo-men that they are in fact not welcome.

Of course, it goes beyond the general sense of hostility that drives people off and into the problem of moderation. Even if they're not biased by nature, internet moderators are unpaid humans and they're going to tend to look at users generating a lot of reports and angry responses as troublemakers, even if the quality of their posting is well within acceptable parameters.

"Already, we see why the typical answer “If you don’t like your community, just leave and start a new one” is an oversimplification. A community run on Voat’s rules with Reddit userbase would probably be a pretty nice place. A community run on Voat’s rules with the subsection of Reddit’s userbase who will leave Reddit when you create it is…a very different community. Remember that whole post on Moloch? Even if everyone on Reddit agrees in preferring Voat to Reddit, it might be impossible to implement the move, because unless everybody can coordinate it’s always going to be the witches who move over first, and nobody wants to move to a community that’s mostly-witch."

https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/07/22/freedom-on-the-centralized-web/

I don't think these views are more common than they used to be. They've always been here in a certain proportion, and they'll likely always be in any area of discourse that allows open debate.

I think you are right however that a certain proportion of the left has stopped pushing back against these and other views in this community. But it's not a mystery why they did so. They made it very plain why: they tried to spin themselves off into another community where moderation was controlled by left wing people and when that failed, they kicked us off the orange website.

The "liberal" PMCs became tired of pretending they have liberal ideals. They're still running the show at Reddit. You're in the pit with the rest of the undesirables.

they tried to spin themselves off into another community where moderation was controlled by left wing people

There is always /r/theschism, our Evil Twin (or maybe we're their Evil Twin). Set up in good faith (I do give them that much) as a place where the left leaning could express themselves without being dogpiled by all us (reads notes) pitbull Pence lovers. They don't seem to have as much activity as on here, though that too may be a part of the whole evaporative cooling thing. There was even a great opportunity for me to have a punch-up with one particular post if I wanted, but I do try to avoid just haunting the place looking for something to be offended by and then leaping in to have an argy-bargy, so I didn't even stick my head up for that one.

I don't go around looking for left-leaning sites to have fights with, and I'm sort of sad that the Schismatics never stuck around here because it would help balance out the right-leaning views, but you can't force people to join up with your community if they don't want to.

There was even a great opportunity for me to have a punch-up with one particular post if I wanted

When I saw that, my first thought was that this seems to be engaging on the wrong level, but my second was to wonder what you'd make of it. I'm still curious, if you're up for a non-argument explanation of what you personally think?

I don't really want to start a fight about it. There's much to be said on both sides (she said weaselly); I do find "to be deep in history is to cease to be Catholic" annoying myself, and I'm an unregenerate Papist. You could equally well end up Orthodox, or even the Oriental Churches might like a word there. And we've deliberately jettisoned so much of our history anyway, Benedict made a brave effort to re-introduce things but he was swimming against the current, so in many instances we're functionally indistinguishable from Protestants.

That being said, you have to end up somewhere. You can go on being a spiritual tourist, but if you insist on finding the one perfect setting where every single box is ticked on your list and it's all totally in tune with your preferences and prejudices, you're going to end up in a church of one. And Protestantism has split off from the Mother Church, no denying that, Trail of Blood notwithstanding, or Branch Theory, or any justification that "Well actually we're not a new denomination".

And Protestantism has split off from the Mother Church, no denying that, Trail of Blood notwithstanding, or Branch Theory, or any justification that "Well actually we're not a new denomination".

I deny it.

I don't think the natural unit of churchhood is adherence to Rome.

Hence, Luther and the other protestants were engaging in reforming the existing church of Germany (and Switzerland, the England, Sweden, etc.), not the creation of new institutions.

This has become less obvious as time has passed and denominations are no longer locally separated, and so the tendency is to think of it in terms of sects instead of in terms of the community of Christians.

I could refight the Wars of Religion here and it'd be fun, but I will refrain for the sake of peace, love and a currant bun.

You think Luther would recognise modern Lutheranism, with lesbian bishopesses for one thing?

You think Luther would recognise modern Lutheranism, with lesbian bishopesses for one thing?

Probably not; I imagine he would think that the ELCA and whatever else would need to be reformed. Remember, his ecclesiology, much more than yours, allows for institutions to start off healthy and then stray further.

But I suppose I don't get your point. Are you happy with the current state of Roman Catholicism everywhere? The German bishops? The current pope? Blessings for same-sex couples?

(And there are strands of Lutheranism which are healthier. The LCMS is somehow both conservative and pretty large, which is fairly unusual for more traditional protestant churches.)

Is there some way that that previous question was supposed to relate to my previous comment that I'm currently not seeing, or was that just meant to be a sample of the refighting the wars of religion that you would do?

Are you happy with the current state of Roman Catholicism everywhere? The German bishops? The current pope? Blessings for same-sex couples?

(1) No (2) Should all be defrocked (3) Not a fan but he's not Satan or an anti-pope (4) Again, not a fan, but once again that will likely be taken as an excuse by those who would do it anyway to go farther than intended

I think if we brought Luther forward in a time machine, he would recognise the Catholics as much the same as he had been fighting, but he would have no idea what the Lutheran church had become. So yes, I'm sticking to "the Reformers did found new denominations, not just reform the existing church". For one thing, they pretty much 'reformed' in different directions from each other, and the Anglican mess under Henry was "I'm only reforming" so he happily burned at the stake both Catholics for opposing him and Protestants for going further than he wanted. And when his son came to the throne, he had been influenced by the very Protestant nobility around him to take the 'reforms' even further. Then Mary tried reversing that with no success, and Elizabeth (and her spymaster) settled on making it a political question rather than religious - so now you would be executed for treason, not heresy, for not being in line with the state church and the monarch as its governor.

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No, but I don’t think Boniface would recognize the current crop of German Catholic bishops either. All of the major churches in Germany are transforming into something that wouldn’t have been deemed Christian a century ago. The only difference is that the EKD is a bit ahead of the RCC.

I sadly have to agree.

I wonder if there'd be some way to coordinate them joining at once, if they're interested, so that they wouldn't have to worry quite so much about being alone, and so that we could get a little more diversity of thought.

I wouldn't want to start a war, though.

I had completely forgotten that that place existed. I think they could have had a much more interesting arc if the moderator drama at the outset hadn't dampened their early momentum.

me too! I wonder if there's a chance to have a glorious reunion with them. /r/thereunification? Or some sort of organized debate event?

Any chance we can coax them back with - what appeals to liberals/lefties? Vegan burgers and spring water? It'd be great if some of them did drop back here occasionally, even as missionaries trying to divert us all back onto the right path and the right side of history.

they kicked us off the orange website

I must be out of the loop; when did “we” get banned from Hacker News?

The color theory of politics strikes again.

Down with mutualist-liberal-national-conservative-lib-left-social-democratic-fujimorist-catalan-christian-catholic-protestant-distributism and its various silicon valley lackeys!

the net upvotes tell the story of which way TheMotte leans ideologically.

It is a little sad, for The Motte, that it can be assumed people upvote arguments whose conclusions they agree with (as opposed to meritorious arguments on all sides).

It is sad, but that's how most people vote, even here.

People also tend to upvote a nice, spicy polemic, even if they don't necessarily agree with all of it, because it's so deliciously heterodox, pisses off the right people, or tells off one's hated enemies.

People also tend to upvote a nice, spicy polemic

Incidentally, I don't care for the term "spicy" as a euphemism for things that are uncomfortable, or potentially expensive, or potentially dangerous to say. If someone declines to make an objectively reasonable post because it is spicy", then maybe they just don't like spicy stuff; different strokes! On the other hand, if someone declines to make a post because it is uncomfortable (or expensive or dangerous), they are keeping their head down, or perhaps cowering, instead of speaking the truth. There are times to keep your head down, but there is never a time to deceive yourself about the fact that you are keeping your head down.

I use spicy to mean "inflammatory, or meant to be inflammatory." That doesn't mean there isn't a place for such, but most of the time they are high heat, low value.

By "inflammatory" do you mean (a) inflammatory in the eyes of a reasonable person, or (b) something that will, if widely seen, get a lot of people riled up, reasonably or unreasonably?

I have not spent nearly as much time thinking about how I define "spicy" as you have. I suppose trying to explain one's meaning to someone who was just venting about a term he doesn't like was a mistake.

Unfortunately it's inevitable even if every single voter fully intended to vote for quality, not agreement, simply because of the fact that you notice flaws in arguments that you disagree with much more easily than in those you agree with.

Spending a lot of recent time with higher class Africans, any benefit of the doubt that they are civilizationally capable faded.

I don't think this conclusion can be justified unless "they" is defined more narrowly than it would normally be defined in this context. I'd suggest that higher class Africans are selected for ability to retain power, which is not competency at ruling to benefit the people.

While you may be right, I'd quibble with considerably. Moving from Reddit is going to do that regardless because Reddit's rules make a place more left wing because they restrict what you can talk about to begin with. And you lose people that would prefer Reddit over other places and they'd probably be more left wing just going by the idea that: 1) someone using reddit at all is more likely to be left wing. 2) people leaving reddit for another site are more likely to be right wing. The entire idea that the motte leave reddit at all is explicitly right wing coded. Discussing HBD is right wing coded. Discussing trans issues is right wing coded (I say that because discussing means there's more than one view represented). In my experience discussing issues at all is right wing coded. Most of the people I know and most of the people I encounter are left wing and have no interest at all in talking about anything to do with actual issues, they have their stance they've taken and if you talk about it deeper you're a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, shitty person. Unless you're dedicated to proving right wing people wrong in every situation you're simply a bad person. I've heard this many times. And I suppose it's mostly a confluence of most people being left wing and most people really being unable to tolerate content they disagree with and being almost wholly uncurious. But all that being said, it's like IG-111, we're here because we're witches and they allow witches here. The 1000 witches problem is never really going to go away.

I do think that you're posting this in bad faith, however. Considering your examples of most upvoted comments are sitting at 7, 10, and 18 votes and your summary of each being both inaccurate and uncharitable. Why did no one respond to your HBD post about white suffering, because almost no one cares about HBD anymore. The idea that HBD has been talked about to death has been talked about to death, here. But you made it very clear in your post that you didn't believe what you wrote, it wasn't a trick like that post about one movie destroying a child's brain. Do you believe that no one read your disclaimer or that no one here respects steelmanning an argument they don't believe? Is that why you didn't bother to link to it? You brought up none of those rebuttals yourself but instead make a top level post calling people out who actually had the courage to make a post about something they believe and you're mad because they got a marginal amount of internet points and that nobody brought up your own points. It's hard enough to have the energy to argue your own thoughts, now you want us to argue yours as well.

"In my experience discussing issues at all is right wing coded."

Again, as I said downthread, this is only true if the only issues you care about are right-wing.

So yes, it'll seem left-leaning people aren't interested in talking about 'issues' if the issues you're concerned about are proving specific racial groups are less intelligent so we can spend as little on them as possible and make it OK to discriminate them again as been stated by multiple people here, how best to limit women so their only option is to have babies as multiple people have stated here, how everyone who doesn't believe the election was stolen from Trump is part of the Deep State, a RINO, or some other insultincluding Trump-appointed judges or people in the Trump WH who supported him 100% until the 2020 election, with perfect right-wing opinions otherwise, or how transgender people are discussed here, which is a lot of the basic "issues" brought up here, then yeah, you're not going to get a lot of arguments from even normie centrist people - they'll just think you're a weirdo.

Honestly, this is the reverse of some of the very left-wing friends who think 90% of the American population is fascist because they don't want to abolish all police, start bombing Israel (and I say that as somebody who wouldn't mind actually sanctioning Israel), banning cars, stopping fossil fuel extraction, and so on.

Again, as I said downthread, this is only true if the only issues you care about are right-wing.

I don't know if an issue can even be left or right wing, rather than there being a left or right position on each issue. But even accepting your framing, I don't see how this is accurate. Take something like the trans stuff, for years it was progressives pushing it, and it is only now starting to get some organized pushback, so if issues can have sides, that one's definitely theirs. Are they any more open to debating it? Not from my experience, you get banned on sight on any left leaning forum if you stray from the orthodoxy. Same was true for BLM, same was true for MeToo, same was true for COVID. Where is all this vibrant left-wimg debate you're talking about?

You're assuming I'm right wing because I have that opinion. Call me self-deluded if you want but most of my opinions are far left of anyone here. Though I read your union and abortion til birth opinions sound pretty normal left wing to me but I admit I live in a bubble. Most people I know are all or nothing and don't really care about nuance about things, if they believe in unions they believe in every aspect of unions if they think abortion should be legal they make no distinctions on it about how it should be practiced at all. I know it's because they mostly don't care about meting or puzzling out complexity but I also think even if you sat them down and made them think about it there's only a small proportion of people who would be moved to make specific lines about how much of their belief should be used in government mandates/laws. But I live in southern California, maybe that paints my life different.

But I didn't mean to suggest that right wing people are the only ones that will talk, I mean to suggest that it's right coded right now, because they're not in power, because they're the minority, because they will let the discussion touch ends they don't like or want possibly or probably because of those reasons.

Left wing people, in my experience, limited as it may be, will shut down conversations with insults or insults by proxy the moment it becomes even close to being about something they don't like. I've had right wing people talk to me about deep state stuff and it starts off with "I know you think I'm crazy but this is what I believe..." and when I question it they get excited that I'm interested and tell me more like the more they say the more I'll believe. And when I questioned the Steele Dossier's accuracy I had someone switch their tone of voice to the way you talk to a very small child and question my mental fitness and this was just a mild like "I don't know it seems kinda far-fetched..." And that's from people I know, people I don't will just respond with things like "oh so you're a shitty person" or more likely use the originator of a claim or opinion or the biggest name espousing it and then call them a piece of shit so they don't have to call you one. I'm sure they'd be perfectly happy and cordial to talk about a discussion where I was in full agreement with them, but I don't know that I'd consider that a discussion.

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs. It's always going to be difficult for left wingers or liberals to post amongst a much greater proportion of opponents, which means they leave, which means the proportions become even more slanted, which means more leave, and so on.

It was a regular complaint on the subreddit that the posting populace was excessively slanted, but there was at least still the possibility of new entrants to keep it from tipping completely out of balance.

It would be interesting to have a yearly poll about our users' political beliefs.

I think you're right. It's clearly more right wing then it was on reddit. I don't think it's hard right, but there's something to Scott's post about witch tolerance.

@TracingWoodgrains

Any chance you could run another iteration of the survey?

Not really something I have the bandwidth for atm, unfortunately, but I'm happy to provide the questions as a base template for anyone wanting to run it again.

So, the thing about self-described user belief is most people, right, left, centrist, libertarian, reactionary, whatever are sometimes quite self-deluded about their own positions, and relative position within the wider world.

Like, I'm a left-wing social democrat with what would be described as pretty SJW/woke/whatever views on most social issues - but I'm well aware my combination of wanting mandatory union votes for all employers over 10 non-family employees yearly plus abortion 'til birth puts me to the left of 95-96% of the population. Unfortunately, too many of my leftie friends have outsized views on what people support.

Another is salience.

A thing some people try to do, and I'll charitably say for non-prominent people is they're unaware they're doing this, is there are a lot of people who'll describe their views as centrist or liberal, and when defending themselves, go over the various issues they're center-left on, but the only time they mention those issues is when they're defending themselves against attacks they're not a right-winger.

For prominent people, that's how, as a left-wing social democrat who doesn't mind reading opposing views, is how I figure a "the left is going too far" person's griftiness. For example, Matt Yglesias is cranky about some things and thinks the non-profit complex in DC and nationwide is hurting various causes, etc. but also regularly talks about how the GOP wants to ban abortion nationwide and cut Social Security & Medicare.

OTOH, there are various other pundits who anytime a left-leaning person (especially a liberal coded MSNBC-type) criticizes them, goes into the whole, "now, I'm the true leftist because I call for x, y, and z", but then they never talk about x, y, and z again, and go back to complaining about kids on campus or whatever." Honestly, I prefer the reactionaries and right-wingers here who are honest about their beliefs, as opposed to the pundit lying about what they truly care about.

plus abortion 'til birth

Asking genuinely out of interest and not to start a fight or as 'boo outgroup' (before any of the mods get itchy trigger fingers), as someone as vehemently on the opposite side of this, could you expand? For the 'hard cases' (which I am assured are the only tiny exceptions in the second trimester and nobody is doing third trimester abortions) or "no I mean everyone, if last week you wanted the baby but this week you had a row with your boyfriend and want to abort his kid, even if it's due to be born in two weeks' time, totally your right and your choice and the clinic is this way"?

I would like to get an insight into the reasoning there from someone who does hold this view, rather than at second- or third-hand. Don't worry, I have no intention of shaking my rosary beads at you!

I think the number of women and doctors who would both agree to say, in week 38, to randomly decide to do an abortion is basically zero, and basically all Republican-led abortion restrictions put far too many hoops in front of couples in the middle of the worst moments of their lives, just because of a lack of trust of women, doctors, and random religious beliefs.

As I think I've said before, actual European abortion laws (appx. 15-weeks plus exceptions you can drive a truck through) would probably be fine with a mass majority of the voting public. But, Republican's even when they claim they are, don't actually put forth France-style or German-style abortion laws, so that's led to a massive reversal in support for said 15-week abortion bans (they're now underwater in the US), and much increased support, with 55% noow believe women should be able to get an abortion if the woman wants it for any reason, up from 38% in 2006.

If there was some indication of some large numbers of women having abortions at 37 weeks willy-nilly, my view might be shifted, but even the case people like to trot out - Kermis Gosnell - was mainly women who only went to him, because of restrictions put upon earlier abortions that made it harder for those women to get them then. Obviously, still terrible what he did, but these women were not coming to him at week 37 going, "y'know, baby seems kind of a drag now."

There's a reason 90-something percent of abortion are in the first trimester, and even then, most of those in the 2nd trimester are more, "I didn't have enough money/time to wait out the state-mandated waiting period/etc." than "I decided 4 months in babies are no fun."

To clarify, you think it's morally wrong (barring unusual circumstances), but think it should be legal (because trying to filter only for such circumstances imposes too-substantial costs, and you expect low rates of problematic late abortions anyway)?

I think the number of women and doctors who would both agree to say, in week 38, to randomly decide to do an abortion is basically zero

Then there should be no harm in outlawing it, right?

I think bringing back user viewpoint focuses would be a positive change, as well.

Do you want to start that back up?

If mods give an OK, I’ll make a main motte viewpoint focus and nominate another user in it.

Every time you write a top level post, it's a focus on your viewpoint!

I guess what I'm asking is: where the liberals at? Or alternatively, why has the proportion of racists increased dramatically since moving off Reddit?

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.

how much we have to limit women's freedom to get them to make more babies, and start having them earlier.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 [...] 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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Likewise, in an attempt to play devil's advocate, I made a recent comment about the "suffering" of white people in response to the HBD post from @PresterJohnsHerald. It's currently sitting at 10 upvotes, and even more interestingly, there is only one reply!

I can only speak for myself, but I was so bewildered by trying to judge if that comment was even serious, that I just scrolled past without interacting with it in any way.

But also, I'm reminded of a post I read somewhere on the internet about how a lot of good scientific work came from monks, in part, because they had to seriously engage with the heresies of the day in order to figure out how to merge them into a christian worldview, so at a given day some christian would be reading and thinking about a lot more anti-christian or problematic arguments just so he could avoid embarrassing himself in a debate. In that sense, I think the left's increasing tendency to exclude contrasting arguments seriously hurts their ability to hold their own on a heterogenous platform, whether or not they are right. The level of in-depth pushback you can get for progressive arguments in this place is just far above what you'd get elsewhere. And then you either put in a lot of time and research to convince some people that your culture tells you cannot be convinced and should not be listened to, or ... stop engaging.

I think the left's increasing tendency to exclude contrasting arguments seriously hurts their ability to hold their own on a heterogenous platform, whether or not they are right.

I think this hits the nail square on the head. For example, I think there are some good arguments against strong HBD based on evolutionary biology, but you never hear those kinds of arguments articulated by people on the left because it would require them to actually listen to the pro-HBD arguments and think carefully about them, which most are not willing to do.

like the fact that crime is overwhelmingly interracial

Wait is this a typo or am I missing something?

In the US context don't most statistics support violent crime being primarily intraracial?

See for example table 6 of the latest FBI Crime in the U.S. or table 13 of U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Victimization, 2021. Excluding the Hispanic origin category, Both show >75% of perpetrators of violent crime being from the same grouping as the victim.

The odd spread of opinion on the motte in either incarnation has been a puzzlement for both posters and mods alike for years, to the point where, imho, the mods give far too much leniency toward left-aligned posters in an attempt to foster a more 'even' debate forum. A laudable goal, I suppose, but not without it's unintended consequences.

Again, imho.

How the motte as a whole has developed hasn't been a surprise to me. At all.

Please allow me to explain my point of view.

Also, please excuse my generalizations, as I'm going for brevity, and relying primarily on my personal experiences.

I've been around a time or two. Long enough to see how forums develop, primarily in the fandom arena. Fandoms as a whole tend to lean left. Often, most fandom forums will also include 'off topic' areas that allow for political discussion.

While you could likely quibble with the ratio, I think it's fair to say that the most vociferous voices in these off-topic forums are going to lean heavily left. This creates a board culture that slowly dominates more and more, accelerating depending on how the spread of moderators and their personal opinions go.

This creates a specific argument culture - the majority of posters are left aligned, posting frequently, and have a plethora of free time to do so. If any right-aligned posters decide to wade into that pool, they're going to be faced with large opposition - gish galloping, low-level harassment in the form of having to deal with multiple posters attacking their view without pause, and so on. This creates stress, which can result in bad behavior(despite their opposition never being called out on it), often resulting in mod action, which creates a feed-back loop of self-satisfaction for the left-aligned posters and mods. This creates a perceived trend - right-aligned posters cannot debate or argue their points, hence their ideas are not good, and so on. A chilling effect occurs, as right-aligned posters realize the juice isn't worth the squeeze, the environment is hostile, and the mods - supposedly neutral arbitrators - will not be on their side.

So. This reinforces a perceived board culture, and what few right-aligned posters that debate such things will typical be extreme outliers, as they've been hardened by experience and can handle operating in a hostile environment.

However, a curious thing can occur. Off-shoot forums can develop, much smaller, taking population from the larger as a whole yet not having the numbers or involvement. Off-topic forums are put in place, including, yes, politics.

And a different environment emerges. When the playing ground is made even, suddenly it's the left-aligned posters acting badly because they're no longer operating in an environment they're familiar with. One on one, they can no longer rely on gish-galloping or numbers, and their opponents are well-experienced handling rapid-paced one-on-one debates(they have to be, to survive this long). Suddenly, the shoe is on the other foot - and the resultant behavior is so explicitly bad, even if the mods would normally be left-aligned, the size of the forum can't hide the behavior. It's clear, explicit, gains attention, and the mods have to play by the stated rules whether they want to or not.

Such off-topic areas are often shut down in quick order, likely due to all the mod-actions that result from it. I suspect this is due to all the left-aligned posters constantly abusing reports in the background, resulting in an over-sized headache the mods don't want to have to deal with, but this is pure suspicion on my part, lacking in any explicit evidence.

The motte exists in it's current forum because it's a level playing field, rigorously enforced. When their is conflict with the mod's decisions as a whole, it's often in the form of special treatment toward the left-aligned posters as a whole, but the mods have limited choices. The wider internet as a whole has inculcated a specific attitude in most left-aligned posters that does not lend itself toward even debate. They exist in an environment that encourages gish-galloping, low-level harassment, and confidence that the mods will take their side in most matters. They're used to low-level chilling effects and love-bombing in the form of most posters taking their side.

You say the motte is more 'right-aligned'. It is, likely. From the perspective of most left-aligned posters that wander in, because they're used to a radically different debate environment, populated by posters with similar opinions, where their perspective is rarely challenged, and where ideas in opposition to their own are rarely presented in a cogent fashion(and when they are, there's no guarantee it will remain).

The motte as it stands is the result of evolutionary pressure focused on political debate exerted on the wider internet as a whole and this forum in specific. Factors elsewhere do not exist here. This is a strange country, with different rules and pressures.

If you want a more neutral forum, find better left-aligned posters that can operate with those rules and pressures. Otherwise, don't be surprised when they decide to instead debate and argue in places where they can flourish.

You say the motte is more 'right-aligned'. It is, likely. From the perspective of most left-aligned posters that wander in, because they're used to a radically different debate environment, populated by posters with similar opinions, where their perspective is rarely challenged, and where ideas in opposition to their own are rarely presented in a cogent fashion(and when they are, there's no guarantee it will remain).

This is an understatement.

Themotte is clearly right-leaning, it is not just that it's right-leaning compared to reddit or something. Posts of similar quality will get more upvotes if they're right-leaning, and the median comment is right-leaning.

(And lest you think I'm one of the left wing posters, as you described it, I assure you, I'm not.)

Unfortunately the OP deleted his comment. But I think what you say is largely true. Especially about the course that almost every other forum takes- I've seen it on RPG and boardgame forums, on fan fiction forums, on writing and literary forums, even (to a lesser degree) on tech forums. Some of the places I hang out at which are ostensibly "apolitical" have threads explicitly about "How can we support Biden in the election?" You can imagine what would happen if someone started a thread about how to support Trump.

I am "left-aligned" but this place feels like one of the few places left on the Internet where I'm still a liberal. Anywhere else, if I express my actual (classically liberal, or as the choads on those forums would mockingly say, "cLASSiCly LIbErAl!!!") views, I am immediately tagged as a right-winger. This used to make me say "Wtf?" but now I just accept that I am politically homeless and will be the first up against the wall.

(But really, it just enrages me, when I can still muster such feelings, that believing in colorblind meritocracy, free speech, presumption of innocence, biological reality, "my rules, applied fairly," etc., is now coded as "right-wing.")

But really, it just enrages me, when I can still muster such feelings, that believing in colorblind meritocracy, free speech, presumption of innocence, biological reality, "my rules, applied fairly," etc., is now coded as "right-wing."

Because no one believes you. Whatever you, personally, believe, it all stinks of embarassed conservatism. People make fun of self-identified "classical liberals" because the label has been spoiled by bigots hiding behind a mask of libertarianism (libertarianism that for some reason only seems to extend as far as their own preferences). I like meritocracy too, but I've met too many people for whom 'meritocracy' means never having to think about how society allocates opportunities.

I could go on, but I'm on my phone and that makes composition awkward, so I'll leave it at this: I find this comment darkly hilarious because the kind of people who populate the Motte are exactly the reason you are treated to a presumption of bad faith.

  • -15

Whatever you, personally, believe, it all stinks of embarassed conservatism.

Why can't conservatives be 'classical liberals'. If you look up a list of historical classical liberals it's people like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and Ronald Coase. People like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were considered neoliberals. They were and are considered conservatives as well!

People usually call themselves "classical liberals" because they pointedly want to distinguish themselves from social conservatives. What I am saying is that many/most (though not all) such people are just garden variety conservatives who are embarassed by their own socially conservative views and/or the association with other conservatives, so they come up with stories to tell themselves (and others) how the party left them behind or the SJWs forced their hand or something similar, the point of which is say "I am not really a conservative."

So what would you consider a classical liberal that is neither a conservative, nor a woke progressive?

That would depend on the actual content of their beliefs, since someone calling themselves that could be almost anything from a center left neoliberal to a blue tribe conservative to white supremacist who isn't quite ready to take off the mask.

Statistically, my money is still on conservative in denial.

That's not what I'm asking. You shouldn't have to invoke other people to answer the question of what classical liberalism is according to you.

More comments

There was a meme originating during Gamergate about "being thrown into the pit with the rest of us". This is how the throwing is accomplished -- anyone who doesn't sign on with the progressive program in its entirety is branded a closet conservative.

Except that's manifestly untrue. The center left and far left squabble incessantly without the former being forced out. Some gamers have a meltdown because some gaming journalists called them sexist isn't being thrown in a pit, but it is sort of telling.

  • -11

If you can joke about it, and people get the joke, maybe you should reconsider your priors for 'manifestly untrue'.

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I won't say you're wrong that this is how many of my "fellow liberals" think. You are wrong if you are accusing me of actually being an "embarrassed conservative" who actually believes in my heart of hearts that white men rule by divine/genetic right and I'm just pretending to believe in classical liberal values because they flatter me.

As for other Motters, I won't speak for anyone else, but from what I have seen, the people who claim to be liberals really are; the white nationalists or white nationalist-adjacent don't claim liberalism. I can think of a couple of regulars who've claimed they used to be liberals ("before they got mugged by reality" as one person put it) - I am not sure if someone getting blackpilled puts the lie to classical liberalism.

You are wrong if you are accusing me of actually being an "embarrassed conservative

I am not trying to accuse you of anything. I am telling you why this political narrative is not taken seriously.

the white nationalists or white nationalist-adjacent don't claim liberalism

The people I am describing are not white nationalists (they are frequently racist, but not ideologically so). They are embarassed conservatives. I use that turn of phrase for a reason - they are people who like to think of themselves as liberal even though their political priorities and sensibilities are overwhelmingly right-wing. I know no shortage of people like this in real life by dint of the fact that I used to be one, and the almost universal pattern was that when push came to shove they'd come down on the conservative side of an issue. Sometimes this was just lack of perspective - they couldn't conceive of how a gay man or a black woman might have a different experience with - but often it was just disregard.

I think you're just exhibiting the traits I am protesting. So if I have to wear the "right-wing" label if I continue to believe things that made me a liberal in the 80s and 90s, then sure, I guess I'll have to wear that label before I will accept the progressive redefinition of "liberal."

I don't know what to tell you, man. If your political beliefs really crystallized in the 90s, you're going to find the valence of many of your beliefs sliding right (or being reduced to rhetoric rather than policy, or just losing salience). It doesn't necessarily make you right wing relative to the general population, but it probably makes you more right wing than you used to be. That's not some semantic sleight of hand on the part of the modern progressive movement; that's a normal aspect of how politics change. I'm more left-wing/less conservative than I used to be, partly because my views changed, but in large part because things I still believe became less conservative.

And that is apart from how certain phrases can serve as political euphemisms that convey a meaning quite distinct from their literal one.

I don't necessarily think this framing is wrong, but this certainly isn't the kind of anodyne charity deployed in the wild.

It's all well and good to say that 90s liberalism would drift into a kind of conservatism as times change. What I see is progressives habitually claiming that this new strain of 'conservatism' is actually the latest genealogical strain of fascism and white supremacy that traces its lineage to Nazism or similar. You see the difference, and so you can surely understand why that tribe may balk at this "No no, you really are technically right-wing" insistence.

I agree that some of this is 'embarrassed conservatism' being expressed by people who probably identified as good liberals up until the 2010s give or take. But some of this is because there are consequences to being frankly conservative. Few are going to honestly embrace the conservative label if that immediately and unfairly typecasts them as villains.

If your political beliefs really crystallized in the 90s, you're going to find the valence of many of your beliefs sliding right (or being reduced to rhetoric rather than policy, or just losing salience). It doesn't necessarily make you right wing relative to the general population, but it probably makes you more right wing than you used to be.

Am I more right-wing, or are liberals more left-wing? If "free speech" used to be left-coded and now it's right-coded and I am still pro-free speech, who changed?

I feel like there are a few core concepts to liberalism that are very old and very consistent and the disconnect here is that most modern progressives don't realize that they have almost totally abandoned the ideological framework that they were raised in, so they still hold onto the word liberal despite abandoning the ideology.

It seems sort of amusingly illiberal, to rewrite history so that liberal is just the word that the left uses to describe itself and so liberals who are no longer in-line with the modern left, despite being totally in-line with liberalism, must be conservatives.

The reality is the modern left is not liberal for any coherent understanding of the term, this is not even ship of Theseus territory, it is an almost total abandonment of liberalism as an ideology. The principled liberals who used to be on the left were all collectively shocked(or shocked later when they finally noticed) as the rug got pulled out from under them and their massive wide spread cultural support vanished over night in the face of woke. As I vaguely gestured to above, I think this is mostly a politics as fashion thing, and all the people who would have smashed the like and re-tweet buttons on "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it," on a hypothetical 1995 twitter, ended up smashing the like and re-tweet buttons on "Freezepeach" on the real 2015 twitter.

A great place to watch this in the wild is, if you have the temperament for it, any Destiny content. Destiny is basically a liberal, and when he talks to progressives he will make liberal arguments, and you can see the sort of confusion and cognitive dissonance, as they try to square a sort of vague background respect for an under-specified liberalism, with their totally illiberal current positions and thinking.

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This is entirely a dilemma of the Left's own making when they chucked liberal principles and meritocracy aside and left various flavors of the Right to make those appeals. I get that there are legit criticisms of those concepts, some of which resonate even with me. And yet I really thought "racial quotas in every field" was something that would have been rejected by my estwhile peers; a strawman from right-wing media to be scoffed at, not enthusiastically endorsed. And sure, some would argue that not all leftists would support those endeavors if they were truly aware of the extent of them, but they sure do have a habit of digging their heels in if the subject is brought up.

After prematurely evacuating that hill and leaving it to the savages, you're a little suspicious that 'classical liberalism' is being contamined by a bit of white identiarianism? With all due respect: I hope that's some really tough shit the Left has to chew on for a long time. I'm not a WN by any measure, but there's no way we were going to have this collectivist-tinted racialized 'discourse' without that appearing on the menu. They deserve their shot.

Maybe that meme contamination is what will ultimately kiill 'liberalism'. The ick factor. Or maybe one day people will get sick of the progressive rule of the day when it has nothing to show for its actions, and thing start snapping hard in some other direction.

Join the Federation, circa ~2360. Excellent fit, and a good measuring stick besides. Would somebody be uncomfortable as a member of Picard's crew? If so, they're not likely to be an ally to you or me.

I am in the same boat. On here, I am one of the most liberal posters. On Reddit, I would be mis-perceived as some sort of fascist by many people just because I think that racial groups differ in average intelligence (although I don't support discriminating against people because of it) and I don't want to be forced to use trans people's preferred pronouns (although I am completely fine with trans people being trans).

When I read stuff on here, I find myself annoyed by all the authoritarian social conservatives. When I go to Reddit, I find myself annoyed by the wokes.

Increasingly, the only political discussion forums online that I really enjoy are ones where people frequently make fun of, or at least criticize, both the left and the right.

(But really, it just enrages me, when I can still muster such feelings, that believing in colorblind meritocracy, free speech, presumption of innocence, biological reality, "my rules, applied fairly," etc., is now coded as "right-wing.")

I'm probably throwing stones while in a glass house, but I can't help the feeling you've been tying your own rope here. Unless I'm conflating you with other left-leaning posters, I seem to remember years and years of assurances that everything is fine, and us other (some possibly now ex-) classical liberals were overreacting when we were warning about the wave of coming cultural changes.

I don't think I ever said "Everything is fine" but I will admit to not seeing just how quickly and severely things would change and remaining in the "It's just a few crazy college kids" camp for too long. That said, the reason I was on the Motte in the first place was because I was finding myself not sympatico with other people who were supposedly on "my side."

I am "left-aligned" but this place feels like one of the few places left on the Internet where I'm still a liberal. Anywhere else, if I express my actual (classically liberal, or as the choads on those forums would mockingly say, "cLASSiCly LIbErAl!!!") views, I am immediately tagged as a right-winger. This used to make me say "Wtf?" but now I just accept that I am politically homeless and will be the first up against the wall.

This is mostly my experience as well. I'm a liberal more than I'm a leftist, and in the past, those used to be aligned, but now, leftism has morphed into something that is openly and explicitly anti-liberal, and in that conflict, I'll prefer liberalism every time. As such, a forum like this which is both very right-wing and very liberal is far more interesting to read and to partake in than basically any left-wing forum that I know of. I dislike the right-wing racialism/ethnocentrism, but given that the left side is no better at that stuff, I'll take the liberal discussion about the right-wing than the illiberal (lack-of) discussion about the left-wing.

We didn't change that much. The jump from being a thread in /r/slatestarcodex to being /r/themotte was much sharper. /r/themotte started from the beginning as "the portion of the community that was willing to platform HBD", which was what the other side most strongly objected to, so using pro-HBD sentiment as evidence of how we changed seems lacking to me.

I mean, even Scott was a racist all along, he just being esoteric about it.

I anticipated there would be a lot of rebuttals

The position "whites suffered as a response to the civil rights revolution" is an unimpeachable fact that even people on the pro-CRL side agree with, just with a positive valence. Justice for the robbed implies stripping goods from the robber. Why should you expect a rebuttal? Perhaps the word "suffering" implies sympathy for those injured? But even mass murderers and child molesters suffer.

and that the solution obviously can't be segregation.

I'd certainly contest that this is obvious. You seem to be asserting this on moral rather than empirical grounds. Even morally, the weak form of segregation is "allow people to self-select their own communities as they like", which is a proposition most people agree is moral unless you specifically rephase it in the race context.

EDIT: While we're here, "don't let black people watch your kids" is an uncharitable rewording of @RandomRanger's post. He says it's bad to send your children to a mostly American black school/community, which is quite compatible with "letting black people watch your kids" in the case of a black acquaintance, peer, or credentialed teacher/pastor/nanny. The point is that a large group will tend to the population average, not that every member of that group is the average ― this is a standard anti-racist motte and bailey.

The board is more right wing but a lot of the most low-quality racist users have also left and/or been banned. There are far fewer slurs and there is far less generic trashy racism than there was on Reddit. I’m surprised people don’t remember what it was like to have constant drive-by posting from people unfamiliar with the subreddit and rules who came over from MDE, Opie and Anthony and other DR shitposting subs.

I pretty much never report anything these days. I’ve literally reported maybe three or four comments in the last couple of years here, whereas on Reddit I’d report regularly. You may remember I was highly opposed to the move from Reddit and predicted it would be the death of the community; I have been pleasantly proven wrong.

Arguing that the CRA was unconstitutional doesn’t mean it was immoral or even a bad idea; I think a lot of federal authority is unconstitutional but agree that it’s in effect necessary for the functioning of America as a modern state. But the CRA should have passed as a constitutional amendment given its sweeping constitutional scope.

I'd argue the same goes for the high quality posters as well, at the very least in terms of engagment.

The quality is just down overall, regardless of topic. Perhaps there are less offensive drive by posters but who cares?

What high quality posters do you think we're missing? Feel free to PM if you think it would cause drama or something.

(imo there's really only one notable poster I can think of who's been conspicuously absent lately, other than that I think the quality is doing ok, maybe even better than it was ~6 months ago.)

@DaseindustriesLtd dropped off on posting, I think. (If you see that, is that a pun on dasein?)

@faul_sname always had high-quality exchanges, but was never as prolific.

Both seem to still be around, but don't say things all the time.

In terms of why I'm not so active it's mostly the "had a kid 2 months ago" thing, not anything to do with Motte quality.

Congratulations, then!

That was a pun, but also an unfulfilled (except in very narrow personal scope) promise of engineering a Dasein, yes.

I've concluded that discussing American culture war is largely fruitless for a third worlder like myself, on the edge of Singularity to boot.

I find it very sad that the Motte never found a way to maintain activity. Guess Zorba also found things to do.

The quality is just down overall, regardless of topic. Perhaps there are less offensive drive by posters but who cares?

This is the big change. When I go back to 2020 /r/themotte threads, I revel in all the glorious paragraphs and long good-faith back-and-forths.

There has been some churn of high quality users, but go back to 2016/2017 threads and the average writing quality isn’t very high relative to today’s.

It has the great advantage of being interesting though -- "long 'high quality' screeds on boring topics" vs "interesting and often insightful off-the-cuff remarks on hot CW issues" is an easy choice for me, personally.

True, but in part there was also more happening and a lot of topics were not yet overplayed.

Our overall traffic is down, but I think we lost high-quality users and shitposters in about the same proportion. So I don't agree the overall quality is down; we just have fewer posts overall. And this was pretty much inevitable as a result of moving from a very large platform to a very small one.

I was mildly against the move at the time (I think Zorba might have pulled the trigger too early.) That said, it's important to remember why we moved. It was inevitable that we would have been kicked off of reddit eventually, and probably sooner than later. Many of the conversations happening here simply would not be allowed on reddit today.

Our overall traffic is down, but I think we lost high-quality users and shitposters in about the same proportion.

Probably true, but when you have a group of high-quality users that would fit on a school bus vs an infinite tide of shitposters (who seem to be more inclined to set up alts and get even more shitposty when banned, rather than just saying "fuck those guys" and carrying on with life) this is not a sustainable state of affairs.

Speaking of traffic, is there anything in the pipes that might get us more new blood?

Since there is close to no inflow of quality posters it is a problem, especially since we're close to reaching scarcity tipping point of quality posters so as that they have no other quality posters to talk to (or who're willing to engage).

To be clear, I'm not claiming to be a quality poster, I'm just pointing out that we're bleeding quality engagment in general, and have been since almost immediately after the original split from ssc. The liberal/leftwing exodus was easier to notice but we have lost plenty of rightwingers as well, who've not been replaced.

Fundamentally the issue is a lack of quality inflow, of any ideological flavour. It seems to happen to more than this community. Perhaps people are just on substack and twitter now, idk.

Perhaps people are just on substack and twitter now, idk.

I suspect this is part of it. The Motte is just not as rare of a forum as it was a few years ago, before the rise of Substack and Musk buying Twitter. The big woke push to deplatform those who disagreed with them ended up forcing people to actually create their own forums, and they did so successfully.

That is part of the reason why I am significantly less worried by wokism than many of the other people here. From where I sit, it seems to me that wokism has substantially receded from its peak of a few years ago, and there is little danger of it achieving a hegemonic position of dominance in the West's politics.

I think there probably is reason to worry about it capturing institutions, still, because there are many woke people, and things like diversity statements serve to filter out dissenters.

But I agree that he left has lost some of the cultural dominance it once had, and resistance to it is significantly less fringe.

I do worry a little about whether generational change will make things worse.

The Motte is just not as rare of a forum as it was a few years ago, before the rise of Substack and Musk buying Twitter

Yeah, but I think this might be only temporary. I don't think Musk will be able to hold on to Twitter in the long term, and even though it's a lot better now than it was before, Musk's Twitter still seems to favor the woke. The guys running Substack seem to have their heart in the right place, but let's just say I learned not to put my trust in California based companies that profess free speech. Even if they remain devoted to the principle, I don't think centralizing one of the last remaining forms of independent internet media is completely benign.

That is part of the reason why I am significantly less worried by wokism than many of the other people here. From where I sit, it seems to me that wokism has substantially receded from its peak of a few years ago,

So what? The receeded level is still miles above the baseline of when people started warning against wokism. If you want to tell yourself to talk yourself down from doomerism, fair enough, but "there is little danger of it achieving a hegemonic position of dominance in the West's politics" sounds more like an excuse to not do anything about it, in which case I have some pretty harsh words for you.

What makes The Motte special isn’t its ideological leaning; if you want to discuss HBD, reactionary politics and so on there are (and long have been) many other forums and communities for it. I think what makes it special is the focus on discursive long form writing, which is different in kind both from blogposts on Substack and from microblogging on Twitter/X.

It is a problem, but really, if y'all want more people here, you have to go recruit them. We (and especially Zorba) can only do so much.

I'm not asking you to. I don't think this can be solved.

People are either writing long form stuff on places like substack or they're in private discord servers/group chats when they want to discuss stuff.

I'm just mourning a bit.

Let’s ask kulak to put a recruitment pitch on his sub stack…

That would be counterproductive

I do think that the forum could have scraped by for a couple more years on Reddit, but there was also the risk that the chilling effects of admin threats and mod policies in response to those would have left the forum too weak to execute a move as successfully as it did when the time came.

but the net upvotes tell the story

...that I'm not interested in at all...

First, I just can't get into the mindset of someone who cares about votes beyond them being a metric of engagement, but more importantly, and I've been gesturing at the idea for a while, but I'm done with this entire "democratic" framework of analyzing anything. Any forum will have it's share of high-, mid-, and low-frequency posters, and a whole bunch of lurkers, why should the former be judged by the latter? Why should anyone care what people who don't bother to say anything think?

where the liberals at?

Aren't they on Reddit? For all the complaints about the bias of this place, they seem to have monopolized that site to an even greater extent.

Or alternatively, why has the proportion of racists increased dramatically since moving off Reddit?

Same answer as above. As long as we were all on the same site progressives could swing by and drop a comment or a vote, now that you have to register and check up on the place separately, a lot don't bother. The other side doesn't have many other places to go, so they disproportionately end up here.

Some of us get rate limited. The people here love Mike Pence the same way people on reddit love pitbulls. I was banned there for pitbull hate speech.

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The people here love Mike Pence the same way people on reddit love pitbulls.

I find your opinion here fascinating, please expand. I really want to know the correlation there, and where are all these secret Mike Pence love-ins on here that I've somehow missed? Guys, what am I, chopped liver? You don't think that even given the religious divide between us, I can't appreciate an elder gentleman? Where is my invitation to the Top Sekret Mike Pence Admiration Society and Fan Club? 😁

Also, I do find the 'getting pissed at Pence' viewpoint anthropologically interesting, it's like the notion of the Torturer VP who was going to set up the gay concentration camps, just you wait, never went away. I'm honestly surprised, though given the general level of historical literacy I should not be, that nobody tried comparing him to Torquemada.

There isn't anyone on here who I know loves Mike Pence. (Though I'm sure there are a bunch might like him.)

We're allowed to downvote you for preferring sneering to substance.

You got banned for shitposting. Your constant complaints about "this is the sort of post that gets upvoted here" are bizarre in light of your own conversation style.

Aren't they on Reddit? For all the complaints about the bias of this place, they seem to have monopolized that site to an even greater extent.

Well maybe but that's sort of the point. If this is simply a right-wing reddit that doesn't say a great deal for it really.

If this is simply a right-wing reddit

It’s not.

The quality of discussion is higher than anywhere on reddit, and unlike reddit, the admins have no interest in censoring certain political viewpoints; leftists and rightists alike are welcome.

Let's be honest here - nobody is censored here, but it turns out, people don't like arguing 20-on-1 anywhere in society, regardless of ideology. Which is true of left-leaning spaces as well, for conservatives. But, well, those spaces don't do the whole "we're not censoring viewpoints" thing, they just say forthrightly, 'yeah, this is a place for people who agree on x, y, and z. Like it or leave.'

Are you claiming that any space that claims to operate on a neutral principle of free speech is fundamentally duplicitous because it's just going to end up coalescing around a consensus viewpoint anyway?

I don't think it's always duplicitous, but I think anybody who seriously thinks the reason why this place is more right-leaning is some belief that in a free and open debate with nobody limiting it, the right-leaning argument wins is kind of lying to themselves, when in reality, the way the right wins these supposedly open spaces is saying enough things that trigger basically the fight or flight part of people's minds.

I'm a nearing middle-aged white guy, so the silly to frankly, terrible things said in this forum brush off my back, but a lot of the current left are basically and I say this in descriptive way, The Other - single women, minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, etc. So yeah, I can see why many people if in a community where what they think is open racism/sexism/bigotry against them is accepted, they say bye, and leave that community. Some people will hang around and still fight, but the reality is, most black people in 1960's America didn't have to argue about whether they deserved to use the same bathrooms as white people, and likely would've left any group arguing that. Obviously, not zero, but most people aren't argumentative weirdos like we are.

So yeah, the general tilt of any community will eventually become more of that, one way or the other. Also, in many cases (this isn't true here), there's a silent majority that's not as extreme, but also are effected by the community. YT comments section are kind of a perfect example - in a lot of cases, they're utterly rancid, no matter the topic, even when a creator doesn't want that. Because somebody whose basic belief about a YT video is, "that was all right," isn't going to post.

You aren't wrong that it's understandable why The Other, as you put it, mostly wouldn't want to participate here. But what solution do you propose? I think it's appropriate for boardgaming and RPG forums to have rules saying "no Holocaust deniers" or "You cannot say black people have low IQs," because even if there is some intelligent debate to be had there, it's so contentious and inflammatory that it would eclipse what everyone is ostensibly there for. The failure mode in those places is that the consensus opinion settles on not only "No Holocaust denial" but also "No opinions at all that would upset a leftist social justice activist."

And it's not that leftists are particularly censorious compared to rightists. It's just that almost all the hobby and public discourse spaces are dominated by leftists. Righties who are so fond of pointing out that leftists ban all wrongthink are kidding themselves if they think their side ever was, or would be, more tolerant of "free speech" by the other side. (Some are even open about this, and merely bemoan the fact that they happen to be - currently - on the losing side.)

So here, we allow all the disreputable and shady and inflammatory opinions that are too toxic for other places, and the inevitable side effect of that is that people who find those views too toxic are not going to stick around and engage with them.

Either you have actual free speech (which means putting up with ideologues full of hate for their outgroup, who will drive everyone in their outgroup off) or you don't, in which case you have a forum that basically allows only one point of view and will polarize against any form of ideological diversity.

Once you've reached "no Holocaust deniers" you've already set your feet on the slippery slope known as "viewpoint discrimination". The last conceivable step is "no politics except directly related to <hobby>", and that (and the previous one of "no politics at all") both depend on moderators not willing to agree with or fall for the whole "Your views are politics and mine are just common decency" thing.

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a lot of the current left are basically and I say this in descriptive way, The Other - single women, minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, etc.

Could it be that the (current) left is generally self-selected as a group of people that could be said to have 'thin-skin'?

If a single woman has some strength of character and she hears some kind of offensive speech, she's not going to immediately demand censorship by the government. Then that woman can go on and listen and research more right-wing arguments once past the shock of 'somebody disagrees with my teacher, the talking heads on TV, journalists, etc'. And she can become right-wing.

If she doesn't have character, then she can stay within the safe confines of the media-approved opinions, and she'll cowardly switch opinions every few months when the newest update of progressive beliefs comes in.

It's a fragile coalition as well, for example your Other includes TERFs and transpeople, or LGBT and muslims, or open borders supporters and Ukrainian nationalists...

anybody who seriously thinks the reason why this place is more right-leaning is some belief that in a free and open debate with nobody limiting it, the right-leaning argument wins is kind of lying to themselves

I don't think anyone in this thread has suggested that. That's certainly not what I was saying here.

the way the right wins these supposedly open spaces is saying enough things that trigger basically the fight or flight part of people's minds. [...] a lot of the current left are basically and I say this in descriptive way, The Other - single women, minorities, immigrants, non-straight people, etc. So yeah, I can see why many people if in a community where what they think is open racism/sexism/bigotry against them is accepted, they say bye, and leave that community.

This explanation assumes that leftist constituencies have a unique monopoly on being emotionally/materially invested in political issues, which is simply not true.

It's easy to find examples of anti-white/anti-male rhetoric in leftist spaces (I really did try my best to join the discussion on radfem blogs in the early '10s where most commenters thought that men were uniquely and irredeemably violent, that they were the cause of all social problems, that women should live apart from them and reduce the male population as much as possible, but I usually didn't last long before getting banned). Or just pick any hot button issue, unrestricted immigration from Central/South America, trans surgeries for kids, AA/DEI programs that explicitly take job offers and college admissions spots from whites and give them to non-whites... these are not abstract intellectual exercises, people perceive these things as very real and direct threats to their way of life. If rightists are still willing to entertain leftist viewpoints on these issues, then that does in fact indicate a higher baseline propensity among rightists to listen to and engage with opposing viewpoints. Blacks/women/immigrants are not the only ones who have ever felt "vulnerable".

I think this place is mostly forthright about saying, "Yeah, this is a place for people who are willing to expose themselves to 20-on-1 arguments based on the strengths of their arguments, regardless of political leanings. Like it or leave." That such an environment tends to draw a more right-wing crowd, I think, is mostly down to modern leftism rejecting liberalism, which leads both to leftists having access to more mainstream forums where challenges to their views get censored and to leftists just not wanting to go to places where such challenges are tolerated. And the vicious cycle that follows.

It's easy to say that when you know you'll always be on the side of the 20:1.

Also, I just do think it's true. The smartest left-wing person with immense writing talent could show up here, and honestly, I don't think a single mind would be changed. Now, I know the response to that is, "that's just because progressivism/leftism/wokeism is such a weak ideology, that even a genius-level intellect can argue for it, and the only reason it wins today is the rich, powerful blah blah blah."

No, I think it's because most people here are right-wing. Which is fine to have solid views - God could come down from Earth, say, "actually, all abortion is evil according to your Creator, and all aborted babies end up in Limbo forever" and I'd say, "cool, I don't care. Sounds like you have a shitty ideology." But just admit that, instead of just being, "well, I've heard all the arguments and mine were the most logical and true."

That's the reason I only comment here to put forth the actual left-wing view on stuff, instead of the imagined one, to push back against obviously incorrect stuff, and stuff like this, where it's not really a political issue mostly,

Now, the other thing is, I don't get when it became conservative/right-wing/etc. dogma that liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism. Like again, I'm almost middle aged. I've been arguing on the Internet for a long time - even in the early 2000's, there were still TOS and yes, they were maybe more free-wheeling than 2021 in what you thought Twitter was then, and obviously, some politics has shifted, but you could always get banned, and while people may have argued person x didn't deserve a ban, the argument was never, 'banning people is wrong and against free speech,' because even the right-wingers understood there were rules, and if they didn't like the rules, the door was over there. If mods went too far, obviously there'd be a mass dispersal, but the secret was, in most cases, most people who got banned deserved it.

I know the response will be 4chan and it's antecedents, but 4chan was always the place for edgy losers who couldn't follow the relatively loose standards of the Internet, and the fact the young Right is basically all 4-chan adjacent is probably why all decent youth polling still shows them as overwhelmingly left-leaning, because the alternative is the people who were seen as edgy weirdos in 2004, let alone 2024.

That's why even though I dislike it, I'm fine with Elon changing the rules on Twitter/X. Now, he's currently paying the price for it, because it turns out people don't like 'nudes in bio' bot responses, and all the other stuff that has bubbled up, but it's his house, his rules, as long as he's not breaking any other laws. Now, the way he has happily limited the free speech rights of certain groups when certain governments come calling makes him a hypocrite, but that's another story.

Also, I just do think it's true. The smartest left-wing person with immense writing talent could show up here, and honestly, I don't think a single mind would be changed.

Minds can be changed all the time.

That's definitely easier with factual, rather than value-based points, though.

I don't think the right bar for persuadability (at least, when we mean it as a virtue) is whether a sufficiently capable rhetorician could persuade someone: I don't want good speakers to be able to convince me of false things, especially when I'm well grounded in reality and the reasons why what I think are right. Rather, it should be whether they respond to reason and evidence in a sufficiently unbiased manner.

I'll concede, though, that yeah, there's probably some bias.

Also, I just do think it's true. The smartest left-wing person with immense writing talent could show up here, and honestly, I don't think a single mind would be changed. Now, I know the response to that is, "that's just because progressivism/leftism/wokeism is such a weak ideology, that even a genius-level intellect can argue for it, and the only reason it wins today is the rich, powerful blah blah blah."

I think fictional made-up examples are less than worthless.

Now, the other thing is, I don't get when it became conservative/right-wing/etc. dogma that liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism. Like again, I'm almost middle aged. I've been arguing on the Internet for a long time - even in the early 2000's, there were still TOS and yes, they were maybe more free-wheeling than 2021 in what you thought Twitter was then, and obviously, some politics has shifted, but you could always get banned, and while people may have argued person x didn't deserve a ban, the argument was never, 'banning people is wrong and against free speech,' because even the right-wingers understood there were rules, and if they didn't like the rules, the door was over there. If mods went too far, obviously there'd be a mass dispersal, but the secret was, in most cases, most people who got banned deserved it.

This is just a strawman. Approximately no one argues that "liberalism means anybody can say anything anywhere and if you don't want to argue that issue or point, that's censorship and the death of liberalism." I am middle-aged, and I was there in the early 2000s too. Yes, there were TOSs and bans and such. What makes it still liberalism is that bans and such were meant to be viewpoint-neutral. This isn't an easy thing to strictly define, but certainly one side choosing to respond to an argument with offense or choosing to claim that it activates some "fight-or-flight mode" in them merely for seeing such arguments was clearly not considered proper grounds for such bans.

As long as we were all on the same site progressives could swing by and drop a comment or a vote, now that you have to register and check up on the place separately, a lot don't bother.

Yeah, I'm really not sure how I feel about this. Having to sign up (and then needing approval) certainly would add friction to participating, but at least something of that sort seems necessary. (And there are some occasions, like brigading being harder, where friction is good.) I don't know what the optimal amount is.

My memories of the earliest days are very fuzzy, but as far as I can remember even in the /r/slatestarcodex days, this forum always had a noticeable rightist bent, simply in virtue of the mere fact that it allows rightists to speak freely. If you're one of the few places that doesn't subject witches to trial by water, then you're going to attract an unusually high percentage of witches, even if that's not your explicit goal.

That being said, I think we have hit an all time low when it comes to the number of active leftist users, and I think that's due to a couple factors:

  • I think that the average leftist simply isn't interested in dialogue with rightists. This is evident in how they moderate their own spaces. Frequently when leftists get power, they simply ban (certain) right-wing views. If they don't want to deal with rightists in their own spaces, why would they want to come here and deal with us here? There's a reason that the left has become the party of deplatforming. I think it's pretty straightforward.

  • Regardless of how open you are to dialogue, it can be mentally draining to be the only one arguing for a certain viewpoint while everyone else is against you. Once leftists start to self-select out of the discussion, more and more of them will start to decide it's not worth staying as they become a smaller and smaller minority, creating a vicious cycle. We also don't have an easy free source of new users because people can't just stop by with their reddit account when they see this place linked on subs like /r/sneerclub or whatever.

  • Users with unpopular viewpoints are more likely to feel embattled by the general forum atmosphere, more likely to get heated during debates, and thus more likely to get banned. I don't want to litigate the cases of specific users here, but I can think of at least a couple examples of this.

I want to push back on this bit:

I think that the average leftist simply isn't interested in dialogue with rightists. This is evident in how they moderate their own spaces. Frequently when leftists get power, they simply ban (certain) right-wing views.

The average person is not interested in dialogue with genuine disagreement. Christian forums ban atheists, prolife forums ban planned parenthood apologists, socialist forums ban capitalists, etc, etc.

Do I think left wingers are generally worse about it than right wingers? Yes, but I also would think that.

Do I think left wingers are generally worse about it than right wingers?

there were polls on how likely a person would be unfriend those politically opposite views, so big yes.

It's perfectly understandable in those contexts. The vibe shift in my lifetime is nominally non-political spaces taking these stances. I used to be part of several forums with off-topic 'Politics' sections, and despite being consistently lopsided towards the at-the-time Left, the Right was still represented. There were numerous conservative posters whose names I recall to this day after years of arguing with them. Now that type seems to be quickly run out or banished, should I see them at all. There's an autoimmune response where there used to be some tolerance.

I didn't consider /r/pcgaming a 'leftist space'. But make a glib remark in support of JK Rowling and at least the admins reveal it as such.

The thesis of the post you've labeled "desegregation was a mistake" was actually "the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional", which is not the same thing.

As for the "suffering" of white people, why should that be so shocking? I mean, the language is overwrought by conservative standards, but with all the dramatards around here we're used to that. Believe it or not, discriminating against white people does in fact cause them to suffer. As does committing crimes against them. If you go for the reductio, you might just have to consider your counterpart will not consider the conclusion 'absurd'.

I guess what I'm asking is: where the liberals at?

Liberalism used to mean equal opportunity (but not equality of result), and color-blind policy. That's gone on the left, and exists on the right only among those not really paying much attention to politics (and thus wouldn't be here). Many of the leftists that show up quickly lose interest when they realize they can't force those who disagree in line by calling them "racist" or otherwise attempting to shame them. Or they get really frustrated with sharing a forum with people whose views they find repugnant and "flame out" with a ranty post, though it's been a while since we saw one of those.


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