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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

I've even on record in this sub saying that values can be derived from other concerns and can definitely be argued.

In that post, you and Yassine are certainly not arguing that your views are in any sense reconcilable with inegalitarian/particularist views. The central argument there is that your specific set of values are the objectively and inarguably correct set of values, given everything that’s true about the world we live in. Nowhere in there is a suggestion that there’s any practical way for anyone to persuade you out of those values; quite the opposite. You’re saying that the only way someone with inegalitarian values could have any leg to stand on morally is if there were massive, fundamental structural/technological changes in the way our civilization is organized; barring that - something which will not happen in our lifetimes - your values are correct, and mine are not even worth discussing because they’re in the dustbin of (current) history. Not exactly an invitation to “reconciliation”.

I've been bashing my head against this since my first post in this sub and basically consistently gotten replies that are unmoderated personal attacks instead of any substantive argument

I read all of the replies to that post, and I can identify not a single one that I would consider an unmoderated personal attack devoid of substantive argument. Perhaps you’re referring to replies to other posts not linked to.

Again, one of my very early interactions with this community was someone ban-evading and calling me a slithering rat just for having the temerity to try and argue value points.

First off, you’re totally misinterpreting his use of the word “rats” in that post. He is using it as a shortening of “rationalists” - a group with which he himself identified at the time, and presumably still does. It was a very common term of self-identification at the time; there was an entire constellation of Tumblr users, for example, who proudly called themselves “Rat Tumblr” (or Rattumb for short), meaning just “Rationalist Tumblr”.

In that post, Ilforte is accusing you of aping the shibboleths of that subculture while working directly and intentionally to sabotage its aims and core values. In the segments of your post that he quotes, you very clearly do appear to be advocating using social shame to rigidly enforce speech taboos around certain topics - to not only ridicule and socially bully racialists, but to actually actively ruin their lives in a professional sense, or at least to celebrate those who do so. This is, indeed, a very serious violation of one of the core values of that subculture at the time, which was strongly opposed to that type of social shaming and speech tabooing.

I’m also unsure what you mean by accusing him of “ban evading”. That post is in /r/CultureWarRoundup, a totally separate splinter subreddit from /r/TheMotte, and not a sub from which I believe Ilforte was ever banned at any point. If you mean he’s ban evading by cross-posting a post of yours from The Motte and criticizing it… that’s not what ban evading is.

I guess a lot of racialism is just motivated by idiosyncratic aesthetic preferences that are too strong to be overwhelmed by any other consideration---how is this anything but not irreconcilable?

I’m sure that in some cases this is probably true! However, again, many of us racialists once shared your liberal priors, instincts, and aesthetics. Yet this was not enough to stop us from eventually adopting these views. Why do you think that is? Clearly in that case it can’t just be due to some ineffable, inarticulable, subconscious psychological difference between us and you, right? If I was progressive once, I must contain the capability to inhabit the brain states compatible with progressivism. And yet obviously I also simultaneously contain the capacity to inhabit the brain states compatible with rightism. Are you so certain that you lack that capacity?

This experience has not meaningfully changed in the last three years, although I will say that you have been much more reasonable. So trying again, do you mind explaining/linking to some place where you've explained these specific facts?

That would be difficult, simply given the lack of any effective search function in this site’s design. I have been meaning to put together a master spreadsheet of links to some of my more successful/important posts, such that I would be able to supply those links when prompted, but I have not gotten around to doing so. I don’t have time to pull those right now, but I’ll see what I can do at some point in the future. However, I would caution that I’m not confident the posts alone will be persuasive to you, since they will not be in combination with the specific and non-transferable life experiences I’ve had which caused me to be more sympathetic to these ideas than I likely would have otherwise.