TracingWoodgrains
quiet_NaN
4mo ago
That being said, wokeness got a lot of press but it was never able to coalesce into a serious political movement, and while it certainly influenced the "national conversation", it didn't really lead to any concrete changes beyond hand-wavey gestures that in hindsight look more to have been done for purposes of public perception than to make any real changes.
And they managed to make a small minority of Blacks to get away with killing more Blacks because policing them is racist if it leads to disparate outcomes.
Esseintes
Que sçay-je?
4mo ago
Katie Herzog of Blocked and Reported fame (who TracingWoodgrains was formerly working for) came out as a big proponent of naltrexone, apparently she has a book coming out about it as well. Seems like pretty promising stuff.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sea-change/id1743666262?i=1000653826427
James Lindsay of the grievance studies fame has been targeting the right for the past few months. The grievance studies was fairly popular when it came out and he even went on JRE and podcasts run by IDW and adjacent people but is now punching right.
His article summarizes his points about getting parts of the communist manifesto published with a healthy bit of editing in a Christian journal but unlike the last time it is not being taken as seriously as of now.
James has termed the actual right "woke right" and routinely gets hammered in his own comments by everyone to the right of trump, including Auron Macintyre who is not even a strict ethno-nationalist. James like the rest of the IDW is in a wierd spot as the temporary thermidor and rollback of censorship on X (formerly twitter) has allowed people to explicitly talk culture war without being de-platformed which for him is "woke". The IDW ran out of ideas a while back, Auron who i mentioned beforehand was anonymous for a while back when he strictly made NRx videos and is now working with the Blaze without any fears of being cancelled. Joe Rogan has slowly aligned with the Trump VC camp and others have just become plain irrelevant.
The criticisms have already started pouring in with one of our own in tracingwoodgrains chiming in too. I don't expect excessive amounts of rigor from the publication involved here and am neither well-versed in Christianity nor Marxism or any philosophy for that matter but this seems kinda worn out at this point. James yearns for this unstable equilibrium of 90s liberalism without realising that political systems are dynamic. The 90s which he misses were always going to be just temporary and were 2020s for plenty of people, not as much as today. Those who are true believers of christ will rightfully call him out for being a bad-faith actor trying to pull stunts on a publication whilst being too afraid to discuss taboo topics.
Members of babylon bee, the satire website agree with James whilst most like Cernovich are trying to point out that Lindsay is conceding ground and the edits he made render the headline "Christian journal publishes the communist manifesto false". Sargon of Akkad aka Carl Benjamin also found this [unappealing] (https://x.com/Sargon_of_Akkad/status/1864247964442538324), Carl is a noted atheist who routinely wanted ethnonationalists and rabid Christians to be taken less seriously so not far off from Lindsay if we start from 2019.
I would be happy to read what he wrote and learn his claims' accuracy. I have little idea about formal logic or epistemology of any kind. Also I'm pleasantly happy to see sargon improve as a political figure, he did streams with nrx people and didn't repeat cuck right talking points about Marx, genuinely nice improvement from his days losing debates to Richard Spencer on warskis show.
Here
6mo ago
After the election, the president of the Student Advisory Committee of Harvard’s Institute of Politics insinuated that the IOP’s longstanding commitment to non-partisan civic engagement would be put aside to stand against the “threat” of Trump.
The Director of the IOP quickly rebuked the student, as did alumni. The original op-ed was modified to clarify that this was a student proposal, and not an official act of the IOP that could potentially endanger its tax status as a nonprofit in association with the school.
I was more shocked by the quick response than by the student’s comments; it’s taken for granted that the academy is the stronghold of Democrats. As friends and I contemplate government service, we’ve talked often about what doors we’d be closing off entirely by entering the administration now, and how that would impact our trajectory. Mentors have suggested waiting until certain milestones to provide easier routes back into the private sector, but we all agree that academia is DOA outside of like Hillsdale.
Part of these discussions included off-handed references to China’s “loyalty pledges” for students attending plum universities or receiving scholarships to study abroad. Given the academy’s existence as another wing of the Democratic Party, is there a possibility of colleges or universities ensuring students meet certain political beliefs in order to attend their institution? Would it impact their tax status to do so, and if yes, is that the only thing stopping them?
Private non-profit Christian institutions make their students sign statements of faith in order to attend. BYU is an example, although their agreement is slightly more complicated than faith, per se (as TracingWoodgrains has spoken about before). Patrick Henry College includes a bit about the number of books in the Bible to keep out Catholics. It’s not a stretch to thing secular colleges could have students sign statements about their culture war/social beliefs in order to attend. Will the privileges of Ivy League degrees be gatekept for the “woke?”
Is that, in a way, what diversity statements have been doing for years? Maybe diversity statements weren’t about meeting racial categories, but instead to ensure a certain level of “buy-in” to DEI ideology. As an aside, in the post-SFFA world, the number of students interested in the Federalist Society doubled at my law school. It could just be an “election year” thing (the last data point we are able to access easily is 2020, which doesn’t count due to the remote education) or it could be a “freeing” of conservatives entering the upper echelons of professional education. More data is needed here to support this anecdata.
Purity testing at schools is, of course, nothing new. For instance, we had a professor banned from teaching first-year mandatory courses because he donated to the Republican party in 2012, a thing that still doesn’t sit quite right to me. Why are people looking through their professor’s donation records? As people uninvite family members to Thanksgiving due to who they voted for, can universities deny students on the same grounds? Would some universities feel inclined to?
I’m not entirely sure. The demographic cliff means that universities have to start making themselves more enticing somehow. Degrees are too expensive for their value, nowadays, and many are choosing to forego higher education in favor of the trades or other endeavors. Schools like America University saw their acceptance rate almost double and yet still didn’t hit their enrollment targets. Can schools (even elite schools) afford to have an ideological purity test for entry?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6mo ago
And yet she was evidently damn good at her job, and it seems to me that it ain't the same working class, nor the same neoliberalism, nor the same world for that matter. She fought for liberty and against bureaucracy and communism.
She was good at her job based on what, winning elections? Justin Trudeau won as many, after breaking 9 years of conservative rule, yet I doubt you think he's a particularly good candidate or Prime Minister.
As for fighting against bureaucracy and communism, these are just partisan buzzwords. 50 years ago, our ancestors were sitting in a pub bemoaning the sorry state of British politics and the terrible candidates and the country going to hell in a handbasket because the new generation was a bunch of pussies.
Not to mention it's telling that you picked a politician from 50 years ago that (I assume, based on the apparent age of your children) you were barely alive for in a country you never lived in. I'm willing to bet that 50 years from now our grandchildren will lionize the greatness of Obama and Trump without having to deal with the shitty day-to-day reality we inhabit. I'm willing to bet that very few people think [current year] politicians are particularly talented.
I'm pretty sure I wasn't. I was planning to vote for Hillary until Trump cinched the nomination, because I wanted the neoconservative wing of the Republican party destroyed forever. She was quite unpopular in much the way Trump is, but 2016 was a very close election.
Whatever - without guessing the particulars of who you have voted for, would you agree that my characterization fits a broad swathe of the at least the American public, and likely the local commentariat?
As for the 'historical unpopularity' that gets thrown around constantly - this absolutely drives me up the wall. Look at favorability polls (first figure). Insofar as Trump and Hillary were historically unpopular, they're just continuing a 70 year old trendline with vanishingly few exceptions. Do you think our politicians suddenly became retarded and unlikable in the 90s? Here's a bet for you - the next pair of candidates for both major parties will be historically unpopular (say the bottom quartile of favorability). Want to take it?
I am pretty sure that I have never agreed with the moderate talking point that Hillary was a uniquely bad candidate and the only one the Dems could have picked that would have lost to Trump.
I actually largely heard this from progressives and the right, not the center? If anyone liked Hillary it was the center. Bernie bros ain't moderates.
And Progressives sticking their fingers in their ears about it is how he was allowed to vegetate in office, which is why they had to dump him at the eleventh hour, couldn't get their actual talent to sign on, and were left with running Kamala.
Because if we had 25th'd Joe out (presumably he wasn't about to leave on his own)in the middle of the COVID and inflation shitshow and let Kamala run things for 2 years, this election just would have gone swimmingly for democrats? If you think 'the actual talent' refused to sign on this year, they 100% wouldn't have signed up in your hypothetical. Not to mention you'd be sitting here lecturing me about how stupid it was to 'allow' Joe to get elected in the primaries in the first place, or something.
And...you think progressives like Joe Biden? Is this just some Overton ploy to define Joe as a progressive such that everyone to his left is some insane fringe radical, while Trump and Vance live in the center? Public figures endorse him because they hate Trump, but Joe Biden was not the progressive candidate of choice in 2020.
And sure, I claim Biden was a bad president, because I think the record pretty clearly shows that his policies had numerous woeful effects in the real world. The exception, of course, was the Afghanistan Pullout, which I think was a masterful achievement and which I will defend against all comers.
I disagree. With the exception of inflation (and who knows whether the counterfactual recession would have been better or worse than inflation, or whether there actually was a center path that avoided both) I think he's been on point and centrist for the most part. CHIPS act and infrastructure are both great (though we'll see if either can actually be implemented in a meaningful way, there seems to be a lot of grift), the economy is doing well (just watch - the economic doomerism on the right is about to evaporate with the election alongside the voting fraud narrative), he tried to push immigration reform. The manufacturing sector is doing better under Biden than Trump. But I imagine this is an entire separate discussion.
I'm not on your side.
We're all on the same side here, brother.
Progressives have suffered multiple, severe unforced errors due to believing their own bullshit. Their control of the consensus narrative has made them lazy, and now that this control is failing, they're stuck in a position where the main effect their spin is having is to compromise their own decision-making. Biden was in fact too old, as was RGB when she tried to hang on till Hillary. They should have picked a running mate who could actually run for his VP, but they were too busy playing identity bingo, and besides, it was an article of faith that he was sharp as a tack. They did this to themselves.
And what was that mistake, not being leftist enough to inspire the workers revolution (cf Freddie De Boer, Bernie bros)? Not being centrist enough (cf Tracingwoodgrains, stupidpol, I'd guess some MSM outlets in the next few weeks) to win the suburban wine mom vote? You all agree that progressives are stupid and lazy and mistakes were made, you just completely disagree about the directionality.
Here's a different narrative - in 2020, Biden wasn't senile yet and won the primary. In 2020, the focus was on winning the election in front of you, because there's four years to worry about the next one. He governed well, although Harris got some tough assignments and the optics for both of them were bad with COVID/inflation/Ukraine/Gaza. Ending lockdowns would have enraged one section of the population as much as enacting them would another. Bombing the shit out of Gaza or taking a hard stance against Israel both would have pissed off a core constituency. Refusing to fire up the money printers may have triggered a recession that would have lost the election just as surely as inflation/idpol/whatever else actually did.
As an aside, you say identity bingo, analysts say lock down the black vote because you're an out-of-touch old white man. For all you know Biden would have lost in 2020 with a different VP pick.
I am pretty sure it is in my direct interest for Progressives to see things the way you do.
Y'know, the funny thing is Trump will probably push policies that benefit me more personally. Please cut my taxes and kill my competition from China, what do I care?
Whatever. Anyways, you think I'm an arrogant, complacent and intellectually lazy progressive who can't see the flaws in his own party. Leaving aside whether any of those are true, I just think the arguments here are lazy, superficial and mostly ignorant of the realities of governing and winning elections in America. Discussing politics is >95% hindsight bias.
I predicted a Trump win, with weak confidence, based on a lot of factors that seemed to be leaning his way. This does not appear to have been a coin-flip election; pretty much every state in the country shifted right by significant margins, with Donald Trump as the candidate.
If it wasn't a coin flip election, why did you have such weak confidence? And given your uncertainty, why would you say running Kamala was a mistake if you (and presumably the dem machine) couldn't have predicted her loss in advance?
But as I said above, I am pretty sure that Progressives doubling down further is pure advantage for my side. By all means, don't let me dissuade you.
Four years from now, conditional on the Trump faction losing the general election, will you be here saying you guys fucked up and Rs had better learn from their mistakes? Somehow, I doubt you'll take that L particularly gracefully if past experience is any indicator. I know the drill - time to reach for the fourth box, the election was rigged, America will be destroyed by a communist dictatorship.
I hope Trump is as successful as you think he will be, and that our country flourishes over the next four years.
JD Vance was on the Joe Rogan podcast, and references Scott's Gay Rites are Civil Rites. It happens at 23:45. As TracingWoodgrains says, the Eye of Sauron approaches.
I apologize if I can't add much more insight. Are there going to be left wing smear articles explaining the evil Rationalists that have the ear of JD Vance? Or is there so much chaos right now around the election that this will get passed over, widely unremarked upon?
Threats to our community aside, it's pretty awesome that a VP candidate referenced one of Scott's articles.
Edit: Andy Ngo is boosting this part of the interview, focusing on the trans children discussion, without commenting on the article.
2rafa
8mo ago
elite-college grads willing to swallow low salaries in exchange for proximity to power and influence
Yes and as many people (including most eloquently TracingWoodgrains) have said, until you fix this problem the right is screwed in the US.
wemptronics
9mo ago
doing something like that would make us just as bad as them!"
Everyone says this all the time. Both party supporters believe they have the moral high ground in whatever area they are incapable.
If Republicans could muster up a non-profit network that would do their bidding, they would do so without a second thought about the high ground. But they don't have this capability and dont have people willing or interested in building it. I think that lack of interest goes beyond "it is dirty and wrong."
Partly why I don't understand why @TracingWoodgrains gets so much push-back (on Twitter at least) on his Republicans Are Doomed piece. Maybe the conclusion is wrong, but the observations regarding disparity in human capital and reach are correct.
I'm telling that you contrary to what you guys believe, the reason you don't have so many isn't that liberals don't like hearing views they think are toxic, but rather liberals get tired of the tide of obnoxious argumentation you get here when you either argue for liberal views or become known as a liberal
That's a very hard sell considering what I've seen around here over the years. First, it was ages ago by now, but we did have several people flame out not over any obnoxiousness of how a view was expressed, but over the view itself being allowed. This is what happened back when HBD was the talk of the day, and back then the mods even put a moratorium on the subject, because it was freaking the Blues out too much.
The second problem I have is that I never seen anyone complaining about "obnoxious argumentation" have much of an issue when it comes from their side. We've been called every single name in the book, and have it explicitly stated that the only motivation for our views must be some form of bigotry, and 90+% of liberals would either say nothing, outright celebrate it, or rephrase the accusation in a somewhat nicer way ("well, bias is not an obvious thing to see in yourself, so if you were biased, you wouldn't have noticed it, right?"). Whenever a liberal or lefty with a bit more tolerance shows up, I do want to do my part to make them feel welcome, but these sorts of interactions make it seem like they're asking for something they're not prepared to give, so I'm usually left shrugging and saying "sorry, but no".
If you read carefully, this is the exact thing that TracingWoodgrains was complaining about.
I tried talking with Tracing when he was complaining about the dynamics here. I tried expressing sympathy for the dogpiles and other forms of obnoxious argumentation, and the result was that he immediately pivoted to the substance of the views expressed here being unacceptable to him. This is not an isolated experience for me, every time I try to extend my hand to a liberal complaining about the resultant conduct norms here (which I agree are far from ideal, we could be doing a lot better), it turns out the resentment runs a lot deeper.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
9mo ago
Look, I'm operating under the assumption that you guys want more liberal posters here. I'm telling that you contrary to what you guys believe, the reason you don't have so many isn't that liberals don't like hearing views they think are toxic, but rather liberals get tired of the tide of obnoxious argumentation you get here when you either argue for liberal views or become known as a liberal---strawmanning, unjustified personal attacks, and random, derailing accusations of bad faith.
If you read carefully, this is the exact thing that TracingWoodgrains was complaining about. "Unappealing" does not mean "stating values that I find are toxic", it means "obnoxious argumentation that makes it draining to engage, particularly (in this case) the personal attacks and derailing accusations of bad faith".
Therefore, if you actually do want more liberal posters, maybe recalibrate your judgement of the costs and benefits of not moderating these more harshly.
Are you arguing that "obvious dishonesty" and "or does it just prove that your entire interest in the topic begins and ends with its utility toward bashing the outgroup?" are civil?
Idk, I get the impression that some of you are unhappy about the way this site is going---there have been enough discussions about echo chambers and things like that. Yet you keep refusing to listen to people who tell you the clear reasons why such things might be happing. Totally understandable if you don't take my word for it, but you guys should at least take something from the whole Tracingwoodgrains discussion earlier.
There's a political consensus here and many toxic arguments arguing in favor of the consensus are not moderated. Beyond this current example, I've pointed out before that racism violating "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be" is very often ignored (though somehow the entire discussion where this last happened was memory holed. I can only see the comments in my inbox with all links to the actual thread broken). You even put one of the worst perpetrators on the mod team!
This makes the environment quite unpleasant for people arguing against the consensus so most just end up leaving.
Jiro
9mo ago
But LOTT didn't really suffer any harm from it.
It's very difficult to measure how much someone is harmed by things of this sort. It was clearly used by TracingWoodgrains to discredit LoTT. I think I should not need to do some kind of media reputation analysis to calculate how much LoTT was discredited so I can say that LoTT was "harmed".
Was Scott harmed by Cade Metz? If yes, could you prove it?
I had an account on LW-sphere discourse at the time (2012-2015ish? imo), if not particularly active on LW-proper.
I don't know where you're getting TracingWoodgrains into the Dark Arts stuff. He started his current display name in 2018 in a mix of /r/slatestarcodex and SSC-open-thread proper education-posting. He's mentioned having read LessWrong in the 2010ish space, and it's possible that he commented to some degree, but he hasn't publicized any username he had at the time, and his writing style is vastly different from any Dark Art advocates like fual_sname or 08res (or even adjacent people like nydrawku).
((I've got my complaints about both his position and his tactics, but they're a lot more prosaic.))
Yglesias is absolutely following in that approach, often to the point that's less 'parallel evolution' and more 'who stole whose homework', but I don't think anyone has accused him of being on LessWrong. Contrapoints is less Dark Arts and more Sneer, which is maybe closer to what you're motioning around, but again more someone people in the ratsphere talk about than someone who argued for the legitimacy of the Dark Arts (or Sneer) themselves on LW.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
9mo ago
Do you have any examples of TracingWoodgrains saying "it's just a bit of harmless trolling" right until those tactics started to be wielded against people/institutions he cared about?
I think all the people performatively outraged about LoTT being targeted are more solidly in the "no bad tactics, only bad targets" camp. If Trace had done something like that to a liberal group, they'd be raising glasses to him to this day.
True,
people like Matthew Yglesias, Contrapoints, and TracingWoodgrains would be far better examples as they were all solidly in the "no bad tactics, only bad targets" and "its just a bit of harmless trolling" camp right until those tactics started to be weilded against people/institutions they cared about.
Does it lead to and create societal problems that cannot be ignored by the general public, or does this kind of idpol stay "mostly harmless" until everyone pretends it never happened? My hope is that it's the latter. Society allows these kinds of people to eventually say, "oh, silly us" and we all talk about how dumb the 2010's and 2020's were. My fear is the former, which carries a risk in ending in actual ethnic conflict, racial spoils, and bloodshed.
If comfortable white people can somehow forever profit from these kinds of signals, enact laws and policies at the expense of lesser whites without paying a cost themselves, then, sure maybe this is how it all goes down. Quietly. A white nationalist's worst nightmare. If comfortable white people no longer engage in a charming guilt ritual and instead find themselves disenfranchised and destitute alongside the bad whites, they will no longer be afforded to see charm in guilt rituals.
The reason why I find that a more likely end point if we continue down the 2020 framing of race relations is that, somewhere down that road, America empowers real, Black Panther racial supremacists. If the nation empowers true believers of racial supremacy, then I'd expect eventually we see them act as racial supremacists. Along with the fact that, in my estimation, it would coincide with the empowerment of ideologically bankrupt thugs. "Well, those are the good whites, we take care of them" only goes as far as you don't actually empower people that believe whites have a debt in blood to pay, deserve all the pain they receive, are inferior beings, and so on.
I'd like to think that we did reach IdPol zenith in 2020, and stuff like this is fallout. That Kamala Harris' campaign immediately launches identity based zoom calls is gross and disheartening, but she's also a product of her time. We all are. It's a major part of how she got her job, after all. If you're worried about race relations as a risk stuff like this could be a real reason to vote against Kamala. Doubling back to reinvest in 2020'isms carries the risk it all gets worse-- more pervasive, more legal -- that seems like a sharper turn towards Race War, Now! Rd. to me.
I still expect we "get over it", or a large part of it, in the ~20 years range. Maybe we never completely dismantle all the scaffolding, because stuff like socioeconomic outcomes are hard problems to solve, but somes ways of thinking and memes may change. We might be able to start cloning Kmele Foster.
Anyway, another L for liberals like myself. FeelsBadMan.jpg.
ares
10mo ago
Two mods have left the site
I saw TracingWoodgrains posts about leaving here. Who was the other one?
gattsuru
10mo ago
Yeah, baring evidence not presented yet, Cheatle just seems at worst incompetent and at best woefully hands-off, rather than malicious. I absolutely would like to see more serious consequences where evidence of bad behavior is clear -- Shelton Snow doesn't seem to have even been fired, and plausibly violated some laws; the various defiance of subpoenas or lying before Congressional committees -- but the part where they're almost never fired or forced to resign makes it kinda hilariously optimistic to ask for criminal prosecution.
But it isn't constitutionally prohibited, or even prohibited by statute. There's even statutes that are supposed to specifically prohibit government employees doing this sort of bad behavior. They're just never or almost never enforced.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
10mo ago
I don't know if you know all this or not, so my apologies if this is repeating the obvious.
You have the basic concept right. A lot of stuff in Project 2025 is the kind of stuff that's been in every Republican Party Platform at the national convention, on every Republican Presidential Candidate website, in lots of Heritage Foundation white papers, etc. The actual stuff they want to do is neither particularly surprising nor frightening.
What does make it a game changer is the creation of lists of state-level experts willing to serve in a Republican administration and pursue these goals, along with a plan to expand the spoils system such that a huge number of government functionaries will be fired
Republicans/Conservatives have been hamstrung for decades by the dynamics of government work. In many ways from the New Deal onward, but certainly accelerating since Reagan, growing worse under Bush II, and critical under Trump. The people who go into Government aren't Republicans by attitude, and people who are Republicans by attitude don't go into government work. In the same way cops are mostly Republicans because young Democrats don't tend to become cops, EPA staffers are mostly Democrats because young Republicans mostly don't want to work for the EPA. As a result, even when an R admin takes over in the White House, they can appoint a new Republican department head, but that department head can only direct a vast number of Democrats. /u/Tracingwoodgrains has provided a recent overview of how this works in the legal field, where the Federalist society has created what amounts to a list of Republican leaning law students, who are maneuvered into clerking for Republican leaning judges, who then move on to become Republican leaning judges. They've been able to keep the courts relatively split and the conservative bench well stocked, even as it's increasingly hard to find a Republican at HYS tier law schools.
Project 2025 will promise to do the same, but for the EPA and OSHA and HUD.
That is a reasonable thing for Democrats to fear. The destruction of one of their major structural advantages would be a cataclysm. The reclassification of a vast number of jobs as political appointees would also absolutely cripple government for decades, because Democrats would be forced to in turn fire and hire a vast number of people every four to eight years. The resulting chaos would make government slower, even when Democrats win. Rather than having career bureaucrats who have a home field advantage in the bureaucracy, you'll have guys who just heard of this regulation for the very first time. Combined with the recent changes to Chevron, bureaucrats will be on a much more even footing with citizens going up against them. Republicans will say this is making government more responsive to voters and rooting out the administrative state's antidemocratic self-preservation instinct; Democrats will say it is disarming the army and then saying well the army can't protect us so we better surrender. Both, to some degree, have a point.
A side note being, while high-level career bureaucrats have long been political appointees flowing in and out of power with admin changes, there has been an ecosystem on both sides of think-tanks and academia and corporate sinecures to absorb those folks when they are out of power. But what will they do with more low-level staff being swung in and out? What will happen to the entire city of DC when a huge portion of its workforce is being hired and fired constantly?
Gaashk
10mo ago
I felt that trying to read Tracingwoodgrains' recent post and resulting comments. It's not that I'm unfamiliar with his persona -- I was following the Reddit when he used to post there all the time, and then left to found the Schism. Or that he didn't work at explaining the drama. But it still just came across as impenetrable.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
10mo ago
I mean, what's so interesting about it? To the extent that this person is interesting, would she be less interesting if she were a WASPy housewife? (as I'd also assumed)
Fair point! To me it would even be more interesting if a "WASPy" housewife were so aggressive in harassing "libs", so prolific and so invincible, yes. Would probably get crushed by the peer pressure alone, nevermind all the bans.
But maybe I'm wrong. There's like OOMs more of WASPy housewives. Can one point to an example of one doing what Chaya Raichik does, and at comparable scale? After all, that's what you assumed, so this should be a more typical occurrence.
(I think I know there isn't one).
is our own TracingWoodgrains evidence of the relevance of "the Mormon Question"?
Mormons are very interesting too, if less so and for different reasons.
Trace is an account with ≈25k followers whose infamy mainly comes from being associated with Chaya Raichik and, more directly, Jesse Singal; regrettably (not because he's a Gentile, I jut believe he had more constructive things to offer than those two), his own ideas have had less impact on the conversation thus far. This is a self-defeating comparison.
if you are suggesting that culture warriors are in general particularly Jewish -- it's not clear to me, is that what you are suggesting?
My contention has been very clear that Jews are interesting, first of all, because they, individually and collectively, easily attain prominence in whatever they do, tend to act with atypical (for their class) irreverence towards established norms (but without typical White collective self-sacrifice), and affect society to an absurdly disproportionate degree. Culture warring is one specific expression of those qualities, maybe not the greatest absolutely but the most relevant to this place.
More extremely, I believe this topic is objectively interesting, as in, dissent here is not a matter of taste or preference or whatever, only of failure to form a correct opinion for some reason. This I believe because perception of things as interesting must be subordinate to effectiveness at world modeling; and not being able to reason about Jews as a whole as interesting indicates inability to model the world, as that'd require being surprised by parts of its mechanism.
Further, I think that either it's been clear what I mean and you are being obtuse, or you are biased in a way that makes this exchange a dead end. Seeing as we've been at it for like half a decade, I lean towards "doesn't matter which it is".
jkf
10mo ago
I do not agree with the right of cognitively impaired people to censor interests of others.
Good News -- I don't care about your interests either! Like, go nuts man.
Today I was astonished (not) to discover that Libs of TikTok, this completely unsinkable, obsessed juggernaut of anti-wokery, itself immune to any cancellation, is ran by an Orthodox Jewish woman. That part, however, is pointedly not interesting. Got it.
I mean, what's so interesting about it? To the extent that this person is interesting, would she be less interesting if she were a WASPy housewife? (as I'd also assumed)
I think you are definitely over-pattern matching if you are suggesting that culture warriors are in general particularly Jewish -- it's not clear to me, is that what you are suggesting? If so it's pretty easy to find a chinese cardiologist non-Jewish counterpart to LoTT -- is our own TracingWoodgrains evidence of the relevance of "the Mormon Question"?
I'm pretty interested in CW, and not unamenable to thoughts of something like a Jewish conspiracy to the extent that there is indeed a remarkable solidarity there (particularly among Israeli-born Jews) in terms of supporting each other in business & politics -- I think you will need to do a lot more work than "even LoTT is a Jew!" to get from there to "the Jews are to blame for the Kulturkampf".
I do have a lot of sympathy!
Jokes and 'jokes' about violence aimed at specific politicians have always been sporadically enforced, and as much as it's unfair that there's been less notice aimed at the left for the last few decades, it means quite a lot of people genuinely don't have fair notice when the closest thing to ramifications was Kathy Griffin (and even she didn't get booted from Twitter) for almost two decades. Some people do genuinely just have a morbid sense of humor, not just when people they don't like are involved. And it's not unusual for a lot of the enforcement to really be 'about' some more tedious local drama leading whoever starts the cancel campaigns to bubble things up, or because some especially-neurotic town asshole decided to Make An Example of someone.
I just don't have arguments, or at least any not-laughable ones. I've been trying to write up some of the recent libertarian Barnett-Sandefur discourse on related topics, and it's just empty.
- That conservative formal opposition to social media censorship might result in even-handed de-escalation is kaput, an ex-argument, no more, ceased to be. I point to VioletBlue because she was one of the first examples I've offered in MotteSpace, literally no one but the strict free speech advocates noticed, and literally a week after her cancellation she using it as justification for broad censorship.. But it's not like that's nutpicking: Ozy's literal example of the Good Feminist argued that all that open-minded tolerance from Excluded only applied to "perspectives/experiences of marginalized groups", ie her side (and Ozy's significant other joined with the NYTimes cancel campaign against Scott). MorlockP's tolerance for sex worker twitter might have been crude, but it says something that it also came after said sex worker twitter wanted him banned from the platform and kept wanting it afterward. I have a hard time coming up with any examples of progressive targets of cancel culture who, after getting any support from conservatives, haven't turned around and bit back.
- That conservative uses of cancel culture will give ideas to progressive ones is runs face-first into the extent that there are almost-exactly overlapping examples, often longstanding ones. I bring up Corcoran above because it's an almost exact copy of this and, even if Correia doesn't mention him, he absolutely remembers him, and it's the room temperature. People have been thrown off projects they've run for over a decade for liking a tweet critical of a trans school shooter with the threat that if they did not leave other people on the project would have to pick between continued collaboration and their jobs. There's a guy who got fired for legal donations to a someone who was later found innocent and were only revealed because of hackers. A kid got his college invitation rescinded because he said bad words in Google Docs. Teacher's unions called in the FBI over people being a little rude at school board meetings; Canada declared not!martial law over truck horns. There's nothing new happening in any of the conservative-lead campaigns, and I'm pretty skeptical that people like LoTT could even come up with something inventive.
- That conservative uses of cancel culture will provide additional justification for progressive ones doesn't have any traction, either. Here, in this thread, we have people pointing to social conservative bans on homosexuality that are reaching back decades; in the past, we've had people explicitly drop back to 1950. And those aren't philosophies specific to here and now. Even if stopping today would reset the shot clock (not a given!), it would literally exceed my lifespan before we'd clear those existing time spans -- and as I've highlighted that conversation with SlightlyLessHairyApe, it's not like people have to or have stopped at 1950.
- ((The other common example is McCarthyism, and it kinda merges all of the above problems. In addition to its age, anti-McCarthyism was and is explicitly sold and taught as a universal principle about the importance of free speech from both government and corporate interference, vital to protect everyone, until it turned out to protect anyone outside of the Left, and then became Freeze Peach..))
- Does it hit the innocent or those on my side? Ignoring for now the difficult question of whether I have a side, there's no evidence here that anyone who's been hit is. Working at Home Depot doesn't make or require you be a Trump fan, conservative, or even Red Tribe, and this particular person was sickened by Trump's first month in 2017 in the local Press-Republican (no link, because it does actually spell out her name rather than mumble it, and I don't like this); while we don't have as strong evidence for Gass's political leanings as Jack Blacks, he's been calling a Trump victory dangerous since 2016.
- Should we only hit cancel culture advocates or participants? It'd be nice to have a good clean fight, but it's increasingly unclear such divisions exist. Forget indirect stuff like the extent it's gotten baked into HR at work; participating in progressive cancel culture is exceptionally common and these people are all pretty heavily online. I can't show that all those that LoTT is targeting today participated in 2020 cancellation efforts (and I know she doesn't care!), but I was able to find a couple with just a few minutes search.
What's left?
- Principles? Clearly these aren't shared values to the left, but worse than that it's far from clear they're even held by any opponent of cancel culture. Even among self-identified Big-L Libertarians, there's no shortage of big-name people who flirt back and forth from XKCD 1357. It's not that SlightlyLessHairyApe was coming up with increasingly threadbare excuses for why This Didn't Count; it's that the people who write entire legal treatises about the First Amendment and cancel culture struggle to handle whether turning the shop radio to the wrong should be a (required-to-be) fireable offense.
- Appeal to the center? @TracingWoodgrains might believe that the "the center... has been the only group consistently mobilizing against the phenomenon writ large", but a sizable part of my frustration is that, having spent well over a decade, I'm pretty far from convinced. For all the center might be shocked by the excesses of aggressive cancel culture, the resulting policies demonstrably changed minds far in excess of any backlash. In no small number of cases, the center absolutely loves it. We both, specifically, are beneficiaries of the illiberal stridency and cancel culture against homophobia, and today that means gay marriage is a 80%+ thing! Nobody cares about the 'f-word' getting people fired. And as much as I'm personally a fan of "don't beat up gay people" even if I'm far more mixed on jokes about gay people, "don't try to assassinate politicians" is pretty good as a goal if I'm far more mixed on joking about it.
- Hegemonic Swarms and the involved drama are Bad? That's a great argument for not doing it in Matt Parlmer's shop, and I've been lucky enough to find some places that try something at least along the same lines, but they're far outliers. Everywhere else has been quite happy to not merely tolerate but invite Progressive Hegemonic Swarms; whether the right does it or not has no impact on whether it shows up there.
I'd love to see reasons why. I've been looking! I'm not willing to join in, both for my principles and for the what did you think tolerance meant vibes posters reasons. But the best arguments I can find for anyone else to behave differently don't look very good.
Dean
Flairless
10mo ago
And Tracingwoodgrains's continual denial that they did anything morally or ethically wrong with the LibsOnTikTok is an ongoing problem is an ongoing problem, and one they and their defenders have tried to dismiss on the accusation that the issue is nothing more than an old grievance others are raising.
The point isn't that the subject of the slam piece is not an ongoing problem- the point is that it's not the only ongoing problem. Both actions can be wrong, and both can be ongoing, and both can have dated back years, but only one side has trying to dismiss criticism on the grounds of 'old grievance.'
This is special pleading. 'Old grievance' applies to both equally whether that's equally well or equally badly, and so either an ongoing problem cannot be dismissed as merely an old-grievance (which seems to be your perspective), in which case Tracing's defense argument is undercut, or ongoing problems can be dismissed on grounds of old-grievance, in which case Tracing's post can be dismissed on the same grounds.
Seeing that you're sampling this place, how would you feel about picking up the mantle and doing a survey of TheMotte? I don't think anyone has done one in a while. There's been a couple, but TracingWoodgrains did the last major one that I can recall. He shared the results here.
You could do whatever including keeping those same questions or making new ones. Probably would be helpful to have mod approval. Generally, but also so they can pin it at the top of a few threads to create a proper collection period.
Look, I want to make this process of me talking you into doing something as easy as possible.
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