domain:betonit.substack.com
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2hr ago
Imagine trying to convince my 1800s great great grandmother that my great grandmother, who just kicked her from the inside, was not a baby.
Would be difficult. Fortunately nobody not made of straw would need to. All pro-choicers say is that if she wants an abortion she can get one.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
11hr ago
Why do you think it makes sense to say that the views of some random politician are emblematic of the "online racialist Right"?
She's a member of the United States Cabinet!
Lotta people have gotten used to being out of power. Now that Trump is President they're forced to either defend the administration they supported and voted for or criticize their own side, and they don't want to do either.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
21hr ago
If AOC says something and isn't broadly getting a lot of pushback from her party, that would be quite indicative that at least a major fraction of the left believed something, or at least doesn't disagree with her. This is not weakmanning.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3hr ago
Child support payments are part of modernity, not social conservatism
Those two are not antonyms. Contemporary American Social conservatism perceives itself as being "timeless" "common sense morality," but it's very modern. Imagine trying to convince your 1800s great great grandmother that a fertilized egg that's barely visible to the naked eye is a "baby" or "person." It's something social conservatives believe they've logicked themselves into, much like leftists believe they've logicked themselves into "trans women are women!" I'm skeptical either "really" believes it, deep down.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
3hr ago
I feel like this discussion is the missing ingredient to lots of the topics du jour. Let's take the leftward drift of young women- well social conservatism today seems to have, uh, not discussed what other people owe to them, only what they owe to other people.
Yep. There was a commenter here who said women lacked "accountability" because they want to be able to f*** without risking being pregnant for nine months. I'm going to hazard a guess that that message won't be a particularly popular one among young women, as like with most voters they prefer politicians who will make their lives easier rather than harder.
That said, one should be wary of parts of the gender-divide narrative. Trump's performance among white men was actually worse in 2024 than in 2016, while his performance among white women improved. CNN exit polls confirm the same phenomenon.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
10hr ago
The truth is "American don't want to do those jobs for those wages" and that is what this is (and has always been) about, wages.The Plantation owners don't want to pay the help, and once again the Democrats (who have always been the Party of the Plantation Owners) are once again threating civil war if they are not allowed to continue importing and exploiting thier non-citizen underclass.
Whenever committed ideological conservatives* hear about a minimum wage worker complaining about his low wage, they talk about productivity and demand curves and all that jazz. But mention that the worker is an illegal immigrant and all that logic goes out the window and he starts sounding like Bernie Sanders saying that the employer has infinite resources (to pay an American, not the illegal) and that only malevolence and greed stops the lowest-paid workers from getting 65$ an hour.
And even if the government could arbitrarily order wages to increase, why not order wages to increase for the better and cushier jobs Americans are more likely to do? Seems to me like it's a weird fantasy where Americans are supposed to work Bangladesh-level jobs (crop picking, textile sewing, etc) but get American wages for it because I guess the Bengali government is too stupid to just order wages to increase.
Also, most farmers vote Republican and the CSA constitution forbade the international slave trade.
*Not to be confused with normie GOP voters
Celestial-body-NOS
Why should Man not rebel against Nature, when Nature herself is in rebellion against Justice?
19hr ago
So let me get this straight: he's covered literally to his head in tattoos, he sells drugs, he's a drunk and a junkie, he's violent with the criminal conviction to back that up, and he just straight-up violently murdered a guy with a samurai sword over a disputed drug debt. But he's such a loving partner and father!
The contradiction is not as irresolvable as it may, at first glimpse, appear; it is far more common than one would assume that someone will be benevolent to their family or close associates, while displaying unbounded cruelty to those they have convinced themselves deserve it.
This cuts across distinctions of personal appearance; the same pattern, with substitution of variables, describes the Nazi concentration-camp guard ('he's a sub-human weakening the Aryan¹ Race'), the Soviet gulag guard ('he's a wrecker trying to derail the Revolution on behalf of the capitalists'), the United-Statesian ICE agent ('he came into our country rather than obey our command that he quietly starve or be murdered in his place of birth'), the person of hair colour and pronouns in the cancel-mob ('he's a cishet-white-male schistlord who used a term² on the naughty-no-no-word list') and the seller of disfavoured substances ('he didn't pay me the money he owed me, thus violating the Non-Aggression Principle').
Focus less on "Which personal aesthetics mean that this person is or isn't safe to associate with?" (cf. Goodhart) and more on the Parable of the Good Samaritan³, as interpreted by Fred Clark. (Patheos, April 2017)
¹...despite him being of Romani origin, and thus more Aryan than the Germans.
²...which was actually the preferred nomenclature five years ago.
³If Jesus were telling the story today, would it be the Good Palestinian?
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
3hr ago
Why do you think Epstein killed himself if he was hardly guilty of a crime and not wrapped up in any broader intelligence operation?
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
14hr ago
Now tell us her thoughts on the gays and coloreds!
Time moves - values shift.
No need to go too far in either direction.
My late grandmothers position on tattoos was that the only respectable people who had them were concentration camp survivors.
Goodguy
5hr ago
Head-to-toe tattoos and piercings signal massive nonconformity with social norms and a willingness to lose out on a large number of job prospects for the sake of personal expression, which naturally gets people's guards up because if someone does not conform to social norms to that extent, you have to evaluate them closely instead of just treating them as a generic person, before figuring out if they are trustworthy or not. It activates a basic "possible danger" heuristic. Massive nonconformity to social norms straddles two ends of the bell curve - it can be a sign of courage and genius, in some cases, but in probably even more cases it is a sign of things like mental illness, antisociality, narcissism, and so on. Sometimes it's both of those ends of the bell curve at the same time (I know that stretches the metaphor really far, but you know what I mean). If you meet some random person covered head-to-toe in tattoos, it is probably more likely that they are a potentially dangerous weirdo than that they are a misunderstood artist.
That said, I find some of the signalling from the right on tattoos to be very funny. Not saying that you're a right-winger, it's just that your post gives me an opportunity to mention this. About 30% of Americans have at least one tattoo. Tattoos are completely mainstream now, what isn't mainstream is full body tattoos or facial tattoos. I often see right-wingers online virtue signalling about women with tattoos. They'll see a photo of a hot woman who has tattoos and start posting stuff like "eww disgusting" or "why did she ruin her body with that". I am convinced that 99% of these guys would fuck the hot woman without any hesitation if they had a chance, tattoos or not. It's just a big virtue signalling LARP to pretend to other guys that they care more about tattoos than they actually do.
Virtue signalling on the right is an under-discussed topic, in my opinion. Highly online right-wingers virtue signal every bit as much as highly online left-wingers do.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
9hr ago
Whether "woke right" exists or doesn't, "The Right" surely does, and this US administration does rather effectively speak for the Right in the American context.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
12hr ago
if you are as racist as you claim, then surely you would prefer to live in a place where all jobs were done by white people, if only because it would mean that you would only have to interact with white people. But instead your position is that for abstract reasons, it offends you to allow white people to do manual labor, so its better to import brown people to do it, even though it means that you and your friends and family have to interact with brown people all the time?
Without anti-discrimination law people would be able to choose whether or how much they want to interact with brown people.
And you now risk brown people becoming a meaningful voting block in your society that can never be expunged.
A reasonable concern. But it's worth looking at the impact on America so far. In Florida and Texas, the majority of Hispanics voted for Trump. Hispanics nationally still voted slightly more often for Democrats, but if you account for the fact that Hispanics are more likely to support centrist than far-left Dems, (just look at the melanin content of a pride rally or a DSA meeting) it doesn't seem like they're moving America to the left at all.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
14hr ago
They do it for years at a time. It’s called WWOOFing. Lots of the scions of high human capital humans do it.
Perhaps you find it hard to believe because, like the person above, you can’t imagine that QoL and wages for farmwork will increase if the semi-slave laborers are deported. When conditions improve, more people will be willing to do it, and more places will look like WWOOFing.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
28m ago
That was me, and as we discussed at the time that's a horrendously inaccurate and uncharitable take on what I was saying.
Anyone can click through and see what you said.
funzodonzo
3hr ago
Ehhh.. there's a ton of sophistry on the internet, The Motte is no exception. Let's not pretend this is the Library of Alexandria or the old salons of Europe. There is an occasional interesting and well-thought out post, but those are mostly an exception. This is why I mostly lurk and now just skim top level posts for an interesting topic. It's probably best to view this site as a place where somewhat rightwing malcontents talk amongst themselves with an occasionally centrist or somewhat liberal poster chiming in.
Look, I used to be quite liberal, but back in the "age of woke" I got turned against progressive idiocy. I read SSC, Less Wrong, Steve Sailer, etc. and that helped me see the overreach and sometimes straight out wrongness of the mid 00-10's progressive and liberal ideologies. However, I never dug that deep beyond some rightwing/centrist thinkers. Now that a lot of the right is either in power or in the spotlight (see X), I see how stupid much of it is. Politicians talking about banning chemtrails, TACO Don who doesn't understand trade beyond a general love of tariffs and wants to continue scamming his supporters (e.g. formerly Trump University, now Trump Coin, Trump scent, etc.), and to quote SSC, the spineless toady JD Vance. It's just all so stupid! Well, stupid and malicious. It reminds me of an older meme about Pakistan; that they'd be 100% ok with the world blowing up as long as India was destroyed first.
There are strong arguments to be made about some right wing positions, e.g. reducing the deficit, decoupling from China, demanding NATO allies pay more, on-shoring, etc. but these clowns are just bad at this. The BBB adds to the deficit, tariff schizophrenia doesn't allow for a stable and long term industrial policy, etc.
The left might be wrong a lot of times, but that doesn't make the current right correct.
ChestertonsMeme
blocking the federal fist
3hr ago
Not OP but his reputation was destroyed, and for someone like him what does he have left?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
6hr ago
The Middle Class already does crappy work for a living. I don’t think farming is grunt work — if I had a choice I would sooner enslave the financiers than the farmers. I would rather import Chinese and Indians to take the jobs of White financiers than the farmers, because that is truly innoble work. The Western Christian legacy is considering this work as innoble, as beneath human dignity. Even programming demeans humanity more than “picking fruit”. Look at how they write on Twitter. They are halfways to the singularity and I pray that their wishes come sooner and they become fully machine.
a few Oaxacans and Hondurans
Right, it’s obviously an incredibly larger amount than this which can easily make the White population dwindle to 5% by the end of the millenia.
better for everyone
Not at all. Actually, there’s a good argument to be made that deportations could increase all the wages of the lower middle class. But if we’re really basing things off of “better for everyone” we need to talk about waste among the .1% income level.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
6hr ago
We should make national policy decisions based on the projected wellbeing of citizens. That would include the psychological theories of Csikszentmihalyi, which shows that certain occupational activities are more conducive to happiness.
quiet_NaN
9hr ago
Relevant mod comment. If you want to say "these are the views of the Trump administration", then say "these are the views of the Trump administration".
Also, what do you mean by the adjective "racialist"? WN defines it as:
A believer or advocate of racialism, the ideology of racial nationalism.
(UK, dated) A racist.
Is "online racialist Right" an endonym? Who are these people? Do they want a white ethnostate in the US? Are they HBD-believers who want to restrict immigration based on what they see as genetic group differences? Did you just want to call them straightforward racist, but knew that this would generate a backslash, so you picked a rare word which strongly implies racism without saying the r-word outright?
On the object level, I think I share most of your opinions about Trump's immigration policy, which I detest. But I do not think you are doing a good job of accurately representing the beliefs of the Right, which is a prerequisite to honestly criticizing them.
I don't think that the Right has a great answer to what will happen to the fruit prices once the migrants who are willing to pick them in shitty conditions for low wages because they can feed their family in their country of origin with these wages are all deported. I think that a significant fraction of the MAGA base imagine that Trump, being a stable genius deal-maker, will simply pull the US into a golden age of prosperity and nobody will worry about fruit prices. The more realistic Trump voters might concede that prices of fruits might skyrocket if the pickers are US citizens earning a competitive wage, but simply see this as a price worth paying to kick the illegal immigrants out. Your framing which includes White druggies kicking their habit getting of their asses and start to pick fruits seems to me to be a minority viewpoint on the Right, to put it charitably.
This thread is full of people saying that tattoos aren't attractive.
Not quite.
Its more that they're correlated with low social status in the larger scheme. This doesn't mean they isn't a local maxima where they make someone more attractive than they would otherwise be, even if it also makes them vastly less attractive to a certain segment of the population.
In fact, I've said it straight up that the 'cheat code' to getting more women interested in you is get tattoos, get subversive piercings and buy a motorcycle. This can lead to other negative effects, but the tradeoffs may be worth it! At least in the short term.
There's a dearth of people who hold positions of true wealth power who have tattoos, though. Thus, they remain a reliable class signifier.
When something is largely a lower-class phenomenon, just like enjoying MMA or light beer, the fact that a few upper class folks indulge doesn't really prove otherwise.
yet every cop and every Navy SEAL and every BJJ champ and every boxer I know has at least one tattoo visible in short sleeves.
Yes, which might explain why people who AREN'T tough want to mimic a signal that makes them seem tough, whether they are or are not. That's common enough in nature.
And if they do so, that degrades the strength of the signal. And makes counter-signalling more viable. If all the cops, SEALs and BJJ guys have tattoos, what might you surmise about the ones that have resisted the trend and don't have any?
I dunno, it reads like a social trend like any other. I lived through the era of tramp stamps, and those faded from popularity. I've seen dozens of fashion trends come and go. The only trick with tattoos is they're more costly to alter or remove.
Also, add in that there is research indicating they can lead to health issues.
HereAndGone
13hr ago
It may be more relevant than I thought! Guy with scraggly beard and hair like a bird's nest versus guy who at least trims his beard and washes his hair: who looks like trouble you'd want to avoid and who looks at least semi-respectable?
One tattoo on its own is not an indicator of trashiness, but the thing is: some people can stop at one tattoo. Some people, on the other hand, seem to go "just one more. One more. One more" until they're covered in them. This guy is described as a tattoo artist which may be the excuse he gives for 'what do you do for a living?' or it may just be a self-description: "ah yeah, I make my money from doing tattoos for people, not from drug dealing".
I have to come out and admit I'm prejudiced. Not just because I think a lot of tattoos looks trashy, but also because a partner of a family member was something I moved from being neutral about, to disliking, to writing them off as a manipulative shit head. And funnily enough, they got a tattoo later in life, then went the "just one more" route, then shaved their head, then moved on to full-blown "being a manipulative shit head". So my priors on people with tattoos may well be contaminated 😁
I don't see how that's not strictly better than not taking it.
I'm not making the argument against taking the drug, I'm making the argument against being stuck in a local maximum.
The hell is a "complex" drug?
One that relies on an international supply chain for its industrial production and the existence of a large enough empire to secure sea lanes. A type-2 technology.
Do people not know what that word means?
Apparently they don't anymore.
From The Oxford English Dictionary, Volume 1:
Addicted (adi-kted),///. a.
[f. ADDICTS. + -ED.]
3. Self-addicted (to a practice); given, devoted or inclined; attached, prone.
From The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary:
addicted adjective /əˈdɪktɪd/ [not before noun]
unable to stop using or doing something as a habit, especially something harmful
Saying diabetics are addicted to insulin because they would die without it is a tautology.
So is saying men are slaves to biological necessity. These are realities well understood since antiquity.
Such addictions may well be natural, but they are cumbersome, and one of the common criticisms of modernity is that it has tricked people into novel addictions under the guise of liberating them from natural ones. I would have thought this line of reasoning to be popular enough as to not demand explanation. But here we are.
This is all such immensely confused thinking that I don't know how such beliefs can even arised. At the very least, it is factually incorrect.
I could throw it all back in your direction, but I'm afraid I know too well the source of your confusion, and it is that you think American Psychologists among other colleges of experts have dominion over the English language and its conceptual space. As if they can declare the valence of things by fiat.
It is an all too common sort of delusion that leads people to demand pronouncements from these priests as to whether certain lifestyles are or are not illnesses.
But as we are now in a place that is open to people who are not adherents of this religion, I therefore enjoin you to consider that such authority is not self-evident.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
19hr ago
I don't get your point about "the establishment" in this particular context. Why does it matter if they have power (real or perceived) in regards to whether it's a specific or general group. Most people, even politicians, don't see themselves as "establishment". For some people, Trump as POTUS is the epitome of "establishment". For others, calling him that word is utterly ludicrous. Note that I personally think it's fine for people to attack "the establishment" -- I'm opposed to this rule in general.
And I'm not defending his post wholesale -- I agree the last bit is presumptuous and I'm fine with him being given a warning for something like that. I don't think throwing the gauntlet to someone like this is really that bad, but maybe I'm in the minority on that. I think personal attacks are far worse for productive conversations, which happen regularly and don't get punished (or even become AAQCs!) as long as it's someone with a right-wing opinion attacking someone with a left-wing opinion.
I also have some reservations with how it seems like a final warning from stuff like his previous post which didn't deserve a mod action at all.
This part:
Is ridiculously selectively applied, e.g. basically any time people use "the establishment" as a foil they're guilty of this, but they don't get modhatted. As it stands, the rule is merely another cudgel to use against people making left-leaning arguments, although in this case I don't think an unbiased application of this rule would be particularly good either. It just makes it clunky to talk about subsets of a group that believe in specific ideas that might not be shared among the whole group.
Though I do agree the "I expect that RandomRanger will withdraw his claim" is fairly presumptuous here.
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