domain:kvetch.substack.com
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
4d ago
I expect now that they've been made, the Arkansas government will crush them one way or another.
Here's hoping. Evil should be nipped in the bud.
Instead you post: Acktually, if HBDers really believed what they say, they "would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race." Therefore all HBD enjoyers must be nazi white supremacists.
What I actually said was:
whites, who all the statistics show have higher incomes, higher IQs, higher educational attainment, and lower unemployment
Maybe the problem here is you reading things that aren't there, not my writing.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2d ago
On the sidebar it says "This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases." In this thread, it is claimed "the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here."
After my ban for this comment, it's hard to take that seriously. It did not include personal attacks, name-calling, strawmanning, or attempting to enforce ideological conformity. It "spoke plainly" and provided evidence. Yet the mods banned me for it, saying I was being an "immense pain in the ass."
I think the mods, and most people here, believe that they want this to be an open discussion forum with people of many different viewpoints, but when they're actually confronted with it, they feel it's an "immense pain in the ass." They called me an "obnoxious trolling shitstirrer." Yes, I am a shitstirrer in the sense that I say things that go against the dominant ideological viewpoint here, and I know in advance that hostility is likely to result. But isn't that what you want here, rather than another online echo chamber? I'm sure many of you have experience being "shitstirrers" in online spaces where you're in the ideological minority, now the shoe's on the other foot.
The mods accused me of "snarling" at my enemies, which gets to the meat of the issue: do you want an ideologically diverse forum or not? I freely admit I have a contempt for forms of conservatism and white nationalism I see as third-worldist. (Anti-vax, raw milk, conspiratorial, superstitious, fetishizing low-skilled manual labor, etc.) That's why I disagree with you guys and don't identify as part of your political tribe. If you think I'm a "leftist," try talking to a real one, the kind who uses terms like "patriarchy" or "heteronormativity" non-ironically. They do NOT like you. They see you as a malignant, cancerous influence on America. If you don't want to have a discussion forum with people who dislike you, change your rules to state that they aren't welcome. If, on the other hand, you want people from other tribes to be in this "jury," then you've got to accept them as they are rather than the imagined versions who disagree with you but like and respect you and never come around to actually posting here.
It seems to me that what some people here want is a forum with "left-wing" equivalents of David French. For the unfamiliar, David French is an allegedly "conservative" columnist for the NYT whose articles are just one after another telling liberals they're right and that conservatives are gross and mean and only ever making "we need 50 Stalins" criticisms of the Left. Thing is, French doesn't play this role for free. And you should be glad you don't have David French's, as I suspect that they have had a detrimental impact on the Left's electoral fortunes. If your only exposure to "conservatives" is people like David French, you're going to get a warped view of American politics that will lead to bad election strategy.
None of this is to say you should get rid of your rules against shaming, strawmanning, name-calling, etc. Maybe a new rule should be "be as polite as possible without being insincere." I admit that this is a tough balance to strike, I just think that right now the Motte is too far toward forced politeness leading to ideological conformity.
Rov_Scam
4d ago
For years, on this very forum (well, fine, you have to come buck to the /r/SSC days), whenever someone pointed out the advances of the SJ movement, the response was something to the effect of "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses / Tumblr", or alternatively there'd be an attempt to "steelman" the movement to make it look more reasonable than it actually is ("defund the police doesn't really mean defund the police"), something later dubbed "sanewashing" by other elements of the left.
It was more than that, but not much more. There was a lot of media rhetoric from the left and teeth gnashing on the right about certain things, but in the end it doesn't seem to have amounted to much. But beyond some limited effects at the local level, most of the media coverage from the left amounted to little more than trend pieces (where a fringe phenomenon is puffed up into something bigger than it is), and the right's reaction had all the hallmarks of a moral panic. I can't tell you how many arguments in bars I got into where someone would insist that this school district just down the road was teaching kids that white people are bad blah blah blah and can you believe what these kids are hearing about gay people only to find out that they got this information from their neighbor's cousin's kid, or something, which is the equivalent of them just admitting that they got it from some dubious social media post. I have yet to talk to anyone with actual firsthand knowledge of any of this who could reproduce lesson plans or anything.
And at the national level, this rhetoric was soundly rejected within the Democratic party. Regardless of how the Republicans would like to portray them, there are few woke Democratic elected officials. The Squad is the most notorious, but those are a few House reps in safe seats, and even some of those got primaried the last go-round. AOC may be nationally known, but it remains to be seen whether she's that popular outside the Bronx. And when woke politicians do get the opportunity to go national, they fall flat on their faces. If there was ever an election where wokeness could triumph over the Democratic establishment, it was 2020. The woke lane was there for any Democrat who wanted to take it. Who did? Kirsten Gillebrand and Beto O'Rourke. Arguably Kamala Harris, though she wasn't very convincing about it. The Democrats ended up nominating Joe Biden, about as an establishment candidate as you can get. Hell, Mayor Pete made a convincing run as a moderate and even led early on despite being the mayor of a town most people couldn't point to on a map.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2d ago
You're quoting me out of context to make it seem like I'm saying the opposite of what I'm actually saying:
This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans. They see whites like people have long seen the American Indians, a "noble" race who ought to "own" the country but who are ill-equipped to deal with the evils of modernity that more advanced peoples have introduced like liquor or fentanyl.[1] But where this worldview makes some sense in the case of the Indians, it is utterly nonsensical to apply it to whites
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2d ago
What was wrong with it?
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
22hr ago
There are reasons to “uplift the in-group” and you need to articulate why this is an innoble goal in and of itself
I never said it was. I think uplifting the in-group by getting them jobs sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain is pathetic.
They are raised with values that are de-socialized by our ridiculous mandatory education culture, and this isn’t the kind of thing you can arbitrarily re-socialize at will
The fundamental difference between me and you is that I like white people more, which extends to liking first-world societies that white people built. I'm not concerned that these Guatemalans coming across the border are going to out-compete whites because they have a "better" culture.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2d ago
I'm not anti-HBD. I'm anti third-worldism.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2d ago
positive ideas
Strength. Health. Beauty. Intelligence. Fertility. Truth. Reason. Vitality.
Tree
2d ago
Thank you for providing an example of how silly and far-fetched the accusations of being darwin got. You don’t seem to know anything about darwin, impassionata or me. This basically confirms guesswho wasn’t darwin, he was just annoyed, I get it.
As Amadan said, he was very, very good at riding the line between what would be just that step over it to get a ban, and provoking his interlocutor into taking that one step.
That’s called being innocent of any wrongdoing and losing fair and square, respectively.
MartianNight
1d ago
Amadan, you are a fucking hypocrite and you're a disgrace of a mod. You constantly spread Zionist propaganda while pretending to be politically neutral.
You intentionally conflate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and deride criticism of Zionism as “Joo-posting”, an intrinsically dismissive term, as if the people who have some concerns about the genocide-in-all-but-name that is being perpetrated by Israel in the middle east are just cuckoo-bananas.
Again in this comment, you create a false dichotomy between “Jews and Jew-haters” as if you can be either in support of Israel, or you must hate the Jews, which is far from the truth. I have no issue whatsoever with the many Jews who live in my neighbourhood, nor with those Israelis who are content to remain within the internationally recognized borders of Israel. I do hate anyone who supports the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, whether they are Jewish or not. I make no secret of this. Any attempt to conflate that opposition to Zionism to “hating Jews” is obviously disingeneous.
Even in this reply you stroke your own dick by waxing poetically about how you magnanimously tolerate the “Joo-posters” (a derisive term you invented to ridicule those who don't share your pro-Israel bias), as if banning people for disagreeing with you wouldn't violate half a dozen stated rules. Your tolerance of anti-Zionists is only commendable if this is an explicit Zionist space which is founded on the principle of promoting Israels divine right to annex Palestinian land and carpet bomb Palestinian civilians. If that's not a founding principle, you don't get brownie points for tolerating people who are calling out the state of Israel on its gross violation of international law.
I wouldn't be writing this reply if you were just another random Zionist voicing his dumb opinions. In that case, I would just flip the bozo bit on you and ignore your stupid takes from now on. But the fact that you're an actual moderator makes that impossible. I would think moderators should be extra committed to following the rules of the Motte, including being kind, charitable, not antagonistic, avoiding weakmen, not being egregiously obnoxious—all standards you fail here.
Clementine
2d ago
"actually the survivors aren't credible and what happened is that they worked people to death for free labor but with no mass shootings, no mass gassings, no locking people into buildings and setting those buildings on fire, just very polite Germans extracting human labor until it dropped dead" is still holocaust denial actually.
Since the claim about the Holocaust is that Jews were targeted for extermination, not just abused as slaves and "incidentally" dying.
He also mixes in the claim that many fewer Jews died than is accepted by mainstream historians and that these numbers are inflated to suit the Zionist agenda, which is also holocaust denial.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
5d ago
In order to genuinely enjoy any sort of fiction, you have to be able to suspend disbelief.
No not at all. "Suspension of disbelief", as if you were hoping that you could be "taken for a ride" if you could only make yourself believe that the story really was a window to another world, is an immature way of approaching art (immature in the sense of pre-critical, pre-reflective, pre-self-consciousness).
The mature, critical way of approaching art (which actually just turns out to be straight up more fun) is to start from the recognition that the artwork was deliberately constructed as a product of human intentionality. Like all other artifacts of human labor, it was designed according to certain specifications in order to serve certain purposes. So our analysis begins with questions like, why was this created, what narrative did the artist tell themselves about why it was created and is it in any sense different from the truth of why it was "actually" created, what is the background casual chain of social/material conditions that lead to the production of this specific work in the specific way that it was produced, how are its formal features related to the conditions of its production, how do its formal features relate to its conceptual features, etc...
Some works reveal themselves to be richer and more amenable to this type of analysis than others, which is how the term "genre fiction" came to take on a derisive connotation.
Tree
22hr ago
Your yikes are worth nothing. Your female intuition, less than nothing. Mother’s intuition, female intuition, ancient wisdom and tradition, they all did parenting for thousands of years. One day some dudes with erlenmeyer tubes showed up, and they saved half the children. They saved half the children.
Kids today, or at least middle class kids upwards, are a lot more isolated. "The newborn is in a crib in the nursery and we monitor via babycam"?
Parents now spend far more time with them than they used to. You think parents used to wake up 8 times per night for two years to take care of one baby, plus the dayshift? They had actual work to do. I have a lower class family story: Neighbours of my grandparents who had 8 kids, put alcohol in the babies’ bottles to shut them up because they had to work the fields in the morning.
SSCReader
4d ago
If the rule brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
I mean America is pretty great in my opinion.
Moral improvement should have costs surely? If being moral was easy and cheap then everyone would do it. If you want to be moral you are explicitly making decisions that are worse practically, because if they were better practically you wouldn't have to be moral to choose them. Being moral mean soften looking at the most efficient choice and not making it. You risk your life to dive into the river to save the child and so on and so forth.
The ancestors of America brought the wolf in (as per Jefferson), they could later have chosen to be immoral and kill/deport all the wolves. Or moral and have to contend with what enslaving a race means for race relations and the future when you let them go. They chose the latter. That means their descendants have to deal with that choice, for better or for ill. Being immoral is often better practically. But it isn't what America was founded to aspire to. I don't think that's a nasty lesson in as much as a lesson about reality. Choices have consequences. Being better than you were does not immunize you against previous choices. It's easy to go back and think we should have just killed them all. It probably would be easier. But morality isn't about being easier it's about being better, however you measure that.
"Jefferson wrote that maintaining slavery was like holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”17 He thought that his cherished federal union, the world’s first democratic experiment, would be destroyed by slavery. To emancipate slaves on American soil, Jefferson thought, would result in a large-scale race war that would be as brutal and deadly as the slave revolt in Haiti in 1791. But he also believed that to keep slaves in bondage, with part of America in favor of abolition and part of America in favor of perpetuating slavery, could only result in a civil war that would destroy the union."
America you will note, managed to not have the union destroyed, not have a full scale race war and has not as yet been destroyed. And part of the reason for that is because efforts were made to make up for slavery. The Civil Rights Act, Affirmative Action and the like were promises to ADOS that they didn't need to resort to a race war to get their place in America. The white guilt you speak of as a mental illness was vital in charting a course that has made great strides.
Is it perfect? Not at all. Racial resentment did not vanish. Black people are still poor compared to whites. But assuming you think genocide is bad, the outcome has to be measured against that. Not against perfection.
SSCReader
4d ago
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Yup, but this isn't medication, or mental illness. This is a choice. You may not like the choice, but that doesn't make it mental illness.
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If anyone is carving out the founding stock, it is the founding stock themselves. Indians, Mexicans and whatever else can't do anything they are not allowed to do. The vast majority of your political apparatus is white. This isn't colonization or invasion. It's invitation. And it is invitation largely because of the white guilt felt by large numbers of your fellow white Americans. You can't fix that by making them do the same thing they felt the guilt about in the first place. If you think it is a problem (and it legitimately might be!) then you have to resolve it, not repeat the actions that led to it. Unfortunately this is one of the dividing issues your nation has faced since its founding. It was called out at its founding this was going to be a huge problem in fact. The Civil War, Civil Rights movement, wokism is all downstream of the choices your ancestors made.
I don't see a good answer, with the possible exception (and even this is shaky) as you point out as going all in for blacks. Affirmative action for blacks only, reparations for blacks only, attempt to help your fellow white Americans extirpate their guilt by focusing on the main group that was harmed so others don't get pattern matched in. But that guilt is the foundational issue you are going to have to deal with. Letting immigrants in is asymmetric. It takes much less effort to do so, than try and get rid of them afterwards. So you have to find a way to make them stop wanting to. To make them stop feeling guilty about being so privileged and about how that privilege was used against yes primarily black people through American history.
I don't think you can do that, by going back to the same behaviors that got you here in the first place.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
14hr ago
You're broadly correct here: the anti-immigrant right (or "racialist Right") definitely don't regularly push back against claims that legal Americans would be willing to do those types of jobs. If they did, it would undercut their position that we should do mass deportations, so they either ignore it (like Catturd and friends) or they say legal Americans would do it if the price is right. The people claiming you're strawmanning Republicans in this specific post are hard to take seriously.
Jiro
2d ago
Yeah when I wrote my original post it occurred to me that I was going to have to repeat myself ad infinitum about this, but, I'm not disputing that the holocaust happened or that millions died.
A common tactic of people questioning the Holocaust is to say "I'm not questioning the Holocaust but..." followed by things that are carefully worded to cast doubt on the Holocaust without explicitly denying it. And that's what you're doing. You're not disputing it, but you think the numbers are substantially inflated? That's disputing it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
I saw precisely one guy link to an actual "bad" comment Darwin made, and it wasn't actually bad at all in terms of debating style. The person Darwin was debating with was far worse, funnily enough.
I don't trust testimony because people just disagreed with him since he was a leftist, and then tried to work backwards to find things they claimed were "manipulative" debate tactics. If we asked a bunch of lefty /r/politics users what they thought of the average poster on this forum, and the broad consensus was "horrible", would you trust them? I wouldn't.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Hmm, what can “we” learn by summing your entire outgroup up as one monolithic movement, then gaming out an elaborate social strategy?
Probably not much. Definitely nothing “optimal.” I think you’re overfitting a model, and in a way that just happens to bait agreement from a certain sort of ambiguously-autistic Internet commenter.
I suppose I also think you’re assuming the conclusion. Perhaps, for bait, that goes without saying?
Point is, your model kind of sucks.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
4d ago
I'm surprised no one compiled a list of all of the jobs or things he claimed to have experience with, but I wasn't about to spend the time going through his comment history to do it.
If you or anyone actually does have a list like this, it would be helpful. People keep handwaving that he was doing all sorts of nefarious debate tricks but nobody can actually point to any examples. Nobody has receipts, so they broadly fall back on "trust me bro".
"Engaging in good faith" seems to be synonymous with "only disagrees with me within certain bounds".
SSCReader
4d ago
What if they preferentially hire whites the same way Indians favor Indians, or Jews favor Jews? What if they aggressively subsidize and import white residents the same way the federal government bombs small Midwestern towns with Haitians or Somalians?
I mean they did right? Even more than that actually. This is something white Americans already did. It's how you ended up where you are now. Do you think trying it again is going to work better? You have affirmative action and white guilt, people trying to make things up to black farmers and the like because this is what happened before and white people decided, actually this makes us feel pretty bad when we look at in comparison to our theoretical national values.
Whites had the nation you are envisaging and even more than that. Then they decided they didn't like it. Black people didn't have the power to change it. White people themselves did.
The things you complain about are already the tat for white peoples tit! (so to speak!), to try and make up for slavery and Jim Crow and so on and so forth. Instigated by white people themselves!
They already did the "What if?" You know how it ended.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2hr ago
Sewing bras is more conducive to wellbeing than stacking them on a shelf.
Then buy yourself a sewing machine. We shouldn't make national policy choices based on psychological theories like that.
In what world would “picking fruit” be pathetic? I think you are having trouble dissociating the image you have of these things now, with what they would look like if employers didn’t have a semi-slave class. There’s a farm near me where people — college-educated, white, smart — sign up to plant and reap for free. Because in return they get free room and board, and most importantly a social environment filled with other young white people. They work quite hard, then they drink in the evenings and dance and fuck and make music and so on. This is exactly what agricultural work was for nearly all of history.
do you really advocate that some people are property?
personally I will take transing fans, russian agents, antifa and flat earthers over slavery enthusiasts*
anyone that advocates for slavery or considers it as acceptable is worse that serious communists (conscription being a special case, I guess - if you want to argue it is a form of slavery)
*not that I would want either in position of authority or within 100 000 km from me
Recently @RandomRanger accused me of strawmanning the Right:
Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:
DeRemer refers to "Americans," the online racialist Right is talks about whites, but in both cases the vision is the same, uplifting the ingroup means getting them the opportunity to do the jobs currently done by the guy standing in the Home Depot parking lot. Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party? Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor, which is why in the video DeRemer goes on to talk about how Americans will be given opportunity through being "skilled, upskilled, re-skilled" and how the Trump administration is increasing apprenticeships. Of course, few illegals do those high-skilled jobs, so upskilling Americans won't replace many illegals, but it's not like the Fox News host is going to point out the apparent contradiction.
Given that I've given an example from a cabinet-level Trump administration official, (not "nutpicked" from some rando on Twitter) I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim that I "obnoxiously created imaginary narratives" in the interests of truth and courtesy.
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