domain:kvetch.substack.com
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
3d ago
Genuine applause for taking one for the team. I protest your ban as unjust silencing for stating true facts about the world, with your only crime being that your blade was too sharp and well honed. I stand with you in solidarity. Omnes pro uno.
Tree
3d ago
One of his predictions was wrong, that warrants a ban. You really have zero arguments.
If you disagree, show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like
darwin had AAQC's. But just presenting a somewhat uncommon, solid argument is high quality in my book, and he did that often, because by virtue of his politics, most of his arguments were uncommon here. We banned the only progressive voices we had, all to maximize the content-free comments complaining about the enlightenment, modernity and the sexual revolution - the motte equivalent of complaining about boomers, or neoliberalism.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4d ago
Can't even begin to respond to how hateful this message is.
If you read more carefully, you'd realize I was mocking the message and saying it was wrong.
If that's your definition of nuance, then I'm sure phrenology and alchemy are right up your alley as well.
There's the difference between HBD as-in "Human genetics drift over time as populations are isolated, let's explore those differences" and HBD as-in "The genetic differences between populations can explain why the world looks like it does today[1]." Too often the former acts as a Trojan horse for the latter, and I guess people can't be trusted with the responsibility of communicating with nuance so they get called racist.
[1] Nearly every grand-theory-of-everything of why the world looks like it does today gets laughed out of any room with people who capable of deep critical thought in adjacent topics (see how anthropologists feel about Guns, Germs, and Steel) - HBD is not unique in this regard.
Edit: To add, the invocation of HBD in this thread was of the latter type, and not of the former type.
Tree
3d ago
You: show me some examples of what high-quality Darwin looked like
Me: His AAQCs
You : sure, he made AAQCs....
ez win.
I'm not convinced guesswho is darwin, because guesswho was treated antagonistically, and constantly accused of being darwin, and if you are to be believed, a 'bad faith' poster.
Tree
3d ago
I was there, and he was definitely banned for his political opinions. It's obvious because :
-
he was the most progressive commenter
-
he was a capable debater
-
he stuck around a long time, obeying rules that became increasingly convoluted and personally-tailored against him, due to the hatred of the people.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4d ago
Yeah that was what reminded me of the subject.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
I have a laundry list of bad interactions with MAGA aligned people on this forum, but I can't really supply evidence of any specific poster being bad over and over again since I typically just block them if they're sufficiently bad even once. The fact it keeps happening over and over across many different posters should be sufficient evidence that it's a systemic issue, and not just one or two bad apples that slip through the cracks.
Moderation never worked on a "specific sentences get you banned" basis, it was always about whether the post as whole
This type of vibes-based moderation is just a glaring invitation for mods to be arbitrary. At the very least there should be a sentence or two that should be close-enough to breaking the rules that it can be cited as the issue, and then the rest of the post's tone can be used as context for whether to pull the trigger. Right-leaning mods are naturally going to feel that left-leaning posts are far more hostile and delusional than the average right-leaning post, which is probably why a post like Turok's gets banned while something like this gets AAQC'd.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
People just hated Darwin since he was unabashedly left-wing.
The guy who deletes his posts was weird but I don't really think he fits this mold either. His posts were mostly short -- I don't recall him really gesturing at anything particularly bad, but maybe I'm misremembering.
Tree
3d ago
Here’s an idea: Just fucking take it. Argue whatever the hypothetical is. Or don’t. But don’t censor. You are among friends here, right-winger. You don’t need to use the mods to crush your political opposition. You have your numbers, your downvotes (Turok is consistently downvoted even for neutral comments, which btw already censors him). This burning hatred for any left-of center commenter is embarassing.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4d ago
The Online Right is small and powerless
Not true. Google Marko Elez.
So, again, let's start with the heart of the issue: why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable?
It doesn't. Nothing in the post was directed against white solidarity, which I have no problem with.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
Do you have an actual point here?
aceventura
4d ago
- ICE is not personally loyal to Trump
Roman soldiers often became loyal to the generals that distributed them land and victories over the roman state itself. It's really hard to not see this dynamic replicated.
Tree
3d ago
I know guesswho claimed that. Still. You should have asked him if he was ever wrong on the smollett thing to determine his identity. If he said yes, it wasn't him.
Tree
3d ago
Personally if I was a mod I'd take a pretty hands-off approach. Permabans essentially never, suspensions only rarely.
Amen to that. I wanted to express that I do not "understand the frustration". This isn't a therapy session, your feelings aren't valid.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4d ago
Or there were, anyway, I haven't seen them around in a while; they just got called racists like all the others.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
4d ago
Yes I often dismiss whole belief systems, because there are many quite shit belief systems - history is filled with them. I recommend you spend as much time engaging in the same practice, lest you become a lemming in someone else's schemes.
how you imagine the relative status of people who believe in it compared to those who don't
I don't know what this means, but yes, I do tend to hold those in lower regard who fall prey to believing in shitty belief systems. But, since I'm not a misanthrope, it's more of "pity" than "hate". I look at the pictures of cultists clutching onto empty goblets sprawled around tents and I feel sad, but then I see the children in the photo and I feel angry. It's more complex than what you're trying to paint me as.
I'm sure there's no need to engage with the object matter on this, your preconceived ideas are probably 100% right about everything.
I do engage. Like my example, I read Guns, Germs, and Steel - but then I also read the criticisms and appreciated those just as much if not more than the original source material. And then I adjust my priors.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
3d ago
Doing a similar standard of job for 30% of the price, or even doing the same job to an 80% standard for 30% of the price for almost all jobs is a very valid component to the merits of an individual for a job. Microsoft choosing to recognise and reward this doesn't reflect badly on either them or the person doing the job for cheap, the only person to boo here is the person who wants to extract economic rents by artificially restricting competition.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
4d ago
You're right that Auron does not give an alternative plan to co-opt EHC, but do you have one?
No more Trump, RFK, Hulk Hogan, or prayer breakfasts.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
4d ago
Alright Jordan Peterson, let's shift the debate to the definition of the word "nuance".
My core point stands uncontested. HBD the theory hides behind HBD the science in order to try to gain legitimacy as a "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is" despite every "grand-theory of why the world is the way it is" being half-baked and not capable of standing up to any critical analysis.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
4d ago
Really just said ~ "Only white people have a high enough IQ to form democracies".
I mean, I don't even find it useful to engage that assertion, but it is funny to contrast that with the take that I often see here that democracy in the west is now dysfunctional due to low IQ HBD dysgenics and only might concentrated in a single infallible strongman avatar can save us (Deus vult).
(+1 to aceventura's "History is longer than the last 70 years." which is approximately "read a book". I doubt the Greeks who invented democracy would've identified closely with your self identification on the HBD spectrum, you know, based on who they were geographically interacting with: southern Italy, Egypt, Anatolia, and Persia).
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
If there's not a rule against attacking your opponent as "living in denial" separate from the actual arguments, there should be. It adds nothing to the conversation but heat.
The second one didn't receive a mod warning. There's a mod warning a different user downthread, but nothing to the post claiming the outgroup politician is a foreign agent.
Turok is clearly arguing against a line of though that, will not predominant, mostly certainly exists on the fringes of the Republican party. I don't understand how you think what he's doing is "performance art".
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3d ago
First off I think there ought to be much more stringent thresholds for people who are part of the conversation vs people who aren't. JK Rowling wasn't actively debating on this website, so things are different for her as a public figure than they'd be for a poster on the Motte responding directly to me.
Second off I agree that it's generally bad to put words in peoples' mouths or to think much stronger statements are implied by things people actually did say. There has to be some limitations to this or else any sort of debate is effectively impossible, but Darwin definitely exceeded what could be reasonably claimed by JK Rowling's words.
Third, I cut a little bit of slack for how common a political idea is among a group, even if it's wrong. This might seem utterly arbitrary, but I think Darwin's statement here is about on par with a Republican claiming "Biden wants to take all our guns away". In one sense, Biden was in favor of further gun control. In another sense, the literal statement of "Biden wants to take ALL our guns away" is clearly wrong since he never advocated for completely taking all guns away. If someone then claimed that I was taking it far too literally and that it was more about Democrats as a whole, I'd think they're being kind of cheeky but I wouldn't act like Amadan did and start lobbing personal attacks all over the place, nor would I describe it as "dishonest", or "bad faith" or "manipulative".
Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore. It makes sense. The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China. The unemployment rate is only low because these people are so dispirited that they've given up looking for work. We need to drastically remake our economy to help these unfortunates, who are incapable of helping themselves. 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, who all the statistics show have higher incomes, higher IQs, higher educational attainment, and lower unemployment. Even opioid overdose deaths, initially a "white" issue, are now highest for blacks and American Indians, as with most social problems. (Whites do die at higher rates than Hispanics or Asians.) Labor force participation rates have indeed declined, mostly because there are more students and retirees. 89.2% of men aged 25-54 are in the labor force, a figure that is likely higher for whites, and the 11% who aren't include students, prisoners, stay-at-home dads, and those who can't work because of legit disabilities.
The Online Right has often been compared to the woke left. The woke black looks at his race, disproportionately poor, uneducated, and working low-skill jobs, and demands affirmative action so that more blacks can work in medicine, law, business, and politics. The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain. Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?
Now, you may be asking, "what about the real unemployed drug addicts?" For one, this is a disproportionately non-white group. One study found that blacks are 3.5 times more likely to ever be homeless in their lifetimes than whites, while Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely. Still, while not as common as some of you think, they do exist. Tariffs aren't going to help them. Law enforcement, drug treatment, mental health care, and legalizing SROs might, though the real issue is that these people need to help themselves. If I believed, as many of you profess to, that my race was at risk of going extinct, I wouldn't be centering my politics around helping the least capable members of said race who refuse to help themselves. Don't you have bigger problems? It's not like you should feel any "political" loyalty to them, Trump's working-class base work, homeless people rarely vote.
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