domain:worksinprogress.co
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
29d ago
The following is a nakedly partisan take, but that's because you asked for a poll of opinions. These are my sincerely held beliefs; there's no room for anyone to argue me out of them, but I'm not expecting anyone to share it, either: there is simply no good faith left at all in my heart. my political opponents, and they will never operate in good faith. There is no negotiation in existential conflict. There is only the will and the power to act.
'You see Charlie, these liberals are trying to assassinate my character. And I can't change their mind. I won't change my mind, because I don't have to. Because I'm an American. I won't change my mind on anything, regardless of the facts that are set out before me. I'm dug in. And I'll never change.' For your viewing pleasure - one of my favorite clips, and not even for that quote.
Every time I read one of these pathetic tough guy screeds, my first thought is to laugh at the absolute lack of self-awareness. 'Reee, my outgroup is full of animals who would never compromise or act in good faith! This justifies me never acting in good faith either. I can't wait for my fellow citizens to get mown down by the stasi for disagreeing with me!'
My second thought is to reply, 'Say it louder, and into the microphone, please.' Seriously. Go hop on Fox News and give an interview about how you want to shoot protestors and cruelty is the point and God praise Donald Trump. Write your angry, impotent screeds and spread them as widely as possible - under your real name if you can. There's really nothing better for democratic electoral odds than platforming people like you.
Or, and I hold little hope for a week-old-probably-troll account, you could dig yourself out of your sad little internet radicalization hole and stop holding so much hate in your heart. I guarantee your life would be better for it.
Nerdy men were the first to get access to internet pornography, and for a while it was associated with them. Now guys in the slums of Nigeria are watching it on smartphones. Nerds were the first to have access to online conspiracy content. Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams! Muh Magic Bullet! Now the same conspiracy stuff is hitting young women. From an NYT report about a women's conference:
Rhaelynn Zito is one such conservative convert. Ms. Zito is a 25-year-old nurse who lives in Raleigh, N.C. In 2023, she said she had a real belly flop of a year. She went through a breakup, lost a family member and was searching for purpose outside work. Ms. Zito began listening to Ms. Clark, whose Turning Point USA show is often ranked among the top ten of health podcasts on Spotify.
Listening to Ms. Clark, Ms. Zito said, changed her life. She started a Bible study group, cut down her drinking and stopped dating casually as she focused on finding a husband. She stopped using birth control, taking up a natural family planning method recommended on Ms. Clark's show, and became dubious about abortions and vaccines. She no longer identifies as a feminist.
{sinp}
After the 2024 election, when young men swung markedly to Mr. Trump, pundits and political operatives began a frenzied and almost anthropological analysis of the "manosphere," the ecosystem of podcasters, like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, who nudged young men toward the Republican vote. Less in focus were the young women — a demographic that is still reliably left-leaning, but whose support for Mr. Trump also increased, according to post-election polling. Some were also swayed by what has been labeled a "womanosphere" of uber popular podcasters blending lifestyle advice and political polemics.
Many of the young women at the Turning Point conference were drawn to the event because conservative women influencers had helped them remake their lives: start dating seriously and stop eating ultra-processed foods, start taking supplements and stop using birth control. The Young Women's Leadership Summit, which marked its tenth anniversary, drew its largest numbers yet this year: roughly 3,000 women, up from around 2,000 last year and under 500 in 2015, at its inception. The event, some attendees noted, was light on discussions about policy — immigration raids, trade wars — but heavy on dating, parenting and nutrition advice.
Women are more hostile to COVID vaccination, perhaps reflecting a female urge to make politics revolve around their bodies.
Many people here have been asking about my politics: it's actually remarkably simple: I want the old America back where children were born within marriage, didn't try to change their gender, and got all the vaccines their pediatrician recommended.
To Rightists with daughters reading this: are you concerned that they might encounter "natural family planning" on the internet and really f*** up their life?
General poll of opinions here, since I don't see much conversation about it - either because of news bubbles or general disinterest in discussing the ugly side of authoritarianism.
Main query: Are the blackbagging tactics of ICE a necessary evil, a dangerous overstep, or some nuanced in-between?
Genuinely, I don't have a steelman for blackbagging tactics. Right now, ICE is targeting a certain type of "undesirable", namely, allegedly undocumented illegal immigrants, and appear to have carte blanche to apprehend anyone who disrupts that process. But the hallmark of authoritarianism is to expand the definition of "undesirable" to include your political opponents - and if blackbagging undesirables is already palatable, then you can blackbag your political opponents. It's a matter of convenience that political enemies are already attempting to disrupt the blackbagging of undocumented illegal immigrants - it makes that leap that much easier were it to happen. How convenient as well that there's now an entire organizational apparatus gaining valuable experience in how to make people disappear on US soil? They may look like mall cops who are dressed for the paintball arena for now, but if they happened to get any of that DoD money...
Blackbagging by ICE seems to be an extrajudicial process by design, as a flex of the unitary executive theory that the judiciary exists only to serve the will of the executive. The judiciary is viewed as uncooperative and painted as obstructive, despite being intentionally hamstrung by the right wing of congress that has refused for several presidential terms to pass any immigration reform despite bipartisan efforts. One doesn't have to look very hard at all to find red tribe voices foaming at the mouth to declare enemies of the state: official mouthpieces of the current administration, senators, congresspeople. History rhymes, and I know enough of the current admin has read Carl Schmitt to recognize the paths that are available to them at this point if they happen to be hungry for power.
Ending query: Assuming (for the sake of this question) that the end goal of this administration is to establish a type of authoritarianism where people are kidnapped and disappeared because of vocal opposition to the regime, what should be the response by the opposition that would want to prevent that? History buffs, what are the best examples of countries barely recovering from the brink of authoritarianism?
Edit: I appreciate the responses, there was actually quite a bit of variety which was nice to read. I came away with a steelman (which I didn't have originally) which is that the theatrics of ICE is meant to intimidate illegal immigrants. In effect, it would seem like that would select for immigrants who are reckless and fearless (yikes), or immigrants who face such extreme danger in their home country that even Twitter videos of brown people being tackled by men in masks doesn't slow them down (these desperate people would probably be considered "authentic" refugees by most leftists, and not just "economic migrants").
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
23d ago
The remarkable predictive accuracy of Nick Fuentes on the Israel Conflict
I'm sure most here have heard of Nick Fuentes, maybe seen clips where he's said something funny or outrageous. I do not consider myself a follower of Fuentes, I have my criticisms of him and his movement, but I have to give credit to Fuentes for churning out consistently correct predictions.
When it came to the Israeli-Gaza war, Nick Fuentes registered these predictions in this short clip, in summary from just the first 60 seconds:
- The Oct. 7 attack is going to be the tripwire that enables Israel to finally solve the Gaza Question with ethnic cleansing.
- Israel is going to conduct a "brutal campaign against Gaza" which they "know Iran has to respond to."
- In doing so, their retaliation against Gaza will knowingly provoke a retaliation from Iranian-backed militias against Israel.
- This will give Israel an excuse to widen the conflict and "to do what they always wanted to do, which is bomb Iran's nuclear program".
- This will initiate war between Iran and Israel, and Israel will draw the United States into the war with Iran- Israel brings in the United States to "put Iran in check."
- This will culminate in an end to the regime in Syria and an end to the regime in Iran.
- This is the big play Israel is making.
Nick Fuentes registered these predictions on October 8th, less than 24 hours after the Hamas attack on Israel. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say Fuentes may have registered the best predictions out of anyone in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7th (feel free to keep me honest here if you think someone else was even more on the money).
Hindsight bias being what it is, the accuracy of Fuente's predictions may seem less impressive than they actually are. But I still remember the huge amount of uncertainty leading up to the Gaza campaign, including a high degree of uncertainty over the strength of Israel's retaliation against Gaza- whether they would show restraint or even put boots on the ground in the first place, and even if they put boots on the ground would it be a relatively short and mostly symbolic campaign. Certainly at the time "Israel is going to ethnically cleans Gaza, provoke escalations from Iranian militias, and widen the conflict to try to draw the US into war with Iran" was a prediction registered by not very many people.
Fuentes drew a huge amount of criticism for vocally opposing Trump's campaign due to his belief that Israel would draw Trump into war with Iran. A lot of that criticism comes from the "Bronze Age Pervert" sphere, and BAP is a sharp critic of Fuentes for Fuente's low-IQ obsession with da Joos. But we can contrast Fuente's sober-minded and accurate predictions with BAP's own incoherent analysis of the conflict he published last week, chalking it up to some old-man syndrome while remaining baffled as to why Israel is pursuing the strategy it has engaged in since the beginning of the conflict.
Nick Fuente's live-stream on Rumble in the aftermath of the US bombing campaign against Iran had something like 66,000 live viewers, with overall viewers on that VOD now around 530k, putting his viewership on par with Ben Shapiro despite the fact Fuentes is banned from YouTube so his content is relegated to a much less mainstream platform.
One of the most remarkable parts of the Ted Cruz / Tucker Carlson debate was that Ted Cruz:
- Said one of his primary motivations to become Senator was to be Israel's greatest defender.
- AIPAC is not a strong enough lobby.
- Said that his support for Israel is personally motivated by God's command in Genesis that those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.
And then, just a few minutes later, Ted Cruz accused Tucker Carlson of being "obsessed with Israel" for Carlson's pointed questions on AIPAC as a foreign lobby. The turnaround of why are you so obsessed coming from someone who just said God has commanded him to support Israel is just a discredited attempt to derail the conversation.
Fuente's obsession with Israel appeared to result in what is perhaps the most accurate prediction of the series of events following Oct. 7th among anyone else.
Yeah, zoomers are brainrotted with tiktok slop and think the genocidal jihadis are oppressed. It's not a mystery, it's just a grim reminder we should have banned tiktok ages ago.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
24d ago
Iran originally decided to pursue 60% enrichment after Israel attacked their nuclear sites in 2021. This attack happened 3 years after Trump ended an agreement to inspect Iranian nuclear sites, which was criticized by NATO, EU, France, the UK, etc, but was clearly requested by Trump’s Zionist funders. Iran’s radiopharmaceutical industry is genuine — they commercialize isotopes that only Germany has been able to produce. Iran needs to pursue its own cancer treatments because sanctions prevent access to state of the art treatments.
I hope Iran gets a nuke now. We can’t have religious extremist states have nukes — Israel is well on its way in becoming majority Haredi, whereas Iran is on a clear secularization path. A nuclear Iran would counter the power that Israel exerts in the region and may even prevent the genocide of Palestinians.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
20d ago
I want to talk about genetics. Scott Alexander has a new piece out about Missing Heritability, basically going through the issues with twin studies:
Twin studies suggested that IQ was about 60% genetic, and EA about 40%. This seemed to make sense at the time - how far someone gets in school depends partly on their intelligence, but partly on fuzzier social factors like class / culture / parenting. The first genome-wide studies and polygenic scores found enough genes to explain 2%pp1 of this 40% pie. The remaining 38%, which twin studies deemed genetic but where researchers couldn’t find the genes - became known as “the missing heritability” or “the heritability gap”.
Scientists came up with two hypothesis for the gap, which have been dueling ever since:
Maybe twin studies are wrong.
Maybe there are genes we haven’t found yet
He goes through a TON of research literature, basically describing how the entire scientific apparatus in genetics tried to figure out why twin studies couldn't be confirmed via actual genetics. To me, it sounds like an extremely robust way to prove that the twin studies were wrong. However, his ultimate conclusion appears to be:
So how heritable are complex traits, and why can’t different methods agree on this?
I think the twin / pedigree / adoption estimates are mostly right. They are strong designs, their assumptions are well-validated, and they all converge on similar results. They also pass sanity checks and common sense observation.
Although polygenic scores, GWAS, GREML, RDR, and Sib-Regression are also strong designs, they’re newer, have less agreement among themselves, and have more correlated error modes in their potential to miss rarer variants and interactions. Although it’s hard to figure out a story of exactly what’s going on with these rarer variants and interactions, there seems to be some evidence that they exist (again, see 1, 2, 3)15, and it seems easier to doubt this new and fuzzy area than the strong and simple conclusions from twin / pedigree / adoption work.
So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."
To me, this assertion is evidence of the glaring blindspot which materialist rationalists such as Alexander have - they assume that materialism / genetic determinism is right, and then reason backward in order to make their fundamental assumptions fit the data. While the genetic framework is clearly helpful and has had some limited success in new medical breakthroughs, it's beyond obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense that compared to the hype in the early 2000s, the new branches of genetic science have been a massive let down.
Overall I'm very curious where the life sciences will go. Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary as well as other books, makes some interesting comments in a recent post where he excerpts his own book:
As David Bohm commented in the 1960s, it is an odd fact that, just when physics was moving away from mechanism, biology and psychology were moving closer to it. ‘If the trend continues’, he wrote, ‘scientists will be regarding living and intelligent beings as mechanical, while they suppose that inanimate matter is too complex and subtle to fit into the limited categories of mechanism.’[9] He was not mistaken.
Nonetheless, in the first half of the twentieth century, many philosophically minded biologists, including such eminent British figures as John Scott Haldane and his better-known son, J.B.S. Haldane, as well as Conrad Hal Waddington, moved decisively, like the physicists, away from the machine model. Less renowned, largely by his own choice, but no less distinguished, was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the great Austrian biologist and polymath who originated general system theory. In 1933 he wrote: ‘we cannot speak of a machine “theory” of the organism, but at most of a machine fiction’.[10]
Despite this encouraging development, a more or less abrupt reversion to the seventeenth-century Cartesian model came over the life sciences with the rise of molecular biology, and its language of ‘programmes’, ‘codes’, and so forth, in the twentieth century’s second half. According to Carl Woese, writing in 2004, ‘biology today is little more than an engineering discipline’.[11] And Woese was no embittered outsider. His pioneering work revolutionised mainstream biology; he was one of the most influential and widely honoured microbiologists of all time, described by a colleague as having ‘done more for biology writ large than any biologist in history, including Darwin’.[12] But he was disturbed by what he saw.
We'll have to see if biologists are actually able to move beyond the mechanistic model and into a more complex, realistic view of life. The obvious CW implications here are how the scientific/materialist worldview and the religious worldviews continue to interact. Right now, the Left seems to be mostly materialist, whereas the right is (nominally) religious. If we can work to merge these two views, we may find more political unity or at least a new set of combinations for our political approaches.
The linchpin is Israel: a country with an undeclared nuclear weapons program in violation of international law, who some speculate killed our President in 1963 in order to secure nuclear weapons, who stole our own uranium to create their weapons, and a country that we provide aid to in violation of our own laws which prohibit us from providing aid to countries with undeclared nuclear programs in violation of the IAEA.
Israel’s illegal nuclear weapons and behavior in the region compels every sane country to pursue nuclear weapons, especially when they see what happened to Iran, a country which could have pursued but did not pursue nukes. Saudi Arabia apparently has some agreement with Pakistan to obtain nukes whenever requested, because they originally invested in its nuclear program. According to Russia yesterday, there are other countries interested in supplying Iran nukes, perhaps China, or perhaps this is a bluff.
Hadad
27d ago
Why doesn't Ted Cruz know the population of Iran?
Others have taken the meat of your post to respond to already, so I'm going to reply with a tangent: who cares?
What utility does knowing Iran's population matter? What relevance is the specific number of Iranians to any American interests? They're a far group whose only relevance is how much they might endanger our investments in the Middle East with their constant terrorism funding and sabber-rattling. There could be ten million, twenty, one hundred, it'd change no calculus.
The population of a minor nation across the sea is trivia. It's not important knowledge, and not knowing it shouldn't be taken as significant. It's like not knowing what Burkina Faso is the capital of.
Tree
3d ago
Trump on his assassination attempt:
"They briefed me and I'm satisfied with it," Trump said. "They should have had someone in the building, that was a mistake, they should have had communications with the local police—they weren't tied in—and they should have been tied in. So there were mistakes made. And that shouldn't have happened."
"But I was satisfied in terms of the bigger plot, the larger plot," he continued, "I have great confidence in these people. They're very talented and very capable—they had a bad day, I think they'll admit that." "This is a very dangerous job being president,"
Trump’s claims of stolen election have led to much recriminations that he is no mere crook or liar, but damaging to democracy. His supporters otoh, have ramped up the anti-elite conspiracy to include this assassination attempt, in order to show loyalty/outbid themselves, even here on the motte. This rejection by the principal actor/TV star sends a clear signal where the truth lies in this matter, whether you agree with Trump’s politics or not. Test is over, results are in, you can calibrate. If you bought the assassination conspiracy, consider that your brain may have been fried by the culture war.
The deportation LARPing events are stupid wastes of political capital meant to appease fools like Catturd that want to watch a few dozen immigrants be manhandled by armored goonsquads on Twitter and Fox News. This is the type of crap that made Dems freak out when they won the presidency and do defacto open borders via loophole. With the current bent now the public will have even more reasons to associate any enforcement of immigration laws with authoritarianism. It's just a dumb, unforced error by Republicans who are listening to their sectarian cheerleaders instead of trying to be strategic with their approach.
If MAGA actually wanted to deal with immigration, they'd first take the R trifecta and pass comprehensive immigration reform like the old Lankford bill, but an even tougher version. Close the loopholes and make it harder for Dem presidents to not enforce the law. Have more of their executive orders get shredded in the courts like DAPA did during Obama's tenure, and like a lot of Trump's EOs always do. This at least does something to prevent the problem from getting worse, and is the lowest rung on the totem pole in terms of political capital required.
Then, if Republicans want to remove the illegals already here, go after the employers that hire them. Break the incentive structure that acts as a magnet to illegal immigrants in the first place. This will cause economic pain and will take a lot more political capital, but is better than hurling immigrants out one-by-one. Note that I don't really think this is actually a good idea, at least for throwing out the entire illegal population as there are a lot of jobs Americans genuinely don't want to do for illegal-tier prices. I'd go after some of the legal immigrants instead, mainly the H1B scourge that's drenched in fraud and that's actually hurting the employment prospects of Americans for good jobs.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
12d ago
Does anyone have anything to say about the OBBB being passed
Nothing that wouldn't make me sound like a broken record: an unparalleled triumph of sycophancy, fiscal conservatism is a scam the barons use to con the peasants, dream of Argentinafication, etc...
I find it largely to defy discussion.
It definitely looks like trump is making a military force loyal to him personally because he doesn't trust the loyalty of the existing forces.
The Trump administration is run by people who are genuinely rabid xenophobes who view Hispanic day laborers as an existential threat, but I suspect this is in the back of their mind as well. Well, less of a military force per se and more of a political gendarmerie. You want someone you can count on to shoot protestors and whose fortune is tied to the regime.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
29d ago
So no I don't think that the other side of immigration is doing anything in good faith.
As evidence that your outgroup is acting in bad faith, you bring up legislation from 40 years ago. 2/3rds of those voters are probably dead, while the majority of voters today (myself included) weren't alive or were far too young to vote for your compromise. Your imagined voter who supported amnesty in the 80s knowing that we'd be in the situation we are today as part of some dastardly bad-faith plan to bring in more illegal immigrants is nonexistent.
"But Chris!" you say, scurrying back to your bailey, "I didn't mean voters today are acting in bad faith because of legislation from 40 years ago, I'm saying they push compromises in bad faith knowing that they're meaningless and we'll be back where we started 40 years from now! How could you not parse that from my two sentence effortpost that I worked on meticulously to avoid any ambiguity?"
To which I say, you aren't offering any evidence that these compromises are offered in bad faith, you're pretending to read the minds of your outgroup and ascribe the worst possible impulses to them. I believe that the majority of Americans support a middle path, flanked by people like the one I replied to and open borders folks. Biden, the media, and a majority of voters all knew the administration had a problem with immigration leading up to the election which is why they tried to craft a compromise to address it. You won't get a mea culpa, but it was pretty obvious throughout the summer that the status quo was unsustainable.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
18hr ago
young ghetto boy ... virulent invasive species that will leave the land barren.
Whelp that's enough of TheMotte for me today.
Anyway, my bigger concern in the US is actually having a healthcare crisis with my child and becoming destitute, especially since I've worked diligently to create a life of relative comfort compared to my very blue collar ancestors.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
5d ago
This part:
This is exactly why we have the rule,
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible.
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.
PokerPirate
8d ago
Flagged as consensus building.
What you call "optimal cultural leadership" is really just "how to make my outgroup not get in power". And your use of neutral language to cover this switch up is bad rhetoric.
A very large percentage of Americans still find the "social justice craze" to be a good thing, including many of the academics/religious leaders/politicians you are critiquing for not being anti-social justice craze from early on. It's fine for you to be anti-social justice craze. But you shouldn't be assuming that everyone else is or that it is the norm around here.
FWIW, I would be very interested in reading an ideologically neutral account of the failures of conservative leadership to account for the rise of wokism, and what lessons can be learned in order to better spread/suppress future ideologies.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
13d ago
Terrible ban. We get stuff posted here of a similar level of snarling, but pointed at the left, and it regularly doesn't catch these types of bans.
Which of his statements was actually even worthy of the ban here?
You do realize that by moderating @Chrisprattalpharaptr while defending @Hadad from push-back you are saying that want more posters like @Hadad (who by your own admission is going for heat over light) and fewer posters like @Chrisprattalpharaptr.
In short you are choosing to incentivise heat over light.
WhiningCoil
5d ago
Now, the biggest hurdle holding back the poor family in the story I've linked to is a simple one: the Overton Window. If, for some unfortunate reason, the number of women crazy enough to act that way rose significantly, society would probably develop memetic antibodies or legal solutions. This might, sometimes, become strong enough to overcome the "women are wonderful" effect, if such women are obviously being the opposite.
Ah ahahahahahah.
Hah.
Oh man, that's a good one. That's a really good one. You really aren't from around here. Our society's worship of women is downright pathological at this point. They can do almost anything and it's excused. I mean even in your own home away from home, there are plans to just get rid of Women's prison. Women are too good to spend time in jail for their crimes you see? In fact, their reasoning is that since more women are being sent to jail, something must be wrong with the legal system, since women are wonderful obviously. So we'd better start shutting down the women's jails so they can't be sent there.
Clementine
7d 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.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
13d ago
Maybe it's cruel, morally, but I fail to see the connection with patriotism at all.
To steal a turn of phrase from someone I spoke to several years ago who was probably quoting someone else without attribution, "the truest form of patriotism is a desire to see your countrymen prosper." A political program which constantly castigates your fellows as parasites, regards their welfare with indifference, incites hate against them, or treats them as means to an end is not, in this paradigm, at all patriotic.
As evidenced by the whole patriotism thing: a Republican is quite literally less likely to listen to you, because they will get the impression that you hate the country and hate their values.
I think this is backwards: American conservatives want to define patriotism as equivalent to conservativism. Patriots must be conservative; conservatives cannot be unpatriotic; liberals are unpatriotic by dint of their politics. This is fundamentally unworkable because it is a paradigm that demands ideological submission as price of entry.
... while right-wing posters get to regularly accuse people on this forum of being delusional, claim outgroup politicians are "foreign agents", claim that anyone who holds specific positions is "too dumb to vote", etc. without even getting warned most of the time.
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.
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