Corvos
1hr ago
TLDR: To an atheist, Christianity is quite literally 'unbelievable' and not being able to say so loudly and clearly (and repeatedly) is ridiculous.
As a former militant atheist, anything that prevents one from saying, "Fuck off with your stupid fairy-tales, and don't come back to debate unless you can find a basis for your way of life that isn't 'but sky-Daddy said so'" comes across as a Christian hugbox. It's somewhat equivalent to the reaction I have to being told by trans activists that a man can become a woman by wishing really hard and to be fair to Turok it is probably true that I would be reported for the Christian bit and not for the trans bit.
OTOH you are perfectly able to make the atheist argument here provided you aren't obnoxious about it, and indeed lots of people do if you actually try to assert the tenets of Christianity as literally true in a debate (we had one a while ago about 'what does it mean that God allows bad things to happen' where I earned a decent number of downvotes and pushback for giving what I see as the Christian answer. 'Christian culture has a pretty good track record even if we can't prove the religion is literally true' is a much easier sale and offends fewer people here.
The lawyer who was selected for hotness has a fool for a client.
Lawyers are like houses - if you judge by the usual criteria, you pay through the nose and get one no better than anyone else’s. So you need a find a criterion which is meaningful to you :P
The story is a bit doxxy. It was local politics, he was a Labour activist and leader of the militant wing of the committee who were in the middle of a hostile takeover. He did not have ‘I am a socialist’ tattooed on his forehead but he did have a desk full of books on Marx and biographies of 20th century socialists - I knew him and believe me he was socialist.
The consequence he wanted in this particular case was extensive public shaming. It worked too - lots of people were unhappy with the new direction but absolutely refused to say so in public.
Corvos
14hr ago
It does help when you follow up with, “and if they do, we’ll make them suffer”.
One of the more politically enlightening experiences I had was being on a committee with a socialist who argued strenuously against the secret ballot because “people need to know there are consequences for how they vote”.
With Russians and the ‘stans bringing up third place, interestingly enough.
Positions for non-Japanese are very strictly controlled and the Mongolians have got most of them (entirely through interest and merit AFAIK), and are killing it as you say.
To address the object point, I think one reason right-identarians tend not to go to Church very much isn’t hypocrisy so much as the lack of the invisible infrastructure that gets most Catholics into church. When you have no Christian friends (nearby), no muscle memory from long practice and you’re not integrated into the social scene, church is largely a chore.
Lots of us are intellectual/aesthetic converts hoping for faith to come some day, rather than suddenly being seized by faith on the road to Damascus, and that makes weekly Mass difficult.
I like the first half of Mass very much - the readings and the sermons are full of intellectual meat to get my teeth into - but the second half is the same litany and prayers every single time followed by fifteen minutes of shuffling people about for the sake of a ceremony I’m not actually allowed to participate in. In theory I register the weight of it, but in practice doing it every week is interminable.
Your reaction to the above may well be a justified ‘get thee hence, Satan!’ but just giving the less appreciated side of the story. And any advice would be appreciated, of course.
Corvos
15hr ago
Not really, as I said. I mean to but when Sunday rolls around somehow ‘get up and spend an hour and ten minutes sitting still and being quiet’ never quite gets onto the todo list.
I’m not disputing Monzer’s point, but I dislike people throwing around silly slurs of ‘libtard’ and ‘right-idiotarian’. It’s not an argument, it’s a boo-light, and although I am not a mod I believe it is against the rules and not what the Motte is for.
Corvos
18hr ago
Happy to be of service. Note that Teddy's original turn towards the strenuous life and deliberate weightlifting was prompted by his father though (at least as relayed in The Rise of Roosevelt by Edmund Morris, strong recommend). His father basically told him flat out that he had a brilliant mind, but that it would do him no good unless he built bodily strength to match, which Teddy assented to.
Corvos
19hr ago
I have enjoyed using Sublime Merge. I would say that
Having again lost a day's work to git deciding to delete files I hadn't committed yet (nor will I ever commit to the master)
sounds like the best solution would be using .gitignore more. We're all hypocrites but IMO all your files should be either committed to git, or ignored.
Corvos
22hr ago
The stereotypical right-idiotarian
I'll cop to being one of the people under discussion but this just seems like a boo-light to me. If you have actual specific arguments against right-identitarianism then make it by all means make them, but in the nicest possible way this seems like heat for the sake of it.
Meta, but I also just wanted to thank you for responding to criticism with a proper well-written top-level post. I'm dubious on a decent chunk of the actual argument but good-faith, constructive responses to disagreement are not so common.
Corvos
1d ago
At least 2, of which one cannot be 'I punish you harshly for not choosing the other'.
There is something to your broader point, but...
The most important choice you make in life is who you will choose to follow. Obedience is agency.
Choose is doing a lot of work there. In the anecdote you give:
The other boys who were playing with him chose the cowherd's son, as he was called, to be their king. He then proceeded to order them about some he set to build him houses, others he made his guards, one of them was to be the king's eye, another had the office of carrying his messages; all had some task or other. Among the boys there was one, the son of Artembares, a Mede of distinction, who refused to do what Cyrus had set him. Cyrus told the other boys to take him into custody, and when his orders were obeyed, he chastised him most severely with the whip.
Rather than abide by the rules that he and his peers had organized together, rather than live in the world conjured by their own collective will,
Did this boy choose Cyrus? Actively, willfully? Or did he 'choose' in the sense that I 'choose' to pay my taxes because something something Social Contract means that a big man will hit me with a stick if I don't? 'Collective will' so often imitates that Fuentes line: 'your body, my choice'. Cyrus was a tyrant who didn't give a single shit about your 'choices', and we can tell because when that boy does make an active, willfull choice, Cyrus has him beaten.
really were the main conduit for the trade in slaves out of the Christian world and into the Muslim one, etc)
Wait, really? I've never heard that one. Kind of awkward if so.
that the reason whites outperform blacks - average IQ differences - is most likely behind their own underperformance relative to Ashkenazis
I'm happy to bite that bullet, personally - the evidence is that Orientals and Ashkenazim have higher IQs than average gentile whites, and this explains much of their over-performance.
I do also suspect that there is quite a lot of conscious and unconscious discrimination going on - reading people like Scott and Zvi and the various Jewish columnists I read makes me realise that their Jewishness is sotto voce very very important to them, and my experience in real life backs that up. Humans tend to show ingroup bias unless there is lots and lots of explicit structure / ideology to prevent it, and given that Jewish people often tend also to be highly competent as you say, I wouldn't be surprised if non-Jews had to climb a higher bar to be meritorious in the eyes of Jewish bosses. I don't have any proof for that, of course, but that's why I don't like the taboo around Jewish over-representation. It prevents us from having conversations that we need to have.
TLDR: Ingroup preference can only get you so far if you don't have the raw merit to back it up, but I'd be surprised if some ingroup preference wasn't also in play.
Corvos
2d ago
I guess when the conservatives argue that the ECHR is too restrictive they hear 'we have too many human rights'. Also people including myself have been fairly open that they don't consider human rights to be a sensible construction, or native to the British unwritten constitution.
When Jeremy Corbyn (previous head of the UK Labour party and genuinely very antisemitic) was elected as head of the party, I was slightly taken aback to see literally 1/3 to 1/2 of my usual columnists writing articles starting with some variant of "As a Jew, I am horrified to see Jeremy Corbyn...". That's a literal 'literally'. In a country with <1% Jewish people. Later I discovered that it's the same in publishing, and also in finance.
There is also the famous 'white people rule the world' left-wing meme complaining how almost all top CEOs, media people, politicians etc. are white, and then the far-Right got hold of it and pointed out that almost all of those are Jewish and if anything gentile whites are underrepresented.
TLDR: The combination of 'huge Jewish over-representation at the top of most key areas' and 'you will be destroyed if you notice or discuss that over-representation' makes people distrustful. The fact that white people are hounded for far smaller discrepancies makes people resentful.
Corvos
3d ago
I didn’t have any trouble at all, though I did have to sign in with my passport. Only trouble was that my bank kept having a hissy fit and cutting me off. I always travel with some paper money just in case but I could have got into real trouble otherwise.
Corvos
3d ago
Certainly as I Brit I find it hard to see the EU as a guardian of national sovereignty.
Based on a very trans-heavy niche of science fiction I like (i.e. almost all protagonists are trans people written by trans):
More options
Context Copy link