Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6d ago
Well of course not, they strategically located their weapons depots under the hospitals universities.
What?
I learned from the best!
Who, me?
The vast majority of the modern left are identitarian, so not incorrect but also not a clarifying statement.
This is my point. What does it matter if Nara dresses his partisanship up in pretty language when the functional outcome is more or less the same?
If Rachel Maddow or whatever other blue partisan hack you want to choose went on MSNBC and said I don't hate Republicans, I just hate people who oppose immigration, would you be fooled into thinking she's some enlightened centrist operating on lofty principles?
Why not?
Because for the purposes of this conversation, the cause of the differences doesn't matter. If I don't utter that shibboleth everything inevitably devolves into a discussion about HBD.
If you want to own abolitionists, you have to own the eugenicists too. Is that really what you want?
In a single conversation, I've been told I need to take responsibility for:
- All the inner city slums and attendant race riots - 1910-1970 (built by progressives, progressives imported black people from the south)
- Right wing 'ethnonationalism' or whatever euphemism is deemed inoffensive by the users of this board - present day (it's the fault of progressives)
- 9/11 (progressives passed an immigration law in 1965 enabling hijackers)
- Antisemitism in America/running cover for Islamofascism - present day (Spoiler: it's progressives who are the real antisemites!)
- Eugenics movement in the US - 1920s?
Lol, alright. If you want me to take responsibility for a hundred year old eugenics movement, maybe try taking responsibility for the president you elected 20 years ago instead of frantically trying to recast him as a democrat. How's that for a non-sequitur?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7d ago
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7d ago
It started 30 years before that
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7d ago
No actually it was racist white southerners lynching them and denying them economic opportunity that drove millions of them north
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
7d ago
My point was that magicalkittycat was engaged with a mixture of whataboutism
How can he engage in whataboutism when he is the one initiating the conversation...?
Chinese Robber fallacy
So your argument is that antisemitism is vanishingly rare on the right, and common on the left?
Insofar as 'running cover' implies the news media has some secret agenda to promote antisemitism, no, I don't think it's true. Insofar as they're sequentially denying, deflecting blame, minimizing and whatabouting, yes, they're running cover for antisemitism.
Again, you're deflecting and refusing to engage with the object level by reverting to criticizing the way the 'news media' (a, how did you put it? Unmitigated bullshit line? if I've ever heard one. As if the news sources consumed by your average MAGA footsoldier has any overlap in coverage whatsoever with the NYT) covers what you see as leftist antisemitism. You're minimizing the existence of antisemitism on the right (Chinese robber fallacy), and in the rare cases where those Chinese robbers get caught, they were pushed into it by the lefists!
Right, and the circlular firing squad for this argument is the one where I point out that you're playing the role of the leftist who simultaneously speaks as the arbiter and adherent of objectivity and truth while downplaying the possibility (or at least likelihood) of objectivity and truth.
I'm not downplaying it - reaching some Platonic ideal of objectivity is impossible. Thinking otherwise is foolish. Discarding the pursuit of objectivity is equally foolish.
I'm not the arbiter of objectivity and truth, and neither are you. But the data don't lie. I'm fairly confident I could go through your post history, tally up the posts that are right-wing coded, tally up those that are left-wing coded, and I imagine a statistically significant pattern would emerge. But, 1) I assume I'd run afoul of some kind of harassment wildcard rule and get banned and 2) there would be a hundred reasons you could give to preserve your self-image.
And yet exactly one of us in this discussion has frankly admitted the existence of, and offered criticism against, both right-wing and left-wing antisemitism and racism, and it isn't you.
This is just blatantly false, but I suppose if Trump taught us anything, there's a lot of value in making truthless accusations without any supporting evidence. If nothing else, it puts the other person on the defensive and makes them respond. So, this is the closest you come to criticizing right-wing antisemitism:
That said, just speaking from personal experience, in my social feeds earlier today I read some surprisingly outright racist remarks in response to Ketanji Brown Jackson's ill-advised suggestion that being a racial minority be considered a kind of disability. As an anti-identitarian liberal this concerns me greatly, but I do think it is (as others have suggested) directly downstream of leftists spending decades crying wolf.
Which is hilarious that in your mind you consider this some even-handed criticism of right-wing antisemitism. Throw in some tiki-torch cosplaying and you've got some quality partisan hackery going on here!
Insofar as you're accusing me of not admitting to left-wing antisemitism, I did break it down into multiple components, but if you'd like me to be pithy and explicit: Yes, I agree that it exists. I think it's fundamentally different and less dangerous than right-wing antisemitism in the ways I described and with which you completely failed to engage with.
Why is it that forums with actual free speech so often begin leaning to the right--almost as though leftism can't stand on its own two feet?
Well, thankfully this space offers a valuable refutation of your point. We've been here for nearly a decade now and there is still an equal balance of left and right-leaning views, right?
And I think a lot of Leftists are not identitarians, though sometimes they have to be reminded of that.
You'd be surprised, although again your desire to label someone as an (anti-)identitarian will elide a lot of heterogeneity in political views.
The main difference between left-wing identitarians and right-wing identitarians so far is that left-wing identitarians mostly control their political coalition (the Democratic Party) while right-wing identitarians remain at the fringes--albeit, less at the fringes than they were before the Great Awokening.
Indeed, that is why AOC and her crew ran the table with the old guard and toppled Nancy as speaker of the house. But sure, while I think 'mostly control' is another unmitigated bullshit line, before we get another 'exactly one of us has frankly admitted the existence of both right and left wing identitarianism and it isn't ChrisPratt!' moment, I acknowledge the existence of what you're alluding to and won't debate it in order to avoid an entirely new conversation.
But, the fact that you think Trump and MAGA are not identitarian just lays bare the gaping blind spot in your entire self-conception. And may be one of the funnier things I've read today. I know, I know! Circular firing squad. I guess I'd better let that one slide so we can break this cycle of violence.
With specific reference to antisemitism, the antisemites on the Right are reactionaries who fetishize a failed effort to implement national socialism in a country they often know nothing about.
No; there are plenty who dislike black people, who argue that some Jewish elite controls [X] institution, that immigration is a Jewish plot to dumb down the gentiles, and whom never bother invoking the Painter or tattooing swastikas on their foreheads. But you'd rather focus on the latter to fit your Chinese Robber narrative.
The antisemites on the Left, by contrast, are the vanguard of Islamofacism, a movement with at least tens of millions of supporters around the globe, who are prosecuting a centuries-long grudge against the ideological descendants of Judaism and Christianity.
Muslims make up 1.1% of America, and antisemites make up some much smaller fraction of that. Are you genuinely misguided enough to think that these people are the 'vanguard' of islamofascism in America? What do you think follows the vanguard, an invasion force of Taliban led by the spirit of Mehmed the conqueror to purge America of the Jews? What western nation has ever been so influenced by 'Islamofascism' that it started pogromming Jews?
White nationalists and Christians, on the other hand...
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10d ago
They are fools running cover for the most relevant group of anti-Semites in the modern world (a large subgroup of Muslims, fronted by the Palestinians).
Or they genuinely believed the lies about 'Never Again' that they were sold by their leaders.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10d ago
Harvard, Columbia, and many other universities are still fighting court cases about their abject failures to make that distinction, aren't they?
Maybe you're right, I'm not particularly familiar with the details of the court cases or what specifically happened during the protests.
That said, I'm also not impressed by the mere fact that Trump decided to sue a bunch of Blue Tribe institutions.
And the people most likely to preach that white people are the scum of the earth are progressive white women and pick-me progressive white men. Projected self-hatred is not exactly an uncommon psychological ailment.
It's a bit condescending to suggest that Jews protesting Israel killing thousands of Gazan civilians must be doing it out of some psychological ailment. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone here defending American Adventurism in the 21st century (to the point of obsessively redefining George W. as a democrat, and Trump as the first true Republican in forty years), yet I imagine this is a rational argument rather than a bunch of self-hating Americans?
Still waiting to an answer on this one first.
Then you can keep complaining about woke, Magicalkitty can keep complaining about nazis, and I can write 10,000 words to gesture at the ascendant [redacted] in the west.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10d ago
But you guys are are nazis! Look at all these things we never fucking talk about because we're too busy calling Trump or Stephen Miller a nazi! What else are we supposed to do except bring up shit that I don't think is Nazism and use it to tar you as nazis?". I don't know, talk about the shit you think is actually Nazism?
No, I'm serious - I don't want to call you a nazi, nor have I called anyone a nazi. What word would you like me to use to describe someone who believes that politicians are importing brown people to replace the white race, and all the attendant beliefs that normally swirl around that one? A Great Replacement Theorist? What word would you like me to describe someone who thinks that Trump should have power to do X, Y and Z regardless of their legality without resorting to what you see as slurs?
We have been telling you that this would happen from the very beginning.
No, progressives have been telling you this would happen since you brought the first slave ships over in the 17th century! Why would you do such a thing, Fruck?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10d ago
I honestly can't tell whether you're being ironic or just aggressively misunderstanding my point.
I am neither being ironic, nor am I aggressively misunderstanding you. Thankfully options exist outside your false dichotomy!
Less charitably, I did find this line to be unmitigated bullshit:
Thank you for your honesty. Now, moderator, ban thyself.
I am not running cover for antisemitism on the right, and nothing I wrote can be reasonably construed that way.
Your post was a mix of whataboutism, if it's true that there are nazis on the right it's not their (red tribe) fault, and oh, while I hate nazis they'll treat me better than the woke police. Insofar as 'running cover' implies you have some secret agenda to promote Nazi material, no, I don't think it's true. Insofar as you're sequentially denying, deflecting blame, minimizing (lol Tiki Torch cosplayers) and whatabouting - yes, you're running cover for them.
Hell, I am occasionally accused, here, as a moderator, of running cover for the Jews!
In reality, you are a flawlessly objective crystal passing judgment from on high. You have principles that you live your life by, and you chide the left and the right equally, god damnit! Anything less would be to descend into partisan hackery.
And Nara, I am (whatever people may think) fundamentally of this place. I believe that we should strive towards objectivity, that it exists, I deeply believe in mistake theory and progress and that things are getting better and discussion is good. I reject the people on the left who claim that everything is political, nobody is objective and it's all just white supremacist/patriarchal/isms all the way down and doubly so if you're a white man.
But dude, I have to actually invoke that progressive argument here, much as it pains me. You fit the trope of the partisan pretending to be objective and principled to a T to avoid confronting the fact that you are, in fact, also waging the culture war most of the time.
because everyone is so distracted by the tiki torch cosplayers they fail to notice (or outright excuse) blatant antisemitism from the left and its political allies.
Tiki torch cosplayers vs. blatant antisemitism. I am impressed by your objective framing of the political situation!
My beef is with identitarians.
Your beef is with the vast majority of the modern left. Seriously, replace identitarian with vast majority of the modern left - is your statement significantly different?
I don't like it. I don't agree with it. I think that nothing good will ever come of identitarianism, no matter how righteous-minded its practitioners. I don't think any of it is good. But neither do I think it reasonable to apportion blame equally to both sides; this is a mess of progressivism's making.
Nara, go to West Philly. Go to Baltimore. Go to Chicago. Much as I love your race-blind ideals, much as they resonate with me, the modern incarnation of progressivism and identitarianism didn't build the slums and the poverty and the suffering. Cancel culture wasn't a thing during the Rodney King riots. You can't be naive enough to ask an entire nation not to Notice that people of one skin color are overwhelmingly worse off, and it doesn't even matter what the cause is. People take that information in the direction they prefer.
Discussing the culture wars is not the same as waging them. Yes, I acknowledge that people do wage them, to various degrees. But we do try to discourage that.
The problem is that people like waging the culture war. I commend you and the moderation team, because the failing lies with the users. You can't mod yourself a better forum population.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10d ago
it's difficult to not see this entire post as an artful, nut-picking troll.
The only remarkable thing about this post is the political valency; what is this place if not nut-picking to wage the culture war?
left wing antisemitism, or perhaps more specifically Islamist antisemitism from left wing political parties, is so frequent that people scarcely bother to report on it (or, perhaps, they actively suppress it because it hurts Democrat narratives).
Broad swathes of 'antisemitism' on the left can differentiate between opposing Jews and opposing Israel. You and others running cover for antisemitism on the right ignore the significant presence of slogans and groups like 'Jews for Palestine' at all the rallies on college campuses. The largest protests against the Israeli war in Gaza in my region were led by Jewish men in kippahs with megaphones blocking traffic.
Hardcore fundamentalist Islamists who truly hate Jews and want to 'do a genocide' in the local parlance (usually by people who want to murder Palestinians) are broadly orthogonal to left and right. Were the 9/11 hijackers leftists?
And, yes, apparently there was a nutjob who shot up an embassy and presumably wanted to kill Jews. Who was just complaining about nutpicking, again?
Antisemitism on the right rarely bothers to make the Israel/Jew distinction, particularly when it arrives at it's antisemitism via the protocols of the elders of Zion and the Great Replacement Theory and Holocaust denialism. They view all Jews, everywhere, as the problem, nowhere more so than the US government/wall street/other institutions and blame them for immigration and a supposed genocide against white people in the west. Contrasted with 'leftist antisemitism,' how many Jews do you think subscribe to this ideology?
One of these flavors of antisemitism, were it to gain power, would likely cut foreign aid to Israel and boost aid to Palestine. The other would likely pogrom the US government and elites, or worse.
but I do think it is (as others have suggested) directly downstream of leftists spending decades crying wolf. If you spend enough time and energy insisting that your political opponents are Nazis, at some point your political opponents are going to decide that they might as well break out the jackboots, then.
See, when this is done by people you dislike you break out the Narcissist's prayer:
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
How many times have I seen this pasted here when it comes to the gays? trans people? Communism? Cancel culture? At first they said nobody was crazy enough to change genders! Then they said it's happening, but it's good actually! Now the HR lady is crushing my balls while I have to swear fealty to the rainbow flag!
Well, fuck man, if you were calling us gay trannies who cancel people for wrongthink for the last twenty years, I guess we might as well all be gay trannies who cancel you for wrongthink, amirite? Why would you spend so much time and energy insisting cancel culture was a thing? Guess I may as well cancel you now, and also it's your fault.
No, Trump is not a nazi. Nor is JD Vance or Stephen Miller, or probably anyone in the administration. I'm skeptical that any of the incidents OP posted are suggestive that the Fourth Reich is some fifth column in the Republican party. But at the same time, there's been a groundswell of interest and support and tolerance of ideas like Great Replacement Theory and authoritarianism in the Red Tribe mainstream that's been slowly gaining steam for the last decade. And, while I know everything wrong with the Red Tribe is actually the Blue Tribe's fault, what word would you like us to use to describe that? Not nazism, not racism, not fascism, so...what?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
28d ago
A lot of people are clearly downvoting the idea rather than the argument; I've been perhaps too quick to assign you to this general category.
I don't vote on any posts.
Your questions scanned to me as a fairly impressively-polite phrasing of 'are you full of shit' (sincere appreciation there; it's an art) and to be blunt I just didn't experience any desire to satisfy you about that.
The mods generally take a dim view of your phrasing.
What I'm talking about is kind of a broader sense of mutation load. Like, abstract it up a level or three; I'm not sure how many. It's a general concept, and principle, and with yesterday's post I bet you can see where I'm suggesting the pieces might be tied together.
Abstracting it out from something concretely genetic to general 'fitness' implies that you know some (at least for some local maxima) 'wild-type,' which I'm very skeptical of. Both of it's existence, and your ability to understand it in a meaningful way.
More broadly, particularly without references I can follow (feel free to recommend a paper or book), your posts are mostly a series of just-so stories. I could easily write a just-so story how the optimal social structure is a group of genetically superior Alphas ruling over inferior betas-epsilons social strata rather than whatever you propose. Or how Chinese are mathematically gifted but fail to be creative from centuries of curating rice paddies rather than swashbuckling adventures on the high seas (but you beat me to it this week).
And you chronically ignore huge environmental influences on most of the traits you discuss, the inverse error of blank slatists who ignore genetic effects. Any complex trait you study will have significant gene-environment interactions, and the things you want to discuss are almost certainly several levels of abstraction away from genetics. Your core assumption that people with different genetics will necessarily experience the world differently is unsupported, so far as I can tell - the last time I raised it, you didn't convince me. If you want to convince me - write fewer words and less syllogism, and provide more hard data. Every post is rife with all of these issues, and I don't have time to comb through 20,000 words a week to write a reply.
So looking at it that way, I think the divergence comes in line three: "Good times make weak men." Yes, but also no! Good times make new men who are better in some ways and worse in others. Then comes the winnowing. See?
No, I don't see. What is your evidence for this?
Venetians grew obscenely rich relative to their Italian neighbors as a trade hub with the orient, plenty of peoples lived in harsh environments (polar regions, deserts in Australia and Africa, Tibet) without genetically selecting themselves into Fremen ubermensch, indigenous nations given guns conquered others without, many of the strictest selection pressures of the last millennium have been infectious diseases rather than anything you care about. You'll necessarily add epicycles to your argument (Australian aborigines never conquered the globe because you need a harsh environment but not too harsh?), but it doesn't matter, because it's all just made up and I can just as easily make up convincing sounding things as you.
I believe your data in the lab studying butterfly psychology or whatever, but the problem is in the application to human history/genetics/sociology. Even were you an expert in all of those fields, which I don't think that you are, our knowledge is significantly more limited than the absolutely deterministic fable you're telling.
Thank you for the rigour. Please keep it up if you don't mind, even considering that I've been a less-than-stellar host to you thus far.
Are you Russian? I get the same feeling talking to Ilforte/Dase. The Russian genotype and way of experiencing the world seems to favor verbose and beautifully written arguments, and disfavor concision and data. Give me more data, and I'll probably participate more.
For example: I've always wondered what would happen if you could run a Lord of the Flies experiment with 2-3 year olds. How long until they redevelop language? Tools? I presume you think we're genetically superior to the people of antiquity, so would it be significantly faster than the millennia it actually took us? Would they form similar social structures to their parents (per your example of 'Tropicals' giving any surplus to their extended family), or would it be stochastic/determined by their environment and numbers?
For what it's worth - if we could run the experiment above, I don't think it would come out anything like you'd expect. Are you aware of any natural experiments along these lines?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
You're sanewashing what he's saying into 'multiple perspectives are good.' He's free to teach his children whatever he wants, but I'm going to mock him for having the arrogance to think that he's teaching them Actual History.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
In the meantime may I ask your favour that, if you manage to connect some dots about me, you confine your guesses to DM?
I'm not going to guess; in your field I've probably only heard of the Siberian silver fox experiment, the NIMH rat utopia experiments, and...Jane Goodall?
The general problem with mutation load in small populations is very well and very widely understood, such that I'll be a bit surprised (but happy to help) if you'd just like to know more about it. But that's not the impression I'm getting. What would you like from me, specifically?
I'd rather just hear what you know, but fine. You're pushing a model whereby:
- Bad times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, etc. Isn't this your overarching thesis? You have a large number of relatively common variants in your population floating around, and as soon as you relax purifying selection on the weak alleles, your model organism/people are suddenly 50-65% less 'whatever' even in the F1 generation. I'm not a population geneticist, but I don't see how that can be possible? You're telling me that if you relax all selection and let everyone breed (and you're also telling me that all your captured animals have this trait!) a single generation is enough to wreck what you're looking at?
This is like saying you can take a population of people in the 90th percentile for height, remove any kind of selection such that they all breed, and your F1 generation averages the 60th percentile. Regression to the mean is a thing, but I don't believe it can happen that quickly.
Calhoun's mouse utopia bred like gangbusters from 8 mice to 2200 without any kind of purifying selection. Shouldn't they have crashed in a generation or two?
-
Whatever behavior you're looking at (you're an animal psychologist, right?) has a significant environmental component, and living in captivity is deleterious. Plenty of animals fail to breed or exhibit other behaviors in captivity and this has nothing to do with 'catastrophic mutational load.'
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Consanguinity/founder effects - I assume you're trapping these in a smallish area, and your starting population might be significantly related? It seems unlikely to be able to account for the early effects, maybe some of the future generations.
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'Catastrophic mutational load.' The generational mutation rate is the same whether they're breeding in captivity or in the wild. In this context, you're almost certainly speaking about genetic variants rather than mutations which (at least in human genetics) have a stricter definition. It doesn't make much sense to say they have a 'catastrophic mutational load.' How do you define a wild type and a mutant when an allele is 70:30 in one area of the world, 30:70 in another, and there's no clear indication that it even has any kind of functional effect?
How do you think it works, genetically speaking? Concisely.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
It's actually pretty difficult to keep a captive population from sliding into catastrophic mutation load.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by 'sliding into catastrophic mutation load?' What, specifically, do you think is going on (genetically speaking) when you run this experiment?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I read 99.5% of the comments that get posted to the motte using the firehose view,
Wild. I never imagined anyone would use that feature to read 2,000 comments a week.
I get the feeling you enjoy our exchanges less than I do
You're a good guy. So is Whiningcoil; I imagine we could easily meet at a party and have a few drinks without incident. But two things drive me crazy, insofar as I let anything on the internet drive me crazy: blackpills and political violence.
Even setting that aside, you're like the friend who's a huge sports fan and is either constantly bitching when his team is in the dumpster or gloating and rubbing it in your face when he's winning the division title. Your specific ideology (and I don't mean Red Tribe ideology here) means that you're either constantly winning or losing an existential struggle, with all the attendant emotions.
Life's a lot easier when you can just kick back and watch the game with a few beers.
Blue Tribe dominance is now collapsing
I've already expressed my skepticism on this point.
we are sufficiently closer to base reality that we need propaganda a lot less, and our lack of the Progress narrative means we have less need to rule people and can ask less from those we do need to rule.
On the contrary, your lack of a progress narrative makes your message ultimately soulless. People don't want to believe that it's iphones and laissez-faire capitalism and poverty until the heat death of the universe. And they certainly don't want a retvrn to housewives and the cultural norms of the early 20th century let alone whatever era twitter has decided is best this week. If anything, malaise is from a lack of progress relative to the norms of the last century, and it's clear your movement doesn't have a widely palatable solution to that problem beyond grievance politics.
Guns, taxes and global weather patterns don't hinge on peoples' mentality, and so are less amenable to the core Social Justice strategies. Even trans impinges far more on the physical world, and it is these impingements that have resulted in resistance and, seemingly, downfall.
What? The bad guys, narratively speaking, are white nationalists/white suburban teen boy school shooters, and wealthy old white men oppressing the lower classes for the latter two. The Social Justice narratives write themselves.
I question whether you won hearts and minds, or generated a preference cascade through a massive social pressure campaign backed by threat of legal force.
Did abolition occur through social pressure campaigns, legal and actual military force? Desegregation? Pick any social change in history - the rise of Christianity, American independence, whatever you like - which of these were legitimate? And what criteria did you use to decide?
But the people who such a campaign can't flip don't cease to exist, and their arguments were never defeated, only suppressed. Lincoln had it that you destroy your enemy when you make him into your friend, and that's not a victory the LGBT movement ever achieved.
It seems ironic that you would accuse the gays of strongarming you into accepting their movement, then quote someone who literally waged a war to force acceptance of his.
Regardless, large numbers of people opposed to the gays were converted. There are plenty of gay conservatives, and they don't seem to suffer any major consequences for it. After abolition, slaveowners didn't disappear, and yet we've still arrived at a future where genuine supporters of slavery are vanishingly rare. Give it a couple generations.
My kids are going to get a few samples of the narrative I got, and then learn the actual history
They are fortunate, indeed, to learn Actual History.
I think shoving Christianity into the closet was bad for society in strictly material terms, because it unleashed much harm that Christianity might have helped to mitigate or restrain.
It's funny that you should frame it that way, when I raised in a much more secular area and the stereotype is that Americans are obnoxiously in-your-face Guns & God religious. And there is some of that, to a degree you likely don't notice and can't comprehend because you've been swimming in these waters from birth.
I note that many people on all sides express considerable nostalgia for the 90s, and even the 2000s; the point where we lost and were cast out is also pretty close to the point where things started taking a very serious turn for the bad, and not by my assessment alone.
They're also the years where we had just won the cold war, were the sole hyperpower in the world, ran a budget surplus with bonkers economic/technological growth and it also just happens to be the time of our childhood/adolescence. It's bread and circuses with a side of martial victory, not normies longing to spend two hours of their Sunday doing bible study.
This time, I'll ask: do you genuinely think my prediction was wrong, and that we are in fact moving away from large-scale violence? Do you genuinely believe the Culture War is winding down?
Yes, and no. I agreed with whichever post you wrote in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk shooting that this event certainly moves us towards the brink and I denounce it. But no, I do not think we are close in any meaningful way.
The culture war, defined as people self-assorting into tribal groups and flinging shit (verbal and otherwise) at each other is eternal. To dream otherwise is to dream of Progress and Trying Something Different, but I'm not holding my breath. I do think the temperature is lower than the early 2020s when I would literally routinely watch proud boys and antifa beat each other with sticks in the streets. Do you genuinely think that tensions today are as high as they were in 2020 and 2021? Or 2016? Or what I imagine the 70s were like?
Whether we're in a trough, a peak or just about to keep chugging along for a while - I don't know.
If we can restore something like accountability to power, and if we can generate common knowledge of where we are and how we got here, it seems to me that many of our problems are solvable.
I wish you luck. But I'm pretty sure 'restore accountability to power' means 'my political opponents don't have power anymore' and 'generate common knowledge' means 'teach Actual History to other people's kids.' Not to mention people have been mouthing 'restore accountability to power' since at least the 2000s on reddit, if not the ancient Greeks.
Christianity is regaining a great deal of the cultural respect it lost over the last generation. It's regaining this respect not by playing "political hardball", but by having its predictions validated by subsequent events, and by maintaining its principles in contrast to the example of its opposition.
It might amuse you to hear that I've considered going to church recently, largely to try and surround my family with a functional social circle. It's a tough trade-off when I have such limited time to teach my children already.
That said, you're living in a bubble, my man. But then again, I suppose I am too.
A wager then - weekly church attendance isn't going to significantly increase in the next couple years (say, an increase of 20% or more - so if 30% of Americans attend church weekly, a boost of 6%). Me, living in a large blue city, will be 100% unaffected by political violence in the next year. By this, I mean I will not witness any shootings/melee/violence between two large gangs of Red/Blue tribers/insert your definition here, nor will anyone I know. There will be some nonzero number of school shootings/political assassinations/assaults on ICE at maybe a rate of 1 every 1-3 months? Were real money on the line, I'd dig up the actual numbers to get a background level over the last decade but I can't imagine it's much more frequent than that.
Feel free to make your own wagers.
When truth is truly on your side, no political hardball is necessary, only contrasting outcomes and the ability for people to choose freely.
lol. This is funny on so many levels, but maybe in the interests of brevity: we'll see whether people freely choose conservativism and Christianity and the Hallmark channel or whether they want to smoke weed, watch netflix and have premarital sex. And I say that while holding a dim view of at least smoking weed and watching television! Your idea of freely choosing is fiercely teaching your children 'Actual History' because you're terrified they'll internalize values and ideology from mainstream culture instead.
I'm not even making a value judgment one way or the other, but to say that the people will freely choose your way is both breathtakingly hubristic and seemingly ignorant of the last century of history.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
I'm confused by the timing. 2015-2020 saw the Pittsburgh synagogue, Charleston church and El Paso walmart shootings despite conservatives being in power and the anti-Trump/nazi rhetoric being significantly more unhinged than it is today. 2020-2024, all I remember is the Tennessee trans school shooter despite the rhetoric against Fauci and plenty of other government officials being absolutely bonkers in right wing spaces (traitors, nooses, trials, you know the drill). 2025 has seen what, a half-dozen left wing events all at once? It doesn't seem to track with who's in power or how violent the rhetoric is.
I'd guess that during Trump I radicals of both stripes thought the majority of the country was on their side, whereas this time around, it certainly feels like the left is losing the normies. Shooting Kirk or ICE agents is retarded on both fronts, you're going to further alienate the normies and obviously not going to stop deportations.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Are you beetlejuice? Or do you, gattsuru and germ have some kind of discord group? I don't see how else you could find a 6 day old comment in a two week old thread, short of trolling my comment history or someone else doing so and reporting everything I write.
And as @gattsuru often notes, it worked. You won. Those you did not persuade, you shamed and abused and harassed into silence. "Protected Class" law formalized this for employment, the media and the Academy handled it everywhere else. As several Blue Commenters have straightforwardly stated it over the years, we lost, so it's our turn in the closet for a couple decades.
It's foolish to ignore the actual issue being discussed and chalk it all up to what you view as a propaganda apparatus, both because you're ignoring a half dozen other issues (gun control? trans people? climate change? Taxation and social welfare?) that failed to achieve anywhere near the same level of unity and because you're going to fail when you try to spin up your own propaganda apparatus.
How fortunate that this sort of political hardball had zero negative consequences of any kind.
...political hardball? Winning the hearts and minds of a significant majority of the population is not political hardball. You're so blinded by your obsession with realpolitik, so deeply steeped in the culture war and obsessed with small-minded zero sum games that you can't see anything beyond conflict and winning or losing. You can't even reflect on whether the change was a net benefit to the country, you're just bitter that 'your side lost.'
Is a more perfect union simply one where your side wins, and blue tribe is eradicated? And what comes after that? You'd just fracture into normiecons and groypers, neolibs and church fundamentalists and repeat the cycle. Your path is just one of endless conflict.
Tell me, then, your model of ethically influencing the electorate without playing 'political hardball.' Or are you so far gone as to think it's impossible?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Sure.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
If this is how culture war is defined, it's too broad to be a useful phrase. By this standard how would you have separated civil rights from culture war? Or would you consider them together?
Probably parts of it were, given that it happened many years before I was alive and history is not my forte. Undoubtedly FC could give you a detailed list of anti-segregationist terrorists who went on to have illustrious careers at Harvard.
Gay marriage may be a better example. Writ large, I'd consider that an example of Mostly Peaceful and Well Intentioned propaganda and PR campaigns which successfully won supermajority support among the American people. And even among those who don't support gay marriage, probably a significant portion have no problem with gay people and just hold some views about the church and sanctity of marriage and whatnot.
But it was largely a campaign won by sympathetic figures you knew in your community, not shitposting on twitter about the hordes of illegal immigrants coming to take your jobs and rape your families. It wasn't won by darkly hinting about how many guns you have, or congressional shenanigans or gerrymandering.
Undoubtedly there are those who'd claim that the left's takeover of Hollywood, the media and institutions etc. are just culture war by a different name. Realpolitik applied to culture war. But realpolitik invariably seems to be an excuse for defection.
He was self-consciously a DEI pick because Harris or somebody advising her apparently thought she needed another generic old white guy for racist reasons, and they played it up too much.
Were those racist reasons them thinking that rustbelt/Pennsylvania/Georgian white working class Americans (aka where the election was won) were less likely to vote for a black/black or woman/woman ticket than woman/white man ticket? Because...yeah? Probably true? I'm sure they're not opposed to voting for either black or female candidates (Obama clearly won handily), but on the margin, I would 100% go with Walz or Shapiro or Newsom over Stacey Adams. Are you arguing that there were better-qualified non-white/non-cishet-male candidates that were passed over because Walz is white?
Either experts have consequences when they're wrong, or you're asking that the lowly public trust them, forever, no matter what, that trust can never be harmed by failures. That is not a reasonable request.
I can guarantee you that physicians in the 50s and 60s (your golden age!) believed much dumber things than they do now, and they nevertheless enjoyed much higher levels of trust. Thalidomide? Doctors selling out for smoking companies? Tuskegee syphilis experiments? Refrigerator mothers and autism, electroshock therapy, lobotomies? What, exactly, were the consequences for the profession for all that shit, and why was the public too stupid to know better? And I can guarantee you that whatever era of history people want to RETVRN to, the 'experts' believed even dumber shit than they do now.
Your argument should be that nobody ever should have trusted experts.
All our conversations and you think I'm on the EA side? It has been too long since we've chatted, hoss.
Don't overindex on the beliefs of the candidate, the point is that you're weird relative to the population norm. If you genuinely liked a politician that much, they're almost certainly unpalatable to the general population. I can't imagine you hold the combination of positions most electable in any given campaign year.
I remember once upon a time we had happier conversations. Can we get back to those? If you've got the time and interest, I've got two questions I've wondered your input on.
I've been here for 7 years, give or take. I'd estimate I've read >95% of the top-level posts in that time, although I rarely participate. Somewhere along the line I lost interest in people bashing Fauci and other causes I care about while nodding sympathetically, patting them on the back and censoring myself.
One, how can scientific institutions regain the public trust? Do you think there's anything they could do to meaningfully communicate some degree of awareness?
With the caveat as always that I don't really know what I'm talking about; they can't. They haven't lost the public trust, they've lost the trust of Republicans. Pandering to one would piss off the other. Probably best case scenario is that they fade into the background over the next 5-10 years and win bipartisan support in the senate (which is still holding, by the way).
In the meantime, people can stop vaccinating their kids and take supplements instead of chemo I guess. They're free to make their own choices.
Do you think the left (defined very loosely to include even sane liberals; the phrase used as a matter of convenience rather than strict party lines) will ever change regarding their at-best indifference and sometimes encouragement of anti-white racism, or is that just permanently baked in and people are supposed to take it on the chin?
I'm pretty far removed from anyone deep down those rabbit holes, but the chasm between the way you see things and the way they do is...significant.
I'm far from the first person to say this, but the left and, to a large extent, normies, support the underdog. So long as blacks and other minorities are the underdogs, there's going to be an urge to perpetrate what you call anti-white racism. I feel like this has been shifting for men vs. women given the way women outperform men in school and outnumber them in university. I wonder if the dam would have broken already were it not that 1) women still make less than men on average (debate the data/methodology of that all you will, it's a nice figure to quote to normies) and 2) women are much better organized and understand the game significantly better than most men.
I also think it's why I believe 2015-2020 were so damaging to the right (all the shootings and gun rhetoric and threats) and why the last few months have been so damaging to the left. If the right can position themselves as victims of leftist violence rather than threatening paramilitary men with all the guns, the mainstream will bail on the left pretty quickly. People don't like assassinations and domestic terrorism.
But what do I know, I've been largely wrong about every prediction I've made in my tenure here.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
How did you manage to exclude the pittsburgh synagogue shooter, the el paso walmart shooter, and the Charleston church shooting?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Why not just let them come back? There's another person active in the thread today who's so blatantly a banned user that I'm shocked nobody else has said anything, but they haven't been banned yet. I remember an unofficial policy that if someone came back under a new pseudonym and changed their behavior sufficiently to plausibly avoid detection, that was a win too?
Not to mention if most people don't realize it's hlynka he can shed all the baggage of people who hated him for his mod decisions.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Possibly. I had thought there was more space between Floyd and the 2020 election.
I'm not expecting people to be specifically fired up about Charlie Kirk in 2026, but by the same token, 2026 is not shaping up to be 2018. From 2016-2018 we had massive protests and anger. From inauguration 'til now, it's been one thing after another taking the wind out of Dems sails and motivating voters on the right. Gun control, trans rights, racial equity are all 100% out the window until at least 2028 and even then I doubt the public will have much appetite for any of those issues, no? Isn't that forcing them to moderate and move away from the left?
But who knows, you're right that a couple years is a long time and I sure as hell wouldn't have had a good prediction record if you asked me in the fall of 2021/2017 what would happen that election cycle.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
As always, disgusting. As always, it's going to backfire on whatever political positions the perpetrator holds. Dems are either going to have to moderate and cut off crazy fringe to avoid alienating the majority, or they'll just lose. Either way, whatever causes the shooter believed in are worse off for it. Abject stupidity and waste of life.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
Yes, the several million illegal immigrants was the original defection, and sending a couple dozen to self-proclaimed sanctuary cities that immediately shipped them back was the tiniest possible tat in reply.
The funniest thing is that most of the increase in the illegal population occurred during our mutually agreed upon golden age, and evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Although, I often forget that MAGA has retroactively decreed Bush to be a democrat, the same way that every politician elected between prior to 2016 (maybe with some exceptions carved out for Roosevelt, Lincoln, Jackson and Washington) was a democrat.
Even if you argue that there were an extra several million that came during Biden's presidency, this is more a return to a historical trend than 'an invading rapist horde' to paraphrase someone here.
Numbers of illegal immigrants almost seems to correlate with the relative prosperity of the USA to South American countries rather than ICE enforcement, which I'm told was a bipartisan issue in the 90s and early 2000s...
Well, absolutely! I'd give my left nut to crank the clock back to late 90s cultural détente, colorblindness, warts and all. Hell, I'd be tempted just for Utopian Scholastic and Frutiger Aero to make a comeback.
Have you considered that your main complaint with the contemporary US seems to be the culture war, yet your vitriolic hate for Fauci (and apparently Tim Walz?) is itself, culture warring? Even as you decry a lack of national unity, you're just as angry as everyone else.
As much as I found Tim Walz to be an odious little troll performing a racist minstrel act
...why?
Down ticket- well, did you catch the wackadoo that ran for governor where I am? I didn't vote a straight Dem ticket but it was closer than I would've predicted a few years ago.
No, I missed it. That's...an interesting choice.
I am angrier, because I have a kid and I want my kid to grow up in a better world, and neither of these idiot parties are going to deliver that.
I have two, and I'm confident they are growing up in a better world. They'll have significantly more opportunity than I ever had should they choose to pursue it.
I am angrier because I watched scientists and public health experts and journalists shit all over the reputation of everything, and for what? They ruined and debased themselves for nothing, but the public pays the price! Fauci got his pardon and nobody that signed that braindead open letter got stripped of credentials, and here we are with Trump, RFK, Florida cutting vaccine mandates.
You act like the people have no agency or responsibility for themselves. Fauci is still trusted by close to a majority of Americans; there's every possibility that regardless of what Fauci did, half the country would hate him. I worked at the same institute as Fauci and met him in passing, and I'm sure you've read enough of my writing in the past to know I think that the right's fixation on Fauci as a figurehead betrays a near-complete lack of understanding of his actual role/function and is largely a character assassination downstream of resentment about lockdowns.
Someday I hope to vote for a politician I actually like, that isn't a collection of horrible tradeoffs or ends up doing things that disgust me.
If you do, it will look like this. The politicians you would like are not the politicians that would win elections.
I'll admit, I kinda like the Harvard stuff. Resentment isn't the healthiest motivator but I have so much of it. Perhaps that's my most socialist trait. Ha!
Can you imagine the CCP cutting funding from Tsinghua or Peking university? The center of gravity around biotech and STEM are shifting towards China, and the only question (in biotech at least) is whether the equilibrium will be that of peers or whether we go the route of low/mid-value manufacturing, aka extinction. NIH is probably getting budget cuts next year too. Ten years from now neo-MAGA will be bitching about how they have to buy their new drugs from China because their elites sold them out, without realizing it was their own retarded policies that got them there.
You want justice? Justice would be the next democratic president coming in and cutting subsidies to farmers, trade schools and other red-coded industries who are trying to fuck over mine. Thankfully, I doubt that would ever happen contrary to what you and Iconochasm think about retaliation from the left.
Then how should I respond to the accusation that liberals are to blame for right wing skinheads? Is '"Liberals are the only people with agency" theory undefeated' the professorgerm approved line?
Who cares? I obviously couldn't vote for LBJ in 1965. Most people couldn't vote for Reagan, but apparently he was the last 'real' Republican president prior to Trump, everyone else was a Dem or Dem dressed up as an elephant. The only other real Republican presidents in the 20th century were Nixon (unfairly set up by the CIA/FBI btw) and Teddy Roosevelt.
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