Goodguy
5d ago
this all happened because Scott platformed Mencius Moldbug back in 2013
Did he? I'm not aware of this part of the rationalist-sphere lore. Do tell.
Bro you're being way too sensitive, to be frank. Yes, I'm completely fine with you calling them trans men, I just used the term "trans women" because that is the most common and thus least confusing term these days. And yes, you can refuse to hire them if you want to. I lean in favor of freedom of association overall. Although, you might want to be careful with that principle, since the same principle will cause some people to refuse to hire anyone with views that are seen as too right-wing, which indeed we have already seen happening.
As for the CRA, I think we can agree that it was in many ways a bad idea for the country. But that does not mean that it is a good thing for fervent, resentment-driven right-wingers to take over the country. Those are two somewhat separate conversations. CRA and Trumpists can both be bad.
Goodguy
5d ago
You are still not giving any concrete reasons, based on my numerous writings on this site, to think that I am a leftist. As for "framings of leftists", that's highly subjective. As far as contrarianism, no, I am not writing these things out of contrarianism. Not sure what would convince you. You seem to be a smart guy based on some of your posts that I have read, so I don't know why you make these assumptions about me, but the assumptions are incorrect. To be fair, I am also a smart guy and I make unwarranted assumptions all the time. I'm just trying to let you know that you're not only wrong about where I'm coming from, you're on an almost flat Earth level of wrong in your mental model of me. If you insist on disbelieving me, well... you still haven't pointed out any of my writings that would show that I am a so-called leftist. Feel free to do so, but you will probably be disappointed, unless you think that because I am a social libertarian with some mild questionings of modern capitalism it means that I am a leftist.
Goodguy
5d ago
I mean it's pretty simple, my ideal world is one in which you can talk about the fact that different ethnic groups have different intelligence levels and that trans women are more like men than they are like women, without losing your job. But at the same time, individuals of whatever ethnic group would be judged based on their individual characteristics rather than based on their group averages, and politics would not be dominated by resentment-driven fanatics of either a left or a right persuasion. This is not some weird abstract ambivalence between left and right, it is a genuine solid third view that is opposed to both the left and the right, and it is my view.
Goodguy
5d ago
Wait though... you're still not giving any actual specific reasons based on my writings to show that I am a leftist.
I mean, if I was a leftist it's not like I would be embarrassed by being a leftist. I would proudly wave a leftist flag high, since I am pretty straightforward as a person (sometimes too straightforward) and I would have no good reason to lie on this site. It just so happens that I am not a leftist, lol.
Goodguy
5d ago
Because I disagree with the left on many crucial, definitional issues. If you think that I am a leftist, I think you should probably explain specifically why you think that I am a leftist.
Goodguy
5d ago
About the assassination attempt: look, it's just clear to me that there is nothing necessarily surprising or conspiratorial about the Secret Service fucking up after successfully protecting one of the most hated figures in US history, who also constantly does outdoor rallies, for 10 years. It would be surprising if they didn't eventually fuck up.
As for your second paragraph, I think that you profoundly misunderstand where I am coming from. I have spent years regularly arguing against people who engage in anti-Trump hysteria. As recently as a few months ago, I was telling lib friends that their horror of Trump was overblown and misguided. I'm not some kind of crypto leftist who is here to convince people to hate Trump, for fuck's sake. I am telling you the truth, which is that until recently I thought Trump was part good and part bad but I felt he would be effectively contained by checks and balances, but I am now worried because I am beginning to see the checks and balances waver. You may agree with me, you may disagree with me, but the reality is that I am not making a bad faith argument. I am literally just telling you about the evolution of my political thought. A few months ago I really thought that Trump's second term would be a nothingburger, both because Trump's first term was a nothingburger and because I assumed that libs and leftists would put up more resistance than they actually are.
The idea that I "inexplicably trust" the media is absurd to me. I have spent years criticizing the media to anyone who will listen. If you assume that I am some slavish devotee of the media, you are just plain wrong. I hate and distrust the mainstream media, but that doesn't mean that I have to like Trumpism.
Goodguy
5d ago
If I'm a standard Blue-Tribe American democrat or leftist I must be a weird one, given that I have literally never voted for a Democrat in my life and I regularly criticize communists. I swear, sometimes I feel like this site is becoming too much of an echo chamber where anyone who is not actually right-wing is assumed to have leftist sympathies or whatever. I hate the woke, but that doesn't mean that I want to support what seem to me like weird, ideologically fervent right-wingers who are displaying the same sort of authoritarian tendencies, tribal emotionality, and lust for conquest that the woke displayed.
It's possible. The Secret Service are humans, not superpowered ninjas from a movie. They are good at what they do, but the reality is that there are probably like 30 million people in this country who would happily kill Trump if they could do it and get away with it. The Secret Service has managed to successfully protect Trump for 10 years, through hundreds of outdoor rallies and so on. They're not perfect, so it's rational that they eventually fucked up. One might argue that it's weird that the two assassination attempts that we know of that even came close both happened shortly before the election, but that can be explained by the fact that just before the election is precisely when random lone wolves would be most motivated to try to kill Trump.
It might seem weird that the Secret Service would not do anything in reaction to someone telling them they see a guy on the roof with a gun... but at the end of the day, it's a job for them. We all have bad days on the job when we're tired or whatever. Besides, if I my job was protecting Trump for years and having to stand around in all kinds of weather conditions listening to him ramble for hours, and someone told me that there was a reason to think Trump might be about to get shot, I can easily imagine even as an elite Secret Service operator being like "fuck who cares, I'm tired of all this shit".
Goodguy
5d ago
The way I look at it, Trump is:
- Someone who does a lot more outdoor rallies than most prominent politicians.
- One of the most reviled politicians in US history, among a large subset of the population.
The Secret Service might be good, but they are not perfect. It's not surprising if they just genuinely slipped up after almost 10 years of protecting Trump.
Goodguy
5d ago
I'm in favor of a brand of classical liberalism that is pragmatic and acknowledges things like HBD, that is anti-woke because it values judging people as individuals rather than based on the average characteristics of the groups they belong to, to the extent that this is feasible. Classical liberalism has a pragmatic approach to issues like population group gaps. The fact that this approach has not been followed for the most part is no reason for me to switch my actual politics, although it may be a good reason for me to switch my strategies of messaging and optics.
I question your assumption that centrists do not have to deal with reality. Why would that be the case? If anything, it seems to me that us centrists are dealing more actually with reality than either left or right vanguards are. The left and right vanguards, to me, seem like they are existing in airy clouds of their own imagined worlds, driven ahead by self-reinforcing echo chambers and the thrill of owning their enemies.
I didn't vote for Trump. I left the presidential vote blank. Yes, I feel a bit stupid, although I certainly don't regret not voting for Harris, but I think given how much libs have flexed their muscles in various politically effective ways over the course of the last 10 years, I can be forgiven for thinking that they would put up more of a fight against Trump 2: The Trumpening than they actually are. Well, in any case, it seems that I was wrong.
I did think that Trump would roll over and lose to the same move twice. His first term left me assuming that given a second term, he would spend all his time tweeting and eating McDonalds on some bed in the White House. I think I really underestimated the team that he gathered around himself since 2020. They have proven to be effective and committed, and have caught me by surprise.
Goodguy
5d ago
There is no real evidence that "they", as in some deep state group, even tried to kill him once much less 2-5 times. As for the color revolution idea, while I hated the 2020 riots, the notion that they were organized to hurt Trump has never made much sense to me. Realistically, such riots would tend to make as many people more likely to vote for Trump as less likely to vote for him.
I just assume that if the deep state actually set up a shooting to assassinate Trump, they would probably succeed at killing him. It's hard for me to believe that they would manage to get a shooter within fairly easy range of him, yet the shooter would miss. The lone wolf theory seems way more plausible to me. In any case, if the deep state has had 10 years in which to kill Trump and they haven't done it, then they are fairly irrelevant as a political force, which is part of my original point.
As for the progressive status quo, I don't know where you are getting that from. I disagree with progressives on a range of issues, including HBD, policing, and the economic consequences of socialism. The average progressive would certainly not classify me as a fellow progressive if exposed to my unfiltered political ideas.
Goodguy
5d ago
Trump just tweeted "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
I know that Belisarius thinks I'm a far-leftist (lol), but I think that a fair reading my post history will show that I am what I present myself as, more or less a classical liberal who hates both the left and the right.
I've spent a lot of time and energy both online and offline defending Trump and Trumpism from the often hysterically-phrased accusation that it is fascist, a huge threat, etc. I feel a bit like an idiot now, to be frank. I still hate the woke and am somewhat glad that Trumpism rose up to halt the woke's authoritarian tendencies... but lord, more and more I wish that it had been almost anything other than Trumpism doing it. The argument that Trumpism is fundamentally a classical liberal force is becoming more and more absurd almost by the hour, in my opinion.
Accelerationists (the three or four actual ones for whom it's not just a funny pretense) must be rubbing their hands raw with glee right now. Things are moving very fast.
As much as I appreciate some of what Trumpism is doing to upend stale norms and wokism, at this point I, and probably many other centrists are starting to think "shit, maybe the hysterical libs had a point about these people". And if politics is making me start to side even slightly with literal Redditors, you know that things are bad and crazy.
My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term. But libs and the left seem to be missing. Turns out that there is no deep state waiting with sharp fangs and CIA assassins to stop the orange man as soon as he tries to actually do anything that hurts the Blob. Instead, there are only old tired bureaucrats and the occasional protester wearing a pussy hat.
Whoops. Well, so much for that. I was wrong. And this shit is starting to be a bit genuinely alarming. I think I am, actually, getting tired of "winning". I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals, not by a rage-filled vengeful gaggle of right-wing revolutionaries.
Goodguy
6d ago
I appreciate many things about the new regime and their direct, bold willingness to explode old and stupid taboos. But I feel no sense of glory or triumph. The new regime, at their emotional baseline heart, is just as insane as the old. Maybe even more, because they are provoked and maddened by having been oppressed for years by the old regime. While I appreciate much of what they are currently doing, I do not trust them in any way. I fear that these are not principled classical liberals in their emotional core, they are vengeful radicals. I wish that they really were principled classical liberals, but my reading of what they do and say tells me that unfortunately, they are not. I appreciate that they are correcting the nonsense of the old regime, but I do not trust their new regime in the slightest bit.
Goodguy
12d ago
If I have to make a choice between the twitter racists and the race communists
Reading it put in this stark way makes me glad that I find both equally disgusting. And no, I do not have to make a choice between them. Why would I? We're not in a civil war, so far at least. I'm not going to die if I continue to despise both of these tribal groups. I get that if we were in a hot civil war, I'd probably have to either leave the country or pick one of the tribal groups, just to survive. But even if, in that situation, I picked one, I wouldn't really be picking it, I would just be pretending to in order to survive, and I would happily go over to the other side if it offered me better opportunities. Internally, I am pretty sure that I will never actually choose to support either of these tribal groups. And that's in a hot civil war situation! In today's situation, I don't even have to pretend to pick one of those two groups. I can, and do, freely say that both utterly disgust me.
This site did not keep going during leftist authoritarianism. It kept going during a political situation in which the left was more powerful than the right, but not by that much, and the left's powers were still significantly constrained. During a true authoritarian populist regime of either a left or a right flavor, that would not necessarily be the case. American-style free speech is very rare. As far as I know there is no other country in history that had/has such strong free speech norms. Any major deviation from the American liberal (in the old sense of the word "liberal") model would be more likely to do away with our free speech norms than to retain them.
Goodguy
12d ago
Moldbug is smart enough that he understands that a truly demotic regime, whether it is left-coded or right-coded, would likely put him up against the wall and shoot him for some reason. Hence his constant harping on the idea that we should treat the defeated regime's soldiers with decency and that we should let elves rather than hobbits take care of things. I agree with him about all this. Some people here on TheMotte don't understand what would actually likely happen to them in a true authoritarian/populist revolution. They think that this site would still exist and they would still be allowed to write politically incorrect essays. They wouldn't. We are far from that now, but I see the danger of it on the horizon. Just because leftist authoritarianism has been given a huge punch on the nose does not mean that we are not in danger of rightist authoritarianism.
Goodguy
12d ago
If the US military became un-neutral in the politics battle in either direction, I feel that it would lead to civil war. The only rational and emotionally satisfyingly honorable plausible response from non-right-wingers if the military came out largely in support of the right to the point that the left was about to actually lose all power in a real genuinely frightening way and not just in a "I'm going to move to Europe cause Trump sucks" way would be secession. Likewise, the only rational and emotionally satisfying response from the right if the military overthrew Trump would be revolution, since without revolution they would be certain to never have any power again in the foreseeable future.
Goodguy
12d ago
I don't mainly care if it's just or not, I mainly care about living with a political system that delivers to me the sorts of things that I want in my life. How is one group of people vindictively doing shitty things to get back at another group of people who did shitty things going to help me?
Goodguy
12d ago
There was plenty of complaining about it. As someone who dislikes both the left and the right, I am not impressed by "the Democrats did bad thing X, so now the Republicans should also get to do bad thing X" arguments. I'd rather that nobody did bad thing X, if X is actually bad.
Goodguy
13d ago
I'm not sure why I should invest in responding to one of your typical walls of text if you start out by assuming that I am basically a leftist, which in fact I am not except from your sort of pretty far-right perspective on the political spectrum, and that I wrote my comment because I want to stop people from further attacking the woke, which in fact is not why I wrote my comment.
I agree, I actually had the same thought when I read it... this doesn't sound like Trump.
More options
Context Copy link