monoamine
1d ago
Arguing against any sort of care for morality is in fact a very right-wing position. Really, a right-wing child's position.
monoamine
1d ago
Among lots of feminists, sure. I addressed that in the post, though. You are describing third-wave feminism, which I described as "third-wave feminism" in my post, but you are simply saying "feminism".
monoamine
1d ago
I largely don't, since it's mostly selection bias etc. There is potentially sometimes some truth to it, but not much. (There are some exceptions for, for example, autistic/Asperger's facial features. But autism is a lot more than just a personality trait.)
It is funny to joke about but it's mostly just right-coded pseudoscience and pseudointellectualism.
monoamine
15d ago
Society needs to lean much harder into non-blank-slatist atomic liberalism. (i.e., Scott Alexander Thought)
monoamine
15d ago
I would feel it would be more rational and, in particular, more moral to simply universally demand individualism, rather than say "people of this group or ethnicity are not sufficiently individualistic!" and violate the very contract you are attempting to enshrine. (This is basically why rightism is, at heart, an immoral and often irrational, hypocritical, and incoherent ideology. Some of the more intellectual far-right strains are more rational but trade that for being far more immoral.)
This is why I simply try not to associate with illiberals. I have a "one-drop rule" for it: even the slightest inclination towards this nature of thinking (collective attribution) for any group from any group means your whole mind and epistemology and morality are, essentially, completely fucked. There is no hope for such a person.
One area where even people who are generally of a liberal mindset tend to falter is judgment of men and women. I'd like to say the SJW/woke/third-wave feminist thing would've been very warranted since this was one of the main things it attempted to address, but unfortunately a ton of them - albeit not all - just did and do the same sort of thing towards men.
I also basically consider this a kind of "spiritual rightism". A huge number of leftists are essentially spiritual rightists with some moral luck + a bit flip.
monoamine
4mo ago
I'm sure most people here are aware of it, but in modern parlance it first gained popularity in response to that neo-Nazi Walmart mass shooter who was depicted as "chudjak". "Chud" wasn't used much before then.
monoamine
4mo ago
Where can I find a (much more) left-wing community similar to The Motte? /r/slatestarcodex is close but obviously intentionally tries to avoid Culture War topics (spurring the creation of this place in the first place).
By left-wing, I solely mean on social issues ("progressive liberalism"), like immigration, race, sex, gender, gender identity, democracy, rule of law (which I guess is now a pro-left position in 2026 or something). On economics stuff a range of views would be fine. I'm a pro-free market pro-capitalist person, myself rather than a socialist. There's /leftypol/ but those are essentially all communists who are pro-authoritarianism and all of that and who are often even right-wing on social issues.
There are tons of Twitter clusters full of very smart center-left people who agree with me on everything but it's not quite what I'm looking for.
monoamine
7mo ago
I would be fairly surprised if most of the ones who joined after January 2025 meet that description. Or, if it is most, it's cutting it close. I am basing that mostly on heuristics rather than strong evidence, but that's just how I'd lean.
monoamine
7mo ago
Going by your comment and just looking at that URL, I am going to guess that that is misrepresented. So I will look it up...
And, indeed, he is alleged to have shoved someone. And he was acquitted. Kind of seems uninteresting. Nothing like the UK. I don't know the facts surrounding the physical altercation, but if he had never shoved someone I highly doubt he ever would've been arrested. Seems the legal system basically worked appropriately, here.
monoamine
7mo ago
That's the UK though. They don't have a strong sense of liberal values encoded into their legal system.
monoamine
7mo ago
I don't think it was or would be "terrorism lite", but it might be considered intimidation or harassment. (I support the protest's cause, but they should've done it outside of the church when the pastor was entering/leaving rather than interrupting the church service and entering the church.)
monoamine
7mo ago
The most we know is he met with/talked with moot a few times and looked porn on 4chan. I would be somewhat surprised if he ever posted (words, anyway) or looked at any non-porn boards.
monoamine
7mo ago
I'm a hardcore leftist and of course extremely anti-right and anti-Trump, but, yeah, I'm not seeing any new revelations about Trump, here, and so far there don't seem to be substantiated allegations Trump ever did anything sexual with anyone underage. I could think of hundreds of reasons to hate Trump and to consider him a terrible person and a terrible president, but the Epstein stuff is effectively just noise when it comes to him. If there's a bombshell regarding him and Epstein, everyone will know about it immediately.
Bill Gates though does have pedophile vibes.
I think you're probably just suffering from bias due to ideological disagreements with him. While Gates was/is clearly a creep, none of the emails suggest he did anything with any underage people, nor are there any other allegations or pieces of evidence pointing to that. He probably regularly cheated on his wife, and as the emails show he even contracted an STD from a prostitute, but I see no evidence or suggestion (or "vibes") he was a pedophile or did anything like that.
monoamine
7mo ago
Always fun to check in on this place from time to time to see how far it's descended. I'm grateful at least /r/SlateStarCodex and most other rat-adjacent places are still sane.
monoamine
1yr ago
Every minor violation of Trump's is blown out of proportion, and every major violation of the democrats is minimized and not talked about.
I don't want to get into an object-level argument about this (though my personal stance is probably blatant), but it's interesting and funny how for the opposite side it's viewed as the exact opposite of this, with the perception that all media across the spectrum is always "grading Trump on a curve" / minimizing his actions because they're so acclimated to it while the left can get away with much less than he can.
There are geopolitical and moral reasons to support Ukraine beyond what you list. It is not Marvel-ization but a support for American unipolarity, liberal democracy, and upholding of the taboo against territorial conquest. With all due respect, I think it is you who is acting stupid for thinking that bad arguments for supporting Ukraine -> good arguments to not support Ukraine. (That said, Zelenskyy's strong leadership is genuinely inspiring, even if it isn't itself a factor in the equation of whether or not to support or send aid to Ukraine.)
And there are plenty of reasons to think Israel is mostly in the wrong right now. In my opinion, there's a kind of midwit curve here where the topwits and the dimwits are the ones saying "TV images bad = Israel bad". You have the dumb leftists reflexively opposing whatever Israel will do but then the pro-Israel side reflexively defending them and telling you not to believe your lying eyes because of "Pallywood" or other such nonsense.
There are many valid criticisms of Harris, but if you dislike Trump more than Harris you must support Harris and vice versa. To act otherwise in the US electoral system is to act irrationally.
But, anyway, all these comments trying to relate this to his cancellation are truly baffling to me. How can you all be so tribe-brained? The NYT and some weird anti-rats with vendettas trying to cancel him is completely orthogonal to Trump being a horrible person, a horrible leader, and an initiator of democratic backsliding in the US (with a possibility he will become even more of one, whether he wins or loses). Harris and the DNC did not pen articles about Scott being problematic, and even if they did I suspect he would still (rightly) support Harris and the Democrats in the 2024 election, because their opponent is Trump.
monoamine
1yr ago
He's being honest rather than cowardly, even knowing it will be controversial. That's a good thing.
monoamine
1yr ago
He shouldn't have said it (for optics/politics reasons), but he's 100% right (or at least 95% right; some, I assume, are good people). Just wish he would've said it after November 5th instead.
(But also, it's clear from his statement that what he meant is "the real garbage is the people saying Puerto Rico is garbage".)
I like using my own slightly idiosyncratic definitions for things.
The definitions collide and contradict, a bit, such that an egalitarian leftist could be "rightist", but I don't mind it. Especially when you see tons of rightists demanding egalitarianism, albeit for solely their tribe/kind/ethnic group.
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