naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
Can you imagine the courts doing "interest balancing" on whether the government can restrict your speech?
Yes: "time, place, and manner" restrictions on speech are exactly this. I don't point this out to disagree with your substantially correct point that the Court is much less deferential to the Second Amendment than to the First, and frankly I don't think they're nearly deferential enough to the First. But they do engage in "interest balancing" on basically all issues. There is a reason Iustitia wields a balance scale.
From what I've read up, it's HYS or nothing. I have a natural aversion to prestige games but I suppose for the prestige chasers that's just loser talk.
In the interest of completeness, it's worth nothing that there are other paths up the mountain. For example, one common bit of advice is that if there is a state you know you want to practice law in (and you actually want to practice law, not just be an academic or something) then you should try to get into the best law school in that state. If you can parlay that into a position as e.g. the state's Attorney General then you actually have a better chance of winding up in front of the Supreme Court than if you go BigLaw, and you will have direct impact on public policy even when you're not arguing it in front of the nine aristocrats who actually rule the country.
But yes, the legal profession is incredibly infected obsessed with prestige, which it routinely and wholeheartedly substitutes for genuine merit. In any number of venues there is just no amount of demonstrated intelligence or accomplishment that will make up for choosing a lower-ranked law school, and no amount of idiocy that won't be excused if you've got the right pedigree. Exhibit A is of course the educational demographics of the Supreme Court itself. But I have seen a backwater state legislature reject a state supreme court nominee for the crime of not having gotten a 4.0 GPA at their top in-state law school, while cheerfully approving nominees who went to Yale, which doesn't assign grades. It's a real problem.
I suppose this is what I am missing from my normal job, I don't have fulfillment. I feel that I do a good job and the people around me says I am and the company show sufficient financial appreciation, but at the end of the day it's just pushing text from left to right to get people to buy more stuff.
Are you married? Do you have children?
It might off-topic but fulfillment is elusive prey. "Success" in the workaday world entails climbing to the top of a heap and then defending your position there. But by definition most of us cannot be at the top of any heap of humanity. Modernity treats business and government as the only heaps worth climbing. We obsess over promotion and pay raises and political victories. A single layoff or a single health issue can knock us back a whole decade.
The simplest way to parlay that "financial appreciation" into fulfillment is to take on the long term project of community-building. The paradigmatic approach is to start making tiny humans, whose parent you will always be, no matter what the role specifically entails. Not everyone will have the opportunity to be President, or Governor, or Justice, or CEO--indeed, the vast majority of us never will be. But everyone can be a good parent. The title of "Mom" or "Dad" is available to all, if not biologically than through adoption, and the only promotions available are to "Grandma" or "Grandpa." This is why certain political thinkers are so anti-family--because if you are focused on success within your actual sphere of influence, you are much more difficult to recruit as a single-minded soldier advancing the policy visions of others. Family (along with church and other, similarly genuine communities) competes directly with business and politics for your time and attention and loyalty, but offers you fulfillment on your own terms, rather than the terms of whoever happens to be at the top of the heap.
And every time it seems like confusing and non-clear ROI. Nor does it seem like my job then would be more fulfilling, at least on the SWE path there are some pretty clear next steps I can do (big tech/unicorns/interesting startups/open source/anarcho-hackers/etc.). And yes, currently I have to wait for the company-sponsored green card process to complete before it seems like my next chapter in life can begin.
Sorry to hear that. It's never fun to be waiting on bureaucracy. Good luck!
I suppose in my fantasy future, I would be doing appellate law and someday argue Supreme Court cases, but everything I read up shows that law is a high-stress, singular life.
Not always, but by far the best path to that point is to graduate from Harvard, Stanford, or Yale, maybe Chicago, to clerk for a Circuit justice (and then, if possible, a SCOTUS justice), and go to work at a large law firm. The first step is to take the LSAT. If you can score 175+ (less if you are an underrepresented minority) then at least that step is not impossible. But if appellate law is the only thing that really interests you, then you should probably just not go to law school--unless, perhaps, you are extremely well connected. Even if you go to Harvard, the odds of ever actually arguing interesting questions in front of the Supreme Court are quite low. Even arguing in front of state supreme courts is pretty unusual.
If you're sufficiently interested in law to accept a career well short of your fantasy future, then you might as well take the LSAT and see how it goes. STEM majors actually tend to do very well as it is for the most part an obfuscated psychometric, despite the recent removal of the logic games portion. If you do poorly, then you can turn your attention elsewhere. If you do well, then you can decide whether to take the next steps of figuring out plausible schools to apply to. But bear in mind that law careers have a "bimodal distribution" between highly compensated "BigLaw" attorneys and the rank-and-file of family and criminal and liability lawyers who are (often at best) comfortably middle class. You could easily end up spending 3 years and $100,000+ to take a pay cut and spend the rest of your life refereeing messy divorces.
I am a lawyer, but I only practice on rare occasion. I left behind full time law practice to become an academic philosopher. I find it much more fulfilling than law practice, and I get to argue about whatever issues I want with people who are actually a lot smarter than the median SCOTUS Justice. The pay is terrible and it's unlikely I will ever make a meaningful difference on actual public policy, but that would probably be true even if I were a powerful appellate attorney.
While Fable 5 was available, I was able to use it to update the AAQC listed-by-user post. It took less time and exhibited more capabilities, in particular integrating its own calls for AI assistance in sorting some of the less organized posts. I was also able to make the update in a couple of hours where the original took a couple of days, but the new attempt also was able to draw from the lessons of the original attempt so the increased speed might not be down to the model. (It did absolutely chew through my usage limits in a way I'd never seen before, though.)
My "max" subscription trial expires soon and I can't imagine ever paying for an AI subscription out of my own pocket. But I can see how anyone who codes for a living has probably had their job description permanently changed to "the wet part of an AI centaur." Artists and musicians are basically there, too. Of course there are remaining questions (like how much this all actually costs) but all the MBAs I know are currently doing their best to extract as much value as possible from the trend while contributing as little as possible of genuine worth in return so, who knows.
It's kind of the opposite of life insurance, really. The point of an annuity is that you can't outlive it, so you purchase annuities as a hedge against living longer than you anticipate, where life insurance is a hedge (you erect for others) against dying sooner than you anticipate. I think many annuities also have death benefits associated but I assume that is to mitigate unjust windfalls to the brokers.
What incenses me most about race-conscious rightoids
This is a bad start--it really communicates disdain in a way that wages culture war rather than discussing it. And while "race-conscious rightoids" is at least arguably a somewhat specific group (?)--
how incapable they are of sovereign thought
--seems too sweeping to apply to an appropriately specific group. The violation is not exactly egregious and there is some substance to your comment but I feel like I should at least say, "more light, less heat, please."
It is far from the shortest AAQC ever! In fact I think we've had at least one one-liner accrue sufficient nominations as to make the cut, though I don't remember off the top of my head when that was.
The nature of the space is such that length is often rewarded (and sometimes confused for effort/quality) but shorter posts do sometimes get nominated, and pretty routinely make the roundup.
Two things. First, it's probably not a good approach to just reproduce an entire blog that isn't your own--a submission statement seems like the better way.
Second, while I don't think that every post about religion necessarily qualifies as "culture war," I do think that maybe this particular blog reaches that level, if only barely. So if you'd like to share this article as a link with a submission statement in the CW thread, that would be fine. But thanks for posting!
I've never been diagnosed, but yes, I'm plausibly "autistic" under current use of the concept.
When I was young, only the most severe cases of "autism" were ever diagnosed, and IIRC it was considered by most to be a form of "childhood schizophrenia." I was in my 40s, give or take, when the "spectrum" really sank into the zeitgeist and people first started commenting about me being "on" it. Some of my children (who are all now adults) do have psychiatrically diagnosed autism, based on criteria that would clearly apply to me, so it seems fair to say that I'm genuinely autistic, insofar as any such diagnosis admits of authentication. Specifically, my social interaction norms are deep into "spectrum" territory, while my repetitive behavior and sensory processing tendencies are less severe but still noticeably autistic.
But I am "high functioning," especially verbally, and as an adult it seems pointless to get a personal "diagnosis" for a variety of reasons. Would I get an embossed certificate for my wall? I think that clocking me as autistic sometimes helps other people but I've lived an above-average life by most metrics; if it ain't broke, don't fix it! I do look back at many interactions of my youth and, viewed through the lens of disability, a lot of my suffering was arguably the result of other people genuinely abusing me. But they couldn't have known that any more than I did, and blaming myself (despite never really knowing what I had done wrong) probably developed my sense of agency.
This is a very interesting post, and I appreciate the photographs. Thanks!
Hereβs a fun one. Did you know that Pizza Hut in China is actually a sit down restaurant?
Some of us are old enough to remember when it was a sit down restaurant in the United States, too. Apparently the company is exploring a possible return to that norm.
I've been lurking here for a bit and it was my impression that copy/pasting the essay wholesale was not the way things were done.
Well, not when it's someone else's essay. But yes, generally we don't mind if someone mirrors their blogpost here, and generally we do frown on bare links, so something between "include some commentary" and "make the whole post" is the norm. (It also tests our patience when someone posts their blogs here but then entirely refuses to engage with responses in the comments--obviously no one is under any obligation to reply to everyone, but we are watching for patterns that look more like the user using the site for their own ends, than for its stated purpose.)
But as I said--we haven't developed much in the way of hard-and-fast rules, particularly concerning non-CW posts. Again, welcome!
Hello, and welcome to the Motte!
I am approving your post. However, I am doing so with some hesitation, because it intersects kind of an ongoing concern, for which I will, with apologies, partially hijack this thread to mention.
This is a discussion site. The sidebar explicitly invites posts more-or-less like this one: related to philosophy, submission statement, appropriately outside the CW thread, etc. However new users with zero posts or comments here, pitching their blog rather than engaging directly, raises questions about the extent to which this is a discussion site as opposed to a click-farm for geek links (it would for example have counted more in your favor if you'd simply reproduced the entire blog post here, but submission statements are also, strictly speaking, okay, and of course better when linking other people's stuff you don't technically have permission to copy). In the era of ubiquitous generative AI, the problem is further complicated by our aim of being a discussion site for sapient users.
The mod team has not (yet?) really worked out a consistent response to this. We do have some interest in new users, it's healthy to the site and helps advance the foundation of the rules. So I'm approving the post, but I make no guarantees as to whether similar posts (from you or other fresh-rolled accounts) will be let through in the future. For whatever it is worth, if you had posted this after participating in discussion elsewhere on the site for a while, I'd likely have approved the post without further comment. Users with an established posting and comment history are an easier call and continue to be encouraged to post. This is a reputation economy!
So, what are you reading?
I just started Platform Decay. Murderbot is comfortable science fiction, to me. It's not groundbreaking work, but it is smoothly executed and enjoyable. The series definitely does a bit of anti-capitalist pandering but this never does successfully undermine its meritocratic undertones. The TV adaptation was also watchable, though strictly inferior (and more inclined to lean into the pandering).
Please post CW content in the CW thread.
Wasn't Utah settled from the Midwest?
Initially, yes. But the earliest Utah settlers were quickly joined by converts from all over the world, albeit mostly England and Scandinavia.
I know they love cosmetic surgery almost as much as the Koreans, but I think s_m_h would've noticed that.
I think this is a "Mormon moms" thing ("staying hot for hubby")--girls out seeking converts will most often be in their early 20s, when cosmetic surgery would in most cases be premature.
Surely polygyny means women should be subject to less sexual selection, not more.
Attractive women do not just come from attractive mothers; they also come from high value fathers with substantial resources (such as would be needed to support families with multiple wives). Additionally, Utah was disproportionately settled by immigrants from Scandinavia and the British Isles. You can find similar phenotypes in the Midwest, especially Wisconsin and Minnesota. This is probably also an HBD explanation for why Mormons and Midwesterners have such rhyming cultural stereotypes (e.g. passive-aggressive politeness, or Mormon "funeral potatoes" versus Minnesotan "hot dish").
Do you have any idea what's going on?
Not to be a single-note piano, but "the Great Awokening" seems like a plausible culprit for what you've observed. It's just identitarianism forcefully asserting itself. This, basically, and then this (PDF warning). "Assimilation" used to be a goal; then it got dumped into a bucket with "colonialism" leading to the crazed perception that Indians (or whomever) who travel to Europe or the Americas are being "colonized" if they assimilate.
I have met a fair few immigrants who are actually quite insistent that their children assimilate, but in many cases this seems to backfire somewhat. There are definitely people out there who prefer to feel attached to the culture and practices of their ancestors, for various reasons, despite being geographically remote. That I am a rootless cosmopolitan does benefit me in some ways, but there are definitely times when I wish I had been better suited to becoming a key figure in a community of comparatively limited importance beyond its own boundaries.
You can talk to Zorba about the details, but there is a "janitor" bot that already does this, and has been doing it since late 2019. The AAQC list is not strictly handcrafted but rather the bot compiles the entire list of user AAQC nominations, and then the moderators (in theory; in practice this is my contribution) whittle those down from about 200 per month to the top (roughly) 40. The final list gets a "commit" which (mostly) auto-formats the monthly post, and Zorba keeps that "commit" list in a database somewhere. That database was at one point fed into the "Vault" project for sorting but I don't think Zorba has touched the Vault in quite some time.
I do assume it would for someone with coding experience indeed be "trivial" to generate a list like this from that database. My suspicion however is that anyone who is both (A) adept at coding and (B) willing to contribute to the Motte's code needs would be significantly more valuable to the site working on, like, literally anything else in our list of priorities. But if spinning up a "running tab" of per-user AAQCs seems like a fun project for you, I doubt anyone would discourage its development.
Dare I ask who has the highest AAQCs/Total comments ratio?
At a guess, I would bet that at least some of the single-AAQC posters have zero other comments--lurkers do occasionally pop up to say "hey, I actually know something about this topic..." and proceed to publish an absolute banger, only to return to lurking afterward.
But if you went with, say, users over 10 AAQCs, I would guess that /u/barnabycajones would be high on the list, considering he accumulated at least 60 AAQCs in the SSC era--about the same number that Dean has accumulated in the years since the switchover. /u/yodatsracist may have a similar comment ratio. I would also guess /u/gemmaem not for an overwhelming number of AAQCs but for a lower number of non-AAQC posts. /u/darwin2500 accumulated about thirty that in the SSC era, edging out myself and /u/TracingWoodGrains by a handful there, but all three of us were prolific commenters so our ratios wouldn't be very high.
Similarly, Doglatine pulled over 60 in the Motte sub era, while (say) fcfromssc and efficientsyllabus were half that in the same era. Fivehourmarathon has drawn more than 70 here, but themotte.org is the longest timeframe.
Longevity is of course the main driver in terms of sheer numbers, but I was honestly surprised to be the only unitary username over 100 AAQCs. I know my ratio would be much lower than many even if you don't count my modposting in the sub. Dean and Ilforte are also over 100 across usernames, and TracingWoodGrains should also be regarded as in the hundred club since I know there are probably few dozen AAQCs out there that weren't properly included in this compilation. One thing this project has resulted in is slight improvement to the /r/thethread wikis, so I could run the project again and likely improve the list, but I am a little burned out on wrestling with janky LLM tools this moment. A real coder like Zorba could do a much better job, but real coders like Zorba have more important things to do--like keeping the site operational!
Mine is missing "Introductory Texts to Rationalism".
It... looks like maybe that entire roundup did not get included in /r/thethread, actually! So none of those entries would show up here.
Now that all the links are in one place, any chance you can have Claude submit them to the Wayback Machine and archive.today?
I certainly can't. Someone else probably could.
But actually there was a point at which @ZorbaTHut scraped a bunch of them, and for several years now the full text of all AAQCs has been automatically archived. That is what led in part to the Vault, which project unfortunately hasn't had any forward motion in years. But Zorba does already have a database with much of the content archived. It's just a question of being able to actually do something with it.
Sorry about that!
One thing I have discovered is that the parser Claude made me did not pick up any AAQC awards if there were in-text [brackets] used when linking to the AAQC in the roundup. Sometimes these were used (as with yours) to edit the text a bit, but sometimes they showed up in the formatting for other reasons (like stripped links that left the brackets behind). I think that is the main category of missed AAQCs as there are probably a few dozen that ended up getting reported like this. I tried to catch as many as I could but by the time I finished this up, I had decided that I probably could have done the whole thing faster by hand, and it would have been substantially more precise. Alas, I squandered my time vibe coding, instead.
But, I have edited yours in now.
AAQC Archive, by Recipient β Part 1 of 3
This archive compiles every Actually-A-Quality-Contribution award by recipient, across all three eras: π΅ /r/SlateStarCodex, π’ /r/TheMotte, and π£ TheMotte.org. 1142 contributors, 5284 AAQCs.
@ratanon β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
@__unterwasser β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- I β November 2020
@jkf β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "What did you expect when you told these people that they would be unable to earn a living, go out for lunch, or leave the country for the forseeable future?" β January 2022 2/2
@_windjammer β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
@-LVP- β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Banging Continents Makes Mountains β Week of September 10th, 2018
@-Reman β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- This article is very sophomoric take on the age-old democracy vs technocracy debate. The form of technocracy varies from ideology to ideology (e.g. aristocracy, communism, fascism, scientocracy, etc.) β Week of April 1st, 2019
@[deleted] β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- On cultural narratives around the American presidents from the past 20-30 years β 11-14-17
- My child just finished that section. They had speakers who were interned, visited the Japanese American museum, read Farewell to Manzanar, and spent what seemed like a month on it. They did not cove β Week of October 29, 2018
@07mk β 17 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- diminishing returns of Social Justice β Week of April 30th, 2018
- Rise and Decline of the SPLC β Week of June 25th, 2018
- Consequences, Suffering, and Terminal Values β Week of September 17th, 2018
- Against University Micromanagement by The Government: Gender Studies β Week of October 15th, 2018
- > In that world, the only way to fight the class war is for all workers, across the world, to cooperate, and that first means tearing down the nationalistic and ethnic divisions we see between each β Week of November 19, 2018
- > But this is kind of the point - yes, literally everything is violence, and that's why it's critical that we understand the violence we are doing and analyze it until we come up with a coherent fr β Week of December 10, 2018
- > Similarly, I agree that progressives need to be self-reflective and look for ways to improve (like any movement), but it seems crazy to be trying to do that in this thread, where a few scrolls do β Week of December 10, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- I've had thoughts similar to this when considering how genuinely well-meaning people keep causing massive amounts of unnecessary suffering due to actions driven only by good intentions. It was initial β Week of February 11th, 2019
- I think it's been coming into prominence over the last 3 or 4 years, at least. I haven't noticed an uptick particularly recently, though. β Week of April 22nd, 2019
- >"a truly non-sexist society would structure child rearing norms such that both men and women shared an equal workload" β Week of April 22nd, 2019
- "What makes woke "woke" is the supremacy of the sociopolitical messaging of a film as a determinant of its quality over more traditional determinants such as writing, pacing, character development, cinematography, choreography, etc." β August 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "But when you're making products for a business, you run into the issue of actually having to appeal to potential customers so that they give you their money for the product." β April 2023
- "There's just no sense that the writers had any understanding of the way people in these roles and with these responsibilities think and operate." β March 2024
- "I don't know that there's any theory that neatly ties all this together. I'll just say, as someone who's been a leftist Democrat all my life, seeing Democrats whine about Republicans for so many decades without taking responsibility to improve themselves has largely made me check out of politics over the past half-decade to a decade." β March 2024
- "I guess that's just a long-winded way of saying that The Boy Who Cried Wolf is, unironically, a pretty decent fable with a pretty decent lesson." β March 2025
- "I'm also reminded of the commonly known 'thrive/survive' dichotomy, where progressives are characterized as focusing on how we can thrive, which is only possible in times of plenty, and conservatives are characterized as focusing on how we can survive, which is most relevant in times of not plenty." β August 2025
- "In both of these, there's this implicit idea of getting to do whatever one wants and then being apparently confused by the obvious consequence imposed on one by uncontrollable external forces." β August 2025
@0jzLenEZwBzipv8L β 4 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "Fragment of a dialogue between a white nationalist, a minority activist, and a government official..." β August 2021
- "My own take is that extremist alarmism about COVID is largely irrational but that also extremist alarmism about the lockdowns is largely irrational." β September 2021 2/2
- "Egalitarianism is a master morality. Eugenics, on the other hand, is a resentment morality practiced by the world's grumbling failures." β January 2022 2/2
- "Almost no matter what you want the system to be, if you try hard enough and you are good enough at blocking out contrary evidence, you can rationalize why the system actually is like that." β January 2022 2/2
@100ProofTollBooth β 29 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "The counter-intuitive thing, in my mind, is that a well developed sense of self is often easier developed within a group or community." β February 2023
- "In terms of guilt, a movement away from traditional religion may be good, bad, or mixed, but there's been no secular alternative." β January 2024
- "Dealing with suffering and failure is part of any life. When it's your own damn fault, you ought to use it as a learning experience and an impetus to better choices and behavior." β January 2024
- Rationalism's core flaw, in my opinion, is that you're trying to debug the firmware with the firmware. β February 2024
- "I categorically reject literal cellular biological modification when we have already developed, employed, and enjoyed a social, cultural, and legal mechanism to address the problem. Namely; monogamous marriage." β February 2024
- "I think the crux of it lies in the fact that a society wide ritual of real consequence to mark the transition from boy to man has been effectively eliminated." β March 2024
- "I wanted to add something related but tangential to @self_made_human 's post on therapists. The business model issue." β June 2024
- "The higher level of analysis, however, is; should police departments be setup for this? I'd actually argue they should not. Complex investigations are rare." β June 2024
- "The WSJ published an article today about the voting gap between men and women below the age of thirty." β July 2024
- "Opportunity cost and compound interest - they're a real bitch." β August 2024
- "Finally, one of them pipes up and says, 'Dude .... you got "guy angry" for the first time.'" β August 2024
- "Americans are notoriously self-contradictory in their opinions on abortion." β September 2024
- "Government is incredibly powerful. It's like a mountain. If a mountain shifts in massive ways haphazardly, we call it an earthquake and it's bad." β October 2024
- "These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills." β December 2024
- "The problem, to me, seems to be that a purely rational worldview creates a fundamentally underdeveloped system of knowledge and personal agency - we really do become the rational ideal." β April 2025
- "As they say, one of the the best things you can do for your career is die." β May 2025
- "If the forecast total market is well over $1 trillion, then VCs who give you literally 10s of billions of dollars are still making a positive EV bet. This is how these people think." β August 2025
- "'So you're saying I should let me friends pick my wife for me?' Yup." β September 2025
- "So we get this weird kind of social communism - do what you want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, where 'hurt' is never clearly defined and can change subjectively." β September 2025
- "I'm arguing this idea that the MIC "loves war" because it means sales go up and that, furthermore, they're so gifted as to be able to manipulate a whole host of world leaders. That's not the case." β October 2025
- "The steelman that I can think of is something like the following; Small talk, which is most of conversation, isn't about the transmission of information at all." β October 2025
- "Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die" β December 2025
- "The Vibecession, to me, is a reaction to some harsh nonlinearities that have developed over the past 40 years." β December 2025
- "Marriage is a miracle." β December 2025
- "Traditionalism is vibe based gesturing at 'how it used to be' with the implication that 'it' used to be better." β January 2026
- "Big, legacy CRUD apps - and, absolutely, more specialized apps - aren't really in danger of being disrupted by AI in the immediate future. 5 to 7 years from now, ehhhh, I am not so sure." β February 2026
- "This is also why I still am against extreme forms of bullying. I am not, however, against all bullying because the alternative is worse." β February 2026
- "I'd say that most of the 'problems of capitalism' are bad feedback loops from efforts to solve the 'problems of capitalism.'" β February 2026
- "But for a party apparatchik, your organization doesn't really ever go out of business so long as the American two party system remains as it has been since the end of WW2 and, probably, since the end of the Civil War. So your feedback loop is broken." β May 2026
@15ImpoundedCats β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- To give you a super-brief sketch of a skeleton of the cliffs' notes of the debate . . . . β Week of June 3rd, 2019
@2D3D β 3 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "There are a few extremely interesting nightlife entertainment options that are not commonly experienced by westerners, so I think it is worth sharing the mechanics of Southeast Asian seediness with the fine denizens of themotte." β May 2024
- "Chinese pop culture is crippled by government diktats." β August 2024
- "Hezbollahs destruction is a good thing, but whether the Lebanese can capitalize on it is a different issue." β September 2024
@4570_throwaway β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The Incomparable Joy of Child-Rearing β November 2020
@4bpp β 24 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- A hard problem in transgender policy. β Week of May 7th, 2018
- My main issue with the whole pronoun business has never been any sex/gender thing, but the circumstance that Western society as I have so far experienced it was strongly built around the premise that β Week of December 31st, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Does Bill gates equal 10^5? β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- The Rise of Tribalism in the Anglosphere β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
- A Theory of Mod Actions Drawing Ire β February 2020
- Is White Supremacy Inherently Self-Defeating? β March 2020
- Ceteris Paribus, Video Games Are a Waste of Time β March 2020
- The Prevalence of Conversion Narratives β March 2020
- Diversity Casting as Nagging β April 2020
- Male vs Female Socialization Regarding Bounded Conflict β July 1/2, 2020
- The Great Attention-Management Trick of Democracy β September 2020
- Powerlessness Begets Hatred β September 2020
- Drawing Mohammed and the Power of Public Slights β November 2020
- The tacit collusion between pro- and anti-abortion culture war crusaders to never, ever seek principled consistency beyond the borders of their dispute β December 2020
- The importance of avoiding cross-cultural typical-minding on gender issues. β January 2021
- QAnon as a Columbian disease exchange of political memes. β January 2021
- How understanding public morale and democratic support for war can help you win at Civ 2. β February 2021
- "...people often talk of the exit versus voice dichotomy." β March 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- The shortest Quality Contribution ever! β April 2024
- "Interesting post, but I am reminded of how revolting and deleterious I find continental philosophy." β October 2024
- "The German parliament snap election is coming up, and for the first time I actually managed to get my postal voting documents on time and am in a realistic position to send them in before the deadline." β February 2025
- "I still have memories of a different Germany..." β February 2025
- "Well, the mistake is in thinking that 'left' and 'right' as used in practice represent any object-level political positions at all." β February 2025
- "It is quite likely that many men have an experience like this at some point in their lifetime, which teaches them to be judicious about even accidentally flaunting their capacity for physical violence, though often it is embarrassing and private and not a thing they will proudly talk about." β July 2025
@4QHURikzXS β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- So I was thinking about Scott's article "Sort by Controversial". Reddit has a "controversial" sorting option, which presumably surfaces comments which have received many upvotes and many downvotes. β Week of January 14th, 2019
@5434a β 3 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "[T]he transgender philosophy begins wherever they are and ends wherever they want to be." β June 2023
- "The 'assigned at birth' is another rhetorical sleight of hand from the TRA camp." β June 2023
- "Then a statistician comes along, shoves them all into one box and finds that 50% of people find someone at work/at parties/at church/online/etc." β June 2025
@7thHanyou β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- on playing as the villians β Month of July 2019
@89237849237498237427 β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Dysgenics β Week of June 11th, 2018
@895158 β 6 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- On tuition waivers. β 12-10-17
- "Should taxes discriminate by race?" β 12-10-17
- Estimating an upper bound on the utility of donating to Democratic political candidates. β 12-28-17
- Sharp little poem on the current state of /r/slatestarcodex β 03-08-18
- eating on the cheap β 04-02-18
- Simpson's paradox and low-skilled immigration β 04-02-18
@9461701 β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Social class β Week of July 23rd, 2018
@a_motte_alt β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- A Yelp Employee Shares What Actually Goes On With Yelp advertising β October 1/2, 2020
@a_random_user27 β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- "I once heard some interesting speculation as to why dropped-r's became standard in England but remained merely regional accents in the United States..." β 12-28-17
- Jordan Peterson: if a stronger belief in God would have prevented the rise of the Nazis β Week of May 21st, 2018
@aaa β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "No other media that existed before or after twitter is as bad as twitter." β November 2022
- "ChatGPT does Advent of Code 2023" β December 2023
@aaronb50 β 3 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Three frameworks for explaining why prison sentences are too long. β March 2021
- "There is approximately a 0% chance that a minimum wage is the policy youβd come up with. β May 2021 1/2
- Why? Politics and economics." β May 2021 1/2
@Abdul_Alhazred2018AD β 3 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- On Getting Tattoos for Himself β Week of September 17th, 2018
- Comment 2 β Week of October 1st, 2018
- Analyzing the Phenomenon of "Nice Guys," A story of B and K β Week of October 15th, 2018
@Abdul_Alhazred2018D β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- The Economic Life of a Millennial: Worst Uber Ride Ever β Week of September 17th, 2018
@ABigGuy4U β 4 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Wokeness is a great ideology for an empire standing at Fukuyamaβs end of history, when the main priority is global resource extraction and the only threats are threats from within." β December 2024
- "I donβt think Far Cry 5 meant to make a commentary about America or American politics, I think that was something it accidentally stumbled into by virtue of releasing around the time Trump started to become a controversial figure." β March 2025
- "Palpatine actually did a pretty good job tricking the Jedi into looking like they were trying to overthrow the Republic, and I donβt think the rank and file would object to their orders based on what they know." β October 2025
- "People including myself will often point out how the first American Civil War was militarily not much like a traditional civil war, and more like a war between two nations. But the political breakdown leading to that actually does look a lot like a civil war..." β November 2025
@Absox β 3 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- King Lear and Kurosawa Akira's "Ran" on the Banality of Virtue β December 2021 2/2
- "The present and future state of Texas hold'em: at the intersection of degenerate gambling and computational game theory" β January 2022 2/2
- "On Olympic defectors and the ongoing superpower competition for human capital" β March 2022
@ActuallyATleilaxuGhol β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Enforced silence on a topic can be more effective than enforced orthodoxy, since it's so much more subtle." β February 2023
@Ademonera β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@AdiabaticShear β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "Atomization promotes exploitative behaviors over cooperative/moral/pro-social behaviors." β September 2021 2/2
@adnzzzzZ β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
@aeiluindae β 3 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- on Steven Pinker on red-pilling and Trump. β 01-04-18
- /u/aeiluindae's β 01-15-18
- I noticed in the outrage against the smirking kid this week a lot of redirected rancor against the people who mistreated them in their youth. For a lot of people, a face like that boy's seems to be al β Week of January 21st, 2019
@agallantchrometiger β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- highlights the relationsship between the clarity and gameability of a ruleset β Month of August 2019
@Agentorange β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "For a given novel virus like SARS-CoV-2 the following steps are needed to produce an effective, safe, and most importantly manufacturable protein based vaccine." β November 2025
@ahh_fuck_it β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Doing favors for others and being annoyed by their gratitude. β February 2021
- "The culture war looks to me like people acting out their childhood resentments on the grand political stage." β July 2021 2/2
@ahobata β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "White identitarianism has gained traction online because of the way whites have been treated." β April 2024
@aiislove β 5 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "At the end of the day, the barrier for gay sex is so insanely low that any 'competition' that happens is purely elective." β January 2023
- "Fortunes go up, people are excited, they create great things. Fortunes go down, people feel worse about themselves, they create fewer great things." β April 2025
- "Today I make over 90% of my yearly earned income from print on demand items that I design myself." β March 2026
- "The reason heterosexual relationships are so positive for people is that a man completes a woman and a woman completes a man." β March 2026
- "The most unbearable thing in American culture is that disrespect is seen as high status and respect is seen as low status." β March 2026
@ajijaak β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- >Speculate, out loud, about the fertility status of women you meet β Week of June 24th, 2019
@AlanCrowe β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- memetic power β Week of April 30th, 2018
@AlertConfusion3782 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "In light of the killing of Daunte Wright, the debate about the police is swirling again." β April 2021
@alfrednachos β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Erisology and rationalism at the level of a community. β Week of May 7th, 2018
@AliveJesseJames β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- stats dump on race relation β 11-06-17
@alphanumericsprawl β 7 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The Decline and Fall of the Western Empire β October 2/2, 2020
- Maginot Syndrome: Bullish for Han Hegemony β February 2021
- "Don't go into Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya or Syria or Ukraine or Venezuela: it won't end well. We have neither the competence nor the willpower to succeed anymore." β September 2021 2/2
- "[W]hy aren't people more angry and upset about lableaks than all COVID public policy combined?" β February 2022
- "In this case, Western countries are, as a matter of national policy, wrecking their own economies." β July 2022
- "China's SMIC has started shipping domestically produced 7nm microchips." β July 2022
- "Imagine instead that you're an ascended intelligence with a body that spans kilometres, absorbing the ferocious energies of the Sun for fuel, in a constant state of hyperawareness about the universe." β August 2022
@AlternativeEbb β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- "nice guys", vulnerability β 04-02-18
- The sexual marketplace β Week of May 14th, 2018
@Amadan β 28 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "That said, I wonder if you've ever known any genuinely suicidally depressed people?" β October 2022
- "First They Came for the Fantasy Authors" β January 2023
- "I've never actually heard of a doctor at one of these clinics saying, 'Well, actually, have you considered you might not be trans?'" β February 2023
- "Becoming β March 2023
- Radicalized β March 2023
- Hugos" β March 2023
- "Sometimes you do see cops acting more aggressive and antagonistic than the situation calls for, when it's clear they are out of patience, but only rarely have I seen cops really behaving like "bastards" or taking down someone who didn't need to be taken down or using unnecessary force." β September 2023
- "Ask them if they are literally in favor of open borders and they will say no. But ask them what sort of restrictions we should have..." β January 2024
- "Show me. Show me her endorsing someone who literally wants to 'eradicate trans people.'" β April 2024
- "So, simply saying 'The Palestinians have a clear moral case,' even if you're right, does not solve the current problem." β May 2024
- "These 'woke' writers everyone complains about aren't inventing anything new, is the problem..." β August 2024
- "The average Republican, even really conservative Republicans, will fold if accused of sexism or racism and mumble something about how unfair such accusations are. Trump doesn't care!" β October 2024
- "No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this." β October 2024
- "It is petty and mean and beneath me. It is my coping mechanism, because this election sucks." β October 2024
- "A lot of hobby spaces have actually banned AI art, and if it's not banned, it's treated with extreme disdain." β October 2024
- "I mean I resent that I can't say 'Why yet another Pride event?' I mean I resent knowing that they expect us all to pretend and affirm and validate." β November 2024
- "The problem is not so much 'AI is crap' (that will become less and less true) but 'AI produces so much content so easily that even if you are looking for human content, it's becoming harder to find it.'" β January 2025
- "I try to be sympathetic to feminist arguments, because I do in fact believe women are people, but very much of modern feminist writing seems to fall within the stereotype often described here of women wanting all the privileges, none of the responsibility." β February 2025
- "It's a year beginning with a 2, which means there is drama over this year's WorldCon." β May 2025
- "This is basically just the modern progressive Christianity that dominates many denominations in the US and Europe, with a shiny new label." β June 2025
- "If you are serious about wanting to make a living from writing... you know that every single book on writing tells you the same thing ("don't quit your day job or have a supportive working spouse") for a reason, right?" β August 2025
- "Clearly I should go find greener pastures more aligned with me, right? There are none." β October 2025
- "I object to coercion and restricting people's freedom, even freedom to make bad choices, so I am not going to subscribe to 'We should make women do what's best for them' even if I really did believe it's what best for them and not motivated by self-interest." β November 2025
- "It's honestly baffling to me that anyone would say 'China seems fine, better than being forced to pray at the altar of DEI.'" β January 2026
- "Oh boy, literature sniping, my favorite kind of geek-out." β April 2026
- "I, personally, do not like racists." β April 2026
- "In my personal experience, trans people I know are mostly chill. Most of the time. Until you Ask Questions. Until they sense Doubt." β May 2026
- "I know some trans people, and they are mostly okay, but sometimes they Do and Say Things that really make me want to Say Things in response, and I don't because there would be Consequences that aren't worth it to me." β May 2026
@Amadanb β 4 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The Internet's Effect on Publishing β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- "I will say that [Basecamp's] David Hansson impresses me with his reasonable and nuanced takes, in marked contrast to the responses to him from both employees and the media." β May 2021 1/2
- "If your "divorce" happens, with all the blood and fire that implies, it will be a failure on many sides to adequately model the behavior and thinking of other people." β January 2022 2/2
- "It's been a losing and increasingly futile battle, but I will probably go down as a mistake theorist to the last, even as the leopards eat my face." β May 2022
@Ame_Damnee β 26 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- A Deep Dive Into A Few Polls β September 2020
- Identity Markers Ranked In Order of Importance By Partisanship β October 1/2, 2020
- How trans activists undermine decades of feminism through reifying gender stereotypes. β January 2021
- Christianity versus "womanist theology." β April 2021
- "I think when we've come to the point of needing leaflets warning 'Just a heads-up, but if you're facilitating a meeting between an adopted person and their birth family, be aware that some of them may decide to fuck each other', then something has come loose in the machinery of society." β April 2021
- "'We have inalienable rights and we were promised justice, liberty, peaceful lives and the common good!' is what lies behind everything, even BLM and whoever else you want to example as the most extreme." β April 2021
- "If you're only doing homework 'to get the teacher off my back', you're not going to learn." β May 2021 1/2
- "The wicked rouΓ© spies-for-hire seduced the ingenue press and left her pregnant with the story about Trump being Putin's pawn which she then delivered into the arms of the public." β May 2021 1/2
- "So whatever way we look at it, there is not an epidemic of murder against trans people." β May 2021 2/2
- "It will never happen, and when it does, you will have deserved it." β May 2021 2/2
- "Maybe when we have seven billion 160+ IQ people, we'll get Post-Scarcity Luxury Gay Space Communism. But until that day, it will still be a lot of the same things that enable success today..." β June 2021 1/2
- "Women and reproductive health issues is a fucking disaster minefield." β June 2021 2/2
- One small reason why the Jesuits didn't support Galileo. β July 2021 1/2
- "So having been burned several times, people with the 'wrong kind of views' soon learn not to snap at bait." β July 2021 2/2
- "Speaking from the other side of the fence, the Reformation did need to happen, but more in the vein of the Counter-Reformation." β November 2021 1/2
- "And when I see people boasting of how they dodged jury duty, and only idiots who are too dumb to figure out how to get out of it actually sit on juries, it does make me angry." β November 2021 2/2
- "Do you not have anything that if you lost it, it would hurt you deeply?" β November 2021 2/2
- 1 β December 2021 1/2
- 2 β December 2021 1/2
- "I grumble a lot about the modern church, and Francis is definitely not my pope the way Benedict was, but you know: grumble, grumble, but still filial obedience because he's the pope and I'm not..." β December 2021 2/2
- "Harems were not really about sexual preferences, or not solely; there was a whole lot of politics wrapped up in them also." β January 2022 2/2
- Summarizing Judge Jackson's sentencing record. β March 2022
- "Like I said, I'm hyper about this because back at the start, I was one of those going 'No way this ever happened, priests and nuns would not do this, it's lies or mentally ill people or grifters!'" β April 2022
- "Today is unstable? Try being a courtier in Henry VIII's court." β April 2022
- "Sure, but the pro-choice side kept pushing and pushing until the pro-life had to dig their heels in." β May 2022
- "So when The Thing They Said Would Never Happen Keeps On Happening (not going to link to any particular example even though I have one in mind, because it would be a distraction), what do we think?" β May 2022
@AmrikeeAkbar β 3 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Srinivasan's book, The Network State is largely an attempt to envision how recent technological developments β mostly, crypto β might enable the formation of alternative societies that look quite a bit like what Stephenson envisioned." β January 2023
- "Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: The Machine Politician Vs the Administrative State" β June 2024
- "Sure, we can smash their conventional forces, and their economy, and kill all their leaders. But in another twenty years there will be a fresh crop of military age males. And what will their formative experiences have been?" β April 2026
@anatoly β 4 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- The Great Brownie War β Week of May 21st, 2018
- "A Paper Down the Memory Hole β Week of September 10th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- More Culture War Discussions and Less Culture-Warring, Please β October 2/2, 2020
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Discussing 'a non-proportionate response to the Oct 7 incident' sounds like nonsense, because the Oct 7 started a war, not a 'response'." β October 2023
@anechoicmedia β 12 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- [BLANK] has done more to reduce global badness than anything else β 11-14-17
- "Wolff's book is glorified gossip and suffers all the problems that implies. However, it is probably roughly correct in its portrayal of the president. We know this because if it were grossly wrong, the administration could trivially prove this publicly." β 01-09-18
- Contra /u/JTarrou on a finance-based approach to immigration β 01-15-18
- A posited distinction between individual fairness and actuarial fairness β 02-01-18
- on partially-successful prohibition maybe having been the point all along β 02-01-18
- Deeply Ingrained visions of the education system is viewed, and how this affects perceptions of Affirmative Action β Week of August 13th, 2018
- Heritability: Chimps and Airplanes β Week of September 24th, 2018
- How Smart is Elon Musk Really? β Week of October 1st, 2018
- >If we ignore that number and just look at physical resources in reality, why can't we do this? β February 2019
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The Republican congress effectively conceded the ACA issue in 2017, with their spectacular failure to reach consensus on any of the "repeal" bills. The dog finally caught the car and looked foolish, u β Week of February 25th, 2019
- This is basically "The United 93 Election" for Democrats. Like, "sure, (candidate) may be a dumbo with an incoherent/ill-formed policy vision, but damn it, this is our moment and we either go all-in o β Week of February 25th, 2019
- The Problem of Inflation Analyses β August 2020
@annafirtree β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- There is a blog, called SlateStarCodex, written by Scott Alexander. β Week of February 25th, 2019
@anodognosic β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- talks about crime in Brazil β Month of August 2019
@anonymous_rocketeer β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Well, I went off to a fairly prestigious college as a bright-eyed 18 year old, trying for a degree in economics and engineering. I was told directly by the university that they'd give me lots of finan β Week of April 8th, 2019
@Anouleth β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- discuss the popularity of Joe Rogan β Month of August 2019
@anti_dan β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@anti-intellectual β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Always On Camera, Never the Cameraman β January 2020
@Antidisestab β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
@AnythingMachine β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Sharing Articles on the Future of Progressive Politics β Weeks of December 16th and 23rd, 2019
@apostasy_is_cool β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "When someone gender-conforming lists his gender-conforming pronouns, he's basically declaring that his ideology has already won. He's raising the rainbow flag over the Reichstag." β October 2021 1/2
@ApplesauceIrishCream β 3 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I've been trying to get myself to do a writeup of Walter Russell Mead's four traditions of American foreign policy..." β May 2023
- "There was a multi-decade trend across the South from one-party Democrat control to mostly one-party Republican control, but this trend happened at different rates in different states, and even more so, in different electoral contexts." β June 2023
- "Anticipating the vacancy of John Kerry's Senate seat if he won election to the Presidency that year, the legislature amended the procedures for filling a Senate vacancy over Romney's veto, stripping him of his appointment power, and calling for a special election to fill the vacancy temporarily." β December 2023
@Appropriate-Report β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Supplies for Border Crossers being an Attractive Nuisance β February 2020
@ApproxKnowledgeSite β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- unfucking your life β 11-01-17
- here β 11-01-17
@April16-1457BC β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "I am uncomfortable with the direction of treating statements of the policy positions of one party as hate speech." β November 2021 1/2
@April20-1400BC β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "To make a governor resign I would expect more than a claim that some people found him 'creepy.' I really can't tell what was behind this." β August 2021
- "Somehow people understand what matters when it is another group but can't get their head around the idea that a nation is the people who live there, not the people who might move their in future." β August 2021
@aqouta β 10 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "Finding out your spouse can't have children doesn't necessarily mean you'd leave them but I think most men who are looking for a partner to start a family would filter out barren women before the first date." β April 2021
- "You think antipathy towards Doctors is even in the same class as antipathy towards lawyers and bankers?" β May 2021 2/2
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "To conservatives progress is sound investment and carefully maintained stability for that investment to grow." β December 2022
- "There is undoubtedly learning at Harvard, but is the point of Harvard the learning?" β April 2024
- "It's that we, the voters, have no single coherent thing that we want or can demand." β June 2024
- "Aqouta goes to China" β March 2025
- Part 2 β March 2025
- Part 3 β March 2025
- "The piece uses the term 'identity' 33 times and I think defining that term is at the heart of this whole thing. Identity has a few factors and all importantly interact with what trans even is." β November 2025
- "What are other trade partners supposed to do with a nation that's long term goal is to not buy anything from their partners?" β December 2025
@Areopagitica_ β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- social peace in campus protests β 11-06-17
@ares β 3 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "This occurred back in 2005-2006: hunting Somali pirates before hunting Somali pirates was cool." β May 2024
- "So I guess the US government is pretty consistent in flipping-the-fuck-out if you harm birds." β June 2024
- "Again, there could be benefits to moving to a more "open source" shipbuilding model, but there would also be plenty of challenges, and I don't think it's clear how the scales would tip until we start hammering out the details." β November 2024
@ArgumentumAdLapidem β 12 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Critcizing the Cook β Week of August 20th, 2018
- The Cyclic Nature of Centralization in Tech β Week of September 24th, 2018
- This book is near and dear to my heart. As a young ArgumentumAdLapidem, a undergraduate physics major, I was really feeling my oats, and taking some upper-level history classes, just to prove I could β Week of January 7th, 2019
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Here's a fun culture war story - from Japan. β Week of April 1st, 2019
- This is amazing. I think there are several failure modes at work here, which aren't necessarily exclusive to left-leaning causes. β Week of April 1st, 2019
- Thanks for the details on the plan. β Week of June 24th, 2019
- b β Month of July 2019
- on recent events in hong kong. β Month of August 2019
- On "Open" β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- Accountability and Trust - Its Not So Easy Being Green β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- A Quick Guide to IKEA and Furniture Quality β June 1/2, 2020
- here β June 1/2, 2020
@arjin_ferman β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Are The Global Elites Coordinating β January 2023
- Push LGBT Acceptance And Gender Theory?" β January 2023
@ArjinFerman β 9 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "If RETVRNING is not an option, I do have a general principle in mind on how to proceed, but I don't have a name for it." β November 2023
- "My general conclusion is: contrary to Jack Turban, and the general pre-2022-ish pro-trans discourse, gender affirming care, especially it's pediatric variant, is not uncontroversial within medicine, it's not The Science, it's an experiment." β March 2024
- "The WPATH To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions" β June 2024
- "Another batch of documents from Boe v. Marshall shines light on the buried systemic review commissioned by WPATH" β June 2024
- "My old libertarian self would probably spit on me, but there's something to be said about these sort of communal activities, where one does not have to fret about their relative status, or line going up." β January 2025
- "Are puberty blockers chemical castration?" β March 2025
- "Psycho-Pass is set in a post-cyberpunk future, where Japan developed technology capable of looking into our very souls." β April 2025
- "Evidence Based Medicine, Science Based Medicine... I just want Based Medicine" β September 2025
- "One of the open questions on the trans issue is just how big is the problem, really, particularly as it relates to children, and how often they're prescribed irreversible medical procedures." β May 2026
@ArmedTooHeavily β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "The current state of Portland makes the costs of these luxury beliefs ubiquitous and impossible to ignore." β March 2024
@Armlegx218 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- What Do Americans Want From a President? β May 1/2, 2020
@Artimaeus332 β 7 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Oy, this brings me back. In high school, our psychology teacher-in-training did a similar exercise, but instead of filling out a worksheet with points, the exercise was framed as a race, with the goal β Week of April 15th, 2019
- At the current moment, if you're writing and publishing YA literature about gay teenagers, wokeness is probably a valuable part of your brand. This isn't to say that books about gay teenagers couldn't β Week of April 29th, 2019
- on defining the consiquences of policy β Month of July 2019
- A Perspective on the Buisness Culture and Wokeness β Weeks of December 16th and 23rd, 2019
- Liberal vs Progressive - Differing Political Strategies β Weeks of December 16th and 23rd, 2019
- On the Problems With Narratives β January 2020
- "When I read Kendi I just want to say, dude, get off your high horse." β June 2021 2/2
@asdasdasdasd β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@asdfasdflkjlkjlkj β 3 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Rejecting Commercialization of "Emotional Labor" β March 2020
- A Thorough Review of the Arbery Shooting β May 1/2, 2020
- A Chestertonian Intellectual Journey β October 1/2, 2020
@asdfaslkjhdfaasd β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- fat shaming β 11-01-17
@asdflkaiuwemn β 7 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- transgression being sexy, and what that means for the politics of sexuality β 11-06-17
- gender dynamics and negotiations, a gross and/or humorous and/or illustrative take depending on who you ask β 02-01-18
- "Why is it taken for granted, in every one of these pieces, that men as a class need to be taken down a peg or two?" β 02-01-18
- on how trying to be not-racist routinely backfires, and then it's awkward β 04-02-18
- appeal of blood-sports β Week of April 30th, 2018
- Personal Finance Under 50K β Week of September 10th, 2018
- Critiquing the Podcast "No" β Week of October 15th, 2018
@AshLael β 4 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- He wasnβt being pedantic, he was trying to be clearer to help explain the point you clearly were not getting. Itβs not fair to demand people explain themselves better and at the same time bitch at the β Week of February 18th, 2019
- It's Ok to Be You β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- Protect the Player Going for the Ball β January 2020
π£ TheMotte.org era
@Ashlepius β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Harmful Academics β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
@AspiringAlzabo β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- ICE vs Nazis β Week of June 18th, 2018
@Astranagant β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Sunderland, UK, is on fire." β August 2024
@AT497 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "The problems weren't as 'dealt with' as we thought at the time, and this lead to a greater willingness to examine all problems." β December 2021 2/2
@atokenliberal6D_4 β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@atomic_gingerbread β 5 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- There are two kinds of intersectionality. The first kind demands consideration of the unique circumstances of people who are members of multiple marginalized groups. In this case we see that gay whi β Week of February 18th, 2019
- In short, pointing out hypocrisy is an ad hominem. So it is. Lisa Borders not believing her son's accuser doesn't mean she's unjustified when, in other contexts, she implores us to believe women. β Week of February 25th, 2019
- (Content warning: extreme cynicism) β Week of May 20th, 2019
- I was skeptical about your purported reason for this statute being adopted, so I tracked down the city council meeting minutes where the ordinance was debated. In the words of Councilman Lester, who β Week of June 3rd, 2019
- I've written before that LGBT activism has two forks that are not always distinguished: a political project to secure civil rights for those who do not conform to traditional norms of gender and sexua β Week of June 24th, 2019
@attitudegratitude β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- You Don't Need a Coyote to Enter the Red Tribe β June 2/2, 2020
@AugustusPertinax β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- A Deep Dive Into Police Killings β June 1/2, 2020
@auralgasm β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
@Aurondarklord β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Difficulties in Drafting a Culture War Peace Treaty β Week of October 8th, 2018
@Autistic_Hitler_666 β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- the alt-right's mythos about Jews β 04-02-18
@AutisticThinker β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- The Drug Problem in Yemen β Week of September 24th, 2018
@baazaa β 3 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Problems with Progressive Education β Week of September 10th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The Errors of Neoclassical Economists β October 2/2, 2020
- "People do in fact vote in their self-interest on average. It's just the left has this bizarre idea that everyone below the upper-middle class relies on government handouts." β February 2022
@Bagdana β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
@BahRamYou β 4 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I've heard stuff like this before, that Hispanic is a nonsense category. But I actually think it makes sense..." β May 2024
- "When you really learn about foreign cultures, it's not all tasty food and fun dances." β September 2025
- "Do you remember a short story called "Cat Person," which was published in 2017? It went viral and caused quite a stir at the time." β November 2025
- "You know what movie I'm kind of coming around to? The Last Jedi." β November 2025
@Baila β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "It seems to me that American hegemony has created such a prosperous peace in the remainder of the West that many non-American westerners have come to hold false beliefs about the nature of their prosperity and the quality of their societies, laws and governments." β November 2022
- "On Communist Supervillains, Cognitive Dissonance, and IQ." β September 2024
@baj2235 β 9 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- University finances β 11-14-17
Kermit the FrogJordan Peterson in a nutshell β 04-02-18- Culture's Role in Fiscal Responsibliy β Week of September 10th, 2018
- So I'll bite. β Week of October 22, 2018
- Reminds me of the Galbrush, because I think there is some truth to it. β Week of November 05, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- So I'll give you an overview of the basic process, as I am more or less de facto in charge of them. If I had more energy, I'd write this up in School House Rock I'm Just a Bill format, alas I don't ha β Week of February 25th, 2019
- Take Your (Intellectual) Medicine on Coronavirus β May 1/2, 2020
- Nostradamus Would be Jealous - Viral Zoonosis and the Origins of COVID19 β May 1/2, 2020
- On Shepherding Communities: Thoughts and Criticism β October 1/2, 2020
@bamboo-coffee β 3 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Alienation, Idpol, and Promises: The Left β Week of October 1st, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- I was half way through a long post on this, but here's the short of it. β Week of June 10th, 2019
- Why suspicion of China, in connection with COVID-19, seems warranted. β January 2021
@BarbarianPhilosopher β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- how Vietnam also has societal problems β 11-01-17
- The Vietnamese Palate β Week of August 27th, 2018
@barkappara β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- On Political Needles β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- The Alienation of Marxmensip (Reply to /u/KulakRevolt) β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
@BarnabyCajones β 62 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- presidential elections as popularity contests β 09-16-17
- Exit vs. Voice, cultural determinants of conflict aversion, suburbia β 10-07-17
- downthread digression β 10-14-17
- the disappearance of traditional social norms β 10-14-17
- competing perceptions of the political valence of academia, with parallels to the SSC community β 10-14-17
- technology raising your kids β 10-14-17
- the duel between the University of Wisconsin and the state legislature β 10-14-17
- growing up Mormon β 10-14-17
- fat shaming β 11-01-17
- which stories get "air time" in this subreddit, and why β 11-01-17
- New Atheism β 11-01-17
- the view from low-information voterdom β 11-01-17
- GamerGate β 11-01-17
- transgression being sexy, and what that means for the politics of sexuality β 11-06-17
- competing media bubbles β 11-06-17
- intra-group identity politics, feminism, Kevin Spacey β 11-06-17
- how moralizing sabotages coalitions β 11-06-17
- the limitations of trusting the experts β 11-06-17
- universal culture and cultural self-defense β 11-14-17
- Louis CK and show-business β 11-14-17
- On the dichotomy between government and tribalism (?) as forces of power and social organization in America. β 12-10-17
- "Is it reasonable to allow [teenagers to marry] if they already have kids together?" β 12-20-17
- on urban schooling by race and social class β 12-20-17
- "In her telling, a lot of rougher neighborhoods are just functionally unpoliced until a homicide has already happened. And there's no trust on the part of residents of those neighborhoods that the law will resolve their problems, and so they don't cooperate with the police at all." β 12-28-17
- "...And regardless of how much the law, on paper, should treat everyone equally, as a practical matter, the social workers and teachers and people who staff disability and Medicaid offices are going to treat them in certain ways, because they, as a group, face certain special challenges and present a lot of really hard problems, much of it seemingly self imposed." β 12-28-17
- "In this telling, the interesting observation about Steve Jobs isn't that he was an asshole - that's par for the course. The interesting observation about Jobs is that, despite his specific set of traits, he wasn't involved in any physical conquest by force that left a giant trail of dead in his wake, and instead made a giant business that made stuff for other people that they largely wanted." β 12-28-17
- Some difficulties experienced when discussing with [a sample of] left-identitarians IRL β 01-09-18
- "I've been thinking a bit about how social 'liberation' is experienced over time by different people, and wondering how it plays a role in the intractability of the culture wars." β 02-08-18
- Migrants from New Jersey to Georgia brought their ideas about small government with them β 03-08-18
- political engagement and self-care β 04-02-18
- "different groups have different values, the kinds of bad actors they fail to police from within their own coalitions are different, and it's often glaringly apparent to people outside their coalitions." β 04-02-18
- on faith promoting stories β 04-23-18
- On fighting over definitions of words, identity politics, and who can be said to speak for whom. β Week of May 7th, 2018
- On Jordan Peterson's bedevilment of left wing pundents. β Week of May 7th, 2018
- Transition (or lack thereof) between America's tribes β Week of May 14th, 2018
- How the costal pressβs moral critiques of Hollywood parallel with those formerly made by the religious right β Week of May 21st, 2018
- Military Influence β Week of June 4th, 2018
- Universalism β Week of June 4th, 2018
- Anecdotes β Week of June 4th, 2018
- White-Knighting β Week of June 11th, 2018
- Describing the Indescribable: β Week of June 18th, 2018
- On Distorted Views β Week of July 9th, 2018
- Definitions of the Word Racist β Week of July 9th, 2018
- Having a Traceable Online Persona β Week of July 9th, 2018
- Identity β Week of July 16th, 2018
- Soccer in the US β Week of July 16th, 2018
- Comparing Culture War to Everquest β Week of July 16th, 2018
- How Parenthood Changes You β Week of July 23rd, 2018
- BarnabyCajonesβ response β Week of August 6th, 2018
- Trump's relationship with the media β Week of August 6th, 2018
- The Loss of Shared Context in Communication in the Age of Twitter β Week of August 6th, 2018
- Empathy in the Underclass β Week of September 10th, 2018
- Response β Week of September 17th, 2018
- Passion Makes You Biased β Week of September 24th, 2018
- Vitriolic Academy β Week of October 1st, 2018
- Comparing Canned Phrases when De-mormoning to the NPC Meme β Week of October 15th, 2018
- I don't think your question addresses the reason for the opposition, because at this point , for the people who object, the denotation of "toxic masculinity" is obviously very, very secondary to its c β Week of October 22, 2018
- As far as I understand, that last assertion is almost literally the opposite of true. Exactly 100 years ago, Progressives were trying to suppress voter turn out as much as possible everywhere. There β Week of October 29, 2018
- For your last statement, founder of sociology Emilie Durkheim wouldn't be on board, as I understand it. β Week of November 05, 2018
- I largely agree with your sentiment. Most of the left of center people I know take their moral concerns and worldviews very, very seriously - much of my writing here is really about what happens when β Week of November 12, 2018
- Springboarding from this, I want to note something in this space that I find really, seriously puzzling about the more general post-meritocracy stance. β Week of November 26, 2018
- I would be extremely curious about this as well, but from a slightly different angle. β Week of January 28th, 2019
@BaronVSS β 4 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Why Websites Suck β July 2/2, 2020
- "I put forward the opposite notion: echo chambers are based, and possibly even group-pilled. In fact, I would say that they are the only long term community organisation that is viable." β April 2021
- "If you want to prevent incels, the best thing to do is to identify boys seemingly without any friends and are the victim of constant bullying from others and help them form a social group of their own." β May 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
@barristan_selmy β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Fun hypotheticals, complicated feelings, and harsh realities about a war with Canada, from a Canadian point of view" β January 2025
@Barry_Cotter β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- thread on the future of human rights β Month of July 2019
@Bartender_Venator β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Speaking for myself (never a massive HBD argument partaker), if I get into an argument over it, I don't expect to hear anything new, just arguments I saw refuted here ten years ago, often with a heavy dollop of bad faith." β October 2025
- "I'll leave it to the gallery to decide if OP simply has natural talent at this, or is a trained and well-polished master baiter, but, from me, kudos." β November 2025
@bassicallyboss β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Social Status β Week of June 11th, 2018
@bbqturtle β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Rationalist Contrarianism β Week of June 4th, 2018
@bearvert222 β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The Tyranny of Meaningfulness β May 1/2, 2020
- The Weird Dynamics of Conservative Moviemaking β June 1/2, 2020
@Beej67 β 8 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- I'm not a climate scientist, but I am a licensed PE, hydrologist, and have a masters degree from a top 5 engineering university in environmental fluid mechanics. I also read IPCC AR5 cover to cover, a β Week of October 22, 2018
- The following post is an impartial writing critique, and has no relevant input to the content. β Week of January 7th, 2019
- She Did Not Go Gently β April 2019
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Thanks for the tag. Now I lost an hour of my workday. You owe me a beer. :) Maybe I can save this down for a later article or something. β Week of March 4th, 2019
- Thanks for replying, genuinely. I didn't totally want to go down this road, but I'd like to, since your reply was totally even keeled and I just want to elaborate on my perspective. β Week of May 6th, 2019
- "Natural selection has bred a people who absolutely will not stand up for any government ideal, because if they did they'd be dead." β August 2021
- "I think the dynamics around the IVM discussion were classic Game B sensemaking crisis culture war stuff." β June 2022
- "The article basically analyzes the conservative claim on social media from last week that the 87,000 tax collectors in the Inflation Reduction Act would be used to attack poor people." β August 2022
@Beerwulf42 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Analyzing The Music in Hamilton β July 1/2, 2020
@Belisarius β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "It is exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time to be doing to be promoting hypotheticals of bad right wingers to excuse and downplay any of this." β July 2024
- "While going full 'vaccines are bad and unecessary' is stupid the pro establishment fanatical close minded position is also stupid and there are valid issues animating RFK and others." β November 2024
@Belisaurus_Rex β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The History of The Bastille β July 1/2, 2020
@Ben___Garrison β 3 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "...the decline of monogamy has had a catastrophic impact on the rate of healthy relationships." β October 2022
- "The time when Trump sabotaged immigration restrictions, and the alt-right cheered" β May 2024
@BergilSunfyre β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Constructing a Feel-Good Civil War Historiography β April 2020
@Bernd β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Are you in the market for a new heating or cooling system?" β December 2022
- "I wrote about the likelihood of the Move To Mastodon resulting in a purity spiral of banning-everyone-who-won't-ban-the-target-of-the-week, and it seems to have already started." β December 2022
@best_cat β 19 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Explicit vs. Vague Rules β Week of August 20th, 2018
- The Purpose of Silly Fury β Week of August 20th, 2018
- The Financial Intricacies of Bay Area Sandwiches β Week of August 27th, 2018
- Issues with Bay Area Restate β Week of August 27th, 2018
- On Doubt and Math in Law β Week of October 1st, 2018
- Trump and the media are in a symbiotic relationship β Week of October 1st, 2018
- Adjusting to new alliances β Week of October 1st, 2018
- Definition and Praxis of Political Correctness β Week of October 8th, 2018
- Being a Successful TFCMHWiSE β Week of October 15th, 2018
- I'd explain it as a mix of the ideas in "reverse any advice you hear" and "right is the new left" β Week of December 03, 2018
- > Isn't an overwhelming scientific consensus about a scientific topic good enough? β Week of December 31st, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- This will create way more toxoplasma. β Week of May 20th, 2019
- The phrasing isn't particularly weird. If we truncated the tweet to: β Week of June 3rd, 2019
- To make a comparison: I spent a while on the volunteer board of a church. β Week of June 10th, 2019
- Reasoning about "the poor", as some homogeneous mass, is a bit odd. True tragedies exist. And people can have obstacles that prevent them from trying various solutions. β Week of June 17th, 2019
- I'm not right wing, but share a relevant part of their worldview. Roughly: β Week of June 17th, 2019
- 's response β Month of July 2019
- on labor specialization β Month of August 2019
- Models of Crime - Right vs Left β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
@bewilduhbeast β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- resident genetic editing sleuth β 04-02-18
@bibbledyboppit β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Some awesome regnancy and nursing advice β 01-09-18
@biggest_decision β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- You can learn a lot about the world from Wikipedia. And it has many facts and dates and maps and pieces of information. But I often think that you can learn a lot about how the world works by looking β Week of October 15th, 2018
@BigObjectPermanenceSh β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Perhaps the root of evil is plebeian resentment as such." β April 2026
@BigTittyEmoGrandpa β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- this exchange β Month of July 2019
@BillyDeeWilliams1990 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- This post is very long, so I apologize in advance. Earlier today I read this article at The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/extremists-understand-what-tech-platforms-have- β Week of March 18th, 2019
@birb_cromble β 4 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "There are a lot of replies down-thread that boil down to 'just have kids bro', that seem to be dripping with a kind of smugness that suggests that it truly is that easy, and any complications that come along with it are speed bumps at best." β December 2025
- "Because right now, I'm a little afraid for my 401(k), and with each passing day it's less because I'm afraid that I'll be out of a job and more that I have no idea how these valuations are justified." β January 2026
- "They won't offer unfettered access to the foundation model because it's 'unsafe', but they're simultaneously willing to give up on 'safety' as a core principle." β February 2026
- "Management thinks it's the best thing ever because it can automatically spam LinkedIn for them. Development uses it as a more accessible StackOverflow. But we've given up on agentic coding for the time being." β April 2026
@bird_of_play β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- The role of values in effective altruism β Week of September 24th, 2018
@Birdsday β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- To give some context: There have been elections in Germany for two of our "states" over the last 2-3 weeks, the results leading to Angela Merkel making this announcement now. β Week of October 29, 2018
@BiteVisual β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
@bitter_cynical_angry β 3 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- The Talisman of the Gun: Pro vs. Anti gun Fetishization β Week of July 2nd, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- There's actually an entire book called "The Introvert Advantage" by Marti Laney, which I read years ago and recall being a fairly accurate description of my mindset. There are also a number of pop-psy β Week of June 17th, 2019
- shares some code β Month of August 2019
@bkawcazn β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- a quick and informal neo-luddite manifesto β 04-02-18
@bl1y β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
@Bleep β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "The Matt Gaetz Story: Blackmail Operation, Distraction Attempt, or A Bunch of Convenient Coincidences involving a Naughty Congressman?" β November 2024
- "But somehow, universalizing single-payer to everyone is going to force lower salaries and other cost-cutting measures, much of which could be done right now under current law given just the basic buying power of the federal government by conditioning funds." β January 2026
@blendorgat β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
@blooblyblobl β 7 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I can't see the US being globally competitive in manufacturing anything that needs a Li-Ion battery in it 20 years from now." β March 2024
- "The case for space mining is a complete, unsalvageable disaster." β May 2024
- "I think once the Dominion CEO demonstrably perjured himself by claiming that Dominion voting systems don't have modems in them (photographically, demonstrably false) and then again by claiming they weren't connected to the internet (demonstrably false again per the dominion records leaked by Dar Leaf), I decided that voting machines are completely ridiculous and no one should ever assume an election in which a voting machine is involved is fair." β May 2024
- "The value of AI in robotics is that it can help plan motion in uncontrolled environments." β June 2024
- "My father runs (well, ran) a business remodeling homes in and around a city where such adjacency to reality is the default disposition, and the cost and time difference between projects in this county and projects in the neighboring farmland county would make your head spin." β August 2024
- "Reform is a far better option than repeal. But the Jones Act is a meme and virtually all discussion of it is unproductive signaling." β November 2024
- "The transgender memeplex wants to expand the usage of the word 'woman' to include unfalsifiable claims about someone's internal mental state." β February 2025
@Bombadil β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@BoneDrained β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "There have been two recent high profile shootings." β February 2024
@BonJellairs β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
@Borzivoj β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- Response to @ymeskhout β November 2023
@BothAfternoon β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- The SPLCβs War on Christmas...Calendars? β Week of June 25th, 2018
- Justice, Tabloids, and Witches β Week of September 24th, 2018
@Botond173 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The Woke USA is a Speeding Locomotive With No Brakes β June 1/2, 2020
@BPC3 β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Consumer protection laws in Germany vs. the U.S. β 12-10-17
- Environmentalism β Week of June 4th, 2018
@brberg β 10 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- On an often misquoted quip about race by Lee Atwater β 02-01-18
- the marketplace of ideas, by analogy to lawnmowers β 04-23-18
- Racial Resentment β Week of June 4th, 2018
- Chaining Grammar Up in his Basement β Week of August 13th, 2018
- > where the measure of a man is always assumed to be the size of his paycheck and everything else is just a silly hobby. β Week of December 10, 2018
- It's important to note that labor's share of production and profits do not sum to 100%. In addition to labor's share, there's: β February 18th - April 1st, 2019
- In a thread about political videos in YouTube recommendations over in the Den of Iniquity, I mentioned that most of my YouTube recommendations were popular Japanese songs from the late Showa era ('70s β Relaunching the /r/SSC Quality Contribution Roundup
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Its Ok to be a White White Hat Troll β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- Instinctive Misconceptions About Bloomberg and Wealth β March 2020
- "As far as I can tell, there's very limited evidence that billionaires are actually making much use of the "buy, borrow, die" strategy alleged in that Pro Publica hit piece." β October 2021 2/2
@BreakerofHorsesandMen β 5 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "The Internet is mostly a sewage pipe with a small bubble of moderately fresh air trapped up against the pipe, and I donβt find your argument that therefore libraries should also become sewage pipes to be at all convincing." β April 2025
- " If [Aella] converts to traditionalist Catholicism in her 60βs, it wonβt surprise me at all." β June 2025
- "So, I donβt count 'We have more bridges, McDonalds, and better military toys' as a definitive killer app in the endless war between peoples/nations/cultures." β October 2025
- "This church has absolutely lost sight of the priority to save souls, by overemphasizing loving their neighbor." β November 2025
- "All of that could have been avoided by the planners packing up their notebooks, going home, and letting natural civilizational cycles of rising and falling fertility play out." β December 2025
@bsbbtnh β 14 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- How not to engage a suspect β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
- Molding the Care/Harm Model Around Partisan Politics β April 2020
- Fractional Reserve Banking In a Nutshell β April 2020
- Tenancy/Zoning Laws and Unintended Market Distortions β May 1/2, 2020
- What Good Would Come if Arbery's Killers Were In the Right? β May 1/2, 2020
- The Illusions in Environmental Policy β May 2/2, 2020
- The Businesses that Won't Rebuild β June 1/2, 2020
- Writing Good and Bad Female Characters β September 2020
- Every Country Is Not Vietnam β October 2/2, 2020
- "Language is always evolving, but it's weird that only those who lean left are involved in this process." β July 2021 2/2
- "Autism has really been diluted over the past 20-30 years, almost becoming a status symbol." β April 2022
- "Looking at RCID financial statements, I don't see $2 billion in bond debt." β April 2022
- " An anti-gouging bill won't lower the price of gas; at best it does nothing, and at worst it leads to nationwide shortages." β July 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "All these gender 'subcultures' are for the normies. They have absolutely no barrier to entry, you need no knowledge, there's no learning curve." β October 2022
@bsmac45 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
@BuddyPharaoh β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Characteristics of the Internet β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
@BurdensomeCount β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Why Have Women's Sports? β July 2/2, 2020
- A dive into the numbers on Harvard admission without "modifiers." β January 2021
@BurdensomeCountTheWhi β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "On ruling well as a substitute for morality" β October 2023
@Butlerian β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@byvlos β 4 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Problems with Political Argumentation β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- Explaining the Citizen United Ruling β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
- Skepticism Regarding Voting System Reform β Weeks of December 16th and 23rd, 2019
- Well-off, Smart, Healthy, and Empty β January 2020
@c_o_r_b_a β 6 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Googling is absolutely crucial in the tech field. Google capability is probably a better determinant of success in a programming or IT role than anything else, including degrees, certifications, exper β February 18th - April 1st, 2019
π’ r/TheMotte era
- on cherry picking for polemical effect β Month of August 2019
- discuss non-binary robots β Month of August 2019
- Two Movies: Trump and Media Derangement Syndrome β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- Identarianism and Extremism β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- The Most Gender-Imbalanced Game β May 1/2, 2020
@cae_jones β 4 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- On Free Will β Week of September 17th, 2018
- I am age dysphoric, and ever since I read that The Federalist article, I've been thinking NO DO NOT DRAG ME INTO THIS! β Week of November 05, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Peaking in 1996. β March 2021
π£ TheMotte.org era
@caethan β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
@campfire β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "A breakdown of the Daniel Greene-Naomi King sexual misconduct scandal" β February 2025
@campfireSmoresEaten β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Humanity going extinct is a function of AI capabilities. Those will continue to increase." β April 2024
@Cananopie β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
@CandidVoice β 7 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- comment β 04-18-18
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Just your daily reminder that the culture war has always existed in some form or fashion. β Week of March 25th, 2019
- This is entirely false and laughably uncharitable. You can do better. β Week of May 13th, 2019
- I think a necessary component of arguing in good faith is recognizing the limits of your own knowledge and being willing to update your priors when necessary. I think it's a conversation between eq β Week of May 20th, 2019
- summarizes the case against Jeffery Epstien β Month of July 2019
- how often aliens show up for thier court dates β Month of July 2019
- on the supreme court β Month of August 2019
@CanIHaveASong β 12 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Against the Tradwife Meme β September 2020
- Why do religious people have more children? β October 1/2, 2020
- The Impact of Waiting Until Marriage For Intimacy β October 1/2, 2020
- Male Privilege in the Gymnasium β October 2/2, 2020
- Order, Chaos, and the Creation Story β November 2020
- Inappropriate Advances In the Video Game Industry: A Candid Discussion β November 2020
- Evolution as a Creation Myth β August 2021
- "If we lose the incest taboo, we run the risk of making all love and all intimacy sexual..." β January 2022 1/2
- "In Favor of Discrimination" β January 2022 2/2
- "It irks me that Aella doesn't bother to define intimacy and love." β March 2022
- "I submit that the fundamental unit of existance/personhood/whatever is ... the relationship." β May 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Our sex culture needs a deeper culture change in order to work for most people again, but we have to find a way to fix this! Our whole future is riding on it." β September 2023
@cantbeproductive β 8 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Validation and Presentation β February 2020
- The difference between rural white conservatism, and rural white nihilism. β January 2021
- Crying a river through history: the exhaustibility of sentimentality. β March 2021
- Asian bias incidents by the numbers and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. β March 2021
- Translating the New Testament in search of fun and theological insight. β March 2021
- "Itβs funny reading outlets similar to the Atlantic bemoan this phrase, whenβbecause of the Atlanticβs Anglo-Saxon heritageβwe have articles about Anglo-Saxon tradition from the 19th century." β April 2021
- "If they can write this stuff about Donald Trump, so synonymous with New York that he had a cameo in Home Alone, born and raised by a father raised in New York, whose name is writ large on the skyscrapers, then let us please have one comic about Yangβs California values." β May 2021 2/2
- Weighing what is known, versus what is said, about the infamous Tulsa riots. β May 2021 2/2
@cantrunn β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Disappointment in Artistic Culture of the Right: A Historical Meander β November 2020
@Capital_Room β 14 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Cancellation as Cultural Imperialism β January 2020
- Examining 'Amerikaner' Culture β January 2020
- Analyzing "White" Culture β July 1/2, 2020
- We Cannot "Solve" Poor Condition of Back Row Americans By Bringing All to the Front Row β July 2/2, 2020
- "Puritan natural fervor provides motivation; the shape of the social and legal environment determined the avenue through which it was expressed." β May 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "So, yes, you do have to 'save democracy from itself,' even if that requires 'undemocratic' measures like Colorado has taken. Or so goes the argument." β December 2023
- "In short, this is an argument that teleology can constitute a valid 'joint' upon which reality may be 'cleaved,' particularly when it comes to law." β December 2023
- "So there's something more needed beyond just 'people are born different' to get to 'therefore we must exterminate the lower orders.'" β January 2024
- "Mencken defined 'Puritanism' as 'the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,' but a better definition might be 'haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be doing wrong.'" β February 2024
- "On disparate impact, prejudice, American civil rights law, and academic vs. lay definitions of words." β March 2024
- "Except, as I've noted before, many on that side tend to define 'Democracy' rather differently than what you imply." β July 2024
- "Which reminded me of the 2016 Australian study ... about how baby simulator dolls intended for education programs discouraging teen pregnancy ... actually increased a girlβs probability of having a kid by age 20..." β December 2024
- "No 'guerrilla' or 'terrorist' insurgency has ever won a civil war against a domestic enemy." β January 2025
- "I'm reminded here of Arnold Kling's 'Where are the Servants?' from back in 2011..." β May 2025
@Captain_Yossarian_22 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The terribleness of the "three boxes and equity" cartoon. β March 2021
@CarefulExamination β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Men play the victim and demand sympathy successfully all the time - look at the archetypal βpowerful victimβ politician, for example. β Week of May 20th, 2019
@Careless-Question-57 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
@Catbyself β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Imagining a Rationalist Hellscape β November 2020
@Catsnakes_ β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@CDO_Cubed β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- This is a nice reply. I certainly recognize the need for vigorous representation, attorney-client privilege, and the existence of robust ethics requirements involving honesty and other best-practices β Week of June 3rd, 2019
- Starter Packs Teach You to Dodge Stereotypes β June 1/2, 2020
@celluloid_dream β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "I don't know where I'm going with this, but the internet is disappearing and I don't like it." β March 2021
@ceveau β 3 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- I saw this tweet in the gamingcirclejerk subreddit a couple days ago. β Week of April 1st, 2019
- I opened that to read with the intent of doing a defense. β Week of June 3rd, 2019
- The Nazis Really Are to Blame and Other Thoughts β July 1/2, 2020
@Chaarmanda β 3 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- WWIβs role in the Rise of Nazism β Week of July 9th, 2018
- Studying Race in the Shadow of the Holocaust β Week of August 6th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "I submit that this misses the most powerful response, which we can semi-ironically refer to as 'the Bartleby'--refuse without fighting." β May 2021 2/2
@Chad_Nauseam β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "Also, asking for explicit consent doesnβt solve the 'making people uncomfortable' problem." β July 2021 2/2
- "One of the models that rarely seems to fail is the idea of a 'circlejerk/counterjerk cycle'." β March 2022
@charles β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I used to be obese, I've used semeglutide, and I no longer am. There's more too it than that though." β August 2023
@charlesf β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@CharlesUF β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- on drug dealers mostly having access to shit guns only β 04-02-18
- payment processing β Week of April 30th, 2018
@Charmanda β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- comment β 04-02-18
@cheesecakegood β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Whether Pax Americana ultimately ends as a result of military conflict, or lack of military conflict, over Taiwan. β January 2021
@Cheezemansam β 14 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- "Lets take an adventure through the 2016-2017 Term of the Supreme Court of the United States." β 12-10-17
- "The 11th seal has been broken." β 12-20-17
- Against former Senator McCarthy β 01-15-18
- "Normalization is such a heavily politicized and ideologically entrenched word that I have a hard time understanding what it means..." β 02-01-18
- some recurring annoyances with HBD discussion β 04-23-18
- Post-modernism β Week of June 11th, 2018
- Naturally a lot of people went into this incident with a bias (the initial reports of the incident seemed tailor-made to show Trump Supporters in a bad light outside of direct racial epithets and phys β Week of January 21st, 2019
π’ r/TheMotte era
- So, in the case of undocumented/illegal immigrants, to me the two central cases are when a family either enters the US legally and overstays their visa, or when the adults knowingly and voluntarily β Week of June 24th, 2019
- So Holocaust Denialism. I will try to address some of the reports being made everywhere. β Week of June 24th, 2019
- supreme court watch β Month of August 2019
- Shameful Police Acquittals β May 2/2, 2020
- The Role of Precedent in the Supreme Court β July 1/2, 2020
- Algorithmic Bias and Predictive Policing β July 2/2, 2020
- Carefully source-checking claims that the brutality of antebellum American slavery has been exaggerated (and finding those claims exaggerated). β March 2021
@Chel_of_the_sea β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- "I had a real-world Copenhagen interpretation of ethics example right in front of my face yesterday morning." β 01-04-18
- On what one may hide behind speaking true facts. β 01-15-18
@ChestertonsMeme β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "There's a more general point here, which is this: discrimination is required for a well-functioning society." β February 2023
- "I'm becoming more and more convinced that all of the negative aspects of American (sub)urban design post-1950 are basically compensation for not being able to exclude undesirables explicitly." β August 2023
@ChevalMalFet β 11 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- An Opus on Korean Education: Part 1 β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- An Opus on Korean Education: Part 2 β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- An Opus on Korean Education: Part 3 β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- An Opus on Korean Education: Part 4 β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- The Underplayed US Contribution to World War I β March 2020
- Ulysses S. Grant as an Abolitionist Hero β June 2/2, 2020
- Differing Views in 1865 About What to Do With The South β July 1/2, 2020
- Welcome Aboard the Harriet Lane (The Civil War at Sea) β July 1/2, 2020
- Sekigaraha: the Last Great Samurai Battle β September 2020
- here β September 2020
- Comparing the Character of Islam and Christianity β October 2/2, 2020
@ChickenOverlord β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "Now who will grab their rifle, And keep the roof with me?" β November 2021 1/2
@chineseforums β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "One of the more interesting cultural moments on the Chinese internet so far this year is (was?) Lying Flat, or tangping θΊΊεΉ³." β July 2021 2/2
@chopsaver β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- physics! β 04-23-18
@Chrisprattalpharaptor β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@ChrisPrattAlphaRaptr β 19 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Tearing into the Inadequacies of Black Genetic Criminality Studies β July 1/2, 2020
- NYT's Nuanced Take on Cancel Culture β August 2020
- The process and promise of disease eradication. β February 2021
- The risks and uncertainties that persist around COVID vaccination and future viral mutations. β March 2021
- The tradeoffs between civil liberties and public health. β March 2021
- "I can't make very firm predictions because nobody has really researched the best way to encourage viruses to make the leap to humans, but I'd probably try to make really high titer virus in the animal and pump it into human lungs." β April 2021
- "We have an incomplete understanding of literally every process in the world." β May 2021 2/2
- "mRNA vaccines transiently produce spike protein on the order of days-weeks." β May 2021 2/2
- Holy Fire, the Medical Industrial Complex and Aging β July 2021 2/2
- COVID Vaccination & Virus Transmission β August 2021
- "I never thought I'd live to see an R01 be a hot-button political topic, yet here we are." β September 2021 1/2
- "I wish the entire media circus would shut the fuck up about Fauci." β December 2021 2/2
- "[V]accines are safe and a testament to the innovation of modern Western medicine straight out of a pulp sci-fi novel from the 1930s." β January 2022 2/2
- "Greatschools.org β the new face of racism in America" β February 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Mice live two years, scientists have shown that you can take differentiated T cells (not stem cells!), stimulate them with a virus, transfer them to a new mouse and so on and so forth for more than 10 years (!)." β January 2023
- "They were dismayed that my school was teaching me that the French had been subjugated, but as far as I can tell, it was true." β October 2023
- "Probably we're again going to rely on godlike AI designing new methods for manipulating gene expression on broad scales, or maybe some Kwisatz Haderach breeding program over generations as we slowly introduce the changes we need." β February 2024
- "Nothing would make me happier than some godlike AI oracle that could satisfy my curiosity, I'm just skeptical that even the ASIs pitched by proponents like Aschenbrenner will be as omnipotent as advertised." β June 2024
- "Amara's law seems to apply here: everyone overestimates the short-term effects and underestimates the long-term effects of a new technology." β March 2025
@Chrononological β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- I think you're making the case here that he's just playing to win and that playing to win is justifiable. I think the argument has merit, so I wanted to respond. β February 2019
@cincilator β 22 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- On people's tendency to build up distant lands as somehow better, and how it influences ideology β 02-01-18
- Identity politics in the Balkans β Week of May 21st, 2018
- credibility of Elite Institutions β Week of June 4th, 2018
- Multi-agent Game Theory β Week of June 11th, 2018
- Night-crawlerization β Week of June 11th, 2018
- Calculations of Transgressional Impact β Week of August 6th, 2018
- Deriving Truth from the Bible, Nature, and Pre-history β Week of September 3rd, 2018
- We See in History What We Want β Week of October 1st, 2018
- Historical Symbols are about the Present, not the Past β Week of October 8th, 2018
- One very good point I saw on twitter is that the movie Matrix essentially portrays successful terrorist indoctrination. Think about it. It starts with Thomas Anderson, mild-mannered upper middle class β Week of November 05, 2018
- I would like to give here elaboration of a post I wrote before. I wrote a brief response, but I think it requires more thought. β Week of November 12, 2018
- As someone from a formerly communist country, I am getting the sense that supposedly free western societies are increasingly gaining communist features. Obviously things are nowhere as bad yet, there β Week of December 03, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Recently I started watching on YouTube various American cop interrogation videos. And what is fascinating about that is how completely different real interrogations are compared to what you see on Ame β Week of February 11th, 2019
- T Greer twitter thread on how different was the old Blogosphere from current social network situation. Written in response to Scott's closing SCC culture war thread and explains why today's structure β Week of February 25th, 2019
- One meta-observation about the Culture War. β Week of February 25th, 2019
- This might be a good place for me to review Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt. It is a slam against Postmodernism of their day writ β Week of May 13th, 2019
- This might be something of a captain obvious take on GamerGate, but to me it just clicked now. And I haven't seen this particular take before, so whatever. β Week of June 17th, 2019
- Hateclick Perfector β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
- Nuances Regarding Individualism and Conformity β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
- D-Day, Mistakes, and Social Media β September 2020
- Whether "tech needs humanities" sends the message its advocates think it sends (or want it to). β February 2021
- "I am getting the sense that some parts of the left in America have unfortunate tendency to see underclass criminals as potential allies in class warfare." β January 2022 1/2
@Cirrus β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "It is possible to strongarm policymakers with enough political will. But itβs not easy." β November 2023
@cjet79 β 41 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- On misgendering/mistitling people β 09-30-17
- media consumer profiles by analogy with materials β 04-02-18
- I like this list, even though I disagree with the problems listed. I wish there were more of these kinds of discussions around here. β Week of October 22, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- >because we live in a frustrating hellworld. β Week of February 11th, 2019
- Discussion in some gaming subreddits about an IGN article that suggests game developers should unionize. I posted the comment below in r/games. But its likely to get buried or go unnoticed, so I figur β Week of March 18th, 2019
- I think someone mentioned this last time, but it would be a much better approach to just make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. β Week of May 6th, 2019
- on moderated thinking and how power corrupts β Month of August 2019
- Adversarial Establishment of Religion β August 2020
- "...why I hated being single and going on dates..." β May 2021 2/2
- "I wanted to go through the process of imagining a good immigration system to demonstrate that what we currently have is not a designed system." β August 2021
- "Where are all the immortals?" β November 2021 2/2
- "What everyone really does is ask a much more human centric question: 'Do I trust them?'" β February 2022
- "I can't speak for all libertarians, but I have started internally cataloguing things that I care about having in a society." β April 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "God-Emperor Franz has all the economic value. He wants an advisor and a semi-subserviant friend to talk with about god emperor related issues." β December 2022
- "I was a bit of AI apocalypse skeptic a few years ago. Most of my skepticism is gone." β March 2023
- "No one has even bothered asking what spirit of the law Trump has broken. They went straight to finding the tiny letters that he might have broken." β March 2023
- "Our legal system increasingly resembles a system of 'might makes right' if you have enough powerful people on your side then the law can literally be what you want it to be." β May 2023
- "I sort of lean towards weak-manning not being a thing, and any view that anyone holds is fair game." β May 2023
- "The engine of capitalism is chugging along and doing great things. And it pulled you and those around you out of poverty, and now you want to turn it off because the engine is loud and annoying." β August 2023
- "One of the easiest things to coordinate on is 'we all want more wealth'. As soon as you allow any other values to creep into that equation you have a huge fight on your hands." β August 2023
- "...there is one area that always rubs me the wrong way. It is smart people who don't know dumb people talking about intelligence." β September 2023
- "What is the problem with policing today?" β September 2023
- "If the 'philsopher-kings' existed and were actually competent I believe they would just exactly recreate money and artificial scarcity." β September 2023
- "I normally don't care to comment on Trump stuff, but I don't like the massive gaslighting that it feels like we all went through during 2020." β October 2023
- "My earliest memory of a story retelling was that of Chex Quest." β November 2023
- "Its possible to have a good company in India, but I think there is going to be a real problem if you are just doing it as a random cost saving measure and not putting much thought into how it should be done." β December 2023
- "The common online reputation of George Mason is basically totally wrong." β February 2024
- "Scott Alexander has written a piece about love and liberty" β February 2024
- "Government Programs Should Have Legible Budgets" β May 2024
- "Politics is the Mind
KillerChanger" β July 2024 - "I generally agree with the effort to preserve games. If you also agree I think you should do the following things:" β August 2024
- "Scott Alexander endorses basically anyone but Trump" β October 2024
- "A flexible labor market is the goose that lays the golden egg in America." β January 2025
- "Where is the American Dream?" β April 2025
- "Overall my life has been awesome and not filled with much tragedy. My encounters with immigrants have been almost entirely positive." β July 2025
- "Gun Rights are Civilization Rights" β August 2025
- "Is everyone else just pretending this is not how the world works while we put on a public facade of 'oh yes this is so terrible, how could anyone ever say this'? Or is it genuinely secret knowledge to people about how to make friends and socialize?" β October 2025
- "Politics is the desire to place the preferences of humans over the preferences of inhuman competitive forces." β January 2026
- "At its root 'healthy masculinity' is an existential crisis that every individual man sort of has to navigate on their own." β March 2026
- "Professional life in America has a weird double reality happening. One where sex exists, men are horny, and women are using their bodies to advance. And one where we act like sexless automotons in the workplace and things are determined on merit and skill." β April 2026
- " I have no idea how a judge said that with a straight face as he ordered a child to pay child support. And to specifically pay it to a mother that is a convicted pedophile rapist of a child that was under her care." β May 2026
@ClaraMegVeronica β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- The Nature of Emotional Abuse (When it is in the Public Spotlight) β Week of September 24th, 2018
@Clementine β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Why do I want a fourth kid?" β June 2025
- "I moderated a forum once." β July 2025
@ClinicalGazesUrBulge β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- >All the vehicles and gasoline in the world wouldn't matter if key roads, tunnels, or bridges are impassable, or if you no one could buy gas because credit and debit cards don't work. Or if electro β Week of June 10th, 2019
- that turned into a book review of Blood Meridian β Month of July 2019
@clo β 4 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "It's not that Japan is somehow exceptional at this, it just seems like Hollywood has entirely forgotten what humans are like." β April 2024
- "I donβt like the fact that there is something approaching a general consensus here: that the time for discussion and dialogue is over and the normies can be led around by the nose to believe and fight for whatever makes them feel good." β November 2025
- "Nowadays it's interesting as a piece of internet history, but the bombed remnants of a once relatively consolidated gaming media and the cratering efforts of the bloated game developer and publishing industry tell a story of how everyone failed to learn anything at all from the entire experience." β February 2026
- "I wanted to put a bit of effort into a post about how my understanding of bars changed over time, but I realized halfway through writing it that I couldnβt go into it without discussing how my relationship with alcohol changed over the course of my life." β March 2026
@Closedshop β 4 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "This is going to be a split between a movie review for Ne Zha 2 and some of my thoughts on the state of culture from a China-born American." β February 2025
- "Here's a legitimately unhinged blog post: 15 fragrances in 5 different collections." β April 2025
- "For myself, it really is impossible to overstate how important he was to the New Year's Gala." β February 2026
- "Detroit, China: A personal account of a small slice of urban decay in China" β May 2026
@CodexRunicus β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Imagine for a moment we have a fixed space in an art museum and we need to allocate the space efficiently so visitors can enjoy good art. Let's simplify our assumptions for this toy problem such that β Week of January 21st, 2019
@coffee_enjoyer β 10 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Christians are not golems designed to do good for outsiders continually." β May 2023
- "Masculinity, manliness, Incels? Red herrings. The issue is that men chase rewards, and the rewards today are disordered." β July 2023
- "Reclaiming religious social technology by rejecting literalism" β September 2023
- "Status in the progressive art scene" β May 2024
- "Our civilizations did not always have superstimuli available to young people." β June 2024
- "Anyway, an Essene-origin theory of Christianity would explain why they critiqued the Pharisees and scribes, while elevating the status of the poor and ignorant." β November 2024
- "Our instinct for broad purpose is to align ourselves with a collective, and our instinct for clarity is to ensure that the path ahead of us will provide a good life." β January 2025
- "I have never seen a piece of media that is so clearly a psy-op." β April 2025
- "LARPing isnβt fake, itβs pre-reality." β May 2025
- "IMO algorithms have changed dating in recent years, as feeds will present women with highly attractive men outside of their extended social network at a considerably higher rate than in previous half-decades." β January 2026
@ColonCaretCapitalP β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Maximizing personal autonomy or minimizing suffering is a very secular-Western moral foundation. The concept of having duties from the very start is found in many societies' traditions. See "filial pi β Week of June 3rd, 2019
@comicsansstein β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@CommercialTurnip β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Interpretations of the Law β Week of June 11th, 2018
@confuciuscorndog β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@conquerer7 β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Facing a Senator's Racism as a Chinese-American β April 2020
- The Remarkable Verbal Intelligence of Active Politicians β April 2020
@ControlsFreak β 21 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Preventing coercion is why we have secrecy in voting! Preventing coercion is what it's for!" β January 2023
- "School/education on its own seems relatively fine. It's just the particular way we go about it that ruins everything." β April 2023
- "No one thinks that when you go to the grocery store, or go to buy a TV, a refrigerator, or car, or anything else, that you should first have to just give them all your financial information so that they can tailor your price." β May 2023
- "So, well, if we can't come up with any good ideas to actually implement the principle in the face of the concrete thing that we want to do right now, the 'principle' will just be attested to verbally, as a signalling mechanism, while we proceed in just trodding all over it." β August 2023
- "Society didn't come to their beliefs on this subject via rational scientific exploration and explanation. They did so through pure cultural power and intimidation." β November 2023
- "Major NYT opinion piece dropped this week. At the time of my clicking on it, it was under the headline 'Born This Way? Born Which Way?'" β December 2023
- "I've been thinking a lot on the application of the laws." β December 2023
- "I don't know any honest-to-goodness real life spies, but I really wonder if they have some sort of similar dysfunction/skepticism toward each other that we Science types have toward our own." β January 2024
- "I cannot imagine five members of the Court will sign off on saying that the Constitution guarantees GMail the right to refuse private communications service based solely on their dislike of an individual's politics." β February 2024
- "But how effective is it? How costly is it? How efficient compared to possible alternatives? Who knows? Who cares?" β March 2024
- "As such, I think the freedom of speech part is kind of a distraction for what should really be considered freedom of the modern press." β March 2024
- "Why are the Status Games so powerful?" β April 2024
- "The issue is that many have a very naive understanding of 'fairness', as other folks have pointed out here." β September 2024
- "Various threads lately have had me thinking about how incredibly wealthy we are as a country, and how it definitely was not always so." β September 2024
- "Suddenly, he has the power of distribution and can use it to build his status, favor people who will favor him, and he can screw anyone else for basically zero reason at all; it costs him nothing if he doesn't give you a coupon because he doesn't like your face." β September 2024
- "Businesses compete, in many many ways. One of the ways they have to compete is to acquire labor and talent." β January 2025
- "You have to do both these things... simultaneously convince prospective students and employers, because if you don't do both simultaneously, the group that was falsely convinced will quickly realize that they were duped and stop..." β May 2025
- "NYT Continues Medical Pricing Beat" β August 2025
- "Birthright Citizenship at the Supreme Court" β March 2026
- "Birthright Citizenship in US Territories" β March 2026
- "There is a huge debate about playing online or against engines, and this could certainly come up in a conversation about the controversy." β April 2026
@Corvos β 4 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "But if you are sure that the most important thing for conservatives is that they hold fast and don't get seduced by the poison of identity politics, please consider it possible that you might be wrong." β June 2023
- "To the extent that there exists a Republic Patronage network it's still largely inchoate and not integrated with supposedly non-partisan government spending the way that the Democratic Patronage network is." β January 2025
- "Immigration is like steroids or heroin, it changes the decision-maker in ways that make their future decisions unforeseeable." β February 2025
- "But if we are going to have a thread discussing downstream whether the 1800s British were the official Worst People In The World in conjunction with the Nazis, Stalin, Mao and slavers, or merely just very bad, could we please have a bit more providing of sources and a bit less of 'everyone knows'?" β September 2025
@CounselorDegen β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- > A law system wherein the laws are clearly written in some sort of plain language which requires no interpretation... β Week of March 25th, 2019
@CourtyardHound β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
@Covane β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- on japanese architecure and the right to sunlight β Month of August 2019
@CPlusPlusDeveloper β 10 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- (Crossposted from the blog's WordPress comments): β Week of November 05, 2018
- Some advice, that I rarely see crystallized, for the young people here starting off their careers. β Week of November 26, 2018
- One of the under appreciated reasons for the modern popularity of Valentine's Day is it serves a coordination strategy to find philanderers and cheats. β February 2019
π’ r/TheMotte era
- A distinction that mostly gets lost in this discussion is the difference in performance before fees and performance after fees. Remember hedge fund performance is always reported after fees. Thi β Week of February 11th, 2019
- To be honest, I really don't have a specific proposal. If I knew a viable business model for content micro transactions, I'd be dictating this reply to an Instagram model on my yacht off the coast of β Week of March 11th, 2019
- Rules 1 and 2 for Economic Success β January 2020
- Why We Should Hold Primaries Two Years Early β February 2020
- Your Irregular Reminder that You're in a Bubble β February 2020
- Education Policy Budgeting β February 2020
- Defending the Rational Addiction Model β October 2/2, 2020
@crazycattime β 6 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- >Is there any principle here beside "Muslims are not permitted to speak about Israel"? β Week of May 13th, 2019
- >the inspector general's office said it found "evidence that limiting the volume of asylum-seekers entering at ports of entry leads some aliens who would otherwise seek legal entry into the United β Week of June 24th, 2019
- >Ross wanted to include the citizenship question on the census since he was sworn into the office, long before any determination was made about the sufficiency of administrative records. Further, i β Week of June 24th, 2019
- Anaylyzing the Media β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- On the Slow Adoption of Ideas β Weeks of December 16th and 23rd, 2019
- Lawyering and Bizarre Errors: All Part of the Show β November 2020
@cretan_bull β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Probability Theory and Stereotypes in Medicine β May 2/2, 2020
@CrispyFriedBarnacles β 27 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I think there's something really puzzling and interesting going on with American (left-of-center dominated) institutions broadly right now, and I think the phenomenon is captured nicely by this example of the press, the public, and the unpopularity of affirmative action." β June 2023
- "'Racism' now means whatever it is that progressive activist networks say it means on any given day, and in turn it's just one more term of abuse hurled by self-aggrandizing partisans heavily steeped in conflict theory who want good zero sum things for their allies and bad zero sum things for you." β August 2023
- "I think, ironically, it's an atheist conceit that 'theists' believe that 'religion' is generically good." β August 2023
- "One thing I've very hazy about, though, is whether this is an argument that stops with the Republican party being doomed, or whether it's rather an argument for all those institutions actually being doomed." β December 2023
- "Which is to say, from this perspective, affirmative action is a red herring and rhetorical distraction." β March 2024
- "Back in the 2016 election, I remember being struck by the fact that Trump lies like a used car salesman, and most other politicians lie the way that lawyers lie..." β August 2024
- "But wealthy, civically-minded people from specific backgrounds and specific worldviews have absolutely used giant amounts of money to push this stuff to try to shape demographics." β September 2024
- "I think there's a very, very strong case to be made that the birth of the entire New Deal state and its subsequent massive growth . . . relied intensely on real time, overwhelming broadcast media." β September 2024
- "I've noted before that I often get a 'born on third, thought they hit a triple' vibe from progressives when it comes to the institutions they've inherited..." β October 2024
- "And so, it turns out that being extremely unreasonable, confrontational, and obnoxious can be surprisingly effective." β February 2025
- "One of the consequences of the Reagan revolution is that it cemented a certain kind of public rhetoric about the American Federal government in relation to citizens." β March 2025
- "It's not like no civilization in the history of the world has figured out how to make safe streets in urban areas, and so we have no models or something. Westerners simply aren't allowed to, that's all." β April 2025
- "As an example, one of the interesting things about the modern university system is it bolts two incompatible accountability systems on top of each other." β April 2025
- "But I think this has probably been a great example of arson being applied to Chesterton's fence - the older Reagan-era norm, with its insistence that "of course you can expect plenty of black people to live up to high standards" played a really important social role in encouraging everyone else to go along with integration." β May 2025
- "I believe, and I think this was once a much more common American belief, that there are much, much, much worse things in the world than different groups with different world views and different values giving each other some generous space." β June 2025
- "I saw some comment a while ago (I can't recall where) that Obama had said he expected some macho, manly, John Wayne type to be who Republicans settled on in 2016." β June 2025
- "I've gotten rather stuck on this notion that the older 2 party system, the one that was stable for a while, was really two coalitions that were, especially, catering to two regional sets of winners." β June 2025
- "I think most traditionalist Christians would say, you want a culture that treats sex like it's sacred and important." β June 2025
- "I mean, obviously there are a lot of strands of anti-woke. But it seems to me that a slightly more nuanced read on this might be more like this, and I'm going to dip into analogies here..." β June 2025
- "From the 1930s on, a certain version of liberalism became so overwhelmingly dominant in America that its native conservative tradition was essentially sidelined into a permanent minority status, really, and given no public oxygen at all." β July 2025
- "I think (when it comes to art and communication), everything kind of went to hell with the combination of the collapse of conservatism in the George W Bush years, the rhetorical success of, especially, Jon Stewart, and the messianic rise of Obama." β July 2025
- "This is the framework I can't help but see and compare to when I look at the 'young men need to be scolded, young women are always victims' public discourse, because at a basic human level, it just seems so totally anti-human and disconnected from reality." β July 2025
- "There's a specific critique I've seen about smart people on the left, which is something like there's this overabundance of book smart people who have extreme problems modeling second order social effects." β September 2025
- "Way back in the 90s, there was a popular freakout about video games making young men into killers." β September 2025
- "I could totally imagine seeing progress, for such a person, as being synonymous with dampening all possible public expressions of homogenous, assumed religiosity." β September 2025
- "I am in the unusual position that I was working on a commercial FPS when Half-Life came out in November 1998, and it had an immediate and dramatic impact on our game and all the game design that followed." β April 2026
- "I don't think the overwhelming majority of people who are extremely skeptical of progressive shibboleths or even accept the general HBD frame want to bring back slavery or even be particular unkind to decent, law-abiding black citizens. But there is absolutely a spectrum of skepticism here..." β April 2026
@CriticalDuty β 14 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- In one of my college courses, on feminism, my professor was a Marxist who preferred an anthropological understanding of the origins of patriarchy, as opposed to the common narratives regarding organiz β Week of June 24th, 2019
- Identity Politics not Winding Down β February 2020
- Fictional Psychopathy as Wish Fulfillment β May 1/2, 2020
- The Ultimate Success of China's Tiananmen Reaction β May 2/2, 2020
- The American Dream: Anti-Blackness Mingled With Feigned Respect β May 2/2, 2020
- Blackpilling on the United Methodist Church β June 2/2, 2020
- Charity as A Game Mechanic β July 1/2, 2020
- The formless void is as American as apple pie. β January 2021
- "Buck Breaking is a documentary β June 2021 1/2
- organizer Tariq Nasheed..." β June 2021 1/2
- "They're dealing with an existential crisis where compromise means armageddon. Why, then, does the climate movement not turn against democracy, a system infamous for compromise?" β October 2021 1/2
- "...American foreign policy is formed and proselytized by diaspora groups whose goal is to use American power as a tool to relitigate ethnic struggles that their ancestors - and sometimes they themselves - were on the losing side of." β March 2022
- "...there is a limit to how liberal you can be in a society where popular mullahs can summon strikes, riots and worse seemingly at will." β April 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
@crushedoranges β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Anime Tiddies Are the Salvation of Western Civilization β April 2020
@curious_straight_ca β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I think trying to prove a black-white IQ gap just via the existing income gap is a mistake, anyway." β February 2024
@curious-b β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "...even if we never get to hyperinflation, and we see only mild (secular) inflation of the USD, we could get into trouble." β May 2021 2/2
@cvdailyupdates β 7 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- How Twitter and Reddit Outperformed Institutions on COVID-19 β March 2020
- here β March 2020
- Civil Liberties and the Impossibility of Full Lockdown β April 2020
- COVID-19 Protestors Are Acting Reasonably On Wrong Beliefs β April 2020
- Astroturf or Facilitating Community Organizing? β April 2020
- The Evolution of My Personal View on Coronavirus β April 2020
- here β April 2020
@cw-throwaway291672 β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Female Attractiveness as the Default β Week of October 15th, 2018
@CyberByte β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Dr. Timnit Gebru's termination by Google and the putative racism of our machine-mind overlords β December 2020
@D0TheMath β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Calculatons on Gun Accidents vs Car Accidents β July 2/2, 2020
@D1m1tr1Rascalov β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Die Linke - The German Radical Left β March 2020
@d357r0y3r β 3 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Ah, yeah - I just can't go along with this. β Week of June 3rd, 2019
- Starting A Conversation: Dating from the Wrong Side of a "Tribe" β May 1/2, 2020
- "In summation, dating and family formation is just the latest entry in a list of things that technology has critically injured." β November 2021 2/2
@d4shing β 3 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Black People Did Not Misplay the Great Hand of Sympathetic Victimhood β June 1/2, 2020
- Summarizing 'Debt', by David Graeber β September 2020
- If you're not willing to stand for principles even when they produce a policy outcome you don't like, are they even really your principles? β October 1/2, 2020
@daermonn β 4 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- On religion. β 12-10-17
- Good Electronic Music Suggestions β Week of September 10th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- get in to it on Wittgenstein and the vacutity of philosophers β Month of August 2019
- The Shortcomings of Ecnomic Measures as a Metric for Human Flourishing β January 2020
@daezor β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@daffodil_day β 12 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- >Originally meant almost as a censure of Democratic representative from Minneapolis Ilhan Omar for her criticism of the Israel lobby's financial power, the resolution became watered down to condemn β Week of March 4th, 2019
- >Truly it is the lack of early British rock that keeps black men oppressed! β Week of March 4th, 2019
- >Left-activism generally argues that this is the case, and that they are following in the footsteps of MLK and Rosa Parks by fighting for justice, or stopping Hitler by punching "Nazis". β Week of March 11th, 2019
- >Trump, though. Trump isn't even trying to be respectable. He has no interest in appealing to moderates. His absurdity doesn't need to be revealed; it's out in the open. This leaves comedians in β Week of March 11th, 2019
- While I don't know how representative of the rest of Team Red this is, here's how I felt about Obama and IdPol over the years . . . β Week of March 11th, 2019
- High prole too. Despite that, I enjoyed the quiz, since I've always been into interior design and architecture. I didn't find it too dated either. They were spot-on with the "cathedral" ceiling and β Week of April 1st, 2019
- >That seems odd to me, the housing market is a massively distorted by government intervention all the way from the municipal to federal levels increasing the price of housing. β Week of April 8th, 2019
- I wouldn't say singing shows like American Idol (which is airing on ABC literally at this moment) are horrible, but they are very tired and boring at this point. Idol had its premiere over the β Week of April 15th, 2019
- > The places people travel to are often just places with great (classical) architecture, great urban planning, and "culture" (which is really just a lot of interesting things to do). But I don't se β Week of June 3rd, 2019
- >It's a little hard for me to believe that conservatives don't "get" why it was a gaffe, even if they believe Romney's intent was sincere. Politicians say things all the time that come off as reall β Week of June 17th, 2019
- discussing Al Franken β Month of July 2019
- tells a story β Month of July 2019
@daguerrean β 3 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I don't know exactly how to piece it together but there is some common through-line that connects feminism, White people, desire to be ill, environmentalism and suicide." β December 2024
- "Lately I've been reflecting and I think one of the biggest themes of change in my lifetime is the increasing efficiency of the world, and largely, it sucks." β January 2026
- "If you tell people that they are traumatized they will feel traumatized." β January 2026
@dalamplighter β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- This is one of my main concerns. Just my PhD research requires using cold-active enzymes produced by super geographically-restricted ice-residing bacteria living at the top of a mountain range. As the β Week of December 31st, 2018
- This but unironically. Iβm a Catholic socialist (very interesting with neuroscience as a day job), and this probably the place I sympathize most with the right. I find the replacement of colorful, his β February 18th - April 1st, 2019
@dalinks β 3 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Chinese Housing β Week of Memorial Day, 2018
- Has Money Poisoned the American University β Week of August 6th, 2018
- Packing the House β Week of October 15th, 2018
@Dangerous_Psychology β 18 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- thier effort-post here β Month of July 2019
- on navigating the discourse β Month of August 2019
- Legacy admissions maybe being necessary β September and October 2019 (extremely late)
- Disscussing The Rise of Victimhood Culture β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
- Humorous Thoughts on the WInners and Losers of Democratic Debates β Weeks of December 16th and 23rd, 2019
- Yang Vs Beto: How a Message/Signal Changes Depending on the Speaker β Weeks of December 16th and 23rd, 2019
- Richard Jewell - Orphan of the Culture War β Weeks of December 16th and 23rd, 2019
- 2019: Year in Review β January 2020
- Ai and Benjamin Explore Locked Doors β January 2020
- Gaming, Articulating, and Gatekeeping Oppression β January 2020
- How the Opinion Section Took Over the NYT β January 2020
- Red-Tribe Marketed TV Series β February 2020
- The Secret of Biden's Success β March 2020
- On Conservative Black Democrats β March 2020
- Why Republicans Embrace Trump: He Punches Back β March 2020
- Boys' Struggle in the Modern School β March 2020
- "How do you square the problem of historical accuracy β January 2022 2/2
- that the racially inclusive America we want to celebrate and portray isn't the America that actually existed in 1776?" β January 2022 2/2
@darwin2500 β 50 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- on girl-branded whisky β 04-02-18
- "[Black Panther] is more subversive than it looks." β 04-02-18
- the marketplace of ideas, by analogy to lawnmowers β 04-23-18
- This exchange β Week of April 30th, 2018
- breaking Taboos β Week of April 30th, 2018
- Red vs Blue tribe sexuality and sexual consent. β Week of May 7th, 2018
- Delineating the two activist movements in gender and gender roles β Week of May 21st, 2018
- Outgroup homogeneity bias β Week of Memorial Day, 2018
- Liberal worries about the Trump movement β Week of July 9th, 2018
- Liberal HBD positions β Week of July 23rd, 2018
- Can we thrive under different social conditions? β Week of July 23rd, 2018
- conversation β Week of July 30th, 2018
- definition β Week of July 30th, 2018
- Race β Week of July 30th, 2018
- The social Context of Sarah Jeongβs humor, and the toxicity of twitter β Week of July 30th, 2018
- High vs. Low Status β Week of August 6th, 2018
- Darwin2500βs Response β Week of August 6th, 2018
- Rationaist Literature β Week of August 20th, 2018
- Why you should read the Sequences β Week of August 20th, 2018
- Avoiding Leaders with Ulterior Motives β Week of September 17th, 2018
- Death By 10,000 Discussions of Nuance β Week of September 17th, 2018
- Consequences, Suffering, and Terminal Values β Week of September 17th, 2018
- Kavanaugh, and The Tails Coming Apart β Week of September 24th, 2018
- Comment β Week of September 24th, 2018
- Loves a graph β Week of September 24th, 2018
- Meritocracy, a Justification for the Status Quo β Week of October 8th, 2018
- Cost Benefit Analysis: False Rape vs Actual Rape β Week of October 8th, 2018
- Memetic Colonization β Week of October 15th, 2018
- In case you're interested, here's a short list of problems with capitalism that I came up with a while back when someone else asked what problems I had with it: β Week of October 22, 2018
- Given recent bans, I am afraid to say what I really feel about this. β Week of October 29, 2018
- I've been thinking about it a little bit, and I believe I'm correct in saying the following: β Week of October 29, 2018
- There's not a strong reason to care about political violence in terms of the violence itself, compared to other sources of violence. β Week of November 12, 2018
- As a resident lefty, I feel compelled to reply. β Week of November 19, 2018
- This all makes perfect sense in my head, but I'm having trouble describing it with feeble human words. I'm constantly disappointed that we don't have a more effective form of telepathy than language. β Week of November 19, 2018
- Although I largely agree, I'm going to chime in and say that we should be careful not to conflate insight and novelty. β Week of November 26, 2018
- > Breaking it down, if being very smart was much, much, better than being of average smarts, then everyone would become very smart up to the physiological limit β Week of December 31st, 2018
- Literal high school drama. β Week of January 28th, 2019
π’ r/TheMotte era
- > n practice it will be different, but it should be nearly identical. β Week of February 18th, 2019
- Well, first of all, they definitely are weaponizing a hot button culture war issue in their salary negotiations; this is a business entity negotiating a contract, not a political or social justice m β Week of March 4th, 2019
- Maybe I should clarify my initial post then. I took GSD's primary complaint to be that people with limited knowledge were speaking in ignorance on a topic, and he couldn't get them to listen to him w β Week of March 11th, 2019
- Are you linking to the archived version of the CBS story instead of the live version because the archived version doesn't reveal the auto-play video that fills the screen as you open the page, startin β Week of April 15th, 2019
- Between this article and the discussion of clown memes below, the phrase I am most reminded of is β Week of May 6th, 2019
- A confound here is that the timecourse of 'The Second Demographic Transition' coincides with the rise of 'The Digital Age,' and the movement towards screens and away from meatspace. β Week of June 3rd, 2019
- >if anyone thinks that a 00.0001% rate of conservatism is organic they are out of their mind. β Week of June 17th, 2019
- on locuses of control in personal defense β Month of August 2019
- get into it on gun control β Month of August 2019
- The Progressive - Liberal Split β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- On Principles of Discourse β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- The Capitalist Message of Bee Movie β February 2020
- On Pulling Down Statues β June 2/2, 2020
@DaseindustriesLtd β 25 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Simply put it's that we are entitled to be represented in the future β personally, or by proxy of our values and heirs; and EA-Utilitarian-longtermism does not serve this purpose well." β September 2022
- "HBDers' incompetence is the intended outcome of censorship." β October 2022
- "By all means, do promote statistical literacy and demand intellectual honesty among HBDers, do shame us for our sloppiness. Keep discussing this in terms of phenotypic null hypothesis, if you must. But do not gaslight." β November 2022
- "This is how evil looks historically. Not generic cruelty, callousness, petty narcissism and even psychopathy we are used to, not mere weakness of will or intellect, but well-functioning people with actually hazardous moral convictions." β November 2022
- "It was, indeed, a genocide, and it means that, were the Axis successful in its ultimate political program, it would have been the end of Jewry globally, the final death of Israel." β December 2022
- "On a pothead and notions of personal freedom." β December 2022
- "Now that I think about it, not much has changed since 1988 and 'The IQ Controversy, the Media and Public Policy.'" β January 2023
- "The real point is: eugenicists, too, wanted to prevent existential risks arising from dysgenic civilizational collapse." β January 2023
- Β«Media is being honest and good to have you believe it's honest and good when it's actually deceptive and bad β and those few issues are central to its mission.Β» β January 2023
- "Truly, the day when we have to portray moneylenders as a whole as generous folk just to not offend groups which have historically been overrepresented in this line of work (and still are, just less so) will be a dark one." β February 2023
- "The pragmatic answer is that the opposite of HBD awareness is not the innocent race-blind utopia that millenials have retconned into their childhoods, but Β¬HBD, which by virtue of impossibility to bring reality in accord with it has unbounded actionable consequences." β February 2023
- "Women, we are told, are worried about costs of living and stagnant wages, career opportunities and iniquities; men give up on marriage, selfishly play vidya, voluntarily join alpha male incel organizations." β February 2023
- "When I feel like there are no reasons for me to keep living, happiness is a delusion and my existence itself is an exercise in sad absurdity, I remind myself that all of this has happened before, and was proven false..." β March 2023
- "It's perfectly conceivable that the paucity of known Β«relatableΒ» figures from your demographic will be an invigorating stimulus, rather than discouragement." β March 2023
- "There's a profound epistemic benefit to learning about HBD as a scientifically sound framework." β April 2023
- "High-performing brains ride the edge of metastability and wrangle representations easily; low-performing ones waste power fending off chaos and lose track of the context." β May 2023
- "I suspect that the biggest intellectual deficit of the rationalist culture is precisely this preoccupation with the meta." β May 2023
- "Affirmative Action is never just affirmative action, never just redistributing the pie of prestige; it carries costs that may measure in lives." β July 2023
- "What does Kirin 9000S tell us about the future?" β September 2023
- "E/acc and the political compass of AI war" β December 2023
- "The state of open-source LLMs as of summer 2024, or: Core Values of Socialism with AGI characteristics" β July 2024
- "I've been an increasingly convinced DeepSeek fanatic ever since their very first LLMs, Coder-33B and 6.7B, first surfaced on Reddit around October 2023." β January 2025
- "China's fragile treasure" β March 2025
- "The chip situation is roughly stable. But Chinese culture, with regard to AI, has changed a bit since then." β July 2025
- "I'm pretty open to the idea that diversity is good β real diversity, not this consumerist Western appreciation of cuisines, not the lukewarm respect for ethnic varieties of ideas the West already accepts." β December 2025
@dasfoo β 6 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- There's a contradiction in progressivism that's been bugging me for a while. I'm sure this is nothing new, and my evidence for its anecdotal, but the popularity of the Black Panther movie brings it in β Week of February 25th, 2019
- If I try to be charitable, I find this vehement anti-anti-abortion sentiment perplexing. I'm intellectually anti-abortion but culturally pro-choice, so I'm personally in a constant state of cognitive β Week of May 13th, 2019
- When it comes to selling ideas to the mass market, very few people are interested in the mechanics of how and where an idea evolved but are concerned primarily with its practical application to their β Week of June 17th, 2019
- The Left "War on Sex" β April 2020
- "Objectification of women is a (too-narrow) expression of love for women, one which celebrates biology and fertility and primal intimacy. What is celebrated in the cynical send-up of [Promising Young Woman]?" β May 2021 1/2
- "Is there some marketing campaign that can make participating in American civics cool again?" β May 2022
@dasubermensch83 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- > Can you even make a woke algorithm without explicitly assigning different values to people according to the progressive stack? β Week of May 6th, 2019
@dawin2500 β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- sexual marketplace β Week of May 14th, 2018
@dazzilingmegafauna β 3 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- the problem with historical counter-factuals β Month of July 2019
- what Anti-Fa activists think they're acomplishing β Month of July 2019
- Ask and Tell in Gender Issues β February 2020
@ddxxdd β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Hitler, the left-right spectrum β 11-06-17
@Dean β 68 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "The longer term prospect, more tentative and possible than decisive, is the prospect for Korea and Poland to do future joint armor/APC/combat vehicle design projects in the future, with the goal of competing with established European producers." β December 2022
- "For the better part of the last decade, at nearly every stage in the Ukraine crisis, Putin has had agency on how to proceed, and keeps fucking it up..." β January 2023
- "Since the war has started, Ukraine has gotten not only increased aid β January 2023
- but increased attention and various oversight mechanisms." β January 2023
- "Setting aside that the Hanania doesn't identify how society is actually being made smarter by the current media, he also doesn't identify what society being 'dumber' even means." β January 2023
- ...thoroughly doubts the Seymour Hersh article claiming that the US wrecked the Nord Stream Pipeline. β February 2023
- "The counter-argument/most relevant argument I'd make is that nations can die not only when they lose resources to sustain themselves, but also a desire to." β February 2023
- "What is going in Sudan is a practical demonstration β April 2023
- being a global power does not mean that everything going on in the world is secretly about you." β April 2023
- "In culture war-ish political shifts from Eastern Europe, Poland's opposition looks to have overcome the PIS, meaning that the sometimes notorious Euro-skeptic right-wing government will likely be replaced by a more EU-phile coalition." β October 2023
- "Regarding the El Salvador Constitution..." β November 2023
- "Iran is probably not going to have as much of a blowback, but then again no one would have predicted the Ukraine War's consequences for the Russians in the first few months of NovaRussia either." β November 2023
- "The issue for the US's current recruitment woes comes from how the generational transition has matched to politics." β November 2023
- "I'd go further that Kissenger violated a number of ideological tropes and expectations." β November 2023
- "On the American-Mexican border, this year the Biden administration implemented a policy intended to allow a stronger/politically-more-viable legal basis for ejecting migrants." β December 2023
- "When the Israelis occupied Gaza and the West Bank in the Six-Day War in 1967, one of the reasons for seizing the territory was both as a military buffer, but also that they could be traded back for peace in the future." β April 2024
- "To believe in an international rules-based order, you have to believe that there are actual rules, or else it's an arbitrary vibes-based order." β May 2024
- "El Salvador, by contrast, is basically just a city state centered on San Salvador." β July 2024
- "In military doctrines, there are generally two main types of defense: positional defense, and mobile defense." β August 2024
- "Who wants to hear about who blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline in September 2022?" β August 2024
- "What the Ukrainian offensive has done is force the Russians into a very awkward position of taking forces that would otherwise be supporting the attacks further south, and bringing them around to Kursk." β August 2024
- "Elden Ring is positively dripping with north germanic vibes and tropes both in and out of the Ring Cycle." β August 2024
- "The Supreme Court judge can ban X and demand fines on people who use VPNs on it, but that's a separate matter from an electorally-sensitive administration actually enforcing such things." β September 2024
- "The Thucydides Trap paradigm is a way of modeling behavior between two potential hegemons, but by the nature of the historical allusion . . . and general proposer propensities . . . it's really, really bad at recognizing or accounting for other relevant actors." β September 2024
- "Appearing to turn a blind eye to one's own partisan faction and what they do against their political opponents is about the worst thing you can do for the legitimacy of a legal institution." β October 2024
- "You may feel this is brilliant journalism, but nothing in it really addresses child soldiers, which have a sordid history in islamic extremism even without touching on Hamas' deathcult tendencies." β October 2024
- "I dispute that the regard other world leaders hold the POTUS reflects American standing, and think you are falling victim to the classic conflation of being popular with being influential while tethering yourself to a stunted view of who the audience that matters is." β October 2024
- "What many posters in this forum think AI may imply in the medium to long term in terms of major upheaval and disruption, I view drones implying in the short and medium term." β October 2024
- "In another interesting development in a week with a number of interesting developments, the Syrian civil war has kicked back up a bit with a surprise rebel offensive that has taken Aleppo..." β November 2024
- "I maintain the premise that peace talks in the year are dependent on currently unknown factors (i.e. Trump), but this now also depends on the results of the German governing coalition come Spring." β November 2024
- "The fact that Zelensky is in a position to resist Western calls to conscript 18-25 year olds is a mark against collapse desperation, not evidence of it (which it will inevitably shift to being characterized as when/if Zelensky does proceed with expanding conscription)." β November 2024
- Steelmanning Biden's approach on Ukraine. β November 2024
- "In a bit of public reflection on a past prediction of the Syrian war, Dean admits to getting a Quality Contribution post wrong..." β December 2024
- "Start stacking these effects together, and gradually you go from 'a group of middle eastern terrorists coordinating how to hijack a series of airplanes simultaneously' to 'guy rents truck.'" β January 2025
- "In this week's context, the Pardon worked twice as a balancing function limiting the capacity to carry out and sustain politically motivated prosecutions." β January 2025
- "Due to the elevation, topography, and regional climate, the term 'fighting season' in Afghanistan was literal, not just figurative." β February 2025
- "Trump-Europe can be an alliance in which the Americans are the mercenaries paid for by the EUropeans... but mercenaries still have to be paid." β February 2025
- "Bottom line- I think this OPM email event has resulted in Musk undercutting himself and DOGE for the foreseeable future, and greatly reigned in its potential to reign in agencies without the backing of those agencies own leaders." β February 2025
- "And so, let us explore the nuances and limitations of dual-hatting institutional positions." β February 2025
- "It is not that 'cruelty is the point'- it is that the accusation of cruelty is no longer sufficiently deterring." β March 2025
- "The Great Le Pen Conviction Saga" β April 2025
- "The trade flow diversions across the globe, who will receive what runoffs and to what effect, will be the most interesting part of these interesting times." β April 2025
- "In Which Dean Points to New and Upcoming News as Reason to Expect the Ukraine War to Continue For Some Time" β April 2025
- "Congressional committee placement politics isn't an exact analog to the French Monarchy making appointments dependent on remaining at court, but there are more than a few parallels." β April 2025
- "Yes, the new scandal for the new week, just in time to replace coverage of the somewhat embarrassing judge from last week, now presents a heroic judge objecting to the deportation of US children." β April 2025
- "Honey wake up. The US Fiscal Year 2026 Budget War started today." β May 2025
- "How
Trump Defeated Columbia UniversityColumbia University Defeated Itself" β May 2025 - "Why not bother?" β June 2025
- "Dean Highlights The Reuters' 2025 Digital News Report So You Don't Have To" β June 2025
- "Looking Forward (In Time) To The Democratic (Midterm) Civil War (And Likely Trump Law Enforcement Accelerant)" β June 2025
- "An Audio-Book Review of 'Mere Christianity' by C.S. Lewis, from the C.S. Lewis Essential Audio Library" β July 2025
- "If I were to try and make a fancy title for my opinion on the Texas anti-ICE attack, I'd call it 'How I Had To Figure My Way Out Of A False Flag Suspicion.'" β July 2025
- "The biggest obstacle to a Russia-Ukraine peace agreement isn't the objection of 'the nationalists' to peace, but rather the 'everyone who suspects Putin would attack again' caucus to 'a peace agreement that sets conditions for Putin to attack again.'" β July 2025
- "Male audiences might not want modern Hollywood female lead character because Hollywood writers often insinuate the woman of the show doesn't [want] them in her life." β August 2025
- "A YouTube Channel Review: Summoning Salt, the Video Game Speedrunner Sports Documentarian" β September 2025
- "The conflict over the nature of the locus of control of society is a very longstanding paradigm conflict." β September 2025
- "In 2008, someone just coming into politics could be forgiven for only associating the Democratic Party with peaceful protests, as the Democratic Party was in the later phase of ditching the older violent protestors and hadn't yet developed a new violent protestor cohort." β September 2025
- "In which Dean spends sick time writing a bit too much about a game about bugs." β October 2025
- "As much as it was never going to happen, even at the time of the series I remember really liking the 'Harry is a decoy chosen one / Neville was the real boy who lived' theories for what it could have let Harry Potter be." β November 2025
- "The International Criminal Court is a treaty-law organization. Its powers derive not externally, but from the sovereign authorities of its constituent members." β November 2025
- "In so much that I present a definition of 'victory' for Ukraine, my inclination has generally leaned towards 'terms that are sufficient to allow Ukraine to deter yet another continuation war by Russia.'" β November 2025
- "So You Want to Win an AAQC This Yearβ¦ (Or: 15 Tips For Writing Actually A Quality Contribution Posts)" β December 2025
- "The End of An Era of Air Piracy in America" β January 2026
- "Maduro, who was a busdriver before then and who has no prospects or powerbase outside of it, is basically committed to the cause. Whether he is a true believer is irrelevant- without the PSUV he has nothing." β January 2026
- "The point here isn't that the Somali diaspora growth in the Twin Cities region was illegal, but rather that it was purposeful. Purpose without a shared intent between all the actors involved, but purposeful all the same." β January 2026
- "If anything, at least in the [A]merican culture war body cameras seem on net to have... kind of vindicated the pro-law-enforcement side by surprise." β February 2026
- "Now you make me want to dig out my own personal screed of a time when the game 'punishing the player' was actually the better writing. For me it's Mass Effect 3." β May 2026
- "If we're doing a retrospective, it feels worth noting that around about now was about the time that predictions from years ago were estimating that the early-war Russian advantages in various pre-war stockpiles and early-war industrial mobilization would be petering out." β May 2026
@DeanTheDull β 45 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- d β Week of March 18th, 2019
- There's a number of gun tropes associated with the US that flutter across Europe. Biker gangs are sometimes associated with the mobility aspect, but the idea of open-carry is sometimes conflated with β Week of March 18th, 2019
- NPR had a fun story back in 2016 looking at America immigration to Canada, with a nice graphic reach as far back as Reagan. The bottom line is 'eh'- there was a bump after Raegan's election, but there β Week of April 1st, 2019
- The difference is that it warns against assuming identical contexts. β Week of April 1st, 2019
- Calling someone a villain is a framing device, an attempt to assert an objective moral condemnation and to contrast the villains with the not-villains (either the victims of the villain or the heroes β Week of April 8th, 2019
- Without disagreeing with your broader points, I would like to note that there is one sort of magic dirt that does widely determine potentially prosperous countries from those that will always struggle β Week of April 8th, 2019
- I know, am aware, and agree with the first paragraph while disagreeing strongly with the conclusion of the second. In-group pressures are one of the most powerful forces in human existence, and are an β Week of April 8th, 2019
- I am fully aware how Social Justice advocates are attempting to reframe various issues. I also believe they are balefully wrong, using the wrong tools for the wrong problems and creating new injustice β Week of April 8th, 2019
- Bottom line is political- China, North Korea, and Left-leaning South Korea all align in having Japan as an acceptable national evil who is useful to villify in order to justify uniting the nation behi β Week of April 8th, 2019
- Cutting reply in two because of character limit. Also, tired rambling. β Week of April 8th, 2019
- I think this sort of viewpoint is one of the reasons that the American Republican electorate stopped caring about respectability and jumped in bed with Trump despite (and sometimes because of) the aghast moral objections of his opponents. β Week of June 17th, 2019
- They won in the same sense most insurgencies do- they weren't beaten and scattered by an overwhelming force of far greater strength, capability, and organization, and did considerable damage to the cr β Week of June 17th, 2019
- epic-post on America at the turn on the millenium β Month of August 2019
- Contextualizing South Korea's Political Situation β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
- Open vs Closed Fist - Morality in Bioware RPGs β June 2/2, 2020
- Islamic Terrorism Still Happens, You Just Don't Care β July 2/2, 2020
- A Defense of the Electoral College and Federalism β July 2/2, 2020
- Reflections on the Dragon Tyrant β September 2020
- Worrying about what was done in the name of opposing Russia. β October 1/2, 2020
- Anti-Imperialists in Korea: A Shrimp Among Whales β October 2/2, 2020
- The independence of Scotland β December 2020
- The importance of the UK as an ally β December 2020
- The extent to which the climate emission targets were or were not the point of the Paris Accords. β January 2021
- The EU's failed (?) attempt to bolster its image with rapid COVID-19 vaccine development. β January 2021
- International politics: EU and US interests in Germany and Poland. β February 2021
- Gamergate as an insurgent victory of not losing despite the efforts of your enemy to crush it. β February 2021
- "There's tons of ways to break down media-as-an-information service, but one way is to break down audience perception of media into three forms: 'media intended to inform,' 'media intended to convince,' and 'media intended to indoctrinate.'" β June 2021 2/2
- "French secularism has always had a strain of severe insecurity regarding the loyalties of the genuinely religious..." β June 2021 2/2
- "Facebook employee/boss initiatives don't get graded by how effective they are at what they claim to do, they get evaluated by being able to point at some issue and say 'I'm helping!'" β June 2021 2/2
- "How much of Afghanistan was a wasted effort depends on what you think the point of it was." β July 2021 1/2
- "In the spirit of the other (poke)ball the world revolves around, please enjoy this quite serious, not at all tongue-in-cheek consideration of what cultural stereotypes a children's monster-collection game implies." β July 2021 1/2
- "Institutional trust is developed by publicly purging bad actors at their own instigation and by taking politically and popularly unpopular positions and hits to institutional interests for the sake of a stated principle." β July 2021 2/2
- "The US loses its internal wargames all the time, and this is a good thing (if you are an American)..." β September 2021 1/2
- "Maybe he was just power-hungry, but another reading of Xi's moves is that he's made a strategic calculus decision, and is forseeing Bad Times ahead and sees a hyper-centralized state with single leader as the only way to get through some obvious issues, of which a conflict with the US may well be the least dangerous." β September 2021 1/2
- "Americans aren't going to look at it AMD as a meaningful disruption to MAD, and are going to keep working on it. Not because they want to start a nuclear war or war over nukes, but because- from their perspective- it will help avoid one." β November 2021 1/2
- "You know what happens if you only swim left? You swim in a bloody circle." β December 2021 1/2
- "The greatest losers and political targets of Russia sanctions are the pro-Russian political influence groups in Europe, by taking away the pro-Russia business lobbies that provide funding and legitimacy for pro-Russia politicians." β March 2022
- "The point is that when you start really looking at the politics behind media politics, 'I read it in a popular Ukrainian newspaper' ... is not a great spot to start..." β March 2022
- "Unlike Rey, Finn is not a martial powerhouse who solves his problems primarily through physical/force Strength." β April 2022
- "If you think a precautionary principle shouldn't apply to you, you are precisely the sort of person the precautionary principle was developed to apply to." β July 2022
- "Obama was far worse for the democrats far further down the ticket, as he was the one who cemented the party's structural transition to the technocratic city-and-minority coalition that really only worked for him because of his personal star power, β July 2022
- even as he sacrificed various other institutional interests to consolidate his power." β July 2022
- "Inherited ideological opposition to nuclear + contemporary economic interest opposition to nuclear and russian gas + decade-long neoliberal power struggles + period of opportunity during the Ukraine crisis = a green party that's pro-war, willing to import gas from the Americans." β July 2022
- "'Winning' is defined by one's own side, and not defined by the other..." β July 2022
- "The American alliance network in Europe is founded on the premise of preventing a strategically autonomous Europe where 'Europe' can refer to a collective, cohesive polity." β August 2022
@dedicating_ruckus β 12 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Disparate Impact β Week of July 2nd, 2018
- "Good Whites" and "Bad Whites" β Week of July 30th, 2018
- This Exchange β Week of October 8th, 2018
- Presumption of Innocence Protects the Disprivledged β Week of October 8th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- There are two different basic issues here: the question of whether it is in fact an emergency, and the question of what the best approach would be, assuming it were. β Week of February 25th, 2019
- It's honestly difficult to articulate how simultaneously misguided and repulsive I find that argument. β Week of April 8th, 2019
- First off, I want to give props to Vox for that article; it makes me upgrade my estimate of their general usefulness. (I note it's Kelsey Piper/unitofcaring who wrote it; she's likely a high outlier a β Week of June 3rd, 2019
- > So if there is something anti-fragile in history, it's not the taboo against SSM. It's a whole conceptual framework about marriage. Christians partially get this when they say modern society is l β Week of June 10th, 2019
- The CNN interview that the quote was in response to has the line "radicalization is a public health crisis". The type specimen given is Molyneux, in the context of beliefs like "black people are infer β Week of June 17th, 2019
- Trump Supporters - Defending the Ingroup β January 2020
- Gun Control Laws as Seen by Gun Owners β January 2020
- Social Conservatism, Survival, and Scalability β February 2020
@deerpig β 4 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- A Story of Loss in Rural Thailand β Week of June 25th, 2018
- I tend to agree with the overall argument. I actually live in an apartment that was funded by a BRI grant in Cambodia -- part of laboratory campus that was meant to became a agricultural testing lab β Week of December 03, 2018
- Email was originally, a distributed system. We can thank webmail -- hotmail and later google and yahoo for turning it into the centralized point for surveillance that it is today. Email is a simpl β February 18th - April 1st, 2019
- >In my city, we can order organic veggies from local farm. Its definitely awesome quality, but its also very expensive (like 1.5 - 3 times what you would pay at the grocery store). β April 2019
@deleted β 4 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- tribal loyalty, xenophobia β 11-14-17
- Working class vs Middle class β Week of June 18th, 2018
- Comment 5 β Week of October 1st, 2018
- The first time I ever participated in an election (2008 Canadian general election), I spent a good 3 to 5 hours per party (so, Libs, Cons, and NDP => 9-15 hrs total) reading through the entirety β Week of October 22, 2018
@deluks917_ β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Being a self-professed leftist who opposed police brutality against the Capitol rioters. β January 2021
@Demonwaffle β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- If You Have To Shoot Someone, It'll Be Quite a Few Bullets β August 2020
@Denswend β 10 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- A "theory of mind" of rationalists for outsiders β 02-08-18
- "Most kids these days can't use computers." β 04-02-18
- the subtleties of defining ideologies and movements β 04-02-18
- chemicals actually are turning the frogs gay, and They actually don't want you to know about it β 04-02-18
- Words: Denotation vs Connotation β Week of October 8th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Covid Deaths and Dignity of Life β August 2020
- Defining Religion β August 2020
- Bedlam and Competition of Violence β September 2020
- "I find the story of ethidium bromide to be a nice metaphor for COVID." β October 2021 2/2
- "To put it bluntly, Yugoslav war absolutely decimated every country, except Slovenia, enough to permanently put an end to any early 20th century-esque displays of violent nationalism." β December 2021 2/2
@dev β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "The wording of the Amendment was designed to unambiguously include freed slaves, but exclude unconquered American Indian tribes." β February 2025
@devinhelton β 4 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- presenting Counter Search, a website for getting both sides of a debate β 12-20-17
- college basketball fraud β 04-02-18
- authority consensus β Week of June 4th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
@Difficult_Ad_3879 β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "But I wish my fellow coffee people could respect alcohol for how magical it is." β May 2022
- "If fat Americans canβt stop eating cake, though they know it will kill them, how can we expect horny Americans not to suggest a sexual act to an attractive coworker when their willpower happens to be depleted?" β August 2022
@dimension_door β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- >You seem to have the most well-developed notion of social class out of the comments I've seen here β Week of April 1st, 2019
@DinoInNameOnly β 6 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- I guess Iβm first to the punch on this. β Week of January 14th, 2019
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Most media is porn. β January 2021
- here β January 2021
- Meditations on Oreos β January 2022 2/2
- "To believe in gender identity you have to simultaneously believe two contradictory things..." β July 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Cyberchase was amazing and now itβs just okay, and Iβm sad." β September 2022
@DiracsPsi β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "There is a popular argument that meat, beef in particular, has a large negative impact on climate"--and it's false. β April 2021
@Direwolf202 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- This is interesting, right up until you realize that the company with better computing can do far more powerful data manipulation. The same unit of data is more powerful (has a lower marginal cost) fo β Week of June 17th, 2019
@DirtyWaterHotDog β 4 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Read what Paul has to say about Sam, and you'll see a carefully worded pattern. Paul admires Sam, but Sam scares him." β September 2024
- "JCPOA withdrawl would have been a slam dunk, but geopolitical changes outside the middle east ruined it." β November 2024
- "Indians (among other first-gen immigrants) are more spiritual, family-oriented, and 90s-American-like than naive 2025 Americans." β February 2025
- "No, girl-boss feminism doesn't aspire to be equal. They aspire to be the same." β November 2025
@DiscourseMagnus β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Personally, the Republicans have lost a lot of goodwill from me by acting like the pro-life mission was accomplished with the end of Roe." β November 2024
- "Perhaps it is precisely because of the complex collapse of traditional sexual morality in our society that so many fathers are unable to articulate a desire to protect their daughters' virtue that does not ironically sound disgustingly incestuous." β December 2024
@DishwaterDumper β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Finding new songs to listen to. β November 2021 1/2
@DJSpook β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "I have reached the settled conclusion that the issue of abortion is the single lowest-quality conversation on the internet." β September 2021 1/2
@djt1988 β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- The stupidity of Donald Trump β Week of August 20th, 2018
- The Legal Doctrines Surrounding Speaking on University Campuses β Week of August 27th, 2018
@dmz β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@Dnetropy β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "Fertility is an issue, it is THE issue of our time (assuming the agi does not arrive and humans remain in the loop of creation)." β April 2022
@dnkndnts β 9 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- The Ecological and Demographic Stability of Different Cultures β Week of August 6th, 2018
- > easy to code β Week of October 29, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Interalized Legal Formalism in Protestant Cultures β May 1/2, 2020
- Don't be a Pavlik Morozov, You Rat β June 1/2, 2020
- The Procrustean Enlightenment and the Shift from Fetishism to Uniformitarianism β June 1/2, 2020
- The Conservative Response to Radical Feminism β June 1/2, 2020
- Whence the Demarcation Between Porn and Story? β June 1/2, 2020
- "Apple will now rummage through the photos on your iPhone to make sure you are not in possession of any contraband images." β August 2021
- "Ordinary male friendships suffer as homosexuality is accepted, because now one has to take active effort to ensure everyone knows it's not 'like that.'" β April 2022
@do_i_punch_the_nazi β 4 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- thorough Q&A about guns and gun laws. β 03-08-18
- what kind of gun lends itself best to home defense β 04-02-18
- Country Music and Blue Collar Identity β Week of July 30th, 2018
- Politics and Sewage β Week of August 20th, 2018
@DocGrey187000 β 4 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- On the mΓ©tis of being poor. β 01-09-18
- Weβre very close on this. β Relaunching the /r/SSC Quality Contribution Roundup
π’ r/TheMotte era
- In the grasshopper and the ant story, what should actually occur? β Week of April 29th, 2019
- discuss dogwhistles β Month of July 2019
@DoctorGlas β 6 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- intimacy, relationship dynamics, and homophobia β Week of May 21st, 2018
- A Taste of the Blackpill: There but for the grace of God I went. β Week of July 2nd, 2018
- I was going to make a post about this, but I see you have beaten me to it. I was struck by an odd thought when I first saw the tweets you posted, which I wanted to explore. This is going to be very, v β Week of November 26, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The Swedish National Council on Crime Prevention (BrottsfΓΆrebyggande RΓ₯det, shortened BRΓ ) has released a new, incredibly detailed report on rape statistics in Sweden. In the report, BRΓ has looked β Week of May 27th, 2019
- Reviewing the Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- here β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
@dogaltine β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- βDrumpfβ β Week of August 6th, 2018
@Doglatine β 79 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Categories of Ideological Objections β Week of July 2nd, 2018
- Auschwitz β Week of July 9th, 2018
- On PhDs and Mental Health β Week of August 27th, 2018
- Reverse Empathy β Week of September 10th, 2018
- Innocence, consequentialism, Kavanaugh, and how I learned to keep worrying and reluctantly accept the principle of double effect. β Week of September 24th, 2018
- Contributions of Modern Philosophers to society β Week of October 8th, 2018
- Oh, this is a great question. In short, I think there are two main kinds of unconscious mental state that we have some good reason to appeal to. β February 18th - April 1st, 2019
π’ r/TheMotte era
- These are really interesting arguments. I don't think I quite subscribe to kind of views that you explicitly have in your sights here, but I feel some sympathy for them, and my views on immigration ha β Week of March 18th, 2019
- Heard a quick discussion of white privilege on Start the Week on Radio 4 this morning (link) featuring BLM activist DeRay McKesson. It was mostly a reasonable discussion, but I worry that the notion o β Week of April 29th, 2019
- Sometimes I think men lose out in certain forms of relationship conflicts and dispute resolution because of straightforward issues of vocabulary and tone. Some (over the top) examples to make the poin β Week of May 20th, 2019
- Having taught 30+ undergrad philosophy classes, I basically agree with you, especially for intro classes at more professionally (and less academically) oriented institutions. My usual teaching strateg β Week of May 27th, 2019
- on "Trumpism" β Month of July 2019
- annecdotes from teaching β Month of August 2019
- on polarization of the immigration debate β Month of August 2019
- on norms, laws, and inequality. β Month of August 2019
- Do People know their own political beliefs? β September and October 2019 (extremely late)
- Satyagraha Awards β September and October 2019 (extremely late)
- Proposing a Novel form of Wealth Tax β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- Pragmatic vs Cowardly Non-resistance β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- On Open Societies β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- The Problems With Institutional Legibility β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- On MOOCs and Motivation β January 2020
- Examples of Conceptual Transformations β January 2020
- Analyizing Transinclusive Views of Gender β January 2020
- Against Dissolving the Modern Monasteries β January 2020
- Hamilton β February 2020
- Abusing Appeals to Context β March 2020
- Trust In Media: Some Perspectives β April 2020
- The Three Ages Model: Do Hard Times Create Good Men? β April 2020
- The Devil-May-Care Nature of Coolness β April 2020
- The Changing Way Philosophers and Psychologists Approach Beliefs β April 2020
- The Don'ts of Dating: Romantic Advice for Contrarians β April 2020
- In Praise of Casual Sex β May 1/2, 2020
- Eurozone: Battle for Aid β May 1/2, 2020
- Varied Thoughts on Conspiracy Theories β May 1/2, 2020
- Gaming Motivations, Gender, and Snobbery β May 1/2, 2020
- China's Precarious Position β May 1/2, 2020
- Who Knows, Maybe I'm a Bigoted Sociopath β June 1/2, 2020
- A Sex-Positive Rejection of the RadFem Narrative β June 1/2, 2020
- Wait, Grandad, You Mean Zoe Quinn Caused the Second Civil War? β June 1/2, 2020
- How to Dive Into the Sociology of Philosophy β June 1/2, 2020
- Losing Trust in the Left and Becoming Politically Homeless β June 1/2, 2020
- How Much Sexualization in Society is Appropriate? β June 1/2, 2020
- On Knowledge of 'Hate Facts' β June 2/2, 2020
- Jane Austen Is What 2020 Needs β July 1/2, 2020
- Does Therapy Work? β July 1/2, 2020
- Matching vs Bonding in Relationships β July 2/2, 2020
- The User Viewpoint Focus Series β August 2020
- Beyond a Utilitarian Defense of Free Speech β August 2020
- Is the 'sexual market value' of the median 25 year old straight guy decreasing? β October 1/2, 2020
- A Hereditarian Left View of State Compensation for Disadvantageous Traits β October 2/2, 2020
- Who Enforces Norms of Masculinity? (Quality Thread) β October 2/2, 2020
- Where is the anti-progressive Borat? β November 2020
- Judge Instituitions Not One Purpose But On Effects β November 2020
- The Black Tribe β November 2020
- Why right wing populism should have secured buy-in from cultural and intellectual elites... β January 2021
- ...in order to set a policy agenda for the future of American conservatism. β January 2021
- Revising conflict/mistake theory into a more granular matrix. β January 2021
- What "learn to code" looks like on a wetware substrate. β January 2021
- "I will be very surprised if China makes a move on Taiwan in the next decade, and if it does, I expect it to be a painful defeat for China, even if not a quick one." β March 2021
- "I think it's entirely reasonable based on our cultural messaging for the average person to feel entitled to having a romantic life." β July 2021 2/2
- "Part of me suspects that it's just general gender mystification - just as many men struggle to empathise why catcalling can be fucking scary, many women struggle to empathise with the idea of being literally unfuckable." β July 2021 2/2
- "Thus to the extent that the current situation produces some pangs of humiliation and fears of decline, I hope that in turn it will prompt more Americans to reflect seriously on the benefits and costs of their global empire." β August 2021
- "In fact, I think there's an interesting prima facie case to be made that in terms of strategic failure, the War in Afghanistan might be the worst defeat in American military history." β August 2021
- A Dialogue on Disability β October 2021 2/2
- "So it was that last week, I decided to re-assess my opinions on pornography." β November 2021 2/2
- "Something a little bit different but still culture war: which country has the best national cuisine?" β November 2021 2/2
- "I want to probe a provocative idea: could it be in Europe's interest to align itself with China rather than the US in any coming superpower conflict?" β November 2021 2/2
- "I had a lot of fun last week reading the responses to my 'best national cuisines' question. But one thing that piqued my interest was that no-one raised serious objections about the intelligibility of the question." β December 2021 1/2
- "The criticisms of woke ideology you're seeing here significantly predate the term 'woke' becoming mainstream." β March 2022
- "I was convinced that any large-scale attack by Russia on Ukraine would be beneficial to Western geopolitical interests. This prediction has largely been borne out..."" β March 2022
- "Whereas AGI is currently slated for 2050 or so, Social AI is already here." β April 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Ever since the Ukrainian successes in the northeastern campaign, I've been trying to get inside the mindset of the Kremlin to figure out what their likely response is." β September 2022
- "Some complaints about Netflix's new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front." β January 2023
- "In this regard, LLMs are absolutely wonderful. They allow anyone with limited training to meet bureaucratic standards with minimal effort." β January 2024
- "So, I think it would be a mistake to throw up our hands in despair; the US has formidable structural advantages in any prolonged conflict with China." β April 2024
- "While you can definitely fuck your kids up, thereβs minimal difference on childrenβs outcomes between good and great parenting..." β September 2024
- "Conversely, inter-male jokes about being the victim of male-on-male sexual violence are pretty common." β November 2024
- "In short, the bulk of the breakdown on the European side is due to Trump, or increasingly Trumpism as a movement, which seems tailor-made to alienate European elites." β March 2025
@DoktorGlas β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Earlier this year, the Swedish publisher Natur och Kultur released a new book discussing the rise of male sexlessness by the name of 'Man gΓ₯r sin egen vΓ€g: riktningar i sexlΓΆshetens dimma.'" β July 2023
- "Earlier this year the Swedish government appointed a state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen fΓΆr en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and what it portends for Sweden going forward." β December 2025
@Dormin11 β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- An in Depth Review of the Disaster Artist β April 2019
@Dormin111 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Modern US Politicians as Late Roman Republic Figures β September 2020
@doubleunplussed β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- How strong feminist messaging can have negative effect in the dating world β Week of May 21st, 2018
@dovetailing β 7 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Every time the psychology of trans stuff comes up at ACX or here I want to write this essay; this time I finally did." β February 2023
- "Book Review β March 2023
- Trapped β March 2023
- Men's Bodies" β March 2023
- " One of the more insidious things about the prevailing culture is the way that it encourages people, almost to the extent that it is unthinkable to do otherwise, to identify with their desires -- especially if those desires are sexual." β November 2023
- "'The right side of history' tries to have it all three ways while not committing enough to any of them to expose weakness there." β April 2024
- "So anyway, next time you see some dude in a dress, with long hair and breasts but a face and voice obviously male despite his best efforts, think about what kind of emotions must have driven him to that place, and have a little empathy." β November 2024
@dr_analog β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I buried a beloved uncle this week and was asked to be a pallbearer in a Catholic mass." β January 2023
- "Anyway, this isn't meant to be an impassioned defense of SBF, more like my continuing fascination and horror at this alien thing we call modern business." β October 2023
@DradisPing β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "In the Presidential campaign Kerry cast himself as a proud veteran. Meanwhile other swift boat veterans were still pissed off at him." β August 2024
- "I don't think he's actually particularly pissed at Harvard specifically." β May 2025
@drewiepoodle β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- On Blanchard's typology of trans gender β 02-01-18
@Drinniol β 5 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- "Suppose you're typical lower middle class with some but not large savings. If you have a plan with a sky high deductible and even then caps on how much they pay after, then any catastrophic healthcare event is going to put you into medical bankruptcy even with the insurance. Which is exactly where you'd be without insurance." β 12-10-17
- "The 11th seal has been broken." β 12-20-17
- romantic scripts in the modern era β Week of May 21st, 2018
- Tariffs in the Real-world β Week of June 11th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Innocuous Phrases as Political Slogans: A perfect motte and bailey β September 2020
@drmanhattan16 β 10 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- communication and charity β Week of April 30th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Learning from Camden's 2013 Police Reform β June 1/2, 2020
- "The Civilizationβ’ Fallacy" β September 2021 2/2
- "Some culture war from India." β March 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Letβs Interview Fascism with Paul Gottfried" β December 2022
- Part 1 β The History of Transgenderism β January 2023
- Part 2 β The Causes and Rationalization of Transgenderism β January 2023
- Part 3 β How Transgenderism Harms Women And Children β January 2023
- Part 4 β How Transgenderism Took Over Institutions And How Some Women Are Fighting Back β January 2023
- Part 5 β Conclusion and Discussion β January 2023
@DTulpa β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@DuplexFields β 9 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Grey Is the Warmest Color β June 2/2, 2020
- My Little Pony: Goalposts Are Moving β January 2021
- The anatomy of a "news" piece. β July 2021 1/2
- this contribution β July 2021 1/2
- "What I Learned About Relationship Maintenance From My Little Pony: The Basics" β August 2021
- "Could I commit to purging the babykillers? I, myself, could not." β September 2021 1/2
- "I, a furry and a member of the one-in-38 with autism, have a theory on this. Prepare to be amused at my audacity." β December 2021 1/2
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Ironically, the backstory of the final trilogy could have been the first film of it and garnered critical acclaim! Call it Fall Of Skywalker." β January 2023
- "Then in November 2010, in my darkest depths, I discovered My Little Pony Friendship is Magic." β June 2025
@dwaxe β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- On Election Integrity: An "Election" Is Really Thousands β October 1/2, 2020
@DWXXV β 3 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Meditations on Moderation β October 2/2, 2020
- Contra /u/self_made_human on the present and future of automation in medicine. β September 2021 1/2
- "Sometimes I complain how healthcare costs in the U.S. are poorly understand by...pretty much everyone." β April 2022
@Dysautognome β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "College was pretty strict about having to take leftist concepts for granted and it certainly exuded an exclusively leftist cultural pressure." β May 2021 2/2
@eaturbrainz β 10 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- /u/eaturbrainz staking out a narrow definition of antisemitism β 10-07-17
- Exit vs. Voice, cultural determinants of conflict aversion, suburbia β 10-07-17
- ethnonationalism in Israel and Palestine β 11-01-17
- special snowflakery is adaptive if you plan on being admitted to college β 04-02-18
- the problems with neuroscience as reverse-engineering β 04-23-18
- realism and nonrealism, diversity β 04-23-18
- Brain Background Noise and IQ β Week of June 25th, 2018
- Problems with popular scienceβs evo-devo just so stories β Week of July 9th, 2018
- The necessity of precise terminology in in political discourse β Week of July 23rd, 2018
- The Middle Class made Capitalism Respectable β Week of September 17th, 2018
@ebrso β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I was on one of these busses that was filled with migrants sometime around the beginning of the year." β September 2023
@Ecgtheow β 3 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "You don't have to train yourself to be a self-denying online YIMBY who insists that there's no downside to living next to a homeless shelter, but you do need to come up with an argument for why NIMBYism isn't just everybody defecting in a prisoner's dilemma." β February 2023
- "The question isn't why has women's behavior changed, that's obvious, it's how will men's behavior change to adapt." β February 2023
- "Wokeness is humanities academia fed through the incentive structure of social media. It's purpose is not to signal distinctiveness between blue and red, but between impure blues and properly pure blues." β June 2023
@edalis β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The Rise of Skywalker was a Romance β January 2020
@EdiX β 3 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Hindsight and Go Dep β Week of September 17th, 2018
- I think that the left experienced a sudden and extreme narrowing of the overton window in the past 10 years across a plethora of topics. The more visible effects are the narrowing of acceptable opinio β Week of November 12, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- discuss the popularity of Joe Rogan β Month of August 2019
@edlolington β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "That Person Starting an Online Argument With You May Not Be a Bad Debater or a Bad-Faith Actor, They May Just Be Functionally Illiterate" β August 2021
@Edmund-Nelson β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Not Trusting Prediction Markets β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "How feasible is it to eat on food stamps" β March 2025
@Eetan β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
π£ TheMotte.org era
@EfficiencyPlenty β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The Inside View from a Jail Cell β August 2020
@EfficientSyllabus β 35 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Wokism Maintains the System β June 2/2, 2020
- You Couldn't Be You If You Weren't Who You Are β June 2/2, 2020
- The Americanization of politics in Hungary β October 1/2, 2020
- The Contradictory, Curious Nature of Hungarian Nationalism β October 1/2, 2020
- How European:nationalism::American:corporatism. β January 2021
- Compartmentalizing your life is good for you and for society. β January 2021
- "Every ideology and cult has a common-sense packaging around it that lures people in. You can't start with the crazy stuff outright." β March 2021
- "I think ultimately the onus is on those who claim something that is outside the mainstream to convince the majority. That does not simply mean drowning people in pdf link dumps." β April 2021
- "Sure our state media in Hungary is way worse [than Germany's] in the other direction, but there at least nobody thinks it's independent." β April 2021
- "As a rule of thumb, if you can be unambiguously wrong in your job, you aren't elite/high-status." β April 2021
- "Why do they have horns, hooves, claws, sharp teeth, so good eyes and ears, etc. etc.? What use would they be if we eliminate the potential for "bad" stuff happening, if any animal gets to live in safety to an equal degree? The whole animal makes no sense under such circumstances!" β April 2021
- "This story just tells so much about Hungary, they should put this in those textbooks on cross-cultural understanding and stuff." β May 2021 1/2
- "Unintelligent and low-social-skills people are routinely stepped over and screwed over using constructs 'designed' (or rather evolved) to filter for cognitive and empathic capacity." β May 2021 1/2
- "...people around me said nobody would buy a car with enforced speed limit. But what if there's nothing else?" β October 2021 1/2
- "Hungarian opposition primary update" β October 2021 2/2
- "It's always interesting to see international reports about your own country." β October 2021 2/2
- "Politics is about negotiating the rules of living together with your fellow humans. Saying that the smallest infraction is backed by threats of guns is totally out of proportion." β October 2021 2/2
- "I think the collective human psyche that emerges from large-scale society is really only capable of producing a limited list of tropes." β November 2021 1/2
- "Being from Hungary, it's certainly a Gell-Mann amnesia moment β November 2021 1/2
- This review is just so thick in narrative β November 2021 1/2
- "Woke β November 2021 2/2
- math." β November 2021 2/2
- "I dont think segregation is morally and philosophically nice, but you have to be a sheltered urbanites to not understand why it happens in such places." β November 2021 2/2
- "The Hungarian divide isn't a typical left/right one." β March 2022
- "I think these quotes make it clear that [OrbΓ‘n] shifted towards Russia because he thought that the West missed its chances around 2007-08, around the time of Putin's famous Munich speech." β April 2022
- "Women's sport exists so women can also experience the thrill of competition, the preparation, the mental battle of striving for excellence etc." β April 2022
- Written in 1861, The Tragedy of Man is a play by Hungarian writer Imre MadΓ‘ch. β April 2022
- "Meaningwave and the West" β May 2022
- "Unitarianism β May 2022
- what is conservatism β May 2022
- tradition is liberal?" β May 2022
- "Each declaration of this statement is therefore about publicly announcing that 'this movement has power over me', and the higher status/accomplishment/rank/seniority these people have, the more others will also learn to know their place and that they are also under the authority of this movement." β June 2022
- "It's OrbΓ‘n's yearly (except for 2 covid skips) visionary speech, and is important to listen to." β July 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "If only we had a way to make sure that a (sexual/romantic) relationship is socially acceptable (according to whatever the local moral rules are) within your community." β September 2022
- "Human motivation is multi-faceted." β September 2022
@egoitis β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Analyzing "Strange Statisitcs" β June 2/2, 2020
@eigenwert β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "I feel callous saying all this, but the invasion is a great opportunity for [Europe]." β March 2022
@Eihabu β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Inconsistencies in the Trayvon Martin Case β May 1/2, 2020
@EleventhKey β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Dark Matter β Week of October 1st, 2018
@Ellenvelemeny β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- The Nature of Information β Week of August 20th, 2018
- Make-Up in General Just Making Women Feel Good β Week of September 17th, 2018
@Eltargrim β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- The Science of Different Toothpastes β Week of September 24th, 2018
@EngageInFisticuffs β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- on wealth and privilege β Month of August 2019
@eniteris β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- So because I'm bored, I don't know where else to put this, and apparently international maritime law is now a hobby of mine, I have some opinions on on the recent drone shooting. β Week of June 17th, 2019
@entobat β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Cliff's notes on the Trump-Russia controversy β 02-01-18
@epakesa β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- response β Week of May 21st, 2018
@Epistaxis β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- disturbing classical music β 11-06-17
@Epistemic_Ian β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Urban transportation. β Week of May 7th, 2018
@Eqth β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The political development of Argentina. β April 2021
@erwgv3g34 β 8 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- PUAs vs MRAs β Week of October 1st, 2018
- First, get an e-ink reader. You are going to be consuming millions of words, and reading them on a computer screen or a phone is going to get old really fast. I recommend the Amazon Kindle Paperwhit β February 18th - April 1st, 2019
π’ r/TheMotte era
- asserts the inevitablity of religion β Month of July 2019
- "You can't lower the price of real estate and not lower the price of real estate; you can't lower the cost of rent and not lower the value of houses." β March 2021
- "The fact that the word 'pedophilia' conflates these perversions with the normal and healthy attraction that men feel for teenage girls makes it an anti-concept..." β December 2021 1/2
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Poor areas are not awful because of tragic dirt; they are awful because they are filled with stupid, violent, impulsive people." β January 2023
- "Most of what you think you know about sex/romance/dating is a feminist lie, fed to you through a combination of the education system and the media, or people repeating falsehoods they themselves learned from school and movies and TV shows." β May 2023
- "Given those choices, you are much better off taking your chances with the Christians than with the nominal Atheists." β February 2025
@Eryemil β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- This is going to sound like trolling but I'm honestly perplexed at how anyone could read something like this and not see a civilization at the brink of collapse. I also believe---in spite of the media β Week of June 17th, 2019
@Escapement β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Valve: Censorship and Business Model β Week of June 4th, 2018
- The Freedom of Speech β Week of July 23rd, 2018
@Esperanza β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Can you imagine a modern politician being in favor of legalizing something that they thought was deeply morally wrong?" β April 2023
@Ethan β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Coed settings have their own dynamic." β May 2023
@Euphoric-Baseball-61 β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "Education was intended as a way for the rich to force the cost of training workers onto the workers themselves." β May 2021 1/2
- "Youth were more precocious in Ancient Rome." β May 2021 1/2
@EverythingIsFine β 4 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Here is a simple model of a pension fund." β September 2022
- "My argument, to be clear, is that as a practical matter whatever the philosophical truth of the suicide right, not only is it controversial, implementing it is very vulnerable to abuse, to a degree that the terminal death right is not; therefore, we should not implement anything beyond a terminal death right." β August 2025
- "So as one of the resident Taiwan pessimists, I have surprising news. Contrary to all my expectations, Trump might have actually pushed back a Taiwan invasion." β March 2026
- "So, I remember reading this a year or two ago, and I thought it was so apt I'm just going to roughly word-replace it because history rhymes." β April 2026
@EvilCorporation β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- reacting to racist remarks. β 01-04-18
@evilmaniacal β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The extent to which Millennials are facing economic hardship as a result of public policy. β June 2021 1/2
@f3zinker β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "I want to talk about 'the environment'." β July 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Ground report from the UAE" β March 2026
@faceh β 44 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- > I'm thinking more of "If a women you know says she's been raped, maybe don't go around telling everyone what a slut she is" (something I've seen happen multiple times, sadly). With a celebrity th β Week of March 11th, 2019
- This is one of several reasons I think the general public is in the midst of an 'epistemic crisis' wherein the vast majority of the information they're exposed to is false or misleading and the normal β Week of May 6th, 2019
- >Is opposition to same sex marriage like preparing manioc? β Week of June 10th, 2019
- Oh hey, this is something I can comment about from lots of personal experience! β Week of June 17th, 2019
- >The polarization ratchets up another click. β Week of June 24th, 2019
- 's on examination of studio casting decisions β Month of July 2019
- Trump's "strategy" β Month of July 2019
- looks at monkeys and religion β Month of July 2019
- on the monty hall problem β Month of August 2019
- on the utility of Eliezer Yudkowsky to the AI Risk movement β Month of August 2019
- comments on hedonism β Month of August 2019
- The Consequences of Removing Social Pressure β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
- The Slippery Differences in Genetics β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
- In Support of Taleb: The Weaknesses of IQ as a Metric β April 2020
- Should You Cause a Political War to Win a War Game? β May 2/2, 2020
- Why Not Give In To Violent Impulses Against Rioters? β May 2/2, 2020
- Taking Difficult Steps to Resolve Underlying Conditions that Lead to Crime β June 1/2, 2020
- Civilizational Decline and the Value of Tradition β June 2/2, 2020
- "Selective leaking which has the impact of undermining the institution's credibility without actually revealing enough for onlookers, citizens, and representatives to accurately judge the behavior on display is just chicanery." β May 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Anyhow, I strongly feel that martials arts might be the sole remaining bastion of pure, healthy masculinity left in Western Society, and it is almost certainly the only one that hasn't come under direct attack from the Cathedral, like team sports, military service, and fatherhood have." β September 2022
- "Perhaps we can gain some insight into Desantis' mindset by looking at the 2018 election..." β October 2022
- "Because across all of those previous grievous institutional failures he mentioned, you'd be hard pressed to name any authority figure who paid any significant personal cost for their role in the events." β October 2022
- "For my part, having grown up in the South makes me feel pretty uncomfortable in situations where people are actively choosing to center their identity on their race and drive a discussion (for some values of that term) about racial disparities and how to rectify them." β February 2023
- "'Failing upward' doesn't even begin to describe it." β June 2023
- "I think the main thing that boomers and even elder Millenials might be missing is that literally EVERYTHING in Zoomer culture is in a constant state of molochian hypercompetition/red queen races thanks to the influence of social media and algorithmic ranking of every aspect of their performance in life." β May 2024
- "...it is increasingly difficult to take allegations of this nature seriously in this world where women are simultaneously demanding to be treated as fully agentic adults in every other decision they make, ESPECIALLY those involving their own bodies, but are infantilized when it comes to sexual interactions with an older male." β July 2024
- "So the phrase 'immigration is a net positive' can be true in a broad sense but still not accurately describe how the actual citizenry experience it in their day-to-day lives." β August 2024
- "With all the tools for censorship that are now turnkey ready to implement across the board, starts to feel like it is just a question of whom will be in charge when the governments of the world lock down speech entirely." β September 2024
- "The best option I've really heard on this point is to give married persons some extra voting power, and maybe scale it by how many children they have." β September 2024
- "I just have an seemingly inborn 'disgust' reaction to those persons who have fought up to the top of some social hierarchy while NOT having some grounded, external reason for doing so!" β September 2024
- "'The state will shepherd your kid through the psychological turmoil of puberty without your involvement' is a bone-chilling statement." β October 2024
- "I'm an elder millennial, so I can remember a childhood without phones (and, barely, one without computers or internet), so I actually balk from blaming 'the phones' in the abstract." β January 2025
- "The set of ideas that I think represents "The American Way" would roughly look like:" β March 2025
- "And where else can we go for an actual clearheaded view of things?" β June 2025
- "Really feels like we managed to get the worst of both the sexual revolution AND the evangelical movement." β July 2025
- "The dating apps have managed to cheapen the value of any individual connection to almost zero. And most of what we're seeing now is downstream of that." β August 2025
- "Its probably fair to say that the bottom 50% of men, in terms of attractiveness, are functionally invisible to the average woman." β August 2025
- "When is the last time, genuinely, you've seen any article published in any mainstream new media that was written from the perspective of a disaffected male where he was able to express what his perceived grievances were, and explain what he might want from a political party?" β October 2025
- "But human beings are exceptionally good at finding ways to drive excess calories into their own bellies at the expense of others." β October 2025
- "The reason I will defend "Stand Your Ground" laws even without considering firearm presence is that the alternative is batshit insane in my opinion." β October 2025
- "Fundamentally, I want to live in a High Trust Society with traditions and social institutions geared towards maintaining it against all interference." β November 2025
- "All the pressure is being put on the men to improve and jump through whatever hoops women require in order to get one... and every avenue for improvement is being cut off and the hoops have been set on fire, lifted 500 feet in the air, and suspended over a pit full of poisoned spikes." β December 2025
- "Just seems like your standard scare piece, like they moved on from climate change, declining bee populations, or unhealthy fast food meals, and now its the big, scary red pill men who are corrupting the youth and we should be having a satanic panic about it RIGHT NOW." β March 2026
- "If men are steeped in misogyny and treat women so horribly, how does it work that a supermajority of men view women positively, and a substantial minority of women view men negatively." β April 2026
@faioseam β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
@faith5 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "A few basic rules for confrontation..." β January 2022 2/2
@faoiseam β 7 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- "I think you fail to understand who is actually in charge of large companies. In the case of Google/Alphabet, the founders are in control, and have ceded day to day management to Sundar." β 01-15-18
- TIL Algerian universities aren't all that. β 01-15-18
- A slice of life from Democratic politics β 02-01-18
- On the media narratives about "women in STEM" under-reporting stories of actual women engineers. β 02-08-18
- Types of NIMBYs β Week of September 24th, 2018
- In Group Preference, and Observing that the West Lost It β Week of October 1st, 2018
- What Sokal^2 Actually Indicates β Week of October 8th, 2018
@FarNearEverywhere β 16 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "But Tolkien was very clear that Middle-earth was not an invented world, it was meant to be our own world as we have it right now, just that the tales were set in a very distant, mythological past. So the English parts are meant to be English, and that does mean white." β September 2022
- "This is flogging the FTX crash horse, which if not expired yet is certainly not in the best of health, but I'm currently reading the Chapter 11 declaration by the guy put in charge of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, and it is prime entertainment." β November 2022
- "Yer a Nazi, Harry! or, the alleged anti-Semitism in the work (particularly in the latest video game) of J.K. Rowling." β February 2023
- "[Jane Austen is] very clear-headed about the vital necessity for women to marry, because for women of a certain class (stuck between the working poor and the gentry with inherited wealth), they can't economically survive without a husband." β March 2023
- "[T]here are people who shoplift because they genuinely have no money and are hungry or their kids are hungry. The vast majority are not these cases." β May 2023
- "Custody battles are already nasty enough without dragging in 'Your Honour, my ex should not have custody or visitation rights because they are a child abuser because my kid is trans and they don't accept that'." β June 2023
- "So you may have heard of The Problem Of Susan, a literary critical view of what happened to Susan in 'The Last Battle', the final Narnia book." β July 2023
- "What us religious zealot bigots opposed was embryonic stem cell research. Adult stem cells and other means of deriving stem cells, such as from umbilical cords? No problem." β October 2023
- "There's a difference between 'the return of a popular show and this time the lead happens to be X' and blaring 'the return of a popular show where the whole point is that the lead is X!'" β December 2023
- "And if you've reached the point of junkets, you are not 'doing charidee right unlike those other mugs'." β December 2023
- "I'm about 40% through Michael Lewis's book on Sam Bankman-Fried, and so far I find it intensely frustrating." β December 2023
- "I was just going to write something on the recent winner of the Booker Prize. The winner is a novel called 'Prophet Song' by an Irish writer, Paul Lynch." β December 2023
- "You may not like them, but if the entire fucking point of the war was 'you are our fellow citizens, you can't just up and leave and start your own country', then afterwards you have to act like it." β December 2023
- "Falling birthrates matter when it comes to individual families, because the last person ever to remember an event/speak a language/practice an art dies, and that information is lost, and no amount of AI will ever get it back." β January 2024
- Speaking as a former minor local government minion, I recognise this person. No, not the blankface... β February 2024
- "Back then, as I said, we were told things like this would never happen. And then they happened." β April 2024
@fauji β 3 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Nolan's Oppenheimer released this weekend, and I wanted to use this opportunity to both post an excellent paper about Bhagavad Gita's influence on the man and a short introduction to Hinduism to illustrate just how different it is from Abrahamic religions." β July 2023
- "Indian elections are coming up in a month, and seeing the rising importance of India, I wanted to do a series on culture wars in Indian politics, give you a bit of the historical context of what's going on." β March 2024
- "Because the most important thing you need to know about India is the huge inferiority complex the Indian identity has." β October 2024
@faul_sname β 4 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "The Yad Vashem 'Central Database of Shoah Victimsβ Names' includes both people who survived and people who died. " β January 2023
- "...if a bunch has been written about a topic, ChatGPT actually has quite a lot of knowledge about that topic, and the trick is creating a context where a human who knew the thing you wanted to know would have expressed that knowledge." β April 2023
- "I guess the problem with reddit is the redditors." β April 2023
- "Poker serves as sort of a 'job of last resort' to people who, for whatever reason, cannot function in a 'real job'." β December 2023
@FCfromSCC β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- On Maintaining Charity β Week of July 9th, 2018
@FCfromSSC β 88 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Comment β 09-23-17
- guns β 10-14-17
- Peak Charity β Week of August 6th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Why defend the past? β January 2020
- Media Bias and the Biden Sexual Assault Allegation β March 2020
- Reflections on Media Narratives β April 2020
- The #BelieveWomen Memeplex β May 2/2, 2020
- The Power of Violence to Secure Change β May 2/2, 2020
- The Higher Satisfactions β July 1/2, 2020
- Effortfully grasping accountability β January 2021
- Capitol riot β January 2021
- Promising us an effort-post about "policy starvation." β February 2021
- "Tell your kids to go into accounting, or learn to code, anything but policing. Move to the burbs, and let nature take its course." β April 2021
- The incompatibility between free speech and cultural fraternity. β June 2021 2/2
- The state of the sub, plus some comments on COVID-19. β August 2021
- "I actually agree that a more callous, honestly violent approach probably would have been more effective, less wasteful, and probably kinder in the long run than the quarter-ass humanitarian bullshit we actually did." β August 2021
- "Political violence isn't a magic 'I win' button, especially for people who don't consider stacks of bodies to be a win condition." β September 2021 1/2
- "I think we agree that the violence and repression of the Deep South '50s and '60s needs to be discussed from the context of the overall culture. What evidence is needed before we can say the same for the violence and repression of the current era?" β September 2021 2/2
- "Of the indignities of the modern world, this poisonous righteousness that insists that our side is pure good and the other side is pure evil is perhaps the most depressing." β September 2021 2/2
- "The big problem is that the longer we maintain dominance with our existing tools, the more incentive and lead-time we provide for counterparties to optimize their own systems to avoid our strengths and exploit our weaknesses." β October 2021 2/2
- "I argued for years that political violence was a shitty thing to normalize. β October 2021 2/2
- decisively lost that argument last year, when political violence was in fact normalized, and my enemies reaped considerable rewards from its exercise." β October 2021 2/2
- "The authorities issue a statement to clear the area, and then conspicuously fail to make any effort to enforce it, or to stop others from encouraging the order's violation." β October 2021 2/2
- "That's the point of court-packing and admitting new states and all the rest of it: to decisively and permanently win the tribal political contest in such a way that the other tribe is no longer able to resist one's social and political preferences, even within their own historical strongholds." β December 2021 2/2
- "What isn't going to work is a society that zealously devotes its mental energy to racial and ethnic critique, while simultaneously insisting that specific ethnic groups be completely insulated from this critique, and further that these ethnic groups are just like everyone else and anyone who says different is a witch." β December 2021 2/2
- "Reducing tribal conflict to 'Sadism' elides more than it illuminates." β January 2022 1/2
- "What is clear is that to the extent that we tried to help Russia pick itself back up, we failed and made the situation much, much worse..." β January 2022 2/2
- "I do not condemn BLM for the street dancing and murals. I condemn it for the extremely widespread lawless violence." β February 2022
- "Public education, like all facets of democratic government, is a cooperative endeavor." β March 2022
- Making the case for non-intervention. β March 2022
- "Civil war or horrible crushing seem more likely, because the latter is what all the evidence tells me blues actually want, and the former is the only conceivable alternative that Reds appear to have." β April 2022
- "It is very, very difficult to exert meaningful civilian control over an organization like the CIA." β July 2022
- "'White flight' is certainly the established narrative. Little thought is given to why they were fleeing, beyond a simple caricature of 'racism' or 'intolerance'." β August 2022
- "My guess would be that grouping a large population of relatively poor, relatively violent people together in very large numbers, in a way that effectively precluded workable community institutions or social structures to self-police, and with ineffective outside policing, resulted in a runaway spiral of criminality and violence." β August 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I intend to enjoy what peace my family and I can find, and will continue to pray for the miraculous doom-bypass none of us actually deserves." β October 2022
- "Cultural hegemony, as you've noted, can't be voted on. It can only be fought over. Therefore, we need to fight over it if we wish to see our values upheld." β October 2022
- "It's an argument I want to make, but it's an argument I cannot actually back up, and so it's not an argument I should expect others to take seriously." β October 2022
- "The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble." β October 2022
- "Categorizing society into oppressors and oppressed and relentlessly framing all social issues according to these categories, on the other hand, is actually how both the Marxist and Wokeist systems work." β November 2022
- "Long ago, I was interested in tabletop game design, and came across the concept of 'rules fragility'." β December 2022
- "Liberalism's promise was that once we adopted its norms, everyone would just sorta chill out, everything would work out, reason would carry the day, mumble mumble you get the Federation from Star Trek. It hasn't worked out like that." β December 2022
- "God is a bulwark in many ways, but the fact that I am committed to him in a durable way, and so are those I surround myself with, is certainly not the least of them." β January 2023
- "Your thesis seems to be that creativity, intelligence, and cunning are innate markers of Blue identity, that people blessed with these traits always have been and always will tend toward Blueness. I don't see things this way at all." β February 2023
- "There is no general solution to the problem of tolerance, only best-fit local solutions." β April 2023
- "We've engaged in heroic levels of social engineering to try to eliminate discrimination and racism. To the extent that such elimination is actually possible, I'd say we've done it." β April 2023
- "The reason Anheuser-Busch being boycotted is that they got dragged into the culture war." β May 2023
- "Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work." β May 2023
- "But of course, previous iterations of Social Progress, including the Trans issue that prompts this discussion, have demanded changes to values and social systems now, with logistical solutions promised in the indefinite future." β June 2023
- "What is the Enlightenment?" β July 2023
- "Being moderates, both of them are liars: Rufo is lying about the past, claiming that Jefferson wasn't a white supremacist, and Robinson is lying about the present, claiming that Jefferson's white supremacy is at all relevant to the current situation." β August 2023
- "Christians positing the existence of Hell neither breaks your leg nor picks your pocket, any more than your claiming our God and Heaven does not exist." β August 2023
- "The thing is, I straight-up don't think Progressives generally care about fidelity in marriage, in any way I recognize as 'caring about marriage'." β September 2023
- "You should value statues of Lee because you should value peace." β October 2023
- "You and a great many others here seem to be operating under the assumption that the story requires there to be a good guy. It does not." β November 2023
- "My introduction to Social Justice in its modern form was getting "cancelled" by a close friend for speaking the truth in good faith..." β November 2023
- "More generally, this is one of a class of arguments demonstrating that the basic assumptions civil society is built on do not hold, and that cooperation across the tribal divide is not positive-sum." β December 2023
- The modern era is best understood as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. β February 2024
- "When enough such incidents accumulate, as I observe they did in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, I think it is reasonable to conclude that the democratic process is not only threatened, but has in fact been compromised." β February 2024
- "The Motte is not intended, nor is it fit, to Do Something." β March 2024
- "The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine. That pitch has been gradually walked back as the resulting disasters become increasingly undeniable." β April 2024
- "The captain's wheel of Democracy does not appear to be linked to the rudder of concrete policy; spin it left, spin it right, take your hands completely off, it doesn't actually matter much." β April 2024
- "I was a Blue for a number of years, and the Blue habits of thought die hard." β May 2024
- "All this has been done to us; tit-for-tat is the correct strategy given the state of play."step. Impose costs anywhere and everywhere." β May 2024
- "I believe that 'We know how to solve all our problems' is a brief, common-language encapsulation of the core thesis of a specific ideological movement, and that this ideological movement is best understood as the central example of the Enlightenment." β May 2024
- "At some point down the line, the escalation for one side or the other will be unsurvivable to the system as a whole, and it will fail. Again, people counting on the system's survival should be made aware of this." β May 2024
- "I don't see any value in the HBD hypothesis. On the other hand, I don't actually see positive value in diversity in and of itself, and I'm not willing to go along with the polite lies our racial "conversation" consistently demands." β May 2024
- "One of them argued at length and quite explicitly that it was better for people like myself and my family to accept beatings at the hands of a mob rather than defend ourselves with lethal force, because criminal mob beatings were statistically less likely to kill people than lawfully justified gunfire. That's the sort of conversation that leaves an impression." β June 2024
- "They whipped themselves into a frenzy over Trump, and now someone has actually tried to kill him, and for many on the left there is no actual way to walk it back, nor ability to recognize the realities of their position." β July 2024
- "The next step is to recognize the specific parts of your thinking that are hateful." β July 2024
- "There are times when I might have been tempted to claim that I was smarter than my wife." β August 2024
- "It seems obvious to me that the various branches of Social Justice theory are, to a first approximation, direct descendants of Marxism." β September 2024
- "The social cohesion you see right now, where cities are haunted by the specter of nation-wide race riots and federal politicians are dodging assassins' bullets, this is as good as it's ever going to be, and it's never going to be this good again." β October 2024
- "A lot of people support Trump because they want to fight back against a system they perceive to be deeply pernicious and entirely insulated from accountability." β November 2024
- "The January 6th protest was in fact significantly more mostly peaceful than many of the leftist riots that preceded it." β January 2025
- "The gay community is not typified by two men in a committed long-term relationship." β February 2025
- "If people actually want Christians to start policing non-Christians again, they should present a general case for when and why this is desirable, and also for why the desirability of such policing was not evident in the past." β March 2025
- "I do not believe that coexistence is likely to work out well for anyone involved; our differences are irreconcilable, and we need a national divorce before our growing mutual hatred gives birth to large-scale tragedy." β March 2025
- "But what I am trying to tell you is that, right now, no one can enforce a norm against political violence, because the norm is already gone." β May 2025
- "The question is not whether the Supreme court has made a good decision in this case. The question is whether the Supreme Court is capable of delivering a good decision in any case." β June 2025
- "Worse things can happen to you as an upload that could ever happen to you as a human, and by a very wide margin." β July 2025
- "What predictions have you invested in? Where have you been wrong? What have you learned?" β August 2025
- "It seems to me that people who have adopted what you label "revenge narratives" generally no longer believe that there is such a thing as 'our country' or 'our citizens'." β August 2025
- "A gunman has opened fire on an unmarked government vehicle carrying detainees to an ICE facility in Dallas, Texas." β September 2025
- "Reds are not going to back down because there is no retreat available to us. We decline to be reduced to second-class citizens in our native country." β October 2025
- "Both Tribes routinely coordinate meanness against things they consider socially hazardous, always have and always will." β December 2025
- "It is not just that the Constitution is no longer serving its intended function, but that the very idea that it could potentially serve that function is now understood to be ridiculous." β January 2026
- "To boil it down, I note that the economic predictions and even current assessments seem fundamentally unreliable, that the previous order seemed obviously unsustainable, and that the risk is worth it given the current trajectory." β January 2026
- "It's the strong linework, and specifically what I guess might be called Economy/Confluence of line." β May 2026
@FeepingCreature β 3 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Feminism vs Antifieminism, an Eternal Struggle at Behest Fnargl β Week of August 13th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Scalpers and Defection Against Implicit Compacts β March 2020
- "The universal pivot goes: as you go from weak to strong, you want validation, then independence, then authority." β June 2022
@Felagund β 7 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Seek to create value, not seize it. Companies are not your enemies; they are your friends." β December 2023
- "South Africa's Election" β May 2024
- "The other four cases I didn't get to before..." β June 2024
- "Here's Chevron's overruling." β July 2024
- "Thoughts on Trump v. United States" β July 2024
- "Moody v. Netchoice and Netchoice v. Paxton" β August 2024
- "Supreme Court Term Limits" β August 2024
@Felipe β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@felis-parenthesis β 14 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- I remember Slashdot and Kuro5hin. They collapsed under the weight of spam, trolling and mediocre posts. It seemed then that there would be an eternal churn. One discovers a new forum. It gets popular. β Week of January 14th, 2019
- I find it hard to engage with the hypothetical because I believe in subdividing intelligence into "model and anticipate rationality" and "sideways looking rationality". β May 2019
π’ r/TheMotte era
- I like to overthink what I see in nature documentaries, so I keep coming back to the problem that lionesses and she-bears have with the males of their species. The pride lion gets killed by a stronger β Week of April 15th, 2019
- on meta-ethics β Month of July 2019
- "The notion of 'judicial activism' needs the context of a theory of jurisprudence." β November 2021 1/2
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "One of the rival positions is monocensorship. The other position is bicensorship." β May 2023
- "If you can distinguish between Tower Jumpers and Arm Whirlers, employ only Arm Whirlers." β June 2023
- "The underlying issue is that the economic logic of copyright leads to an awkward compromise." β November 2023
- "You can pass out from hypoxia with very little warning. I think this is now widely know, mostly due to the warning on the airplane safety card." β January 2024
- A good egregore teaches us eudaimonia instead of hedonism. It saves us, and since we are its substrate, it saves itself. β February 2024
- "Asking 'Do you believe Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is true?' is doing the 20000 foot overview thing. It can only lead to vague waffle." β March 2024
- "The Anasazi question reminds me that adults forget what it is like to be young and are oblivious to the social constructs of middle age..." β June 2024
- "They want the junkies gone before their children grow up and reach the age to be at risk." β August 2024
- "There is an important distinction between reserves and resources." β January 2025
@FellowCitizen415 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "[T]o be able to have the power to say 'no' to trans women, cis women would need to empower men to say 'no' to them." β June 2021 2/2
@Felz β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Some bespoke fanfiction in response. β August 2021
@femmecheng β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Book Review: The Scout Mindset β June 2021 2/2
@Festering-Soul β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
@Fevzi_Pasha β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- An Update on the Syrian Civil War β February 2020
@ff29180d β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Defining "alt right" β Week of August 6th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- In 2006, in the middle of Bush's second term, 23 intellectuals founded, under the aegis of the Future of Humanity Institute, Overcoming Bias, a group blog on the systemic mistakes humans make, and how β Week of February 25th, 2019
@FFCfromSSC β 1 AAQC
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- this β Week of August 6th, 2018
@fIexibeast β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The idea that meaningful freedom of speech should extend at least to the leader of the biggest opposition party. β January 2021
@FilTheMiner β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "If you want to place the burden of your safety upon someone else, you are obligated up to a point to follow their direction." β July 2021 2/2
- "The most deadly mass murder in our history used box cutters, the second used fertilizer and the third used gasoline." β May 2022
@Firesky7 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Taking a peek into insider perspectives on oil spills β December 2020
@firmamenti β 2 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Allow the CWR to return to its roots: a weekly roundup of culture war topics." β October 2023
- "Of course this also doesnβt work, and the cycle continues until the answer becomes that the whole of society is broken and we need to completely tear down all of the structure of the world and rebuild it from scratch (which of course will also not work)." β January 2024
@FirmWeird β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- What Motivates Support for Trump β Week of October 8th, 2018
π£ TheMotte.org era
@fishtwanger β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I think national businesses have correctly gotten the message that Seattle now lacks the consistent political will to create a good business environment." β February 2024
@FiveHourMarathon β 85 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "The partial success of modern mental health approaches at integrating these players allows them to reach a level where they get to breakdown on the national stage, and where that breakdown merely consists of a temper tantrum and a ruined tournament rather than a ruined life." β March 2022
- "The Culture war is entertainment, and its consumers demand the new and the different." β March 2022
- "A decade later came Obergefell and, what do you know, here we are at the bottom of the slippery slope. " β March 2022
- "Nobody has ever understood themselves as evil, and pretending they did will prevent us from holding ourselves or anyone else to 'Never Again.'" β April 2022
- "Abercrombie and Nietzch: The Missing Perspectives in Netflixβs White Hot" β April 2022
- "Even if the laws/policies were designed to protect you it is more harmful than helpful if the result is that your coworkers don't invite you to parties because they're scared a costume/musical choice/joke/food might offend you and get them fired." β June 2022
- "Has Modern Capitalism Lost Track of the Idea of the Gimmick?" β July 2022
- "There are times when I, when most men, are acting out and identifying with these archetypes, and to the extent that the archetypes are gendered that is closer to a gender identity than any general feeling of Maleness I work with day to day." β August 2022
- "We're all at the mercy of the employees who have access to sensitive information." β August 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Letβs at least consider the possibility that the problem wasnβt drug use as such, but using illegal drugs dosed by an amateur, with the obvious preventative being legal drugs dosed by medical professionals under regular observation for results." β September 2022
- "Slate might not openly dream of herding cishetero white men into camps, but it doesn't hugbox them either." β September 2022
- " Why the last two years should finally put 'Credibility' to bed as an argument in foreign policy." β October 2022
- "The subset of American men who self-consciously dislike football is tiny, it's not accurate to equate that subset with the entire Blue Tribe or the entire Upper Class." β November 2022
- "Thoughts on Shifting Definitions and Models of Religious Liberty" β November 2022
- "A conservative boycott of liberal companies would fail because in competitive industries the top talent is all blue tribe, or such a strong majority that it is doubtful red tribe talent can even man a ship together." β November 2022
- "Someone commenting on the Dickstretcher-Rolex saga suggested we have a watch thread." β December 2022
- [Scene: Larry, Jeff, and Susie are getting cocktails at the bar before Ted Danson's wife, Mary's 70th birthday party.] β December 2022
- "So I might hold a genuine belief, but have no interest in marginalizing myself by advocating it or implementing it in a useless way, while having an ultimate interest in implementing the idea in an effective way." β January 2023
- "The Penfield Mood Organ and Me: β January 2023
- Are We Already Transhuman by Chemistry and Mnemonics Rather than Engineering?" β January 2023
- "Regardless of whether chatbots are sentient, or can become sentient, or will become sentient in the future; if chatbots are capable of mimicking sentience and emotion to some extent, will treating them as beneath morality brutalize actual human feelings?" β February 2023
- "Going all-in is scary, you never know, you could lose everything. But Kipling tells us (by implication) that if you can't 'make one heap of all your winnings, And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,' then you will never be a man." β February 2023
- "You don't get to be an athlete, an intellectual, or a lover after college; not in the same way you do in school, not unless you're really talented." β February 2023
- "Expand the Universe of Acceptable/Respectable Ways to be a Man or to be a Woman" β March 2023
- "1000th Comment β March 2023
- On The Value of Conflict or if we want to Make America Great Again we need to start raising kids with values we donβt intend them to keep" β March 2023
- "Oh man I have thoughts on Gilmore Girls." β March 2023
- "Feminism knows that a sexual past can be a problem, but canβt imagine a realistic solution." β March 2023
- "Don't end the first amendment to fight blackmail, end a culture that shames normal people for liking things that normal people like." β March 2023
- "A peasant village? Never. But up until the mid-late twentieth century, the rich had very personal relationships with their servants." β April 2023
- "Don't teach that Nazis were extraordinary for being villains, or that Jews were extraordinary for being victims." β April 2023
- "A world where Bud Light's customers do at least a little critical examination of what they consume will probably improve the world." β May 2023
- "Shakespeare, Honor, Unitary Leadership β May 2023
- How To End the Culture War" β May 2023
- "The femcel narrator's view of herself as the putative underdog ('She wears short-skirts I wear T Shirts, she's cheer captain and I'm on the bleachers') is the kind of self-view every American takes of themselves." β September 2023
- "On American Graffiti, Street Rod Shows, the Meaning of Teenage Rebellion, and Watching a Subculture Choose Death Over Diversity" β September 2023
- "How do we make it worth rooting for the Pacers if the Pacers are as likely as not to never win a championship in your conscious lifetime as a fan? By creating things the Pacers can win." β October 2023
- "Why did the Men of Country Music Lose their Mojo?" β October 2023
- "Why is Kissinger hated so much more aggressively than other ghouls and swamp creatures like a Donald Rumsfeld or a Paul Wolfowitz?" β November 2023
- "Content warnings aren't effective because they prevent exposure to a 'triggering' stimulus, they are effective because by giving them society is acknowledging the power and importance of the individual/group that could be thus triggered." β December 2023
- "[T]he first wave of Chinese immigrant laborers to the western continental US largely just...died out for lack of wives." β December 2023
- "This is why Aella's definition makes a lot more sense than @ymeshkout's: the difference between polyamory and cheating is the cuckolded partner's reaction." β January 2024
- "The Dawn of Everything, The Pop-Tarts Bowl Mascot, Joseph Campbell, and the Importance of Play" β January 2024
- "The death of SI reflects that loss of a broad shared mainstream culture, traded in for specificity and niches." β January 2024
- "Saltburn as a Critique of Privilege Discourse" β January 2024
- "The TikTok Ban, Male Role Models, the New Punk, and the Right to be Cool in American Society" β March 2024
- "I know and admire the hell out of the Amish.... That said, the refutation to the Amish question is pretty thorough and not particularly difficult..." β April 2024
- "Nate Silver thinks 70 is a good retirement age for Sotomayor because we might not see a Democratic Senate Majority again for a while, but if we can't get a D Senate for 16 more years, what's the point anyway?" β April 2024
- "Naz Reid, Romance, and Regret" β May 2024
- "What the Fuck Do We Know Anyway: Nobody Knows Why They Broke Into the Watergate" β June 2024
- "There's a saying I've seen in the Manosphere that women are human beings and men are human doings." β June 2024
- "Path Lit By Lightning Thoughts and Review: A Hero's Life, Long Obscured by One Set of Politically Correct Myths, Now Obscured by Another" β June 2024
- "So, that's my call: if Newsom were offered the job, he'd probably take it. And he'd probably be smart to take it." β June 2024
- "Republicans/Conservatives have been hamstrung for decades by the dynamics of government work." β July 2024
- "Which is the final contradiction: talking constantly about Master Morality is often a form of Slave Morality." β July 2024
- "A Trip to the Mall and our Society-Wide Experiment in Extreme Trust" β July 2024
- "I came away from this saying, the Cybertruck really is as fast or faster than a 911, even with a lot of cargo." β July 2024
- "I'm just going to throw a bunch of quotes from the excellent Rick Reilly book Who's Your Caddy? in here." β July 2024
- ...was wrong about a bunch of stuff, apparently. β September 2024
- "On The Edge of Glory Disconnected Thoughts on Nate Silverβs New Book" β September 2024
- "What does an Alabama Sorority Sister Consider an Ordered Sexuality?" β October 2024
- "I don't think PMC Turbolibs disdain McDonald's because it is lower class, I think they disdain McDonald's because it is so American." β October 2024
- "'Tacky' find its closest synonym in 'uppity' with all the racist and classist implications thereof." β December 2024
- "Something I noted when I first read Coming Apart in undergrad for an assignment, and have only continued to see grow over time: it's not just economics, we're Coming Apart everywhere in America." β December 2024
- "RETVRN TO TRADITION: Why NATO should seek to install Prince Harry and Meghan Markle on the throne of Ukraine" β January 2025
- "Wokeness was a particular expression of the politics of the Coalition of the Ascendant logic." β January 2025
- "That's the reason for the Anglo-Centrism of the list, it's meant to tell the story of the Anglo intellectual tradition." β April 2025
- "My Life Measured in Captains of the New York Yankees" β May 2025
- "Playboy Was Never a Magazine, It Was a Breast Certification Organization" β May 2025
- "I donβt know how to square that circle. Was the adultery somehow necessary? Or an inevitable side effect. Iβd take JFK over Biden any day." β May 2025
- "I just don't see how evangelical politicians can act like the bible command leads directly and easily to using bunker busters on Iran." β June 2025
- "Jake Tapperβs Historic Misnomer in Original Sin" β July 2025
- "Taking advice, really taking it to heart and following it, requires a radical act of submission foreign to the modern mind." β August 2025
- "With and Against Yarvin on Cults, Racism, Gaza, and the Danger of Being Wrong" β September 2025
- "As we're probably all aware by now, Israel bombed Doha, Qatar this week, in an attempt to assassinate Hamas' leadership resident in the city." β September 2025
- "His basic thesis was that when you look at American political history, when a President wins 1) Two consecutive terms and then 2) gets his chosen successor elected after him, then that sets the paradigm (a Turning Point) that the country operates under until another Turning Point when a new paradigm is established." β October 2025
- "When Israel makes the antisemites correct about one thing, they risk making people look at the rest of their thoughts." β November 2025
- "Kids will, left to their own devices, self organize to achieve their goals, with those goals mostly being or rhyming with 'fun.'" β November 2025
- "TLDR: The most important choice you make in life is who you will choose to follow. Obedience is agency." β November 2025
- "The problem is really that any high trust group can defraud the government pretty easily." β November 2025
- "This young man is now shipwrecked, with a professional degree and probably a great deal of debt, and no real way to make money at it except by conning others into 'accommodating' him." β December 2025
- "I'm curious to probe why we have all chosen to use primarily left-coded examples, when the same examples on the right abound." β December 2025
- "Liminal horror is in many ways the modern manifestation of the 'horror of the gaps,' that horror exists just at the edge of civilization, just at the edge of what we have normal knowledge of, and as that line has shifted so has the location of horror." β January 2026
- "I've actually long been an admirer of the Islamic Republic's constitutional system, since learning about it in AP World Gov in high school." β March 2026
- "The most obvious parallel to Chastity is Violence, both in the sense that these are the two highest stakes human activities that can be done for fun or profit, and in the sense that engaging in them or not is both a huge sign of your character and totally ambiguous absent context." β May 2026
@flailingace β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "In short, the fear of all the Western players is nuclear escalation." β November 2024
@flitter β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Is private equity delivering the Georgist promise?" β May 2024
@FlyingLionWithABook β 7 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- this exchange β Month of July 2019
- "We toss away the idea that all human life is sacred to our own risk." β May 2021 2/2
- "Developed nations donβt go to war anymore because no gains from war are likely to be more than the cost of fighting it." β February 2022
- "I work in medical billing and calling your insurance company is your best bet for predicting coverage and costs." β June 2022
- "A Primer on Sanctity β June 2022
- for Seculars" β June 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Natural Law is the philosophical setting out of which all modern Western societies came." β April 2023
@FlyOnTheWall β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@fnovd β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The Sea of Information β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
@Folamh3 β 25 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The Americanization of Irish Politics β October 1/2, 2020
- Exploring moral panic in connection (hah) with social media β December 2020
- The use/reference distinction in fiction. β March 2021
- Social contagion and the glamorization of mental illness. β July 2021 2/2
- "Spending an evening sitting in a dark room clutching your erection and letting the cold glow of XVideos wash over you is by no means a noble use of one's time, but I'm not convinced that watching stupid action films is much of an improvement." β November 2021 2/2
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "You will be hard-pressed to find an example of a wealthy, attractive, popular and charismatic person endorsing or trying to bring about truly radical changes to the society in which they personally live." β March 2023
- "American cultural exports" β May 2023
- "So this is my interpretation of 'women are loved for who they are': women tend to be loved and respected by their families, friends and romantic partners more or less unconditionally." β July 2023
- "Most of us go through our lives quietly toiling away at doing the right thing, not expecting or receiving any special praise for doing so." β October 2023
- "In the woke framework, genes may not determine how smart you are, or strong, or fast, or your career goals, or who you like to have sex with - but they damn sure determine whether you're a size 16 or an 8." β November 2023
- "Well, who has "power" and who doesn't (who's punching up and who's punching down) are intentionally defined in a manner which is fuzzy, opaque and prone to being gamed." β November 2023
- "As I said in the linked article, if a journalist tells you that Bob has Bad Opinions but refuses to tell you what those opinions are, that suggests that the journalist has remarkably little faith in their own opinions to win in the marketplace of ideas..." β November 2023
- "Contra deBoer on transgender issues" β January 2024
- 'Bob/Alice posts a public photo or video on a social media platform, and a bunch of people who don't know Bob/Alice create edited versions of said photo or video without Bob's consent' describes hundreds if not thousands of viral memes throughout the history of the internet... β February 2024
- "The 'radical fringe' which is neither" β March 2024
- "Lies, damned lies and the Washington Post" β April 2024
- "If you are demanding that men not interact with you, and the only men reading (or caring about) that demand are men who care about respecting your boundaries - it should come as no surprise when the only men who interact with you are men who don't care about respecting your boundaries." β May 2024
- "This demonstrates the motte-and-bailey fallacy at the heart of the trans movement." β July 2024
- "A Dyslogy for Ireland's 'Hate Speech' Bill" β October 2024
- "If I'd been born ten or even five years later, dollars to donuts I'd be calling myself Lilith right now." β November 2024
- "The McGregor verdict and modus ponens" β December 2024
- "As a Literal-Minded Person, I am Once Again Asking for Connotation not to Completely Supplant Denotation" β December 2024
- "In the short-term, perhaps it is kinder to play along with trans peopleβs beliefs about themselves and affirm their claimed gender identities, if failing to do so makes them sad and upset. But in the long-term..." β February 2025
- "It is transparently, facially untrue that Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared." β March 2025
- "If opponents of Trump were only trying to convey that they thought Trump was extremely dangerous, I question why they chose to devote so many column inches to the claim that he was dangerous in this extremely specific and easily-refuted way..." β March 2025
@FootnoteToAFootnote β 3 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "Deadnaming" the dead on Wikipedia. β August 2021
- "In my experience, librarians are overwhelmingly very liberal, social-justice-y women. Are they deliberately under-ordering books like this with ideas that they consider offensive or dangerous?" β November 2021 1/2
- "Some interesting culture warring behind the scenes of Wikipedia this week." β May 2022
@FPHthrowawayB β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- A Pedophile's Perspective on Pizzagate β September 2020
- "I am 2019 Chinese coronavirus vaccine critical (a term I quite prefer to antivax)." β May 2021 2/2
@freet0 β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Do Insects Suffer? β Week of September 10th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "'Lived experience' is a concept used almost exclusively by progressives, but by all rights it ought to be a conservative concept." β April 2021
@fren β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "Sorry, I have to say it. This is good for crypto." β November 2022
@fribble β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@Frosty-Beginning5601 β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
@Fruck β 4 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I'm not a Qatari Muslim, but I think I can take a stab at how they'd reply..." β November 2022
- "That was the most ridiculous thing I have ever read, and that should mean a lot, because I have read many books, papers, articles, comics, and pamphlets - and some of them were ridiculous on purpose." β September 2023
- "[W]hat are your favourite newer Christmas songs . . . ?" β December 2023
- "See, Cyclone Alfred hit South East Queensland two weeks ago, and while I know internationally the news barely covered it, if you were listening to the local news the week preceding it, it was the end of days." β March 2025
@FruitfulLemonyLemons β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Principled Centrism β Week of September 10th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- My pet theory is everybody's neurotic (according to the old psychoanalytic definition, substitute "mentally ill in a very broad and general sense" if you wish). When you're neurotic you often want to β Week of February 25th, 2019
@FtttG β 15 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "POSIWID, deepities and scissor statements" β April 2025
- "Just imagine feeling sad and upset that your girlfriend is fucking another man who's more attractive than you, and thinking 'Yes, obviously this is an unhealthy emotional response, I need to dose myself up with antidepressants'." β May 2025
- "Regardless of what you think of the luxury beliefs concept ... the discussion about polyamory has got me thinking of a related idea, the general case of which polyamory is a specific example." β May 2025
- "Iβm sure it feels good to call everyone whoβs more excited than you about AI an emotionally stunted manchild afraid to confront the real world, but itβs not a productive contribution to the debate." β August 2025
- "To steelman the political revenge framework, consider it from a game-theoretic perspective." β August 2025
- "Suffice it to say that I believe the question of whether participation in radical trans communities is a risk factor for violent radicalisation is one which warrants serious consideration and ought not to be just dismissed out of hand." β August 2025
- "For years, Chase Strangio of the ACLU characterised gender-affirming care as lifesaving medical treatment. Before the Supreme Court, under oath, Strangio admitted that there's no persuasive evidence that gender-affirming care has any impact on the rates of suicide among gender dysphoric children." β November 2025
- "They can list off all the identity categories they fall into like a math nerd reciting digits of pi, but they couldn't begin to tell you who they, personally, are." β December 2025
- "Just to illustrate that accusations of two-tier policing are entirely warranted, a 25-year-old influencer posted a video in which she called for the deaths of all conservatives. After being questioned by the police, she was not arrested." β December 2025
- "I think the average five-year-old child could reliably explain the key difference between the sexes: women can have babies, and men can't." β February 2026
- "In a society in which death is an omnipresent fact of life, emotionally insulating oneself from those around you is a sound strategy." β March 2026
- "I appreciate that some of the below may seem obvious to the point of coming off as condescending, but the reason obvious advice is seen as obvious is because so much of the time it really works." β May 2026
- "Since the beginning of this century, the ratio of trans murder victims to perpetrators in the UK was 0.8: there have been more transgender murderers than murder victims." β May 2026
- "I would go so far as to say that I don't think Dave identifies as a 'woman' so much as he identifies as the hypersexualised portrayal of femininity which exists in porn and nowhere else." β May 2026
- "Stop lying about why you don't want children" β May 2026
@fubo β 17 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- What gun ownership would be like if guns were treated like cars. β Week of May 7th, 2018
- Civilization survivorship bias. β Week of May 7th, 2018
- Gender: Biology vs Social construct β Week of May 21st, 2018
- Rights β Week of Memorial Day, 2018
- Responsibilities β Week of Memorial Day, 2018
- Chad's Ass Constant β Week of August 27th, 2018
- Judicial Activism vs. Deference β Week of September 24th, 2018
- On Taxis β Week of September 24th, 2018
- Conflicting Interests in the CoC Drama β Week of September 24th, 2018
- The Keyboard Complexity β Week of September 24th, 2018
- In the computing world, sometimes conditions exist to allow someone to exploit others' resources maliciously. We call this a "security vulnerability", and it usually results from a bug in code, but so β Week of January 7th, 2019
- I sometimes find myself trying to chunk political movements up in weird ways. β Week of January 21st, 2019
- Remember, humans are made out of meat; they aren't directly made out of math. Utility functions are made out of math. There are lots of ways that math can be used to measure meat (e.g. describing the β Relaunching the /r/SSC Quality Contribution Roundup
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Occasionally, I find myself listing out all the different things that people use the words "capitalism" or "capitalist" to mean. I think I need to add a couple. β Week of February 18th, 2019
- How does age affect our perception of various professional roles' status? β Week of February 25th, 2019
- I've sometimes described myself as a left-libertarian, though I more often say center-libertarian these days. I was a right-libertarian 15 years ago and have moved steadily leftward since then. (I hav β Week of April 1st, 2019
- Warning: This is a wandering ramble, not an argument for a particular proposition. β Week of May 20th, 2019
@Fucking_That_Chicken β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "Follow-up question: if we're not a cult, should that change?" β June 2021 2/2
@Fullaster β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- get into it on gun control β Month of August 2019
@FunctionPlastic β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Edit: man, I did not expect this many replies. Despite being a communist and on the internet, I don't really have the patience and time to argue all of this, I'm sorry. β Week of April 1st, 2019
@functor β 3 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "It never made sense for right wing voters to support neo conservatism." β September 2023
- "The justice system is too harsh toward people with a life while not being effective at keeping people who can't function of the street." β November 2024
- "I am pro Russia for several reasons." β December 2025
@funobtainium β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- A first hand account of paralysis β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
@Gaashk β 7 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "I'm currently dealing with FMLA for a baby due next month. There's no paid leave, so I'll just use up all my sick time, then any additional time off will be unpaid, including having to repay the employer part of my benefits." β November 2021 1/2
- "It isn't impossible that I (and Peterson, in his way) am too reality oriented to feel the thing the postmodernists are worried about." β June 2022
- "My deep moral intuitions are on the humility side of things -- that we should not be all screaming for attention. That it is actually morally bad to be screaming for attention." β August 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "People should be able to be pleased with their children living normal, functional lives!" β May 2024
- "There seem to be a lot of women, of the making histrionic remarks on Facebook variety, who are into looking at the faults of their mothers, and 're-parenting' themselves at 35." β November 2024
- "Again, a lot of people don't seem to feel permission to be an ordinary person, doing a slightly below average 9 - 5 job, sending their kids to the ordinary public school, to themselves become an average person living an average life." β December 2024
- "Apparently my whole feed is late 30s bloggers writing about child rearing now, even the ones I subscribed to for the AI news." β May 2025
@GaBeRockKing β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@GaiusLeviathanXV β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- comment β 04-02-18
- an autopsy of New Atheism from the inside β 04-23-18
@gamedori3 β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- In neuroscience, of all places, a conflict has arisen over sexual dimorphism in the mammalian brain, and the journal Nature has taken the "equalist" side. β Week of April 22nd, 2019
- "To any pre-social justice leftist, it is very suspicious that leftist economic policies are only implemented when they assist the profiteering and rent-seeking of the billionaire class." β May 2022
@GapigZoomalier β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
@gary_oldman_sachs β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- "There is a story about class conflict to be told here, but itβs not the one socialists are interested in telling." β February 2022
- "One of the interesting things about the Ukraine crisis has been to observe the discourse on the Left." β April 2022
@gattsuru β 89 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- /u/gattsuru on the socially conservative view of sex ed β 08-26-17
- eating on the cheap β 04-02-18
- (Solder) Gun-Slinging β Week of August 6th, 2018
- Businesses, and the Issue of Free Association β Week of August 13th, 2018
- Religious Freedom Restoration Act β Week of September 10th, 2018
- > One of the things that seems weird to me about Rand is that she seemed to have capital-O Opinions on everything, including smoking (she was for it). β Week of November 05, 2018
- The 'death of the blue collar job' is basically this graph. 1980 as a start point is cheating because that genuinely was a surge, but you have to go back to 1950s before the absolute number of manufa β Week of November 19, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- The NRA brand isn't particularly valuable as a marketing thing. Just as the callbook is what makes them a political organization of any relevance, the NRA range insurance is what makes them a finan β Week of May 6th, 2019
- tells a story about dealing with the media β Month of July 2019
- Four Replies to Unnecssariat β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
- Why we don't teach firearm safety (Reply to /u/KulakRevolt) β Weeks of December 2nd and 9th, 2019
- The Cancel Mob May Be Inescapable β June 2/2, 2020
- The Tangled Ties of Nature and Nurture in Homosexuality β August 2020
- How have the Ballot Box and Soapbox Failed? β September 2020
- Jimmy Carter, Reactor Cleanup, and Nuclear Non-Proliferation β September 2020
- A New Addition to the Commerce Clause β October 1/2, 2020
- The Taxonomy of the Rationalsphere β October 1/2, 2020
- "Don't throw all government employees in the same bucket"--but maybe most of them... β April 2021
- "Quite a lot of my potential dating pool has made it very clear that Trump support is an absolute non-starter for even platonic friendships, and while it's more prominent for my demographics, it's not limited there..." β June 2021 1/2
- "That is, there may be a lot of guidance on what would be illegal. There's no guidance on what couldn't be. This is a bit of a theme with recent firearms-related regulations." β June 2021 1/2
- The continuing expansion of cancel culture in furtherance of radical politics. β June 2021 2/2
- "I'm quite likely the only person on the planet who cares about [FEMA trailers and formaldehyde], and it's mostly because I'm really obstinate." β July 2021 1/2
- The apparent impossibility of rebuilding trust between academia and conservatives. β July 2021 2/2
- "...congrats you just ended rental housing!" β August 2021
- "...it's definitely not whataboutism to point out when people say 'Laws like this are way past the point of acceptability' that they demonstrably weren't." β September 2021 1/2
- "One interesting revelation is that Grosskruetz claims that, in addition to acting as a paramedic at the time, he was also acting as an ACLU observer." β November 2021 1/2
- "On October 30th of 2020, Project Veritas sued the New York Times for defamation..." β December 2021 1/2
- "But by that framing, there's never going to be a broad expert lie; anything not already caught by experts is controversial, and even were there something we as a group could agree was false, the vast majority of experts will never have seen whatever source data makes that falsehood." β January 2022 2/2
- "'LibsOfTikTok' is a twitter account that highlights what it sees as strange or bad results of modern progressive ideology." β April 2022
- "But if the future is a different country, I'm not sure I'm ready for a visa stamp to turn the discourse from "Lovecraft was racist" to this." β May 2022
- "Don't ask me what direction electrons flow in a circuit." β May 2022
- "It's fun to imagine what a ur-Minecraft would have ended up like, had it been released even four or five years earlier in the GameFAQs and rumor-mill era." β June 2022
- "I'm open to the importance of institutional knowledge, and I'm sure there's someone at the FBI that isn't completely incompetent and hasn't been driven out yet, but it's not exactly a poster child for the case, here." β August 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "The Supreme Court has responded to a stay request in Yeshiva University v. YU Pride Alliance." β September 2022
- "I don't particularly buy the whole "pivot to video" concept, and indeed I'd argue to its opposite, but people are a lot less aware of the extent outright video manipulation can occur and be undetectable." β October 2022
- "The Loudon County Special Grand Jury final report has been released." β December 2022
- "There are increasing campaigns to open up the CDC for gun violence research, often countered by gun owners pointing out a tendency for the organization to be captured by political forces, and it's hard to see this as anything but a poster child for that problem." β December 2022
- "Begun, the Butlerian Jihad has..." β December 2022
- "StableDiffusion 2.0 has released a few weeks ago, closely followed by 2.1, with some nice new features and also a couple somewhat noticable subtractions: the new tokenizer has removed tags related to celebrities and almost all living or recently-living artists, along with anything that triggered the NSFW filter." β December 2022
- "More broadly, though, there was a short time where people said 'live and let live', and even if you couldn't exactly believe they meant it, they at least were willing to put more than a little lip service to the concept." β December 2022
- "Some of it reflects the modern youth being far more reviewable ('seeable-to-a-state') than any demographic in history, at far smaller scales, and social pressures encouraging that review." β January 2023
- "Oi, Bruv, Can I See Your Porn Loisence" β January 2023
- "It's physically possible to discuss the material without endorsing it (although whether such discussion would prepare students for an AP exam...), but do you really expect the average classroom to manage it?" β January 2023
- "I'm more pro-Sad than anti-Sad, though I'm also pretty heavily anti-Rabid. β March 2023
- To give as neutral a summary as possible..." β March 2023
- "Three Felonies A Day was less interested in asking how hard it was to comply with the law, and more interested in asking whether the laws really mattered when police, prosecutors, and sometimes even judges were willing and happy to accept novel frameworks for the right target or high enough (or low enough) stakes." β April 2023
- "There are three broad classes of radioactive nuclear waste..." β April 2023
- "A lot of gatekeeping discourse in trans spheres reflected practices based around WPATH SoC v6; while this officially only ran from 2001-2011 (most of that under the name Harry Benjamin International Genders Dysphoria Association), it had a pretty significant foundational effect..." β May 2023
- "Since my 'don't trust Science' threads were already toeing the line between 'Pepe Silvia!' and schizophrenic (fair!) (I didn't even touch the four-part follow-up), Nate Silver summarizes better than I can..." β July 2023
- "Some updates from New Mexico since two weeks ago." β September 2023
- "The Ninth Circus vs. VanDyke: Collegiality Edition" β September 2023
- "Prestige Biotech" β November 2023
- "Conservatives and conservative organizations are not just uncommon but destroyed in a wide variety of professional fields, and that's a result of enemy action." β December 2023
- Docket Update β December 2023
- Gun Law Updates β January 2024
- "[Y]ou shouldn't or can't treat these massive systems as much more earnestly engaged in finding those answers than some rando online, and you shouldn't trust that much, either." β January 2024
- "The majority of US airline disasters leave an impact on airline regulation and aviation in general, if sometimes not quite enough, or only after a delay." β January 2024
- Mediated group hallucinations and consensus reality β February 2024
- "Against Large Language Models as an Archive" β February 2024
- "FOSS and The XZ Problem" β April 2024
- "Some legislation made it easier..., but the grander problem is that you now had thousands of people who's job was to find discriminatory actors, who were trained to notice the most subtle hints of it, and in no small part who believed in the mission." β May 2024
- "The Death of Trust in Bipartisan Lawmaking" β May 2024
- "Taylor, also known as CarbonMike, was both a CTRL-Pew 3d printing enthusiast and a New Yorker, a combination that Didn't Go Well." β May 2024
- "The NLRB can look at all these questions if they want to, but why would they want to here?" β June 2024
- "But in turn the overwhelming majority of successful boots-on-roads efforts come in communities with unsophisticated and disorganized criminals, in cultures not predisposed to escalatory violence." β June 2024
- "Oregon Goes To The Purge" β June 2024
- "Various downstream knowledge and pragmatic matters made 'gay mentor' a thing, and while a majority were genuinely in the 'leave a pamphlet and pretend the question never came up' side, it left a massive space for abuse among people who by definition would not be able to readily recognize abuses." β June 2024
- "The more internal debate variant is What Is Intersex to even start with." β July 2024
- Security Advice β July 2024
- "Some people do genuinely just have a morbid sense of humor, not just when people they don't like are involved." β July 2024
- "Bianchi v. Frosh's en banc opinion has dropped." β August 2024
- "Now, I don't particularly trust DailyCaller reporting. But it'd be real nice to have a way to tell." β August 2024
- How is airspace usually regulated? β October 2024
- "I'm writing about them -- I'm reading about them -- because people want each and every one from the other team removed. β October 2024
- "I took the plunge for The Year Of Linux On The Desktop, starting with a few tiptoes in 2016 and moving my personal computer default boot in 2021." β December 2024
- "VanDerStok has dropped." β March 2025
- "The Obama administration, when DAPA/DACA was being challenged, swore before court both in writing and orally in the court proper that they would not issue any new determinations under the new policies, in order to avoid having the judge issue a preliminary injunction. And then the issued literally over a hundred thousand." β May 2025
- "Snope v. Bonta has dropped like a gravestone" β June 2025
- "The National Instant Criminal Background Check Systems (NICS) is a 90s-era system that (almost) all buyers of firearms have to undergo every time they buy (almost) any firearm." β June 2025
- "I'm not going to throw away the Great Man Theory of subcultures, but I also think there are very dire limits to it." β July 2025
- "California Closes In On A Glock Ban" β September 2025
- "SCOTUS picks a couple Gun Cases... kinda" β October 2025
- "There's some interesting deeper things that could be said about the wider state of self-defense law (although the FBI numbers are kinda sus if you look at them too hard) and the WSJ analysis is less actual analysis and more looking at a CSV and hitting the filter until you get a chart you like." β October 2025
- "The advantage of the conventional educational system, and of government grants in general, is just how damn much money is thrown out there, while its results and evaluations are monitored only on the largest scales at any politically responsive level." β December 2025
- "Award-Winning AIs" β January 2026
- Appellate Caselaw Update β February 2026
- "LGBT Talk / Conversion Therapy: Chiles v. Salazar" β March 2026
- "Counting To Four In Duncan" β May 2026
- "What happens when you build a major program serving a half-million people, and the hardware doesn't show up?" β May 2026
@GavinSkulldrinker β 1 AAQC
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Analyzing Narratives on the Arbery Shooting β May 1/2, 2020
@gaygroyper100pct β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "From the perspective of someone from Delhi or Calcutta, 'native rule' is so far in the past that it's silly to consider the British as removing it." β December 2022
@Gbdub87 β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Outgroup Homogeneity and "Defund the Police" β September 2020
- "The black Princeton grad lecturing an unemployed opioid addict in West Virginia about his white privilege might be woke, but they sure as heck arenβt practicing intersectionality." β March 2021
@GBRK β 1 AAQC
π£ TheMotte.org era
@gcz77 β 2 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- Chess β April 2019
- There are two big ones. The first is in the kind of reasoning. The second is in the amount/complexity of laws jews have vs other religions. β April 2019
@gec_ β 3 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Channeling Noam Chomsky's Words β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- Is Trump a Fascist? β November 2019 (Christmas roundup)
- Straussian analysis: what it is, how it works. β March 2021
@gemmaem β 35 AAQCs
π΅ r/SlateStarCodex era
- the disappearance of traditional social norms β 10-14-17
- "Why does this Vagina Monologues thing keep coming up? Let me outline why I find the fuss absurd." β 12-10-17
- On Christian colleges, federal aid, and LGBT politics. β 01-15-18
- Conflict Theory vs. Mistake Theory in the context of sexual consent β 02-01-18
- Two competing views of gendered traits, activities and spaces β 02-08-18
- a reskin of "privilege" for feminist-critical palates β 04-02-18
- this sub's perceived attitude towards women β Week of April 30th, 2018
- A feminist's view of femininity. β Week of May 7th, 2018
- What distinguishes a proper "hacker." β Week of May 7th, 2018
- Hypotheses pertaining to how frequent sexual offenders may get away with it β Week of May 21st, 2018
- The value of having (any) principles β Week of May 21st, 2018
- Exhibit 1 β Week of Memorial Day, 2018
- Exhibit 2 β Week of Memorial Day, 2018
- Free Speech and Signaling in the Grey Tribe β Week of Memorial Day, 2018
- Life as a female "incel" β Week of Memorial Day, 2018
- response β Week of July 2nd, 2018
- When should we treat the sexes differently? β Week of July 9th, 2018
- The Value of Rules that are Hard to Change β Week of August 13th, 2018
- Art Transcending Politics β Week of August 27th, 2018
- On Closure β Week of September 10th, 2018
- Dynamics between Evangelicals and Feminism β Week of September 17th, 2018
- Believe Women as strategy to move the Equilibrium View β Week of October 8th, 2018
π’ r/TheMotte era
- > Which would remind me of Scott's universal culture that's just wearing the mask of Western culture. β Week of May 13th, 2019
- Interestingly, Bruenig acknowledges that there is a cultural argument to be made, here, in addition to the economic one: β Week of May 27th, 2019
- calls out the pitfall of rational debate β Month of July 2019
- Feminism, Victim Blaming, and Reducing Abuse β August 2020
- Questioning whether the West is Different β August 2020
- Safe Spaces as a Safety Valve β August 2020
- Trying To Watch US Covid Measures From the Outside β October 1/2, 2020
- Community-Building Tendencies Among Women β October 2/2, 2020
- How the body and mind change together, and how that relates to feminism. β January 2021
- " I think itβs a real shame when the positive case for liberal sexual norms gets lost in the outrage." β July 2022
- "The simple fact of the matter is that giving birth to a child does often make a person more inclined to self-sacrifice and more likely to put up with ill-treatment." β August 2022
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "I take public transit a lot, often in New Zealand, but also a little bit back when I lived in Los Angeles. I have not been harassed as far as I can remember, although if the incident was minor then I might easily have forgotten it." β November 2022
- "Nevertheless, my explanation of the trend that you identify would be that these liberal norms fell out of fashion because they genuinely were flawed, and that bringing them back will require re-working them to take some of these critiques into account while also preserving what was important about them." β December 2022
@Gen_McMuster β 4 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- I think the outcomes of the "black community" can be fairly analogized to an immigration environment where assimilation is discouraged. The problem isn't that they're a given identity, it's that the β Week of April 8th, 2019
- >I don't have a completely fundamental opposition to violence. Who kills who makes a difference. β Week of May 6th, 2019
- discuss the popularity of Joe Rogan β Month of August 2019
- Cautioning against the nascent division between "sex" and "gender" as potentially introducing unnecessary confusion into well-understood phenomena. β March 2021
@genusnihilum β 2 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- How Forums Self-Select by Writing Style β January 2020
- here β January 2020
@George_E_Hale β 10 AAQCs
π£ TheMotte.org era
- "On (ζ©) means basically when i do you a favor, you owe me some sort of favor in return (ζ©θΏγ) ." β June 2023
- "Today on the morning train nothing of import happened." β June 2023
- "Marriage ain't about the one true one. It's about making a goddam decision and choosing." β June 2023
- "The first train ride takes me to a commuter hub, where you can actually travel to one of the international airports in my area. You see a lot of Chinese, Korean, Thai, probably other Asians as well." β July 2023
- "I had a thing in high school where, when faced with the attention of females, I would become so emotionally fraught that I would vomit." β January 2024
- "Many years ago I got high for the first time with my good friend, R." β January 2024
- The Motte: A Working Glossary β March 2024
- "The trip to the states was mostly uneventful, but I will document it here for posterity and to get my own head around it." β January 2025
- "Any man in the wrong circumstances is capable of cheating. The trick is to stay the hell away from those circumstances." β December 2025
- "But I've been to the mountaintop. And I've smelled the promised scent." β February 2026
@georgemonck β 11 AAQCs
π’ r/TheMotte era
- Question for u/Bananageddon, u/Shakesneer, u/GPoaS and others who think this is "funny" or "slapstick": Is it funny because throwing a milkshake at someone is always funny, or just specifically at pol β Week of May 20th, 2019
- discussing Al Franken β Month of July 2019
- explains thier understanding of conservatism β Month of July 2019
- Contra Keith Woods on Moldbug β August 2020
- "Today's journalists all grew up watching John Stewart." β August 2021
- "I do think that this case does count as evidence against the thesis that 'if Rittenhouse was black he would be found guilty.'" β November 2021 1/2
- "Personally I would describe being 'woke' as synonymous with 'succession ideology.'" β March 2022
- "A big problem here is that Western progressive morality is different than traditional geopolitical morality (Vattel, etc.)" β March 2022
- "[H]ere is how I think the motives can be broken down by persona..." β May 2022
- "...when I meet a new person it is very, very helpful to know if they are male or female because it provides critical information for how I should interact with them." β June 2022
- "It is interesting how the concept of 'curse', 'swears' and 'profane' language have all been mashed together." β July 2022
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Is it, though?
Peggy McIntosh's 1989 essay "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" is one of the most culturally influential reframings of victimhood in history. That same, year, Kimberle Crenshaw coined the use of "intersectionality" in a law review article (PDF warning) to make claims like
By 1993, the phrase "oppression Olympics" was in sufficiently wide use that it was referenced by feminists in terms of something to be avoided in favor of coalition building:
And that same year (1993), black Jewish philosopher Laurence Mordekhai Thomas published Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust, in which he (from the publisher's description) "denounces efforts to place the suffering of one group above the other." So it seems like people have definitely been noticing this approach to "victimization" for a while now.
I have written often and extensively on leftist identitarianism, and one of the things I've written on most frequently in this space is the emergence of right-wing identitarianism as a mistake made by ostensibly conservative people trying to use the weapons of the enemy and thus becoming the very thing they swore to destroy.
I would actually argue that there are some interesting features of normative ethical reasoning that explain "victim mentality," namely that we often do have genuinely good reason to prioritize those who are "worst off" (see Rawls or, you know, any medical triage process) and this incentivizes people to either disingenuously cast themselves as the "worst off," or to genuinely come to see themselves as the "worst off" even when that's not really a reasonable position to hold. So I don't think it's a new attitude, but I do think that in the last three or four decades we have granted a shocking degree of deference and, through it, political power to irrational individual claims concerning just how badly-off people actually are.
I think you can draw a direct causal line from there to, for example, here: "Universities from Harvard to Hampshire have admitted significantly more students with disabilities over the last decade, as diagnoses for A.D.H.D. and anxiety increase." "I did poorly because I didn't get the right accommodations, not becuase I never do the reading" has become the bane of many a college professor's pedagogical efforts, and it is just one small example of an observable trend.
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