popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
popocatepetl
11mo ago
The statement isn't about the staffer not understanding why he's getting criticized. This is a classic case of a person in the midst of a scandal putting up the bat signal for their in-group, screaming that the out-group is attacking them just for being a member of the in-group. (See: Zoe Quinn in GamerGate). People do it all the time because it works.
You have an unintentional bait-and-switch in your comment, I think. Very clearly the latter "has fervent ideas for changing the social fabric" but they are not treated as "a logical extension of progressivism".
I'm aware of the seeming contradiction, and considered including a "What about the Nazis, why don't they get considered progressive?" paragraph, but I thought it would be going too much into the weeds of political taxonomy.
To summarize, I view people like Mencius Moldbug as progressive heretics rather than conservatives. Their ideas for changing society are such that they cannot be integrated into the progressive gestalt, so they try to pitch their platform under the only other tent instead. Progressives are more than happy to generalize everyone under that tent as the same. And the progressive heretics (like libertarians, neoreactionaries, or neocon New American Century types) will structure their radical message to play to the base of conservative voters. Said voters will of course be aghast when a libertarian pretending to be a conservative tries to implement open borders, or when a neoreactionary pretending to be a conservative lets slip he thinks the constitution is stupid and the US should be reconfigured into a no-voice only-exit-rights monarchy. Or posts something like this, revealing he has absolutely no reverence for tradition and an Openness factor that is off-the-charts for a "conservative".
Certainly you can disagree. But I think the average Democrat voter is much closer to the platform of their party than the average Republican voter. Because, again, conservatives don't care enough to take command of their own party.
The Neutral vs. Conservative problem, as I understand it, has an entirely different genesis. It arises from the fact that creating a specifically right-leaning version of something that already exists is a project that is only going to attract rightists, and the result will be much more obviously skewed than the original.
I think it's because, when the left takes over an institution, conservatives don't care enough to stop them. Then, when an alternate new institution is created, normal conservatives don't care enough to join, leaving only the extreme fringe of people who say, think the Holocaust is fake, which is not a typical US conservative position.
There is a true need for an alternate Wikipedia at this point. Future generations will see Wikipedia like we see Herodotus's "Histories" - flawed but ultimately the core upon which historical knowledge is built.
This slams into Neutral vs. Conservative problem. Much ink has been spilt trying to model the core value that splits progressives from conservatives, but I'll piggyback on Richard Hanania and say the central difference is pretty banal — the left has causes they really care about advancing, while the right would mildly prefer to not be pushed off their spot, please. Any time a new faction has fervent ideas for changing the social fabric, they get automatically slotted into the left coalition, and the political theory bloggers have to do midnight brainstorming on how this group's ideas are a logical extension of progressivism.
The conservative right definitionally cannot summon the passion to create a rival Wikipedia. Arguably, the conservative right cannot even summon the passion to have its own political party. Here in the US, the GOP has repeatedly been parasitized by some passionate heretic progressive faction, like libertarians or then neocons or most recently the NRx inspired alt-right. These groups do not reflect the values of the baptist truck driver or stodgy civil engineer dad who wants lower taxes, but they have passion, so they out-ground-game mere conservatives.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
Where is KulakRevolt famous? A Google search turns up very little.
One-tiny-part-of-the-internet famous. He runs a twitter account with readership in line with a second tier NRx/DR figure. (One quarter the followers of BronzeAgePervert, half that of Steve Sailer, slightly more then FistedByFoucault or Whatifalthist.) He mostly posts threads about how the civil rights act destroyed America.
"Famous" is overselling it, but he's glowed up from being a regular on the motte. Spending time here is likely a waste for him in terms of reach.
My understanding is that the Roman Republic's early rise to power was based in part on their willingness to assimilate other Italian powers into a new political concept rather than just attempting to utterly crush, enslave, subjugate, and kill them.
Kinda but not really. Look up the Social War. Rome tried to keep Italy as subject vassals with no political representation well past the point it became politically non-viable. They did allow regional autonomy, but viewed conquered populations as their natural lessers, and kept it that way until they had been hegemon over the Mediterranean for over fifty years (The Punic Wars and Macedonian Wars ended in the 140s BC, the Social War in 87 BC).
They were relatively tolerant, but they conquered most of the known world and kept it as their footstool for a couple generations on an ethnic nationalism model (for citizens of the city of Rome, specifically).
The transition to civic nationalism followed in degrees over the next few centuries.
I would say that the Roman Empire could only be founded on ethnic nationalism. Over the course of centuries, it survived by slowly granting priviliges/power to ambitious and competent outsiders, starting with the Latins, then the Italians, then to provincials, ramping up with Trajan and peaking with the Illyrian emperors, and ultimately ceding it to barbarians like Stilicho or Alaric. So the seemly mutually exclusive ideas "civic nationalism worked for Roman Empire" and "the decline and fall of the Roman Empire tracks with the loss of its Roman character" can actually coexist.
Imagine the state capacity of Rome like the material of the balloon, and its prosperity as helium. As state capacity contracts, the balloon must release air, otherwise it will pop. It is a "bad thing" for Rome to be leaking power, of course, but necessary for survival. You can only leak power so long until there's no empire left, though.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
A frequent contrast is drawn between the Hyper-Athlete QB (Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen) who combines arm strength, running speed, strength, creativity to make crazy plays out of structure; and the System QB (Kirk Cousins, Brock Purdy), a savvy game manager who follows the playbook... Just as Josh Allen puts himself in terrible positions then pulls a rabbit out of his hat because he's such an outlier athlete, the smart guy will put himself in a position where he needs to process a lot because he ignores the rules
Very bold of you to assume these quarterback analogies will make any sense to anyone on The Motte. Consider rewriting using HPMOR characters.
I think what's going on here with the trope of an "idealistic, trusting, gullible" simpleton and your knuckleheaded distrustful simpleton is that he's the same man, before and after getting taken for a ride. Real stupid people are not like Lennie, jumping into water when you tell them to, then forgetting about it, and being glad you saved them from drowning. There is a switch from total trust to total distrust. The boomercon who had a child's faith in US foreign policy in 2003 believes the US government is populated by satanist pedophiles in 2023.
The reason old fiction has so many trusting yokels that we don't see IRL anymore is that the world changed. The simpleton gets scammed early and often in the modern world, and updates his heuristic accordingly.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
That made him an active proponent of an otherwise often faceless machine, but also means that people's desires to anthromorphize broader collectives had an easy target to pin collective actions and policies onto, which has the effect of re-allocating responsibility away from less subtle actors in more flattering ways.
It's a bit like Klaus Schwab and the alt-right. People see big institutions doing bad things, and some sinister-looking guy gets up to the podium and says "Yes, it's me, I'm the bad guy. Look at my important title, I'm responsible." If you're willing to wear that mantle, outsiders will gladly heap superhuman agency on you.
popocatepetl
11mo ago
A lot of my knowledge of Napoleon comes from Wikipedia dives embarked upon during my read of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
Great book, really brings to period to life. But Susanna Clarke obviously knows nothing about the military side of things.
Eventually, though, the odds caught up to him.
His life beggars belief.
It happens a lot with these Alexander/Caesar/Hitler/Gustavus Adolphus/Tom Brady figures. They win so much and so hard they see themselves as infallible and end up embarrassing themselves on a low-odds gamble, like playing football at 45 or invading Russia.
So how do you feel about Napoleon's legacy?
Morally, Napoleon strikes me as what Spengler characterized as a Caesar: no strong ideology, ambitious, a pragmatically minded autocrat who sweeps into command of an exhausted society. Men like that do not fight for a cause; viewing them in "good" or "evil" terms is a mistake. Had Napoleon not foolishly killed the Duke of Enghien and invited another coalition against France, the right would view him with the vague favorability they do with Salazar or Franco, because he set a house in order after a decade of chaos. His concordat with the pope, rehabilitation of the emigres, and rationalized law code were just what the doctor ordered for France.
Politically, Napoleon is fascinating to me. He successfully defrocked something that looks suspiciously what the online right calls the Cathedral. People who see only the vague outline of history sometimes say that Napoleon tamed the French revolution after its Jacobin excesses. This is incorrect. After the Thermidorian Reaction, France endured a relatively bloodless period under an oligarchy masquerading as a republic, which historians call the French Directory. The Directors held to the ideological center of the French revolution, using press censorship, anarcho-tyranny, and election fixing to ward off their strong left and right flanks. Napoleon staged a coup with the help of a few Directorate insiders who thought him their pawn. After Napoleon got rid of those 'friends', no one stood up for them.
Provoking another war with Europe afterwards was a dreadful mistake. If not for that, he'd get good marks in my book, but he did do it.
Is it possible to salvage a non-trivial version of the DKE?
The observation that low-skilled people overestimate themselves and high-skilled people underestimate themselves survives this criticism. Yeah, that's trivial. It doesn't reveal the psychology of skilled vs unskilled, just that, like @rae says, misestimation by the worst will be on average an overestimate, while misestimation by the best will be an underestimate.
The reason Dunning-Kruger feels so real to us is that dilettants outnumber experts by a ludicrous margin. It feels like "history buffs" on the internet are always running their mouths with questionable takes on the Roman Empire. In reality, specialists talk a lot more. There just aren't that many of them.
This seems to me a quite bad refutation of white nationalism. The meat of your objection is that wignats would have to use violence to achieve their policy goals, but apparently you've never had a frustrating conversation with a libertarian. That's true for every political movement ever. Whether we are talking about ethnic cleansing of hispanics or civil rights laws for blacks or motor vehicle registration for your SUV, the enforcement of policy ultimately rests on an escalating sequence of consequences that end in non-compliants being gunned down by police in the street.
Yes, making an ethnostate would require reprisals on people who don't want to obey. This is equally true of patrolling borders. China, Korea, and Japan are not "naturally" homogenous today. They are homogenous because they have continued to enforce a threat of violence against border crossers who do not meet their preferences.
This post could be rewritten to condemn any political movement that is not in power, save ancaps.
Because the prevailing sentiment here is that anti-semitism is stupid but not particularly threatening.
It's not unthreatening, I just don't put it in a different category than other grand narratives about who/what is really responsible for modern woes, and I find it faintly disgusting that it is elevated to a special dais by tastemakers. Ideas are dangerous. That's the nature of the beast. Communism will be the obvious whipping boy here, but it wasn't too long ago Jacobins flew into a bloody frenzy over ideas we today consider utterly banal.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
I don't find it valuable to engage with arguments I consider silly, nor do I feel that occupying a website with silly thinking sullies me, nor do I find it onerous to collapse uninteresting comments, nor do I think the average person here is too unintelligent to spot fallacies, nor does their existence on the motte seem to cry out to heaven for redress. Antisemitic conspiracy theorists do not seem evil to me. For the most part their reasoning is just poor. Also, there are a few arguments the mainstream calls 'antisemitic' I find convincing, and that will be true for thoughtful liberals/leftists too.
The rules here do a good job keeping this space pleasant, at least for my preferences. I acknowledge there's no accounting for taste.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Your breakdown of the motivations and rhetoric of both factions seems accurate.
I feel like the ultimate result of the controversy was probably a marginal pro-GG victory. Anti-GG got to control the narrative, to the extent that e.g. the Wikipedia article on GamerGate is pure anti-GG propaganda, but that control didn't translate into success because the traditional video game journalistic scene that anti-GG had their base in was becoming irrelevant. If I think about the movers and shakers who get to define gaming as a subculture now, it's all much more crowdsourced - it's streamers and YouTubers and content creators. If I think about the people with privileged access to gaming companies whose feedback changes the way games are made now, it's, well, it's content creators. It's not journalists.
I don't play many video games these days, but of the few recent ones I bought, Elden Ring seems celebrated in GG circles for being especially non-woke. Its character creation uses "Body Type A / Body Type B" rather than a gender option. Another celebrated non-idpol game, Hogwarts Legacy, apparently lets you play as a black male witch in the female dormitories in 19th century England, and has openly transgender NPCs.
Yes, traditional gaming journalism is a shadow of its former self, but that's just social media killing the legacy press. The culture of AAA games shifted with everything else. Calling the situation a pro-GG victory seems like telling a 1924 Russian white that he won the civil war because Lenin died.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
My personal experience is that attempted child molesters face extremely minimal legal and social consequences. His family members say, “I’d never defend what he did,” then minimize his offenses and keep inviting him to children’s birthday parties. They give him plenty of opportunity to try again. Their acquaintances all go along with this, because it would be too socially awkward not to.
There's more to "legal and social consequences" than your family. Frankly, you can never expect family to hold their kin accountable for serious crimes. Violence, robbery, corruption, false testimony, rape – family will offer every possible excuse, and when excuses run dry, every opportunity for rehabilitation. Blood runs thicker than morals.
For legal consequences, criminal abuse gets an average of 16 years, while statutory rape gets 3.6 years (source). It's hard to parse where "child molestation" fits between these two, since the latter probably includes a lot of non-central examples like teenagers dating adults. I'll acknowledge I really don't know how I could recalibrate my intuitions on this. The only time I hear about child molesters being sentenced is when there's a news story about the penalty being shockingly low. But if I trusted this heuristic, I would believe tens of thousands of unarmed blacks were being killed by police officers, or that shark attacks are rampant, and a hundred other false impressions.
Socially, outside the family, I'm not sure what universe you live in if you think chomos don't get serious social consequences. Perhaps your cultural milieu is different than mine.
There's nothing the military could really do. While tempting for my own biases, "recruitment is down because woke institutions alienated poor conservative whites and catered to effete progressives" doesn't eat like a full meal to me. The woke ads didn't help, sure. And it also doesn't help that the current ruling ideology of the USA skims close to condemning the USA's very history and existence.
But fundamentally, the nationstate is past its expiration date. People need to belong to a tribe. Historically, the local church, one's birth neighborhood, and the ethnic nation filled that void, but now the internet exists. Globalization happened. These forces have channeled people into particularist tribes which are divorced from their geographic location.
So today, you can find people who would be willing to fight and die for LGBT rights, the white race, or classical liberalism if such armies were recruiting. Not so many willing to die for their hometown of Mobile, Alabama.
I expect militaries to regress to a pre-Napoleonic model in the future: an elite professional core with mercenaries who are in it for the cash and prizes.
"Low Status Secret History."
You nailed it. @ymeskhout and many others in this thread are searching for the rationalist equivalent of the philosopher's stone — a meta-criterion for determining whether a position is reasonable without reference to the facts. I too have been beguiled by such a formula. That I could tell whether someone's claims are worth evaluating, just by their posture and disposition in the debate. That I coud tell the difference between a "framework" and an "epicycle" without learning the theory. That I could separate "motivated delusions" from "suppressed truth-speaking" without knowing the facts. I can't.
The reason I don't bother investigating whether interdimensional aliens built the pyramids is purely because my social sense tells me that people who make those claims are not worth entertaining. Progressives do the same to people like me when we talk about HBD or cultural marxism.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
How have your predictions fared?
Decently. Graded:
- ✅ 99%: Trumps Twitter ban has been lifted
- ✅ 95%: At least one case of Twitter moderation has happened for which the NY Times or WaPO has written a story highlighting hypocrisy
- ✅ 90%: Hate speech rules for protected classes remain, neither being retracted nor expanded to cover everyone
- ✅ 70%: Misgendering and deadnaming no longer fall under this category, however.
- ✅ 70%: Payment processors, cloud service providers, banks, and the US government have NOT taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (This one is tricky to adjudicate so I'll leave it to you.)
- ❌ 70%: The EU HAS taken measures to leverage or punish Twitter for content policies. (Same.)
- ✅ 60%: Twitter's medical misinformation rules have been modified.
- ❌ 60%: Twitter's election misinformation rules have been modified.
Vibes-wise, I've been surprised by how full-throatedly dissident conservative Elon Musk has been in his tweets. And while "hate speech" is still against TOS, I've been subjectively impressed by how much far right accounts have been able to test the limits without being deleted, banned, or throttled from at least my feed.
I'm not a foreign policy expert but a pair of catastrophic outcomes come to mind.
- A coalition of neighboring Arab countries declares war on Israel, as you predict. All progress towards normalizing relations with Muslim countries in the last fifty years resets, and the atrocity is remembered for hundreds of years. The US likely stands on the sidelines for the war.
- The Arab citizenry of Israel instantly radicalizes. All Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem instantly radicalize. Whereas once Israel had terrorists living behind a wall in a containment zone, now they have terrorists dispersed in their population and ready to act as fifth columnists in the invasion. Unless Israel is willing to genocide those people too, which would spark a civil war, terror attacks ramp up dramatically.
It seems like a very bad idea to yours truly.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
- 0% of women want to sleep with your average incel (definitionally)
- Some percent, say 5%, of women want to have sex with a dog.
It is not ~0% of all women who don't want to sleep with the incel, it is tilde 0% (Zorba fix markdown escape pls) of all women he ever met (more plausibly, approached).
He probably haven't met any dogfuckers, either.
To demonstrate the problem a different way: Go to an incel forum, select a thousand incels. Go to a dog competition, select a thousand charming, beautiful, intelligent, expensive male dogs with female owners. Which group do you think will have more sex with female humans in the next five years?
The "incels are less fuckable than dogs" doesn't hold up unless you redefine "incel" much more narrowly than anyone actually does. Your average unemployed 5'6" recessed chin guy on those forums is still more sexable than a chocolate lab.
Reading people's personal accounts on Hacker News and elsewhere lends credence to the existence of bad genetics, such as men who consume far fewer calories predicted by calculators but still obese or overweight. Metabolism varies greatly among individuals even controlling for factors like age, height, sex, lifestyles, etc.
Anecdotal, and people are terrible at estimating their own consumption unless they're weighing everything they put in their mouth. The variation of metabolism is not completely insignificant, but not enough to explain the obesity crisis. An extremely cursed person in the 99th percentile might have to consume about 400kcal/day less than average (assuming 160kcal stddev) which does not explain the obesity crisis. Your run-of-the-mill unlucky person complaining of a "slow metabolism" has to consume the equivalent of two fewer apples a day.
The main way in which obesity is genetic is behavioral. People with a satiation reflex that does not activate as quickly, whose hunger is stronger or self-regulation is weaker, who are inclined to sedentary activities and don't walk as much. But these factors of genetic variation often reflect poorly on the character the obese person in question, so they prefer to focus on a supposedly unbelievably efficient metabolism.
Bad genetics can explain a fixed proportion of the population being obese even in the 70s, 60s etc.
A new environment can expose genetic variation that was invisible before. Vulnerability to drug addiction is also genetic, but there were no fentanyl addicts in the 60s or 70s.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
+1 on the 12 Miles Below rec.
I enjoyed 12MB, but mostly because of the unique setting. The protagonist lucks into all the things that give him power progression, as opposed to planning, training, or using his own unique cleverness to problem solve. IIRC, despite being characterized as a brainy engineer, his major contribution to his own success is using a few Bash commands.
popocatepetl
1yr ago
Could we be seeing the beginning of the end of the Chiefs dynasty?
As a Patriots fan I certainly hope so. It would be very annoying in retrospect if we secured consensus for Best Dynasty of All Time, Best QB of All Time, Best Coach of All Time, etc around 2017 only for the title belt to be lost the minute after the band broke up a few years later.
This perspective always strikes as odd from an outsider's perspective. To me, the divinity of Jesus or the prophethood of Muhammad are clearly the legitimization methods, not the essence, of their respective religions. "You should believe X because Y." Imagine an alternate universe where Muhammad taught Catholic doctrine on grace and God's kingdom, preached radical forgiveness and against material wealth; while Jesus related the Quran to his disciples, who subsequently waged Ghazwah against polytheists to protect the faith and bring fellow monotheists under a protection/patronage system. I would still pattern match the first as Christianity and the second as Islam despite the "core claims" being reversed.
Of course, the moment one becomes cynical enough to meta-reason past these legitimization claims and choose a belief set on its own merits, one has ceased to be religious in any appreciable way, and might as well just make up one's own beliefs.
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