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In this episode, we talk about white nationalism.
Participants: Yassine, Walt Bismarck, TracingWoodgrains.
Links:
Why I'm no longer a White Nationalist (The Walt Right)
The Virulently Unapologetic Racism of "Anti-Racism" (Yassine Meskhout)
Hajnal Line (Wikipedia)
Fall In Line Parody Song (Walt Bismarck)
Richard Spencer's post-Charlottesville tirade (Twitter)
The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict (The Walt Right)
America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization (Richard Hanania)
Recorded 2024-04-13 | Uploaded 2024-04-14
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Notes -
This thread speaks to something I really don't like about rationalism.
It is incredibly pedantic and overly concerned with explicit formalist truth/knowledge in a way that doesn't reflect how identity and power work in the real world. It comes off as extremely autistic at times. The fact is that reality is nuanced and messy and contradictory, and virtually all heuristics will be inapplicable to some situations. It's sturm and drang, not high minded spergy debate. As a successful propagandist, I know that irrational emotions and especially the invisible rules of prestige/cultural coding are a million times more powerful than beautifully crafted syllogisms.
When it comes to race--The shoreline of England is infinite if you keep zooming in. You can't define the world in terms of edge cases. Sometimes you need the low resolution filter to reflect how people actually behave. And in a lot of situations people will only use (and very frequently, can only use) the low resolution filter. When you are attacked as a white person, it makes sense to defend yourself as a white person, and not as some New Libertarian Man who exists outside of the world's tribal classification schema.
You might not care about race, but race cares about you. In prison you hang out with the other white guys or you get raped.
When it comes to immigration policy, from a WN perspective there simply isn't a good answer as to where to draw the line and any smart WN will tell you this, but that doesn't mean race is irrelevant. Race is clinal, and whenever you try to chop it up into discrete subgroups you will have to make some simplifications that reduce the accuracy of your model. This doesn't mean the variation covered by the original cline/gradation isn't significant. It just makes creating immigration policy etc. that isn't overly accepting or too prohibitive very difficult.
This is something WNs are very thoughtful about and will discuss internally, but when asked by an outsider it always feels very shifty and bad faith. Thankfully as a former WN who hasn't renounced my past, I can still have those discussions with active WNs in a way you can't. If you look at episodes 5 and 14 of my podcast I explicitly grill them on where/how they draw the line, and they make a genuinely good faith effort that leads to very interesting discussion.
I don't appreciate you trying to frame my rhetoric as shifty or evasive, or trying to "pin" me. I'm not some drug kingpin you're trying to prosecute. We're supposed to be gentlemen trying to hash out how the world works, and these are incredibly complex and nuanced issues that need to be answered in an expansive way with the proper historical and scientific context. Sometimes you need to let someone ramble for a few minutes so they can adequately provide this context, but you were grilling me like a prosecutor with very simplistic and direct questions and it felt on many occasions that you were coming at me in bad faith or with an agenda. I don't think that's what you wanted to do, but I also think you have a lot of unexamined biases.
I detected in the first few minutes of the discussion that you weren't interested in a broad historical/philosophical discussion that could get into the meat of the issue, and wouldn't let me provide enough context to satisfy a neutral party. I subsequently gave an extremely direct answer to literally every question you asked. But no, I didn't let you trap me into defending something I don't even believe, because I have a much higher IQ than the frog twitter wignats you're fighting with on Twitter, and can tell when I'm being baited.
This reflects an uncharitable and supercilious attitude I think you should work on. Nobody calls themselves a "white supremacist" first of all, so when you say this you just sound like an asshole who won't let someone define their own beliefs. But I know you're not an asshole, so you should stop this behavior.
Second, I am clearly someone who is engaging in good faith in an adversarial environment, and deserve be treated entirely on my own merits, and not be spoken down to because of your interactions with past interlocuters of an ostensibly similar worldview. But you were acting like I was still a WN and were entirely uninterested in my deeper and more abstract thoughts about race.
If you had let me ramble more and actually flesh out my worldview rather than pressing me to defend tenets of an ideology I had very explicitly abandoned I think the convo would have been more enlightening.
Perhaps we can aim for that in a future discussion?
Rationalist hubris is believing politics can be understood 100% rationally. Only to the degree you can place yourself in the heads of the emotionally-driven other will you understand what's going on. It was strange to me you got laughed off/brushed aside so often in the podcast, because your low res filter is much closer to how average Americans engage with politics than this abstract-1000-moving-parts-strict-heuristics-analysis-machine the ratsphere attempts to lug everywhere.
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In general I think formalism is a good thing. If we’re to have a debate on the merits of a certain social system or political ideology, we must know what it is that we’re actually talking about. If I’m advocating for “democracy” or “white nationalism” or “communism” it’s absolutely important to know what the terms actually mean. The first reason this is important is that it prevents people from speaking past each other. If “communism” is formally defined as “state ownership of capital” then we can be sure we won’t get lost in the weeds of talking about things that look like communism that actually aren’t like Kibutz or monasteries or nuclear families. It also avoids the issues of changing definitions and snuck premises. If we don’t define Communism, then either one of us are free to change the definition in ways that suit us. If I don’t agree with communism, I can redefine it to be only totalitarian socialism and dismiss everything else as “not really communism” even if it would meet the definition. If I’m in favor of communism, I can do this in reverse and start including Sweden as a communist country because some utilities and the health care system are state run. It also prevents to snuck premise problem where I talk about things that I really wish were part of the communist system but aren’t.
But there is a related problem there where people try to win arguments solely by definitions. For example, you defined communism as state ownership of capital. What about a state that allows for private ownership of capital but imposes very high levels of taxation and requires regulatory approval to basically make any decision?
But that then devolves into a discussion of “what constitutes high levels of tax” or “approval.”
All of those things are important but frequently when I see someone overly focused on definitions they often forget that the map was made for man.
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There was no malice at all on my end, and I'm more than open to having any of my unexamined biases pointed out. My goal with asking questions is ideally to reach a point where I can pass an ideological Turing test and be able to accurately rephrase my interlocutor's position. The questions I ask therefore come from what appears to me to be either contradictions, ambiguity, or lack of evidence. I can't claim to really understand someone's beliefs or how they came to form those belifs if I gloss over that nagging curiosity. I understand that any categorization will run into limitations. I wouldn't expect the answer to my question about who is white to come with crisp demarcated lines, but I am nevertheless interested in how someone would try formulating an (imperfect) answer.
You're right about this. It was wrong of me to impugn you by association and I retract and apologize for that.
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