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As a fundamentalist Christian that slowly deteriorated into an agnostic, son of a right wing libertarian that later turned into a radical fascist, who still tends to think with conservative values, I am a product of liberalism. I do not share values with many people, given that I am agnostic and yet still right wing, and yet still holding disdain for a lot of the rhetoric thrown around by the current administration. If liberalism goes away, what will happen to me? If liberalism goes away, what will happen to gay furry skeptic centrists like TracingWoodgrains?
Have you checked out TW's twitter lately? He's all in on "we freaked the normies out going too hot and fast on the trans kids thing, we need to be more subtle next time." He's not aiming for liberalism, more like "wokeism with a human face, run by enlightened lawyers in policy think tanks rather than HR ladies"
I'm not logged in on this phone, but if you haven't been following him I can get you the choice quotes
This is, like most of your straw men about your enemies, written in bad faith and not at all accurate. I follow TW and he's posted nothing that could be fairly characterized in that manner. He's consistently liberal and partisan in the sense that he's anti-Trump and, more broadly, anti-GOP. He's never made a secret of that. But the idea that Jesse Singal's former assistant has ever been carrying water for trans activists is absurd on its face. The idea that the guy who broke the DEI FAA story, which has been retweeted by Elon himself and which gets Trace regularly called a Nazi, is "woke" is ridiculous.
You constantly prove you have no theory of the mind for people unlike yourself.
The hate Trace gets for being a liberal gay furry has always been kind of amusing to me. Instead of believing he is what he has always said he is, you need to invent hidden motives and masks to conceal his nefarious true agenda, when his true agenda is out there in the open. And ironically you show yourself as suffering from the same derangement and lack of theory of mind that his leftist crticics calling him a Nazi and a racist do.
Hard as this is for you to believe, people usually actually believe what they say they believe. Especially when they're arguing on the Internet, where there is little value or purpose in pretending to have beliefs or intentions different from your real ones. The only exceptions are people like, say, some of our Joo-posters, who are more or less honest about what they think of Jews but are not forthright about what they actually want to do to Jews.
Notice that KulakRevolt didn't go full mask-off while he was still on the Motte; once he got some traction on Substack and Twitter, he found the grift was more profitable when you stake out an extreme position and appeal to temporarily embarrassed basement-dwelling warlords. It's actual extremists (or grifters cosplaying as extremists) who hide what they really want to say here.
Trace, on the other hand, was never grifting. Much like Yassine, you can hate what he says, but he's saying the same things he always did.
You are unable to make these distinctions and so you are constantly constructing, and even fabricating, things the people you hate haven't actually said, done, or even hinted at.
No, TW is not a trans activist as generally understood, but I think its quite fair to say that the author of this objects on speed and methods rather than principle.
I think he was extremely obvious the whole time. If hes gotten into holocaust denial now, it certainly doesnt really change much for him.
I think TW is actually pro-trans in the same way that Jesse Singhal, the notorious Trans Enemy #2 is. Speed and methods are important.
He was obvious (and explicit) about wanting political violence the whole time. The Jew and race hatred he mostly kept under his hat until he moved to Twitter.
Yes, as in "we freaked the normies out going too hot and fast on the trans kids thing, we need to be more subtle next time." He literally says it every time he talks about the issue!
Except "speed and methods" would include whether or not kids should be transed at all. Your claim is that he agrees with trans activists about everything and just thinks they need to be sneakier about getting to where they can physically transition children and put trans women into women's prisons, etc. That is not what he "literally says."
No, he says he doesn't want them to push for transing kids until they can do womb transplants to guarantee no loss of fertility. It's literally in the last essay he wrote about conquering nature!
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Wait, Kulak left? And he was grifting, and somehow became an extremist? Can you share a bit more context?
He technically still uses his account here, but only to post his substack links and argue in the comments. Guy got enough traction in the Twittersphere to make money, I guess.
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Technically not gone, but his most recent post was a rant about how we're all useless for not being out on the streets killing our political enemies right now. Meanwhile on Twitter, he's gone full Holocaust denier and RAHOWA, and his schtick is encouraging his followers to go out and kill their enemies and stop believing in fake gay things like governments and coexistence, tribal warfare is all that matters, and also please subscribe to his Substack.
I temper my sense of decency to ask, but... RAHOWA?
It's like NANOWRIMO but for the turner diaries but in Minecraft
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Short for Racial Holy War. Coined, as far as I’m aware, by Ben Klassen, the founder of the Church Of The Creator, and a prominent member of the early White Power movement.
I have been robbed of three vowels, and all the possibility they contained. My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
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Wow damn what a twist. I remember him for his insightful posts. He was such a long-time member too, I wouldn't have expected this.
I think you definitely should've expected this. All he ever did when he was here was post about how Americans should undertake violence in order to fix what he saw as the evils of our country. That's pretty LARP-y at the best of times, but was even worse in his case since he's Canadian. Dude was never insightful, all he ever did here was post calls to violence. Now he does the same thing, just on another site.
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I agree with your criticism of Steve, but come on, Trace isn't what he always said he is. Trivially, he's not a "Lee Kuan Yew liberal" in any sense that doesn't make the label deceptive. His grievences with this forum also can't be taken at face value.
You do? Why? Other people have already linked half the evidence I was right. He outright says he just wants to go slow on pushing the "trans kids" thing until nature has been fully conquered with womb transplants. It's literally wokeist transhumanism but not bullying hard enough to cause a backlash. The same goals but managed by clever smooth-talking lawyers who can con people into surrendering instead of fighting.
It's the exact same thing you said you find creepy about him!
Because you told me to look at his Twitter, I did, and didn't come up with anything. I saw someone else post his Substack, but didn't read it yet. If you can post any links, I'd still appreciate it.
You know, that's a not-bad description of what I think about him, but I don't recall stating it like that with that amount of certainty. This may be what the issue is here, fairness demands that harsh judgements are withheld until you have evidence, or at least to qualify them them with an explicit acknowledgement that it's vibes-based.
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I don't know how much of a "Lee Kuan Yew" liberal he is, only knowing a little about Lee Kuan Yew, but if he ever called himself that (I don't recall), in what way is it deceptive?
What he says he is nowadays is a center leftist who favors the Democrats and dislikes Trump, but he also dislikes woke extremists. He's a gay furry with lingering Mormon sensibilities despite having left the church. That all seems very accurate to me.
I wish he had not left the forum the way he did, but I understand his grievances. Years later, he's still getting flack and being accused of being an entryist or something for starting the Schism. Now, I think the Schism was a bad idea and didn't like it at the time (and said so), but he was always pretty honest about his intent. I don't think it was a secret plot to destroy the Motte.
Calling him partisan just seems pointless and obvious. @FCfromSSC is a partisan too (and the proximal cause of TW creating the Schism). Like TW, FC is quite honest about his partisanship. People are still butthurt that Trace went off because of all the civil war fedposting that FC and a few others were doing at the time. (I think even FC admits he was not in a good headspace at the time.) But FC is popular here (I like him too, despite being much closer to Trace in my beliefs than FC) , and honestly, folks like @SteveAgain like fedposting. So Trace got endless shit and finally left.
I wish he hadn't and I wish he was less bitter, but I see no dishonesty or grift in his game, and he's certainly not, as Steve implies, telling his followers that actually the only problem with trans extremism is that it scared the normies.
Link some. Come on, put up
I don't mean you fedpost yourself -you like it when other people fedpost. Some people very consistently AAQC any "spicy" post no matter how low effort it actually is
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I mean, just do a search on his profile, it comes up quite a lot (1, 2, 3), and I don't know how you want to invoke his name without either implying authoritarian measures, or being deceptive... and I'm pretty sure Trace is not about to start advocating for the execution of drug dealers.
Yes. I don't care about him starting The Schizm (it was no worse an act than the spinoff of /r/CWR, and no more successful for that matter), nor do I care about him being a partisan (aren't we all?). What bothers me is that I feel like I've been played for a fool by taking his complaints seriously. Originally I understood his grievances were about being mistreated, "muh miserable scolds and ankle-biters", and as far as complaints go it's pretty valid. People got pretty jaded here, there's a background radiation of hostility to anyone with his views, fair enough I wouldn't want to hang out in an environment like that either, if the roles were reversed. So when someone raises an objection like that I try to hear them out, and see if there's a way individual users could do something to make posting here more tolerable (funnily enough I never seem to get much of an answer for the latter, or there's a clear implication of "no - get rid of the background radiation, or bust").
So now some time has passed and I mulled over some of the conversations with him, and my only conclusion is that the mistreatment was at most an excuse, and the grievance was actually about the ideological distance. "Oh noes, you guys didn't like my LOTT hoax (please forget that the B&R audience had pretty much the same reaction to it)", or "oh noes, FC doesn't want to live in the same country as me". When I do the role-reverso on that one I come up empty. If I could politely listen to him as he unironically defended surrogacy, I'm sure he can handle hot takes like "I don't want to share a political jurisdiction with people opposed to my core values".
"Porque no los dos?", you might ask, his issue might both the ideological distance and the mistreatment. Sure, and I'll even grant that the background environment here absolutely is an issue, the problem is that given who he picked to found his "better" alternative to the Motte, we know he doesn't really care about people with other viewpoints being mistreated. This leaves us only with the second complaint, which, as far as I'm concerned, leaves us with nothing. Now maybe it's all a big misunderstanding and I'm a big dum-dum for not noticing what the core of the issue was about, but like I said I feel like an idiot for taking the bait.
I know Trace personally and he is in fact in favor of executing drug dealers. Your inability to understand his politics makes me skeptical of your ability to psychoanalyze him.
Welcome back. That's a name I haven't seen in a long time.
Regretting my decision already.
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Did he ever express that publicly?
In my defense he's not making himself easy to understand. When you get the chance, can you ask him why he's in favor of executing drug dealers, but against lethal self-defense when faced with a lynch-mob?
I don't know if he's said it publicly, but you had it right here, Trace invokes LKY to imply authoritarian measures. You got most of the way to understanding it and I think this was because it was easy.
I think you are strawmanning because I don't understand him to be against self-defense from people faced with a lynch-mob. If I'm mistaken about this you can provide a link to him saying so, but otherwise I'm comfortable assuming this to be another case of you imagining your political enemy to hold beliefs he does not actually hold.
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As someone roughly nearer the same pole as Trace and also subject to that hostile background radiation, I'll agree Trace seemed more sensitive to it, but I do think you're being unfair. He's spoken up against cancellation of right wingers, and he was a long time Motter - I don't believe he was against the principals of extending charity to his ideological opponents all that time. You know everything you've said about him has also been said about (and to) me. At a certain point you become jaded to people telling you you're an evil liar and you should die (yes, I do sometimes get that too), or else you decide you've had enough and you leave.
And also to be fair, FCfromSSCs original posts went beyond "I don't want to live in the same country as you," but to me read more like a near declaration of war.
I realize I'm defending Trace a lot here when I also disagreed with a lot of his stunts (the Schism, the LOTT prank, etc.) But man am I tired of everyone left of center being accused of being a closet Stasi. Yes, I know everywhere else on the Internet everyone right of anything (even to the degree Trace and I are) gets accused of being a Nazi.
I aspire to better for the Motte, but if you saw our mod queue (and especially the "contributions" of people like Steve), it's clear a lot of people don't really object in principal to boots stomping on human faces, only to being the stompee and not the stomper.
Fwiw, I am anti-stomping, and I do believe Trace is too.
I believe you are anti-stomping. What's your assessment of the following hypothetical argument?
Taking this argument in complete isolation, I ask you: if I committed myself to this argument, would you say that I'm anti-stomping? What if I argued further that the proper solution for such a black man in the 1930s South would be to rely on his local police for protection? Would that be a good-faith anti-stomping position to take?
A major part of Trace's argument was that beatings are a lot less lethal than gunfire, so it's better for a mob to stomp on a person than for that person to defend themselves with gunfire. It is hard for me to agree that such a position can be fairly described as "anti-stomping". The reason I don't want to share a country with him is because he convinced me, through rigorous disputation, that should a mob come for my family he'll side with the mob.
I'm reluctant to speak for Trace, who is no longer here, and I'm also reluctant to read a four-year-old thread to get the full context, both because there were probably a lot of other concurrent threads at the time, and also because people change and refine their views (or at least what they are trying to express) and gods know I get weary of people throwing something I said years ago- often out of context- back at me. But if he was arguing that it's always wrong to use lethal force to defend yourself against a mob, I disagree with him. If you genuinely believe he'd rather see you and your family dragged into the street by a mob than allow you to defend yourselves, I can't blame you for your feelings about him, but I'd argue you don't just get to push everyone you consider untrustworthy and potentially dangerous to you across a border. The people here who've made it clear they'd Death Note me in a heartbeat are certainly not people I'd ever trust or want to have any power over me, but I still have to coexist with them.
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Anyone who says this is lying either to others, or to himself. Between two people one always stomps, or gets stomped, or dies before the balance could decisively tilt toward a side. For example, I expect you to stomp me with a ban for this comment.
(Proof by induction: Imagine there are only two people left. The stronger one gets rid of the weaker one and takes his resources, or they are evenly matched before one dies of other causes, and there is still one person left. Now add one more person. Either two ally against one and win, and then it's the beginning of the previous scenario, or they lose and it's the outcome of the previous scenario, or they don't and it's a three-way stalemate before one person dies for an unrelated reason, and it's again the previous scenario. Now add one more person...)
That proof is incomplete. What if “evenly matched” is a really wide band? What if there’s uncertainty? You could be stuck waiting for “other causes” indefinitely. Liberalism is about extracting the most value from those stalemates.
I think our world favors stalemates. “God made Men; Sam Colt made them equal.” That lets me honestly say that it doesn’t have to end in stomping. We can make it too expensive to purge the heretics just like we made it too expensive to invade Germany.
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There is such a thing as cooperation. And it's a little ridiculous to think that Amadan would ban you for this comment.
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Yeah, I know. I was assuming that's what was bothering him, but last we spoke "I don't want to live in the same country as you" was the bit that he brought up, and acted indignant that I don't see an issue with it.
As for the state of the Motte, while I don't have the insights into the mod queue, I believe you, I don't see it as the least bit surprising, and I also see it as an issue. It's just that I currently consider myself burned for giving Trace the benefit of the doubt and assuming that was his issue as well. I'm also currently uncertain about his anti-stomping principles, for the reasons already stated.
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I do check his Twitter. In fact, he's just about the only main reason I visit the site, because I value what he has to say. If you can link it, I would appreciate it, though I don't think it's the whole story, since he clearly supports Jesse Singal and thought it was a mark against Bluesky that they were trying to kick him off.
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He only pops up when people I follow get into a spat with him. I scrolled for a while looking for words to this effect, but I can only scroll so far, so if you could get those quotes I'd love to see them.
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Who cares? I've got problems enough without having to worry what happens to a gay furry. Like the local school districts fighting tooth and nail to keep secretly transitioning children, NGOs air dropping 50-100% of my towns extant population in Haitains on us for the crime of voting wrong, and all the hiring freezes of white male applicants at seemingly most major organizations.
After my kids are all over 18, haven't been talked into sterilizing themselves, haven't had their future stolen from them with explicitly anti-white policies in every institution, and haven't had their community destroyed with infinity third worlders, maybe I'll circle back and see how the gay furry is doing. Maybe he'll figure out a place in this world that doesn't involve going "I know the Democrats aren't great, remember that FAA thing I pointed out? But I still think we need to keep voting blue no matter who forever and ever."
"Who cares" is not the response I was looking for. This problem extends a lot farther than Trace, obviously. Do you think China fosters the type of environment that makes this type of forum possible? For how niche it is, for how many types of people post here, for how many ideas can be represented here, this website itself and everyone in it is a product of liberalism. Do you care what happens to it? Do you care what happens to everyone who uses it? Do you care what happens to yourself?
I mean, I don't really have a problem with gay furries being actively discriminated against, perhaps prosecuted under sodomy or gay propaganda laws. If they want to avoid that they should just not be gay furries.
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LOL, oh no, this forum. And it's many diverse views. So diverse the mods keep contriving new and creative reasons to ban me for mine.
This forum has more or less outlived it's usefulness, and effectively radicalized me against it's own principles. All I see anymore are liars using arguments as soldiers to trick the other side into not believing their own lying eyes.
My views are a bit spicier than yours and I've never been banned except for referring to 'the chink virus' and 'devil worshipping jigaboos'. I 100% believe that the rules are about tone and not content.
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As a lurker since long before the offsite from reddit, this describes my evolution as well. This forum is pointless now. Discussion is pointless now. It's war.
It is certianly not war yet, and the probability of war is currently trending downward in my estimation. Discussion is still quite valuable.
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I am (and always have been) pretty far right, but at a bare minimum discussion forums like here are at least sources of entertainment. I enjoy arguing with people, and I can get marginally more intelligent debates here than I can on /pol/.
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This lack of empathy is not what I think the ideal person should have, nor is the victim complex. I suppose this is one example of someone whose values I do not share.
I have empathy for my family over empathy for the gay furry on twitter. It's that twitter meme about the empathy graphs come to life...
Is this just 'gay furry' as thought-terminating cliché? Heck, why do you keep bringing him at all? Why does TracingWoodgrains live rent-free in your head? He was brought up by someone else a few posts up as an example of someone who, whether you like his hobbies or not, has a place in the body politic, and oats then clarified that his point is to do with oddballs and dissenters of all kinds.
The point is not about TracingWoodgrains specifically, or about homosexuality, or about people who like to wear silly fox costumes, and cannot be addressed by going "lol I hate that guy". Oats' point terminated in the question, "Do you care what happens to yourself?"
Maybe you hope for a world in which the hammer of state power comes down on TracingWoodgrains and not on yourself, but that sure sounds like an awfully precise hammer - the type that squishes one specific type of online oddball but not any other type. How sure are you that a world that crushes one guy who posts spicy takes on obscure online discussion forums isn't going to crush another guy who posts spicy takes on obscure online discussion forums?
This conversation started out being about liberalism, not empathy. Whether you like so-and-so isn't really the point. But you're using "screw the gay furry" as an evasion. The point is - okay, sure, you can reject liberalism. You can reject the social compact that allows everyone from you to furries to coexist and even have their own discussion spaces like this. But if you reject it you open the door to a lot of boots stomping on a lot of faces, and maybe you shouldn't be so confident that the boots aren't going to be stomping on you.
If nothing else, your views seem significantly more repulsive to random normies than those of gays or furries or, heaven forbid, gay furries. Maybe a little caution is called for.
This would be better targetted at the person who brought up "don't you have any empathy for the gay furry?" With the implication being that I should give up on my political project of preserving my families future, in favor of his political project of depriving them of a future, because "empathy". Maybe I took obvious bait, but everything you are trying to but on me deserves to be on oats_son.
It looks to me like you suggested that liberalism was just a "stalking horse" used to destroy society. Oats asked the question - if liberalism goes away, what happens to people like me, or TracingWoodgrains?
At that point you then replied with "I don't care what happens to a gay furry".
But the question was about what happens to people like Oats, or people like you. You can be apathetic towards TW, but he was never the central point. The point was your future. You want to work on a project of supporting your family's future? That's the point.
I mean, obviously TW's project or Oats' project isn't to destroy your family. I very much doubt they care. But the question about whether destroying liberalism will be better or worse for you and your family is a valid one, and no amount of yelling boo furries addresses that. Here's what Oats said:
It's all very well and good to rant about liberalism, but it seems like many of the things you value, including your ability to express yourself right now, are products of liberalism. Remove liberalism, and maybe all that goes away. What's your alternative?
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The Twitter meme does not imply what people think it implies. It shows the extent of a person's moral circle of concern, and does not mean that liberals care more about distant strangers than their own family or neighbors.
But let's not let actually reading the study get in the way of easy gotchas or reasons to yell at the outgroup, eh?
The study on which the meme is based on does not imply that, the meme on the other hand...
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It's hilarious to me that people who are usually screaming that all social science is fake and gay and data collected by surveys is meaningless suddenly think its SCIENCE! when it allegedly shows something bad about leftists.
I found that survey meaningless because the question, as presented, would leave me very confused about how to answer. Like, "my inner group"? My social circle? In a very abstract sense I do care about the entire human race, so maybe I'd choose one of the outer circles. But in concrete, day to day concerns, where I place my priorities (and my money)? Inner circle for sure. So would I be in the "Good conservative family values" blob or the "Sociopathic liberal who loves random Africans more than my own children" blob?
The study is useless except as a source for a cheap meme.
Why? It's human nature, and goes in all directions. For example all the lefty social science enjoyers are gangsta, until you bring up IQ genetics (note: not even HBD).
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That study really should be redone showing priorities allocated to each band per ideological grouping. Maybe it already contains this, no idea. My intuition is it would illustrate the same dramatic difference as is already assumed on the right.
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