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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.
Oh. I remember now
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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.
The argument I got in with him, that he has since pointed to as one of the bigger impetuses for creating the Schism, was specifically over whether it was appropriate for a law-abiding individual to use a gun to defend themselves from mob violence. I really do not want to misrepresent him, but his position very clearly seemed to be that it is better for the mob to be able to attack an unarmed person, than for an armed person to defend themselves from the mob with lethal force. He claimed (correctly) that since mob violence tends to be less lethal than gunfire, letting the mob brutalize helpless victims would result in fewer overall deaths. He claimed that the obvious best solution was for the authorities to crack down on the mobs in the first place, but when pressed with the then-current situation of the authorities ceding the streets to the mob, he stuck, as it were, to his guns.
I've seen a lot of morally-repugnant arguments here in my time. I'm quite sure I've seen many worse arguments than his. That one, though, is probably the widest spread between repugnance of argument and regard I had previously held for the arguer, ever. I've always respected Trace a great deal: I've spent enough time conversing with him over the years to know that he's a thoughtful, considerate, intelligent person. The lesson I drew from that conversation was that those qualities are insufficient for functional cooperation; it is, in the end, values which ultimately matter.
Here's the thread in question, read it for yourself. I'd be interested in your assessment of the arguments presented.
I would describe his overall argument as "Rittenhouse shouldn't have brought a gun to a skateboard fight precisely because something like that might happen." There seems to be a factual disagreement about how likely Rittenhouse was to die there with Trace thinking it was a 1-2% chance, and also a moral disagreement about what likelihood of death you need to be facing before you're allowed to use lethal self-defense, with Trace's answer at "more than 2%, less than 100%".
Granting Trace's facts, I'd say he supports lethal self-defense for people faced with a lynch-mob, and simply doesn't think Rittenhouse was facing a lynch mob. Granting some other set of facts I suppose you could frame it as "But it was a lynch-mob, and Trace opposed it, therefore he opposes self-defense from lynch-mobs in cases where he mistakenly believes them not to be lynch-mobs", but that seems like a boring semantic argument.
The obvious next step in Trace's argument and a sentiment I remember him expressing is that rather than letting himself get beaten, Rittenhouse shouldn't have been there at all. Suppose there's a maniac with an axe standing in the middle of nowhere shouting "If you walk near me I'll kill you", and you have a gun. The libertarian says you have every right to walk near him and then, when he tries to kill you with his axe, shoot him in self defense. Trace says killing is bad and you shouldn't pick a fight with that guy when you could just walk around him. I expect Trace would be a lot more sympathetic to Rittenhouse if he got mobbed while walking home from work, rather than having gone out of his way to show up at a riot.
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In all his time posting here, he never expressed a sentiment close to anything like "execute drug dealers", whenever he mentions Lee Kuan Yew he talks about bland things like "excellence", and the centrist-liberal audience he's trying to gather would blow a gasket if you recommended such authoritarian measures. I dunno, maybe he's hiding his power level, but I hardly find that interpretation more charitable.
Since you (wisely) demand a link for my claim about his opinions, I hope you understand that I'll need more than your say-so on this one.
Here you go
I asked Trace about executing drug dealers, his words:
That oughta be good enough for you. Now, about that link I asked for? Because I checked his Twitter for Rittenhouse and the literal first result says
You're 0 for 2 here.
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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.
Cooperation is but a temporary alliance. As Blocked And Reported subreddit, pertinent to the topic, demonstrates, an enemy of my enemy is an enemy of my enemy, no more, no less.
And I think he will ban me for calling him a liar without sufficient evidence.
If anything, it's the "Bet you'll ban me for this post!" gimmick that I find most annoying. Oooh, reverse psychology, however shall I respond?
As for calling me a liar, maybe you really do believe I am lying to myself about wanting to coexist and cooperate with other people rather than stomp on them. In which case, either I am a fool or you are very sad.
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Paranoia and Trust are opposites. Trust is required for cooperation. Paranoia prevents it. You are too paranoid.
You cycle alts through here because of your paranoia.
We don't trust you in turn because the small request we have of users which is to maintain a consistent face/username is something you won't do.
Society is an iterated prisoners dilemma. You have chosen to hit defect on the assumption that everyone else will do so as well. You'll never be proven wrong, because you have defected first and most people run a tit-for-tat strategy.
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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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