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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   31909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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Yep, Scott's at his worst when he's complaining about his outgroup. Not that most of the twitterati who employ POSIWID are particularly shrewd analysts, but the concept has plenty of explanatory value.

For another recent example of Scott getting sloppy, see his article on how the BAPist "based post-Christian vitalists" were hypocritical for caring about the victims of the Rotherham grooming gangs when they normally sneer at caring about poor people an ocean away as cucked slave morality. Of course, the obvious counterargument is that the Rotherham victims were white Westerners like themselves, aggressed upon by a far more alien outgroup.

I think he was actually closer to the mark there. You can see the hypocrisy when someone like KulakRevolt, for example, is calling for all of England to be burned down over the Rotherham gangs, as if he doesn't hold promiscuous fatherless girls from the lower classes in utter contempt himself. When all your grievances are formulated around tribal affiliations, you can argue that it's okay when we do it and bad when they do it, but you can't argue that you genuinely care about young girls being mistreated, and that sort of gives the game away when you're trying to convince people they should be outraged at rape and grooming when your actual objective is to stir hatred against your alien outgroup.

If Kulak hated European maidens he wouldn't have constructed his entire identity on the worship thereof. I don't think this is a good example at all.

The idea that you can't really care about your ingroup if you wouldn't care about them if they weren't part of it is a dangerous nonsense.

I ask you, would you love your Mother if she wasn't your mother. And if you wouldn't, how dare you say you love her? It's absurd. Who we are and what relationships we have is important and meaningful. It is not and never has been morally neutral.

I hate this gnostic reduction of our essence to some abstract individual will with every fiber of my body.

The Rotherham girls are not his ingroup just because they're white. He constantly talks about what he thinks should happen to white people who are also not in his ingroup.

His feigned outrage over "European maidens" being besmirched by Muslims is because Muslims are doing the besmirching, not because he actually cares about victimized white girls. If it were Irish grooming gangs responsible, he might contrive some anti-Irish reason to wash the streets in blood (he's certainly flexible like that), but more likely he'd just find something despicable brown people are doing elsewhere.

I'll note that, by reputation at least, (often drug enabled)abuse and grooming of lower-on-the-totem-pole teenaged girls is a 'the purpose of the system is what it does' for Kulak's claimed ingroup of reconstructionist pagans.

I don't really intend to go experience reconstructionist paganism. It may well be a false stereotype- and frankly doesn't much affect my (extremely negative) opinion of either reconstructionist paganism or idiot teenagers who experiment with it. But Kulak doesn't seem very upset about it either way. Nor does he seem to care very much about war rapes by the Russian Army, for another example of white people doing this.

Yeah, that's my point. If anyone else was drugging and raping teenage girls (including teenage white girls), Kulak wouldn't care. He just wants to see bloodshed. Also, his recent Braveheart Viking Hells Angel Paganism schtick and telling all his right-wing r3tvrn Christian followers that their religion is fake, gay and Jewish, is almost as hilarious to me as the people who still think he's an OF girl.

Isn't he/they an MTF?

No lol, he just picked an anime avatar and now some of his twitter audience unbelievably think he’s a woman. I don’t think he’s even claimed to be, so it’s not even a grift, it’s just weird or very stupid people.

No.

This like complaining that a Muslim cares about the Umma even though he cares about his sect or tribe more.

How dare people have Ordo Amoris? Their care must reduce to one bit!

Obviously people have circles of concern. And obviously just because someone doesn't extend their total moral community to all of humanity or all of creation doesn't make them abnormal. On the contrary.

Multi level tribalism is a perfectly acceptable and eugenic human behavior, albeit with some much talked about drawbacks. It is not however reducible to nihilism or egoism.

I think you give too much credit. I don't believe people like that feel ordo amoris for anyone at all. It's not about concentric circles of affinity, it's about identifying an enemy and manufacturing a grievance. I might believe some people feel some faint amount of "ordo amoris" for distant white girls because they happen to be white, even if they otherwise hold them in contempt, but not when every other message is about how they're dirt. Oh, now you care because a Muslim touched them? No heat graph meme argument is going to make that convincing.

Well I believe that you don't give people enough credit because they're part of your outgroup and that your standards of what people are allowed caring about without being hypocritical are bad models of people's behavior and therefore functionally useless except as the very sort of grievance they denounce.

The idea that people feeling empathy for the plight of people who look like and feel like them is bad, empty or without meaning in some way is, I believe, one of the great sins of Western civilization. And I don't feel difficulty defending anybody who feels such feelings, wicked as they may be, far from me as they may be.

Indeed, insofar as humanism has any degree of visceral grounding, it springs from this feeling and cannot denounce it without sapping itself.

Well I believe that you don't give people enough credit because they're part of your outgroup

Fair. People who hype genocidal warfare are indeed part of my outgroup.

and that your standards of what people are allowed caring about without being hypocritical

I do not think you understand what my standards of what people are "allowed" to care about are.

The idea that people feeling empathy for the plight of people who look like and feel like them is bad, empty or without meaning

This not what I believe.

Is your objection merely that people recommend violence as an answer to things that are not in their most intimate circle of concern? Because whilst I can understand the sentiment, I don't really see that as particularly worthy of judgement given the ubiquity and inherent merits of direct action as a political means.

Please. Explain.

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It's perfectly possible to not-care-if-individual-Xs-comes-to-harm without hating Xs in general, or indeed, if you like Xs. Plenty of people like bunny rabbits, and might even sincerely love their pet rabbits, without turning into animal rights activists.

Would you say people who love pet rabbits in general but still love humans more don't truly love pet rabbits?

All you say is possible, I just don't believe it's an accurate or charitable description of almost anybody's concerns.

Suppose a man loves his pet rabbit, and finds pictures of rabbits abstractly cute, but happily eats rabbit meat without a twinge of guilt, and has never lifted a finger to campaign to ban the hunting or industrial farming of rabbits. Suppose that he has a personal enemy. Now suppose that he learns that this enemy sometimes goes rabbit-hunting; and suppose that, having found this out, he makes a stink, ranting to all who'll listen about how it's outrageous, how the guy must be brought to accounts, and now won't everyone see how much of a monster he is, like I've been saying all along: he's been blowing cute defenseless bunnies' brains out for fun, you can't deny it now.

In such a case I think it's fair to accuse this man of using the rabbit thing as a convenient weapon against someone he hated anyway; and to say his anger has very little to do with a sincere concern for rabbit welfare. Even if he really does love his pet rabbit.

While his criticism kinda missed the mark, I do think there's something inconsistent about it. You can have a consistent ideology of supremacy for your own ethnic group, but in a globalized world it's not really compatible with being a Nietzschean individualist who sneers at caring about the weak in general. The archetypal ubermensch is a pre-Christian warlord - an aristocrat who strides above the petty concerns of his own nation's peasants and paupers. The 'master' isn't interested in whether the daughters of the slaves two counties over are getting raped and tortured, white or otherwise. Unless he considers those counties part of his holdings and, therefore, his alone to rape and pillage.

A guy who's concerned about tortured little girls an ocean away because they're white girls and he considers the fate of the white race his business, whether or not he stands to gain anything from it, has more in common with a guy who's concerned because he considers the fate of all Homo sapiens his business, than with a guy who actually only cares about himself, his kin, and maybe his nation.

People can't seem to get it through their heads that Nietzscheans aren't master moralists, they are would be designers of their own moral codes and specifically reject the impositions of acting as a master, or as a slave.

You are allowed to care for the weak or for anything or anyone insofar as you deduced on your own and not through social mimetism or scolding that this is right and true. But it has to come from you and not from whims but your own self legislated catechism.

I feel like this is the same brand of lazy criticism levied at objectivists for acting collectively despite being individualists. It's like people just imagine what the ideology is and what it precludes instead of actually asking or reading about it.

I'm aware actual-Nietzsche is more nuanced. But the guys Scott was debating aren't serious Nietzschean scholars, nor do they claim to be. Perhaps I should have just stuck with the tongue-in-cheek Based Post-Christian Vitalist coinage. The point is that these are people who sneer at the entire concept of Effective Altruism and indeed charity. You can't do that and care about Rotherham. It's untenable. If you're an American and you care what happens to the Rotherham girls, albeit only because they're white, then you're not coming from a completely different paradigm than the EAs. You just have an unpopular opinion on who the most relevant moral patients are.

Such as Objectivists would say, altruists, let alone utilitarian ones, do not have a monopoly on caring about people. And their claims that they do are an intellectually dishonest trick to refuse admitting that good natured feelings can be arrived at through other means than their pathology.

I would, actually, say that "altruist" objectively, etymologically describes anyone who cares about other people. It's what the "altr" means. Altruism is a broad church. Some altruists care about shrimps and others only care about humans. I see no reason why altruists who only care about white humans should act like they're something completely different.

It's simple. Non-altruists don't find alterity inherently valuable and it enters differently or not at all into their ethical calculus.

Arguing that they are still altruists because their calculus still leads them to conclusions similar to that of altruists in some cases is intellectual dishonesty.

You can redefine the word to be broad enough as to become useless. But that's not worth engaging with.

I claim that the calculus is the same. When it comes to caring whether perfect strangers live or die, suffer or thrive, in ways that will never affect you - either you do, or you don't. Those of us who do, I'm confident are, in an overwhelming majority, applying the same drives in the same ways. Sure, some of us care about the suffering of our countrymen, others about the suffering of our whole race, others still of the whole human race, and others still about the suffering of all animal life. But the only thing that changes between all those cases is how you draw the border between the people you care about, and the people you don't. It's still altruism even if it's race-specific, much as someone who cares about other humans but doesn't give a fuck about animals is still an altruist.

This isn't to say you can't have genuine non-altruists who, by coincidence, have similar practical aims to altruists. For example, you might object to rape gangs not because you care whether the victims suffer, but due to a deontological objection to rape. Or you might value the survival of your ethnic group, without caring about the suffering of any specific members within it per se, and treat the Rotherham gangs as one facet of a genocidal attack against your race as a whole. I wouldn't call those people altruists. But once you start talking about the suffering of random girls an ocean away as something which in and of itself should make your blood boil, something which you have a moral impetus to stop if you can, even though it's in no practical sense your problem - then, sorry, you're an altruist. Albeit a narrow altruist. And a lot of people screaming about the British rape gangs were using that kind of rhetoric.

(Of course, they may have been lying — perhaps Scott was too optimistic in taking those fragments of altruism as glimmers of an underlying better nature, rather than disingenuous, cynical attempts to play on actual altruists' emotions and win them over.)

Or you might value the survival of your ethnic group, without caring about the suffering of any specific members within it per se, and treat the Rotherham gangs as one facet of a genocidal attack against your race as a whole.

This is what it is and nothing else, in this case. Transpose this story into India and none of the people involved still care.

a lot of people screaming about the British rape gangs were using that kind of rhetoric

I do not believe that to be the case. Not insofar as your specific understanding of "in and of itself". And I don't believe that precisely because unlike, Scott, those people are not altruists.

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Wouldn't deducing any moral code after reading Nietzsche by definition not be "on your own, not through mimetism" etc?

He enjoins you to have your own consideration of the moral problem. This, in my view does not recurse because you can look at it and disagree that making yourself moral legislator is a good idea.

There are people in the specific group this thread is talking about that believe in the possibility of a christo-nietzcheean synthesis for instance.

We quickly arrive at topics where logical contradiction is not disqualifying, however, so such logical descriptions are instrumental at best.

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