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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30462 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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This place has made me more anxious, more prejudiced, more frustrated, more hopeless, less compassionate, less able to appreciate beauty, less joyful.

For what it's worth I sympathize, and I have found myself participating less and less of late for much the same reasons. I find myself wondering why I'm wasting my time arguing with idiots and assholes here when I could be playing with my kids or spooning with their mother. The counter is that little voice in the back of my head that tells me that the righteous are in no need of a priest, and that a physician goes where the sick are. Maybe that's arrogant of me but that's what it is.

Edit to Elaborate: "Be the change you want to see" is one of those stupid fucking cliches that is also a deep wisdom. One that people in general, and rationalists in particular, seem to shy away from out of fear of appearing stupid or being taken for a sucker. Why "cooperate" when "defect" is an option? they ask. The answer takes many forms depending on context but what it ultimately boils down to "people like you are why we can't have nice things".

When @BurdensomeCount asks Are you stupid or am I evil? the answer is "yes". We are all at least a little bit stupid, we are all at least a little bit evil, but that doesn't mean you should be the sort of guy who wears flip-flops in the foundry.

FWIW I hope you stick around but will wish you well if you don't. Do what you must.

I was really hoping that hyperlink was to a story about some idiot wearing flip flops at a foundry because that would prove to me the multiverse theory!

I like this place, but I think it's gotten too right-dominated since the move from Reddit. I come here to be challenged by people to my left who are both smart and intellectually honest, a rare breed. The only other place where I could find them was the SSC Discord, and they permabanned me. (The adjacent servers also have a uniform rule to ban me if I ever talk politics.) So I'm stuck here regardless of my criticisms, but I wish it was leftier.

Agreed. It feels like there's a lack of new blood and new ideas. Not an unexpected problem, but still there's no solution.

We need to hire paid shills. Not to advertise this site, but to post on it. Maybe we can find some Correct the Record or JIDF alumni!

I must be getting old because the idea of someone standing out as "new blood" just sounds annoying. As for new ideas, I suppose you're right, but it's not like they can be found anywhere else.

Come to think of it there seems to be a distinct lack of energy at the moment. As much as I hated it, back during the rise of BreadTube it was undeniable the energy was there. I tend to think it's for the better, the last decade was a wild ride, I don't think you can do anything constructive in that kind of atmosphere.

Do you see the irony in "I wish we had more leftists, like that other place where they ban anyone who isn't leftist"?

They didn't ban me for not being a leftist, bro. They banned me because of my significant personality problems that made me impossible for the management to deal with. They had a number of right-wingers there as of the last time I checked (which is admittedly over 3 years ago), and I hear the new admin is an anti-woke libertarian (so basically right-wing).

I just want to be challenged more.

More lefty people would be nice, but even more than that I'd just like more perspectives, and more topics, whether about tangential political issues or even nonpolitical ones.

guess this is the only comment i can reply to.

you raging about threads here is a tough look. same for deleting your top-level, something @ZorbaTHut & co should block as an option, at least when the thread it's in is the weekly.

i don't know of anywhere online where discussion is as good as the motte. i see twitter commentators racking up followers and media appearances/cred for observations that are at best watered down versions of ideas posted here years ago. it's all i think of with the hanania hubub. his pieces i've read, not many, would receive bipartisan scorn if posted by a rando here. yet i see people here treating him with respect and i know a lot of that is only because he's a known name. it's not his old and just bad arguments, it's certainly not his asinine leaps in reasoning or pure worse writing. not when a lot of people here could go on twitter and make a name for themselves, and i think more than a few would do better than hanania. how couldn't they? he'd be a motte washout.

i maybe get some bit of what you're feeling, i try to comment only when i think i have something to add. but i'm tired of people being critical of this place because they can't get a handle on their own emotions, whatever the angry/nihilist/impotent root. yeah in some cases, by no means all, quality dips here because a matter's clearly settled and there's no good faith arguing to be done. or to counter my own point, because it's been hashed out and explored enough everybody knows the positions and without anything novel it suffers from repetitiveness. but in whole, the motte is better at so novel and astute posts than all of substack. i'd like to find the time and impetus to contribute one of those, maybe you should strive for that too. posting something truly interesting, not attention-seeking complaining on the meta level of the best place for real discussion on the english-speaking internet.

also--scott stepped back from this community because for all his brilliance, he greatly lacks conviction.

I think this is false. Every idea that ever mattered didn’t start out with political power. The American Revolution probably started out in pubs before it became a mass movement. Same with the French Revolution. Communism started out that way and academically does have some appeal but fails in the real world. CRT was a bunch of professors in academia before it owned everything. The origin of the gay rights movement I believe was a bunch of gay men in bath houses in San Francisco.

HBD is a quant discipline so I don’t think it’s going to be popular with most of society or a store clerk. I do think it’s fairly popular in the mainstream in a different form. For instance the movie “White Men Can’t Jump” everyone just accepts the premise. That’s as blatantly hbd as anything.

I'd actually go even further - if you do not take the knowledge gained from HBD into account your society will fail or otherwise incur significant costs that can only be papered over with extravagant amounts of energy or plunder (i.e. the modern era or historical empires). But more than that, the idea that HBD isn't going to play a role in the future is just flat out wrong. As you've noted, there's an instinctive understanding of HBD baked into most people and most of popular culture(as long as you're talking about acceptable targets), but there's actually a far bigger nexus for HBD thought - China. HBD et al (or whatever the Chinese term for those theories are) is commonly accepted at all levels of society and factored into government policy, and China is one of the largest and most influential countries in the world right now - urquan isn't just wrong about the future, he's wrong about the present.

I find myself wondering why I'm wasting my time arguing with idiots and assholes here when I could be playing with my kids or spooning with their mother.

My personal approach to dealing with this is that I reserve my motte posting for downtime at work. At most I'll look at replies I've received when extremely bored, but I've done almost all of my posting here during times I'm ostensibly meant to be performing my actual job. I should probably use this time on more productive habits, but posting here is fun and enjoyable... and I can dimly justify the time spent here as polishing my rhetorical skills and understanding of the world for my actual creative endeavours.

I'll admit that I've always been vaguely puzzled by the posters here who claim to be worried about getting canceled (as distinct from getting banned by theMotte's mods) for their postings here but now I realize that there are people here who are posting from work. Fucking A, am I really such an ancient-fag that I just took it as a given that no one here was dumb enough to post using their work or school account?

It's not like this account has my work username or profile attached to it in any way, I (mayhaps foolishly) trust the moderation staff here not to go "HEY LOOK THIS DUDE BELIEVES IN HBD, CAN SOMEONE TRACK HIS IP SO WE CAN GET HIM FIRED" because that's the only way I'll get doxxed outside of revealing myself. That said I do find it amusing that you called me dumb while simultaneously somehow believing that my randomly generated Reddit username is the official corporate branding of my employer.

  • Smartphones are a thing these days, grandpa.
  • A sufficiently motivated mob will find out who you are from the few traces you leave behind, find out where you work, and spam your employer about how horrible you are. Not posting from work won't save you.

you're not using your own phone though are you?

Who's phone am I supposed be using? That's the one I have control over, and can be sure no one is spying on.

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