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You’ve made a series of baseless assumptions about me, based on limited evidence, and used your false model of me to prove your thesis about “racists”.
Firstly, I didn’t bring up the three individuals in question because I obsessively ruminate about my contempt for them. While they genuinely are contemptible - two of them are actually quite pleasant in person (though ruthless behind your back) and the other is just an absolute mess, keeping everyone around him on edge - my contempt for them has absolutely nothing to do with their race, and did not have any influence on my developing a racial consciousness; the latter came significantly before the former. My relationship with these individuals soured in large part because I, independently of anything they did or said, had turned toward a positive racial identity, and therefore could not react any way other than negatively to their naked anti-white statements and assumptions. I brought them up, though, as counterexamples to a specific claim that had been made by the OP. I felt that they were appropriate to bring up in that context, not because I think of them all the time - I don’t - but because OP’s post made me think of them.
If the standard you want to hold white advocates to is “never make any negative statements about specific non-white individuals who have pissed you off or wronged you, because of you do then I will immediately assume that all of your beliefs are based on petty feelings of personal vengeance and not on logical reasoning” then not a single one of us is going to pass your test. You might as well write us off completely.
The reality is that for the vast majority of people who adopt any ideology, other than maybe the one they grew up around because of their parents, it’s going to be because of some combination of personal experiences, exposure to arguments, observation of patterns in the world, independent reasoning, and natural inborn personality traits and instincts. By ruling out one of those factors (the personal experiences part) as inherently illegitimate and discounting the possibility that others also played a part, you’re holding your ideological opponents to an impossible and anti-human standard.
Yes, I have had some bad experiences with some particular individuals in my life; the lion’s share have been non-white, although some have not. This is actually the pattern one would expect if one takes racial differences and the inevitably of interracial conflict seriously. You don’t, so you’re forced to impart causality that doesn’t actually exist, or at least not as a monocausal explanation.
Here's what I specifically assumed about the story in that post: there are some people who wronged you in the past---a few months to a few years ago. You cut off contact with them and are likely never going to interact with them ever again. However, you still keep a list of their names in your head as those who would be first to die in fantasies where you're a dictator. Please let me know if these specific assumptions are substantively incorrect.
Even this by itself is not normal. It is also very different from simply just "making...negative statements about specific non-white individuals who have pissed you off or wronged you" or "obsessively ruminat[ing] about [your] contempt for them". Please don't play this kind of debate game of skewing the strength of a claim to make it sound wrong (though you're definitely not as bad as some of the other replies here).
On your second point, there is a hierarchy of types of evidence. Personal experience and anecdotes are at the bottom and really on acceptable when you're dealing with something so hard to measure that you don't have a better option. For the specific question you raise about the inevitability of racial conflict, there is much stronger evidence---you can find statistics, research trials, multitudes of case studies of different modern and historical societies, etc. Just as a heuristic, if something is an active field of academic research (well, barring certain fields), you shouldn't be reasoning about it based on personal anecdotes. In fact, your strongest, most thought-provoking posts are the ones where you stick to these stronger forms of evidence.
I do have to disagree far more vehemently here. You can see above exactly what standard I use to discount the personal experience factor as illegitimate---I personally care more that my evidentiary standards lead me to conclusions that are correct than that they feel "human" to me. Obviously people are imperfect and not perfectly rational in seeking truth. However, I can't see any other interpretation of what your saying here except that this means that we should give up because trying to improve is "inhuman" (please again correct me if I'm wrong).
From another perspective, I'm someone who strongly disagrees with you about some particular argument; if you make a mistake because of human failings, that's your problem and I'm perfectly justified in writing off what you say as not convincing. However, please note here I'm not taking this as evidence that your point is wrong (just pointing out that many people definitely will!). I'm simply asking you to fix your argument and holding judgement until I see what happens.
You are the third person to interpret my joke as a serious statement, which means it clearly wasn’t a good joke, and I regret making it. No, I do not actually have fantasies about killing some bitchy theatre people who harmed me socially. No, I do not actually have fantasies about becoming a dictator. I expected people to extend to me some basic charity and assume that I’m not a nutcase; in hindsight I should not have expected this, especially given that people here are inevitably going to pattern-match me to The Austrian Painter, and therefore I need to hold myself to a higher standard.
That being said, your suggestion that it’s abnormal to remember specific individuals who have pissed me off or harmed me, and to remember those people’s names and faces, just seems nakedly wrong. That’s a completely normal human thing to do. Would it be more “normal” of me to have… forgotten who they were? People I knew for years and interacted with as recently as three years ago? It’s normal to lose all recollection of their names and faces in the span of three years? No, that would actually be really weird! I would have to have a pretty bad memory for that to be normal.
As for the rest of your post, we just disagree strongly about the relative merits of personal experience/anecdata as a basis for reasoning about the world. I agree with you that it’s not sufficient in itself and that it needs to be backed up by data. Were I to have made a serious effortpost, with citations and links and statistics, it’s fair to say that this would have been a stronger argument than my relatively low-effort comments that I rattled off without much forethought. That doesn’t actually mean that a post without data and citations is necessarily weak. Anecdotes are actually a totally valid way of reasoning, as long as the preponderance of available macro-level data doesn’t actually countervail against the conclusion you’ve drawn from personal experience. I think that the conclusions suggested by my personal anecdotes are sufficiently similar to the conclusions that the available data suggest, such that the anecdotes actually strengthen my case rather than weakening it. One would expect society-wide trends to be replicated at the micro/interpersonal level more often than not, and indeed that’s what my personal experience has been.
That drops the situation from "abnormal and worrying" to "within the range of normal but not healthy", leaving aside points others have made about whether the joke was a Freudian slip and whether that's a valid way to infer things about someone. The point that you're never going to interact with them again is doing a lot of work here---why waste mindshare making them one of the first things you think of in a situation like this?
Sure, as long as you understand that this is not going to mean anything to anyone who doesn't already agree with your interpretations of the stronger, macro-evidence. I think a lot of the pushback you got was because people interpreted you as saying that it should---the Motte isn't that much an echo chamber yet.
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