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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   29656 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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It's actually insane to me that much of the the left in America thinks white supremacy not only is a threat to America but literally the biggest threat. I have been visiting some family in California this week and I have really gotten to see the white lib in their natural environment. Before this trip I had thought that the complaining about white liberals by conservatives was just a round about way to criticize other groups that aren't acceptable to attack and they were overemphasizing how bad they are. I have actually changed my mind on this and I think they have become quite deranged. Literally everything is seen through the lens of race and white/POC. These were people who had pretty moderate political views from what I remembered but they are no longer moderate. I was so annoyed by their beliefs but I didn't want to argue with them so I just kept silent.

However, I kept thinking to myself who are these white supremacists that they think run the country? If this country was run by white supremacists, they would be doing a terrible job. I think we can imagine what a white nationalist government would do.

First of all, their immigration policy would obviously promote having a white majority. The US obviously fails this. Its immigration policy has transformed a country that was once 90% white into a country where whites will be less than 50% of the population in 20 years and this has happened in people's life times. This isn't some slow demographic change. It was deliberate in some cases and merely allowed in other cases. A white supremacist country would simply not allow this to happen. We've seen ethno states from Nazi Germany to Israel. In the case of Israel, they prioritize keeping Jews the majority and try to get more Jews to move there. In the case of the Nazis, the took it to the extreme and exterminated non-Germans. The US does the opposite of either of these, allowing non-whites to become a majority of the young people and of births in about 50 years.

The second things they would do is prioritize whites over non-whites. Does the US do that? DEI and those kinds of organizations and philosophies are designed to hire more non-white people and less whites. On my job review I filled out, I was judged on 20% of my review on DEI type stuff, one of which was hiring more "diverse" candidates. It is illegal to specifically hire whites only and even if it wasn't the country would hate you if you actually did it. All kinds of programs have been set up to get more non-white people into elite institutions through affirmative action and other policies. The isn't a single government program that was created to specifically help whites, but the same can't be said about all other groups. Biden literally said he would only consider a black woman for VP and on the Supreme Court. Their competition in the Republicans would never dream of explicitly saying they'd only pick a white man.

In a white supremacist country ran by white supremacists, white supremacists would also be liked by the population and government. Except again this doesn't happen. If you are a white supremacist openly, you will be hated and fired from your job. If you try to be a public intellectual and organize a pro-white organization, you will be kicked off of social media and be removed from the banking system. People will say it is okay to physically harm you. If you get famous enough, you will be the most hated person in America like RIchard Spencer. You will be sued and attacked by left wing lawfare, again like Richard Spencer. If you want to be like and be successful, being a white supremacist is literally the worst thing you could be other than a pedophile.

This has real world consequences where it makes people think in insane ways. Look at this insane reddit thread I found on rdrama. These people literally think being concerned about millions of people crossing the border a year is racist and white supremacy. I know many people like this, including in my own family. This delusion is then propped up by academics and intellectuals. Probably 75% of every "smart" person out there who is educated in elite institutions believes this to some degree.

I don't really have anything else to say other than I'm just baffled that so many supposedly smart and rational people don't think through their arguments and beliefs. Cartesian doubt is apparently out of style. I don't see any evidence whatsoever that white supremacy or racism is anywhere close to the biggest issue the US faces.

I think you're severely overestimating the popularity of the Coatesian 'white supremacy' anti-racist paradigm versus normie lib 'don't be a dick' anti-racist paradigm.

(I suspect you also underestimate the prevalence of racism, which leads to further confusion)

I kept thinking to myself who are these white supremacists that they think run the country? If this country was run by white supremacists, they would be doing a terrible job.

Your confusion arises from semantic differences. When someone like Coates or Kendi talks about "white supremacy", they don't (just) mean mask-off segregationists or white nationalists. They don't even mean closeted white racists. They mean the whole accumulation of things which collectively acts to keep white people at the top of the socio-economic heap*. You can probably find a direct quote from one of the above that articulates this without my paraphrasing, but it's late and I'm on my phone, so I'm leaving that as an exercise for the reader.

Crucially, in this paradigm, it is entirely possible for society to be white supremacist despite the fact that everyone including racist white people profess to oppose racism and look at efforts to form explicitly white organizations with intense suspicion. Disparate impact and outcomes are the key indicators.

*though they'll also be quick to note that the US also has a pretty long history of explicitly giving preferential treatment to whites.

Your confusion arises from semantic differences. When someone like Coates or Kendi talks about "white supremacy", they don't (just) mean mask-off segregationists or white nationalists. They don't even mean closeted white racists. They mean the whole accumulation of things which collectively acts to keep white people at the top of the socio-economic heap*.

Which begs the question: if white supremacy isn't a tangible ideology or movement, only a nebulous feeling permeating pie charts about household incomes and crime rates, then why would "white supremacists" be a threat to the status quo? A status quo that, supposedly, they benefit greatly from?

They mean the whole accumulation of things which collectively acts to keep white people at the top of the socio-economic heap

This is, mostly, the predictable consequences of people’s own actions.

Your confusion arises from semantic differences. When someone like Coates or Kendi talks about "white supremacy", they don't (just) mean mask-off segregationists or white nationalists.

This is the kind of thing the motte and bailey phrase was designed for.

This is the kind of thing the motte and bailey phrase was designed for.

maybe even THE thing.

Except that they're more than willing to defend the supposed bailey. This is more like referring to refugees and asylum seekers as 'illegals'.

acts to keep white people at the top of the socio-economic heap

The awkward part is that Asians have higher income and homeownership rates (among other outcomes) than white people.

Yes, but only because they live in places with high cost of living.

When you compare them to white people living in the same location, they're not actually doing better.

They just cluster in coastal cities for historical reasons (which have their own White Supremacist aspects, but I'm not an expert on that).

I don't buy it. Asian homeownership rates are also higher than whites. If Asians are also living in higher COL areas, that should raise estimates of their true "adjusted" wealth/income even further.

There's a contingent of Asians who want to minimize Asian success for various reasons (obvious contradictions with woke orthodoxy, visibly successful groups are less likely to get handouts and resources). I've met some of them in the past and you basically cannot believe what they say.

The second things they would do is prioritize whites over non-whites. Does the US do that? DEI and those kinds of organizations and philosophies are designed to hire more non-white people and less whites. On my job review I filled out, I was judged on 20% of my review on DEI type stuff, one of which was hiring more "diverse" candidates. It is illegal to specifically hire whites only and even if it wasn't the country would hate you if you actually did it. All kinds of programs have been set up to get more non-white people into elite institutions through affirmative action and other policies. The isn't a single government program that was created to specifically help whites, but the same can't be said about all other groups. Biden literally said he would only consider a black woman for VP and on the Supreme Court. Their competition in the Republicans would never dream of explicitly saying they'd only pick a white man.

I believe tech companies are meritocratic in the hiring process, at least for the tech positions. Those interviews are regarded as notoriously hard, assuming you even pass the screening.

I don't really have anything else to say other than I'm just baffled that so many supposedly smart and rational people don't think through their arguments and beliefs. Cartesian doubt is apparently out of style. I don't see any evidence whatsoever that white supremacy or racism is anywhere close to the biggest issue the US faces.

Because it's only a belief. There is no consequence for being wrong, nor does it require any effort beyond thinking it. So there is only upside for holding socially acceptable beliefs and zero personal downside in the short-term for holding wrong ones, even of society is made worse in the long-run.

I believe tech companies are meritocratic in the hiring process, at least for the tech positions.

Startups, yes, because the first 30 people at a company matter. But places like Google, Apple, and Microsoft are just running annuities now. They can stash thousands of useless employees on vanity projects and still issue dividends for the foreseeable future.

I believe tech companies are meritocratic in the hiring process, at least for the tech positions. Those interviews are regarded as notoriously hard, assuming you even pass the screening.

This isn't even remotely true. In fact I'd wager tech is one of the least meritocratic places out there, if by that you simply mean your talent and results correlate with success in the company.

Because it's only a belief. There is no consequence for being wrong, nor does it require any effort beyond thinking it. So there is only upside for holding socially acceptable beliefs and zero personal downside in the short-term for holding wrong ones, even of society is made worse in the long-run.

Most of us don't have good arguments for 'anything' we believe. We don't work out a logical syllogism and reason our way to actions through Socratic dialogue on a daily basis. We simply approach a situation with a set of beliefs about things. I don't even think it's true that most people learn from their experience.

i guess the wrongness of my first statement proves the second

This isn't even remotely true. In fact I'd wager tech is one of the least meritocratic places out there

Why do you think that?

I'm not the one you asked but I'll take 'direct observation' for 500 Alex.

Maybe things were different 20 - 30 years ago, but these days all I see and hear coming out of Silicon Valley is grifters and venture capitalists looking to grab a slice of the Next-Big-Thing™ rather than build a business. What sparks of brilliance and merit that do exist are often isolated and by no means representative of the wider class.

Because in much of tech, development and maintenance is looked at as a cost center, not a profit center. Now in fairness to you, you did only say "tech," you didn't say something like cyber security more specifically. Nevertheless I've found in my own experience that it generalizes. But because of that, the business incentive structure for a lot of tech focused jobs punishes skilled developers and instead caters to being the first to market, with mediocre products that hit the shelves before they're ready.

If you want some basic insight in how aspects of the tech world view this, I'd suggest watching this insightful 10 minute clip. I'd wager cybercrime is more meritocratic than almost anything else you find in tech.

Why do you think it’s worse than in other industries though? I don’t think anyone was comparing tech to cybercrime when you claimed it was one of the least meritocratic places.

Is it less meritocratic than law firms? Newspapers? Hospitals? Academia?

My personal experience has genuinely been that the best people on people on my team tend to have the highest level (software engineer at Google). I would loathe to assume that my experience generalizes across the company (let alone the whole industry), but the mere fact that tech has interviews that are at least sensible proxies for ability automatically puts it way ahead of the curve compared to most industries.

Why do you think it’s worse than in other industries though? I don’t think anyone was comparing tech to cybercrime when you claimed it was one of the least meritocratic places.

I think you may have misread my previous comment... The original statement was simply about tech, so that's the context I was replying to.

My point about cybercrime is that if somebody wants to segment and break down tech into it's various sectors, I think you'll be hard pressed find a subsection of it that's more meritocratic than the criminal element. Ransomware gangs don't care one bit about arbitrary qualifications or making you jump through hoops. If the axis of a meritocracy are that people are rewarded in proportion to their value, then that's certainly true. Cyber criminals earn their just desserts. All they care about is your talent, performance and reputation as a black hat. If you can deliver, you go to the front of the line. All other considerations are secondary.

When you deviate away from tech and look at the catalog of other industries, you could argue that in other industries a meritocracy is less the exception and more the rule. I could be wrong, but all I can draw from are my own experiences and observations. Perhaps someone else can offer up a different view.

My personal experience has genuinely been that the best people on people on my team tend to have the highest level (software engineer at Google). I would loathe to assume that my experience generalizes across the company (let alone the whole industry), but the mere fact that tech has interviews that are at least sensible proxies for ability automatically puts it way ahead of the curve compared to most industries.

I think interviews are a lousy barometer for evaluating merit, personally. And that's a rule I apply across the board. I don't think they're entirely useless per se, but I'm guarded about over relying on their utility.

I believe tech companies are meritocratic in the hiring process

Hopefully without doxxing myself, I work as a contractor for several of the top-5 tech companies (however that is construed it is true). So I'm privy to a lot of their internal communications, culture, etc. And I can tell you that these people are simply falling all over themselves to worship the dark and the lame. The gay, the fake, the trans. It's pathological and it's clearly a very high priority.

at least for the tech positions

Yes, but this is doing a lot of work. A serious skilled employee (i.e. white or asian male) generates enough productivity to support maybe 10-20 others. But this is being utilized. I go to a lot of sales meetings, etc. with the 'big guys' and it turns out that almost everyone in a position to function in other-than-coding-or-facilities is a woman of color, and they (mostly) have no idea what's going on.

I like to ask people questions. E.g. I was once at the Udvar-Hazy museum, where resides the actual Enola Gay, and was fortunate enough to chance upon a veteran who had flown the same model of plane. I asked him one of my favorite questions, which is, "If you could change anything about it, what would you change?" This is, more broadly, a great question to ask of anyone about his industry. But the guy's response was, "The head." Apparently people at one end of the plane had to crawl through a long, cramped, dark, very cold tube to get to the bathroom. Fair enough and good answer; precisely the sort of insight for which I am fishing.

So anyway, given what I do, people very high-up on the corporate ladder like to meet me and have a conversation. Executives, etc. And I like to ask them, "How did you get into this?" Up until about 2017 it was mostly white men with blue eyes and they had interesting answers. Long life histories, fascinating twists and turns, happened to be in the right place at the right time so as to illustrate broader trends and forces. These guys were enthusiastic about describing their journeys and, frankly, grateful to tell someone who clearly wanted to glean what wisdom he could from their examples.

Now it's all girls with names like Roselia and they have no idea how they got where they are. Not only that, but they perceive that they don't belong, and suffer terribly from impostor syndrome, and hate me for asking. So, after a couple years of bad sales, I stopped asking, started emotionally supporting them, and am doing just fine. Except inside.

And I can tell you that these people are simply falling all over themselves to worship the dark and the lame. The gay, the fake, the trans. It's pathological and it's clearly a very high priority.

True, but worshipping various identities is one thing but working with the incompetent is quite another, and in general they don't want to do the latter, which is why their diversity numbers remain what they would consider abysmal. Google had a rather large group of true believers who really thought (and perhaps still do think) that they could somehow find and/or create far more black and (cis)female software engineers. And they failed, over and over again.

I believe that the best argument for HBD is that years after setting progressive diversity goals for themselves, the most powerful, wealthy, data-rich companies still can't meet them. Perhaps we need some kind of kamikazes willing to crash entire departments by hiring large numbers of random brown people to hit the diversity targets (only), but that wouldn't exactly look good for anti-racism enthusiasts.

Not only do they believe they can make engineering representative of US demographics, they believe that racism within the company is the reason it isn’t already representative.

Never mind that the company sources talent globally and neither India or China can help to deliver black engineers.

I know some guys from India who are black-passing.

I don't really have anything else to say other than I'm just baffled that so many supposedly smart and rational people don't think through their arguments and beliefs. Cartesian doubt is apparently out of style. I don't see any evidence whatsoever that white supremacy or racism is anywhere close to the biggest issue the US faces.

Once again, you can't reason people out of things they didn't reason themselves into. To quote Michelle Obama: "Don't think, Barack, feel!"

If you reason from facts, the United States is obviously not a white supremacist nation. The top countries of origin for immigrants in America are Mexico, China, India, the Philipines, and El Salvador. The highest income ethnic groups in America are, in order: Indian, Filipino, Taiwanese, Sri Lankan, Japanese, Malaysian, Chinese, and Pakistani. Whites are barely average.

"People of Color", as white liberals like to call them, seem to want to come to America, and once they get here, they do so well they outperform white liberals. They even serve in the armed forces in higher proportion than whites.

But those are facts, and white progressivism isn't about facts, it's about feelings.

Progressives believe things that make them feel good. More specifically, they believe things that make them feel like they are a member of a high status group, they have high status in that group, they are secure in that status, and that they deserve that status. That's how they simultaneously claim that you are born with your sexual orientation, but you can pick your gender, that affirmative action is a remedy for past discrimination, but Asian Americans should be pushed out in favor of whites, etc.

There's a greentext floating around saying that some people parse information through a "consensus filter" - they don't ask themselves "is this true", they ask themselves "are other people OK with me believing this". If your world is social, that's probably a good survival tactic. You conform to and behave according to the memes that will cause the group to accept and protect you.

That's how white progressives end up saying crazy things about ethnic minorities that ethnic minorities themselves don't believe.

"White supremacy" is one of those things. By saying that America is white supremacist, you differentiate yourself from your lower or middle class origins where people are patriotic and colorblind. You can ingratiate yourself into and reinforce your position in the PMC. You even get to tell yourself you deserve this status because you have a large circle of care than others.

They don't, in any way, believe in the literal truth of America being white supremacist - if they did, they would ban immigration from Haiti to save the Haitians. You won't get anywhere pointing out the three million people of color risking their lives to get here, or the incredible success so many of them achieve in such short order.

To a white liberal, words don't actually have meaning, they're just the carrier wave that gets modulated to transmit feelings, specifically social feelings about who is cared about and who belongs where.

Trying to reason with them will just confuse or infuriate them.

Filipinos are the second highest income group? That seems off.

Does it? I feel like they pretty much run medicine and manufacturing.

By household. They commonly have households with several working adults.

Great point. Collectivist living'd skew it back, definitely wouldn't expect them to be top 2 for average adult incomes.

There's some truth in what you say but I think that you go too far with it. White liberals don't just spew meaningless words, they have plenty of explanations (or, to be less charitable, rationalizations) for their beliefs. Take your Haiti example. The bog-standard progressive explanation for this is "Yes, America is a white supremacist country, but it is still a good thing for Haitians to be able to come to America because white people have destroyed Haiti so much through colonialism that America is better to live in materially than Haiti even though America is white supremacist." You might not agree with this explanation, but I don't think that it's pure status/virtue signalling. If you are convinced of the truth of the assumptions that the explanation depends on, the explanation will seem quite logical to you.

I think that some people really overestimate the degree to which progressiveness is some sort of status-climbing social adaptation. To some extent it is, but I'm not sure that it really is one much more than any other political, social, or religious movement.

And if you want to convince white liberals that they are wrong, I think that you would probably be more effective by doing stuff like subtly introducing them to data that puts their assumptions into question than you would be by going into it assuming that most of them are opportunistic social climbers who do not actually care about the truth.

Some people here don't realize that what is obvious to them is not obvious to others. Yes, you (not you satirizedoor specifically, I mean the generic Motte poster) might be well-acquainted with FBI crime statistics, for example, or with sophisticated logical arguments about why central planning underperforms the free market. But there are a bunch of people out there who literally do not even know that there are racial discrepancies in crime or in the results of intelligence tests, or know anything about the history of communist economies. It's not even that they know about it but have progressive-type explanations for those things, it's that they don't even know that there is anything to explain to begin with.

Of course there are also white liberals who know about those things but have progressive-type explanations for them. And there is a group, probably small in my opinion, who really do simply not care about the truth, like some kind of O'Brien from Nineteen Eighty-Four. My point is, though, that in my opinion the most accurate mental model of white liberals is that most of them fall into either the first (they don't know) or the second (they know but they have progressive explanations for it) groups. Not into the third (cynical social climbers) group.

And if you want to convince white liberals that they are wrong, I think that you would probably be more effective by doing stuff like subtly introducing them to data that puts their assumptions into question than you would be by going into it assuming that most of them are opportunistic social climbers who do not actually care about the truth.

Oh my sweet summer child, I'm related to white liberals.

You'll never get anywhere reasoning with an AWFL. On the other hand, you can move them by subtly implying that the elite social consensus has moved on, and that by advocating for what they believe, they're now behind the times or low status. The other way you can move them is to show that there's a group that their opinion doesn't care about, and then emote about the harms done to that group.

And if you want to convince white liberals that they are wrong, I think that you would probably be more effective by doing stuff like subtly introducing them to data that puts their assumptions into question than you would be by going into it assuming that most of them are opportunistic social climbers who do not actually care about the truth.

I would love to live in a world in which I could redpill woke people just by spitting a ceaseless barrage of facts and logic™ at them until their worldview crumbles into dust. Unfortunately, after a decade of arguing with woke people using pretty much exactly this approach, I don't have a great deal of confidence in its efficacy. Wokeness is a fully self-contained and self-consistent paradigm. In a remarkably short period since its inception, it has evolved antibodies for any objection one might raise against it - not necessarily good antibodies, but antibodies nonetheless. If you tell a passively woke person a politically uncomfortable fact, they will generally defuse the cognitive dissonance by appeals to ignorance ("I'm sure that's only one of several studies showing that Asian-American households make more money than white American households, and other studies have found otherwise"), while a hardcore true believer will do so by retreating into conspiratorialism ("you really think the Amerikkkan police only shot 30 unarmed black men this year? There's no way the police are reporting every single black man they kill").

Really, I think the idea that woke people can be persuaded just by showing them facts and data is the same sort of naïveté Scott described as endemic on the 2000s internet, in which atheists apparently believed that Christians and/or creationists would leave the faith en masse once presented with ironclad evidence of Biblical inconsistency or irreconcilable fossil records. It's fair to say that didn't go as they hoped.

You're preaching to the choir. I'm not arguing that it's possible to convince the majority of woke people with facts. I'm just arguing about what is more likely to be effective when trying to convince that fraction of woke people who are persuadable.

intelligence tests

Completely poisoned in the educated upstanding progressive brain. Back in college we were thoroughly taught how bullshit intelligence tests are. I believed it for a bit before I understood college misled me.

Posters on reddit commonly recite the thought-defeating sneers against intelligence tests that I learned in school. This has really sunk its claws into the broader progressive consciousness.

There but for the grace of God go I. Good thing I was born a contrarian.

A lot of them do and you get responses like this:

White supremacists claim the number 90 refers to the percentage of violent interracial crime allegedly committed by African Americans. Some white supremacists cite the 1994 National Crime Victimization Survey produced by the Justice Department as evidence for the percentage. However, this figure does not show up in the survey itself and is not considered an accurate one. In any case, it should be noted that the vast majority of violent crime is intraracial (committed by a person of one race against a person of the same race), not interracial, in nature.

Pretty much any online political person knows about this and they wave it away with all kinds of ridiculous rationalizations. Just search "13/50 reddit" and you'll see they don't even try to engage with it just find some way of deboonking it and moving on. Same with economics.

In any case, it should be noted that the vast majority of violent crime is intraracial (committed by a person of one race against a person of the same race), not interracial, in nature.

A better retort to counter the 13/50 stat would be something like '90% of fraud in the US is perpetrated by whites'. Different races are more inclined to engage in different types of crime. for blacks, it is violent crime.

Best stat I can find shows whites committing about 70% of fraud; this figure is 20 years old and is roughly the same as the percentage of the population that was white. Whites are only over-represented in bribery.

This isn't true though. Blacks commit almost every crime at rates higher than whites. There might be a few exceptions but the general trend is certainly not that different races commit equal amounts of crime but just commit different crimes. The general trend is that blacks commit more crime.

white people have destroyed Haiti so much through colonialism that America is better to live in materially than Haiti

This is true far more than even the normal damages that colonialism did to non-whites living under it. Haiti (then Saint Domingue) used to be a very productive and rich colonial possession of France, its plantations provided a good amount of the total wealth of the French Empire. During the French Revolution the Haitians managed to get a small amount of freedom for themselves, while still being a French colony. After wanting the ideals of equality that the French apparently espoused so heartily to apply to them as well, the were rewarded for their impudence by first being sent Charles Leclerc who tricked the Haitian leader Toussaint L'Overture into meeting him, ostensibly to discuss terms. When L'Overture agreed to this meeting, thinking Leclerc was a man of honour like himself he was arrested and shipped off to Metropolitan France and imprisoned until he died. It turned out that Leclerc was not an honourable man...

Leclerc died of Yellow Fever (perhaps a divine punishment?) a few years later and was replaced with Rochambeau (this was the son of the Rochambeau who fought in the American Wars of Independence, his father was a hero, he was a shitstain), who turned out to be even worse than Leclerc, being actively evil instead of merely dishonourable.

Rochambeau was known for burying captured rebels alive in insects or boiling them to death in molasses. He even invented the first rudimentary gas chambers to kill people en masse and the story is told of him inivting some natives to a ball then at the stroke of midnight announcing that he had just ordered his troops to come and kill every single native man present (this trechery against his guests would get him straight down to the 9th circle of Hell if we are to believe our Dante).

Eventually the Haitians were able to throw off the yoke of the French and declare independence in 1804. However their "white man" problems were far from over. France was not happy at losing such a valuable possession, and immediately instituted a blockade of the island. At this time the other great naval powers of Europe who had a presence in the Carribean: Spain and England were engaged in the Napoleonic Wars against France where they were tearing each other apart. A reasonable observer may well have expected that given they were at each other's throats, these two countries might have helped clear the blockade of Haiti. Instead they did the exact opposite, choosing to help France enforce the blockade out of fear that their own colonies in the area may be next to revolt...

In 1825 the blockade was finally lifted and France recognised Haitian Independence. But not before the Haitians agreed to assume a 90 million Franc debt to France, and to add insult to injury the reasons given for this debt were as "compensation of lost property". To put this into perspective, France had recently sold Louisiana (this was the entire middle third of the modern day US in size, not the small chunk of land Louisiana is today) to the United States for 60 million Francs and here they were demanding substantially more from the populace of a portion of a single island in the Carribean.

So basically Haiti, an island of half a million extremely poor recently freed slaves, was burdened with a debt 1.5x the price France had gotten for the entire middle third of the modern day USA. And of course they had to pay high rates of interest on this debt too. It would not be cleared until 1947, well over a century after it was imposed on the Haitian people.

It is impossible to deny that the conditions imposed by the white man upon Haiti made it particularly difficult for them to become a success story. To me a fair punishment for French crimes in the region would be France being obliged to take 30,000 Haitian citizens a year as immigrants in perpetuity, accepting them as citizens and treating them no different from their own people, up and until we reach a state of the world where each year there are fewer than 30,000 people who want to move to France from Haiti. It would provide a very good incentive for the French to improve living standards in a country where the people are still so poor that they eat cookies made from mud to sate their hunger.

Yet Haiti and the Dominican Republic had comparable GDP per capita in the 1950s. Look at them now.

They don't, in any way, believe in the literal truth of America being white supremacist - if they did, they would ban immigration from Haiti to save the Haitians. You won't get anywhere pointing out the three million people of color risking their lives to get here, or the incredible success so many of them achieve in such short order.

To a white liberal, words don't actually have meaning, they're just the carrier wave that gets modulated to transmit feelings, specifically social feelings about who is cared about and who belongs where.

Here I was thinking that I might have an uncharitably low opinion of the PMC's cognitive abilities, but fuck me if this isn't so much worse.

I wouldn't say this speaks ill of their cognitive abilities. They took over Harvard, and we didn't.

Good post. So what can be done about people who pick and choose based on feelings and belonging rather than truths? I don't know how I can respect and get along with them. For me truth, or the attempts to find it at least, is so central to what separates us from the animals.

Politically you prevent them from being able to participate in the broader society.

This is serendipity, because I was just going to write something on the recent winner of the Booker Prize. The winner is a novel called "Prophet Song" by an Irish writer, Paul Lynch.

Before I start, I have to say that I am badly out of touch with literary fiction of the past twenty years or so; I stopped reading it around 2005, when John Banville's "The Sea, The Sea" was published. So I don't know what the current trends are, or have been, and this is simply my immediate reaction to a book I have not read, and have no intention of reading, based on the reviews of what it is about.

So! Paul Lynch wishes he was an American. Or in second place, Canadian. Because he has written the male version of "The Handmaid's Tale". Here's the review by the Irish Times and I'll just pick out bits to let you know why I think this.

The main thrust of the story is that Ireland in the near future is now a totalitarian, dystopian state. The good old Irish misery novel redux, sez you? Ah, but in the prime of that novel, the Big Bad was the Catholic Church. Even a sensitive soyboy liberal writer like Lynch can't pretend that the Church has anything like the power it used to have, so he has to settle for politics instead. (And yes, I apologise for using a term like soyboy but that's the reaction his face and quotes evokes in me).

We got secret police and union leaders being disappeared. Wait, is this 80s South America? No, not even that interesting. Canada is the Holy Land place of refuge, just like in "The Handmaid's Tale". To be fair, traditional Irish emigration has also been to Canada amongst other places, but I don't think Lynch is making that kind of connection. It's more the kind of converse you see when people claim in American elections that if X wins, they're fleeing to Canada ahead of the jackbooted fascists that will surely be coming for them.

And here's where it all falls down for me, because the political landscape Lynch is writing about is not Irish, it's the imported American culture war politics, and that's what leads me to believe Lynch secretly wishes he were an American/Canadian living amongst His People, not stuck in this benighted island (the accounts of his previous novels on the Wikipedia page about him are the standard Irish novel tropes, apart from the one imitating Hemingway).

Thing is, we've had our own home-grown Fascist movement, the Blueshirts (in analogy with Mussolini's Brownshirts and Hitler's Blackshirts) and indeed, one of our political parties and one of the parties in the current joint government are the heirs of that movement, Fine Gael. But they're down with all the new liberal social progressivism; indeed, the current leader and Taoiseach is the half-Indian, openly gay, has a boyfriend but is in an open relationship (minor kerfuffle over pictures of him kissing a guy not his boyfriend in a gay club with mostly everyone coming down on the side of ‘not our business’, though here is the video clip about what that socialising entailed) Leo Varadkar, so what would be fascinating in a novel would be the exploration of how the social progressive agenda can fit comfortably alongside pro-business, pro-light touch regulation, pro-capitalism and indeed pro-law and order which is seen as developing into authoritarian and fascist regime.

But that’s not what Lynch gives us.

Instead, he’s writing “Suppose Donald Trump gets elected for a second time?” fiction but set in Ireland. And here’s where I start quoting and laughing.

(1) Article about him winning the award:

After receiving the award, Lynch said: “This was not an easy book to write. The rational part of me believed I was dooming my career by writing this novel. Though I had to write the book anyway. We do not have a choice in such matters.”

…During a press conference later on Sunday evening, Lynch said he was “astonished” by the violent disturbances on the streets of Dublin last week. “I recognise that energy is always under the surface, what’s happening in Dublin, we can see (the book) as a warning.”

Lynch said he was “distinctly not a political novelist” and his book is really about “grief”, as it tells the story of a woman who has her husband taken away by the newly formed Irish secret police.

Oh gosh wow, yeah, totally risking his career. With a topic that is the received wisdom of the day, the favourite bogeyman of the chattering classes, and the subject of countless opinion pieces in online media, both traditional and social, about the horrible rise of fascism and the death of democracy in Western societies, particularly America. Is he really trying to persuade us that the literary Cheka are going to wreck his career for touching this one?

That bit reminded me of nothing so much as this scene from C.S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce”, where the liberal bishop claims he ran huge risks and his friend reminds him that all he did was surf the Zeitgeist:

"Do you really think there are no sins of intellect?"

"There are indeed, Dick. There is hidebound prejudice, and intellectual dishonesty, and timidity, and stagnation. But honest opinions fearlessly followed - they are not sins."

"I know we used to talk that way. I did it too until the end of my life when I became what you call narrow. It all turns on what are honest opinions."

"Mine certainly were. They were not only honest but heroic. I asserted them fearlessly. When the doctrine of the Resurrection ceased to commend itself to the critical faculties which God had given me, I openly rejected it. I preached my famous sermon. I defied the whole chapter. I took every risk."

"What risk? What was at all likely to come of it except what actually came - popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric?"

"Dick, this is unworthy of you. What are you suggesting?"

"Friend, I am not suggesting at all. You see, I know now. Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause."

(2) Synopsis from Wikipedia tells us what the story is all about:

In a near-future Republic of Ireland, in the wake of a teachers' union strike, the right-wing National Alliance party seizes control of the government. The National Alliance gives the Irish national police (the Garda Síochána) and the judiciary far-reaching powers. The regime also establishes a new secret police force, the Garda National Services Bureau. The new government quickly repeals civil liberties; peaceful protests are broken up, and Irish citizens are arrested without cause and tortured.

Larry Stack, a teacher and trade union leader, is arrested and held without charge while attending a rally. His wife, Eilish, who is a scientist, is left to care for their four children and her father, who has dementia. Eilish petitions for her husband's release. The state soon descends into civil war, and Irish citizens who are suspected of being part of the resistance are arrested or killed. Eilish struggles to keep her family together during the civil war; she contemplates fleeing the country with her family, possibly joining her sister Áine in Canada.

Oh, Canada! The dreamed-of paradise for the liberals who are terrified Trump is hiding under the bed! There’s a lot to be discussed here, and I hope to get through it, if I can gather up my scattered thoughts into a bundle (maybe even a fasces?

(3) From the review of the book, which is a little bit critical of Lynch’s approach as a work of writing, not so much the politics:

In this Ireland there has been an unspecified “crisis facing the state”, which has allowed the government to establish emergency powers and create a secret police, the GNSB. We are, in other words, deep in dystopian hell – though shallow might be the better word. The best way of involving the reader in a world like this is through individual stories, and Lynch cleaves the reader close to the Stack family in Dublin.

They are Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist working in biotech, her husband Larry – deputy general secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland – and their four children Mark, Molly, Bailey and Ben. The story opens in grand style – “The night has come and she has not heard the knocking” – as the cops arrive to take Larry in for questioning. Larry has been negotiating for better pay and conditions for teachers, and has been publicly vocal in his support. There is a tense scene where “sowing discord and unrest” battles “exercising my rights under the constitution”.

But Larry doesn’t come back from his interrogation and Eilish, however much she believes that “there would be outrage” if the police overstepped the mark, is about to learn that constitutional rights depend upon people in authority being willing to uphold them. That brings to mind the still-fresh story of Trump’s desecration of constitutional norms in the United States; and when Eilish, like a frog in slowly boiling water, hopes that everything will be fine and she won’t need to take the kids to Canada as others are doing, we think of Jews who didn’t flee Nazi Germany.

Indeed, there is no shortage of heavyweight analogies here, and some good dramatic scenes too: when the family home is sprayed in red paint with the word TRAITER (if the devil is in the detail, then that misspelling is the mot juste); when Eilish runs from hospital to hospital in search of bad news, and is greeted with even worse; and the last pages of the novel, which seem to give the whole story purpose by twisting the reader into a fresh perspective on a timely issue.

There are a few points here where I laugh, and the one about the threat of the Teacher’s Union is one of them. Up till about 2008 and the aftermath of the economic crash in Ireland, the teachers’ unions (we have four of them: one for primary school teachers, two for secondary school, and one for university lecturers) were about the most powerful unions in Ireland, able to wring concessions out of successive governments. Whether you were the atheist, Labour Party Minister for Education, the slightly more to the right of centre centrist right wing party Minister or the slightly more to the left of centre centrist right wing party Minister, you could and can be heckled and booed at the union conferences.

I have no doubt that Irish governments would have loved to haul off teachers’ union big-wigs to the secret police headquarters, but they never had the public support until the economic crisis meant that now the government had a mandate to stand up to public sector pay demands and broke the unchallenged power of the teachers’ unions.

The rest of it is standard “oh noes the Trumpists are coming to haul us all off to the concentration camps!” stuff which, unhappily, has percolated over here as well. Now, in the article about Lynch’s interview after winning the award, there is mention of the protests that happened in Dublin, and here’s where it gets a lot more complicated than a simple morality tale of the Bad Far-Right Desecration of Sacred Democratic Norms.

Yes, we’ve seen far-right, white nationalist, and white supremacist groups making incursions into Ireland. Yes, we’ve had our own nativist party trying to get going. And yes, our police force has long wanted more powers and more equipment in line with other, armed, police forces. But all of this has been resisted, in a general, passive, way by the public.

However, and here is where the narrative departs from Lynch’s tale of secret police hauling away trade unionists, it is in response to the anti-immigrant rioting which was destructive and hitherto unknown in Ireland, that the ramping up of police powers happened. In other words, it’s the liberal/left political inclination which is getting the law-and-order police state going, not the right.

That’s where the really interesting novel should happen, but instead even the reviewer drags out the comparison with Trump, and not with historically established leftist authoritarian states.

We’ve had a civil war in Ireland, and the historical parallels with people being killed, arrested, and so on are there to be made. But not in the simplistic manner here.

As to the part where the reviewer purrs about the mot juste, that rattling noise you hear is my eyeballs rotating in their sockets. Well of course the hate graffiti would be misspelled, after all we nice, right thinking people know that the lesser sorts are stupid and illiterate. But they might also like to bear in mind that reports in America of such hate graffiti and similar incidents often turn out to be hoaxes perpetrated by the very people claiming to be the victims in fear of their lives.

The Booker's had a string of weak winners since George Saunders' deserved win for Lincoln in the Bardo. The best of the stack is Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida but read it vs the last South Asian winner, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.

Karunatilaka:

The memories come to you with pain. The pain has many shades. Sometimes, it arrives with sweat and itches and rashes. At other times, it comes with nausea and headaches. Perhaps like amputees feeling absent limbs, you still hold the illusion of your decaying corpse. One minute you are retching, the next you are reeling, the next you are remembering.

You met Jaki five years ago in the Casino at Hotel Leo. She was twenty, just out of school, and losing pathetically at baccarat. You were back from a torrid tour of the Vanni, unhinged by the slaughter, breaking bread with shady people, seeing the bad wherever you looked, and wearing your notorious red bandanna. You had sold the photos to Jonny at the Associated Press and cashed a welcome six-figure cheque. Even in Lankan rupees, six figures are better than five.

You had outplayed the house at blackjack, whacked the crab at the buffet and washed it down with some free gin. A regular day at the office.

‘Don’t bet on ties, sister,’ you said to the strange girl with frizzy hair and black make-up. She looked at you and rolled her eyes, which you found strange. Women usually like the look of you, not knowing that you prefer cock to cooch. A trimmed beard, an ironed shirt and a bit of deodorant will elevate you above a herd of sweaty Lankan hetero males.

Adiga:

. . . That's why I want to ask you directly if you really are coming to Bangalore. Because if you are, I have something important to tell you. See, the lady on the radio said, "Mr. Jiabao is on a mission: he wants to know the truth about Bangalore."

My blood froze. If anyone knows the truth about Bangalore, it's me.

Next, the lady announcer said, "Mr. Jiabao wants to meet some Indian entrepreneurs and hear the story of their success from their own lips."

She explained a little. Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don't have entrepreneurs. And our nation, though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy, or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs. Thousands and thousands of them. Especially in the field of technology. And these entrepreneurs -- we entrepreneurs -- have set up all these outsourcing companies that virtually run America now.

You hope to learn how to make a few Chinese entrepreneurs, that's why you're visiting. That made me feel good. But then it hit me that in keeping with international protocol, the prime minister and foreign minister of my country will meet you at the airport with garlands, small take-home sandalwood statues of Gandhi, and a booklet full of information about India's past, present, and future.

That's when I had to say that thing in English, sir. Out loud . . .

(that thing is "Fuck!/Motherfucker!")

Adiga's a natural, Karunatilaka's a purply tryhard.

2019 was the most transparently political of all the recent transparently political awards. It was a double winner despite the rule against it, Margaret Atwood won (her writing is excellent, but it was for a Handmaiden's Tale sequel) and Bernadine Evaristo became the first black woman to win for Girl, Woman, Other. I'd rate GWO above most of the other recent winners but that's not really praise. The others all do this varying combination of purple prose, idiosyncratic writing, and "unconventional structure." They might not be consciously or even unconsciously trying to be Cormac McCarthy but there's a shitty sameness of what reads as McCarthy wannabe-ism from writers who don't understand the great works succeed in spite of such style because of masters who know when and how to break the rules.

Milkman

"My poor deprived class!" cried teacher and gain she was bluffing, pretending sorrow about our lack of color, our hampered horizons, our mental landscapes, when it was obvious she was a person too defined within herself to be long perturbed by anything at all. And how come she was this? How come she was doing this antagonizing, this presenting of an anti-culture to our culture when she herself was of our culture, where the same rules of consciousness regarding the likes of color – regardless too, of church affiliation – as applied to us ought equally to have applied to her? But she was laughing again. "There is no blue in the whole of the window," she said. "Look again please. Try again please – and, class" – here she paused and, for a moment, did become serious – "although there's no lack of color out there really – there's nothing out there really. But for temporal purposes please note – the sky that seems to be out there can be any color that there is."

"Testicles!" cried some ladies and gentlemen and a frisson – the only French of the evening apart from "le ciel est bleu" and that literary guff the guy in the book had been posturing –went through us. It seemed to our minds that no, what she was saying could not ever be true. If what she was saying was true, that the sky – out there –not out there – whatever –could be any color, that meant anything could be any color, that anything could be anything, that anything could happen, at any time, at any place, in the whole of the world, and to anybody – probably had too, only we just hadn't noticed. So no. After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, centuries and millennia of being one color officially and three colors unofficially, a colorful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be.

Jesus Christ, editor totally MIA.

The Promise

I should have been there. So Astrid thinks. That she was flirting with Dean instead only adds to her guilt. She believes, wrongly, that her younger sister knows the truth about her. Not only this truth, others too. For example, that she vomited up her lunch half an hour ago, as she regularly does, in order to stay slim. She is prone to paranoid fears like these, suspecting sometimes that her mind can be secretly read by people around her, or that life is an elaborate performance in which everybody else is acting and she alone is not. Astrid is a fearful person. Among other things, she's afraid of the dark, poverty, thunderstorms, getting fat, earthquakes, tidal waves, crocodiles, the blacks, the future, the orderly structures of society coming undone. Of being unloved. Of always having been that way.

Shit editing again.

Prophet Song

You were supposed to bring Molly to practice, Larry, I had to cancel another call with our partners, I have only just returned back to work after maternity leave, how do you think this looks? He stands by the door with a foot half-pulled from his boot and then he lowers his eyes like some abject and beaten dog, he shakes his head and looks her full in the eye and she sees a change come over him, his voice an angry whisper. They are trying to disrupt us, Eilish, they are spreading lies within the union, you will not believe what I heard today — His voice falters before her narrowed gaze and then his eyes seek the floor again. Look, he says, I hear what you're saying and I'm sorry. He shows her a small pay-as-you-go phone, a burner phone he calls it. Even if they wanted to listen in, they could not know the number. She watches him thinking of the children listening to them whispering in the hall. You are behaving like some criminal, Larry, listen, it looks like Bailey is coming down with a virus, he's gone upstairs.

Now Prophet Song, which maybe I should have started with because that's what you wrote about. There are weak Booker winners but the writers still show some skill. Burns and Galgut have chops they just had shitty editors. Prophet Song is the first Booker winner I've read I would call a bad book. I felt less disgust after finishing Hank Green's "I can do it too" YA trash than that shit. Lynch is a shitty writer, this is a particularly shitty piece of his overall shitty submission. I've read significantly better from anons on /lit/ and if someone posted this to a /wg/ thread they would have been mocked relentlessly for being so far up their own ass without even having something good to show for it. The book is poorly conceived, poorly written, and that's besides the terrible structure that should have magnified the shittiness to everyone judging but for some reason put it on track for the preeminent English literary award.

Coetzee's Booker-winning Life & Times of Michael K is unconventional structure, no chapters but three sections, set in South Africa during a civil war the novel implies the whites are losing. The book is rich with commentary, but being Coetzee who can actually write, it's usually subtle and beautifully so. There's an idea in this space; still set in Ireland, a revisiting of the Troubles where the racial line is Irish and not. A story of a person who keeps experiencing events and actions against them beyond their control. Proper punctuation and structure but like Coetzee with very long sections instead of chapters. But all of this would require an intelligence and thoughtfulness and above all skill in prose Lynch does not possess.

A woman won the second Booker, a Trinidad-born Indian Brit the third. This stuff is such a bummer, and it's also insulting because writing might be the purest meritocracy. If someone could write like Rushdie they could look like anything, be anything, believe anything, and they'd succeed, because his lower peers have for decades. Wherever there is a "lack of representation" it's because there's a lack of skill. You can take the angle of social and economic factors keeping that writing skill from being developed, but that's the only angle there is. If it's good enough, people will read it. Political awardings do nothing, they aren't incentivizing anyone to pick up the pen who wouldn't so they're not bringing anything new and good into the field, they're just making the brand worse and the field worse as they further encourage publishers to keep facilitating this bullshit.

Your excerpt from Lynch's novel is exactly what I imagined 🤦‍♀️ "Ochone, Eileen achusla, but isn't it the hard, dreary life you have and you trying to rear your seventeen ragged-arse children while your drunken husband is never home except to beat you and get you pregnant again in between spending the rent money in the pub, och ochone agus ullagón o!" Such a staple of the Irish novel as to become a parody of itself, and he's still using an updated version of it.

Trade union husband finding out that it's the left-wing element* he's served all his life turning Ireland into the authoritarian police state, but one where anyone can get gay married and sure don't we have abortion now (albeit it's in a limited way) and do you want to bring back the bad old days when the Church was in power, do you, Larry? while his middle class striving to be upper-middle class STEM professional wife working for one of the American pharma multinationals with a base here dreams of making it to the head office in California because that's where the action is, everyone knows that the real career advancement and power lies in America if you can get there and doesn't want to know anything about it, don't rock the boat Larry, we're never going to get a visa if you have a criminal record; everyone is happy with the new prosperous Ireland - if you are in the right place to avail of that prosperity - and of course we need to crack down on the ignorant lower class that is rioting in the streets - now that's a novel that would threaten his career.

But that's not a novel he's ever going to write.

*Or the version of it we have now; the Frank Cluskey type in the Labour Party is long gone and replaced by the champagne socialist element much more comfortable with social progressivism rather than the class struggle, and appealing to win the middle-class vote by promising more social liberal policies while the real working-class element is scooped up by Sinn Féin and the tiny splinter Marxist parties, such as our very own college-graduate Trotskyists.

The rational part of me believed I was dooming my career by writing this novel. Though I had to write the book anyway. We do not have a choice in such matters.”

sobrave.jpeg Reminds me of John Boyega saying that he expected his acting career to be over as a consequence of his heroic decision to speak at a - Black Lives Matter protest, in London. Okay buddy.

I heard about the central stylistic gimmick of this novel (the entire book is told in one unbroken paragraph) before I heard about the premise, and based on that alone I knew I'd never read it. I've read some books which experimented with the form and presentation of the text in interesting ways (e.g. House of Leaves), but I find it impossible to imagine any way in which this gimmick would be anything other than an annoyance. Upon hearing the premise I'm even less inclined to read it than previously.

You're entirely right to point out that concerns about a far-right authoritarian takeover of Ireland are about as unfounded as it being taken over by pixies and unicorns. Even the idea that such a scenario is implausible in Ireland, but would be plausible in the US or Canada, is fanciful - just as in Ireland, it's the parties who present themselves as woke centrist neoliberals who pose the greatest threat of initiating democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. As @KulakRevolt will remind us, it wasn't a far-right Canadian prime minister who froze the bank accounts of anyone even tangentially connected to an oppositional political movement (the kind of thing we'd expect from Erdoğan or Putin) - it was Justin Trudeau, Mr. "Because it's 2015" himself, on whom Leo Varadkar unabashedly models himself.

To be slightly more charitable to Lynch, I wonder if he's fallen victim to some kind of The Last Psychiatrist-esque "telling yourself one story as a protection against what's really bothering you" psychological defense mechanism.

Any remotely politically aware person living in Ireland in the last five years would have good cause to be concerned about Ireland falling victim to democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. The lockdowns instated in response to Covid-19 represented an unprecedented seizing of control by the state and an incursion into the private lives of Irish citizens, and were some of the longest in the world. Likewise, nobody ever expected the introduction of vaccine passes to get into bars and restaurants: the denizens of /r/ireland scoffed at me when I said I was worried about them being brought in, and assured me they never would - then they did, and the same people scoffed at me for being concerned about this unprecedented invasion of privacy. Earlier this year, a piece of "hate speech" legislation (which, among other things, would make it an offense punishable with jail time to have a racist meme stored on your phone, even if it was sent to you by your annoying uncle in a family WhatsApp group chat) passed in the lower house of parliament, despite only 27% of the public supporting it. It has not yet passed the upper house, but of course the architects of the bill are using last month's race riot as a pretext for pushing for it to be passed (even though it would have done nothing to prevent the riot). All of these policies or pieces of legislation were introduced by a coalition government which presents itself as woke, centrist and neoliberal. Meanwhile, the far-right politicians in the country are so marginalised that they might as well not exist for how involved they are in the democratic process - no politician who could be characterised as far-right under even the most generous interpretation of that term has ever held public office.

Now, you can scoff and roll your eyes at anti-lockdowners and accuse them all of being anti-5G nutters who'd step over their own grandmothers' corpses for a pint in a pub with their mates, but on some level, any thinking person must experience some measure of concern about these developments, if only on a subconscious level, no matter how much they might try to deny it. Perhaps Lynch reacted to the political developments of the past five years with the same alarm I felt about Ireland's future. The problem for him is, he can't imagine a world in which a socially progressive government could also be authoritarian. I don't mean the possibility of such a thing coming to pass has occurred to him, but he's dismissed the possibility as too remote to merit serious consideration - I mean that he can no more conceive of such a thing than he can a triangle with four sides. For most educated Irish people, "right-wing" and "authoritarian" go hand-in-hand, and the concept of a "left-wing authoritarian state" is an empty set, a term without a referent. They've never heard of the Holodomor, or the Khmer Rouge - they think of Cuba as "that place with great healthcare" and nothing else. I've even had a Trinity graduate patiently explain to me on Facebook that Josef Stalin was actually far-right, and accused me of doing a disservice to real socialists by inaccurately characterising Stalin as far-left.

So, Lynch notices he's concerned about the possibility of Ireland becoming an authoritarian state in the near future. He can't bring himself to confront the possibility that Fine Gael could ever be the instigators of such a state (how could they? They have their pronouns in their bios on Twitter!). So the only way he can express his concerns in a way that feels psychologically safe for him is by contriving this absurd scenario in which the far-right seizes power and instates all of the policies he's worried about Fine Gael bringing in (presumably along with some token anti-LGBTQIAA2S+ and anti-immigrant legislation, to improve Lynch's plausible deniability). I don't think Lynch is lying to the readers about what his book is about - I think he's lying to himself.

That was the part that made me laugh till my sides hurt: my career is so threatened by writing this book that I... won the freakin' Booker. Such threat! So consequence!

The moves to give the police tasers and greater powers recently all grew out of the liberal response to perceived far-right incursion and hate speech, and that's the kind of "some sort of public crisis permitted the government to go in this authoritarian direction" that would be a better novel to read, but Lynch went the easy way.

Never mind that I'm supposed to believe that a modern Irish woman in a middle-class college-educated STEM job as a molecular biologist is going to have four kids today, but again Lynch is going for the tired old tropes of classic Irish lit. He wants the "ochone, Eileen achushla" tropes of the days when the Church was the Big Bad (so the martyred wife and mother of a large family will-she nill-she with the checked-out/emotionally unavailable/absent husband and father) mixed with the Ripped From The Headlines stuff, and of course the overseas literary prizes are going to eat it up because this kind of "so poetic!" bullshit is what they expect from Irish writers.

Again, at the risk of engaging in shameless self promotion...

The reason that various flavors of failed progressive seem to gravitate towards an ideology resembling early-mid 20th century fascism (as opposed to some flavor of conservatism) is that fascism is a fundamentally progressive ideology. They might take the red pill but they never manage to free thier minds. They want to continue believing that the world runs on inductive logic when any game involving multiple agents is going to be anti-inductive. They want to quibble some group's position within the intersectional stack rather than question the validity of the stack as a concept. They cling to psuedo-marxist nonsense about group/class consciousness and group/class differences to salve their own wounded pride. They still seem to think that they can appeal to some non-existant higher authority with words like "academic consensus" and "studies show". In other words they still think that's air they are breathing.

It's pretty poor taste of you to repeatedly bring me up as an example of how awful and racist HBD posters are on here (particularly when I'm none of the above), and then use my comments as a springboard to promote your own stupid hobby horse whenever the mood takes you. Have some respect.

???

I think you are missing the linchpin of the worldview, which is an axiomatic assumption that persistent group differences in outcomes can't be just, natural or accidental. The fundamental equality of groups (rather than individuals) is as close to a central dogma of faith as you can get for the dominant secular religion, and everything you observe follows quite easily from trying to square this belief with observed reality. Do you have a better explanation for US statistics that does not violate this belief than that somehow, despite superficial appearances, pro-white bias must have found a way?

(Regarding the bafflement, surely smart and rational people being unwavering in a religious belief should not be surprising, given humanity's track record.)

Do you have a better explanation for US statistics that does not violate this belief than that somehow, despite superficial appearances, pro-white bias must have found a way?

Cultural differences can make a very big difference- Asia adopting memes from Christendom is why it had so much catch-up growth despite by HBD it should have had better outcomes earlier. Assimilated Jews are fantastically successful, unassimilated ones are not.

It's not hard to point to cultural factors in the AADOS community which explain the income gap, and there are perfectly reasonable cultural-happenstance explanations which don't rely on HBD. White progressives are simply uncomfortable with a narrative that most people are responsible for their own station in life, more or less.

It is such a strange belief.

  1. It is saying in effect society writ large matters but micro cultures don’t matter. That is, the overall structure of society causes some groups to fail but an individual group culture is at best orthogonal to success. That is an extraordinary claim.

  2. It assumes that genetics apply for individuals but not groups despite clearly there being a genetic difference between groups (eg whites and Asians look different). Again this is an extraordinary claim.

So to believe that difference in group outcome is proof of discrimination relies upon two extraordinary claims.

Very few people, especially ones who'd be considered "normies" by any sane criteria, think about the logical structure of their beliefs deeply enough for these sorts of questions to ever occur to them. This is true even if they are straightforward factual beliefs and not mere signalling (and I agree with a few others that what's going on here is more a complex mix of the two than straightforwardly one or the other).

I think with some people here you might be talking cross purposes with regards to equality. Underneath the progressive dogmatism and irrationality, there is a real debate to be had about the importance of socioeconomic and political equality, that I think people want to get to; but they mostly get swept up in the first category with the common satirical image of the 21st century progressive that they don't want to be associated with.

Race will always be a dead end that will lead nowhere, if you want to use it as a proxy for trying to attain some level of material equality with another group.

Diversity or equity? Pick one. They're basically antonyms.

I think you'll find it agreeable that diversity without the dogmatism (and in particular the virulent progressive strain of it) is a good thing, and a certain amount of it is necessary for a healthy and functioning society. The same can be said for equality as well. But, I reject your dichotomy as a false dilemma. I think the research bears out the notion that greater levels of equality, or rather the lack of inequality if the former is too politically charged, leads to better overall outcomes. Saying this as a far-right leaning person myself doesn't necessarily make me uncomfortable either. Liberals not leftists have a monopoly on terms like diversity and equality.

The research is written by people with an agenda. The US has both more "inequality" and better overall outcomes than the rest of the western world, which argues against that rather strongly. Same for "diversity"; lots of research up and down swears diverse teams do better, then we look around and we find homogeneous teams which did really extraordinary things.

I'm all for being skeptical of motivated reasoning, but I'm not a priori dismissive of a body of research that does exist, that seems to lend to support for more equitable societies being healthier. I'm aware of absolutely 'no' research, save for somebody pointing it out to me, that suggests less equitable societies have lower rates of crime, poverty, life satisfaction, etc.

Your last point is interesting to me. I'm not even aware of a reputable institution that claims diverse teams do better. That is if my understanding of "diverse" is calibrated to mean the same thing I think you're implying.

I'm all for being skeptical of motivated reasoning, but I'm not a priori dismissive of a body of research that does exist, that seems to lend to support for more equitable societies being healthier.

That term "healthier" isn't well defined and is generally used to hide circular definitions (the research will include in its definition something which is equivalent to inequality itself). The people pushing this can generate as much research as they care to.

Your last point is interesting to me. I'm not even aware of a reputable institution that claims diverse teams do better. That is if my understanding of "diverse" is calibrated to mean the same thing I think you're implying.

The business journals are full of such claims, so I think you just don't consider that field reputable (as indeed you should not)

Well I can't confess to being well read on any business journals, so unfortunately I can't comment on them. If your remark is meant more generally to gesture in the direction of pointing out how much garbage is littered throughout the social sciences, this isn't pointing out anything researchers haven't known for a long time. I deal with it quite regularly myself. That said, I don't see much opportunity to engage further with your remark, as it doesn't actually address any of the direct claims that are made. Not that I'm faulting you for it, I don't have much time to read books people throw at me either. But based on what I've read as highlighted above, this at least does pass the sniff test to me. I'll leave it to someone else to tear the data apart.

greater levels of equality

terms like diversity and equality

Nomenym didn't say "equality," they said equity, which is not the same thing. To quote a passage repeated in various places:

Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.

(Emphasis added.)

You can see how trying to equalize all outcomes between individuals and groups and increasing diversity are goals at tension, yes?

Nomenym didn't say "equality," they said equity, which is not the same thing. To quote a passage repeated in various places...

Fair enough. However I think my usage still converges with the point you're making quite well.

You can see how trying to equalize all outcomes between individuals and groups and increasing diversity are goals at tension, yes?

If by that you mean there are always innate and fragile fault lines that underlie the mutual cooperation and peaceful engagement of diverse groups, sure; I have no problem with that. Lee Kuan Yew (the founder of modern Singapore) thought race and religion were two of those things, which is why they required delicate social managing to keep the peace between diverse cultures and ethnic groups. So we know it can be done. Not saying it's easy. I'm not even saying it's always desirable. Only that it's possible.

I think you are missing the linchpin of the worldview, which is an axiomatic assumption that persistent group differences in outcomes can't be just, natural or accidental.

This isn't even true though, is it? Almost everyone knows that black people are faster sprinters, that Kenyans win marathons, etc...

People understand how genetics works, observe it in their own life, and comment about it frequently. There are almost no people who truly hold the absurd "tabula rosa" worldview.

It's all post-hoc rationalization. Social signalling comes first and then people work backward from that. They'll claim a tabula rosa viewpoint when pressed, but when the subject of which race has the biggest dongs comes up, they'll have a bad case of amnesia and revert back to the HBD thinking which they know to be true.

This why you can't convince any of these people with correct arguments about HBD. It's not about HBD. They already believe in HBD! It's about social signalling, and by saying politically incorrect things you are being impolite and low status.

I don't think that most of them are consciously deceiving others by secretly believing in HBD but not admitting it. Many of them simply never think about any kind of HBD to begin with. They have literally never noticed that most of the best sprinters are ethnically African. Others have noticed HBD when it comes to physical skills, but have literally never thought of the idea of applying it to intelligence or behavior. And there are some others who have thought of applying it to intelligence or behavior but have decided that it does not apply. Which is not even necessarily such a crazy decision to make. I personally think that, while, HBD is definitely somewhat applicable to intelligence and behavior, the arguments in favor of it are not as air-tight as many people around here believe. For example, typical HBD views do not neatly explain how the Germans went from having no scientific achievements or large-scale civilization around the year 0 AD to being world leaders in math and science, living in one of the world's most complex and organized civilizations, by about 1900 AD, and they do not explain why I should assume that black people will not be able to do the same thing at some point.

They have literally never noticed that most of the best sprinters are ethnically African.

They obviously notice. A sprinter like Dafne Schippers got a lot more attention because she won despite being 'different.'

I don't think that most people think about Kenyan runners at all, but if they do, they can surely also chalk this up to something non-genetic like life in some parts of Africa just happening to involve really good running training.

tabula rosa

A... pink slate?

This is why you can't convince

You mostly can't convince religious people with correct arguments either; if they (or, more commonly, their children) are persuaded at all, it is usually precisely by status gradients. To the extent your argument works for progressive antiracism being fake, it seems that it would do likewise for religions - but then that fakeness is surely moot, since smart people have lived, killed and died for it in droves.

A... pink slate?

Lol. My bad.

To the extent your argument works for progressive antiracism being fake, it seems that it would do likewise for religions - but then that fakeness is surely moot, since smart people have lived, killed and died for it in droves.

Great analogy. Wokism is similar to a religion in many ways. The beliefs of wokists are fake. Similarly, the religious disputes between Protestants and especially Catholics during the Wars of Religion was fake as well. Do you think the average person cared about doctrinal disputes? Of course not. They might have pretended to care. But not enough to actually learn enough about religion to adequately explain the differences. These were, after all, mostly illiterate people.

So why were they fighting? Tribalism.

A… pink slate?

”Man is born gay, and yet everywhere they are marrying their beards.”

Almost everyone knows that black people are faster sprinters, that Kenyans win marathons, etc...

I think you'd be surprised how many people simply wouldn't even get that far. I've been told by a lot of people that it simply has to do with the elevations of those runners' countries of origins or something. That's all it takes to wave it away, and if that fails, they can always just suss out that you're trying to prove a broader wrongthink narrative, AKA "arguing in bad faith."

Many people won't even believe that male and female humans have different physical performance in sports for any reason but different socialization. Whether they were thinking backwards is an irrelevant question now, because the firmware is now complete and they just have trouble accepting genetic differences being real in general.

Many people won't even believe that male and female humans have different physical performance in sports for any reason but different socialization.

While I find this plausible, I haven’t seen this myself. Could you link me to any actual instances of this argument being made non-ironically?

One time I got into an argument with a woman who would not concede that men have a higher sex drive.

I've seen that on Reddit (from men, even!) and it makes me laugh every time. Granted, it's Reddit so what would one expect, but still. I've seen more than one person unironically try to turn "men have a higher sex drive than women" into "haha these loser virgins think women don't have any sex drive". It's so bizarre that they are dedicated to denying what every generation prior accepted as a basic fact of life (that while women want sex, on average they don't want it nearly as much as men do).

I obviously don't have a transcript, but I've had this argument with my sister many times. She's even gone so far as to deny that men become more muscular than women when both lift weights.

I have dated several girls who refused to believe there are any innate differences between men and women. To the point of melting down a bit when they tried to play wrestle with me and discovered that their exercise regimen of an hour at the gym every day doing cardio and weights was no match for my exercise regimen of lying on the couch every night inhaling chips ahoy.

The Williams sisters at the height of their career versus the 203rd ranked tennis player was a big eye opener for me, he smoked them both with basically no issue.

"Height of their career" is not accurate, neither had won a major title at that stage. They were emerging players. I think Serena was 17 at the time.

Not to say the result would have changed if they had played a few years later, but still.

Invite her on here.

Sorry bro, she's married.

Many people won't even believe that male and female humans have different physical performance in sports for any reason but different socialization.

In my subjective experience here in Sweden this has almost entirely gone away. It used to be fairly prevalent in the late 90s/00s but then both statistics and young teenage boys comfortably beating elite professional women over and over again got media attention and the narrative went away.

Counterpoint: I live in an extremely progressive-dominated part of the US but in over ten years of having lived here, despite the fact that I am more politically outspoken in a heteredox way than the average person around me, I can count on one hand the number of times that I have ever talked with a person who seemed to see everything through the lens of race and white/POC or who made a fuss about my political opinions.

Leftists tend to overestimate how white supremacist America is, for sure, no doubt about that. But I would say that critics of leftism sometimes overestimate how radical the average leftist or progressive is.

To be fair, I think that I have only stepped foot on a university campus like twice in the last ten years, so I don't know, maybe I'm out of touch with how radical things have gotten at those places.

I was the same, until I got involved in some political activism groups. The people who see things this way may be a small minority of the overall population, but are dramatically overrepresented in certain places.

Left-wing conspiracy theories—or at least this one—have been polished by the mainstream media and intelligentsia. If you engage in a deep discussion disagreeing with this conspiracy theory, you could lose friends, family members, or even your job. It's what you are told to believe and incentivized to believe, so, of course, many are going to accept it. Also, what's so bad about the belief? At worst, you're just sacrificing to help out people who were harmed; your standard of living might drop a little, but it's worth it to alleviate the incredible suffering of others. That there are people who are genocidal towards whites is just a conspiracy theory...

I think Moldbug said something along the lines of 'if there are millions of casual, part-time witch-hunters and inquisitors all going on about how much they hate and want to kill witches, then the country doesn't have a witch problem. On the other hand, if the moment anyone comes out to complain about sorcery and they're immediately turned into a newt...'

The answer is simple. What you are starting to notice the lies that underpin the whole secular progressive worldview.

You're expecting social constructs and conflicts to abide by inductive logic when they don't.

You're expecting IQ scores and educational attainment to be proxies for intelligence and rational behavior when they are not.

You're trying to assign value based on identity only to realize that the whole concept of identity is incoherent.

You're starting to notice "the leviathan-shaped hole", and you are starting (if only just starting) to become red pilled.

You know why white nationalists are hated don't you? Because they are losers. Look at who they seek to emulate, the Nazis? don't make me laugh. The Antebellum South? as much as it might pain some of my long-dead ancestors to hear me say this, that dog wont hunt. Like I said losers. Now imagine the most stereotypically racist, and toxically masculine, man that you can. Sheriff Buford T. Justice himself transplanted into the modern day. Now ask yourself what does white nationalism and the dissident right have to offer such a man that he can't get for a better price elsewhere. Why would a man like Sheriff Buford T. Justice want to associate himself with a self-loathing Hollywood Jew like Steve Sailer? or the cavalcade of faggots, furries, and perverts that follow him?

You can try appealing to academic consensus but academia is a progressive feminist bastion and Sheriff Buford T. Justice is suspicious of your fancy city talk.

You can try appealing to strait Nietzsche "will to power" nonsense but Sheriff Buford T. Justice is a god-fearing man.

You can try appealing to simple racism and this plan might just succeed but Sheriff Buford T. Justice, being a southern man, will be sure to point out that not all niggers are black.

self-loathing Hollywood Jew like Steve Sailer?

Sailer isn't Jewish. Fuentes supporters were wilding recently on twitter with accusing everyone of being Jewish, and as a joke most everyone who wasn't with them started saying they're actually Jewish..

So, a meme.

Now ask yourself what does white nationalism and the dissident right have to offer such a man that he can't get for a better price elsewhere. Why would a man like Sheriff Buford T. Justice want to associate himself with a self-loathing Hollywood Jew like Steve Sailer? or the cavalcade of faggots, furries, and perverts that follow him?

Elsewhere? Where are the non-explicitly white nationalist communities that would offer what a 1970s comedy movie character would want? Where are these 'winners' upholding the West's heritage shamelessly?

Where are these 'winners' upholding the West's heritage shamelessly?

All around for those who have the eyes to look.

  • -14

Responding universally to questions about specifics is not exactly a good way to convince people that something exists. "Where's energy? It's all around us maaan."

Come on, at least give three examples. Better yet ones that you wouldn't dismiss as being ridiculous failures.

At this point the only people I see who are taking the Western canon seriously are all fringe pessimists that have long given up on political solutions and are writing about it in the past tense.

Responding universally to questions about specifics is not exactly a good way to convince people that something exists. "Where's energy? It's all around us maaan."

You're not wrong, and yet at the same time how else am I supposed to answer? Dude might as well be asking where all the non-pozzed girls are, the answer is "not where you're looking."

Dude might as well be asking where all the non-pozzed girls are, the answer is "not where you're looking."

That can't possibly be a fair comparison.

People who would uphold the West's heritage shamelessly should be easy to find, as they would fly their colors high. On the other hand non-pozzed girls have no incentive to publicize their virtue, as modesty is a central aspect of being 'non-pozzed', by opposition with OnlyFans or Twitch performers.

So if I'm not looking in the right place for people who are both pro-traditional Western values and proud to display them, where am I supposed to look? Is there a British Empire going around colonizing the world I just haven't noticed?

Why would a man like Sheriff Buford T. Justice want to associate himself with a self-loathing Hollywood Jew like Steve Sailer? or the cavalcade of faggots, furries, and perverts that follow him?

The much larger cavalcade of "faggots, furries, and perverts" on the other side seems to have quite a following, so those chartacteristics fail to be distinguishers.

Basically what @slothlikesamwise said.

That there is a more popular cavalcade to the left doesn't mean he has to join the one standing next to it.

They are distinctives within the right tho, he doesn't have to choose the left but merely not this one faction.

a self-loathing Hollywood Jew like Steve Sailer?

Steve Sailer is not Jewish. His ancestors were primarily Swiss. He has discussed this numerous times. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?

He may not follow the Jewish faith, but his mother's Jewish and in a bio-deterministic world that would make him Jewish.

Meanwhile in a non bio-deterministic world, I think that rubbing elbows with producers and being a member of that culture should be enough to mark one as "a Hollywood Jew".

That said @2rafa correctly points out that Ronald Unz would have been a better example. That's on me for not really paying attention to who's-who in the WigNat/dissident blue tribe.

his mother's Jewish

I have never heard this before. Would you happen to have a way for me to confirm that handy?

but his mother's Jewish

Is she? This is genuinely the first I’m hearing of that. Where did you find that info? A cursory search turned up no results for that claim.

That's on me for not really paying attention to who's-who in the WigNat/dissident blue tribe.

You already know what I’m going to say. This seems like Example #846 of you making a bold claim about a figure in your outgroup, and then having to walk it back when someone points out that you made it up or mixed up two completely different people. You keep claiming to have some valuable insight into what makes your outgroup tick, and yet so often your statements about them are not only wrong, but are directly contradicted by reality. You don’t know anything of value about the people you’re talking about, which might be why you have to keep making things up about them.

Where do you find that Steve Sailer’s mother is Jewish?

Given his other comment about “rubbing elbows with producers” - something which I also don’t think Steve Sailer does or has ever done - I’m almost wondering if he has mixed up Sailer with David Cole. They do both write weekly columns for Taki.

I already admitted that I should have used Unz as an example instead of Sailer but there is there no "confusion" here at all. The entire Takismag crew is composed of degenerates.

No, there literally is confusion because you have mixed up two different individuals, attributing to one of them things which are true of the other one. You appear to have been thinking of David Cole, but saying Steve Sailer. None of your criticisms of the one even remotely apply to the other. You can’t tell the difference between them, because you are too lazy and too obstinate to even attempt to develop a cursory understanding of a topic on which you nevertheless continue to opine very confidently. The next time you post another screed about how you understand the Dissident Right than we understand ourselves, I do hope that people will take a moment to recall that you can’t even be bothered to get the basics correct.

I don't think it's certain, but he's apparently adopted and believed as of 2002 that one of his biological parents is Jewish:

Personally, having been raised in Los Angeles a continent and a generation removed from the 1948 Trotskyist vs. Stalinist squabbling at CCNY that obsesses some prominent neoconservatives to this day, all this NYC in-fighting seems a little remote to me. I have one foot in all three camps (I guess that makes me a campstool): I'm Catholic; I've always assumed I'm biologically half-Jewish (I'm adopted); and I'm an Anglophile and an admirer of WASP culture. So, I wish everyone well.

How interesting, truly some archival Sailer deep lore.

Yes, Sailer isn’t Jewish and also isn’t antisemitic by the standards of the dissident right, I suppose he has a minor Paleocon ‘noticing’ thing, but he’s more aligned with Murray and Hernnstein than with MacDonald.

Unz is probably the best example of a self-hating openly Jewish person on the DR, essentially uncritically believing and arguing that every single thing that went wrong in the 20th century West was the primary fault of Jewish people.

Why not try to emulate Israel? They seem like winners not losers.

Why not try to emulate Israel?

Ahh the old "To defeat the Zionist we must become the Zionist" gambit. ;-)

I can think of numerous ways in wich I would like to see the US become more like Israel, but I don't think the BAP-reading RETVRN types are going to like what I have in mind.

Why are we defeating zionists again?

Excellent question.

Hlynka will have a good reason for why Israeli Jews have an interest in their identity, don't worry.

I’ve never gotten the impression that he has a particular fondness for Jews or Israelis, he just doesn’t hate them for HBD reasons specifically. His is almost a kind of Marxian antisemitism, largely cultural.

He is philosemitic, certainly. He thinks people who advocate for white people are losers because "whole concept of identity is incoherent", but it turns out he has a lot of respect for Jews who identify as belonging to a tribe which claims to have been literally chosen by God as God's favorite people. It's a deep contradiction of Hlynka but it isn't his fault per se, he is properly interpreting his own religion which does demand this exact contradiction.

His is almost a kind of Marxian antisemitism, largely cultural.

It's entirely cultural. I actually have a lot of respect for the practicing Jew who actually tries to keep to the covenant and the sabbath. After all, there but for the grace of God go I.

My antipathy is more for a certain sort that seems to treat their status as a member of the chosen/anointed as a substitute for virtue. To paraphrase Ian Malcom, "you have all this power and knowledge, but it didn't require any discipline to attain it, and now you want to sell it, you want to sell it".

Ironically Marx himself is one of the more quintessential examples of the type.

Frequent_Anybody2984 misses the other, equally important side of the equation, which is the conservatives who are so deranged that, even in the face of all these progressive aggressions which you have mentioned, they will still join the Progressive chorus of hateful denunciation of anybody who advocates for the interests of white people. Hlynka in particular is interesting, because he relates white nationalists to progressivism whereas Hlynka himself is better than any progressive at regurgitating the progressive-approved denunciations of the radical idea of advocating for the interests of white people in the face of the patterns of facts you have laid out.

Hlynka himself mentioned being "red pilled", the actual red pill is that Hlynka is playing his role which has been laid out for him within our progressive paradigm perfectly. The left is anti-white, the mainstream conservatives are also anti-white, that's the red-pill, and Hlynka's strong knee-jerk reaction against the idea of advocating for white Americans is proof of that. He's on the same side of progressives on that question, even as the demographic profile of the country radically changes at a historically unprecedented rate, you can rely on Hlynka being there to strongly inform you that you are a loser if you care about white Americans.

The left aint "anti-white" they're Anti-West. White is not a skin color it is a state of mind which is how guys like Tim Scott, Clarence Thomas, and Larry Elder end up being labeled as "white nationalists" by the LA Times.

You're trying to assign value based on identity only to realize that the whole concept of identity is incoherent.

Is it really, or is it just the way it's practiced here in the west? In much of the rest of the world, it's taken for granted and assumed. When LGBT organizers took to the streets in Russia and were banned, much to the collective butthurt of those in the west, it only became an issue here because the wrong identity was the losing side of an issue. Identity is just coalition politics.

I have always felt that Paul Graham captured the modern concept of identity quite well. I can understand calling it incoherent, meaning confusing, in how people argue about it, often holding incompatible or contradictory views. That people try to game social status around the concept of identity does not really speak to the usefulness of identity as a concept when reasoning about the world for any given individual.

Is it really, or is it just the way it's practiced here in the west?

Yes it is. The entire concept of identity as it is popularly described and understood amongst secular progressive types is a load of functionally incoherent nonsense. Not only that, it actively degrades the individual's ability to read and understand social dynamics.

I would even go so far as to contend that; if people were to start approaching identity as a simple political/religious affiliation and not something that has anything to do with the "lived experience" or "intrinsic qualities of" the identified, that this would represent a substantial improvement over the current status quo.

That doesn't really disagree with my statement, I think. Certainly the way it's practiced by American progressives, I agree it's incoherent and a lot of nonsense. But that's a far cry from saying identity itself is bs. And granting as much, it's what human beings do regardless, so I'd say it's better off figuring how how to channel and deal with it than overcome it.

I do not think that it is "a far cry" at all. I think that this is one of the places where the "leviathan-shaped hole" in the discourse is most manifest. There are effectively two mutually exclusive and contradictory concepts of "identity" that currently exist in the same space. That within the identifier and that of the identified. Assuming the goal is to understand, we'd be better off tabooing "identity" entirely.

Assuming the goal is to understand, we'd be better off tabooing "identity" entirely.

I think the practical hope for something like this leaves so much to be desired that it's not even worth spending any political capital over it. We could already count the number of problems that lack otherwise realistic political and economic solutions, but for the fact that people can't find any common agreement or consensus to identify their own self-interest with the importance of the issue at hand. And I think torpedoing things like Christianity or Nationalism doesn't help a civil society in the long run.

People have an identity, whether they want to admit it or not. Societies carry a national identity, the ones that don't, don't exist. There's no such thing as an individual without a history, lineage, common language, ethnicity, whatever else have you. It's a fantasy to believe otherwise. What does lacking an identity leave you with that's superior to a person who has one?

People have an identity, whether they want to admit it or not. Societies carry a national identity, There's no such thing as an individual without a history, lineage, common language, ethnicity, whatever else have you.

Yes, and this is precisely why the liberal fetish for emancipation is so destructive. Having rejected all deeper connections they are left with nothing but the superficial, and thus find themselves embracing social atomization.

The alternative, of course, being subjection to those of higher status they are connected to. Aside from "be the patriarch in the patriarchy", there's no good solution.

Would it be accurate to say that one of the things that makes it incoherent is that they think Identity is intrinsic, not chosen?

I think a good chunk of the incoherency comes from trying to have it both ways.

IE wanting to treat chosen qualities as intrinsic and intrinsic qualities as chosen. Contrast the whole trans-women in sports debate with a senescent white male threatening to take away Mee-Maw's black card if she doesn't vote for him.

Sooner or later something has to give.

I agree with you even though I don’t agree with racism. Politics is simply social power. And the vast majority of people really don’t have thought out positions on issues, they follow whatever the powerful people around them (elders, bosses, authority figures, teachers and professors) tell them that good, honest, hardworking people believe. This is why issues like minimum wage get terrible traction— the only people who care are people who get paid hourly. Trade unions are a non-starter because wanting one is coded working class, uneducated, poor, and hated by the political elite and businesses. Hence people won’t allow themselves to favor them, and would be offended if someone suggested they need one for their office. Go down the list of any issue, and the difference between things that are popular and unpopular is the power of people holding that position.

This is why issues like minimum wage get terrible traction— the only people who care are people who get paid hourly.

This doesn't seem true. Talking about raising the minimum wage and wealth inequality is popular amongst the nytimes reading PMC

Yeah but there’s a reason the federal minimum wage didn’t change much for decades and had its maximum purchasing power in 1968… they don’t actually care that much.

I mean, except the highest minimum wage is in the most left-leaning places in the US. The US minimum wage hasn't raised nationally, because of right-leaning congresspeople.

Related h/t @ymeskhout

This guy is talking about "leftism" as a shibboleth for what I would call radical progressive. People who call themselves "leftists" and hate "libs". Literally abolish the police, end capitalism, Portland / Seattle Black Bloc.

In the above essay, the author is a former leftist examining the pathology that leads to minimizing Hamas atrocities. The latent desire in American leftism to Fuck Shit Up needs a dastardly target to excuse its behavior.

I don't think there is much difference between leftists and libs. The online leftists who hate libs more or less agree with them on almost everything. They pretend to take edgy positions because they aren't actually trying to get elected or affect change, but if they actually ran for office they would be pretty much the same. Look at people on /r/stupidpol who call communists who support trans stuff and identity politics liberals. It's just leftists shit flinging like the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front scene in Life of Brian.

I feel like the core of 'liberalism' is holding principled positions, specifically with regard to crushing people who disagree with you, the Liberal Wisdom is, there are in fact bad tactics.

The progressive liberal conflict, is that progressives think appealing to principles is just a tool of the oppressor, no bad tactics, only bad targets.

The leftist liberal conflict, is socialism/communism vs redistributive capitalism.

This is how I understand these terms in the context of American, and to a lesser extent, Western politics in general.

I’m a liberal and a centrist, and I’ve heard the exact same argument from leftists, but reversed, in that I’m basically a fascist because I support capitalism, am against identity politics, quotas, unrestricted immigration, and am geopolitically pro-Western.

I'm saying the opposite and that most "communists" in the USA (and socialists too like the DSA) are essentially just liberals

There are obviously major ideological differences between DEI capitalists who vote Biden and actual Leninists or Black Bloc anarchists who want to guillotine rich people (including many of the previously mentioned group) ASAP. That’s like saying both sides in the Cold War had the same ideology. Both may have been descended from the same kind of Hegelian narrative, and ultimately from enlightenment ideas about progress, but they weren’t the same.

Stupidpol is just white male leftists who prioritize their interests in the leftist coalition over those of the queer leftists, radfems, third worldists, ethnic minorities and other groups on the far left.

It looks like inconsequential infighting to you because you're distant from it.

Your own disagreements with other people to the right of Mao look like inconsequential infighting to them.

Indeed it's a well documented fact that fascists, liberals and communists all think the other two are basically identical.

The truth is that politics is a great deal more complicated than a discrete amount of ideological groups vying for power.

Necro alert!

Indeed it's a well documented fact that fascists, liberals and communists all think the other two are basically identical.

This is hilarious and too true. Saving for future reference.

The truth is that politics is a great deal more complicated than a discrete amount of ideological groups vying for power.

Indeed, let this be our weekly reminder that Identity Politics makes people stupid.

Differences though there may be, I think there's something to be said of the fact that, for whatever reason, liberals seem to hold that the person saying "liberals get the bullet too"/"Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds" is their dear friend, and they seem quick to circle the wagons to defend radical leftists who hate their guts.

Liberals seem to be under the impression that the radical leftist is a strawman, that these people are just the same as them, save for maybe being a bit more energized, and that they are having their words distorted. This phenomenon is probably why conservatives say they're the same people. Liberals are all too eager to see anyone anti-right as an ideological ally. See: sanewashing, as with "defund the police." "These fellows seem to agree with me, being upstanding anti-rightists. Surely their words and movement are being unfairly mischaracterized." clueless.png

From what I see, liberals don't think communists are fascists, they either think they're fellow liberals, or flat out don't believe they exist, that they're just an exaggeration used to malign regular old liberals. (Which, to be fair, does happen, and might be their primary exposure to these radical ideas.)

I'm reminded of the Muslim suicide bomber's parents who said that they didn't know their son had become so religious as though that were the inevitable consequence. There is a sense in which leftists are just liberals that take the liberal's ideology seriously, and so liberals have no real textual defence against leftists. When a leftist takes them to task on an issue, they might have pragmatic objections but they can't argue the principle.

I’d say most liberals would argue that there’s no imminent risk of capitalism being abolished or overthrown in the modern west and that the actual far left is a vanishingly small and powerless group of irrelevant people who occasionally smash Starbucks or Chase Bank windows during G20 protests or whatever. It’s not like the denizens of CHAZ were going to take over Amazon or assassinate Bill Gates.

When liberals are actually threatened by the far left it tends to be more of a mixed result.

I’d say most liberals would argue that there’s no imminent risk of capitalism being abolished

That's not relevant. You can take a cultural issue, and the same dynamics will appear - "no one is performing gender surgeries on minors", "CRT is just a continuation of the Civil Rights movement", "feminism is just about equality between men and women". I suppose they try to deploy they same sort of dismissive "there's no imminent risk of X being abolished" argument here too, but it's a bit of a harder sell, when all the top institutions are pushing the radical messages that are supposedly strawmen.

Well no, because beyond deciding who gets into Harvard the far left does have a central, overriding goal, larger than all else, which is a revolutionary abolition of the “capitalist mode of production” ie private property. And again they don’t seem close to this in practice. You can’t have Marxism without Marxian eschatology. CRT while extreme wealth inequality and billionaires exist isn’t the ultimate goal for them, or even a good stopgap measure.

I don't think so. If it was an overriding goal, we'd already have an economic-left + cultural-right coalition. As it stands even the "class reductionist" stupidpol leftists have to signal their disgust with "rightoids".

Their economic goals are at best secondary, and in the worst case opposite of what they publically claim.

From years of reading fact checking sites for my job, this seems true. Snopes liberals fend off right wing accusations implicating and sullying Antifa with incredible regularity. Meanwhile something like smiling Covington kid, Damore and other stores that take off on the right isn't really their beat.

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