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Personally, I consider myself alt-right. I consider TheMotte overall alt-right. Everything and anything can be the alt-right. The one group missing for the alt-right would be Neil Strauss - TheGame - and all the pick-up artists. The psychological insights merged with some writers and ended up on the manosphere which eventually lands you in the Proud Boy ideology.
I would consider the alt-right to be primarily the intellectual counter-arguments against the new elites ideology. So anything against modern feminism, blank-slate race views, woke, sjw, modern Marxism (ideology I would attach to blm).
I would consider the arguments Bill Ackman is making to attack Harvard and Dean Gay as fairly core alt-right arguments.
I also would agree that the left successfully labeled the alt-right as literally the KKK so it’s a dead label. But how I understood the term in 2014-2020 would have been the intellectuals of the right against modern leftists assumptions while dropping the religious arguments of the rest of the right.
The alt-right often uses evolutionary biology arguments to replicate the views of the traditional conservatives on a broad swath of ideas/policies.
I never would have associated the old school kkk types as alt-right because they were in fact old-school and old-arguments.
Interesting. Our foundation is supposed to be
From "Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle" by Scott Alexander:
Same phenomenon you see in r/PoliticalCompassMemes. In fact, "Seven Zillion Witches" was considered as one of the possible names for what would eventually become The Motte, though I can't find the thread right now.
The alternative explanation would be that HBD and PUA are correct, so any place which allows uncensored discussion of those topics will eventually convince people to believe in them, and believing in HBD and PUA is sufficient to qualify as alt-right.
The only problem with the PUAs are the absolute degeneracy of it all. They are half-right about a certain group of young materialistic women. A good chunk of the alt-right as it exists rejects the PUA community on grounds of degeneracy.
I'm referring more to the epistemic aspects of PUA than the instrumental ones. As long as you agree with the PUAs about female nature, you are off the reservation even if your response looks more like "make women property again" than "enjoy the decline".
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No, the alternative explanation would be that progressives are less willing to put up with crimethink for the sake of a good discussion than others. ‘Any uncensored online discussion inevitably becomes far-right’ is not an accurate description; any uncensored online space becomes full of things that are generally considered offensive, and racial slurs are one of those things, which shapes the tenor of political discussions there but, you know, 4chan is still mostly porn. It’s just that porn drives the far right out less than racism drives the left out.
As far as the motte goes, we have people preaching very offensive things here. There’s the pedofascist guy, our resident neo-Nazi, and then the bevy of white nationalists and hardcore misogynists. This drives out progressives because they’re used to seeing such things censored; right wingers don’t seem to mind as much.
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He gave you a fairly good softball pitch for this posts.
I wrote a short reply and deleted when I saw you did it better but it was well set-up to just link to Scott.
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Yes, if you found your space on Free Speech you'll attract seven zillion witches. And if you ban witches on sight you won't.
But that post doesn't say that those are the only possible options, probably because slatestarcodex.com was a clear alternative where discourse across the political spectrum occurred all the time.
So yes, the fact that TheMotte became "alt-right" was entirely predictable, but no, it was not inevitable.
Discourse across the political spectrum given that the really contentious issues are not broached. Freedom to discuss only matters as far as you apply it to topics that make your blood boil and no, SSC did not have a solution for that.
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And was then nuked from orbit, or at least Manhattan. Q.E.D.
QED what? Make sure your mods are anonymous?
If you're implying that you've demonstrated "it's impossible to have a healthy community with diverse viewpoints", then I disagree.
Making the mods anonymous doesn't work. SSC stayed together because the community -- both leftists and rightists, but especially leftists -- trusted Scott as moderator. So leftists flouncing out because there were too many witches (as has happened over on Data Secrets Lox) didn't happen. An anonymous moderator couldn't really achieve that.
Agree to disagree I guess. I don’t think there is a lack of trust in our mods.
I trust that they honestly wish the foundation would actually happen. I trust that they’re doing their best to apply the rules impartially.
I just disagree with them that the rules, as they are actually enforced, will achieve the foundation.
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It didn’t get nuked, the NYT doxxed him and he got scared and pulled the plug. There’s an alternate universe where it’s still going in the original.
Perhaps the type of people that would want to host a healthy community with diverse viewpoints, keeping away crazy radicals, are also those for whom the prospect of getting named and shamed by the NYT is a serious deterrent?
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Organizing places where heretics can discuss their views unhampered is itself heretical.
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The label is defunct, sure, but I don’t think the label makes a scene any more than a uniform does. The alt-right describes a scene associated with a memeplex. Some ideas are more core to the scene than others, but I don’t think you’re required to believe everything in that memeplex to be considered at least adjacent to the alt-right.
Nationalism, traditionalism, capitalism and to some degree ethnic nationalism (for whites even if not white) seem to be the big four of the memeplex. And while not everyone is going to buy into the entire thing, most will agree on those 4 points, and have at least a healthy respect for evolutionary psychology. If you’re there, you’re part of that scene whether you admit it or not, or whether you choose a different label.
It seems that a lot of them ended up in the Republican Party and are having at least some impact on the platform.
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he is the opposite of the alt-right. The alt-right would hate him and Gay. There is nothing inherently alt-right about exposing a plagiarism scandal that undermines the integrity of a left-wing institution.
The reason I am including Ackman as alt-right adjacent is because he’s basically a Jew whose realizing Great Replacement Theory is being applied to his group now. Jews have become white and the oppressors in the oppressed-oppressor ideology of the left.
3 of the prior 4 Harvard Presidents were Jewish. The fourth I can’t figure out but her husband is Rosenberg and that sounds Jewish to me. The current President is an obvious affirmative action hire whose a full bred black women of color (though of course not ADOS and appears her family is wealthy). Maybe I’m confusing dissident right with alt-right and just combining them but a lot of his tweeting just sounds like the stuff lower class whites have been complaining about for two decades. And I’ve seen things where Harvard is trying to lower Jewish representation at Harvard.
Yes the Charlottesville people wouldn’t have hated him since they did chant the Jews will not replace us but in the 2020’s they are finding themselves similarly situated.
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Generally speaking, I despise the right as much as I despise the left, so it would be pretty funny for me to be considered alt-right. Rejecting wokism does not necessarily make someone right-wing.
The only use I have for social conservatives is for them to be a counterweight that balances out radical leftists and prevents those from seizing a hegemonic position of power. I would much prefer some kind of different counterweight, since I fundamentally disagree with social conservatives about almost everything other than simple matters of fact, but you have to work with what you have.
If somebody wrote an accurate book about the evolution of the pick-up-artist scene and then the manosphere, I would read it. From what I remember, the original pick-up-artist scene, up until the early 2010s I would say, was pretty a-political. It was results-oriented. Figure out what gets you laid and do it. No whining. No excuses that would stop you from taking action. You'd be called a keyboard jockey and mocked if you just sat around complaining about what women are like or about politics.
The manosphere, on the other hand, has a lot of whining about how women should be different than what they are, how politics is against men, etc.
I can certainly see how the manosphere is in part derived from the pick-up-artist scene, but it is interesting that it became so different in a fundamental way.
The manosphere was pretty much a loose knit movement for the promotion of men's interests that rose in reaction to the dominance of feminism in the social and political zeitgeist.
The knowledge was spread around the internet but didnt really reach critical mass until the Eternal Summer brought enough normies online to create larger communities. It coalesced around forums and blog comments and sometimes branched out into real life meetups (although this was largely only a PUA thing with the rise of 'lairs' in major cities).
The manosphere acknowledged modern female behaviour (and its facilitating cultural attitudes and legislation) as a problem, but the answer to the problem is where they differed.
Mens rights activists wanted the rights of men renegotiated in light of the new deal that feminism had negotiated for women. Things like creating a presumption of shared custody of children in the event of a divorce, legal paternal surrender and the end of alimony.
The PUAs wanted to exploit the sexual revolution to extract sex and companionship from women, generally (but not always) without engaging in relationships which would expose them to feminist laws (like defacto relationship laws splitting wealth after a period of cohabitation)
The Men Go Their Own Way crowd generally just shrugged their shoulders and wanted to minimise their engagement with women. This group was made up of sour grape incels, but also men thay had legitimately had horrible experiences with women and the legal system (divorce raped of assets and child custody for instance).
On top of this there were trad men (eg Dalrock's blog) promoting traditional relationships, as well as the rise of The Red Pill which promoted a 'realist' approach to modern female behaviour.
The manosphere eventually declined for a variety of reasons as others have said. For instance, PUA generally died a slow death as dating apps tòok hold of the sexual marketplace and live venues declined as a place women went to be available for casual sex.
Many of the manosphere ideologies remain perrenial though and will continue to be repackaged by modern influencers (eg Andrew Tate pushing Red Pill ideology).
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I can't speak for the pick-up artists scene, but the manosphere finally found it's outlet on the Internet for a lot of pent up anger and frustration that's been building up for decades now. For those who were born a decade or two shy of the millennium, many of the people I saw around my neighborhood grew up the first fruits of the generation of burn your bra and women's liberation after their decisive cultural victory in the 60's, and knew of no other mentality. Those people then became parents.
I 'frequently' saw households full of children growing up that resented and hated their mothers, weak fathers who found themselves unable to evoke some much needed harsh discipline on their daughters, and general domestic politics in the household that were a non-stop battlefield for all the people living there. Now that generation of kids have grown up and the Internet is now available for their voices. I assure you, the manosphere didn't arrive out of nowhere. It's been bubbling up for a 'long' time. What you're hearing now I remember hearing and seeing before the Internet even went fully commercial.
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Fathers' rights groups and men's advocacy groups have existed for decades. They may have been marginal and small, but they still existed. The online Manosphere, which is by now also largely gone due to multiple factors, mainly stems from them, and, I think, was mostly a reaction to feminist agitators consciously ramping up their culture war rhetoric after Obama became president.
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Is the PUA-scene still a thing?
My understanding of it was that the main message was: Go outside (touch grass), talk to as many women as possible and then you'll catch one or several. Wrapped up with some lingo, florid description, esoteric psychology, and with additional tips for managing multiple relationships/women. Nothing groundbreaking.
I think it did work for the average guy, until Tinder and other apps destroyed the market.
I would expect Covid to be the final nail, what with going outside literally being made illegal in many places.
I'm sure there are still coaches, but even back then it already seemed like too much effort, I can't imagine the sales speech to convince guys to make getting laid their 2nd job.
Online Dating optimization stuff does exist from what I've seen, but I think it's a bit more balkanized since there's more stuff like 'Profile coaching' and 'Profile photoshoots' as opposed to the more direct-line PUA stuff.
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You're right, it's pretty much dead, partially as a result of suppression by the mainstream.
Another aspect is that most of the PUA material the curious are familiar with was written before smartphone use became common among Western women, before Instagram, Facebook, TikTok etc. even existed, and as such, it is by now largely useless.
But I'd say the main factor responsible for the decline of PU Artistry is the combined effect of stringent laws around "enthusiastic consent", the #MeToo and #KillAllMen campaigns, plus (and I don't care how offensive this sounds) the general decline in the human quality of Western women, due to the spread of radfem views, the opioid epidemic, rising rates of alcoholism and prescription pill addiction, the normalization of fat acceptance and mental illness etc. In other words, the overall risk of engaging in PUA is rapidly rising, whereas the potential return on your investment is ever more marginal. Social reality cannot be ignored.
I mean, as long as there's an agreement on the decline of Western men as well.
What's happened is the end of the middle in both genders. People who would've been, to use the 1-10 scale, many, many 4-7's in 1985, and been perfectly happy either got fat, hooked on Oxy, stopped going outside, got hooked on the Internet or got absolutely ripped/in-shape doing yoga, can do much better makeup/dress better, and so on, and can be seen by more people because of social media. Like in many thing is in life, there's now much less of a middle.
Like, there are random side characters in CW dramas of both sexes that would've been top-tier heartthrobs in 1987.
I believe the sexes evolve in a tandem, basically, with the caveat that, due to the reality of hypergyny / female hypergamy, the behavior of the bottom 80% of men generally has negligible effect on women’s perceptions, at least in the short run, due to them being sexually invisible. When female quality declines, it has a demoralizing effect overall on all men who otherwise would make conscious or unconscious steps to get prepared for the role of the eligible husband. This, in turn, has a similar effect down the line on all women who would otherwise be open to assortative mating, which, obviously, in turn demotivates men even more etc. It’s no wonder we hear so many complaints, with mainstream society’s tacit approval, about there being so few eligible men around, especially in underclass communities. Well, duh. Back when the patriarchy existed, it basically functioned as a sort of life insurance policy for midwits and average people in general, by providing them with mates. Now this is gone, and the long-term consequences are visible.
On a different note, what is a "CW drama"?
Eh, this whole talk of 80% of men being sexually invisible is incel/PUA bullshit. Again, if you look at actual studies of this stuff, yeah, the top 20% are having a lot more sex, but it's with each other. Which hey, be jealous, but this hasn't really changed since the 60's when the Pill was invented. This idea of some random guy with a six-pack swiping right and banging a a homely girl with a low body count who'd be married to a normal nerdy guy if only society was framed differently, doesn't exist, except in very anecdotal evidence. 80% of people continue to have, I think, less than five partners lifetime and that's both sexes (so in that sense, 80% is invisible, but it's 80% of women too), and if we look at the kind of bad data set of the GSS, the percentage on younger people having sex is back to even between the genders after a few weird years probably caused in part by #MeToo backlash, younger single women being more COVID-averse, and frankly, probably some not great data.
I think what's happened in the middle is what has happened with both genders - there's easy access to entertainment that's better than dealing with a bad match. On the male side, why waste a night going out, buying women drinks, to end up with a girl who will be a dead fish in bed who you're not overly attracted too, than who will still either ghost you or be clingy, when you can play Baldur's Gate for 6 hours, then masturbate to high quality OnlyFans/amateur HD porn of any kink you have. On the female side, why waste going out, getting hit on by a bunch of weirdo and douchey guys, maybe end up going home with somebody who won't try for an orgasm or will only not last that long, and then either be really weirdo clingy or stalker-ish afterwards, when you can just watch six hours of Real Housewives, then pull up some Amazon Kindle smut and get off with a really high-quality sex toy?
As far as the CW goes, Second-tier network that was full of dramas full of pretty people - it was the home of Gossip Girl, Riverdale, all of the DC Comics superhero shows, Supernatural. If you were insanely good-looking but mediocre as an actor, it's where you ended up until recently when many of those shows ended due to a change in ownership. As another example, look at Hallmark Christmas movies - all very pretty people, many of whom are objectivally better looking than many celebrities were in the 70's and 80's, because they all do yoga, don't eat steak five times a week, don't smoke, et al, but they also aren't giant stars, the same way a relatively untalented, but very pretty person like say, Farrah Fawcett was in the 70's.
Well, yes - if you add a total of 4 rather important qualifiers to a single sentence, it's easy for it to be true. But it's also sort of irrelevant.
Anyway, let's clarify what words exactly mean here, because it seems to be necessary. "Sexually invisible" means "not noticed as an object of lust/desire", "not perceived as a sexual being", basically that women do not grok your existence as a sexual being. As a consequence, whatever amount of sex you do end up having, will be sex that is, in effect, transactional. That's what it means.
And if you tell me with a straight face that 80% of all women are sexually invisible, I won't even know what to tell you, and I won't bother to respond, because such a statement is that absurd.
And I still don't get what a "CW drama" is supposed to be. Anyway, if your argument is that overall beauty/hotness standards for American TV actors have risen as a result of, I suppose, the Sexual Revolution, than that is something that merits further discussion, I think, but frankly I see no visual evidence of such a trend. Then again, I may have my biases.
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I feel like this is just a haze of unrelated grievances rather than an actual cause of PUA dying.
By any metrics you're claiming, compared to the early 2000s, there hasn't been that much decline, it's been a slow downtrend since the 1960s at least.
Alcoholism hasn't really risen since the 1990s, pill addiction is present in a small minority of the population, 'fat acceptance' has little to do with the actual rise in obesity caused by diet which, itself, was already quite high in 2000, 'mental illness' is rising more as a consequence of greater prominence of diagnosis and therapy than anything else.
Ehhh. The laws around enthusiastic consent govern university campus standards for sexual assault, and are (as far as I can tell) not actually enforced enough to entirely change the culture.
note that I didn't address your points about #metoo or the smartphone and internet, which may or may not be true
I wasn’t referring to rates of alcoholism etc. overall, I was referring to rates among women, especially young/single women. And no, I definitely don’t believe that only a small minority of them are abusing prescription pills, anti-depressants etc.
Enthusiastic consent, as far as I know, is already state law in California and elsewhere. It doesn’t just apply to campuses, but even if it does, it doesn’t matter. Saying that it is “not actually enforced enough to entirely change the culture” is, pardon me, nothing but a cope, even if it’s technically true. It’s the cultural environment and signalling that matters. The hard fact is that the doctrine of enthusiastic consent is getting open and unilateral support by the priestly caste in mainstream culture, and any persecution of innocent men due to false allegations is treated as a negligible side effect.
Among women, it still seems to be decreasing?
I wouldn't put the % abusing pills above 10%? This site gives 5% in past 12 months.
I was only able to find laws in California about enthusiastic consent for college sexual harassment policies eg here. If it's the law for sexual assault in general I might be wrong, but what law specifically is that?
Well, we're discussing the material causes of the decline of the PUA scene, so I think the law has a lot less of a chance of causing the PUA scene to decline if it isn't enforced enough to matter. It can be somewhat taboo to do PUA stuff and it can still work.
Maybe I misremembered and the legal term is "affirmative consent" instead. Anyway, it isn't important.
The average citizen doesn't know how often and how severely any particular law is enforced. What is known is that legislation is also downstream from culture, so the very existence of such a law is definite proof of overall cultural trends.
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I am not sure how "suppressed" you can claim it is when there are still large communities and people still talking about it, even if mostly negatively.
No, it was already becoming played out before then.
I actually read Neil Strauss's The Game (published in 2005) and one of the things he describes towards the end is how over-franchised PUA material was, until women in all the hot spots like LA and Las Vegas were just openly laughing at PUAs because every dude was using the same sad routines and they all knew the game by now.
So you mean mainstream online feminists and their normie hangers-on, basically? Because that, i.e. when an entire cultural phenomenon (let's call it that) is only permitted to be openly discussed in mainstream culture (without repercussions like cancelling, that is) only by culture warriors dedicated to, or at least sympathetic to, its suppression, delegitimisation, cancellation and banishment, is how social suppression normally works.
No, I mean pretty much everyone except the PUA community. If a "cultural movement" is widely unpopular, it may be because there is some vast feminist media conspiracy against it, or it may be that it's...unpopular, because of the people in it.
That's not how any culture has ever worked.
PUA isn't a culture. It's a movement. Why are hippies or feminists or Nazis or Democrats or furries unpopular with a lot of people?
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I feel the same way. I hate the left and the right (although I hate the left more, mostly just because I'm surrounded by them, and therefore they're in my face all the time with values contrary to mine that I can't openly argue against). However, I do believe that most leftists these days, at least, would believe that rejecting wokism is enough to make you alt-right. They may not even say it in those words exactly, but if you ever say anything around them that goes against any tenet of wokism, no matter how innocuous might seem to you, like "women are not oppressed" or "structural racism isn't real or isn't a helpful lens", I know of no leftist who wouldn't immediately believe that you are a white supremacist who's either dog-whistling or waiting to happen. I don't know that the left's definition of what the alt-right is should matter the most, but it seems most relevant to me, at least, because I am stuck in a leftist world.
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My guess is it was Neil Strauss book that got the pick-up scene to add a more intellectual aspect online that eventually found a place in the dissident/alt-right. Then you had people who read books thinking about their ideas. RooshV started blogging in that space; chateau heartiste begins read in the pick-up community to explain why many of the tactics they used worked intellectually.
RooshV is one reason I like to combine these groups into one bucket because many of them do jump from one adjacent space to the next. He begin in the pick-up community and now has turned trad-religious. Tucker Max went trad family oriented.
Edit: one thing I would add is the pua material was a lot more ground breaking than you give it credit for. Average dudes were not taught by society to do those things. It might even be worse today.
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I'd love to read that book.
My impression is that PUA quickly ran into diminishing returns: it identified some general principles or strategies that worked, and there's only so much benefit you can get from further elaboration of them, with practice trumping theory 99% of the time. This led to a kind of evaporative cooling, with the people left "developing the theory" were less focused on pragmatism and more on critical analysis/social theory (except swapping evil women for evil men).
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I think what you're referring to is the "dissident right" or "intellectual dark web", which are distinct.
The phrases "alternative" and "dissident" basically mean the same thing in the political sphere.
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I thought the dissident-right was just rebranded alt-right.
The Breitbart guide quotes the Alt-right as being intellectual and specifically cites a geneticists like Razib Khan. And includes a broader less-wrong intellectual group.
But sure that is the hard thing with words in general. People can have vast different opinions of what a term means. I define alt-right is like basically any non-normy view especially when held by IQ>120 people.
If I felt like having a little fun I could define the ADL as alt-right due to their ethnostate support of Israel.
The dissident-right is just alt-right lite. And I don't consider the "intellectual dark web" to be a real thing. That phrase is basically a marketing term cooked up by some news boomers.
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