Hey, reading this thread is my first real exposure to this community. I'm curious, who is Jim, what is his reputation here, and why do you think that blog is worth reading? I'm trying to understand the ethos of this place. I get that you guys try to be open-minded and understand people who disagree with you, but surely essays that say women can't be raped because they don't control their bodies and blames victims of pedophilia for the crimes of their abusers are beyond the pale.
Jim is a far-right (I think at one point he self-identified as neoreactionary) blogger who was close to Scott on the blogosphere social graph back when the blogosphere was a thing. He is interesting because there are not that many smart people with far-right political views, and most of the ones that do exist are hiding either their intellectual or political power level. So he is making the secular case for standard American (i.e. Christian and Trumpy) far-right politics in a more intelligent way than I can find elsewhere. If you are interested in non-mainstream political thought, this is interesting.
By "worth reading" in context I was meaning any or all of the following:
This is a well-argued contrarian take that is a useful contribution to the debate, even if I don't fully endorse it.
As above, with the understanding that it is not entirely serious and should be read in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal
This is well-written and intellectually coherent, and therefore the sort of thing that this site's target audience would find interesting even if the argument is ultimately unconvincing.
This is a cringeworthily bad take by a well-known figure in this part of the internet and thus worth sharing for purposes of ridicule.
This is a post about kinky sex that will be titillating to people who share Jim's (not particularly unusual) kink.
I won't name names, but there are Motte regulars from all five of those perspectives who would not regret clicking the link.
In a hypothetical scenario where "Jim" posted this essay here, in all likelihood we could consider it so flagrantly in violation of our guidelines that demand that inflammatory claims require supporting evidence in proportion, that he would probably be banned immediately.
But the person you are replying to is not doing that, though this is closer to the use end of the use/mention distinction.
@MadMonzer is free to correct me, but I do not interpret his comment as endorsing precisely the same things as Jim, he seems to be claiming that feminism inversely correlates to fertility, and seems to consider Jim's essay to be an exceedingly bad way of presenting an idea outside the Overton Window that he thinks has a kernel of truth in it.
I agree that MadMonzer didn't seem to be endorsing Jim's views, and I didn't mean to give that impression. It just seems a little odd (okay, more than a little) to me to lay out the reasonable version of a view, then direct readers to someone who advocates for committing violent crimes against women and girls. I find it genuinely difficult to see what's valuable about the essay, aside from the trivia about depiction of corporal punishments in film, although I am frankly skeptical that Jim is a trustworthy film historian.
Hello, welcome, and may God have mercy on your soul.
I assumed Jim was “the Dreaded Jim,” an edgy neoreactionary with some very aggressive positions. If so, his reputation probably ranges from disgust to unironic admiration, because users here have some pretty diverse values. And they’re allowed to argue for those values, so long as they follow the rules and maintain something resembling civility.
As for why? In short, because engaging with something is not the same as endorsing it, and engaging with people of very different opinions has value. For examples of what this community can create, I recommend reading some of the old Quality Contribution Reports, which usually collect a month’s worth of the most lucid or surprising writeups.
It is probably worth noting that this community got here, via several levels of indirection, from the comments section of Scott Alexander's blog www.slatestarcodex.com. Jim Donald was quite close to Scott on the blogger social graph for obscure early-2010's blogosphere politics reasons, and got quite a long leash in the comments before eventually being banned for being persistently obnoxious. (In those days Scott didn't ban for far-right politics). So I was assuming a certain level of familiarity with the sort of thing Jim was likely to post.
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Notes -
Hey, reading this thread is my first real exposure to this community. I'm curious, who is Jim, what is his reputation here, and why do you think that blog is worth reading? I'm trying to understand the ethos of this place. I get that you guys try to be open-minded and understand people who disagree with you, but surely essays that say women can't be raped because they don't control their bodies and blames victims of pedophilia for the crimes of their abusers are beyond the pale.
Jim is a far-right (I think at one point he self-identified as neoreactionary) blogger who was close to Scott on the blogosphere social graph back when the blogosphere was a thing. He is interesting because there are not that many smart people with far-right political views, and most of the ones that do exist are hiding either their intellectual or political power level. So he is making the secular case for standard American (i.e. Christian and Trumpy) far-right politics in a more intelligent way than I can find elsewhere. If you are interested in non-mainstream political thought, this is interesting.
By "worth reading" in context I was meaning any or all of the following:
I won't name names, but there are Motte regulars from all five of those perspectives who would not regret clicking the link.
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In a hypothetical scenario where "Jim" posted this essay here, in all likelihood we could consider it so flagrantly in violation of our guidelines that demand that inflammatory claims require supporting evidence in proportion, that he would probably be banned immediately.
But the person you are replying to is not doing that, though this is closer to the use end of the use/mention distinction.
@MadMonzer is free to correct me, but I do not interpret his comment as endorsing precisely the same things as Jim, he seems to be claiming that feminism inversely correlates to fertility, and seems to consider Jim's essay to be an exceedingly bad way of presenting an idea outside the Overton Window that he thinks has a kernel of truth in it.
And that is within the rules.
I agree that MadMonzer didn't seem to be endorsing Jim's views, and I didn't mean to give that impression. It just seems a little odd (okay, more than a little) to me to lay out the reasonable version of a view, then direct readers to someone who advocates for committing violent crimes against women and girls. I find it genuinely difficult to see what's valuable about the essay, aside from the trivia about depiction of corporal punishments in film, although I am frankly skeptical that Jim is a trustworthy film historian.
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Hello, welcome, and may God have mercy on your soul.
I assumed Jim was “the Dreaded Jim,” an edgy neoreactionary with some very aggressive positions. If so, his reputation probably ranges from disgust to unironic admiration, because users here have some pretty diverse values. And they’re allowed to argue for those values, so long as they follow the rules and maintain something resembling civility.
As for why? In short, because engaging with something is not the same as endorsing it, and engaging with people of very different opinions has value. For examples of what this community can create, I recommend reading some of the old Quality Contribution Reports, which usually collect a month’s worth of the most lucid or surprising writeups.
It is probably worth noting that this community got here, via several levels of indirection, from the comments section of Scott Alexander's blog www.slatestarcodex.com. Jim Donald was quite close to Scott on the blogger social graph for obscure early-2010's blogosphere politics reasons, and got quite a long leash in the comments before eventually being banned for being persistently obnoxious. (In those days Scott didn't ban for far-right politics). So I was assuming a certain level of familiarity with the sort of thing Jim was likely to post.
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