Serious question:
I know anything vaguely resembling a left of center critique of this asshole isn't going to get any traction. Lost cause is lost. But where are the actual principled libertarians? "Everyone should be free to do what I want" assholery should be at least as odious to them as it is to us, though admittedly for different reasons.
Read articles from the Niskanen Center. Will Wilkinson and Jacob Levy are principled libertarians who actually care about social justice. Here's a nice example: niskanencenter.org/blog/black-liberty-matters/
They're both active on Twitter.
Yup, those two are the only prominent reasonable libertarians I know of. Radley Balko too, but he focuses only on criminal justice issues. I know a few 'cut chains before cutting welfare' reasonable libertarians personally, but 90% of libertarians are basically selfish white dudes.
>principled libertarians
They're clearly only "principled" when it comes to challenging leftist ideas, though with the occasional timid lip service ("maybe they shouldn't have done that") when someone from their tribe does or says something indisputably egregious.
Also, IMO they're too scared to issue a challenge. They're cowing to the alpha galaxy brain because they think they'll appear weak for not being able to produce as many citations.
slightly off-topic, but is the root of fascism facere? then fascism would be etymologically related to fact and effect, and probably related in meaning as well.
TPO on why Nazi's are bad:
>Nazism led to debt, no real improvements in QOL, and then war.
i.e., Nazism would have been justified if its policies had led to better growth. So quirky and eccentric!
I’ve talked here plenty about how the biggest problem today is fixing
mating markets
When did the rationalist community become saturated with these
neo-MRA types? I don’t seem to remember this being a part of Yud’s
sequences. Was it Scott’s anti-SJW takes? Or was it just a demographic
thing?
Demographics help, but the fetish for pop evo psych makes for easy targets for MRAs/redpillers among nerds who want to "life hack" the femoids. Here's a classic from the vault:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x8Fp9NMgDWbuMpizA/rationality-lessons-learned-from-irrational-adventures-in
> So I broke up with Alice over a long conversation that included an hour-long primer on evolutionary psychology in which I explained how natural selection had built me to be attracted to certain features that she lacked.
Is this a troll?
Allow me to read my dissertation on why I need a girlfriend with bigger titties. This is an intellectual position, please evaluate it charitably and rationally.
Remember also that it's a post on why he's so much better now.
Did you ever see the one where Lukeprog talked about [how useful Scientology had been to his rationality](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qwdupkFd6kmeZHYXy/build-small-skills-in-the-right-order)?
See Scott Alexanders 2009 post on the [typical mind fallacy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizing-from-one-example) , which starts off popularising a fairly useful concept and then uses "pick up artists are actually correct and it's the women who are wrong" as the go-to example.
It would likely have happened purely from demographics, along with the general post-elevatorgate degradation of nerd culture, but for sure Scott put this issue front and center and no doubt drew a ton of UHNs (\*) into their circle.
(\*) unfuckable hate nerds
Annnnnd he’s right
back to it in the responses, to widespread acclaim from the libs and
some restrained “tut tut this won’t do” from the ssc-left. Which is then
considered to be going way too far, how dare you breathe a word against
this high-quality contributor just because they have some
“eccentricities.”
Lol at
> TrannyPornO is one of our most prolific and high quality contributors, and his eccentricities don't do anywhere remotely enough bad to overcome the good he does by being around here and posting.
I suppose the first part of that is true: TrannyPornO *is* one of the most prolific and high quality contributors over there. An indictment of the community if ever there was one.
I think it is worth singling out, despite the large number of cryptoreactionary talking points in the culturewar thread. Besides being highly upvoted and called a quality contribution, TPO let the mask fall off in those two posts. They directly advocated for policies like removing citizenship from people who marry foreigners, or "mandatory abortions for the congenitally ill", or "corporal or capital punishment for adultery", or forbidding anyone taking drugs for mental health from voting, or requiring a level of property/income to vote. When the open declaration of these things is considered a quality contribution to your subreddit and gets lots of upvotes, it's clear that your subreddit is a place for fascists to advocate for fascism. This comment is worth singling out because it highlights that /r/SSC is a place for fascists to advocate for fascism.
For sure. What's particularly damning is that the comment is utterly worthless even if you pretend for a moment that all the policy prescriptions are reasonable and not insane - it's just a list of ideas with no discussion about why any of them should be taken seriously.
I have no idea why anyone could consider this a quality contribution, unlesssss the community has decided that being brave and edgy enough to suggest what other people won't (read: literal fascism) is somehow by itself a virtuous quality even when you put zero effort into justifying why those things should ever be taken seriously and that would be _terrible_.
Hey, that's not fair, TPO puts plenty of effort into defending their ideas with continuous walls of text and gish gallops, it's just that they're ideas are terrible and morally abhorrent.
You're being unfair now.
You forgot to mention that he also uses links to papers and articles with a tenuous connection to the topic at hand, often written by random or biased authors.
yeah the post is transparently fascist and TPO is trash, but also on that list of highly upvoted quality contributions are what looks like a defense of ethnic cleansing by americans because they're not literally nazis, a series of complaints about the lugenpresse unfairly smearing first george zimmerman then the alt-right, a whole lot of HBD, and a neoconservative trying to redefine racism out of existence so what I'm saying is you can take your pick
This is a good point. Certainly there's a lot of shit on /r/SSC to go around.
But I want to mention what /u/Mezmi pointed out, namely that TPO's post contains no analysis/argument and is just a list of beliefs. I didn't look at all af the other 'quality' contributions, but presumably they were more than 'let me count the many ways in which I am fascist'.
Also, I've seen TPO enough to recognize them as consistently awful, so they stand out to me. Perhaps it's irrational to fixate on the user I recognize, but if I wanted to be rational I'd go to LessWrong.
> Also, I've seen TPO enough to recognize them as consistently awful, so they stand out to me. Perhaps it's irrational to fixate on the user I recognize, but if I wanted to be rational I'd go to LessWrong.
But Bayesian probabilities don't go to 1~~1~~ so you would never know for sure he's 100% trash
Libertarian fascism best fascism.
It’s a shame to sneer at it just for the fascism , when the sheer incoherence is so sneerworthy.
When did the rationalist community become saturated with these neo-MRA types? I don’t seem to remember this being a part of Yud’s sequences. Was it Scott’s anti-SJW takes? Or was it just a demographic thing?
Annnnnd he’s right back to it in the responses, to widespread acclaim from the libs and some restrained “tut tut this won’t do” from the ssc-left. Which is then considered to be going way too far, how dare you breathe a word against this high-quality contributor just because they have some “eccentricities.”
no sense singling that one out, a solid third of the posts linked there are just fascist or cryptoreactionary talking points
At this point it’d be more surprising if /r/SSC users didn’t just explicitly endorse fascism.