I'm particularly fond of the "trends" they cite. I'd love to see the unbiased data I'm sure they've done a thorough job of collecting and parsing. Oh wait, it's probably just media + echo + preexisting biases, what am I talking about.
This reminds me when I brought up the catholic pedo crisis and claimed it was larger than incidents like Rotherdam. Of course, because this was before the recent news cycles declared it a crisis, no one agreed that it was a larger phenomenon.
Complete with more of Namrok's (probably) made up stories about evil, cruel leftists he knows that prove that leftist ideology is all virtue-signaling/hypocrisy.
>But I know other disingenuous left of center people for whom this is a convenient white wash for their obvious moral failings. Because in ways big and small, they are the petty, self centered and mercenary in their daily lives. They might donate to charity and then post about it on Facebook. Then they'll stiff the waitress her tip because they felt they waited slightly too long waiting for her to come back around. They'll post about women's rights, but then refuse to give up a public seat for a pregnant woman. They'll talk about treating minorities with respect, but then chew out the poor brown lady at the cash register so badly she cries when she rings something up wrong.
>And it's quite convenient to believe none of this behavior matters because it's not structural. That your virtue is reaffirmed by signing the right petitions, and telling people who you voted on social media.
That whole conservative/left-wing dichotomy in the post that he's responding to doesn't paint conservatives in a good light in the first place. If he's arguing that it's about "personal morality" rather than structural inequality, what does that say about the many, many conservatives who apparently just throw that stuff away in support of people like Trump or Kavanaugh? Even in Australia, we have conservatives like our current PM Morrison who will protect their own churches decisions to protect sex offenders while damning Muslim churches for not doing enough to route out terrorists in their ranks. It's messed up. The only form of consistency is ingroup/outgroup nationalism. Otherwise it's just wholesale hypocrisy. At least these imaginary leftists have to be exceptions to the rule.
You're absolutely right. TBH every fiber of my being wants to say, "you care about hypocrisy? Whatabout conservative hypocrisy?" but I've made it a personal challenge to avoid whataboutism in any form, even if it makes a relevant point, because people, myself included, tend to roll eyes and avert attention whenever an argument against a thing is met with a "whatabout."
But I think the conservative answer to your query would be that the ends justify the means, that Trump and Kavanaugh *are* morally reprehensible, but their agenda to attack abortion rights make them the right choice for a certain type of voter. That logic extended to the ingroup/outgroup would be, the moral decision is to protect and defend people who look and talk like us, and so the sometimes-reprehensible means to do so are retroactively justified.
That's my C H A R I T A B L E interpretation, but I still think that way of thinking is shallow, xenophobic, and can eat a bag of dicks.
>Complete with more of Namrok's (probably) made up stories about evil, cruel leftists he knows that prove that leftist ideology is all virtue-signaling/hypocrisy
I've been tempted to make an alt that just replies to him with even more obviously made-up anecdotes and see how long it takes him to twig.
Only problem would be, I genuinely don't think I could top the one about his brother-in-law; the mentally handicapped Antifa atroturfer, who is paid to protest by mysterious Democrat benefactors. IIRC, even denizens of the CW thread weren't buying that one.
Took me a little while to find it, but [enjoy](https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9cir3w/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_september_03/e5igk0k/).
It's actually a little more ridiculous than I remember - the comment chain is several posts into an argument over whether paid protesters are a thing when Namrok (who has been losing the argument) suddenly "remembers" that his brother-in-law is one.
Hohoho that's almost too rich for my blood. You're a trooper for digging that up. Makes me think of the time Namrok claimed that many friends and family members had been killed by MS-13, but when asked why he didn't get the fuck out of there, he was like, "eh."
>*Long story short, for him and his friends, they are such deadbeat, unskilled losers, getting bused around and put up for a few nights, and having their bail paid for is a* ***huge*** *perk! I mean, they routinely do crap that lands them in jail anyways, so no sweat off their back. And they've burned a bunch of bridges where they live currently anyways, so having someone else pay to relocate them in nice. And they even get to stay in a hotel for a bit on top of it, before they go back to mooching off anybody dumb enough to take them in.*
And he estimates they're getting paid $4000 for this. Or, whoops, I guess not?
>*All we know is that he's routinely bused around to protest, and he sure and shit isn't paying for it himself*
Uh huh. Credible. I definitely believe that these are the clear, unvarnished facts.
He's getting bolder, right? I knew he lied but I don't remember him ever being so blatant about it when I was still reading the CW thread.
I mean, paying dumb, mentally ill drug addicts who are frequently in jail to protest for you doesn't seem to me like a completely airtight operation, which makes it strange that the only person who knows about it is a right winger who is two thirds of the way through losing an argument on the internet. But maybe I'm just being U N C H A R I T A B L E.
>They might donate to charity and then post about it on Facebook.
i thought the prevailing lesswrongian narrative was that leftists don't donate to charity because they all believe that revolution and/or government redistribution is the only way to help the downtrodden? lesswrongers can't even keep their talking points straight
That’s why I’m against empathy. You can weaponize empathy, but it’s
hard to weaponize reason.
Well I suppose if you could weaponize reason maybe Rationalists could
accomplish literally anything more than excessively long navel-gazing
posts and pitiful reactionary commentary posted online but never spoken
aloud in their leftist-bubble communities either out of fear of censure
or because they have no friends in the first place.
This thread is really such a great crystallization of their
somehow-still-stunning lack of self-awareness.
It's also historically untrue in that scientific racism was presented as the reasonable, logical reason to oppress africans and outlaw homosexuals. Science and reason have frequently been used by the dominant class to oppress and justify the status quo.
it’s all but impossible to get inside someone else’s moral head space
such that it actually resonates with you
This is an attitude I see stated or unstated in so much right-wing
thought. It’s the ultimate atomization: If we accept, per Wittgenstein,
that we can only reason about things we can communicate about, this is
the ultimate admission that the right cannot and does not see a need to
reason about morality. The impossibility of communicating about morality
necessarily prevents any individual’s moral beliefs from being held up
to an external standard and allows total freedom to hold contradictory
beliefs.
I think this is a legacy of the religious right. Evangelicals spent decades arguing (incorrectly) that you can't have morality without religion, so when the right dropped religion they dropped morality too.
Incidentally I wouldn't blame Wittgenstein, since he says the same things about science. If anything he puts ethics and science on the same footing, which tends toward moral realism.
I'm aware Wittgenstein didn't believe (the obviously false idea that) moral beliefs constitute a private language, my point is that if you think they do, then you must be accepting that you can't reason about them. Also, do you think they have dropped religion? Evangelicals are a shrinking demographic but they broke very solidly for Trump and remain core supporters of his. I know they're not really following the stated tenets of their own religion but they still identify primarily with religion even as they practice white identity politics.
Nice motte you got there.
You don't need to "feel" someone's morals to take them at their word. If white people's support of sj is inscrutable, you could always try listening to them.
also
> About why leftism is only accused of virtue signaling, there are two reasons. One is simply that the right is assumed by polite society to have zero virtue, therefore we have none to signal.
Oh please. What do you think those people draped in american flag paraphernalia and "support our troops" bumper stickers are doing?
> no u
Huh? I do think the people with the flags and bumper stickers are sincere. Conservatives just have different virtues they like to signal e.g. patriotism.
bailey: "**give us some leeway**: it's all but impossible to get inside someone else's moral head space such that it actually resonates with you."
motte: "I was just trying to say that even if you understand a moral conviction, you can't make yourself really feel it."
The troops stuff may be less prominent, but thats just one example. Today you get maga hats and trumpy bears. There's plenty of right-wing virtue signaling if you're willing to look for it. And even if right wing virtue signaling is somewhat less prominent than that of the left wing, it's nowhere close to enough to explain the discrepancy in its use in the culture war thread.
this thread is a safe haven to discuss ideas/culture/politics in what
feels like a judgement free zone
Speaking personally, this is the case when people express pro-HBD or
really any anti-leftist views. Otherwise, extreme and unapologetic
judgement are rampant.
So we can all agree that SSC “Culture” “War” threads are primarily a
safe space for Nazis to discuss their views without being judged? A
little corner of Storm Front where you don’t have to experience the
horror of people thinking less of you when you say we really just need
to go ahead and slaughter people? Good. Glad we’ve cleared up exactly
what sort of shithole those threads are, and now the responsible,
not-Reactionary adults who mod SSC will quit creating those threads and
ban that sort of nonsense.
The left genuinely cares about things like representation, equality,
intersectionality, and etc., at a deep level, and believes that they are
crucial to reforming deep cultural systems that have massive influence
on people’s lives.
And yet I’ve never seen anyone accept a serious harm to themselves to
advance those beliefs. Ten thousand woke professors demand more
diversity; zero resign their own position for the sake of someone higher
on the stack.
Yes because that’s how it works. “Boss, I’m resigning, please hire a
black woman in my place.”
That is true, but abandoning empathy can be dangerous because on the
flip side you can get people who unironically advocate for genocide.
Reply:
So? It’s instructive to come across arguments for genocide. Educated
minds should handle those without flipping out.
Don’t fall into the trap of believing that they’re incapable of
handling disagreement without losing their minds. The flipping out is
instrumental.
Your own personal response to the advocacy of genocide is rated
based on how emotional it is. No mention of how that perception
is instrumental to white supremacists of course. And 2. of course these
leftists are capable of responding to genocide advocacy calmly, it’s
just that they don’t because it’s easier to shut down those arguments by
“flipping out.”
What’s not said of course, although is actually tacitly conceded here
I think, anyone advocating genocide has already disqualified their own
arguments by advocating fucking genocide, which is obviously wrong, and
so to “rationally” or “calmly” engage does literally nothing except
legitimize genocide advocacy as a position worth arguing against.
Honestly, as somebody who grew up rural as fck, most people on ssc are cosplaying as conservatives. I think those who stan for shit like HBd or eugenics would be terrified if they saw what it looks like "in practice" or if they had any experience actually living in a white supremacist culture, to start with because autists would not survive in a genuinely euegenist culture; an eugenics that gained mass momentum would be selecting for Tom Brady's, not computer geeks. The only reason they support that stuff is because they are so insolated from mainstream society that they don't have to consider the consequences of normalized racism etc. Same with all that survival of the fittest/meritocracy shit, they would fucking hate it if the playing field was truly levelled and there wasn't a whole system keeping the dirty masses away from them, and it shows whenever they talk about their struggles dating, one of the few areas wherein raw merit can't be beat down with systemic advantage.
That's why I mock them at least. I'm from the conservative culture they wish they understood, and I know they would hate it, because they would have spent their developmental years getting shoved in a locker and called a faggot, not learning to code in the gifted program or whatever. The proof is in the fact that they crowd around the (nicer) parts of the Bay Area or NYC or the gentrified cores of the Midwest and bitch about liberal culture, knowing full well that if they really want to live in a culture that acknowledges racial IQ differences Jim Bob's shack is only a few hours away, but of course they don't move to the hollers or the meth deserts or whatever because those people hate their guts more than liberals, who just see them as misguided geeks. Your typical ssc poster would have been eaten alive if they had come up in a truly conservative location, and it shows in the way they approach issues: either they're outright fascists which is where smart conservatives wind up, or they're doing this weak ass "well both sides have merit thing" which would get their ass beat in the real world. In a conservative culture, there is no both sides, you're either a faggot or you're not, and you better be ready to physically fight if somebody calls you a faggot when you express your smart opinion. That's reality of growing up in a truly conservative culture and most ssc'ers would hate having to keep their mouth shut not because they are wrong, but because they are small.
As for why the left is correct, well, the nice thing about universal programming is that it protects the rich and the poor alike. What libertarians and your collaborators can never figure out is that the left isn't your enemy and social democracy isn't stealing from you, it's the sane members of the mass *protecting* you from the Jim Bob's and Jamal's of the world who don't give a flying fuck how smart you are because they are strong and you are weak, and if there wasn't a system between you and them they would just take what you have, merit or not. People like yourself want the benefit of society and socialization but you don't want to play ball and you don't want to help pay for it, that's not how this works.
Edit: if you want to know what it feels like to be a smart guy in a truly conservative environment, watch Day of the Dead
And if the authoritarian rationalists actually got the ethno-state they say they want, they'd be the first to go. This has been described before.
"Mr. G is a very intellectual young man who was an infant prodigy. He has been concerned with general ideas since the age of ten and has one of those minds that can scintillatingly rationalize everything. I have known him for ten years and in that time have heard him enthusiastically explain Marx, social credit, technocracy, Keynesian economics, Chestertonian distributism, and everything else one can imagine. Mr. G will never be a Nazi, because he will never be anything. His brain operates quite apart from the rest of his apparatus. He will certainly be able, however, fully to explain and apologize for Nazism if it ever comes along. But Mr. G is always a “deviationist.” When he played with communism he was a Trotskyist; when he talked of Keynes it was to suggest improvement; Chesterton’s economic ideas were all right but he was too bound to Catholic philosophy. **So we may be sure that Mr. G would be a Nazi with purse-lipped qualifications. He would certainly be purged.**"
there's a lot of classism in this post that doesn't sit well with me- prep school douchebags are probably a better example of right-wingers who would stuff lesswrongers in lockers than working class rural people tbh- but the point you make about how lesswrongers want to benefit from left-wing norms while also complaining about them and refusing to contribute to them rings very true. they're delicate people who rely on left-wing social norms which protect the delicate, such as trigger warnings, prohibitions on mocking mental illness, etc, but they at the same time they refuse to follow those social norms. make fun of their hpmor!quirrell tulpa and they'll angrily accuse you of ableism, but of course they immediately turn around and whine about how experiencing social blowback when they advocate eugenics is leftist tyranny.
no. i still think it was a poor choice to use them as your example, and plays into classist stereotypes in a way that the prep school asshole example wouldn't. your examples bring class into the picture in a way that's unnecessary, since there are plenty of right-wing spaces which have similar economic class to the left-wing bubbles many lesswrongers are in.
I think you missed the point of my post.
To start with, I'm talking about the experience of being a rural conservative because that's what I know; I grew up in that culture, still have links to it, and as a result it's clear as day to me that your typically SSC poster has 0 idea what it's actually like to live in a socially conservative culture. Calling a spade a spade is not bad, don't get so wrapped up in fighting for identities that you elevate shitty people; the reality is rural conservativism is not noble, it's some shit, and just because these people are hard-strung does not mean they get a pass. The core of my post is that the environments SSC'ers role in are explicitly *not* conservative in a social, grassroots sense, and this warps their image of what it feels like to live in those cultures; it's not this fun, fulfilling jaunt through community, it's a fucking bitter-ass time that most SSCers would come to hate because they (somehow) have come to believe that intelligence is respected in conservative environments.
But this is obvious just looking at the way they carry themselves and talk about issues. Your typical urban conservative like Scott is from a *liberal capitalist* background, including the prep school they went to, which was likely socially liberal even if it cost thousands to get in. My point was that there really *aren't* many rightwing spaces that represent a true grassroots conservatism, at least at the level these people play at; sure they may have conservatives but these people are conservatives in defense of their tax rates, not in service of any larger desire to turn back the social clock, which is why whenever one of them is investigated a little bit, you see the same liberal 'vices' as their outwardly liberal peers: sex scandals, drug abuse, divorce, etc. These people are conservative in name only and it shows in the nature of the blog itself; only in San Francisco, gentrified, cutting edge of neoliberal capitalism, historic home of the American gay rights movement, could social conservatism be pitched as a radical, edgy philosophy. Drive 100m out of the city and HBD goes from a controversial take to "just good ol' common sense, now pass me that beer, boy".
These people aren't avoiding conservatives in their prep schools, *they are* the conservatives in the preps schools, and they became that way because they were weird, socially isolated nerds that took up an angsty opposition political position opposite of the kids they went to class with, whom would go on to write about doing Ketamine in Vice or designing the next line of Gucci belts or whatever it is rich kids do to find self fulfilment. They will openly speak to this; ask any of them about their highschool experience and you get a line about how they were surrounded by liberals, which is where their insane conspiracy theory about a liberal take-over comes from, itself laughable to anybody from anywhere but these urban cores and their surrounding (rich) suburbs. Only somebody from that background could read a piece like "You're Still Crying Wolf" and think it's a clever take. For those of us from the rest of the country, we deal with truly conservative psychos on a daily basis; we know the wolves are already in the pen. But SSC will continue to deny it because they don't realize they themselves live in the liberal bubble they despise openly, which is how you can get stupid takes like our libertarian friend above, who somehow thinks the real issue is just that people aren't listening to each other. It's like they can't fathom that both the left and right from outside of these tech-bubbles truly *despises* them, not because they are wrong, but because what enables them to exist at all is the same force that has completely gutted middle America.
Pointing all this out is not classist, it's an honest mapping of how this shit lands. The group in our society that is actually promoting social conservativism is working class folks, because they're desperately trying to hold onto whatever piece of the pie they had before Scott's predecessors demolished the economy via neoliberal reforms. If you're from one of these places, you either land on a soft social conservativism, or a hard revisionary socialism, but never in this middle-of-the-road centrist or economic libertarianism, because **we've seen what that looks like, and it looks like more of what has been dismantling working class communities since the 1980s**. This is ignored by the denizens of SSC because when they think social conservativism, they think of [this](https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-1950s-family-in-the-kitchen-27463539.html?pv=1&stamp=2&imageid=EE5128BA-C188-4BC0-BA10-347A94556F19&p=13044&n=0&orientation=0&pn=1&searchtype=0&IsFromSearch=1&srch=foo%3dbar%26st%3d0%26pn%3d1%26ps%3d100%26sortby%3d2%26resultview%3dsortbyPopular%26npgs%3d0%26qt%3d1950s%2520family%26qt_raw%3d1950s%2520family%26lic%3d3%26mr%3d0%26pr%3d0%26ot%3d0%26creative%3d%26ag%3d0%26hc%3d0%26pc%3d%26blackwhite%3d%26cutout%3d%26tbar%3d1%26et%3d0x000000000000000000000%26vp%3d0%26loc%3d0%26imgt%3d0%26dtfr%3d%26dtto%3d%26size%3d0xFF%26archive%3d1%26groupid%3d%26pseudoid%3d%26a%3d%26cdid%3d%26cdsrt%3d%26name%3d%26qn%3d%26apalib%3d%26apalic%3d%26lightbox%3d%26gname%3d%26gtype%3d%26xstx%3d0%26simid%3d%26saveQry%3d%26editorial%3d1%26nu%3d%26t%3d%26edoptin%3d%26customgeoip%3d%26cap%3d1%26cbstore%3d1%26vd%3d0%26lb%3d%26fi%3d2%26edrf%3d%26ispremium%3d1%26flip%3d0), not [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15tW4dEK7A4), even though if you sit down and map out who supports which policies, you find way more conservatives and socialists are "normal" people, and it's the hyper-teched out cyberbrains of SSC that form the minority of views in North America.
Why does rural America turn out so many Marxists? Because those of us from it have actually see what conservativism looks like and we know it's not the answer. Why are all these tech bros so quick to jump on board with fascism and racism? Because they're the angsty kids of the liberal bubble and they have no idea what hard social conservativism feels like. That's what I'm getting at, and if it makes me a classist to point that out them I am classist. Though tbh I don't think shitty rural conservatives should get a pass on their behaviour because of their class position, these are the people we need to win over, the sickos in silicon valley are a drop in the bucket compared to the class potential that social conservatives represent.
> However, I do that through evidence and logic
#
>Stop viewing people who you don't like as aliens/robots
If you don't want to be viewed as an alien, stop cosplaying a Vulcan.
You are absolutely practicing E N L I G H T E N E D C E N T R I S M when you posit a symmetry that doesn't exist.
Why are you posting here, rather than pointing out how laughable those responses are in the SSC thread? Like, you must agree that
> Part of it, I think, is that on the left there is a strain of thought that is concerned with superficial appearance of virtue above all else, while I don't think the right has a significant movement like that.
is *eminently* sneer-worthy, right?
What cracked me up about this was how the responses proved the original poster right so perfectly. A TL;DR would look something like:
I admit to a degree of hyperbole there, but less than you’d think.
Well I suppose if you could weaponize reason maybe Rationalists could accomplish literally anything more than excessively long navel-gazing posts and pitiful reactionary commentary posted online but never spoken aloud in their leftist-bubble communities either out of fear of censure or because they have no friends in the first place.
This thread is really such a great crystallization of their somehow-still-stunning lack of self-awareness.
From one of the comments in that thread:
This is an attitude I see stated or unstated in so much right-wing thought. It’s the ultimate atomization: If we accept, per Wittgenstein, that we can only reason about things we can communicate about, this is the ultimate admission that the right cannot and does not see a need to reason about morality. The impossibility of communicating about morality necessarily prevents any individual’s moral beliefs from being held up to an external standard and allows total freedom to hold contradictory beliefs.
So we can all agree that SSC “Culture” “War” threads are primarily a safe space for Nazis to discuss their views without being judged? A little corner of Storm Front where you don’t have to experience the horror of people thinking less of you when you say we really just need to go ahead and slaughter people? Good. Glad we’ve cleared up exactly what sort of shithole those threads are, and now the responsible, not-Reactionary adults who mod SSC will quit creating those threads and ban that sort of nonsense.
More goodies:
Yes because that’s how it works. “Boss, I’m resigning, please hire a black woman in my place.”
Reply:
What’s not said of course, although is actually tacitly conceded here I think, anyone advocating genocide has already disqualified their own arguments by advocating fucking genocide, which is obviously wrong, and so to “rationally” or “calmly” engage does literally nothing except legitimize genocide advocacy as a position worth arguing against.
[deleted]