posted on September 14, 2020 04:11 PM by
u/Round_Wolf
76
Like, I knew it was bad, but holy shit. There are literally people
talking about “white replacement”, and other people engaging in “good
faith arguments” with them. Jesus fucking Christ.
There's something sad or tragic in that he **knew** exactly what happens when you say that a forum in which "everyone is welcome to discuss in good faith, even racists," quickly becomes a forum for racists. Like, he literally described what happened to his community.
(That he knew this was happening and let it happen probably indicates that he was... okay with it happening.)
When the Motte was splintered off it was the worst thing to happen to the community since its creation. Anyone left leaning disappeared and now it's become an insular circlejerk suffering from evaporative cooling effect and only the far right are still there.
This is the same community that discusses the "Jewish Question" so often and using those same terms that they have an abbreviation for it, casually calling it the "JQ" in passing.
Yes in general, but I don't think it's really heading in a religious direction. Or rather, there are more people who think religion is useful than who actually believe it and participate in religious communities.
This is the problem with free speech absolutism. When you create a
space where all speech is welcomed in good faith, much like all human
beings will get cancer if they live long enough, your forum
will eventually attract the far right.
Their speech isn’t tolerated elsewhere for myriad very good reasons,
so they seek outlets where they can reach a population of non-nazis.
And the way the influx of nazis is moderated tells you everything you
need to know about the moderators/owners. In Scott’s case, while he
isn’t far right, it’s clear to me that the guy has conservative
leanings. And I think all his talk about “tribes” is largely
bullshit.
r_Libertarian used to be filled with "helicopter ride" memes and screeds about wishing death upon anyone to the left of them.
Most American libertarians are only one snarky tweet from someone with green hair away from wanting to inflict violence upon or kill their perceived political enemies.
The only reason that sub isn't like that now is because the moderation team was deposed, and there's an equal amount of left-anarchist moderators on it. Reddit also bans violence.
> Most American libertarians are only one snarky tweet from someone with green hair away from wanting to inflict violence upon or kill their perceived political enemies.
explain how you got to this conclusion.
I watched r_Libertarian and r_goldandblack revel in sharing memes about murdering their political enemies. I watched libertarians repeat Hans Hermann Hoppe's rhetoric about "physically removing" liberals, communists and (in their words) "homosexuals" from society. I also watched the real life libertarians in my life get together and laugh about throwing leftists out of helicopters.
The libertarian to alt-right pipeline is a recognized phenomenon on the internet and in real life.
Ooh, I'll answer.
1) To quote Bob Black (sorry), you can't want what the State wants and not want the state. American libertarians may decry police brutality and the expansion of civic surveillance. I believe they're sincere in doing that; I certainly was. But so long as American libertarianism prioritizes the right to property over the right to life and freedom, it must also tolerate a state that defends property. And since there's only so long that the dispossessed will sit idly by and let wealth concentrate in the hands of the propertied, an intellectually consistent libertarianism must either embrace repression or abandon libertarianism for the left.
2) The lived experience of "libertarians" expressing a desire to shoot "looters".
A belief in inevitable conflict between the lower and upper class has nothing to do with libertarians being one tweet away from shooting people. Even the fantasy of shooting looters presumes that the looters are coming to attack them first.
>Ooh, I'll answer.
>
>To quote Bob Black (sorry), you can't want what the State wants and not want the state. American libertarians may decry police brutality and the expansion of civic surveillance. I believe they're sincere in doing that; I certainly was. But so long as American libertarianism prioritizes the right to property over the right to life and freedom, it must also tolerate a state that defends property. And since there's only so long that the dispossessed will sit idly by and let wealth concentrate in the hands of the propertied, an intellectually consistent libertarianism must either embrace repression or abandon libertarianism for the left.The lived experience of "libertarians" expressing a desire to shoot "looters".
I don't even know where to begin. 1) Since when does "the right to life and freedom" include stealing other people's property? 2) Libertarianism in no way shape or form allows for use of force to defend property, only to defend yourself in your own dwelling 3) Here's a succinct and accurate response by someone else who just had the misfortune of reading what you wrote: "yeah just abandon property rights. that's rational. I mean, i'm sure the redistribution committees will do a great job, as will the party leaders. they just happen to get the penthouses and the nice cars" 4) Your arguments are logically unsound and use false premises.
> Libertarianism in no way shape or form allows for use of force to defend property, only to defend yourself in your own dwelling
My interest in debating libertarianism does not extend to correcting you on what libertarianism actually means, so have a good one.
When an American describes himself as "libertarian", I just assume they mean something between conservative and far right. American libertarianism is basically the Republican worldview, plus blackjack and hookers, minus religion and war.
American libertarians are pretty interesting once you get beyond the Ron Paul "taxes is bad" crowd.
For instance, libertarian skepticism of government tends also to include police and military, which the nationalist right regards with quasi-religious reverence.
UBI is pretty trendy among libertarians, who view it as more efficient and agency-empowering than other wealth-redistribution aid programs.
Large segments of libertarianism are pro-immigration, since they see immigration restrictions as protectionism related to labor supply.
And while libertarians aren't known for positively supporting sexual and gender minorities, they also tend to avoid entangling state and religion, which is probably the primary source of oppression.
I'm just speaking anecdotally, but my impression is that the younger, educated libertarian crowd has a lot more interesting ideas than were ever expressed by, say, the Tea Party movement.
I’ve never yet met a libertarian who didn’t eventually go mask off. Maybe I just have bad luck but they usually in favor of libertarianism in large part because it’s an argument against doing anything about racism. If the state isn’t allowed to educate people and set up affirmative action and welfare stuff to help the poor and minorities, people *like them* get to keep everything.
It's sort of a downward spiral/pipeline situation rather than a mask, imo. I was captured by the internet libertarian crowd for a few years, and it's just not an internally consistent ideology.
The big issue with libertarians is that they profess to be an irreverent and iconoclastic ideology in one moment but get riled up with nationalistic fervor the next moment. They want to believe you should piss on the American flag, but they also want to shoot you for pissing on the American flag.
One of these things has to give. You can only spend so long insisting that the real struggle for civil rights is barefoot driving and topless beaches before the looming dread of this background contradiction comes knocking. It's pretty delicious that after appropriating the word "libertarian" from socialist anarchists that an idea taken from that appropriation would return to destroy them.
And so the unstable substance that is the libertarian must either yield to the supremacy of the imperial state or the liberation of human beings, and thus the shift to either the right or the left that we see. *Then* they're wearing a mask, at least for the benefit of the still-cooking libertarians around them.
A decade ago it was also an argument against doing anything about LGBT rights or gay marriage. The libertarian "solution" was that the state should stay out of it altogether.
Based on my interactions, I believe the majority of pro-UBI libertarians simply view UBI as a way to ensure the continuation of the underclass required by the wealthy in order to maximize profits, rather than empowering anyone.
Same deal with immigration. A cheap labour supply. A lot of business owners rely on even illegal immigration to keep their costs low. They'll never admit that publicly, but it's crucial for many industries.
I'd like to see a return of left-wing libertarianism.
> UBI
The right-libertarian UBI crew see it as a cheaper way for the state to implement entitlements, and they accept UBI because they're going to be taxed anyway. They intend for UBI to replace *all* and *every* form of welfare, though, and to make welfare 'fair' because everyone gets it, not just poor people and the minorities they don't like.
> I'd like to see a return of left-wing libertarianism.
I participate on r/Libertarian to give it a left-libertarian voice, and over the last year, more and more libertarians of the socialist-anarchist flavor have been posting on the subreddit.
Similar to the leftist revival we've experienced over the past few years in America, there is a revival of left-libertarianism of the historical sort, too.
A libertarian is just a far righter who is afraid to admit so and thinks weed should be legal. There's virtually not much else to differentiate them. I guess a libertarian would provoke a black person to step into his property to then execute him instead of just hunting him down? Yay for them I suppose.
It's just watered down alt-rightism, at least the online version of it, which is by far the most popular one.
I think it kind of differs and vast majority as you say are weed smoking republicans.
An easy test is to ask one what they think about the border wall. Borders are government regulation, and the extreme impediment to freedom of movement is particularly so. It is fairly exceptional as well; almost any goods made by people can be moved with at most a very modest tariff, but people themselves can not move.
And if you look at the whole Earth, it is totalitarian in the extreme; most workers are confined to their regions, freedom of movement is not in any way a right, and on the net that undoubtedly lowers wages (by undermining worker's bargaining position), there are neglected regions where people suffer famines. There is also massive inefficiency due to confining people away from where work is, or due to not worrying about net effects (see global warming; the smarter of libertarians realize that you can't allow enterprises where the owner gets $1000 at the expense of $10 000 in damages to everyone else's private property).
The Earth as a whole doesn't do as much of the usual tropes, like propaganda for everyone to love some emperor of the earth and killing political opponents who talk shit about the emperor, because there isn't an emperor, it is decentralized and nobody can do anything about it; and yet the status quo is as un-free and as brutal for most people as any made up dystopia.
So there is a variety of internal contradictions in libertarianism; the freedom of movement contradicting borders, the issue with private property (e.g. by the water) being damaged and eventually to be completely destroyed by other people's actions (CO2 releases), etc. It is much easier, and no less consistent, to be a weed smoking republican and call yourself a libertarian.
I've found that libertarians tends to be either people who hold these contradictory views and just are hippocrites about it, or really, really weird people who can't really function in society. (angry mountain hermit types)
Yeah haven't seen many of the latter types. There's some that are pro open borders though because they think it would undermine public healthcare, I shit you not. Bry "Ancap" Lan I think is like this.
I think the most non resolvable internal contradiction in libertarianism is probably between private property by the water and assholes releasing high global warming potential gases into the atmosphere (e.g. 1 ton of sulfur hexafluoride equates 16 000 tons of CO2 over 10 years and it also lasts longer in the atmosphere, equating 32 000 tons of CO2 in the long term). With the CO2 they sort of hand-wave it away as cost of doing business, but you can really fuck up the atmosphere with no regulations in all sorts of ways that the world actually managed to avoid.
Bottom line is, I think it is an ideology that is more focused on convincing people that policy X doesn't lead to consequences Y even though the reason you'd ever get paid to do so is precisely that it does.
The tribe stuff only ever makes sense if you DONT look at the substantive issues on the table.
Just like the media finds it easier and less controversial to quote both sides then hand wring and lament how one can escape all this 'tribalism'.
Hence the 'oh so enlightened grey tribe'... what the fuck do grey tribes believe in? Forget all that math shit, you don't \_BELIEVE\_ in that, that's just a tool to get to your beliefs.
I think here we all know the answer: they believe whatever garbage someone with a slick argument comes along with. Be that scientific racism, or anti-trans garbage, they are all susceptible to bad arguments if they can't think around it.
Also the math shit from (checks notes) some psychiatrist whose connection to math is that he lives in the bay area, and some AI grifter whose connection to math is that he has absolutely no clue about any of it besides 1 formula which he wouldn't be able to recognize in a practical use.
> This is the problem with free speech absolutism.
Scott Alexander doesn't subscribe to 'free speech absolutism', otherwise I wouldn't have been banned for pointing out D. Friedman manipulated a citation. The idea that these Rationalist blogs and subs encourage free speech is a persistent falsehood, what they do is cultivate a right-wing following and ban/censor anyone who makes logical Marxist posts.
It's not free speech absolutism, though.
The guy purposefully cultivated it into a white supremacist condition.
Big frigging surprise, a former power content creator on a Thiel-funded blog "lesswrong" (at least, back then, it was), turns out to be rightwing. Who could have possibly thought?
(If anything it is mildly surprising Yudkowsky isn't more rightwing).
And the furthest left he ever got was writing an essay against *monarchism*, which if anything is a case of shifting the Overton window by grabbing both the left and the right side of the window. Anything short of *monarchism* (with a fucking king) is not reactionary in these parts.
I mean let's face it, he never seemed to critically think about any of the harder problems of society. He was always overly credible when it came to the structure of society and why it's that way.
What he never seemed to realize is that everything we experience is a built environment, and that includes the educational status of everyone you meet. It's all been designed, and pushed in the direction we are today. Blacks are poor because \_whites want them poor\_. They are uneducated, and underfed (via poverty) (which as we all know under-fed in childhood years results in lower IQ), due to explicit laws and programs to make it so.
He never talks about this. Big surprise.
*g* is bullshit and so is the SAT lol. I'll never understand how psychologists defined "intelligence" as "answering a lot of stupid little questions very quickly" and tout it as the "most reliable finding in the field". Says a lot more about the testers than the tested imo
imagine looking at the kind of people who score high on the SAT and thinking "yes, this encompasses the entirety of human intelligence." imagine looking at a SAT prep book and thinking "mirable dictu! without biohacking, you can increase your intelligence better than taking a gas station nootropic!"
this is what high IQ does to you. it makes you so fucking stupid it is agony to talk to you or be around you. keep your IQ low, it's the only way to be smart
The 'many intelligences' is fairly well accepted now. SAT only measures one type of intelligence - ain't no SAT scores getting you into music school.
Again, the reference to 'g-loaded' I suspect is yet another form of the kind of math/academic cover up: you use a term that has a specific technical meaning, then generalize it in a way that isn't supported by the original sources, and bam you have yourself something smart-sounding that even stands up to surface level googling (oh g-loaded is a real thing, and its about intelligence tests!).
Whereas g-loaded SAT means that the test accurately predicts performance on similar cognitive tasks. Nevermind the basic questions of if those tasks have any school or real world consequences.
We are about to have a giant ongoing experiment as the UCs in California will no longer use the SAT to determine admissions. So we will find out just how helpful the SAT really is!
>The 'many intelligences' is fairly well accepted now.
By psychologists, yeah. Meanwhile all of their fancy entelechies do not have the slightest grounding in any of the other disciplines, be it neuroscience, genetics or artificial intelligence. It's easy to have something well-accepted when you get to define things however you like.
>We are about to have a giant ongoing experiment as the UCs in California will no longer use the SAT to determine admissions.
I'm more of a "universities should be open and free to literally everyone" kind of person, but that would probably disrupt important people's precious networking. And covid is making all of that shit pretty moot anyway
While I do think free universities are obviously a good idea (it's at least in the case of tuition the case here) it won't in itself actually solve the issue of segregation and other problems with university admissions, there are other ways to "sort" people into "deserving" or not without using cash.
> The 'many intelligences' is fairly well accepted now.
I’m not a psychometrics guy but no, it is not particularly. I mean, it’s a framework for an expanded concept of intelligence, which is fine, I think there’s plenty about human intelligence that is not well captured by IQ, but there’s not a lot of rigorous research backing up that Gardner’s intelligences are all independent categories of perception or aptitude.
So a few things, mr “just asking questions”: what’s your conclusion? You’re leaving it an “open question” but really you’re driving at a conclusion, so what is it?
I don’t think these stats have proven your case at all, which is, obviously, that there is some innate reason blacks don’t do as well on the SAT (or using a colloquialism “are dumb”). Call it biology or culture - either way it’s a free license to discriminate against “a people” and a culture.
These stats do not encompass the entire world - there are additional confounding factors. Also these stats are aggregates of many personal experiences.
So your conclusion from the “rich black kids don’t do as well” is essentially “you were given all this opportunity and money and yet you failed, it’s a basic deficiency in you.”
The real conclusion to draw from that is “there is a hidden effect that isn’t surfaced”... then go find it.
Humans brains are highly adaptable. And it responds to environmental pressures readily. It’s much more logical that the brain is adapting in some way that causes it to perform less well on the SAT - a test that has well known language biases.
EDIT:
The person I was replying to also replied, but the moderator (wisely!) deleted both posts. Here is what I read from my notification (I never saw the full text):
"> What's your conclusion?
You seem to have intuited it, although I would've phrased it a bit more kindly..."
So in short, the person who replied was using 3 small cherry picked stats to justify the belief that black people are not as smart, either due to cultural or biological reasons. This is basically modern scientific racism in action.
If you create a 'no witch hunts' zone it will be filled with 2 principled libertarians and a whole lot of witches. (Yes I know who said that, that makes the whole thing even worse).
I used to argue with people on /pol/ all the time, probably a waste
of energy, but at least there wasn’t any pretense of ‘good faith’. If
you’re just shitting all over each other, there’s no impetus to treat
idiotic or hateful ideas with undeserved respect or cordiality. I keep
telling myself there’s something to that, whether or not there is.
If your the kinda person who enjoys debunking nonsense, debunk it once, then save it so you never have to again. If your not that very specific person, use whatever low effort disaproval strategy is most effective where ever they're posting
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This is the problem with free speech absolutism. When you create a space where all speech is welcomed in good faith, much like all human beings will get cancer if they live long enough, your forum will eventually attract the far right.
Their speech isn’t tolerated elsewhere for myriad very good reasons, so they seek outlets where they can reach a population of non-nazis.
And the way the influx of nazis is moderated tells you everything you need to know about the moderators/owners. In Scott’s case, while he isn’t far right, it’s clear to me that the guy has conservative leanings. And I think all his talk about “tribes” is largely bullshit.
I used to argue with people on /pol/ all the time, probably a waste of energy, but at least there wasn’t any pretense of ‘good faith’. If you’re just shitting all over each other, there’s no impetus to treat idiotic or hateful ideas with undeserved respect or cordiality. I keep telling myself there’s something to that, whether or not there is.
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What do y’all think is the right way to deal with someone making a white replacement argument?