The postrationalist Chapmann argues that what Westerners percieve as
Buddhist morality is a modern invention:
https://vividness.live/buddhist-morality-is-medieval
Agreed. This actually hits on one of my pet peeves, to wit, the notion that Westerners often have that Daoism and Buddhism as practiced in Asia aren't "real" Daoism or Buddhism, but rather some superstitious degradation of the real thing. And the notion that a religion's practitioners for centuries haven't gotten it right but Westerners -- often reading their sacred texts in translation -- have is just pure colonialism.
Its complicated becuase "Modernist Buddhism" while definitely a thing that happened in the context of colonialism and contact with the west, it was also something that was driven as an internal reform movement by buddhists.
There is definitely a historical shift (often consciously to compete with christian missionaries) that emphasizes different aspects of buddhism: A focus on lay morality nad ethics and living rather than monasticism, ritual and cosmological concerns, but its not "just" something that is imposed by westerners or misinterpreted, but its also a deliberate reform movement from within buddhism. (basically exposing tensions that were always there, to some degree)
The Zen establishment were also fervent supporters of Japanese militarism from the Meiji period up through World War II. Produced lots of pro-war propaganda, taught that the Emperor was an enlightened being and that China was being "liberated from suffering", etc etc. The book [Zen at War](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_at_War) covers the history in great detail.
The author traces modern Zen militarism back to how Zen was (almost?) totally banned during the early Meiji period -- it was seen as less Japanese than Shinto -- and the major temples and sects responded by cozying up to the state. Almost total support for Japan's imperial adventures followed.
One detail that sticks with me was that there was this one Buddhist teacher in the countryside, who became an anarcho-socialist after reading some and deciding they were in line with traditional buddhist teachings... He was executed by the state for trying to organize local peasants, with the complete support of the Zen establishment. (e: oh, well, I forgot that he was accused of trying to assassinated the emperor... The evidence was pretty shaky tho.)
Anyway, all this to say that yeah, Buddhism is just another world religion, with all the grime and killing that entails. (I say this as a Western Buddhist myself, lol.)
I think they're referring to [Uchiyama Gudō](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uchiyama_Gud%C5%8D).
[Here's the chapter from _Zen at War_ about his whole thing](https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/daizen-uchiyama-gudo?v=1597900515).
Yeah, this page is a bit of a strange choice to make fun of from Chapman's work, because the weirder stuff like his idea of "meta-rationalism" or his misrepresentation of non-Vajrayana Buddhism (from a practice/goal standpoint) seem like more interesting targets.
TBH, I don’t find his writings on Buddhism to be all that
sneerworthy, mostly because it can get pretty esoteric and there’s some
good stuff in there every now and then, like his warnings against cults
and his suggestions on how to pick a teacher / group.
His tweets, on the other hand, occasionally reveal his true colors
(not to mention the various people he regularly associates with on
there)…
He literally RTs the nrx mag Palladium about "worthy ruling classes": [David Chapman on Twitter: "“A worthy ruling class must, by definition, be meta-systematic” would be another way of putting this. https://t.co/wTP4h7F4hT" / Twitter](https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1373370357176954881)
“ As long as you are resentful about suffering, as long as you think
the world should be different, then you are stuck obsessing over how
unfair it is, and scheming about how to escape. And that just makes you
angry and miserable all over again. Charnel ground practice means giving
up on that cycle. You simply lose all interest in how life ought to be.
As soon as you forget about “ought to be,” you are left with life just
as it is: chaos, horror, death and all.”
Wow way to completely miss the point. If one fully commits to and practices Buddhist philosophy and meditation the way it has been taught for thousands of years across cultures what you are "left with" is loving kindness, compassion, equanimity and freedom from the shackles of the ego and the narrative. Basically the complete opposite of what he said.
He should read about and listen to Thich Nhat Hanh. Or does this Vietnamese monk practice the bastardised western fake Buddhism too? How about the dalai lama?
The history of what Buddhist peoples across a range of cultures and thousands of years have done (and how they have justified it) is an interesting subject but it is a different subject to the philosophy that the Buddha taught.
I am talking about the Buddha dharma as collected and passed down through the pali canon which is accepted nearly universally amongst Buddhists to be the original teachings of the buddha and his students. These teachings have a very clear direction and I hold that it leads to what I described if adhered to.
The article is, of course, an account of the Buddhist tradition, not the specific teachings of the Buddha, because it is bout how they have interpreted by Buddhists since that time
Click the link and see
But the ethical traditions have continually been modified with different times and cultures, why are modern modifications any more "ahistorical" than others? If his point is just that Buddhism's ethical teachings (as opposed to its more psychological/metaphysical teachings like the no-self doctrine) were adapted to feudal society in the past, and that modern Buddhists are wrong if they think the ethical ideas emphasized today are completely unchanged from how they were in the past, that's fair.
His comment "It is definitely less bad than the Aztec religion" is pretty questionable though, in historical terms I don't really see that taking prisoners in war and offering them up as human sacrifice is clearly more "bad" than just having your warriors kill them in the field or enslaving them, as was common in warfare in other cultures. And in any case it's reductionist to boil the Aztec religion down to human sacrifice and nothing else, it has [many worthwhile elements](https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/aztec-philosophy-understanding-a-world-in-motion/) which can be separated from the sacrifice just as Buddhism has many elements that can be separated from feudal era morality.
You seem to me to be in violent agreement with the author posted.
Edit: and you post on /r/redscarepod so you’re skirting the shores of an automatic ban
>You seem to me to be in violent agreement with the author posted.
I acknowledged that as a possibility in the second sentence of my first paragraph, but I wasn't sure.
>Edit: and you post on /r/redscarepod so you’re skirting the shores of an automatic ban
Really, regardless of what I actually say when I post there? I'm just drawn to any leftist-adjacent forum that has some decent overlap in interest with the kind of things [Mark Fisher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Fisher) liked to talk about, it's not like there's a lot of options out there
I really don’t give a shit if you can cite Mark Fisher because as much as I sympathised with his plight I found him boilerplate, reactive, and uninteresting
But as someone who tries - especially now - to give people the benefit of the doubt I do find it annoying to have someone send me just a Wikipedia page about somebody whose work I’ve read as if I’m being introduced to something new
You could have at the bare minimum linked one of his more famous articles like “Exiting the Vampire Castle* if you wanted to have a go at it
>But as someone who tries - especially now - to give people the benefit of the doubt I do find it annoying to have someone send me just a Wikipedia page about somebody whose work I’ve read as if I’m being introduced to something new
No need to take it personally, it wasn't meant as a suggestion that you *didn't* know about him--of course I have no idea whether some random person I talk to on the internet knows about a given author that wasn't part of the prior discussion, so I just have a habit of using links *in case* someone isn't familiar with the reference I'm making (or in case other people reading the comments aren't).
>You could have at the bare minimum linked one of his more famous articles like “Exiting the Vampire Castle* if you wanted to have a go at it
That one was one of his less interesting pieces for me, but I liked the kind of cultural analysis he did in "Ghosts of My Life" (for an online example [here's a blog entry on Joy Division](http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/004725.html)), along with way he blended leftist politics with Spinozism and a cybernetic/systemic perspective on the world and people rather than a moralistic or agent-centered perspective (which has some overlap with the Buddhist perspective as I talked about [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/itx8h8/anyone_else_exhausted_by_the_dirtbag_left_at_this/g5ijqce/), and I guess that kind of systemic perspective also kind of relates to why he was against the kind of self-righteous moralism he talked about in the 'Vampire Castle' essay--note that Marx had a similar perspective on the futility of seeing the world and politics through a primarily moralistic lens, I gave some quotes on this [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/leftrationalism/comments/lp3hts/this_place_is_a_ghost_town_because_leftists_have/goybvz6/)), and his [interest](https://my-blackout.com/2019/04/25/mark-fisher-acid-communism-unfinished-introduction/) in leftist ideas related to the notion of a highly automated post-scarcity society rather than what he called the "Leninist superego" where socialism would involve just as much drudge work (long hours in factories etc.) but it'd be OK because it's all for the common good.
No, I will take it personally. It’s condescending to just link someone to a Wikipedia page like that. Engage with people on a level and just say what you mean instead of saying “this guy exists dumby”
Sorry it made you feel condescended to, but like I said I didn't intend it that way. And if "it's condescending" is meant to refer to some kind of generally accepted standards/netiquette rather than exclusively to your own impressions, I've long been in the habit of writing my posts in the style of wiki articles full of links ([recent example here](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/lxzcau/everything_wrong_with_the_rationalist_mindset_in/gq031n6/)) and I've never had anyone take offense to it before.
Don't waste your time dude. The guy you're talking to suffers from delusions of grandeur. I mean look at how much effort you've made to be as polite as possible and all he can do is whine and threaten you. It's pathetic, like everything else he does.
> Really, regardless of what I actually say when I post there?
I mean, one of our primary criticisms of rationalists is that they're perfectly willing to rub shoulders with open racists to talk about things they have a overlap in interest in. Someone who posts in /r/redscarepod likewise is perfectly willing to rub shoulders with open transphobes, like we see in this thread [here](https://www.removeddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/loazdb/this_resonates_with_me_but_also_seems_it_might_be/) To the mod's credit, the OP seems to have been removed since I last linked to this thread, although when I linked to it, it had been up on the sub for about a week. Still, if you go to the [original thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/loazdb/this_resonates_with_me_but_also_seems_it_might_be/), you can see that it netted 91% upvotes during the week or so it was left up on the sub. So, as we questioned so many rationalists "why do you support and contribute to a community with so many racists", we also turn to redscarepod posters and ask why they support and contribute to a community so steeped in transphobia
My criticism of rationalists on this point is that they tend to *create* forums that have a welcoming attitude towards racists (and where the leaders, or the big names the forum is inspired by, are sympathetic to racist's arguments or at least have a habit of 'steelmanning' them or treating it like a reasonable difference of intellectual opinion). I wouldn't criticize an individual poster for going on a forum where racists sometimes post if they were shooting down those comments when they saw them, and avoiding being chummy with the racist posters. Like on the thread you linked, [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/loazdb/this_resonates_with_me_but_also_seems_it_might_be/go563zu/) engaged with the OP just to mention how shoddy the transphobic study in question actually was--maybe one could make a strategic argument that any such critical engagement is likely to backfire and actually lend credibility to transphobic arguments in the mind of people reading it, but that doesn't seem likely to me.
Well, first and foremost, I'll note that nothing you've posted defends your own posting history. So, let's dig into that a little, apply the analogy you seem to be setting up, and see where that gets us.
> I wouldn't criticize an individual poster for going on a forum where racists sometimes post if they were shooting down those comments when they saw them, and avoiding being chummy with the racist posters.
I want to pick at this a little bit. You seem to be setting up two criteria for being able to justify posting in shitty places. You have to shoot down shitty comments when you see them, and you have to avoid being chummy with the shitty posters. The example thread shows that it's not some of the population of /r/redscarepod is transphobic, but the overwhelmingly vast majority of them are. We see this in the upvote ratio for the thread itself, the upvote distribution on the comments themselves, and comments itself. Given that, you're not avoiding being chummy with the transphobes. You're just giving them a pass if they aren't actively transphobic right in front of you. Except, I did look back through 5 or so months of your posting history, and not only do I not see you defending trans people, I see you giving transphobia a pass even when it does happen right in front of you.
Like, you posted in [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/jusahs/the_law_litwtally_doesnt_even_exist_postcovid_let/), but I see no pushback for the commenter calling a gendernonconforming person a "mentally ill freak" or the commenter saying "They think that by labelling themselves queer and getting dressed up that it makes them interesting.....that they are some kind of activists." You also posted in [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/jrz18f/ex_mtf_agp_ama/), but again I see no pushback against deeply transphobic comments like [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/jrz18f/ex_mtf_agp_ama/gc0pprr/). (As an aside, I don't particularly care about the OP's self-identification as autogynephillic. Like, I think it's misguided and ultimately rooted in transphobia, but it's their identity and I'm not going to argue with them about it. Their support for Blanchard's bullshit characterization of trans people as a whole is deeply transphobic and is what specifically I'm objecting to here).
So, if your criteria for justifiable posting in shitty places is 1) shooting down shitty comments when you see them and 2) not being chummy with shitty posters, then you've very spectacularly failed at both.
And this is if I accept your criteria in the first place. Turning now to this quote:
>maybe one could make a strategic argument that any such critical engagement is likely to backfire and actually lend credibility to transphobic arguments in the mind of people reading it, but that doesn't seem likely to me.
I know you've been on /r/sneerclub long enough that we turn exactly that argument on rationalists. We've literally criticized lib posters on /r/the_motte for being the fig leaf that lets them say "No, we can't be an alt-right shithole, Darwin whatever his name is a lib and he posts here" Or whichever lib isn't currently burned out from arguing with racists at the time. It's a bit of a revolving door.
Now, this part is ultimately irrelevant, because you don't really do critical engagement with transphobia on /r/redscarepod to begin with, but since part of what I've been doing here is holding posters from places like /r/redscarepod to the same standards we've been holding rationalist posters to for years, it wouldn't be a winning argument here even if you did give a shit about transphobia on /r/redscarepod.
It's true that I don't consistently address transphobic posts, but I periodically argue with posts that bring up bad scientific or philosophical arguments in support of transphobic ideas, for example in [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/dph9ku/meghan_murphy_go_on_red_scare/f5xqe6j/) I argued against the idea that it's medical malpractice to give puberty blockers to teenagers, and I've also periodically gotten into arguments with people who claim sex is a binary and thus that trans people are "really" the sex that is normally associated with their chromosomes, with my argument pointing to the idea of sex as a spectrum and the evidence for trans people having brain structure that's statistically closer to the average of the gender they identify with--see for example my comments [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/f5szh7/what_even_is_the_point_of_saying_that_sex_is_a/fi0n60y/) and [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/ghviz8/have_girls_talked_about_this_do_terfs_have_a_good/fqbdy4l/) or the last part of [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/i5kbhm/i_feel_a_calling_to_explore_camille_paglias_use/g0q1wfe/).
>We've literally criticized lib posters on /r/the_motte for being the fig leaf that lets them say "No, we can't be an alt-right shithole, Darwin whatever his name is a lib and he posts here" Or whichever lib isn't currently burned out from arguing with racists at the time. It's a bit of a revolving door.
I agree it's bad to give themotte a fig leaf of deniability by pretending it's something other than an alt-right shithole, but I don't think occasionally posting leftist arguments on an alt-right shithole is doing anything to increase the number of alt-right people in the world; I wouldn't fault the occasional leftist rationalist for posting on themotte sometimes, for example. Consider [this recent sneerclub thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/m069mf/seeking_book_recommendations_for_antihuman_bio/) asking for sources on anti-HBD arguments--if some of the posters there were taking an interest for the sake of having ammunition when going to some forum where HBD advocates post to argue with them, would you see that as an obviously bad thing?
Okay, so I'm not sure "I used to push back inconsistently about transphobic comments, but I stopped doing that seven months ago" is the justification you really want to be going with for why it's okay to post on /r/redscarepod. Did trans people stop being marginalized seven months or so ago? Are you changing your criteria from "shooting down shitty comments when you see them" to "shoot down shitty comments once every now and again? Maybe once a year or so" You know full well that this shit is still going on.
As for the example of the sneerclub thread, I'm just so flummoxed at what point you're trying to make. Yes, clearly it's a bad thing. For the reasons I've already stated. It literally changes nothing, but you've managed to tie in sneerclub somehow. (and again, you don't push back against transphobic shit in /r/redscarepod anymore, so this whole "what if they just want ammunition to go argue on /r/the_motte is totally irrelevant to my criticisms of you). But do you think you have to go to the_motte to argue with racists? You can find plenty of them in communities that aren't dedicated to being racist. Go sit in the replies of a marginalized person on twitter and shoot down racist replies there if you want to put anti-racist tidbits into action. But if you go into a den of racism, all you are is a token defense to be overcome. It doesn't matter what you post, someone will post some bullshit rebuttal, they'll get a bunch of upvotes for dunking on the anti-racist, and the actually end result will be a bunch of people who are more sure about their racist beliefs, not less.
I mean, let's look at your own [example](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/dph9ku/meghan_murphy_go_on_red_scare/f5y9dqi/?context=3). The whole narrative of this interaction is "you push back on some basic transphobic shit, you get soundly rebutted, and then the transphobes jerk themselves off over dunking on the TRA". The rebuttal is bullshit, of course, but how it will be perceived in this community is that it tore your position apart, which is why it got upvoted 12 times higher than yours. So, the transphobes get to have their beliefs strengthened by overcoming token pushback (you), and the fucking 9% of /r/redscarepod that isn't already outright transphobic sees this "victory" for transphobic thought and goes "huh, that's probably right.". The total outcome of your defense of trans people there is a net loss for trans people. Thanks.
And again, all of this is irrelevant because you don't even provide the token defense of trans people anymore. You just ignore the transphobia so you can keep posting about other bullshit with the transphobes. For fuck's sake, go post about shit in /r/critical_theory if you want to talk about Mark Fisher. At least that community isn't totally overrun with transphobes.
EDIT: We also seem to have dropped the whole "not being chummy with shitty people" criteria. You want to try to explain chatting about shared interests in a community there 90+% of the people there are transphobic somehow doesn't qualify as being chummy with transphobes instead of just ignoring it? I mean, for fuck's sake, you're literally the one who set up that criteria.
>Are you changing your criteria from "shooting down shitty comments when you see them" to "shoot down shitty comments once every now and again? Maybe once a year or so" You know full well that this shit is still going on.
I didn't actually say a person should shoot down bigoted comments every time they see them, I just think it's a good thing to practice shooting them down sometimes. Personally, I respond to comments that are making some kind of factual claim that can be argued against, I don't think I could influence anyone's perspective with moral anger or mockery, those can both at times be useful rhetorical strategies for others (though I think it’s rare that moral anger works online, not unless it’s based on personal experience so there’s an element of getting people to empathize as well), but I don’t have any talent for them myself.
>But if you go into a den of racism, all you are is a token defense to be overcome. It doesn't matter what you post, someone will post some bullshit rebuttal, they'll get a bunch of upvotes for dunking on the anti-racist, and the actually end result will be a bunch of people who are more sure about their racist beliefs, not less.
It's probably true that convinced racists (or transphobes or other people with bigoted views) aren't going to change their mind, but nor do I find it likely that they end up *more* racist than they already were. In any case, in internet debates I think the point is usually not to convince the person you’re talking to, more to try to persuade people who may be reading (or get some practice in countering certain kinds of views for future debates, or get a sense about common arguments for the purpose of writing a standalone piece rebutting them in the future, or just clarifying your own views). For people who are not actually convinced racists/transphobes/etc. but are just kind of toying with those kind of ideas, I think there's some small but non-negligible chance that counter-arguments could push them the other way.
As an example, see [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfLa64_zLrU) from an ex far right guy where he talks about how he was drawn in towards increasingly right wing views by watching people like Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, including starting to believe in the “race and IQ” stuff but without yet going all in on wanting to do ethnic cleansing or believing Jews were behind everything, then a little past 17 minutes in he talks about how seeing the youtuber Destiny debating Lauren Southern started to pull him away from those views, and a little past 20 he talks about how ContraPoints really helped demolish a lot of his persisting far right views, he makes the point that her actual understanding of the memes and ideas in the alt-right culture and being able to pinpoint their flaws was a lot more effective (on him at least) than the liberals who just reacted with moral outrage.
If you take the opinion that it’s universally a bad idea to argue with people that have bigoted opinions or post on forums where a lot of them congregate, is that based primarily on strategic/consequentialist beliefs about what effect it actually has on making people seeing your posts more or less likely to share the bigoted views, or do you see it at least partly as a matter of moral principle independent of the effects?
>For fuck's sake, go post about shit in /r/critical_theory if you want to talk about Mark Fisher. At least that community isn't totally overrun with transphobes.
I didn’t mean specifically talking about Mark Fisher, more ‘talking about the kinds of things Mark Fisher liked to talk about’ (like pop culture discussions mixed with ideas from leftism and continental philosophy, or discussions of leftism relatively free of moralism or tankie-style stridency)—in any case, it looks like /r/critical_theory has been banned. The chapo reddit used to be another place where you could find a decent amount of Fisher-adjacent discussions but it was banned as well. (edit: I see r/CriticalTheory is up though, so I'll try going there more)
>We also seem to have dropped the whole "not being chummy with shitty people" criteria. You want to try to explain chatting about shared interests in a community there 90+% of the people there are transphobic somehow doesn't qualify as being chummy with transphobes instead of just ignoring it? I mean, for fuck's sake, you're literally the one who set up that criteria.
My comment about not being chummy was meant to be about people that have actually expressed bigoted views in discussion with you (i.e. examples where they know that you know that they have those views), and again my reasons would be strategic rather than moral. And although there is definitely a high proportion of transphobia on that sub (more so in the last year or so as the sub has expanded, I think), I don’t agree with your argument for seeing the posters as basically monolithically transphobic (the 90+% estimate), you based that on upvotes for a single thread with a transphobic OP, which may attract other transphobes to go and upvote it while others avoid it. For a different example, on another recent thread asking what had happened to a particular trans poster the most highly-upvoted comment was [this one](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/lyfz73/where_is_our_resident_trans_commenter/gpshho7/) which was criticizing all the anti-trans rhetoric on the sub. And as another example, my memory the past the sub has tended to be mostly positive on various trans cultural commentators like Andrea Long Chu and ContraPoints.
>in any case, /r/critical_theory has been banned
/r/CriticalTheory, my bad.
> I didn't actually say a person should shoot down bigoted comments every time they see them, I just think it's a good thing to practice shooting them down sometimes. Personally, I respond to comments that are making some kind of factual claim that can be argued against
You said and I quote "I wouldn't criticize an individual poster for going on a forum where racists sometimes post if they were shooting down those comments when they saw them, and avoiding being chummy with the racist posters." You literally said you wouldn't judge a poster if they called out the shitty comments when they see them. Now you've fallen back to "Eh, do it sometimes".
It's incredible that you haven't seen a single factual claim against trans people in seven months on /r/redscarepod. I guess Blanchard's autogynephillia isn't a factual claim that can be argued against. I guess "Hey, this gender nonconforming person is a mentally ill freak" isn't a factual claim that can be argued against. It's cool, you've washed your hands of it.
> I don’t agree with your argument for seeing the posters as basically monolithically transphobic (the 90+% estimate), you based that on upvotes for a single thread with a transphobic OP, which may attract other transphobes to go and upvote it while others avoid it.
Yeah, cause it's so fucking hard to find transphobic threads with ~90% upvotes on /r/redscarepod. You definitely can't just search "trans" and find loads of them. [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/m8nxm3/sady_doyle_a_straight_woman_married_to_a_man_and/) isn't a thread immediately misgendering and deadnaming Jude Doyle with 88% upvotes. [These](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/m6fz8t/same_energy/) aren't two [threads](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/m68rwi/elliot_page_is_ready_for_this_moment/) mocking Elliot Page after his coming out, with 97% and 90% upvotes. [This](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/mah972/chchk_got_his_ass/) isn't a thread supporting Liz *fucking* Breuning calling someone defending trans children a pedophile with 95% upvotes. I'm just fucking delusional for seeing that threads mocking trans people commonly get 90% upvotes or more. Or maybe you're right and hitting the downvote button is such a huge investment that it consistently prevents the silent majority of trans supportive people from changing the ratio on those posts.
>For a different example, on another recent thread asking what had happened to a particular trans poster the most highly-upvoted comment was this one which was criticizing all the anti-trans rhetoric on the sub.
I hope you were at least a little embarrassed to send me a comment saying that trans people would be right to leave the sub because it's so fucking awful to trans people as evidence for why the sub isn't *that* transphobic. Like, that's the best thread you could come up with, and you could pick literally any thread on /r/redscarepod, and the best you can do is people agreeing that "Yeah, this sub is super transphobic". For fun, let's look at the second highest voted comment [there](https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/lyfz73/where_is_our_resident_trans_commenter/gpsmiw6/), with a whooping 20 less upvotes. Oh, "trans people wanting rights is too progressive, so don't they kind of deserve it when we're awful to them for being so in my face". God, even in a thread dedicated to "one of the good transes", you shitheads can't manage a show of support.
>As an example, see this video from an ex far right guy where he talks about how he was drawn in towards increasingly right wing views by watching people like Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern, including starting to believe in the “race and IQ” stuff but without yet going all in on wanting to do ethnic cleansing or believing Jews were behind everything, then a little past 17 minutes in he talks about how seeing the youtuber Destiny debating Lauren Southern started to pull him away from those views, and a little past 20 he talks about how ContraPoints really helped demolish a lot of his persisting far right views, he makes the point that her actual understanding of the memes and ideas in the alt-right culture and being able to pinpoint their flaws was a lot more effective (on him at least) than the liberals who just reacted with moral outrage.
I didn't realize Contrapoints videos and Destiny debates took place on forums primarily hosted by racists. It's almost like none of this has anything to do with my previous points. This guy didn't get deradicalized by some shithead posting on Stormfront forums, but by people outside of those forums. You don't have to participate in fucking Stormfront to be able to address right wing bullshit, and it's not like you lurk (instead of posting) in /r/redscarepod to learn how to take down transphobic arguments.
>If you take the opinion that it’s universally a bad idea to argue with people that have bigoted opinions or post on forums where a lot of them congregate, is that based primarily on strategic/consequentialist beliefs about what effect it actually has on making people seeing your posts more or less likely to share the bigoted views, or do you see it at least partly as a matter of moral principle independent of the effects?
Both. Right wing (or other shitty) echo chambers are well known to radicalize people, and if you care so little about the plight of trans people that you're perfectly happy to ignore rampant transphobia for seven months, and only provide the occasional limp defense prior to that, then you're also a shitty person. Now, if you were actually consistently and diligently arguing with transphobia on /r/redscarepod, then I would just call you a useful idiot for transphobes inadvertently helping them and leave it at that.
But you're not even a useful idiot for transphobes; you're an accomplice. You're just a piece of shit who knowingly lets transphobia slide, and it's people like you who let bigotry thrive. You're the same as every fucking "good" rationalist who made excuses for Scott Alexander's racism or defended /r/the_motte. It's people like you that let trans children get attacked in the media and by legislatures. Not because you personally want to attack trans kids, you just don't give a shit if other people do. But hey, you've found literally the only possible community online that you can talk about pop culture from a leftist perspective, and if you have to let trans people get attacked, then clearly that's well worth it.
> You said and I quote "I wouldn't criticize an individual poster for going on a forum where racists sometimes post if they were shooting down those comments when they saw them, and avoiding being chummy with the racist posters." You literally said you wouldn't judge a poster if they called out the shitty comments when they see them. Now you've fallen back to "Eh, do it sometimes".
It isn't "fallen back" since the comments you quoted never said I think a person should do it all the time, and of course I was implicitly just thinking of my own posting history.
>Yeah, cause it's so fucking hard to find transphobic threads with ~90% upvotes on /r/redscarepod.
It's not hard to find them (again, more so these days than in the past I think), but my point was that % of upvotes on threads with transphobic OPs are not a good gauge of the overall % of transphobic people. I agree there is quite a sizeable population of transphobes on the forum.
>I hope you were at least a little embarrassed to send me a comment saying that trans people would be right to leave the sub because it's so fucking awful to trans people as evidence for why the sub isn't that transphobic
I didn't say "the sub isn't that transphobic", just that I don't think that implies nearly everyone on the sub is transphobic, so that anyone I get into a conversation with about some leftist or media related subject is very likely to be a transphobe. Of course a sub with say 30% vocal transphobes would still fairly be described as a transphobic sub.
>I didn't realize Contrapoints videos and Destiny debates took place on forums primarily hosted by racists.
So your objection is not to debating racists in itself, but to going to a racist forum to do so?
And again, whatever the specific code of behavior you want to argue for, I'd ask you to address this question from my last comment: "is that based primarily on strategic/consequentialist beliefs about what effect it actually has on making people seeing your posts more or less likely to share the bigoted views, or do you see it at least partly as a matter of moral principle independent of the effects?" For example, is it your opinion that Destiny bringing Lauren Southern on to his channel to debate isn't likely to increase the number of racists in the world but if he went on Lauren Southern's channel to debate her it likely would? Or is it not primarily a matter of beliefs about the likely real-world consequences but just some kind of bedrock moral principle?
The language you use in response to me, like "You're just a piece of shit who knowingly lets transphobia slide, and it's people like you who let bigotry thrive", sounds more like a matter of moral principles than a belief about the concrete effects that my occasionally posting there is likely to have on anyone. So part of our disagreement may just be that I tend to think about any kind of moral question (from posting habits to anything else) purely in terms of consequences and not in terms of any other kinds of principles. I also have a sort of Marxist/Spinozist/Buddhist perspective where the cruelties of society are a product of impersonal systems and processes rather than individuals who are ultimately "responsible" for anything they do, so I'm not inclined to be punitive to people who do horrible things unless doing so is likely to change their attitude in some way.
>You're the same as every fucking "good" rationalist who made excuses for Scott Alexander's racism or defended /r/the_motte.
But I'm not defending /r/redscarepod in the sense of thinking it's fine that they have the moderation policy they do, if I had any say in the matter I'd want the mods make some kind of rule against transphobic posts. I also wouldn't see a problem with a leftist posting on /r/themotte or 4chan's /pol/ or wherever as long as I didn't think their posting was having any bad consequences like reinforcing anyone's right-wing views or somehow granting legitimacy to those forums among people who weren't already super racist.
And in the article these points are contextualised not within the specific teachings of Gautama Buddha, but within the traditions of Buddhism as they developed in Asia
Selective misreadings are annoying even when they pertain to the people generally mocked on this subreddit
Chapmann seems to have, from an outsider’s viewpoint, picked a
uniquely contrarian interpretation of his religion, much like what the
rationalists do with AI
Re: pollution permits “ For certain leftists, this is an abomination.
It allows bad people to continue having bad mental states. It fails to
recognize that pollution is immoral. In fact, it explicitly says that
pollution is allowed!6 Industry executives can continue to run their
businesses for profit, just as they did before. It does not force them
to adjust their attitudes. It does not replace capitalist greed with
compassion. The practical consequences of permit policies are
uninteresting; what is important is that they don’t improve intentions.
Buddhist Tantra is more interested in practical actions and their
consequences than in moral attitudes. ”
“ Everyone could be noble—and at times all of us are noble. It is not
an accomplishment; it is a stance. But nobility is not easy. It is not
easy to hold the intention continuously. It is not easy to abandon our
laziness. It is not easy to let go of hope that one day we will discover
our “true life-mission,” given by the cosmic plan. To be noble is not
special—but it is extraordinary.”- Chapmann on nobility
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TBH, I don’t find his writings on Buddhism to be all that sneerworthy, mostly because it can get pretty esoteric and there’s some good stuff in there every now and then, like his warnings against cults and his suggestions on how to pick a teacher / group.
His tweets, on the other hand, occasionally reveal his true colors (not to mention the various people he regularly associates with on there)…
In which David calmly explains how blaming capitalism is “technically wrong”, and worries about America falling into the hands of “irrational leftists”: https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1366793665713041410
Can’t you see that flawed concepts like “white supremacy” and “patriarchy” are impeding progress?! We must do away with “political hysteria”. https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1366838592870359043
EDIT: formatting and elaborating more on his Buddhism stuff
“ As long as you are resentful about suffering, as long as you think the world should be different, then you are stuck obsessing over how unfair it is, and scheming about how to escape. And that just makes you angry and miserable all over again. Charnel ground practice means giving up on that cycle. You simply lose all interest in how life ought to be. As soon as you forget about “ought to be,” you are left with life just as it is: chaos, horror, death and all.”
[Report] Lost in Thought, By David Kortava | Harper’s Magazine
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Chapmann seems to have, from an outsider’s viewpoint, picked a uniquely contrarian interpretation of his religion, much like what the rationalists do with AI
Also, this weird argument about how pseudo-postmodernists who never mastered the System now desttroy it: A bridge to meta-rationality vs. civilizational collapse | Meta-rationality
Re: pollution permits “ For certain leftists, this is an abomination. It allows bad people to continue having bad mental states. It fails to recognize that pollution is immoral. In fact, it explicitly says that pollution is allowed!6 Industry executives can continue to run their businesses for profit, just as they did before. It does not force them to adjust their attitudes. It does not replace capitalist greed with compassion. The practical consequences of permit policies are uninteresting; what is important is that they don’t improve intentions. Buddhist Tantra is more interested in practical actions and their consequences than in moral attitudes. ”
“ Everyone could be noble—and at times all of us are noble. It is not an accomplishment; it is a stance. But nobility is not easy. It is not easy to hold the intention continuously. It is not easy to abandon our laziness. It is not easy to let go of hope that one day we will discover our “true life-mission,” given by the cosmic plan. To be noble is not special—but it is extraordinary.”- Chapmann on nobility