Generation, Tradition, and the rise of the Far Right

I’ve spent a lot of time observing GamerGate over the past couple years, and whatever you may think of them, one thing that can be said for certain is that many of them are people in transition- the classic GamerGate story is of a person who used to be one way, but then their eyes were opened, and now they are another way. From my perspective, what you’re seeing is liberals becoming conservative, as tends to happen at a certain age.

I’ve also noticed an interesting dichotomy of thought. Your new, anti-politically correct young conservative will react with scoffing and mockery if they hear the terms “Islamophobe” or “Transphobe” more often than not. But in my experience, the majority of them take the term “homophobia” deadly serious- they see it as a real thing that is a real concern that people are afflicted with, and not as a way to merely shut down conversation like the previous two terms. I’m 40, so to me the connection is obvious- all three terms arose in the exact same way for the exact same purpose. But then again, I wasn’t 10 years old when homophobia became a term, either. Telling an adult something is fundamentally different from telling a child something- I think these new conservatives are at an age where the term ‘homophobia’ and the ideological assumptions became simply a part of their being; when they first started thinking critically, they had already been hearing these terms and internalizing them for years and years. So what seems like an obvious contradiction to me is the most natural thing in the world to somebody 15 years younger than me. And of course the same will be true in the next generation if something doesn’t radically change: In 15 years or so, the conservatives/libertarians being forged right now by Trump movements and GamerGate and such will be faced with the next generation taking it for granted that there are 31 genders, while at the same time calling themselves ‘alt-right’ because they oppose pedophilia or Sharia Law. If you try to explain to them the parallels between transphobia (which they believe in) and pedophobia (which they scoff at), they will simply look at you like you’re insane, downvote you, and move on.

And all these people, myself included, think they are thinking for themselves. And they are, to a point. Now that they are adults, when some new SJW idea comes out, they have the ability to consider it, discuss it with each other like adults, and reject it. But they didn’t have that ability when they were 10 years old, and increasingly it seems to me that the things we learned when we were that age go unchallenged throughout our lives. So we can reject the advance of the SJW agenda, but rolling it back is another thing entirely.

But of course, the natural thing to think about next is what about my own upbringing? Are there ideas that are simply a part of my intellectual constitution, planted there by progressive teachers shaping me to their agenda, that I don’t have any easy way to challenge? The SJW hegemony of academia has been going on since at least the 70’s, after all. Well, if I see this effect in others (and I certainly do) I would be a fool to think I am exempt. But how do I challenge assumptions that were ingrained before I knew what an ‘assumption’ was, or that there was any value to be had in ‘challenging’ them- especially when these assumptions were a part of a systematic attempt to engineer my entire generation? First of all, I don’t even know what to look for until some oldster tells me. Secondly, whatever it is, I’m sure is considered now to be the worst sort of bigotry, and I would feel bad for even saying out loud what it is I’m thinking about. Any website I go to will be roundly rejected by the civilized world as being ‘hatespace’ or whatever. So I’ll be peddling up a steep hill to challenge myself, when if I decide to adopt the current accepted progressive wisdom, all I have to do is coast. In this way, the left is not only anti-intellectual, it attempts to destroy the ability of other people to think.

The only answer I have is that I have to dig back before myself- I have to consult sources older than me. Talking to individuals helps, but as I said, I’m 40 now, and people an entire generation younger than me are already starting to die off. So obviously I need to look at books from the past; what were people saying about society not only before the mainstream has shifted, but before the current concerns of the mainstream were even concerns? What did intellectual society look like when it was full of people that didn’t even know the definition of marriage or the existence of race was worth thinking about? This ability to ‘look back’ is one of the main benefits of tradition. Without a good millennia or two of intellectual tradition to sift through, you are completely beholden to whatever agenda this generation of progressive tinkerers wanted you to think when you were 9. And of course this is why everywhere the progressive is in control, tradition is condemned: The Constitution means whatever today’s needs tell you it means. We need to break away from ‘old dead white guys’ in politics and philosophy, and spend more (all?) of our time studying thinkers that don’t go back any further than the middle of the 20th century. Literature is re-written or condemned as racist, everywhere man is estranged from their intellectual inheritance.

We are told these days that white nationalism and misogyny are making a come back. I don’t know if that’s true- it could always be more propaganda, but taking it at face value for a moment, I think there’s an explanation to be had in the above. White Nationalism is a road back. Whatever else proponents of such are, they are an example of a consistent voice that has been saying the same thing for a very long time, and they obviously don’t change what they say to align with the generational demands of the progressives. So when one is looking for true intellectualism, it makes sense that some people would look there. The other major road back is religion. Religion is certainly better than white nationalism when done right, but the problem with religion is that it’s far more demanding on the receiver. It makes sense that some white males might take a road back that tells them they are superior to other people while at the same time not asking them to better themselves like a religion might.

Now, for an old thinker like me, the situation looks like this: Nazi-ism was a horrible, vile thing. Because it was a horrible, vile thing, progressives naturally began to associate everything they didn't like with it as part of a political ploy.  But it is [i]almost impossible[/i] for a young thinker to see that.  To a young thinker, Nazis, Christians, men, white people, Christopher Columbus are all just things condemned in the same way by the same people. As a conservative, it's frustrating to try to explain to a younger conservative or libertarian what's so bad about things like Nazi's:  you find yourself saying the exact same things in the exact same ways as a leftist professor talking about, say, immigration reform or voter ID cards.  In other words, if they've already rejected the "Yeah yeah, everything you don't want me to hear is sexist and racist" trick of the left, you'll sound like 'just another one of them' to the new conservative.   This is  how progressives destroy language when they destroy tradition. 

This is typically the part where a writer would propose a solution, but I honestly don't think there is one.  Once a society is estranged from history, tradition, and the useful impact of language, they are intellectual newborns with nothing to fall back on. By creating a generation who is used to hearing "nazi" casually used to refer to any Republican or Tory, and for whom "hate crime" means 'dressing up as a mariachi band for Halloween', the left has made it [i]inevitable[/i] that real racism, real hate, real evil will be experimented with again so society can re-learn the difference between the reality and the talking points.

The Liberal Bubble has popped. It was Trump who finally pierced it for good. Recommend just taking it step by step, day by day, explaining to others why they are idiots. That’s half of adult education, is shaking people out of their comfort zones, letting them know they are mistaken.

And not wanting to be under Shari’a isn’t Islsmophobia, many Muslims don’t either.

I had to look up gamergate to see what it meant…

I doubt and I mean seriously doubt that the children pushing Gamergate
were in fact liberal at any point in time…
they are children, young as you pointed out, who want to use
their numbers to harass and vilify anyone who doesn’t hold their
position… they are not high and mighty lefties, they are
uninformed right wingers… if you look at what they attack,
women who infringe on “typical” male endeavors like writing video
game… they attack women like the right does…
Herr Trumpfs attack on Clinton wasn’t about e-mails or beneghazi,
but about Clinton being a women running for a male endeavor like
the presidency… the exact same thing as the gamers using the same
type of tactics…and being right wingers, they are hiding behind
the anonymity given them by the internet… they are in fact gutless
cowards… who will post information about someone else they disagree with
but run themselves from identifying themselves… they won’t stand up and
be identified by name… they are gutless cowards and I dub them right wingers…
because they use the exact techniques of the right… gutless posting and hiding
from it… if these clowns are the future, this country is fucked…

as far as the rest… I have learned children in this country are
so uninterested in education, they run far away from any actual
learning and education… all the children of today want is
to be famous and rich without doing anything…kind like
admiring Kim Kardassion because she has no skills and yet
is famous and rich… that is the young role model children
follow today and by young, I mean most kids under 35…
will not put in the work to improve themselves because it might
interfere with their vision of who they are and that vision has nothing
to do with reality…

Kropotkin

What exactly is Gamergate? Kropotkin is opposed, so it must be something reasonable and wholesome.

Right, and so here we have an example of what I’m talking about. PK ‘had to look up GamerGate’, and by that of course, he means "He had to consult left-wing sources to see what the appropriate left wing talking points were’'. He obviously didn’t read into it or understand it in the 32 minutes between me writing this post and him finishing his own- but he has no problem branding the people involved a certain way, demonstrating absolute confidence despite his admitted completely ignorance on the subject.

The Guardian or Salon or whomever told him what to think, and he accepted it and regurgitated it with an air of authority without question. He proposes to tell me all about GamerGate and who they are and what they believe and why they do the things they do, despite me following it for two years and him first hearing of it half an hour ago and spending five minutes looking into it- and that’s being very generous. In all likelihood, he did a google search and skimmed 3-4 headlines, mentally skipping over any headline that’s not from a left wing source (assuming those even come up in the first page of results on google, which would be unusual).

So the problem for PK is that in order to step out of his bubble and actually have an original thought (not saying he wants to), he’d have to expose himself to sources and voices that he’s been taught to vilify. So he’s got this uphill battle, where it’s much easier to coast and just make his declarations. Now imagine PK is only 19, and instead of Salon or The Guardian, his bullshit left wing source is just his social studies teacher. A kid isn’t going to challenge an unquestioned authority when they don’t even know there’s something to challenge. They aren’t going to be able to distinguish between “Sources you should vilify because they are bullshit” and “sources progressives told you to vilify because of their agenda”, since they use the same vernacular. So if you can make somebody like PK when they are young, they’re much more likely to be stuck that way, even if they come of age and stop shifting leftward with everybody else and end up ‘conservative by attrition’ in their 30’s.

Of course, back in 2008, it was the other way around:

The Conservative Bubble has popped. It was Obama who finally pierced it for good. Recommend just taking it step by step, day by day, explaining to others why they are idiots. That’s half of adult education, is shaking people out of their comfort zones, letting them know they are mistaken.

That’s the part the objectivists always sweep under the rug. We won [here and now] so we are right. They lost [here and now] so they are wrong.

Then it’s one or another rendition of “The people have spoken!!”

Gamer-gate?

Isn’t that but one more rendition of how it works? Let’s figure out once and for all the only possible – the only conceivable – manner in which men and women are obligated to think rationally about and then react to each other.

Same with the Nazis. Or human sexuality. Or race.

Our way, or theirs?

The quickest way I can summarize it is to take the journo-list scandal from a few years ago, and put it in video game journalism. A bunch of gamers uncovered the fact that very prominent game reviewers were all working together through a secret email list to inflate the scores of games that had the right politics (and of course inflate the scores of games their personal friends had a hand in developing at the same time). When this was pointed out, the GamerGate movement was called sexist, racist, etc. because some of the people implicated were women, and of course the politics being forced by the dishonest reviewers was stuff like radical feminism.

If this sounds like nothing, keep in mind the video game industry is gigantic now- far bigger than the movie industry- and developers get paid bonuses based on their review scores. Games do or don’t get sequels based on review scores. We’re talking about billions of dollars of influence.

Ironically, when I say GamerGate was called sexist, what I mean is 12 allegedly independent video game magazines and websites published “Gamers are sexist, good people should stop calling themselves gamers” articles within 24 hours of each other (August 28th, 2014), thus making the very collusion they were accused of painfully obvious to everybody. Here’s the list of Gamers Are Dead articles. thisisvideogames.com/gamergatewi … s_Are_Dead

Since then it’s exploded into a facet of the general culture wars, and how journalistic ethics plays a role. It’s also an anti-SJW movement in a big big way. In fact, if you’ve even heard the term ‘SJW’ and know what it means, odds are you can thank GamerGate for that. The term existed before us, but exploded into popularity as a result of this movement.

GamerGate is percieved as anti-woman because when a game gets a perfect 10/10 score despite graphical flaws, game play holes, and general awfulness seemingly just because the protagonist is a lesbian, GamerGaters complain, and this of course means they hate lesbians.

Plenty of people say it’s a part of why Trump got elected- that thousands or millions of young people learned it’s ok to laugh at a journalist who calls everything sexist as a political tactic, and that’s why that tactic failed when applied to Trump. I am skeptical of this, but there are similarities.

K: wow, I can’t even remember me at 19… that was uh, 39 years ago… if my math holds.
I was young, which means I was clueless… I just didn’t know how clueless until
I look back upon it… I was working, didn’t go to collage… because I was rather
busy supporting myself at that age… I was beginning my investigation into philosophy.
I was a typical young man, I was only about me… I wasn’t even radicalize then…
as Raygun wasn’t even president yet, I think? let me think, I was born in 1959, so
20 years would put me at 1979, so no, Raygun wasn’t even president then…
my education began at that point… when Raygun was elected in 80 and began serving
in 81…so I didn’t really have a political afflation maybe, I was like my parents.
moderate democrat… nothing too much…I had no real goals, no point of view,
just I was sure I was smarter then everyone else… an idea that the years knock
out of me… the world was black and white and good was good and evil was evil
and there was no such thing as shades of gray… simple thoughts of a young man…
today, I know better… the world is shade of gray and there is no such thing
as good and evil… and all we are is…

still thinking about that… as I am still working out who I am…

my evolution as a human being really began with Raygun’s election…
and I am still at it…all these years later…

Kropotkin

I don’t care. Your biography is not a reply to anything I said. You tried to tell everybody what GamerGate is and what the supporters are like after looking at it for 30 seconds. You can say anything you like about your political history and how introspective you are, what you do will speak louder than what you say you do every time.

K: what I will do right now is go to work for day 7 of 10 straight days of work…
what I will do on Friday is protest Herr Trumpf on the local main street
and on Saturday, protest in San Francisco… those are my near term goals…
I am hoping to get a haircut along the way, but hay, you take it where you can…

Thanks for your concern

Kropotkin

While you conservatives go through your own revolution which I sincerely congratulate you all as you’ve been taking a beating the last thirty years also realize that in the shadows we anarchists are going through our own revolution as well since the last year hasn’t just opened doors for all of you but in many cases for us as well.

What is white nationalism other than Europeans wanting a homeland of their own that represents their own identity? Is that not what white nationalism is? With that I can sympathize government political correctness be damned. In every case is a white nationalist always a national socialist commonly referred to as a Nazi? I don’t think so in that the desire for an ethnic homeland is seen across the board of a variety of political views. This whole spiel that if a white person desires an identity of their own people somehow translates to Nazism is purely government propaganda and should be recognized as such.

Don’t worry Ucc, another 40 years and you’ll be an atheist nazi :wink:

I think I made a thread expressing a similar thought in the past, but I’ve noticed that when the radical right/social conservatism are condemned, such as Nazis or fascists, it is mostly criticism based on morality - that they are just unquestionably, irrefutably evil, and that no discussion is to be had there.

But when the radical left/social liberalism is condemned, such as communism, anarchism, etc. it is mostly on practical grounds so while communism may be a “good idea”, the problem is that it was just poorly executed, so the solution is either to try to execute it again, this time properly, or to try a less extreme version of it, aka a moderate leftist/liberal ideology. It is never condemned on purely moral grounds as something that is just inherently evil.

The problem with the right/conservatives in general is that they will too often punch to the right and let the other side set up Nazism/Fascism as an evil reference point, and the point of the discussion then becomes distancing themselves from this evil reference point.

The only similarity that can be drawn between the left/liberals and Nazism and fascism is the degree of control they are willing to exert to achieve their ideals, but the ideals themselves are utterly contrary.

Fact is, a conservative/rightist, no matter how moderate, will always be more similar to Hitler, Nazism, Fascism, etc. than a leftist/liberal will be, so if they let leftists/liberal determine the reference point of Nazism/fascism as evil, and the goal becomes to distance oneself from it, then the right/conservatives already lost, since they’ve conceded the moral highground to the left.

The correct response, one for which it is most likely too late now in many places, is to cut the problem in its roots, instead of snipping away tiny branches. It is to completely sweep the rug of moral superiority from the opposition. Something like the alt-right and generally the far-right does.

Hey, if I’m anything at all in 40 years, I’ll be happy.

That’s not morality, that’s what the left taught you morality was before you went right, and you’re still embracing it. That’s another part of the problem- the people questioning the left now are doing it while unconsciously embracing the assumptions the left put into their heads while they were young.

Depends on who you’re talking to. I’ve noticed libertarians, when talking amongst each other, will reject communism and anarchism on moral grounds- they say things about coercion and theft and force and liberty and such. But when you’re talking to a fully indoctrinated SJW, you simply can’t make moral arguments, because they view morality in the way you described- a bunch of cynical bullshit statements used to shame people into silence. So if you want to persuade them, the only option you have is to discuss practicalities and statistics- which of course has it’s own problems since left wing social science departments are busy churning out bullshit data to support their arguments- and of course in the absence of morality, it’s not as though there’s anything wrong with faking numbers in service of a political end.

Yes. One possible response to this is to simply embrace or ignore the terminology so it loses it’s sting- if they call you a racist, instead of getting all sweaty and trying to prove you aren’t, just shrug and say “The left calls anything they don’t like racism, I don’t really care about that”. It works, but a consequence is that you allow for actual, old-school and immoral racism to get a foothold in the right since people don’t want to be an SJW or a cuck for calling it out. Perhaps there is a middle path where you condemn the SJW for calling everything racist, and remind them how that sort of conversation makes it impossible to tell racists just from people they don’t like.

Not if you consider Maoism and Stalinism to be fascist regimes, and it’s pretty clear to me that they both were, especially Mao.

Although a nice thought, don’t bet on that one.
The world is a much, much nastier place than you know … and with age it begins to show.

How much of this stems from the identity politics played by both sides of the political spectrum?

So, on the one hand, a lot of ‘traditional’ morality, philosophy, worldview is glaringly nonsensical. A lot of it is in conflict with many other strains of traditional morality, philosophy, worldview. Tradition is a source of information about the world, but traditional beliefs are based on bad science, bad statistics, a small and, relative to what’s possible now, poorly informed idea of how the world and humans and their societies work.

At the same time, a theory of human psychology that doesn’t explain the earliest recorded thought processes is an obvious failure. There’s insight to be gained from where we come from and how we got here. Religious scriptures contain insights into the original human values, from a time when humans were less divorced from their animal roots, and there was less feedback and noise.

But given all this, to ask something like “is tradition good” is obviously meaningless. It’s good for somethings, it’s shite for others. There’s no ‘tradition’, it’s a group of mostly unrelated things that is neither monolithic nor even self-consistent. If I recommend a book that I say will help you get at your assumptions, it’s just identity politics to insist on knowing whether or not we can call it ‘tradition’.

The same is true of left and right. There are leftists, progressives, that criticize the climate on campuses and the tactics of BLM and radical feminism and the speech codes and the deplatforming and every other sin of the left. There are rightists, conservatives, who criticize Trump and the Deplorables and white nationalism and every other sin on the right. It just clouds the discussion to force anyone who self-identifies as a leftist defend the worst that the left has ever produced. Who gives a fuck if Mao or Stalin are properly left or right, if no one is actually defending what they do?

It’s a flaw, for both the left who use the concepts as cudgels and right who dismiss them all the same for the family resemblance, that the debate seems to stay pretty surface level about “homophobia”, “transphobia”, and “islamophobia”. These are pretty clearly different things; arguments in favor of concern over homophobia do not necessarily apply to islamophobia (while there appears to be debate over the genetic and social roots of sexuality, it’s clear that no one is genetically Muslim).

Since no one else has presented a solution, I’ll offer one (which I’m also trying (and perhaps failing here)): be more rigorous in your thinking and speaking. People in the process had some things right and some things wrong. People in the present have some things right and some things wrong. The only option is to get better at identifying what things are right and what things are wrong. The response in the OP to allegations of racism is exactly right: in general racism is bad because X, and though this specific thing might be called racism, it is not true that X in this case. That’s perfectly legitimate, and it preserves the ability to turn around to the neo nazis and say, “hey, you guys are endorsing X!”.

But that doesn’t work if we keep treating amorphous categories as real things. There is no left or right, there are many lefts and many rights, they are families of disjoint sets. The terms have little if any meaning, and they serve to bolster tribalism and distract from actual description and discussion of the world.

Well, the defining characteristic would be attempting to estrange an entire generation from the moral traditions of the generation before them, such that they learn ideas they are unaware used to be extremely controversial. In theory both/every side could operate in that way- but I think it’s obviously the left that is operating that way in the western world. For a conservative example, I suppose missionaries in Africa might do something similar; ensure that the next crop of tribals hears about Jesus and so on in such a way that it never occurs to them that their grandparents were pagans, and when they finally do learn it, they inevitably think their grandparents were backwards and horrible.

In an idealized world. In the actual world, fans of new-fangled beliefs tell us race doesn’t exist and a man can become a woman by wishing. Genetically modified food is dangerous in spite of the evidence, and Joe McCarthy is the one who persecuted actors and writers for being communists instead of a group called the HUAC that was run entirely by Democrats. The new orthodoxy has it’s anti-science, nonscience and outright lies every bit as much as anything that came before it. What’s more, they got where they have gotten specifically by denying everything you just said: in fact, ideas aren’t evaluated by how real they are and how well the science backs them. Even assuming for the moment that science isn’t a tool of the patriarchy, what really matters is one’s narrative. The idea that beliefs should be grounded in science and reason is a kind of story that you tell yourself because you were taught to like that story and you gain some benefit from following it. Other people with other kinds of stories are just as valid. You can tell me specifically that the old is bad and dumb and unscientific because you know when you say it to me the implication is you mean Christianity. If you said the same thing about a Muslim’s beliefs your ideological peers would fucking crucify you.

So of course it’s strange to tell me that the new replaces the old because of how rigorous and factual it is when the new replaced the old largely by denying the value of rigor and the existence of facts.

Yeah, I don’t think my point here would be to say that tradition is good or bad, but to say that access to tradition is an important way to evaluate the present.

Yeah, GamerGate would be a prime example of that- they are almost all leftists if you poll them, very strong majority in that sense. They certainly do criticize things like that. But, as they criticize them, they embrace without question the civics they were taught as children by leftists who used virtually those same methods on the previous generation. It doesn’t matter for purposes of this conversation if the leftists or the rightists are correct on any particular issue. Forget what you want them to believe. See only that there’s a bunch of people who swear by saying there’s only two genders and SJWs need to shut the fuck up and feminism is cancer and BLM are racist and all sorts of other things you’d expect alt-right people to say and also they unironically call people ‘homophobic’ if they don’t take gay marriage as an unquestioned right and reject the idea of traditional gender roles that apply to the two genders they insist are absolute. So either the left went insane in 2002 and these are just people with the common sense to see it (and in fact many of them will insist this is the case), or these people are rejecting everything the left says now and accepting everything the left said 10 years ago for some other reason; and I am proposing that their age is that reason.

In short, we react different to things that we are taught when we are young than to things we are told when we are old. Because of this, we need to go outside ourselves in order to truly question what we were taught when we were young. If we’re in a minority, then we can merely ask somebody else who was taught something else, but if our entire generation was taught the same thing, the only way to challenge it is through the written tradition of past generations.

But they did and they do. There’s a socialism class at my university that teaches Maoism uncritically- it purely discusses his philosophy and how it worked with no discussion whatsoever of what happened when he actually got into power. The professor is not a conservative.

Sure, but what is clear is that all three words end in ‘phobia’ not because the people who use them seriously mean to say that the people they brand as such are actually scared of anything, but because usage of the word ‘homophobia’ accomplished a particular political end, and they would like to repeat that success. You can debate the merits of homosexuality or the flaws of Islam all you want, but there can be no debate that the terms are each textbook cases of poisoning the well.

About what, though? Should I spend some time seriously thinking about if inter-racial marriage should be allowed for example, or am I already a horrible person for taking the time to do so, regardless of what I conclude? You’re imagining a situation in which people are free to ask about and investigate anything they wish: and they patently aren’t. Specifically, people aren’t free to ask about and investigate things that their ancestors took for granted as true even a short time ago, and this continual evolution of what questions are allowed to be asked is happening faster now: a person used to be an obselete bigot if they maintained their positions for 50 years. Looks like it takes about five now.

I feel like anybody who read your post would be able to reliably place you in one of these two categories that either don’t exist or don’t matter. Same with me.

Belief in witches is traditionally quite common, and most people in a modern society, on the right or the left, are glad to maintain the estrangement between their children and that particular traditional belief.

Perhaps a better left-targeted example would be usury: in traditional Christian morality, lending and borrowing money were prohibited (which is how Jews got many of the stereotypes they still carry, as their tradition had no such prohibition). I’m sure a good percentage of the Bernie types would love to go back to a world with no lending and borrowing of money. But we know that that world would suck because we can look at places where Islamic law continues to prohibit lending and borrowing, and the effects are as modern economic understanding would predict. Similar things can be said about private property, also traditionally absent, also continued much longer than it should in the Islamic world, and also has readily predictable negative effects.

I guess I don’t think there’s all that much for the average person to learn from the fact that an idea used to be extremely controversial. Dancing used to be extremely controversial. A lot of the controversy certain ideas generated as they changed is better off dead. It’s only the things that are still in the process of changing where it seems important. Even assuming it is important there, it’s still in the significant minority among all ideas that generated controversy as they were introduced.

While there’s a lot of anti-science on the modern left, my point was that the societies of the past just didn’t have access to things we know now. Whatever lies and failures of reasoning exist about sex and gender now don’t change the fact that there’s legitimately a lot more information about sex and gender now too. Tradition can tell us what a bunch of uninformed people thought about sex and gender. Is that more useful to the modern discussion of sex and gender than Pythagorean cosmology is to the modern discussion of astronomy?

A few points here:
One, I’m not defending any anti-science view. I think this again is an identity politics line. To show that modern science has produced insights unavailable from traditional sources, I don’t need to defend every bad idea that can be lumped into the left. One thing that modern sources have over traditional sources is access to modern science. That’s true even if some modern sources don’t make full or honest use of it.

Second, it seems relevant that there is a source of assumption-evaluating techniques that isn’t tradition. Modern rational and empirical techniques do in fact undermine assumptions.

And third, going along with my second point, it is often modern rational and empirical techniques, applied to uninformed traditional assumptions, that have led to the new replacing the old. Not always, but often (and perhaps more often in the recent past than currently).

Aren’t there rational, principled ways in which to distinguish between the ideas? Why should we assume that they are only accepting homophobia because they were taught to accept it? Isn’t it more likely that they e.g. know someone who’s openly gay and know that they aren’t going to contaminate the air with their existence?

And further to that point, I don’t think the methods being applied are the same. Homophobia seems a more appropriate term for the phenomenon it describes (or at least, it was when it was coined) than Islamophobia or even transphobia. If nothing else, the latter two were coined to borrow the political cache that homophobia already had, a cache it earned by appearing legitimate to the society into which it was introduced. Homophobia took hold because it seemed right, the others took hold because they seemed like homophobia. That’s an important distinction, and may well explain the differential reaction among the soft right of GamerGate (which, it seems to bear mentioning, borrows its cache from an earlier and more important scandal).

Is there a tension here? If the hypothesis is that it’s a difference in what we are exposed to when young vs. when old, shouldn’t the speed of bigotification remain constant?

Perhaps one point in your favor: as a result of technology, teenagers have a significantly bigger platform now than ever before, and probably the content to which people are exposed is produced by a younger author, on average, than ever before. This explanation would undermine the role of the social studies teacher and left academia generally, though.

Well, I think you and I polarize each other a bit. And tribally, I am on the left. They’re my ‘team’, so I root for them irrationally. And my speech and writing wears their colors, as it were. But I’m also often mistaken for a rightist by people on the left. As are Steven Pinker and Christina Hoff Sommers. And a lot of anti-Trump Republicans have been identified as lefties by parts of the right, while Trump himself has been identified as a closet lefty from other parts of the right. The term “regressive left” was created to refer to a section of the left that has abandoned almost all of traditional liberalism in favor of a certain set of dogmas, complete with tests of faith and believed for very tribal reasons. That’s antithetical to the enlightenment left, and yet it is the left.

So, point taken, “meaningless” is too strong. But I maintain that the terms are no longer usefully meaningful, in that saying only that someone is on the left or right tells you very little about their beliefs or political positions. Similarly, I don’t know that knowing even a significant part of a person’s constellation of beliefs and political positions will allow you to reliably place them left or right. I’m sure that many would describe me as on the right, and I imagine in some circles you could be mistaken for being on the left.

Uccisore

What assumptions did the leftists put into my head that I am embracing? If anything, you are the one who still considers Nazism, racism, and other such “boogeymen” as evil.

I mostly meant how the moderate left and right relate to the far ends of their respective spectrums. Moderate leftists don’t condemn the far left in the same way that moderate right will condemn and dissociate themselves from things far to the right. After all, what both the moderate left and right use when trying to imply their moral highground is call the other a “fascist”, “Hitler”, or “nazi” (all punching to the right), never a “Mao”, a “Stalin”, a “Lenin”, a “commie” (ok, this is sometimes used but doesn’t have nearly the same effect as ‘nazi’).

That’s where I disagree with you, about old school racism being “immoral”. Morality, as I understand it, is about categories of behaviors. Behaviors which promote group success are moral, behaviors which reduce group success are immoral. The problem is where you draw the boundaries for the group, aka, for which group you want to be successful. Nothing is universally, as in, equally for all good and bad. What is good for X may not be good for Y.

For example, if approximately 5 million white people (about 2-3 percent of whites) went all Dylan Roof on blacks in America, each killing 9, that would be good for white people, bad for black people. It would increase average IQ of the country, improve its economy, stop transfer of resources from whites to blacks by means of welfare, stop the niggerization of culture through vulgar rap music etc. etc. Funnily enough, because of black people’s dependence on white people for their high living standards, if black people did the same thing and exterminated whites, they could not maintain the high infrastructure and civilization whites created and America would soon become another Africa except even worse, so it does not necessarily also follow that it would be good for blacks to genocide whites, as long as blacks care about their current living standards at least. But it is good for black people to parasite on whites, definitely.

Of course, you can also try to reach a certain compromise and instead of promoting what is good for white people and bad for black people, you would be promoting something which is half-good, half-bad for whites, and half-good half-bad for blacks (in reality though, because of the discrepancy I pointed out above a compromise like this is actually much worse for whites than it is for blacks). But given the biological differences between the races and the past between them, such attempts would result in inherently unstable systems because one group (blacks) benefits more from that system than another group (whites), and considering that whites enslaved blacks in the past, blacks will naturally be vengeful and angry and constantly try to get compensations, etc. (I explained why in this post: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=191816&p=2640480#p2640463)

But you and I likely have drastically different moralities, so what I’m saying is just “evil” to you. Then again, I remember your remarks about nuking Japan, how it would be better to nuke Hiroshima than risk a single American life because one has a moral obligation towards their own but not towards the enemy or something like that, and I agree with that, and that example is basically about drawing a strict line between the ingroup and the outgroup and not treating everybody as an ingroup just because they’re human or something like that. So, taking that example, replace American with white and Japanese with black and you may understand where I’m coming from. Except of course that for Americans it’s a bit too late now to try to separate blacks as the outgroup, hence all the problems America is facing and will continue to face.

I mean, this is all a very predictable consequence of first treating blacks badly then accepting them into your ingroup as “equals”. You can say that racism is bad and that trying to separate races or to treat one race as an enemy is evil and what not, and ok, but it DOES have consequences, in particular, BAD consequences for whites, and are you prepared to accept that as a cost for your morality?

But Stalinism and Maoism isn’t what most people think of when they accuse somebody of being “fascist”, is it?

Dear Autsider,

Modern conservatives and liberals (Marxists) share one main thing in common, the ideal of a post-racial society.

Who wrote the history books that told you so? Do you actually know that, or are you trusting a handful of scholars (or things you overheard from other people who were trusting them) that have a vendetta against religion? I’m not saying you’re wrong, but you simply can’t cite an example of what people were doing centuries ago as a reason why tradition is bad- in the absence of tradition, you haven’t an actual clue what was going on in the past. If you want to know what happened in the past unvarnished, you need to read something that was written then, not a progressive retelling by some gender studies professor. Same with usury, same with private property.

And my point is that this cuts both ways. Consider Holocaust denial. As the last person who was actually there finally dies, do you think it’s going to become more common or less common? Do you think this will make fascism less likely or more likely? Do you think the left twisting the definition of “facist” to mean "anybody to the right of Noam Chomsky helps or hinders future generations trying to sort this out?

For who? A person who is raised to think there are 15 genders and race isn’t real and sex is assigned to you by your doctor doesn’t have more information, they have less. They are in exactly the same state as a person who is taught that disease is caused by witches. Sure, they can break free of the influence of the left and find out how sex and gender actually works, assuming free speech still exists in their country enough to make it possible, but when they break free, what they are going to find is all that information that has been branded as misogyny, hate speech, regressive, and so on. And some of it actually is, and not everybody is going to be able to tell the difference.

It is when ‘being informed’ means being indoctrinated to a bunch of embrassasing left wing nonsense. From my perspective, the idea that race doesn’t exist is an example of a leftward slide into ignorance. If a person wants to break free of that ignorance, they have no choice but look up the traditional views of what you call ‘uninformed people’. Whether your right or wrong, my point is, if a person wants to find a book that treats race as a real thing, it’s going to be on a shelf right next to The Turner Diaries, because the left put it there.

Virtually nothing that I’m talking about here has anything to do with science. Every issue I raised in my opening post is either an ethical question or a matter of political science. Are you diverting this conversation to questions of hard science because it’s where you can show society has progressed? I don’t disagree with anything you’ve written above, I’m just not seeing the relevance to what I’m saying.

Your second question answers the first. An application of rational, principled method makes it obvious that scoffing at people for using the term ‘islamophobia’ while completely embracing the usage of the term ‘homophobia’ are behaving inconsistently, since both terms were created by the same ideology for the same purpose and have the same relationship to reality. A rational, principled approach is how I happened to notice there seems to be an age corrolation among people who do this.

Well of course it is; the only reason anybody could oppose gay marriage for example is if they’re a backwoods retard that’s never talked to anybody who lives in a different way from them. Hell, a person who even stops to consider the legitimacy of the gay lifestyle should feel guilty just for hesitating. I mean, that’s the conclusion of our rational, principled methods.

Yeah, that’s how I remember it! People accepted the gay lifestyle because we were all free to think about the issue and explore both sides of it, and we all just sort of came to the logical conclusion that it seemed right. It was nothing at all like the terms ‘transphobia’ or ‘islamophobia’ which are just used to make people who dissent from left wing orthodoxy look deranged and feel bad about speaking their mind. You should write a history book. Probably best to wait till after I’m dead to publish it, though.

I think because young vs. old isn’t a hard break. It’s not like precisely at age 22 you become a hard ass and stop listening to people. It’s gradual, and different for different people. We don’t all graduate from college en masse as a generation, either. Every year students graduate, and every year new professors are hired. Social media and mass communication speed things up because the ability of a progressive to shame somebody for badthink is much faster and further-reaching now. You never know when your picture might go up on Twitter for eating Chinese food with a fork or mis-appropriating black culture with your sneakers.

Eh? How would a greater influence of the young on society undermine the role of the professors teaching the classes those young people are still attending? If anything, all those young authors are megaphones for their professors.

Maybe. I tend to think that one of the consequences of social media is that people who don’t know what the fuck they are talking about are heard from more, and those are the people who are more likely to have a mixture of left and right views. Not saying that it’s impossible for a wise, well read person to divert from ideological orthodoxy, but it seems to me that the collection of stereotypically ‘leftist’ ideas and ‘rightist’ ideas are in the category they are because they are consequences of the same fundamental principles, and not happenstance.

Similarly, I don’t know that knowing even a significant part of a person’s constellation of beliefs and political positions will allow you to reliably place them left or right. I’m sure that many would describe me as on the right, and I imagine in some circles you could be mistaken for being on the left.
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