US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8456

On August 17 2017 13:30 xDaunt wrote:

The thought wasn't lost on me. And to be fair, it's the one point that I find to be badly out of place with the rest. Why would Vox include that point when he is otherwise portraying the Alt Right as being race neutral? The charitable answer is the one that I gave, but it may be the incorrect one.

On August 17 2017 13:32 Sermokala wrote:

OH come on. Then just say "Or it might be him expressing facist or white supremacist views that I don't support or agree with". and we can all to bed happy.

On August 17 2017 13:37 xDaunt wrote:

Okay, to be explicitly clear, the obvious alternative to everything that I have said as to why Point 14 is in there is that Vox Day actually is a white supremacist. And once again, I reject white supremacism.

On August 17 2017 13:37 xDaunt wrote:

Okay, to be explicitly clear, the obvious alternative to everything that I have said as to why Point 14 is in there is that Vox Day actually is a white supremacist. And once again, I reject white supremacism.

On August 17 2017 13:34 xDaunt wrote:

Or it could just be some higher level trolling. All I did was report what he says, taking at face value his explanation for what the Alt Right is and why he included Point 14. Again, it's his position, not mine.

On August 17 2017 12:54 xDaunt wrote:

I look at it as the expression of an ideal in which a problem is identified, and an optimal solution is offered. Even though we may never reach the ideal, I do think that ideal can provide useful guidance for real policy to help mitigate the problem. For example, while the ideal may be to stop immigration altogether, the real policy would be to bring in immigrants who are most likely to assimilate culturally and then actively assist in the assimilation.

On August 17 2017 13:10 xDaunt wrote:

Wegandi is pretty much expressing my root concern over lack of sufficient cultural homogeneity. Nations break apart when people cease identifying with each other. I don't think that the US is of a prohibitively large size to preserve as a whole, but we do need to put some effort into it.

On August 17 2017 13:05 xDaunt wrote:

If the problem is maintaining cultural homogeneity, part of an ideal solution would be to stop all immigration so as to best preserve the culture without importing outside influences (again presuming that cultural homogeneity is the only objective). However, this is impractical for obvious reasons, hence the need to look at more realistic solutions.

On August 17 2017 12:24 xDaunt wrote:
Or using IgnE's terminology, the xDaunt brand of fascism does require a certain level of cultural homogeneity within the nation. I'll just say right now that I don't know exactly where the line is as it pertains to the US. However, and per my previous posts addressing this matter, I do think it critical that everyone within the US, at a minimum, accept and embrace the most important traditions of Western culture: individual liberty, inalienable rights, political plurality, rationalism, and the rule of law. And I will be first to say that we have not done a good job of imprinting these values upon our own people (as is amply evidenced by some of the posters around here), thus this isn't even strictly an issue of insider vs outsider.

We can see a nice little microcosm as to why cultural homogeneity matters just by looking at what has been going on over at Google. How was the internal reaction to Damore's memo any different than a cultural conflict? As with cultural conflicts between nations or peoples, conflicting values were the issue. And as we with so many cultural conflicts, one side is clearly working to eliminate the other. As Vox Day says, diversity + proximity = war.

On August 17 2017 13:43 m4ini wrote:
Bwaha, one second, that guy is a "hardcore southern baptist"? Weren't those the morons who said that god gave his go to a nuclear strike against north korea?

On August 17 2017 10:50 IgnE wrote:
bayesian priors are a belief system that is always only a justification a posteriori. you are sitting here making claims that its "rational" to be scared of blacks on a train because of "statistics" about "the violence of black people" (in comparison to the US) with no reference to any other details and no acknowledgement that the criterion black is always an arbitrary criterion.

in other words, if you and i were betting on indidual crimes in trains i am quite positive that i would beat you over the long term by using "average rate of crimes in trains" if you were using a "racial propensity for crime" model. i am aware that this is almost tautological but i am also sure that there are nearly an infinite number of models that would have a better performance than "are the people on this train black?"

now i am not arguing that a feeling of fear is never warranted (imagine a gang of bloods dressed all in red with doo rags and face tatts and all those "im black and dangerous" indicators and flashing a gun) but the millions of pieces of data your brain is analyzing has only the slightest resemblance to this "racial stereotyping" abstraction you are talking about, not all of it inherently racist, while your racial stereotyping abstraction is exactly that. for another thing there is no way that anyone working with stereotypes in practical situations has access to rigorous data of the right type. its always an operation of unjustified belief.

you seem to have missed the point here ("oh you just dont understand bayes theorem! you see there are these things called 'priors' that are really cool"). yeah i know what bayes theorem is and i know what a prior is. a prior is the conscious assignation of a value to what amounts to more or less of a gut feeling. even framing the question structures priors. why are we asking "whether black people are more dangerous" rather than "whether train riders on a wednesday at noon" are more dangerous?

On August 17 2017 11:08 IgnE wrote:
@mozoku

what i am trying to emphasize is that the context under which stereotypes form is always limited and never fully applicable to the instant situation. you have come up with an example (the train example), which you will shift in the course of this discussion, and perhaps disown entirely as "just an example" (i.e. it's not about the specifics it's about the generality of stereotypes in making efficient decisions about known statistical distributions). and yet the framework about which distribution to use in any given situation is (usually) a pre-conscious given that has no possible rational justification other than belief. and in almost all cases is using bad data.

now if you think about how you want to run society, and how those pre-conscious judgments structure relations between people, you might say, "well a consideration about how likely any random black person is to be violent" is a racist consideration because it deliberately chooses his or her race as the arbitrary criterion for making a judgment to the exclusion of literally everything else we know about him or her (and often what we know about ourselves).

On August 17 2017 13:37 xDaunt wrote:

Okay, to be explicitly clear, the obvious alternative to everything that I have said as to why Point 14 is in there is that Vox Day actually is a white supremacist. And once again, I reject white supremacism.

On August 17 2017 13:42 KwarK wrote:

When you say "his position, not mine", how do you reconcile that with your posts from the page before talking about the problems of cultural diversity and how a white ethnostate represented an ideal (if not practical) solution?
specifically these posts

On August 17 2017 13:48 xDaunt wrote:

Because my use of "ideal" there clearly isn't a referral to my ideal. That should have been clear enough when I had already explicitly rejected racial differentiation and, consequently, the ethnostate solution.

On August 17 2017 13:48 ChristianS wrote:

So (and feel free to correct me if I've misunderstood you somewhere) you think:

1) that Vox Day's definition of the alt right is a pretty good one, although it might underestimate the racial emphasis of the movement
2) that he plainly flirts with white supremacists far too much.

and if I recall correctly, you were arguing earlier today that

3) it's SO unfair that people keep lumping the alt right in with white supremacists?

Honestly, how the hell do you mesh those? He openly admits all these white power tenets (different races absolutely cannot coexist, they shouldn't be mixed, we should create a white ethnostate and kick out all the brown people, white people's culture is the pinnacle of human achievement), but insists he doesn't believe in any "general supremacy," because different races have their own unique strengths (their culture isn't the pinnacle of human achievement, but maybe they're good at sports or something). And yet you think people shouldn't lump that in with white supremacy?

On August 17 2017 13:48 xDaunt wrote:

Because my use of "ideal" there clearly isn't a referral to my ideal. That should have been clear enough when I had already explicitly rejected racial differentiation and, consequently, the ethnostate solution.

On August 17 2017 13:47 Plansix wrote:

I believe that was them. And Vox Day is racist idiot practiced in avoiding being called racist.

What is reprehensible is not the suggestion that Jews living in America might have divided loyalties. That is arguably the best case scenario. What is reprehensible, and quite possibly anti-semitic, is the idea that a Jew living in America cannot possibly have divided loyalties

It is absurd to imagine that there is absolutely no link between race and intelligence

There is no reason a white father should hesitate to tell his daughters what sort of young men are approved and what sort are not, regardless of what his criteria might be… If you’re not okay with it, then it is your duty as her father to tell her that you’re not okay with it, even if her reaction is to denounce you as a racist, sexist, transphobic bigot while filming herself being urinated on by an African rapper with a sub-80 IQ.

First, there is no such thing as marital rape. Once consent is formally given in public ceremony, it cannot be revoked... If a woman believes in the concept of marital rape, absolutely do not marry her

On August 17 2017 13:53 KwarK wrote:

How would you like us to differentiate between when you're talking about your own beliefs and when you're simply repeating the beliefs of white supremacists and explaining at length why you think they're not racist while simultaneously disclaiming them? It gets especially confusing when you drift between talking about your concerns over the problems of multiculturalism and talking about the white supremacist ideal solutions to the problems of multiculturalism without any clear signifiers. Could you perhaps start using bold or underline tags so we know when you're echoing white supremacist opinions without personally endorsing them?

On August 17 2017 13:53 xDaunt wrote:

I have no qualms with 1 and 2. As for 3, that's not exactly what I said. Though I did argue that conflating the Alt Right with White Supremacy is bullshit, I also acknowledged that the moderate elements of the Alt Right were also partially responsible for bringing this conflation upon themselves due to their failure to distance themselves from the real white supremacists and nazis, of which there certainly are some in the Alt Right.

On August 17 2017 13:55 ChristianS wrote:
I mean apparently it's definitional to the alt right that putting diverse groups of people in the same place at the same time necessarily leads to war, and is necessarily a lost cause. Racial homogeneity is the only way.

Aren't these guys supposed to like America? When exactly do they think we were last great, pre-Columbus?