Comment by backpropaganda
9 years ago
While I'm fairly conformist, and "won't make you friends" is sufficient for me to join the diversity bandwagon, I can imagine radicals not buying your counter-arguments. Groups like the altright truly believe that multiculturalism is the Worst Possible Thing Ever™, and fighting against it is noble even if that restricts their friend circle. Here's a Vox piece[1] where Renaud Camus explains much better than me on where altright are coming from. While I abhor violence and believe in Enlightenment ideals, I don't take diversity as an intrinsic good, and I think being against diversity is consistent with other Enlightenment ideals, and is not coming from a position of hatred or ignorance.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/world/2017/8/15/16141456/renaud-camus-th...
> I can imagine radicals not buying your counter-arguments.
That is because they are not going be be buying any counter arguments at all, regardless of merit.
> While I abhor violence and believe in Enlightenment ideals, I don't take diversity as an intrinsic good, and I think being against diversity is consistent with other Enlightenment ideals, and is not coming from a position of hatred or ignorance.
If you wish to stake out this position right 'on the line' that's your problem, not mine, it's not up to me to supply you with arguments for your feelings. I'm a bit surprised you would use an expensive word such as 'Enlightenment' and then use it to promote a radically un-enlightened position.
Whether diversity as such is an intrinsic good or not is not even up for discussion, diversity is the direct result of having a society where everybody is equal before the law. If you feel that is something that you could argue about you're going to have a hard time finding a country where you will feel comfortable.
As for the root cause: it need not be hatred or ignorance, there is a much simpler and baser emotion at work here: fear.
Ask yourself this: why is it that you feel that you could not share a country with people with a different culture from yours and with a different skin color than yours?
On another note, earlier you made it seems as if you were just 'asking for a friend' ("Also, these are not my political beliefs.") or speaking entirely in hypotheticals and now you actually admit that this is your own position after all. I'm super interested in how you got yourself into that position in the first place, I've yet to meet someone who openly admitted to such a stance so if you could please try to make me understand how you arrived at your position I'm most interested.
> That is because they are not going be be buying any counter arguments at all, regardless of merit.
Assuming that all the intelligent people in the world only belong to your camp is a reliable way to cloud your perspective, and not only unpersuasive, but dangerous. Since while you're complacent about the abilities of your opponent, they are recruiting and growing because they are not that stupid after all.
> radically un-enlightened position
How so? As I said, it's compatible with equality and symmetry. Your argument about minorities and wealth disparity is unfalsifiable. There will never be a time when we'd say that wealth disparity is gone, and discrimination doesn't exist. It's un-enlightened to use unfalsifiable statements as driving principles. This is why we're stuck on a downward spiral right now, because someone forgot to put in a good termination condition.
People have moralized their political stances (diversity in tech), so that disagreement automatically categorizes you as sexist, and possibly Nazi. Bulletproofing your stance from critics by moralizing it is profoundly unenlightened. Enlightenment requires making your idea criticize-able, something we're forgetting how to do.
Also, the Enlightenment and Hellenistic ideal is equality before the law, not "each man is equal", but "each man will be treated equally by the law".
> why is it that you feel that you could not share a country with people with a different culture from yours and with a different skin color than yours?
I'm a non-white non-western immigrant to this country, so I do speak from a very academic point of view. I have no skin in the game, and maybe that's why I am comfortable taking such an extremist position.
Color doesn't matter to me. But culture does. I believe there are inferior and superior cultures in this world, and there is little to be gained from an inferior culture. I've come out of such an inferior culture myself, only because I had the writings and wisdom of great western thinkers, who instilled the spirit of scientific inquiry in me. In no other culture, is science and its spirit as respected.
Culture and community is humanity's greatest strength. Most of what we achieved is due to culture (that we accidentally acquired in the 1700s) and cooperation among people of the same culture. By fucking up our culture, we risk losing the very thing that built western civilization and its ideals, and gain next to nothing.
Do you not see how little freedom of speech is valued these days? How hurtful speech is categorized as violence? FoS got us out of the fucking dark ages, and we plan to abandon and replace with absolutisms like "Nazism and anything which remotely touches Nazism is shoot-on-sight", or even better "I'll decide if you're Nazi or not, coz you mentioned biological differences between sexes/races, and we've already established that punching/killing Nazis is Good".
Since I come from a non-western country, I know the value of western ideals, probably (dare I say) much more than you, since I've lived in the counterfactual. And I see that the west is also denigrating to the same, becoming the worst of multiple cultures mixed together haphazardly, adopting the most base populist idea of each.
> there is a much simpler and baser emotion at work here: fear.
I don't deny this. Fear is not a base emotion though, unlike hatred or ignorance. It's fear of losing what's important. It's not an impulsive misinformed fear either. It's very carefully evaluated and sustained.
> you're going to have a hard time finding a country where you will feel comfortable.
I'm not a radical myself, so I am comfortable being a passive observer in a country going to the dogs. The altright have half the story right, and the other half (violence, anti-semitism) wrong, and it's possible to have a decently rational brain which believes in the first half without the second.
Also, believing in something just because it's comfortable and would make you the most friends is a profoundly unenlightened idea. I'm sure I don't need to recount the countless times in history when people had to take contrarian positions, make enemies, and eventually been proven right. I'm not saying you should abandon your friends, but you shouldn't disrespect people simply because they have an extremely provocative position. Being gay or an atheist was extremely provocative in the dark ages. Are you sure you're objective Right and not simply following a moral fashion?
Can't not mention this here: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
> how you arrived at your position
Radical skepticism. Mistrusting everything mainstream media tells me, and trying to find alternative explanations for the same. The rationalist bloggers (SSC, LW), Sam Harris, a bit of Moldbug, conservative thinkers like Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, but mostly my own deductions from facts obtained from unbiased sources, or if not available, reading from ALL the biased sources (instead of just one), and weighting their argument's merit. You should try this. Every time you read an opinion `X`, find someone intelligent who is (for some godforsaken reason) arguing for `not X`, and see if his explanation makes more sense. Most of the time the mainstream opinion would be right, but often it won't.
First of all thank you for taking the time to write this long response.
Now let me try to correct some of the errors in how you arrived at your conclusion:
The first is that if you're an immigrant into a country you are roughly in the same position as a smoker who stops smoking. You, more than anybody else know the dangers of smoking first hand and so you will now fall through to an extremist anti-smoking position without realizing that the same people that allowed you to smoke before are part of the group of people who you are now arguing against.
Essentially you have leapfrogged the middle to end up on the other side.
Second, and point by point:
> I'm not a radical myself
You'd be surprised how many people would interpret your position as a pretty radical one. The one mistake I see over and over again in these discussions is that people have no idea in how extremist their positions really are because to them it is all reasonable.
> I am comfortable being a passive observer in a country going to the dogs.
It is going to the dogs, but this is in large part because of the group which you say you are a part of. There is a certain amount of hypocrisy in you moving from one country to another and then joining a group which fairly explicitly states that they are against people being able to do what you just did.
> Mistrusting everything mainstream media tells me
Why would you mistrust them and not mistrust the other sources that you have found?
> and trying to find alternative explanations for the same.
It appears to me that you are consciously selecting for sources that agree with your way of thinking and discarding those sources that disagree with your way of thinking.
> The rationalist bloggers (SSC, LW), Sam Harris, a bit of Moldbug
Those are considered 'fringe' (and worse) by a very large fraction of the population.
> conservative thinkers like Niall Ferguson, Douglas Murray, but mostly my own deductions from facts obtained from unbiased sources
Again, unbiased because they agree with you, not because they are actually unbiased.
> or if not available, reading from ALL the biased sources (instead of just one), and weighting their argument's merit.
That's a better method.
> You should try this.
What makes you think I don't? The fact that we disagree?
> Every time you read an opinion `X`, find someone intelligent who is (for some godforsaken reason) arguing for `not X`, and see who if his explanation makes more sense.
So, how is that working out for you so far :) ?
Note that - wittingly or not - you have aligned yourself with that element of your society that wants to destroy it an that given half a chance would deport you. That makes no sense to me.
> Most of the time the mainstream opinion would be right, but often it won't.
This we can agree on, but for different reasons.
Anyway, regardless of our different position on this subject once again my gratitude for taking the time for a reasoned and measured response.
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