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Jan 27
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Exactly. This should be so incredibly obvious from even casually observing the BAPsphere. Is this guy really so stupid and unable to understand people that he thinks BAPists and right wingers are colourblind individualist libertarians who don't care about their kith and kin? He thinks BAPists and RWers like people from all nations equally? I thought he was meant to be a gigabrained psychologist?

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Jan 23Edited
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> As a practicing Christian, I invite all off he vitalists to practice one of the most universal pagan traditions and convert to Christianity.

...I really don't think that's a good idea, unless you want crusades and inquisitions to make a comeback. Converting to a religion doesn't actually change one's morality, it only changes how they frame their actions.

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>Converting to a religion doesn't actually change one's morality, it only changes how they frame their actions.

I don't think that's true. Christian Europe was different in important ways to pagan Europe, and to post-Christian Europe.

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This post was Scott at his best. Like a rhetorical cartoon anvil ready to splatter the callous and the weak.

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Any specific examples of such people? The first example of "based post-Christian vitalist" that came to mind was Richard Hanania. The next examples were Curtis Yarvin and Nathan Cofnas. I don't think any of them tweeted any red meat about the grooming gangs.

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I'm thinking of commenters here and on X more than public intellectuals. I realize that's a copout but don't want to name names. I predict at least a few people in the comments here will identify as such people and give better or worse justifications for their actions; if not, I'll admit I was overestimating the size of this demographic.

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This is an incredibly niche demographic, to the degree that I have no idea who you’re responding to

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This isn't really a strong argument against addressing it when you're far enough down the subculture rabbit hole to be in the Scott Alexander comment section or in tpot

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Tpot is the far more niche of the two, no?

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I suspect Scott is, charitably or because they are friends of friends, assuming that TPOT is by definition all high rung thinkers.

In this he is grievously mistaken, and maybe this is one of his steps to learning the reality.

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Are those of us who don't sit at the cool kids table what is tpot? Even chat GPT doesn't know

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“That Part of Twitter.”

Something between a filter bubble and a postrationalist movement. The phrase “vibecamp” was involved at some point.

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Look at the various issues here and follow the threads as far as you like:

https://x.com/St_Rev/status/1882307336360144927

Here's a stronger, more fleshed out version of my complaint:

https://x.com/handleym99/status/1882549682800574685

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I barely read the comments here anymore, and yet I have read this sort of people in the comments and twitter, so I don't think it's that niche

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I'm not pointing at any individuals, mainly because I'm terrible at remembering names, but in - for example - discussions on Nietzsche/slave morality here and over on TheMotte, there's a few who are all "ha ha your slave morality is for losers, you losers" and proudly boast of being masters who don't care if all the trash and riff-raff live or die.

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And these people also never seem to consider that someone in charge of their own morality and mind and body doesn't care what they think, and decides for themselves what is worth caring about.

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The pessimistic side of my brain expects this is how the rich tech folks think. They're excited for AI & robots so they can be supermen standing above the starving hordes of now-useless people.

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Even Nietzschian masters would sympathize with children being raped, I think. They can hardly blame the victims in this case.

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Yes, but that is precisely what happened. The girls were seen to have been making an informed choice. There is a BBC news report (shared by Elon) where the the girl is cast as though she was the one taking advantage of the adult! Including an interview with the mother of the accused male who is claiming her son is the victim.

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I’ve seen people openly profess to belief sets like this but mostly write it down to young men trying ti be edgy.

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The specific example he had in mind are almost certainly a very small niche. But the general reaction pattern is widely observable. I think it's usually invisible to the person exhibiting it, though.

Personally, my choice is to focus on areas I'm interested in, and to assume that someone else will focus on the areas I "approve of" but am not that interested in. And to insist that everyone be interested in an area because I'm interested in it seems immoral. (E.g., I've never heard about "grooming gangs", though I've heard about the topic sufficiently to guess what they are about...though I thought the idea of grooming was to encourage consensual behavior that was illegal among the young, so "rape" was a surprise. [I assume he didn't mean statutory rape.])

So I'm all in favor of the problem being addressed, but feel no compulsion to address it personally.

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The gang busted in Rotheram 10 years ago were busted for grooming/statutory rape exactly as you suspect. The accusation is that there are other gangs engaging in the kidnapping/violent rape, which police/prosecutors/courts are also turning a blind eye to for fear of looking racist.

(I don't know if this is true. The BBC continues to insist that there were purely historic problems, that it was purely grooming, and that Musk et al are being confused by misinformation. The misinformation in question appears to be British court transcripts, which one would usually label 'information'. To add to my confusion, a national enquiry is usually a way of making something you don't want to deal with go away for a few years while appearing to care about it. I don't know why the press aren't delightedly sticking a scandal to the government. I'm pretty confused.)

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They literally had sentencing for more gangs just yesterday. Some men got as short a sentence as 3 years. One of the notorious gang leaders in Rotherham is out & working as an Uber driver.

Why don't you do an ounce of research on this before rambling about it? I recommend reading "Broken and Betrayed" by Jayne Senior, one of the whistleblowers, to understand exactly how bad it was and is.

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With all due respect to Scott, a handful of his posts (including this one) remind me of a conversation I once had with my mom, regarding a childhood friend of mine who moved to San Francisco:

My mom: He's hanging out with the weirdos over there.

Me: What weirdos?

My mom: Oh, you know, those weirdos in San Francisco.

Me: It definitely wouldn't surprise me to learn that there are weirdos in San Francisco, but I've got no idea what weirdos you're talking about.

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Andrew Tate, Bronze Age Pervert, Walt Bismark, Kristi Noem.

There is huge slice of the right wing that use Nietzschean rhetoric to sound tough. "Niche Demographic", man it seems very much a "Trump Base Demographic", "Republican Free Market Religion Demographic".

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A lot of those commenters are pretty dumb people. There's a reason why public *intellectuals* don't hold the position of "helping distant people is *never* a priority".

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Well, not publicly.

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You are something of a magnet for that particular flavour of dumb.

Mostly because you're willing to listen to and debate some pretty crazy ideas. And partly because your nerdy logic-above-all approach is conducive to questioning the basic foundations of morality. But also because, I think, they see you as a fellow traveler. Some of the people they hate most accuse you of being like them.

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I wouldn't put too much by these accusation. Certain people also accuse everyone they disagree with as a Nazi.

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Somewhat depressingly, a small portion of those actually are.

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Plus they can use engagement on ACX to funnel traffic to their brands and Substacks. It's useful to have the famous blogger use his valuable time to debate you. Throws a welcome spotlight.

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The rationalist willingness to share social space with people whose ideas they absolutely abhor: something I have incredibly mixed feelings about. I'm for social tolerance in general but humans are social animals and socialization works to change our beliefs. It's a constant process going on in the background, whether you know about it or not. So there's a very rational reason to worry about total social tolerance, and to look askance at people who are totally socially tolerant of others. The rot has to be stopped somewhere.

If you feel immune to social conditioning, congratulations. Almost everybody feels that way, and almost everyone is wrong.

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The next two famous people I thought of were Steve Sailer and Jared Taylor. Of course they talked about the rape scandal but they didn't say anything so hotheaded. Neither one is really a "based post-Christian nationalist", Steve Sailer is an old-school paleoconservative, and Jared Taylor is a white nationalist.

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Here's what I wrote about the grooming gang scandal in 2013, the year before the Rotherham revelation:

https://www.takimag.com/article/the_real_threat_to_british_elites_steve_sailer/

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In 2013 I was on the side of the adolescent girl victims, not the adult statutory rapists.

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Obviously. My point is you didn’t call for invading the UK or anything like that.

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Yeah, you talked about it, but didn’t say anything so hotheaded, as I said. You rightly criticized the UK government’s response but didn’t obsess about it.

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You can just say Bronze Age Pervert. And you can check out this essay I wrote about American Nietzscheans that has a very interesting analysis of him: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/11/nietzsches-eternal-return-in-america/

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Pace your article, it has long been apparent that the rebels, the rulebreakers, the class clowns. The Roasters of Sacred Cows and Tellers Of Forbidden Truths are found on the Alt-right (and, to a lesser extent, the Dirtbag Left), while liberals have morphed into prissy schoolmarmish scolds so humorless and smug, they make The Church Lady look like Johnny Rotten by comparison (Johnny Rotten himself in fact recently made this observation).

This is not because of any inherent love of liberty on the right, nor any innate censoriousness on the left, but is an artifact of their respective relationships with power.

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> while liberals have morphed into prissy schoolmarmish scolds so humorless and smug, they make The Church Lady look like Johnny Rotten by comparison

An eloquent and incisive articulation of something I think many of us are reacting to without putting it in quite these words, kudos for a great encapsulation of the dynamic.

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See Scott's "Right is the new left" https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ though he later concluded that dirtbag socialism rather than right-wing politics became cool.

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I've seen this dichotomy described as "bad boys vs mean girls."

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Hm....me likes.

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What do you think is the relevant relationship with power here? It can’t be anything simplistic like “the alt right has power and liberals don’t” or “liberals have power and the alt right doesn’t” because both of those are trivially false - both groups have some sorts of power and lack other sorts of power, and you have to squint really hard to miss all the ways that one of these groups has power.

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The PMC is the hegemonic class, and so, by definition, PMC values are seen as normative.

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The PMC is a postmodern attempt to rehabilitate Marxism for the Information Age.

I don’t find it very convincing. Yes, it’s now easier to accumulate prestige without controlling capital. That doesn’t translate into the same kind of class interest. Nor does it allow the kind of hegemony which proponents like to assert.

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Basically, yes. The schoolmarms are on the left now, so the teenage boys lean right. (And the beards have all grown longer overnight...)

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I think this is an appealing narrative, but not a correct one.

If you draw one box around mainstream liberals, and another around young and hungry Twitter hustlers, is it any surprise if the former looks more stodgy? The correct comparison for mainstream liberalism is mainstream conservatism. I think that will prove to be just as humorless.

Counterparts to this article exist, but are a lot harder to find in the comments section of a technolibertarian blog.

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Considering that mainstream conservatives have pretty much zero following remaining.

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I had a similar wonder, although I think it's fine to not pick on specific people especially if they're smaller accounts.

That being said, I do always wonder how I should evaluate claims that X group was saying A, and now they are saying B, contradicting their earlier statements. This has very different implications for what I should think if the people saying A and B just both happen to be in semi-overlapping spheres vs being the literal same person.

In the former case, it's more of a Motte and Bailey doctrine where the people saying reasonable thing A are providing cover for different people saying B. The annoying thing about that version is that the motte and the bailey can both be fully staffed at all times, but no one involved is actually contradicting themselves.

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They'll show when they see this. An irresistible branding opportunity. I'd wager they get a lot more out of this than you do, simply though attention share capture. Not everyone engages in good faith, Scott.

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Hey Scott, WTF even is this? There is almost nothing in my writing record that suggests you are responding to me. WTF even is this?

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I think most of the really extreme commenters of this school have been internet ferals swinging through. I have definitely read rants on here, mostly from passing ferals, saying that while some poor people are poor because of circumstance, on average the poor are weak, sickly and dumb, and we should let them die to strengthen the species.

I do remember an exchange on here where someone, maybe Scott, maybe a commenter, said that a certain thing would greatly help the world's poor, and someone who comments here quite regularly posted "yeah, but what do I get out of it?"

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I for one identify as such a person, and will admit this post struck a nerve.

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I bet that Scott has read hundreds of books by Brits, while the only books he has read by Pakistanis are by Kipling.

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It took me a few years to realize that the grooming gang rumors were true, but I'm proud to say I posted red meat in 2013:

https://www.takimag.com/article/the_real_threat_to_british_elites_steve_sailer

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Catgirl Kulak. His whole schtick on Twitter is how only losers care about anything other than their own tribe, and also everyone should be making the streets of London run red with blood right now.

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He (and yes it's a he) is a white identitarian, right? So he would view the white grooming gang girls as part of his own tribe and the Pakistani rapists as the outgroup.

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Yes, but he's also Canadian, and the lower-class English girls who were the primary victims of Pakistani grooming gangs would be exactly the sort of girls he considers to be rightful spoils of war.

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His thinking is simple: white people good, non-white people bad. He also dislikes Jews, and not consider them to be white. He also dislikes Indians and East Asians.

Richard Hanania is the canonical example of a "based post-Christian Nietzchean vitalist". He is a hereditarian and hardcore first-worlders who strongly supports civilizational progress. He likes Jews and Asians, is a big fan of Israel, is a big fans of Singapore (though perhaps they don't like Singapore's low TFR and conformism), likes LKY, likes Milei, likes Bukele, want lots of high-skill immigration etc.

People whose #1 issue is the grooming gangs tend to be hardcore white nationalists or some such and tend to have a lot of sympathy for the white working-class. Richard Hanania makes fun of these people and looks down on them. In fact this article by Scott is in some sense basically a more gentle version of a bunch of Richard Hanania tweets attacking white nationalists.

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> His thinking is simple: white people good, non-white people bad. He also dislikes Jews, and not consider them to be white. He also dislikes Indians and East Asians.

wow Im sure those quotes would be interesting, Id be interested in a primary source

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https://x.com/FromKulak/status/1796267869157605778

https://x.com/FromKulak/status/1855653289410384100

https://x.com/FromKulak/status/1874702366383243441

https://x.com/FromKulak/status/1848429564655243280

Consistent pattern of negative comments toward non-white groups, Jews, Indians, etc. And he literally has "kulak" in the name so of course he is a fan of the white working class.

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Seriously, why even mention that someone like that exists? The world is full of nuts.

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Because nuts on social media have turned out to be one of the most influential groups on future social developments in history?

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Surely an Anglo-Canadian ethnic nationalist is going to view English girls as being part of the same, well, ethnic nation.

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Are you really this clueless? RWers don't consider all foreign countries the same. They care more about people who are more genetiically similar to them, which is a natural human instinct because it is a successful evolutionary strategy and is why you love your relatives more than strangers.

So of course they care much more when indigenous brits whom are their fellow people of European descent get mass raped than when for example Boko Haram mass rapes nigerians.

nothing about htis contradicts BAPism or online RW, NRx or dissident right thought.

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If Catgirl Kulak is a he, then who is this person, who has breasts?

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1ae74e0c-329e-4f15-bb2c-570ca99eae75_542x590.png

Note: this not an AI generated image. According to AI detecting software it has <1% odds of being AI generated.

Unless this person is a transwoman and you follow the unfashionable custom of calling a transwoman a he?

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I don’t know but I once heard at least part of a podcast with catgirl kulak by Alex Kaschuta or someone and the voice was distinctively male.

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I guess Kulak is either a transwoman, or a ciswoman with a very male voice (I know one).

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Explicitly denies being trans here: https://x.com/FromKulak/status/1834836756509741469

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Smoking will get you there eventually.

I've read some of CK's blog and I'd bet actual money whoever wrote that is a smoker, and not a moderate one.

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Internet seems to be consistent in calling this Fabienne Farge.

https://www.instagram.com/fireforce.ventures/p/CnnlzmbJ1Zd/

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No idea, but I’ve only ever seen him identified as “him.”

This goes back to before he adopted the “catgirl” prefix.

See discussion here: https://www.themotte.org/post/400/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/73644?context=8#context

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Kulak is a he. Went on to Alex Kaschuta and said so and everything.

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Yeah, I don't know why Scott finds this behavioural pattern to be especially mysterious. The based post-christian vitalist (whoever that is) could easily consider the english working class to be broadly part of their extended genetic and cultural in-group, and hence included in their sphere of moral concern.

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...Because that would be racist, and he really doesn't want to believe people are racist.

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The kind of people he was talking about in this post, most likely: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/altruism-and-vitalism-as-fellow-travelers

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Who, Walt Bismarck? Walt was a leader in the alt-right famous for making what he calls "racist Disney parodies" and now runs this job stacking thing with the goal of "making white boys rich". While he is no longer a white nationalist and is no longer part of the "alt-right", he continues to self identify proudly as "pro white". He says that white people need to develop business networks and become rich and that this is the goal of his "Tortuga Society". Of course he cares much about white girls getting raped by gangs of Pakistani rapists than black people dying in the third world. I don't think this is a great mystery.

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I understand that you've seen the comment, but others might be interested too

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John Arcto and Johaan Kurtz talked a lot about them, but they’re both British, so I’m not exactly surprised they care about their fellow countrymen being raped by immigrants they didn’t want in the country. I can’t think of any Americans wanting an invasion, and I’m definitely in the circles for this. Even Walt Bismark isn’t calling for an invasion.

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John Arcto is a 20ish year old British nationalist who like most 20 year olds interested in politics often says some hotheaded things, like go and arrest all of the people involved in gender ideology, cancel all the wokes, we need remigration etc etc, but if you DM him and ask him about his policy proposals they are just normal nationalist proposals within the Overton window, and he’ll be nice to you even if you disagree with him politically.

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My intuition is that:

a. This is a salient issue now for media focus reasons, and will stop being salient again in a couple weeks.

b. It's easier for me to see being very worked up about this if you're British than if you're American.

c. It's worthwhile to point out the pathology of policemen not investigating some crimes for fear of being accused of racism, because that's a way you could end up with your police tolerating a lot of crime.

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I don't think remigration is particularly far outside the overton window. It was official state policy in Sweden last I checked.

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Point conceded. There are various forms of remigration which vary widely in how reasonable they are. On substack Arcto often sounds like he wants some kind of white ethnostate with crazy remigration where you deport the grandchildren of immigrants, but if you ask him what policy he wants in a DM you get something that is more reasonable like Sweden.

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When I said remigration I meant some extreme forms of it, I would consider Swedish style remigration to be a normal nationalist policy within the Overton window.

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Fair enough.

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You know, I have to say Walt Bismarck's conversations with Robert Stark and John Arcto are one of the funniest things I've heard lately. A long day of kissing ass at work and then you hear guys arguing over whether cunnilingus is mystical or not. I spewed my soda all over the screen.

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Hanania is pro EA. Yarvin isn't, but that is a side effect of having some 9-D chess explanation of why it's bad that makes no sense.

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I’m pretty sure Yarvin thinks that EA is good. I think he just criticizes it because he thinks it does not address the fundamental political and institutional problems of governance which he views as much more important, and he would say a movement by a bunch of naive rationalist autists who doesn’t understand how the world works. I can’t imagine he thinks that bed nets are a particularly bad use of money, given the kind of rationalist adjacent company he keeps.

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If your description of Moldbug is right, then I wonder why he doesn't support IIDM https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/topics/improving-institutional-decision-making

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Walt Bismarck might be an example.

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Walt Bismarck is a former alt right white nationalist figure and is still a practitioner of white identity politics who always emphasizes that he is “pro white” is running the Tortuga job stacking operation (or if you’re cynical, the Tortuga scam) to “make white boys rich”, so of course he is especially worked up about crimes committed against white girls by Pakistani rapists.

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To be on the same page, the "based post-Christian vitalist" ethic is an attempt in the West to assert emotional and practical limits to in-group treatment. Non-Western cultures have no such difficulty.

Let's not forget Christianity's previous in-group limits of looking out for Christian converts were superceded by Progressivism's assertion of universal human rights which have been a moral and practical failure (i.e., the 20-year American war in Afghanistan).

The popularization of anything (Nietzsche included) will necessarily be inconsistent and ham-fisted. Insofar as the article is addressing this popularization, its characterization of the vitalist is a straw man. Hanania, at least, is not that simplistic.

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I don’t think Scott is floating around our particular gulag, but I have definitely seen this behavior from commenters on the Motte.

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Scott is writing in response to me though not in any meaningful way about me.

https://x.com/futuristright/status/1878623841809059881

Or at least I have no idea what I've ever written that would give him the impression that I feel *No* moral duty to the suffering around the world. What I feel is *far less* of one than to people more like me. This isn't just about poverty or IQ; though I bet you the avg IQ of a white kid born in Rotherham is higher than that of Pakistan's top half.

Pakistani elites still do their cousins in a way lower class Britons do not. Pakistani elites were pro-Osama, lower-class Britons are not. Pakistani Elites would kill me for my atheism (if I were born a muslim), lower class Britons would not. Kill every upper class Briton tomorrow, and the emerging society would still within a generation look more like one in which I would want to live in than Pakistan.

So I care about the British lower-class more than I do Pakistanis... generally. This isn't even racism, and I'm an open (soft-white-man's-burden) racist. I felt this way long before I was at all racist. I don't know how to explain these sentiments to someone who lacks them.

---

* My response post will include comments on and maybe from Catgirl Kulak, Covfefe, and Walt Bismarck, Bronze Age Pervert and their views. While I have my disagreements with all, I suppose this post reveals just how much closer we are to each other than Scott Alexander's worldview.

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You're something of a rather rarer kind of writer because you are in between the two camps I discuss here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/everyones-a-based-post-christian/comment/87971631

The Hanania camp and the white nationalist camp. I would say you're a mix of them, mostly in the Hanania camp talking about progress and scientific achievements and all of those good things but there is a bit of white nationalism, thinking that Hitler salutes are funny because they own the libs, getting extremely angry over Roterham in a way Hanania wouldn't, saying HBD demands racism against blacks etc.

I guess Walt would also fall into this category, and perhaps so would Richard Hoste.

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Hanania 100% believes HBD demands racism against Blacks.

In fact the refusal of whites to be racist against blacks is the #2 reason he's not a white nationalist!

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I mean Hanania is a strong opponent of black nationalism, but this is not the same as “racism against blacks”. Black people are human beings. Opposition to black nationalism is not “racism against blacks”.

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Go to PoliticalCompassMemes on reddit, you'll see what type of people ussually don't care about foreign kids suffering, but suddenly get obsessed with the topic when there's an accusation that Muslims are responsible.

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Even the most pro capitalist, libertarian “better rape whistle” advocate believes in a Night Watchman state which would prosecute rapists with zeal. I’m not sure I see so much contradiction here…

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I think once you have acknowledged that you can care about the inhabitants of other countries that are incompetent at their core night watchman duties, you have opened yourself up to caring about the inhabitants of lots of kleptocratic and genocidal states.

Also, what about immigration policy?

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"Suddenly, they’ve stopped saying that capitalism solves every problem and since your solution isn’t capitalism you’re an idiot to even be considering it. I have heard zero demands that people who really care about grooming gangs have to stop talking about immigration policy or police malfeasance and focus on, I don’t know, investing in a startup working on better rape whistles"

This is pretty strange, presumably someone who advocates for extreme capitalism, say due to econ efficiency or libertarian principles would say govt needs be competent at enforcing rights etc. or just private orgs should do those roles and govt get out of the way. Like I don't think Hanson style bounty hunters or private govt or Friedman style rights enforcement agencies would do nothing and leave stuff up to the consumer goods market.

Also seems like such ppl would advocate going worldwide, so dunno who the second point is addressed to.

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Pro capitalists have always included extreme anti government types as well.as moderate smaller government types...even if the no-government position doesn't make sense to you. It doesn't make much sense to me , either.

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It's not that they care about the inhabitants, it's that they want to see evil destroyed. Thus, such desire is compatible with not actually trying to help people.

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Yes, there is at least the possibility they are anti-perpetrator more than pro victim. As everyone is saying.

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The solution to that is imperialist war. That's not an option, so people don't bother spending energy on it.

The reason people are outraged at the Pakistani rape syndicates is because the UK government, was locking people up for saying mean things about Pakistanis (and others) while at the same time looking at 12 year-olds reporting rapes and responding that they were little whores trying to stoke racial hatred, and then call their "boyfriends" (the middle-aged Pakistani men running the rape cartel) to pick them up.

It was literally treason, siding with foreigners, who live in foreign enclaves, against the natives that they ostensibly represent and are part of.

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Treason is a pretty good approximation to the sentiments at work, yes, although it might not fit the technical definition.

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The desire to set up a British style governorship and the impulse to sent mosquito nets to Congo are two completely different impulses. Not understanding this is why you are conflating them. Both the desire to send mosquito nets to Africa and the desire to ignore/coverup immigrant rape gangs comes from the same impulse: Aversion to responsibility, in two forms. First an aversion to holding people responsible for their own conditions and choices, and second an aversion to taking responsibility yourself.

For all his faults, a dictatorial colonizer who sets up courts and police in a disorganized country is doing real, sustainable (so long as western progressives dont butt in) good for the populace. In ways mosquito net guy can never get close to (who knows, our colonizer might get his country to the place where they can actually manufacture their own nets!). But this isn't the fun kind of charity that makes you feel good. You have to be able to put criminals in prison, you have to let some beggars starve to death, etc. But that is how you do real good.

Its just like prosecuting Pakistanis in England. Doing whats right isn't what is easy or what feels good (if you buy into some of the leftist talking points regarding racism/other isms).

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“a dictatorial colonizer who sets up courts and police in a disorganized country is doing real, sustainable (so long as western progressives dont butt in) good for the populace”

Absurd. At the time of decolonization most of these places were at bare subsistence poverty, as bad as any in their history. The gap between the West and the Rest only started closing in the 1990s as a result of decolonization and globalization. India continually fell further behind the UK while it was colonized and surpassed the UK in total GDP while also growing faster in per capita it a GDP since it became independent.

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Rhodesia and South Africa were very rich for SSA countries.

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India's per-capita GDP was basically stable under the British Raj, at the same time the population roughly doubled, which is actually not what you would expect under pre-industrial malthusian assumptions. The per-capita risk of death by famine also dropped by about a factor of 4, and was concentrated in regions outside of British control.

There are plenty of examples of African countries whose economies and per-capita incomes expanded substantially under colonialism, although the data suggests they were statistically above subsistence level even prior to this period.

https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014498321000462

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Honestly, no you haven't necessarily opened yourself up to that. I mean, if you accept your universalist premises, then yes. If all lives are of equal worth, then if you care about white English children, you should care about Pakistani children.

But these people don't accept that all lives are of equal worth. If you're broadly pro-white (and this extends beyond outright 1488-style white nationalists), you care about white people more than others. English Rotherham kids yes, African malaria sufferers no. I doubt you've run into many white nationalists in your everyday life for obvious reasons, but I'm sure you've run into rabbis who seem much more exercised about Jewish suffering than other types.

Frankly, this is the default, normal human position, and universalism is a late development by post-Axial Age religions like Christianity and Buddhism (I will let you comment on Judaism), just as the use of reason to understand the universe with things like science and philosophy is a hack of a tool designed for persuasion. Most people care more about people like them. The Greco-Roman gods were supposed to keep the polis or empire going; elsewhere in the world you'd pray for rain for your tribe. Confucianism prescribes concentric loyalties to family and state, (EDIT: though you do owe things to humanity as well) . Even older (and the modern more aggressive) forms of Islam have a House of Islam and a House of War that would have been recognizable to any medieval crusader (with the positions flipped, of course). (And there was a House of Treaty too, which people conveniently forget.)

This is where the 'post-Christian' bit comes in, I think. It