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BenMcLean

['Member']Joined: April 06, 2017 at 17:13Last active: February 25, 2026 at 16:443 discussions109 comments

Discussions (3)

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I can sound callous in how I discuss this sometimes because of the harsh realities of it I think our political norms refuse to acknowledge, but I care...
February 25, 2026 at 16:01
They in fact did not move millions back to Africa. So this would be supporters of empty rhetoric, who showed by their behavior that, despite being com...
February 23, 2026 at 18:24
With those four words, I am showing who the real destroyers of truth are.
February 23, 2026 at 18:22
What is a woman?
February 23, 2026 at 16:34
It may be true that there is more to history than the stories of great men. But even if that's true, there most certainly isn't any less to history th...
February 23, 2026 at 16:33
No, and neither has anybody else because they represented ridiculously tiny numbers far below the threshold of significance as representing popular se...
February 23, 2026 at 16:30
For a lot of them (not all) yes, that was true. It didn't justify slavery, but it was true. Slavery was wrong, but also Africa was not a utopian proto...
February 23, 2026 at 15:05
I repeat my previous statement concerning the fact that American blacks were not eager to migrate to any other country, since you haven't contradicted...
February 23, 2026 at 14:37
This absolutely 100% conforms to my model from the OP and does not conflict with it whatsoever. It's the strongest evidence I've seen so far that I am...
February 19, 2026 at 22:30
OK, let's follow this insanity to its logical conclusion. Which means that this wasn't an achievement. (according to your standard stated immediately ...
February 18, 2026 at 16:55
I suppose if by "egalitarian" you mean "bound together in a very non-egalitiaran hierarchy where some outside very non-egalitarian higher authority wi...
February 18, 2026 at 16:47
There is no way in which that is anywhere even slightly close to true. The closer people get to the harsh, brutal realities of survival in nature, bei...
February 17, 2026 at 16:59
European colonization is clearly the relevant past. If you press them, they will define pre-colonial societies as oppressive also because they all bel...
February 17, 2026 at 16:51
A great example of how the National Science Foundation's pronouncements already blew away when the political winds shifted is how a 1996 episode of Bi...
February 17, 2026 at 15:48
No, they really dont. The category of "indigenous" means "oppressted by whites" and nothing else. Their only interest in so-called "indigenous peoples...
February 17, 2026 at 15:40
That doesn't seem like a leap: that seems to be implicit in what "progressive" means as a basic concept. Not that a progressive necessarily has negati...
February 17, 2026 at 15:27
If, as hypercin asserts, "Even handedness is not a strength of a model that is supposed to be rooted in fact." then there are a number of facts I coul...
February 17, 2026 at 15:14
To disprove it, you would need historical counterexamples, not psychology. A historical movement which is indisputably left wing which is anti-progres...
February 17, 2026 at 14:40
I don't believe in AGI. If it's possible then there's only one man who can do it: John Carmack at Keen Technologies. But I don't think even he's going...
February 17, 2026 at 14:34
A sane reading of Jesus's Golden Rule includes its context as part of the larger Christian ethic to inform its meaning. In Matthew 7, Jesus asserts: T...
February 13, 2026 at 14:13
That's not motivation because it doesn't get into why they think of the past as good or bad. Those are conclusions, not motivations for the conclusion...
February 13, 2026 at 13:59
Haidt is attempting to psychologize the motivations behind political ideology. I'm merely categorizing political ideologies by content. While I do not...
February 13, 2026 at 13:48
This is self-serving Leftist rhetoric, trying to redefine the terms in a way that's complimentary to the Left and insulting to the Right. A major stre...
February 13, 2026 at 13:45
My argument there, instead of defending the current second axis, will be to advocate for changing it, at least nominally, to a more useful one.
February 12, 2026 at 18:21
I am planning a second part to this essay which will deal with the Political Compass's second axis. For now, I can say that your fringe anarchism is n...
February 12, 2026 at 18:15
I meant to define "Left" and "Right" and not to adjudicate conservative vs reactionary or progressive vs radical. The Left-Right schema as described h...
February 12, 2026 at 18:08
I'm not convinced the wokists actually are socialist at all. I mean, they do support welfare programs, but they infest Big Tech and seem to have no in...
February 12, 2026 at 14:36
Yeah, that's what my original post said. Trump is disconnected from conservatism. But also, conservatism itself has proven unable to deal with the pro...
February 12, 2026 at 14:30
For me, it would heavily depend on some very sharp distinctive specifics on what "blasphemer" means in this hypothetical. If "blasphemer" means "Anyon...
February 11, 2026 at 18:49
A lot of people, including myself, have changed their views significantly in response to the high tide of Leftist domination that occurred civilizatio...
February 11, 2026 at 17:19
One's personal moral convictions are always, always opinions about what the objective moral truths are and nothing else. They cannot avoid being so by...
February 11, 2026 at 17:05
I think that if it is fair to say that a naturalist-materialist-atheist can posit the existence of tables and chairs meaningfully then they can posit ...
February 11, 2026 at 16:57
Something like henotheism does appear in some of C. S. Lewis's fiction, but what the apologetics works say is in fact monotheism. Saying that all or m...
February 10, 2026 at 14:13
I know I quote or reference C. S. Lewis a lot, but he's just way too relevant to this whole topic. In "The Abolition of Man" (1943) Lewis actualy uses...
January 16, 2026 at 14:04
Actually, no. That's not how monotheism works. As C. S. Lewis explained, the pagan gods weren't simply altogether false but are instead to be understo...
January 16, 2026 at 13:09
But the products all the increased capacity are going into are specialized hardware only for cloud data centers. Local compute is being phased out! Th...
January 16, 2026 at 13:03
What I've found is a strong tendency to comprehend Islam only by analogy to the same aforementioned WASP Evangelical demographic. Of course that's not...
January 16, 2026 at 12:50
Trump does represent a break from previous American foreign policy -- one that it appears had to eventually come by one side or the other because he's...
January 15, 2026 at 20:44
Within your sarcasm, you are correct that I am putting forward a specific theory for describing or diagnosing or understanding the mentality of atheis...
January 15, 2026 at 20:18
Absolutely and this is a point I am consciously very confused about right now. I know I've gone way too far to the Right on economics my entire life a...
January 15, 2026 at 15:08
Transgender persons do not exist. The very term "transgender" is an anti-concept. This doesn't mean I want anybody rounded up or punished or whatever:...
January 15, 2026 at 14:57
I thought I'd said some of it in my post. Consumer RAM prices exploded by about 500% recently due to "AI" data center demand. This wouldn't be such a ...
January 15, 2026 at 06:10
The oncoming industry trend I'm afraid of is for all local compute -- including all on-premises servers -- to be considered a legacy technology fundam...
January 15, 2026 at 05:54
I think that just as the cosmological argument proves the existence of God from knowing the existence of tables and chairs, so too the moral argument ...
January 15, 2026 at 05:38
As I undersatnd it, the major explicit policy goal of the Pax Americana was to undermine international Communism. The policy could have been argued to...
January 15, 2026 at 05:29
What is a woman?
January 15, 2026 at 05:23
I'm seeing some posts online about Foucalt being a really hardcore pedophile. That true?
January 15, 2026 at 05:22
My instinct for most of my life has been to categorically dismiss any contemporary economic idea from Europe, not only out of a doctrinaire devotion t...
January 15, 2026 at 02:54
I ran some of these ideas through an LLM and its response was that my ideas are essentially in the category of "postliberalism" and that I need to rea...
January 15, 2026 at 01:08
I think that in different ways, both the Left and the Right are equally to blame for this. The Right are to blame for this because of their blind unth...
January 14, 2026 at 22:27