If you’re going to bring in contrarian views on things like race, that some view as racist - okay. But I would recommend expanding that to bring in views that are also contrarian but perhaps not so controversial but nevertheless worth discussing.
My impression is SSC readers get caught up in a sort of intellectual exoticism rather than any rigorous analysis of what the landscape actually looks like; the non-conventional but ultimately boring takes are left unexamined.
Not just non-college Republicans, huge swaths of non-liberal Democrats (mostly people of color). Are the majority of Black Democrats, who believe you can’t be a moral person without believing in God, represented? Are there any Muslims who hold social positions their religion tells them to be true? When it comes to immigrants, anyone who actually believes what your typical Indian or Bangladeshi believes? (Or is it just the elite who deliberately left those countries and assimilated into white American culture? And even among the latter, is it the first generation parents hoping their kids will integrate to a degree, but hold on to traditional social morals, or is it the second generation ones who picked up western social morals despite their parents’ efforts?)
Again, none of these assumptions are wrong or bad or right or good. My point is just these are the assumptions you'll see across nearly every commenter on the blog because of its narrow, Western-educated audience. There are many popular, interesting, and dynamic political discussions happening elsewhere in the world (I think the most interesting is Islamism, discussions within the CCP might also count), but those discussions and the elites who have them don't start from these principles.
And I can't find the anti-neoreactionary & in-defense-of-democracy post that goes through these problems, and tries to justify the assumptions.
> (I think the most interesting is Islamism, discussions within the CCP might also count), but those discussions and the elites who have them don't start from these principles.
If you could point these out I think SSC/LessWrong folks would love to ponder over them!
