Scott Alexander's Psychopathic Tolerance? [a short-post]

Some Liberals are worse than Lefties

TLDR: Here’s a scary thought I’ve been having. Many Liberals are largely just Leftists with an anti-fighting-monsters disposition. They’ll casually accept that you are a monster but think tolerating monsters is good, because the alternative would be fighting and they presumably are bad at that.

You cannot trust them as negotiating partners. Anything you put them in charge of will buckle when confronted with the superior force and iron-will of the left.

Any libs you negotiate with must have that Iron in them.

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Under the Trump Administration Liberals now have the cover of political expediency to launch their own bid to retake their institutions from their Left. Some of these Liberals have the distinction of having always stood up for Righties. This should count for something, but we should still generally hope that they fail. What after all is the psychological distinction, between a Leftist and a Liberal? We’ll think of the top 10 American living Essayist Scott Alexander as our maximally charitable stand-in for the Liberal. Our Vice President reads him or at least used to, as do the people programming your GPT-4.5X+++.

One of Scott Alexander’s many masterpieces was his essay - “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup” — in which he tried to increase sympathy for right-wingers, and explain his own sympathy for them. Like much of his writing, if you only look at what he’s trying to do in the vague general picture, or loose yourself in it’s style you’ll come out of it feeling quite like you’ve just read a brilliant and reasonable bloke. But what does he actually say? Here are some excerpts.

“Every election cycle like clockwork, conservatives accuse liberals of not being sufficiently pro-America. And every election cycle like clockwork, liberals give extremely unconvincing denials of this” - Scott Alexander

[Ok, thank you for admitting the obvious]

… I have proud memories of spending my Fourth of Julys as a kid debunking people’s heartfelt emotions of patriotism. - Scott Alexander

[Ok, so again, good points on self-awareness. Surely we are about to reach the part where you realize you’ve made a mistake in doing this. ]

patriotism.

Aaron Sorkin: [What makes America the greatest country in the world?] It’s not the greatest country in the world! We’re seventh in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household income, No. 4 in labor force, and No. 4 in exports. So when you ask what makes us the greatest country in the world, I don’t know what the f*** you’re talking about. [Sorkin Quote Ends, Scott Continues]

(Another good retort is “We’re number one? Sure – number one in incarceration rates, drone strikes, and making new parents go back to work!”)

All Of this is True of Course. But it’s weird that it’s such a classic interest of members of the Blue Tribe…”

“[US] 178th in infant mortality… True of course.” I want you you to pause for a moment and consider the ease with which one of the most Right-Sympathetic Liberals, and a practicing Doctor just casually accepts that the U.S Infant Mortality rate is worse than Haiti’s.

And this is a liberal who accepts race differences in intelligence.

In fact it’s that same liberal who visited Haiti as a medical intern, discovering that some government officials were incapable of grasping the concept of alphabetic sorting and wrote a post describing this long before this essay.

A liberal who is at the very moment you are reading from, writing the case for tolerating Right-wingers.

And yet his case if you read “I can tolerate anything except the outgroup” closely enough, this case is precisely that you only get virtue points for tolerating only those who truly offend you. So naturally the most virtuous thing would be to tolerate Right-wingers. At least that’s how it begins, it later switches into a bizarre rant on how tribalism is most strongly triggered by proximity and *minor* differences like those between White and Black South Africans. *minor*. So I guess, every difference is minor to him, if it allows him to evade a duty to fight. Did I mention the accepting race differences already?

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What would it mean though, to seriously believe that in a country as wealthy as ours babies died at Haitian rates; because right-wingers are just that selfish?

Should you not then hate them? Be moved to anger and rage and what they’ve done to your country?

For a particular type of center-left liberal, the problem with Lefties is simply that they are not having a normal-one. He opposes them, not because of their vices (trivially false claims about everything); but because they demand of him virtue (contempt for comic book levels of evil).

And it is precisely for that reason that you can never truly trust him. See also, Bill Maher.

Think of how surreal this scene is. Bill Maher’s whole shtick is and was - lib guy that mocks lefties when they are doing something stupid. Libs seem to instinctively believe, whatever their knowledge level or contrarian disposition that you are so evil this doesn’t even register as a declaration of war that should end democracy when uttered.

They just think it’s weird that leftists are so uptight about it.

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Edit: I stupidly wrote child instead of infant. Also general tidying up.