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All White People Are Racists

    Sometimes you'll hear a non-white, or an exceptionally self-hating white person, say that "all white people are racist".     This is a verbal weapon intended to browbeat whites into submission. It's fairly obvious that anyone who says this doesn't really desire racial equality with whites but subjugation of whites.     Here's why I say this. "Racist" is not a neutral, descriptive term. It is a value judgment, and an extremely powerful negative one. Most white people would rather be called almost anything other than racist. Nothing short of child molestation or sexual assault (and sometimes not even those) is as good at immediately ruining a person's reputation as a credible accusation of racism. It's the mortal sin of the secular era, perceived by the large majority of the public sphere, especially the educated, metropolitan elite, as a serious moral failing. When someone says that all white people are racist, they are essentially say

Prosperity Does Not Cause Progressivism

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    In what RationalWiki , with characteristic progressive smugness, calls "the definitive takedown," Scott Alexander at slatestarcodex.com has written a long-form criticism of the Neoreaction movement. Here I'd like to respond to one of its main arguments.    The nature of the continual leftward shifting of the Overton window over the last several hundred years is a major preoccupation of reactionary politics. Normie progressives and intellectuals alike tend to see this leftward shift as the result of the application of reason - the freeing of man from his intellectual "self-incurred immaturity", as Kant would call it. This gives it a character of inevitability - once man opens his eyes, he cannot shut them again, and the march towards an increasingly more rational ordering of society must go on. If, somehow, this process were stopped, it would continue in much the same way once we learned to use our rational faculties again. Reactionaries tend to see leftis