Ben___Garrison's profile

Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 2d ago

I don't understand what you mean by this.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 2d ago

You're right, both the chatGPT summary and that one particular quote have been replaced, while the two quotes from the same post are now together and marked.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 2d ago

For your first question, you contend that I'm interpreting the conversation in that other thread uncharitably, but I don't think I am. In my eyes, those calling the cancellations justified were a bit more common than those calling explicitly for restraint. It wasn't by a massive amount, and the exact split would come down to how you'd classify some of the people who were ambivalent. But for a quick calculation, check out the upvote totals in this back and forth between KMC and EverythingIsFine. For further evidence, confuciuscorndog's post is what I'd consider to be the most repugnant. This was the one with "eat their own dogfood" bit and the explanation of just how much he wouldn't care if this woman killed herself. Credit where it's due, this post was modded since it flagrantly broke the rules, but even despite this, the reaction from onlookers was "yes, this is the type of content we want to see more of", voted Motte users by more than a 3:1 margin. Then, the post explaining why he was getting modded stands at a nearly equal vote ratio.

You're correct the first and fourth quotes I had were from the same post. I think they're both quite extraordinary and worth highlighting, but I should have kept them together and noted they were from the same post. This was sloppiness on my part and I've corrected it. But... I also wasn't terribly short on bombastic quotes. I've added a few others to the pile after I've reread some of that other thread.

I understand your point about flanderization, and how it can become a self-fulfilling if people keep repeating it even if it's not necessarily true. But the way you're presenting it seems a bit overbroad here. A blanket ban on meta discussions of the forum's ideological split would be to put our heads in the sand and ignore an obvious phenomenon. As it happens, I've been having a relatively bad time with this site recently. One part of it has been conversations with a handful of users that have degenerated to accusations of dishonesty, ad hominems, or disrespect in ways that clearly violate the spirit of the rules while apparently doing just enough to avoid being modded. As someone who has views across the political spectrum, it's hard not to notice that my right-leaning views are received well, my center views are received somewhat well, and my left-leaning views are received with scorn and derision. I've been meaning to do a top-level post on this to make sure it's not just all in my head, but then one presidential candidate got shot in the head, and the other dropped out.

For your second question on chatGPT, I've gotten mostly positive reviews when I've posted summaries on other relatively high quality subs like /r/slatestarcodex and /r/credibledefense. By that, I mean nobody questioned it and people responded to the points earnestly. I don't really like writing summaries but people seem to expect them and it's the type of rote thing that I'd expect an LLM to excel at. Though, notably, I didn't include the fact that it was AI-generated in my other tests, so I'm wondering if there's some placebo effect going on here.

Somebody else pointed out that it might be hallucinating so I've replaced it with Scott's 9 points.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 3d ago · Edited 2d ago

Scott has an excellent new article that'll likely enrage at least a few people here: Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance

Last week, the Libs of Tiktok successfully cancelled a random lady from Home Depot who called for the assassination of Trump. This prompted a lot of triumphalism from the right: "the time is finally here, now WE get to be the cancellers" they seemed to cheer.

There was a discussion on the Motte, and while there were some voices calling for restraint, many commenters demanded blood from the left. The real question was how much blood should be taken, with most responses landing somewhere between "massive" and "infinity". Some quotes include

Scott's article gives 9 reasons why cheering for blood like this might not be the best strategy. They include:

Nobody Learns Anything Useful From Being Persecuted

This Isn’t Tit For Tat, It’s The Nth Round Of A Historical Dialectic

You’re Not Debating Whether To Become Like Woke People, You’re Already Like Woke People

Nobody Is Ever Both-Sides-ist Enough

Most Cancellations Are Friendly Fire

Cancellation Is The Enemy Of Competence

No, Seriously, This Is A Terrible Decision

Don’t Go Mad With Power Until You Actually Get The Power

There’s Probably Other Options

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 4d ago

"kids are never responsible for the actions of older generations, and parents are mostly responsible for the actions of their kids while they are guardians of those kids, but most of that responsibility goes away when the child reaches adulthood"

I think this is generally true, and is what most people would believe in the US.

The bible talking about killing off entire families as punishments.

Long lasting family feuds.

Feudal level countries killing off entire families as punishments.

Ongoing demands for reparations.

Of your evidence, 1-3 are pretty similar. There's two options here. The first is that killing someone's entire family is seen as the ultimate sort of punishment. This isn't really about a 2-year-old child being responsible for the behaviors of their parents, its their parents being perceived as so terrible that there's justification in inflicting the most heinous retaliation on them. The second possibility is more pragmatic: if you think their family is likely to want revenge, then killing off all of them makes sense so you don't have to watch over your back. This is especially true in feudal states where a deposed ruler's children could come back as pretenders.

For the fourth point on reparations, this is just blatant racial spoils laundered through historical grievance and narrative. It uses slavery as its primary justification, but that's mostly for convenience since leftist media has spent so much time and effort making US slavery look like one of the biggest crimes ever committed, possibly worse than even the Holocaust. In practice, though, demanding reparations just for that is untenable since the vast majority of the US population is not descended from slaveholders (didn't live in the South, not rich enough, immigrated after the Civil War, etc.). So while people pushing reparations use slavery as their primary marketing material, they quickly shift motte-and-bailey style to things like "institutionalized racism" when people ask questions like "why should I have to pay for this?".

In short, none of your 4 points really needs to have much to do with generational guilt.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 6d ago

Your first two images are fake, either appearing earlier or being photoshopped.

First image: https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/8xe65r/the_utimate_blue_screen_of_death/

Second image: https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/national-verify/las-vegas-sphere-blue-screen-of-death-image-is-fake/536-dd009fe6-8ac7-4044-9c3a-ec114107f6e3

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 20d ago

How would "not asking the right questions" be considered "dishonesty"? It seems like we're using very different definitions of that word.

In terms of clips, Trump has plenty of them himself. Like when he forgot the name of his doctor. Or how he keeps confusing Biden for Obama, then in the same speech he confuses Hillary for Obama. Or when he confused Orban as the leader of Turkey. Or when he confused Jeb Bush for W. Bush. These are the obvious examples. I'd say the best example was his performance in the debate vs Biden. Aging affects people differently, and while Trump can maintain a confidence cadence in his voice, his meandering speaking style has gotten noticeably worse (as I said above previously).

Of course you'll retort that these don't really prove much. Forgetting individual facts is something politicians do often, and while the rate at which Trump is doing so is increasing, as of now it's hard to say this is more than just a "warning sign". But of course, the same could be said of Biden in 2020.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 20d ago

So you're not backing off the claim that I'm being "dishonest" here then. Please elaborate, what exactly do you mean by it? I've already said in multiple places that Biden is obviously worse than Trump in terms of age. Why isn't this enough? What would I have to do in your eyes to be having an "honest" conversation?

Some source (even a basic one!) would be helpful in evaluating how Biden's perceived mental decline in 2020 is being compared to Trump's potential mental decline today. You say it's obvious, but for people who disagree with you it might not be so obvious that Trump is far more robust than Biden was 4 years ago.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 20d ago

"My ingroup is relentlessly oppressed by the supposedly neutral authorities, who are actually in the pockets of my enemies. The outgroup is highly organized and relentlessly hateful of people like me. If my side loses a battle, that's just further proof that I'm right and the whole thing is rigged. If my side wins a battle, it's also evidence of how right I am because the only way we'd win against such odds is by being twice as correct as the enemies. My side is the victim. It's all a conspiracy rigged against us."

Freddie De Boer recently posted an article on "The Political Era of Paranoid Delusion". It details how both sides have converged on mirroring ideas of victimization and oppression. The names each side uses might be different, but the conclusions are largely similar. It's only 4 paragraphs long, so I'll post the entire thing here:

President Joe Biden was interviewed last night, his first since his much-discussed debate performance. If you check around online, you will find two simultaneous narratives about this interview, passionately held: that the interviewer George Stephanopoulos and his employer ABC News were bent on embarrassing and attacking Biden, and that the interviewer George Stephanopoulos and his employer ABC News were bent on lionizing Biden and papering over his flaws. It was a hit job; it was a puff piece. The questions were unduly harsh; the questions were softballs. They avoided the hardest topics for Biden to discuss, unless they steered directly towards those questions over and over again. Stephanopoulos was too combative, or was he not combative enough? They taped the piece so that they could surreptitiously edit out Biden’s gaffes and stumbles; they designed the lighting so that it would make Biden look sickly and old. And now The Media™ is reacting to the interview by fixating on Biden’s weaknesses, or maybe they’re treating those weaknesses with kid gloves. What both sides are sure of is that, however the fallout from the interview breaks, it breaks because of dirty tricks, because of chicanery, because of a conspiracy against their side. There is no other option, no alternative. If my side loses, ever, the game was rigged. It’s a conspiracy, and they’re all in on it.

If I had to choose between these two tendencies I would obviously have to choose the blue MAGA over the red. Doing so would protect abortion and environmental regulations and the NLRB, among many other things. It’s not a contest, for me. But of course I’d prefer to choose neither. Blue MAGA is very, very real; the paranoid style has spread like a coronavirus from Republicans to Democrats. Put “The New York Times” into the Twitter search bar on any given day and you’ll find relentless, enraged invective coming from Democratic loyalists who insist that the paper of record is on a mission to reelect Donald Trump. They used to laugh at Republicans when they groused about “skewed polls,” but now they do the exact same thing - any poll that emerges that suggests Biden is losing is a conservative op, run by a firm with a well-known Republican bias. Hacks! That Nate Silver, you know, he’s on the Trump payroll. And while this phenomenon is most pronounced on the streets, Democratic elites have embraced it too. Look at Bruce Bartlett, look at Joy Ann Reid, look at Aaron Rupar, look at Josh Marshall, look at Rachel Maddow. They’re all sure: the narrative that we shouldn’t give another four and a half years to Joe Biden, an octogenarian who looks and acts like the 81-year-old he is, can only be the product of corruption. No sincere heart could look at that man on the debate stage with anything but awe and admiration.

Of course, conservatism is now built on a foundation not of Christianity or free markets but on the belief that elites are screwing you, that it’s all a conspiracy against you and your way of life. That is the bedrock. That is the new covenant - paranoia, obsession, revenge. “They’re all out to get you,” says Trumpism, “and I will destroy your enemies.” You don’t even need me to tell you that.

This, it seems, is where we are: two warring political tribes who share the foundational principle that anything that goes wrong for them is the product of a rigged system. Two angry players, too busy working the refs to concentrate on the game, looking for some higher authority to declare that the other side broke the rules. This isn’t fair. They’re breaking the rules. I’m telling the teacher. They’re denying us what we’re owed. Today the parties are united only in their belief that, on a neutral field and playing a clean game, they cannot lose. If a single voter endorses the opposition, their opponents must be cheating. How could it be otherwise? Surely only conspiracy could defeat us. Surely only The Man could pull the wool over the eyes of millions. This was much more of a Republican thing, and I know that people hate any argument that sounds like “both sides.” But both sides, in fact, are now operating this way. The notion that Democrats cannot fail in a clean election, cannot stumble but through illegitimate outside force, is now fully enculturated into the party. They hate Trump so much they’ve adopted his signature contribution to American politics. And I don’t know how you get out of this without violence, at this point. I really don’t.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 20d ago

Accusing somebody of "dishonesty" because they have a different viewpoint than yours doesn't really add much besides vitriol to the conversation. It's heat without extra light.

Republican age accusations against Biden ran the gamut from the reasonable to the absurd. Scott discussed some of the sillier ones in his article like how Biden was some sort of meat-puppet jacked up on every stimulant in DC. A lot of the dumber ones were either irony-poisoned, or coming from the QAnon bent, so I did the courtesy of not including those as it felt like a strawman. If you have an article that summarizes the right-leaning age arguments against Biden, then that would be valuable to add to the conversation.

Sure, people age at different rates, but the priors are that octogenarians and late-septuagenarians are really old no matter what. Maybe he'll make it to Grassley's age, but there's a much better chance he'll have a steep decline at some point. The decline has already started, it's just a question of when the floor falls out.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 23d ago · Edited 23d ago

It's easy to see why the left didn't catch onto Biden's age problem sooner: negative partisanship. Intense polarization clouds everybody's eyes and means neither side is really looking at the evidence in an unbiased way. The Right has been banging the "Biden is senile" drum for a long time now, long before it was persuasive to people outside the conservative information bubble. They'd post something like Biden flubbing numbers or stuttering as "irrefutable proof" that he had dementia, despite Biden having issues with those for his entire political career. When the evidence actually started getting more persuasive, it was still easy enough to ignore since the people most interested in it had been crying wolf for years. Some on the left saw it sooner, but most only really started believing it once it was impossible to deny during the debate.

Of course the Right is going to take a victory lap, but it's pretty silly to see them do this while also ignoring Trump's own cognitive decline. It's nowhere near as advanced as Biden's is, but compare his most recent debate performance to his debates in 2016 and its clear that his brain is slowing down as well. I'd peg the Trump of today roughly where Biden was 4 years ago, i.e. not terrible, but there are definitely worrying signs. He's always had a meandering speaking style, but it's gotten noticeably worse over time. There's funny stuff too, like Trump challenging Biden to a cognitive test while in the next breath forgetting the name of his own doctor. Trump is only 3 years younger than Biden and would be older than Biden is today when he would leave the White House.

When people on the right encounter this opinion, they mirror what the Left's reaction has been for years and say that not only is it utterly ludicrous to think this, but that it's so ridiculous that the person saying it must be a liar engaging in bad faith.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 23d ago

Something weird is definitely going on. Looking at the charts on Election Betting odds, Biden's chances went from 36% to 22% on June 28th, the night of the debate. It then stayed relatively constant for several days, before collapsing to <9% on July 3rd, which is very strange. The first drop was obviously the debate performance, but then Biden stayed steady despite a barrage of articles demanding he exit the race, and little public comment from Biden other than that he would "talk with his family" about what to do. Then we have this second drop when, if anything, Biden is receiving some positive news. He's saying he's going to stick around, the barrage of negative articles has mostly stopped, and other Dem leaders are more publicly supporting him.

I've checked with a few of the people I know, and none of them are really saying much has changed, so either this is very private stuff, or it's just an issue with the markets being thinly traded and subject to the whims of the whales.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 24d ago

It can certainly be good, but there's lots of drawbacks. You'll typically have some heighted level of respect from people which can lead to perks, both explicit and implicit. Famous people can try to leverage their fame into money, usually with mixed success. Others might find value from spreading their ideas in a way that an unknown person wouldn't have access to.

For the negatives, the novelty of being noticed in public wears off after the first half-dozen times or so, and then is just annoying. People will try to pry into your personal life and form a weird parasocial bond with you. You'll be held to a much higher standard than strangers would.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 28d ago

Sure, it was a relative win since his opponent self-destructed a lot harder than he did. But the 2016 Trump I remember would have at least had a coherent story to follow, and would be better at selling himself than... whatever the heck was onstage last night.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 28d ago

I remember Jeb being derided as low-energy back in 2016, and I used to laugh along with everyone else when Trump smacked him in his smug face. The days when I supported Trump seem so distant now, but rewatching some of those debates brings back lots of memories.

But nowadays, bring back 2016 Jeb! and he would wipe the floor with either of the candidates as they presently stand.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 28d ago

Avoiding questions never looks good. Politicians do it when they know they have no good answer. Usually they can get away with 1 or 2, but it seemed like Trump did it 4-6 times, and he pivoted very awkwardly every time.

Even when he wasn't clumsily dodging questions, Trump's answers were just bad. Again, watch some of his debate performances in 2016 compared to this one, and the evidence is pretty stark.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 28d ago

Yeah, I agree with that article. Anyone who knows anything about politics knows that debates as they ought to be (the issues) are a farce. They're just two simultaneous press conferences, and voters care about amorphous "vibes" more than anything. Nobody can really predict what the definitive vibes will be even shortly after the debate, and in the end they usually don't matter much anyways (e.g. Romney's first debate in 2012).

For Trump's debate performances, I generally agree but will add nuance that I think 2016 > second debate 2020 > 2024 > first debate 2020. The second (non cancelled) presidential debate of 2020 Trump did... fine? I can't remember much about it. At least he didn't blatantly shoot himself in the foot like he did in the first one.

For current odds of Biden's victory, I peg it at around 25% now, with a 15% chance the Dems switch candidates and win, and a 60% chance that Trump wins.

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 29d ago

I agree Trump has never been a great debater, but he generally held his own in 2016 against both the Republican challengers and against Hillary. I encourage anyone who doesn't see the difference to watch some clips from 2016, and then watch some of his responses from tonight right after. The difference is quite stark.

I don't disagree that the Dems have some tough choices ahead for them. If they try to nix Biden, that's unprecedented and causes chaos and is undemocratic. If they don't get rid of him, he'll probably lose. Trump would probably even get to 47% and beyond in that case (he didn't in either of his previous elections).

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Ben___Garrison Voltaire's Viceroy 29d ago

This was by no means a good debate for Trump, at least in terms of his individual performance. He blatantly refused to answer some questions, and they were the pretty important questions involving stuff like Putin and J6. Others were bad for different reasons, e.g. "will you accept the results of the election" with his response being basically "not if I lose". Worse than any of that though is that his responses were just incoherent. It's like if a lobotomized chatGPT was told to act like Trump, and it spewed a random collection of things that individually sounded like something Trump would say, but without any coherent structure or chain of logic. Trump has always had a meandering speaking style, but compare his performance tonight to the debates in 2016 and there's a world of difference. He's pretty clearly suffered a substantial age-related mental slowdown since then.

Of course, Biden's performance was way, way worse so it'll likely just be forgotten.

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