georgioz
2mo ago
Returning to the “right-wing violence is more common than left-wing violence” topic, I’ve been paying attention to how it’s covered in mainstream tech-adjacent media.
I think it is defined quite poorly. Most media cite this study from Cato institute. Just look at the entry for 2020: four deaths by rightwingers and 1 death by leftwinger. So if you did not know, the 2020 BLM summer of love year was actually more violent from the right by factor of 4.
georgioz
2mo ago
Most game theory arguments assume a small number of competitors and perfect information
What are you talking about, the most famous prisoner's dilemma is actually built around absence of information. You have games which are so huge that they are named as social dilemmas with potentially millions or even billions of players such as tragedy of commons.
So if I take you at face value, you would be against any social cancellation for any reason that is let's say currently not against the law? What exactly is the threshold? What if somebody just repeatedly posted on his tiktok that he hates niggers and faggots? What if somebody was sentenced for pedophilia, but is out of prison now and it all got public knowledge? Is there any threshold for cancellation in your eyes - which would of course make you hypocrite as you would fall under argument #4 where you just carve some exception. Or you or are you some free speech anticancellation purist?
Even then, you can be a heroin addict openly admitting that you take it and that everybody who takes it including you is morally weak and you can be correct. You can fulfill the dictionary definition of a hypocrite to perfection and still be correct, as the validity of your argument is independent on your own person. That is why it is a fallacy.
Argument 5
You forgot to add #6 - that argument from hypocrisy is an age old argument, which considered as one of the weakest ones in any debate, the official name is tu quoque fallacy. I will give some reasons why this argument will not win many people - including in this very same debate where the right is now digging up quotes from AOC or Kamala Harris calling for cancelations and showing how they are hypocrites. It is a weak form of ad-hominem. You are not attacking the argument, you are attacking the person giving the argument. For instance even an active heroin addict can rail against taking heroin. In fact he may have a unique position as an active user to effectively argue against it. Just pointing a finger that he is an addict and thus his argument is invalid may not be the best one.
Here, I can show how you are a hypocrite. Are you against cancelling people from their jobs if let's say they have a past of engaging in pedophilia? Are you actively against public sexual offender registry or against people requiring to offer proof of clean criminal records which exists solely to cancel people from any potential jobs or buying property etc.? If not, then you are a hypocrite and you are in fact for cancel culture. So shut up and delete this post you fucking hypocrite.
I think this is underestimating his influence. In the aftermath of the shooting I could not find the actual articles and videos, but I watched some discussion of Democrat operatives who were actually praising how Charlie Kirk was actually an exceptionally shrewd operator for Republicans, especially in the space of young men the Democrats are now talking about in the aftermath of the last presidential election - and I am talking about day-to-day operations, how his activities actually translated into voter registrations or organizational movement toward concrete political action.
He was apparently more than just some right-wing talking head or influencer with clips and gotchas on social media. He was able to organize, lead and move things on the ground politically - he literally cofounded Turning Point USA in 2012 and worked in the same way since then. Think of him as a combination of let's say Andrew Wilson or Ben Shapiro with their debate skills, combined with organizer like Scott Presler. I think he was a prototype of the new type of politician, which is rather rare. Not all internet influencers can translate their audience into mainstream success. It is a shame that he is dead, he really had a bright career ahead of him.
georgioz
3mo ago
If government simply nuked OnlyFans and Pornhub, then no, I wouldn't say it is damning to progress. On the other hand, if they started cracking down on VPNs, proxies, mirrors, torrents and all other less-easy ways to access wrongthink/wrongfun, that seems like it would negatively affect flourishing, through sheer friction introduced to the infoscape. Not to mention political resentment. I hear the recent riots in Nepal correlated with a crackdown on social media.
I don't think so. There is illegal porn content already, which is heavily prosecuted and punished by the government absent bans on VPNs or torrents. We can just expand that no problem. But for me this was just an example and a thought exercise for the test of logic. It definitely is possible to have RETVRN to some semblance of normalcy without sacrificing technology to some magic of absence of abstract liberty to coom.
Sure, let's move it from individual action - although even there I can have many arguments, such as that tech execs and innovators actually do not give smarthpones to their children and send them to schools that ban the technology and stick to older methods of education. But that is besides the point.
What if a conservative government just nuked OnlyFans and Pornhub and other similar websites from orbit tomorrow, similarly to how government recently acted against disinformation channels that they deemed as dangerous - such as Russia Today or what they did to TikTok citing nebulous national security reasons. In your eyes would it mean it represents a dangerous RETVRN ideology, a threat to progress and liberty and modernity and technology and all that, meaning we are now on a slippery slope toward energy blackouts and airplanes falling from the sky?
If you did not notice, we already went to the moon in an era where sodomy was a criminal offense, porn was almost nonexistent. Again, this is false choice - you can have technologically advanced society without "freedoms".
In fact, we live in such a society right now. Progressive puritans are the ones who promote their religious ideas such as the original sin also known as a privilege based on your race, sex or sexual orientation. We have blasphemy laws with their very own taboo words that cannot be spoken - such as a faggot or nigger or tranny and many more. They have their own structure of sins in their broad istophobic categories such as racist, sexist, homophobe and transphobe around which they have requirements for everybody. Is this not a threat to technological advancement, or is it just a protection of progress, liberty and modernity - or is it a RETVRN to religous dogma in a new skin?
georgioz
3mo ago
Man is instinctively conservative in the sense that probably millions of years of experience have taught him that a stable environment is the best for peace of mind, present and future security, automatism of action, and a ready command of material and artificial circumstances. It is the repeated introduction of new instruments, new weapons, new methods, and needs for fresh adaptations, that makes automatism impossible. And it is the complication of life by novel contributions to life's interests and duties that makes a ready command of circumstances difficult.
The shortened version of this argument is that tradition is an experiment which has worked.
The traditionalist response (reaction, more properly) is simply to deny that modernity ever happened, to summon us back to a world where we believe “what the church teaches” (whatever church the given traditionalist may have decided to adhere to), where we simply accept late ancient (or medieval) metaphysics and morals and social structures, where we simply pretend that we can exist as a beseiged outpost of this kind of religious revanchism, a faithful remnant, and make a little world for ourselves.
I think this is a very shallow definition of what is going on. In fact at least since Rousseau it was modernists of various stripes who were preaching about the RETVRN - Rousseau was preaching how we should channel our prehistoric inner noble savage but in "modern world". Libertarians are basing their arguments on how tribal way of property is supposed to work absent government, looking with fondness at medieval Iceland or some such. Marx was calling for return of values of Primitive Communism, where humans lived as true social beings. Nationalists and romantics were literally romanticizing the past looking with fondness at era of medieval chivalry and heroism or maybe Roman republic.
This argument of yours reminds me of a discussion with my mother about Progressivism with her circular logic - progressivism is about progress and progress is what progressives achieve. If so called progressives fuck something up - like for instance tankies - then it was not a progress and thus by definition they were not progressives. Something like how modern progressives hate Woodrow Wilson for his racism and eugenics - despite the fact that he was a prominent progressive of the time. So since eugenics was fucked up, we can throw it into the trash and RETVRN to pre-eugenics era - it was not a true progress anyways. You do the same with conservatives - conservatives can only conserve or regress, otherwise they are not true conservatives. Who knows, maybe even Amish are no true conservatives, as even they improve on their baking or construction methods. Which is BTW exactly the gist of your next argument:
Ultimately if conservatives try to force a return to pre-modern times, not only may we lose technological advances, we also don't even have the living traditional to fall back to anymore.
This is argument from technology and false dichotomy. First, "conservatives" were on the forefront of technological advances for centuries. But this is also besides the point, the argument is stupid on its face - if you want to have modern technology such as tablets and videogames - then somehow it is inevitable to let your child chop his dick off, or at least let him coom on furry sex online, because that is progress and liberty and modernity and it is the basis of our technology? It does not make sense - you can have all the vaccines and airplanes and railroads, and you can land people on the moon even in highly religious societies. How do I know it? Because it already happened historically.
georgioz
3mo ago
I obviously can't speak for everyone but peak woke to me has to be June 2020, and frankly I'm shocked that anyone feels differently.
Summer of George was a time when a woke got a lot of attention. Corporations poured billions into it financing DEI efforts folding to woke activists en- masse. Just as an example take Hollywood, where even now you have projects finishing that were introduced and proposed in 2020.
Nevertheless I do not believe in the whole "peak woke" terminology. This thing comes in cycles going way back at least into birthing of the New Left movement - if we do not want to go back to French Revolution or something like that. You had peak woke of 60ies in form of Days of Rage after which came Regans 80s marked with yuppie capitalism. You had rise of the Woke especially in Education up until 9/11 and wave of neocon patriotism and neverending wars. Then you had third revival especially during and after second Obama term up until the most recent peak woke ending probably with second term of Donald Trump, which demoralized the woke.
But I am sure that this trend will continue, there will be new resurgences and peaks.
georgioz
3mo ago
Because Marcus Aurelius - the coward that he was - lacked the strenght to at least disinherit his useless son Commodus, or even better to strangle him in his crib? Baron is no Commodus.
georgioz
3mo ago
This does not make sense to me. Deep down majority of businesses "act against customers" - they want to extract as much money from them for as little cost as they can get away with. One can definitely consider this stance as a highly political one, at minimum businesses are not supporting communism or similar political stances.
What do you mean exactly?
georgioz
3mo ago
The truth--meaning the underlying, peremptory rational structure of the universe--will manifest itself. It just takes some time.
Where does this true underlying structure manifest itself? If anything, it is the law of the jungle that manifests constantly all around us for hundreds of millions of years. That it is why it is called the law of the jungle - each individual or a group of any given species only gets what they can keep from their peers or predators or what they can extract from their prey. You may point out to some groups - like hives of insects or packs of wolves or tribes of apes - but even they themselves are subject to inherent law of the jungle in competition with other groups and organizms.
So again - demonstrate how nonviolent voluntary cooperation is some underlying structure of the universe, some primordial social law. And no, the bitcoin example does not cut it. It would be on the level of an example where a cow eats grass and then shits to provide fertilizer as some "underlying structure" - and even then it is not clear if cows do not commit "violence" on grass which just accepted its fate to be regularly and violently culled, with some grass species developing abrasive properties to harm ruminants who in turn evolved more durable teeth and mouth to chew on it.
I just don't get this hippie talk of peaceful underlying structure of the universe.
georgioz
3mo ago
Do you have any requirement for what constitutes as "government run business"? For instance a small restaurant is already subject to insane amount of government meddling - from zoning rules, food safety regulation, employee regulation or anti-discrimination laws etc. so it can be considered as largely government run business, as most of the decisions are mandated or heavily influenced by government.
Which leads me to my next question as your explanation provides an interesting dichotomy - the closer the government involves itself in a private business, the less "politicized" it should be? This is impossible, government involvement is already politicization of that business. Did you mean something else?
georgioz
3mo ago
The natural principles are in one sense a result of natural selection, and in another sense, properties of abstract rationality itself. This is quite literally where social structure emerges from: groups that constantly kill each other by using physical force to resolve disputes are naturally out-competed by groups that preserve their members by resolving disputes in other ways.
How did you come up with this? The only true "natural" social law is the law of the jungle or might makes right. History is full of stories where peaceful and pacifist societies were wiped out by groups that cooperated exactly in order to gain strength to protect and impose their will. Like this one or this one or this one.
georgioz
3mo ago
My libertarian leanings have me feeling certain ways about all this.
This is genuinely interesting to me as I think what these payment processors do is exactly in line with libertarian view. They are private companies and they may refuse business to anybody for any reason.
I do think that AI-generated propaganda helps the right more than the left in the current environment, if only because conservatives live in more of an inherently audio-visual culture compared to liberals.
Hard disagree. Left uses audio-visual tools to push their agenda all the time. This photo of a drowned toddler did more for triggering mass immigration acceptance back in 2015, than any other rational argument at the time. Sam Alinsky's Rules for Radicals explicitly calls for tactics like this - such as using small provoaction in order to garner "disproportionate" attention that can be then captured and used for propaganda. If anything, the right is way behind this tactics mostly because it is leftists who are now in power and who are to large degree prone to this sort of asymmetrical warfare. Although even that is questionable as long as the left can keep pretense of them being the underdogs.
Yes, this is one of the arguments I have seen. You can posit yourself outside of any moral structure and define good something akin to "how to achieve one's goal most effectively". So for instance if a school shooter wants to kill as many students as possible, it is "good" for him to use guns as opposed to knives. You are not going to question the morality of the action, you just talk in terms of which actions are more effective in reaching any given goal that you are morally impartial to. I think this level of thinking is useless outside of highly specific and individual action, you even need to distance yourself from any other potential impact these actions have for that person and take their stated goals at their face value, otherwise you enter into moral argument territory rather quickly.
Plus I think it is also misleading to even use the words like good or bad for this concept, I wish there was a different vocabulary there. As soon as you are talking about concepts like what is "good" for country or people, you are losing the argument as country or people are not moral agents to whom you can give any advice.
georgioz
3mo ago
Sometimes it is interesting to which depths this phenomenon runs, how self unaware people can be. Famously Marx extensively used the word ideology as a pejorative descriptor for ways ruling class keeps workers in the dark in the class conflict. Of course he piled all that criticism while keeping Marxism itself outside of such framework, as if it was implicitly true and correct stance and thus it could not be considered an ideology by definition.
It essentially implies the difference between the right wing and left wing argument about things are about morals and not about the effectiveness of policy or economic ideas for the good of our country and our citizens.
I have seen this argument before, where literally in the same sentence somebody can say that other people argue about morals, while he just wants what is good for people. You do realize, that moral philosophy on basic level talks about distinction between what is good and what is bad? As soon as you use the word good or bad, you are making a moral argument.
There seems to be certain myopia for many people, where they hold some moral positions without acknowledging them as such. They pretend that their morality is objective and rational, not even warranting defending it - as if they read it from facts of the universe, they gleaned it from the proton number of atom of carbon, or from trajectory of Jupiter or something like that. It is similar trick adjacent to Russel's conjugation in much of leftist thinking - our moral philosophy is true and fair and outside of critique, while your moral philosophy is just a hideous ideology.
georgioz
3mo ago
Sure, there can be a weird twist when in let's say 50 years what constitutes an undesirable group can change quite radically. The unpredictability of lebanonization of a country.
Sure, you however even have variants of prisoner's dilemma that are mapped for real world situations - such as iterated prisoner's dilemma that can be used to study problems like nuclear arms race. You can even include various real world information asymmetries - e.g. lack of information about opponents capabilities, their confidence and information about your capabilities, their level of "spite" so their willingness to act erratically etc. You have different games modeling economic behavior used to construct various types of auctions between many players etc.
The point being, that your original claim of how most game theory arguments assume a small number of competitors and perfect information is incorrect. In fact you could model the cancell culture as an arms race variant of group prisoners dilemma between two coalitions.
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