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I really like your comments on culture war and I disagree with this take for a few reasons. My intention is not to be rude, in case my response sounds off, please let me and I can reword it better.
Will quote a celt in response here, Aidan Maclear
The pursuit of political power is not fair and anyone abiding by moral principles the other side does not keep is outright incorrect. You cannot cooperate with those who defect. I am neither a nationalist nor am I Irish but I would much rather lean towards waht keith woods says on the topic of migration. Even if you dont have crimes being commited, suppose the people migrating are very smart, you still would have some levels of soceital breakdown after the number exceed a threshold. I know people irl who are scamming their way and getting their relatives and friends to ireland, they dont see themselves as irish and explicitly move out because they can reap benefits from the taxes the actual irish pay and live in a society they created which they could not back home.
On the topic of Conor, this was a civil proceeding, not a criminal proceeding where a girl retroactively took back her consent. I am not sure if we can even call him a rapist legally since he did not serve time in jail, in case it does turn out after a fair trial that he violated her consent, I will hope for justice for the girl involved.
The anti-migration people doing what any political movement that wins always does, it is not ideal behaviour in some place like this forum or in ones family or house but if the people who are against you start doing underhanded things, the only way you can get any peace is by winning against them and that cannot be done via morals. There are examples of the political class letting go of rapists, this case in England for instance. I am obviously against having rapists or other criminals in any movement but he has not been judged to be a rapist by the criminal court. I am not a rape apologist but there is nothing wrong in being a hypocrite in my opinion if you are up against people who routinely do the same thing. You defect against those who defect.
I understand where you're coming from and I don't think you expressed yourself rudely, but this entire comment seems very "boo outgroup" to me. "It's pointless pointing out that your enemies are violating their own principles because they have no principles: the only appropriate response to their lies and deceit is to destroy them and ground them into dust" - I mean, it's fair to say this doesn't pass the intellectual Turing test, now does it?
Of course I'll never persuade the person who wrote that Waterford Whispers post about McGregor that they're being hypocritical, but I think there are people on the margin who could be persuaded that the way the news media covers crime is a bit dishonest and demand them to change accordingly.
Legally McGregor cannot be called a rapist, having never been found guilty of rape in a criminal trial. But while the burden of proof may be lower in a civil proceeding than in a criminal trial, it's not nothing. OJ Simpson was found not guilty of murder in a criminal trial, found guilty of murder in a civil proceeding, and now no one feels bad about calling him a murderer, even if news media avoided doing so during his lifetime to avoid getting sued for defamation. I'm applying the same standard to McGregor, who I think is exceptionally unlikely to sue me for defamation or to firebomb my house.
In the case of conor, the girl was as hammered as he was and her texts were later removed from her friends phones. A womans honor is a pious thing in my society but I do have some suspicions in this case since we have seen rich and famous get accused of rape, in case the evidence out there is sufficient enough to prove that he did rape her then I would absolutely want him punished but these encounters. Conor got accused in the past in Miami too, my statement still stands since rape apologia is not a hill to die on.
It is boo outgroup because hypocrisy is not a bad thing if the people you are up against are that low, Moldbug has echoed similar sentiments and I stand by them. Mass migration protestors are doing what their opponents would do instead of punching right which is very rare.
Doesn't the fact that McGregor has been accused of sexual misconduct by so many different women, completely independently, in different countries or even continents move the needle for you at all? Isn't this exactly why people are so confident that Bill Clinton is a sexual predator, despite (to the best of my knowledge) never having been found guilty even in a civil proceeding?
You've lost me there buddy. If at any point you find yourself thinking "my enemies are so vicious that I must preemptively become more vicious than them before they destroy me outright", I think it's worth taking a step back and asking yourself if that's an accurate appraisal of the state of affairs, or if you're just coming up with some half-baked ham-handed rationalisation to do something you know is bad but want to do anyway. Note that your reasoning is word for word the same as that employed by woke people to justify deplatforming, cancelling or beating up conservatives.
I have never understood the appeal of Moldbug or why he's considered such an intellectual giant. So many of his allegedly profound insights just seem like trite (or even tautological) truisms dressed up with needlessly circomlocutory or obfuscatory language. I think Scott hit the nail on the head with Moldbug's whole approach in 2013:
I don’t think a distributed conspiracy is all that weird. The machinations around power and the seeking of power have not really ever changed, except that they’ve become more sophisticated as knowledge of psychology and technology has allowed for greater social engineering capabilities. In the bad old days of feudal societies, thing we’re done fairly openly because there really wasn’t much knowledge about how to do so quietly. You’d openly scheme that you and your faction want power, find Allies whose wealth, power and influence you could use to take power, and off you go, sitting a Lannister on the throne of Westeros. Not everyone involved would be part of a conspiracy. Maybe you stood to gain a trade deal if you had someone on the throne who shared your interests. In that instance you might well support the movement even if you’re not in on the conspiracy. You might well jump on social trends that increase your power. This is how power always works.
I think by the point at which a conspiracy is "distributed" it can no longer meaningfully called a conspiracy, and is just an ordinary political coalition. The concept of a "distributed conspiracy" just seems to be (neo-)reactionaries attempting to tar a political coalition they don't like by describing it using a scary word. No different, really, from woke people calling everyone they don't like a fascist.
What would distinguish a distributed conspiracy from a political coalition for me is methods and goals that the conspirants would not willingly disclose in the open. Without secret communications, coordination on those would be based on ideas that emerge naturally, that are downstream of memes shared by the distributed conspiracy. In a way this is like encryption, people with the correct key (sequence of memes) will decode the coordination instructions correctly. The left often accuses the right of this in the form of dogwhistles. If you want, for instance, to get widespread cheating in an election but don't want to say it out loud because that has consequences, you push very loudly memes that would justify cheating ("the other side will end democracy", for instance), so that without having to organize (at least not in large conspiracies), susceptible people will naturally wink, nod and act in support when they see hints that another person might be cheating in the direction they support.
This seems functionally identical to "dog-whistle politics" and/or "stochastic terrorism". As with those concepts, I could certainly see how something like this could be true, but in practice it only ever seems to get trotted out as a stick with which to beat one's enemies.
In any sufficiently large political faction, you'll have leaders who make impassioned speeches about the importance of accomplishing their goals, and subordinates who take this to heart and end up bending or breaking the rules in an effort to accomplish those goals. If caught, the leader will inevitably claim that he never explicitly instructed anyone to bend or break the rules. Should we believe him?
I predict that if we agree with the leader's goals, then the movement is only guilty of having a few overly literal-minded bad apples who have been swiftly dealt with; if we disagree, then the movement is really a "distributed conspiracy" in which the leaders use "dog-whistle politics" to escape culpability for "stochastic terrorism".
I am sceptical of the utility of any political term so susceptible to Russell conjugations.
Indeed, at object level they tend to just be unfalsifiable claims against the other side, but I think at least it offers a credible rebuttal to the idea that conspiracies cannot exist past a certain scale.
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