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I didn't vote for Trump, though considering I live in one of the least-swing states in the country, I didn't vote at all because I didn't think it would be worth the gas I would expend driving to the polling place.
In any case, Trump is president now.
When I was a kid at the time of Obama v McCain my nice teacher Miss Collins gave us a very simplified and seven-year-old friendly explanation of politics. In some countries, one guy got to be in charge and nobody else got any say. But America was different because we got to have elections every four years, which let the people choose who we wanted to be in charge. Everybody went into a booth and chose who they wanted to be president, and whoever got picked by the most people automatically won.
When I got a little older I started spending a bunch of time on various forums and image boards where I learned that actually democracy is fake and gay. It's all a sham. We live under the system/the Cathedral/the regime/whatever. Voting doesn't matter because no matter who wins, The Regime will never allow a true based right-winger to come to power.
This skepticism continued through the Trump years, with the explanation for his 2016 victory being that They were caught off guard. And of course his loss in 2020 was because the System was no longer off guard, and had fortified itself against the possibility of another Trump victory through means of gross election fraud. "There's no voting your way out of this." In the lead up to 2024, various RW voices, including many on this forum, insisted that Trump would never be allowed to take office again. Mysterious votes would be hauled out at 3:00 AM to ensure a Harris win. Or else he would be assassinated. Or once in office, he would not be permitted to actually do anything Based™ by the Deep State.
Well, despite the universal opprobrium and opposition of every single group of people I've been assured are really running the show, variously journalists, left-wing billionaires, the CIA, other unelected federal bureaucrats, college professors, the Jews, NGOs, liberal white women, or some combination thereof, Trump won. "They were caught off guard" no longer remotely works as an explanation.
Trump doing mass firings of federal employees, mass deportations, and dismantling DEI, just like he promised. The libs are coping and seething, but they can't do anything more than that, and the reason they can't do anything more than that is because more people pressed the "Trump" button than the "Harris" button in the voting booth, and according to the magic piece of paper, this means Trump is in charge now. Democracy worked exactly like Miss Collins said it would. This literally happened, just replace Hitler with "woke DEI". As soon as it the results of the election were clear, the libs immediately acted in accordance with the magic piece of paper and handed over power, without any attempt at military coups, riots, Hail Mary legal endeavors, or even a lib January 6th. And no Deep State has stepped forward to prevent him from doing exactly what he said he would do on the campaign trail. The Magic Piece of Paper has spoken.
While this is a massive L for the libs, it's also a massive L for many reactionary theory of politics which have proven so popular in what can broadly be called the "dissident right."
Like what is the cope for this? Trump isn't a real right-winger, the System would never allow the election of a real right-winger who would restore seigneurial dues and reverse the industrial revolution? The System is just biding its time until it can do a reverse QAnon Storm?
All the based esoteric schizos gibbering about the Cathedral and ZOG and how everybody is a communist were wrong. Turns, they were the fake and gay ones all along, and my sweet normie liberal second grade teacher was right the whole time. Democracy is Real and Straight. Sorry Miss Collins.
As a long-time Moldbug/Yarvin reader, this is a surreal take.
What Moldbug wrote back from 2008 to 2012 was that the Republican party was fake opposition, that Republican presidents were basically pretending to be a CEO while in fact all hiring and firing is done by civil service laws, broader ideology is set by the Cathedral, and the Republican president impact is minimal. The steering wheel was not connected to the rudder.
Moldbug's proposed solution was to use the internet to route traditional mainstream media power, and hold a "true election" where a majority elects a president who promises to exercise the full executive authority of the Presidency, as FDR and Lincoln did, and to cut through or ignore the strata of civil service rules, administrative state rules, to re-attach the steering wheel to the rudder, etc. etc. in order to break the oligarchical Cathedral/administrative state.
A lot of men on the right read Moldbug, did route around the Cathedral, did do a hostile takeover of the Republican party, and are now at least starting to attempt what he proposed. I'm still worried that they are going to declare victory way too soon and it will all go off half-cocked. But it is a promising start. The Trump administration has yet to go full-Yarvin, and to the extent they hold back I think they are more likely to ultimately fail.
In 1972, the Cathedral could slander and smear a president and the normal Republican would believe the Cathedral over the president. In 2024, this is not the case. In part this is because of the Internet, in part because the Cathedral itself has hemorrhaged talent and dropped kayfabe -- but also in part because Yarvin himself exposed the Cathedral for what it was.
It's like Yarvin said, "Ah, I diagnosed your problem, it is far more fatal than people think, and the cures other people are selling will not work on it. However, I think I may have a treatment that just might work ..." And the person then tries the treatment and starts feeling better, and someone else says, "Ah, Yarvin said you would die of this disease, but you are feeling better, he is discredited!"
In fairness to your view, though, Moldbug and the neoreactionaries have written a lot of stuff and have gone back and forth on what might actually work, what will be allowed, etc, as is to be expected in any longrun and wide-ranging conversation. Yarvin has waffled and said that maybe the medicine won't work, maybe you need a different medicine, etc. With regards to the 2024 election, there was a lot of disagreement in the dissident right about whether the Cathedral would be strong and unified enough to find or manufacture enough votes to overcome its deep unpopularity. Yarvin himself said he did not know. Yarvin also just emailed an apology for underestimating Trump 47 and over-estimating the strength of the Cathedral in 2024.
But overall, to see this as a massive L for reactionaries is ridiculous. What we are seeing is actually the fruition of 17 years of intellectual trench-work and public persuasion.
ADDENDUM:
Moldbug's diagnosis was that we don't live in a two-party system, we live in a system where the Republicans or the "right" are basically fake opposition. They are allowed to win small victories every now, in part to make their opposition look real, and in part to fix obvious problems of too much leftism, but they are never allowed to win on existential questions and in general the country moves to thee steps to the left for every step to the right. It's unclear if Trumps actions will amount to a full regime change and rightward shift on existential questions -- or if it will actually be a re-invorgation of the two-party system just as people were catching on to the fact that the Republicans were fake opposition. IN this scenario, there will be some right-ward shift on the craziest of the left-wing stuff from the past ten years, but the Cathedral will remain in-tact and the country will continue to move to the left after Trump leaves, and very little about our system will have fundamentally been altered or fixed by Trump.
Thus, Moldbug's analysis was and is correct, and as long as the Trumpist-right follows is prescribed treatment plan, they can defeat the Cathedral and cure the country. But if they go off the treatment plan and don't actually bother to follow through in enforcing these executive orders and in firing workers and taking control of the budget and defunding the NGO/academia/non-profit complex, etc, then all Trump will have done is to reboot the fake two-party system with a more exciting season of TV.
You can't expect much more from democracy than occasionally fixing obvious problems of too much leftism or too much rightism. Other regimes have a hard time clearing that bar.
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It's hard for me to understand how Yarvin's "true election" is significantly different from "a candidate who prioritizes stuff I prioritize." The reason the Bushes or Reagan didn't do mass deportations or try to dismantle the civil service isn't because they were just powerless puppets while Trump isn't, it's because that's not what they ran on. It's not like Bush said he was going to get rid of birthright citizenship and then said "psych!" as soon as he got into office. They may have been anti-immigration or anti-federal bureaucracy in comparison with their opponents, but they didn't make that their entire platform the way Trump did. When a candidate actually runs on those things, and gets elected...he does them.
As a side note, it's bizarre to me this "FDR was a dictator!" thing Yarvin returns to again and again. In the very "true election" piece under discussion, he notes that FDR's power was significantly circumscribed by the judiciary, and that he couldn't order someone arrested and shot if he wanted to. But he was still a dictator because...he got a lot of stuff done, I guess? Any dictator worth his salt wouldn't have failed to pack the court. FDR didn't even really control congress for the second half of his time in office, the Republicans and the southern Democrats regularly united to thwart his agenda, and it worked. It was hardly a "rubber stamp."
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I love your enthusiasm but hold on there sparky. Just because he signed a bunch of EOs doesn't mean any of this stuff will actually happen.
Between infinite lawsuits, various federal judges blocking the orders, and deep state foot dragging, it'll be a miracle if any of these things actually happen before a 2028 or 2032 Democrat President comes by and cancels it.
Then Yarvin laughs.
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Obviously there’s a lot of euphoria happening now, but let’s be serious.
Nothing serious has happened yet that can’t be reversed on Day 1 of the next Democratic administration. If anything, the right has only taught the left that it can go further and faster.
Core things like deporting even a substantial proportion (more than 3m) long term settled illegal immigrants seem extremely unlikely and currently have no viable plan.
Major tensions in the ‘Trump coalition’ between the workers faction and the CEOs faction continue to simmer, the H1B thing is unresolved, the corn lobby vs RFK drama hasn’t even really started yet etc.
A big economic crash could see Trump become extraordinarily unpopular extremely quickly, and in 4 (or fewer) years it could all be over in tears.
The anti-DEI stuff is surface level. When they force every Air Traffic Controller to take an IQ test and fire those below a threshold (and have SCOTUS allow it) to get out of the current hole, then they’ll have started doing something in this area.
This seems like setting the bar impossibly high: 1-3 can't be satisfied by 10 days of performance, 4 applies to any Head of State, and 5 would be an arbitrary policy that very few people want and which those people only want for impure reasons (using an objective test of aptitude for specific job duties, performance on which would presumably correlate with IQ, is one thing; a literal IQ test and a threshold presumed to correspond to minimum acceptable aptitude for specific job duties is another).
So? The obvious conclusion is that there should never be a lot of euphoria after 10 days of performance. It's just too soon.
And points 4 and 5?
I would agree with you on 4 and 5. 4 could affect anyone and 5 is weirdly specific.
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I'm not sure if this was an IQ problem more than it was a labor shortage problem. Even someone motivated and with high IQ might have a problem doing the job of two, lesser IQ people.
Maybe AI can take over air traffic controller duties to help offset labor shortage, but so far I don't see that happening soon.
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He hasn't even been in power for a single month. Let's wait and see what happens. You can't judge a presidency from the first two weeks.
Also Trump has to be one of the most Zionist presidents the US has ever had. He was grand marshal of the salute to Israel, he just passed an executive order on antisemitism.
He just froze aid to everyone except Israel and Egypt (which gets aid due for the sake of Israel). The remaining Adelson is still getting her money's worth. And then there was all the stuff he did in his last term for Israel - exiting the Iran deal, moving diplomatic recognition to Jerusalem...
I don't know how it's possible for the word ZOG to be problematized like it's some crazy, loopy theory when in the case of the US, it's literally true. The US is surely the most Zionist state in the world besides Israel, they send billions of dollars in military aid to Israel, they defend Israel directly with airpower, intel, diplomatic support, buying off Israel's neighbours and pursuing regime change in Israel's enemies.
BDS against Israel is legally penalized in most US states. It's not just Zionism but active anti-anti-Zionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws#Anti-BDS_laws_in_the_United_States
And yet a supermajority of American Jews voted for the D candidate, like always. The only Jews that vote GOP are observant Orthodox that have very little political influence. Trump and Republicans in general are probably more Zionist than your average secular American Jew.
There are some Republican voters that are less Zionist, they hate big banks, most corporations and want to end animal testing. They are naturalist, and despise asphalt culture and conspicuous consumerism.
They vote r, because have you seen the d. But the r isn't really centered around their core values.
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If the theory is that the US government is "owned" by a shadowy group of people actively prioritising Israeli concerns over those of the US, that is Elders of Zion level crazy. You can certainly argue that certain policy decisions in actuality have favoured Israel over the US, but in almost all cases those carrying them out thought they were the best for the US.
This is sensationalist. Supporting Israel with modest amounts of airpower (they helped shoot some missiles out of the sky, which I'm sure the Israelis appreciated, but it's not as if the USAF was carrying out airstrikes on Beirut), diplomacy and intel (which the US gets massive amounts of from Israel in return) falls under the general category of the sort of thing you do for a close ally. I'm also not sure what you're getting at by suggesting they're defending Israel by buying off their neighbors. Do you think Jordan or Egypt would attack Israel if not for US aid? And do you think the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan (as the only examples of regime change I can think of) were done primarily for Israel's sake?
Iraq absolutely, Afghanistan no, Syria partially. There is an entire chorus of ex-US officials and politicians who privately and publicly admit that Iraq posed no threat to America (geographically this is quite straightforward) but did pose a threat to Israel. I've posted about this in the past: https://www.themotte.org/post/56/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/5090?context=8#context
And then there is the Israeli 'intel' that spiced up Iraq's WMD program and made the case for an invasion. It's the same kind of intel that Israel constantly produces. Iran has been six months away from nuclear weapons for the last 30 years according to them. This is not useful intelligence!
In what universe is giving Israel free weapons they use to bomb their neighbours good for the US? Make them pay ridiculously high prices like everyone else! Consider the Arab Oil Embargo - helping Israel can be very, very costly. The US economy suffered enormous damage. No level-headed analysis of the pros and cons would come out in favour of giving Israel a huge amount of military aid to replace their losses in a war with the Arabs where the Israelis had basically already come out on top, considering the Arabs have a tonne of oil/leverage and the Israelis have none.
If forcing regime change were evidence of the ZOG being "literally true", we'd have more examples than Iraq (i.e. Lebanon, Iran, Yemen etc). The US wasn't the only country enthusiastically invading Iraq btw - was Tony Blair's government also owned by Zionists?
Israel also buys weapons at high prices from the US. Much of the pressure that Joe Biden was applying to Israel came in the form of withholding deliveries of weapons Israel had already paid for. Like, it's fair to argue the US should provide no aid at all, but this isn't the ZOG.
The US started supporting Israel after their victory in the six-day war showcased their value as a military power in a region broadly aligned with the Soviets. By the time of the oil embargo keeping Israel on their side during the cold war felt like the right bet to decision makers in the US. You may think they were wrong, but that they thought this was the correct choice seems more plausible than that they were being controlled by a shadowy cabal who had between 67 and 73 achieved total control of the government.
How many wars are you asking for? Manipulating a country into invading another country on the other side of the world is just about the biggest show of control you can imagine. It's followed closely by manipulating a country into harassing countries on the other side of the world, which we see with Syria and Iran. And manipulating a country into aiding another country's invasion (in the case of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon). The US doesn't do this for anyone else, America suppressed Britain and France in 1956 while Israel got away scot-free.
The US allies that joined America were there to look like they're contributing (Poland was eager to earn US favour) and there's certainly some Zionist influence too via Murdoch media. It is basically impossible to read a flagship Australian newspaper without hearing about how awful it is that we're not favouring Israel enough. Day in and day out.
There is nothing shadowy about the cabal, it's blatant. Kissinger was right out there in the open sending weapons to Israel. The USS Liberty was immediately swept under the carpet in '67 despite being a very serious military incident. You have all these US officials boasting about how their number one goal is to work with Israel. Pelosi talks about how even if the Capitol were razed, there would still be cooperation with Israel. Trump complains about how Israel used to totally control the US congress and now that control has withered away.
Why did the Arab states turn to the Soviet cause in the first place? Because they wanted weapons to attack Israel with and the US was unwilling to provide them, while the Soviets would.
Yes US politicians seem to think that favouring Israel is the 'correct choice'. Somali-descended US politicians might favour Somalia. Politicians paid by China might find their views on the South China Sea maturing and developing in a certain direction. Islamic politicians might seek more protections for Islam. It doesn't follow that favouring Somalia or China or Islam is good for US interests. AIPAC boasting about 95% of its candidates winning their elections is not necessarily good for US interests.
More than one? (Which don't believe was done primarily, let alone entirely, for Israel's sake, but we'll let that pass for sake of argument). If the ZOG was "literally true" (and blatant about it, as you claim later on), then Israel wouldn't have 5-10 hostile regimes surrounding it that haven't been overturned.
If this were the case, they'd do it for Iran, Lebanon etc. Like, if your argument were that the ZOG was in power 2003-2009 the claim that Israel orchestrated the Iraq war would at least be in service of your position, but if they've been pulling the strings since and before, you'd expect them to use that control to deal with their current threats.
So is the claim that the US only has issues with Syria and Iran (which overthrew the US-backed Shah) because Israel keeps dragging them in? But then why would the US not have kept the Israel-friendly Shah in power (the revolution fits comfortably into the supposed ZOG window)? Why would Obama not intervene in Syria after chemical weapons were used? Why would Obama and Biden have been so pro Iran-rapprochement? Etc.
I mean, maybe I'm being autistic and interpreting too literally your earlier claim that
but again, if the position is that all US interests are subordinate to Israeli interests and have been since the mid 20th century, then Israel wouldn't face any threats at all (or at the very least, far fewer). Is what I just described your position, or have I misinterpreted it?
I'll take your word for it. I'd suggest trying a flagship newspaper in the US or UK, where leftist/centrist publications (so most of them) usually consider it awful that the US/UK/whoever isn't favouring Palestine enough.
A blatant cabal would be politicians saying right there in the open that Israel's interests take precedence over the US'. No one says that (Trump's statements sort of come close, but he says all sorts of exaggerated bs). The rest of the stuff you described is mostly standard for allies. If Japan accidentally sank a US warship there wouldn't be an immediate cessation of the alliance. If you asked Pelosi about whether the US would still be allies with the UK if the capital was razed she'd probably say yes.
The Arabs turned to the Soviets for a whole host of reasons, including Arab nationalism/Socialism, anti-colonialism etc. As I understand it the first Soviet arms delivery to Egypt happened in 1955, several years before and orders of magnitude higher in value than the first US military aid to Israel in 1959. So the US wasn't giving military aid to Israel either at the time the Arabs turned to the Soviets.
Yeah that's a fair position, as is debating the value of the Israeli alliance generally (fwiw I think Republicans over-value Israel and Democrats under-value, but that's another discussion) but this seems like the Motte to the Bailey of "everything we do is determined by Israeli interests", which is Israel-derangement-syndrome.
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Isn't it a bit early for a triumph?
No, it’s a suovetaurilia.
I love the Motte! Thanks for the word!
Nonsense, this is obviously a Finnish word. Must be something to do with Sauna.
It genuinely does look a bit Finnish, I was momentarily confused when looking at it. "Suo" means swamp, at least.
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Ha, no doubt.
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Libs did try to resist Trump after his first election, believing he was illegitimate, didn't win the popular vote, needed tk be impeached over Russia, Stormy Daniels, etc. The last ten years has included more and more political conflict outside the voting booth.
Aa for your question about right wing theory cope: I've been in parties and bars with a lot of these people, we've had these exact conversations. The working theory is that we were wrong. We didn't believe in democracy or our ability to fight back and fix things, which is the same as saying we really didn't believe in America. Trump was the only one who did. Trump was right and we were wrong.
It's worth reflecting on the fact that we all almost saw Trump's head explode on live TV. He was right by about 2 inches.
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It is refreshing that I no longer hear this stuff anymore. Leftists have now accepted that Trump won legitimately for his second term, and no one seems to be doubting that he is the rightful president. Instead it's a lot of "I can't believe people voted for this". But I consider that a lot better then the constant refusal that he is the rightful president, because all of the investigations and doubts really did prevent Trump from fully having the power last time. It was one witch hunt after another, causing everyone left of Jeb Bush to really internalize that it's a virtue to resist Trump on every level. I think the lack of question to his legitimacy this time will make things different this time around, for what it's worth.
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I don't know if I'm necessarily That Guy, really... but you know, ahem ahem, cough cough... it does sort of look like one of the two American political factions had certain elements of itself turn on the Jews and was cast down more or less instantly for its trouble. Meanwhile the other faction can have one of its standard-bearers spaz out and look like he's sieg heiling in public and the ADL will run defense for him as long as Israel keeps getting bombs and the campus "anti-semites" get deported.
Just saying. It's not not what happened. No I don't care who 70% of dentists and divorce lawyers voted for.
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Trump won on a narrative, and the strength of the narrative overcomes the cathedral. And that narrative was- the 2020 election was stolen, leaving a senile usurper to let his incompetent, insane, corrupt, and lazy officials to oppress the people. Even the heavens show their displeasure with unrelenting bad weather and wars and rumors of war. But when the rightful king, hounded and persecuted, returns from his winter palace he will put all in order.
I think he avoided talking about the 2020 election too much. I mean, everyone knew what his position on it was, but it wasn't a huge topic of conversation.
Agreed. In part, Trump won because he made things about the future, and provided a vision for an America he wanted to create, whether you liked the vision or not. He brought 2016 energy to the 2024 campaign. His debate performance was generally bad (not as bad as Biden's!), but his RNC performance was good, and the assassination attempt gave him a huge boost; that iconic photo will be what you see in the encyclopedia when you look up the 2024 election. Biden and Harris just didn't seem to have a vision, the core of the campaign was "we are not Trump."
It's my belief that the winner of most presidential elections is the one with the strongest, most compelling vision for the country. "It's morning in America." "Putting people first." "Compassionate conservatism." "Yes we can." "Make America Great Again." "Build Back Better." Biden's vision in 2020 was a return to normalcy, and he narrowly won on that basis, largely due to the pandemic.
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I agree that this question should definitely be asked here. The dissident right doomerism (which mirrors the 2016 Sanders whining) reminds me of my black/white thinking depressive episodes. It's a kind of justification, not a logical argument. What the right wants to do, just like what Sanders wanted to do, is difficult. Being an outsider is difficult. It is a political miracle for Trump-aligned right-wingers that Trump is electable, when every historical precedent would suggest otherwise. There will probably never be anyone like him in our lifetimes. The fact that he closely lost an election to a former Democrat Vice President under a fairly popular administration should not cause people to spiral so hard. It's an emotional reaction to a very normal possibility that your preferred outsider candidate can lose.
I happen to strongly believe that the election was not stolen, but I imagine that the people here who do also want to live in a high-trust society. My question for those people is, what does it mean if you're wrong about the election? If you learned for a fact the election wasn't stolen, and you had been shouting otherwise, you'd be forced to consider how you contributed towards lowering societal trust by lowering its faith in our democratic process unnecessarily. It's been totally reckless for the right-wing to jump on this boat with so little meaningful evidence. For all I hear about high-trust societies here, that aspect of things, the fact that the right-wing very loudly questioned an election that was very likely totally fine, seems to me to have massively increased distrust. And again, if they're wrong, then what was it all for?
If I learned for a fact that it had zero effect on the election, I would still not regret mentioning to people that I think it's very bad that the clerks of the two largest counties in Wisconsin encouraged people to lie on election forms to avoid providing identification and a large number of people did exactly that. I can imagine this washing out to zero actual difference, but it's still very bad and I'm not the one bringing social trust down by noticing that. Even if this (and the million and one other examples of violations of clear law with Covid as justification) had no effect, I would still favor restoring trustworthy elections where people vote in person with identification.
The question is how much noise and populist rage does this justify, and does it justify the language that has enabled people broadly to believe in much more conspiratorial takes under the umbrella of "the election was stolen". For instance I think it is a very good thing that that effect was much more muted after Al Gore lost, and the adults in the room encouraged moving on, at least much more than in this case where believing the election was stolen is a requirement to be a part of the Trump admin.
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I personally can't answer this, because I've always believed that none of the POTUS elections in my lifetime were stolen, 2016, 2020, 2024, and heck, even 2000. But there's a big leap in logic here in your statement. Let's posit that I'm correct that the 2020 election wasn't stolen; this doesn't imply that there was no good reason to believe that it was stolen. Sadly, our world isn't a clean and easily legible one, and it is often the case that there are many good reasons to believe things that turn out to be false. As such, it can be entirely reasonable to believe that questioning the election was necessary, even if it resulted in lowering our faith in our democratic process. Given that, it also appears to me that the reaction to the questioning was the actual point of lowering faith in our democratic process.
So the question actually hinges on whether it was reasonable to believe at the time that any of these elections were stolen, rather than whether it was the actual case that they were stolen.
I think that's a fair point, I could probably have targeted my critique more precisely. You could make a parallel to the "russia hoax" where Trump made it very much appear that he was a Russian asset, moreso than he really was. How much do we blame Democrats for going rabid because of that? I think ideally the democrat media would have been more measured and patient, and the temperature on everything could have stayed more reasonable while the professionals did there work, and I think an honest Democrat who engaged in any over-the-top accusations would reflect on that behavior as ultimately net-negative.
It is possible that bad behavior is so obvious that the rabble rousing is correct, but I should have clarified my point which is that when it is a failure, like it is here, those who were in the thick of it should acknowledge it, and move towards acting with more prudence if they realize the evidence wasn't quite so open and shut as they thought. If what I believe is true, then a very large amount of social trust was lost with little provocation from the party that supposedly highly values social trust. That party should reflect on that if it's being honest with itself.
This is really the issue to me. The institution that has positioned itself as the arbiter of partisan agreements no longer does their job with any commitment to the truth.
The reason there are so many unanswered questions about seemingly suspicious behaviors on election night 2020, is that there was never a good-faith effort to investigate those questions. If election skeptics thought something fishy happened at a vote counting center after observers were sent away, the reporting on such a claim amounted to "The people counting the votes said 'No, nothing fishy happened.' Therefore, it was the fairest and most secure election in history." Narrative buy-in won over actual investigating, which was never going to convince the skeptics and only pander to those who wanted the skeptics to be wrong regardless of the truth.
I agree that the mainstream media environment is not trustworthy and I don't go for them for unvarnished truth. But again I think there's a good comparison on the other side, so many on the left believe that Trump can never be right about anything, so they believe the opposite of whatever he says, which creates a huge blind spot that ultimately degrades societal trust. It can be a similar problem regarding what the right believes about mainstream media.
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Did you watch the post-election interview that Bob Brady gave? (I think this is it: YouTube link) If you thought that 30M votes were going to be stuffed at the last minute, I think the interview reveals a very plausible explanation for why they weren't.
Now, I am not saying that Miss Collins was wrong. But I am saying that watching the interview gave me the strong (and perhaps wrong) vibe that what happened is that Team Kamala was full of noobs and didn't pony up and play with the city machines and as a result the city machines sent a Clear Message about what happened when you go off-script by simply not coughing up votes for Kamala.
Of course, that's not necessarily a conspiracy along the lines of the CIA controlling voting machines via satellite or something. There are shades of conspiratorial interpretations here, ranging from the sinister and illegal "the machines didn't stuff the ballots because the Presidential campaign didn't release cash to them" to the dodgy-but-legal "the machines didn't bother to get out because they weren't adequately compensated by the Presidential campaign for staff time" to the relatively benign "Kamala failed to coordinate with the boots on the ground and as a result they were disorganized." I don't see the need to say any of the more conspiratorial interpretations are correct, but it seems worth at least acknowledging the possibility that city machines are capable of large-scale voter fraud.
But whichever of these explanations is true, it's worth watching the interview because I think it reveals a lot more about how politics and power works than sitting around theorizing about how a shadowy three-letter-organization has ironclad control over our elections.
That suggests that big city Democratic machines are in fact entirely ambivalent about the Democratic Party and progressive politics and only care about getting paid, which again would be a strong point against the “…burgers?” argument on the right that suggests these people Really Do Care a lot about this stuff for reasons that go way beyond financial incentives.
Senior Dem and non-profit managers being shocked that their interns actually believe all that stuff has been a running theme for the last decade now. And the city machines are the least vulnerable to activist takeover tactics that originated in colleges and are optimized to take over the college-like environments of modern corps and ngos.
I can see an existential battle between the philly turnout machine boss and the 26yo kamela advisor who, like? hit up Beyonce on tiktok? and ofc she's down with the struggle against like fascism and stuff? and sure she'll help us turn out the youth vote?
So now you really are going back to the oft-mocked “it’s just kids on campuses” argument? I mean this seems clearly contradictory. The truth is that the “establishment” or whatever word you want to use for it was not sufficiently threatened by Trump to do everything to prevent him from winning again, the same way they didn’t actually do everything to stop FDR from winning.
You're talking to a different person. But yes, my blackpill take is that they need someone to take the fall for the coming recession, like your pt4 in another post.
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There are different factions on the left, and big city political machines just want to grill at taxpayer expense. They’re not radical activists.
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So, firstly, even people who Really Do Care are unlikely to do their jobs for free. If Kamala comes out and tells her chief-of-staff "sorry but we aren't going to pay you to do your job anymore" and she quits it's not really a dunk to say "wow it seems like the Democrats don't care about social justice and only care about getting paid." Probably they care about both.
But secondly, it does not surprise me that an Irish-Italian Philadelphian born in 1945 is ambivalent about certain aspects of current progressive politics. I doubt he is ambivalent about the Democratic Party; he almost certainly has an intense loyalty to his in-group. But I suspect for Brady and other old-school Democrats (e.g. James Carville) current progressive fixations are tripping them up from doing the real work which, if I had to guess, is winning elections and then using those elections to achieve old-school patronage-style wins in the FDR mold that benefit your allies but also large groups of people – think improving the healthcare or welfare systems, infrastructure improvement, etc. Not to suggest that they don't care about abortion or women's rights or things like that, but for a guy born around the end of World War Two the new gender stuff might not be their top priority.
I think there's a generational (and also different-parts-of-the-coalition) thing here, and if I am recalling the context of the original "...burgers?" comic, the suggestion is that the "...burgers?" people are elite media types that are going to be pushing their agendas with other people's money. I don't think the Bob Bradys of the world were ever really that sort of person, and I think the political world is big enough for both. Currently the GOP coalition is (to overgeneralize) a fusion of Silicon Valley tech elites who care about meritocracy and evangelical true believers who care about abortion – if you find that e.g. Elon Musk cares more about money than pro-life causes it is wrong to suggest that Republicans writ large don't care about the issue of abortion. Similarly, if Bob Brady and his city machine just care about money (which I actually do not think!), it does not mean that there aren't True Believers out there who care much less about the financial incentives.
I agree with what you're saying here, but I'm not sure what you're getting at in your initial post. I had the interview on in the background as I was getting ready for work, and it came across more as whining than anything else. He said that they never involved him in the process and the campaign just did their own thing. He also said that the local Democratic committee did what they could. Yeah, I grant that it's a political mistake not to at least talk to the chair of the committee in the biggest city in an important battleground state,but it's hard for me to imagine what he could have actually done. Was there something he wanted to do but needed to coordinate with the campaign? Did he want to offer his sage advice?
If your contention is that the reason Harris lost Pennsylvania is because her campaign didn't play ball with local party leaders and they punished her by not rigging the vote, a look at the actual numbers makes it pretty clear that it isn't the case. Kamala Harris got about 35,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did, and Trump got about 10,000 more than in 2020. If that difference is solely attributed to ballot box stuffing, it suggests that Brady can manufacture somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 votes. Except Trump lost by 80,000 votes in 2020, and won by 120,000 in 2024. A machine like this could have accounted for, at most, 20% of the difference, if we're as charitable as possible and assume he didn't max out his fraud capabilities in 2020.
Other counties don't help us either. The only other county that can be alleged to have a Democratic Machine akin to Philadelphia's is Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), and Harris and Trump both got about the same number of votes there as they did in 2020. And that's if you take the naive view that there's some monolithic machine because Democrats have won every election since the 1930s. If you were actually paying attention you'd know that the Allegheny County Democratic Committee wasn't exactly a model of functionality heading into 2020, and that the progressive wing of the party had taken over city and county government plus key state and US rep positions. In other words, the people in charge in 2024 were not the same as in 2020, and the new people couldn't credibly be said to be part of any machine. Outside of Philadelphia and Allegheny, you're looking at counties that are either too small or too Republican to have machines. In any event, the most votes you're talking about is a few thousand, and in some places Kamala actually got more votes than Biden.
I think I was trying to answer OP's question – "what's the cope for Trump winning" – with a more sophisticated steelman than "the CIA fell asleep at the hacker remote control button." Now, I never "doomed about the 2024 election" on here – you can go back and look at my posts, I don't think I talked much about it at all, but it's a sort of interesting intellectual exercise to think about, even if I don't personally feel the need to cope.
I would need more evidence than a single interview to contend this (although I will admit that it certainly sprang to mind watching the interview!) I also think that even without any "rigging" the local party machine can make a big difference! Of course, Brady says that he did in fact do his darndest to win the election for Kamala regardless of how poorly he and his team were treated.
I definitely think the Kamala campaign could have used his sage advice. My recollection of the interview was that he says he wanted to coordinate with her campaign, and although the details are a bit unclear I get the impression that it was in resource allocation, probably related to GOTV efforts, and maybe messaging. Now, my assumption is that political machines work on a patronage model (where they receive funding from their patrons for GOTV which they then pass down to their clients and so forth) and Brady's interview – which, as you say, has some whining – sounds to me like what someone would say if they weren't receiving expected allocation of funding from on high. (Of course it is very much in Brady's interests for people to think that he has magical powers to GOTV if they just treat him with enough deference and supply him with adequate funding).
First off, let me say that I really appreciate you bringing the numbers here.
Secondly – yes, and why do you think that was? I definitely think some of it was that voting was easier in 2020. But if you're a political machine, you should be aiming to at least match last year's performance, and they didn't. However, I do think there are non-conspiratorial interpretations for this, though. Besides COVID, it's also true that the city's population is declining – they probably lost upwards of 50,000 people between elections. 2024's voter turnout still didn't match 2020's, but it was very close. All of this – I agree – is consistent with Brady attempting to (and failing) bring home the bacon for Kamala (and again we don't even need to believe in any fraud for this to be the case).
On the other hand, if I don my tinfoil cap and grant the machine 1) very good fraud capabilities, and 2) a decent idea of what the other side's total turnout is going to be, then what I see is that the machine puts in just enough fraud to guarantee a win and for some reason didn't do it here – in Philadelphia they could have turned 70% of the voters instead of 65% and it might only have raised eyebrows in the usual places while bringing in, what, an extra 50,000 votes? That would have gotten them nearly halfway to the win they needed in the state.
TO BE CLEAR, I am not saying I believe this. I'm engaging with the OP – he asked what the cope is for the Trump win, and I'm suggesting one possible cope is that the Kamala campaign failed to play ball with the county campaigns and they reciprocated by failing to bring home the bacon (which frankly seems plausible even if you assume zero fraud). On balance I am inclined to believe that 1) Brady is telling the truth about poor coordination by Team Kamala, and 2) this hurt their GOTV, and 3) Brady would have preferred Biden was the nominee. I think you make a decent case that as much as Brady might prefer for everyone to think otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to tip the balance here (unless you grant the machine really good fraud capability - and from what I've seen actual cases of voter fraud where people have been caught have been box-stuffing, not "I am generating arbitrarily large numbers out of thin air.")
Well, my first question is – do we know that the machine doesn't lend support to county parties outside of its geographic boundaries? My second question is – did you catch the part where Brady suggests that Kamala's failure to coordinate wasn't just with his city, but was nationwide? Obviously PA itself wasn't the deciding factor here in the election, although it was important. Brady's suggesting a nationwide systemic failure to engage with local political machines. That seems to me like something that could be significant – but maybe not enough to tip the balance.
This is a very funny use of charitable, 10/10.
I certainly cop to not paying attention – I don't live in PA, for one thing, so I defer to your superior knowledge of the place or attention-paying skills. In fact, the sausage of political campaigning is fairly opaque to me, so I appreciate being told when I am wrong.
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Counterpoint: Trump acheived all this because he followed the Moldbug plan of having a tech CEO bring in a bunch of 20-year-olds to run the executive branch like a startup. Curtis Yarvin is becoming whitepilled as we speak.
This feels like those people who think Yudkowsky is discredited because recursive self-improvement looks a bit different than what he imagined in 2007 or whatever. No one else was even thinking that deeply about AI in 2007.
I will admit to not paying Yudkowsky much attention but recursive self-improvement is an extremely old trope, you don't get any points for talking about that in 2007. Perhaps you were thinking of something specific he expanded on that wasn't mapped out by sci-fi authors before he was born?
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He only got to do that because more people pressed Trump button. That's the central point, if more people had pressed Harris button, Trump wouldn't get to hire or appoint anybody. Yarvin is as turgid and obnoxious to read as usual, but "moral energy" is conveniently unquantifiable.
RWers have spent the past several years LARPing like they were Soviet dissidents living under a regime of red terror when it turned out they actually lived in a liberal democracy that functioned as advertised the whole time.
I agree with this in sentiment. Your main point is substantively correct.
Still, there are various facts that we're learning about how the government operated that suggest on that on the sliding scale between "red terror" and "following the rules", they were at least a smidgen over the line.
For example, sure, if you press one button or another (modulo Congress, which I'm still convinced ought to step up to their role they've seemingly willingly abdicated, but that's another thread) then the government changes priorities and spend money on different things. That's well and good, but it seems like we've been granting millions in tax dollars to left-leaning groups to do left-leaning politics is not quite inside the rules. The button-pressing-winner is emphatically not supposed to be allowed to spend government dollars to convince people to press his button again in 4 years.
Does that mean it's the Soviet gulag? Absolutely not, but nuance is good here and despite the histrionics of the reactionary right, they had some nugget of truth in there.
I agree with, but even in countries which Americans considered at least adjacent to Liberty, and not dictatorships, the people in power can explicitly use the fact that they in power and thus have access to the fiscus, to persuade the masses of the correctness of their political views.
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Do liberal democracies advertise that they'll prosecute whistleblowers reporting on the law being broken by institutions, unless the right candidate is elected? Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought they explicitly advertise the opposite.
Do they advertise that they'll attempt to control people's speech, unless it happens to be in line with who's in power? I was also under the impression that the ad pinky-swore liberal democracy will never do that.
No, but they advertise that if the government is being mean to you, you can go in the booth and press the button next to the name of the guy who says he'll make the government stop being mean to you, and make it be mean to the other guys instead, and if more people press that button then press the other button, the government will stop being mean to you. This is what just happened.
Can you link me to that advertisement? Because I'm pretty sure that they very emphatically don't advertise that, that they actually advertise the opposite, and that this is one of the defining differences between liberal democracies and other systems.
If this is what Mrs. Collins told you, she may be more based than you're giving her credit.
That liberal democracies never employ repression against political opponents, or that their doing so immediately falsifies the premises of liberal democracy? I don't think this is really held by anyone. Certainly I think very few defenders of liberal democracy would argue that, though they may argue that liberal democracies tend to pursue political repression less than countries which aren't liberal democracies, or do so less harshly, both of which I believe are true.
Granted that's my fault for glibly talking about "advertisement" as if there's a CEO of liberal democracy. A more important promise of liberal democracy is that if you don't like the current government, including if you think the current government is ineffective, corrupt, or unfair, you can vote it out, and the government you vote in its place will pursue different policies.
I think "being mean to your political opponents" isn't necessarily repression.
Repealing the EV tax credit is mean to EV manufacturers, but it's absolutely not repression. It's a policy that Congress really could decide either way based on their priorities.
Of course, there is a line where "being mean" crosses over into repression. But there is plenty of space on this side of the line where it's just "we don't support that as a priority". For another example, we don't want to log/drill this federal land (mean to the loggers/drillers) or we do (mean to the conservationists that want to keep it intact). Neither are repression.
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More like "something something rule of law...", and "mumble mumble not a tyranny of the majority". Anyway, if some exceptions are allowed without it disproving the broader point, I don't see why we should dismiss Yarvin wholesale.
I have never heard a liberal democracy enjoyer say "we totally do political repression, we're just more subtle about it". If this is what you believe, than you may be more based than you think.
That's not a promise of liberal democracy specifically, all democracies promise that, including illiberal ones (which I am told are a very very bad thing).
Perhaps, as they say, real liberal democracy has never been attempted.
Have you heard anyone in charge of a modern-day country say that? Political repression is what the others are doing; you are just taking appropriate measures against the extraordinary threats the nation is facing.
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It doesn't entirely disprove his whole theory, even though I do think he's wrong. It is a data point against it. He himself admits he's surprised. I threw a jab at Yarvin, but I mostly have in mind actual, concrete predictions that They were so powerful and so well-entrenched, and democracy is such a fraud, that Trump specifically would not be allowed to win.
All political systems engage in repression to some degree. But differences of degree are important. Less is better. The repression experienced by the American right over the past several years has been quite mild compared to even the mildest of twentieth century dictatorships, which is why terminology like "the Regime" (obviously chosen to imply an equivalency between liberal democracies and the various states most people imagine when they hear the word "regime," Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, North Korea, and others) is very silly. I expect Trump will exercise some degree of repression against the left over the next four years as he's promised to do, though it won't be particularly severe by historical standards either. And if the GOP loses in 2028 (or even loses badly in the midterms), it will stop.
I don't consider "illiberal democracy" to be a very useful term. All states have some democratic features. Even the Soviet Union in the 1930s did. All states have some non-democratic features. It's also a matter of degrees, and there are edge cases, but that doesn't mean the distinction between non-democracy and democracy is nonexistent, just like there's a distinction between purple and blue despite the seamless blend.
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Yeah, but the American people pressing the button for "right-wing strong man" (as opposed to generic Republican who fakes being CEO of America) is exactly what Yarvin proposed as his solution 15 years ago:
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/03/true-election-practical-option-for-real/
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I was pleasantly surprised to see so many doomers here issuing mea culpas on election night and admitting that if the 2024 election wasn't rigged, the 2020 one probably wasn't either.
People were pissed about 2020 shenanigans, and there was a lot of actual organisation to prevent another steal. In addition, Biden administration was a catastrophe so stealing this one would have been harder. Also, how much did democrats spend on various get out the vote efforts this time?
If you still believe that the 2020 election was stolen and the 2024 wasn't, I would like to see some evidence in support of the former claim. I have yet to see any persuasive evidence thereof.
This has been talked over and over and over and fucking over and I'm beyond tired of it. So I'll be brief.
the absolute hysterics about the suggestion of voter ID. You'd get laughed out of the room in Europe for even suggesting elections can be secure without, at least, state issued photo ID.
the inherent untrustworthiness of mail-in voting
motor voter laws in illegal heavy state that opt-in people by default ? You joking.
the various vote dump anomalies, batches of ballots that were 99% or even 100% pro Biden, the fact there's a wide delta between when counties report votes, allowing for fraud.. ... you can go back to these discussions and read it again.
In short, unless you insist on strict, EU style or even stricter measures for running elections you are not a serious person. Your country is falling apart and the one thing you should all insist on is elections that are as secure as possible. Yet here you are, no doubt almost certainly opposing Florida-style measures. (seems to take it most seriously from what little I've researched)
This post is one I agree with:
Is your argument that all of these vulnerabilities were addressed in between 2020 and 2024, which is why Trump got in in 2024 and not 2020?
My argument is that it's some combo of
-enough of them were addressed and that also
-Biden was so horrifically bad and the democrat party such a trainwreck that it's entirely possible they also failed to organise the steal properly.
Still, a lot of work to be done before people from countries where elections aren't disbelieved but simply annulled (when result is not pro-American enough) can look at yours and say "seems to be ran in a sensible manner".
If Trump had won in 2020, what would your conclusion have been?
Do you think Trump was elected legitimately in 2016?
This is like "if the evidence still pointed to this suspect, but he didn't do it, what would you conclude?"
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It's not "evidence", exactly, but having stayed up all night on Election Night 2024, I was getting text messages from my Biden-supporting friends and family members basically throwing in the towel and saying congratulations. Then at midnight or so, when all the major swing states stopped counting because poll workers "needed to sleep", I thought it really strange that all these states in different time zones decided that at the same time. Then when the 4am ballot dumps came in (what happened to sleep?), and I saw every predictor index go from 95%+ Trump to Biden, I was forever convinced that it was a rigged election.
Too many inexplicable abnormalities. There were some significant statistical anomalies that came out later to confirm my suspicions, but they seem to have mostly been scrubbed from the internet.
How convenient.
it's hard to believe you are being genuine or engaging in good faith here
I'm sorry, but "there would be hard evidence to support my claim, but They have suppressed it" is what you say when you have nothing. It is the first port of call for every paranoid conspiracy theorist who arrived at their conclusion first, went looking for evidence to support it and came up short. To which I say: what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I also don't know what you mean by "genuine". I genuinely don't believe the 2020 election was fraudulent. I genuinely haven't seen any evidence that I found remotely persuasive.
a charitable reading of the above users post is the evidence did exist, it existed on the internet, but he cannot find it using the typical indexing sites like google
there is ample evidence of google doing this with basic searches, e.g., election fraud or vaccine safety now return 100+ pages of the exact opposite of whatever phrase the searcher is looking for
there is ample evidence of these sites delisting and deboosting sites which had this information, there is ample evidence of posts being censored across all social media sites in the wake of the election, including an entire denial of service attack against Parler by their web host (AWS) which destroyed the competitor
being genuine means when you ask someone a specific question or for specific evidence, you're asking the question because you want engage in a dialogue as opposed to it being a rhetorical tactic to win some argument on the internet or through attrition whereby you, who have expended exactly zero effort here but have set yourself up as some arbiter of truth, demand others expend lots of effort to move you
when a user responds to someone else's genuine explanation with something like "how convenient" or "hyuk hyuk that's what I thought," it's the later as opposed to the former
this sort of behavior is cancerous to a discussion forum and should be sanctioned
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Just the narrow vote margin alone suggests 2020 was more likely to be stolen than 2024 (although by that measure, 2000 is way more likely)
The plurality of voters cast votes in favor of Gore in sufficient states to pass 270 electoral votes, and yet Gore did not get 270 electoral votes or become president. "Stolen" seems like an accurate descriptor.
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Who flipped? I am convinced there were attempts to steal both, and there always has been from major urban metros my whole life. But that kind of steal is only so effective. AND it can be stopped/mitigated. Look at what has happened to Miami-Dade county with DeSantis' reforms and oversight. The number of suspicious ballots dropped precipitously and the Democrat advantage dropped by an equivalent amount, often reversing.
Run the Florida model in a few other big swing states and nationwide Democrats have no chance as far as I can tell.
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Just because the liberals folded doesn’t mean that the Cathedral doesn’t exist. It means precisely that the liberals didn’t want to fight in the ways you mentioned. I’d argue that it’s because they don’t have to. As long as they have control of the university system, NGOs, and the administrative system, the damage that a Trump Presidency can do is limited and temporary.
Every student leaving a university has been trained to support DEI and redistribution of wealth. They’ve been trained to be globalist and to be if not atheists, at least very secular. And most of them, even if they don’t agree with that, have to go along with it because the DEI loving HR office won’t tolerate dissent.
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I think that the US political system is bad (FPTP, EC, special interests and all that), but not anything near maximally bad. For generations, politicians have bent the rules to benefit their side, gerrymandering, running smear campaigns, voter suppression and all that, but while the political institutions were full of infighting, they were generally playing by certain rules. Respecting the constitution, the vote of the people (no matter how much you worked to mislead them before they cast their vote) and peaceful transition of power were all part of that.
As seen in J6, Trump is not playing by the same rules. I am not sure if he even has a concept of objective truth, but he certainly decided that as he did not like an outcome in which he lost, it was false and hence the product of fraud. He then also made that terrible bid to overturn the certification of the election using his mob, which was breaking very much with mos maiorum. Luckily, his hare-brained scheme did not work.
While the institutions certainly engaged in lawfare against him, they were also not willing to break their core principles to get rid of him. The deep state certainly did not murder him, nor did 'they' commit election fraud to defeat him. When he was elected, the Biden administration let power transition peacefully -- either because his handlers could not even think of a different way to behave or because they knew very well that the same institutions which will stop Trump from permanently grabbing power would also have stopped Biden.
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So a border patrol agent was killed by a trans vegan-extremist terror cult that came out of Bay Area rationalist culture. they seem to be responsible for at least 3 other deaths (including family members and a former landlord who was going to testify against one of their members on a felony murder charge), but have taken 40% casualties in the process.
Here is an archive link to the leader's blog
As usual Andy ngo is the only person talking about the case at all, although his summary seems to miss a lot of important details.
This is the same group that got arrested in Sonoma a few years ago while raiding a CFAR camp. I predicted at the time that this group would make the news again, so you can imagine that I am Steve's Complete Lack Of Surprise.
So, thoughts. San Francisco continues to generate weird murder suicide cults just as it has for the past... 80 years? This really needs to be investigated because the effect has persisted over numerous different ideological movements. My running theory outside of "something in the water" is that selective migration brings a lot of that sort of person to SF (with flowers in their hair); you'll notice the men in this group were from all over the country (and one from Germany), but were all the sorts of people who were looking for some militant cult to give them a sense of belonging.
Second, and this might be beating a dead horse here, consider the reaction of the "rationalist community" to this group over the years. Even after the murders started, the "horrible dangers of moldbug and why reactionaries must be purged from the community" got oceans of ink spilled compared to one or two blog posts about this group. Meanwhile rationalist groups were still awarding these guys grants. Here is another trans-vegan-r/sneerclub-LW activist who still supports them because murdering landlords is good.
The ability to selectively "problematize" and craft narratives continues to be the main source of leftist power, and seems to be almost completely impervious to evidence-based arguments.
Lastly, it seems like literally every member of this group was a transexual (it's hard to be sure when the news steadfastly refuses to notice "Emma's" Adam's apple) Considering this case alongside the now-infamous "trans-alpaca ranch holocaust", it really does seem like sexual ideologies act as a social technology that allows disturbed and dysfunctional men to overcome social atomization and organize into warbands. "Cut off your family but keep demanding money from them to fund the group" seems to be the main way the cult leaders both control people and fund their lifestyles, when they're not getting grants or NPR fundraisers organized for them.
15-20 years ago, during the great internet atheism wars, it was popular to argue that morality is 'obvious' and that any rational person could easily determine its rough outlines. Is anyone still arguing this?
I was an atheist then and people kept referring me to Harris's The Moral Landscape. So I read that. His argument seemed to be roughly the same: we all sort of just know what's right and don't need reference to any kind of overarching moral framework. He intrigued me by granting that some people clearly just don't see things the way the rest of us do, e.g. psychopaths, but that he'll address this problem later in the book. AFAICT he never actually does, though.
Found it disturbing then and I find it disturbing now. Ran into a guy on reddit quite a while ago who suggested that atheism is best classified as a 'moral parasite'; that it relies upon existing metaphysical systems to generate a socially-agreed upon moral framework, at which point of course an atheist can conform to that and 'be a good person' according to whatever their society thinks that means -- but that atheists also tend to work to undermine the roots of that system itself, resulting in moral collapse.
No real point here; just musing.
ETA:
Is /r/bandnames still a thing?
For the most part, the internet atheism wars have just died, so it doesn't come up much. Scott's relevant explanation suggests:
When it was 'obvious' and 'any rational person could easily determine its rough outlines', a good chunk of folks up and decided that the New, Obvious rough outlines were just wokeness. There was a bit of a schism, and I've found that many of the folks who were disaffected by the schism and went anti-woke instead have mostly rejected the idea that it's so obvious and such. If it was so obvious, then why are so many of their former brethren getting it so wrong? The most common result I've seen is a form of naive relativism, sometimes sprinkled with moral error theory or even just power politics dressed up as game theory (if you don't agree with "society", then we have reason to suppress and even kill you, moving the population toward some sort of 'equilibrium').
But for the most part, aside from a few old hats who went anti-woke, I'd really say that the question just mostly hasn't been considered by many of the masses. They're just not exposed to the concepts; it's not even a meaningful question to them. As Scott says, they're in it for hamartiology, not meta-ethics. They just don't even really conceive of the idea that there is meta-ethics to be done prior to hamartiology. It's just not a question that they would even think to ask, so they mostly don't care whether various schools have a position on it one way or another deep down in the theology. Yes, if you ask a queer theory prof, they can probably tell you the sect's doctrine, just as surely as if you ask a priest whether the holy spirit flows independently from both the father and the son or just from the father through the son, they can probably manage to dig up the doctrine... but who's asking? Who cares? No one thinks they can gain adherents by trying to distinguish themselves on this issue.
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I think this is pretty clear to me. Science cannot by nature decide what “Good” is. It can tell you how to do things you decide are good, but it cannot tell you that some goal is actually good. A lot of that framework comes in, often unconsciously, from the personal beliefs of the individual. Those beliefs would be absorbed from the culture and the dominant belief systems of that culture.
In the West, Christianity has colored western concepts of truth, Justice, rights, laws, and ethical values for nearly two millennia. We don’t think about it because even today, it’s still in the water we swim in. But the concept of individual rights and liberty comes out of the Christian idea that only a person’s own beliefs can save them. We don’t see the point of forcing people into Christianity because especially in Protestant Christianity, you have to decide for yourself to believe. Other systems have absolutely no problem with holding a knife to the throat of an infidel and saying “declare yourself a Muslim or your head comes off.” Or “just obey the emperor and all will be well.” We believe in restraint in war and in mercy. Watching the Israel/Gaza conflict, it’s clear that this isn’t a universal virtue. Nobody wants to show mercy, so it’s a constant revenge fest.
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Sam Harris would not agree that:
His book was focused on countering the argument that science cannot inform morality in some objective way as nonoverlapping magisteria, not outlining a moral framework in any real detail beyond "well-being of conscious creatures." Harris is a consequentialist and very influenced by Derek Parfitt and the overall liberal/humanist tradition. Given the state of the world, no one should argue that liberalism/humanism is humanity's default and indeed Harris's original project was pointing out how badly Islam is opposed to that moral framework.
Atheism by itself is no moral system. Communists were atheists and had/have a moral system quite different from liberalism/humanism. Western atheists today see a big split between classic liberals and post-liberals (i.e. progressives and "Atheism+") split along Culture War lines.
But this begs the question, does it not? Given that we arbitrarily establish some kind of objective quantifiable framework for evaluating well-being (which I'm sure I don't need to tell you is itself difficult and unsolved to say the least), sure, science can definitely be of use there. Doesn't help with the first part.
Well not begging that question is one of the main points of the book, so no it doesn’t. (Many disagree that he succeeds in the philosophical grounding of his moral frame, but he does try.)
Of course, many people take issue with even the second part where you agree science can help. The “how” as opposed to the underlying “what/why.”
Any moral system requires some axiom to start from and Harris explains how we can use reason to arrive at that rather broad one. The lack of other sensible contenders helps here (for those with proper priors, anyway). Of course, there have been materialist contenders, such as communism and whatever we want to call the anti-human environmentalist ideology.
Admittedly it's been a dozen years since I read it but I mainly remember him vaguely gesturing at the possibility in a very unconvincing way.
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FWIW that isn't remotely close to what he argues. He claims that apropos of nothing, we could/should define "bad" as the worst possible misery for everyone. Any step away from that lowest valley is in the direction of "good". He argues that this is the overarching moral framework we need. Many consider several steps in this to be bad philosophy.
I'm not sure how atheism itself could be a moral parasite any more than not collecting stamps could be parasitic hobby.
The implication, I think, is that sustainable morality is necessarily downstream of religion.
That's kind of how I interpret it, but as written its nonsensical as is it misunderstands or misuses the term 'atheism' at a very basic level. Atheism doesn't necessitate any specific moral stance. Moreover, some religious are atheistic.
That's the point. If you think a shared, mostly rigid moral framework is necessary for societies to hold together (you don't need to be religious to think this), and that atheism can't really compellingly argue for any moral stance in particular, the obvious conclusion is that a society of atheists will reliably fragment and struggle working towards any meaningful shared goal. Which means that if a society holds together, it is in spite of the atheists in it. As an atheist, I consider the fate of the early atheism internet wars and the atheism plus fights clear vindication of this theory.
The counterpoint is that there are nowadays a decent number of non-religious ideologies that can hold atheists together. The counterpoint to that is that once you spent any time around ideologues, it becomes clear that ideology serves a function and form near-identical to religion for them, including the archetypical esoteric, nonsensical and/or unprovable assumptions and claims.
De Maistre argued that a fully rational basis for society would always undermine its own stability because people would disagree over the implications.
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My point is that atheism doesn't preclude (or necessitate) "a mostly rigid moral framework". It need not even interact with morality at all. It's the wrong word for what is being argued. Atheism itself does not compellingly argue for a moral stance. It can't parasitize something doesn't interact with, and it isn't liable for something it never claimed to do.
To the extent I see what people are trying to say, I actually agree. I especially think that a shared somewhat rigid moral framework is necessary for a society to hold together. An all atheist society could have a shared moral framework, and could even be based on religion. The A vs A-plus schism didn't say anything about atheism itself.
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The analogy requires torture, but in that case it's as though stamp-collecting is necessary for the non-collector to exist except the very existence of non-collectors leads collectors to stop collecting until...
Atheism itself is not a system of beliefs. It cannot, in itself, be a moral parasite for the same reason not collecting stamps cannot be a hobby. Atheism in itself is devoid of moral content in the same way not collecting stamps is devoid of being a hobby. People often confuse atheism itself as having attributes it doesn't (usually nihilism or hatred of religion). Atheism is the mere belief that there is no god or gods. An atheist could take up the moral code of any religion, save a belief in a gods.
Yeah, the moral vacuum that made its institutions so vulnerable to being atheism "plussed" by an actual vital moral system that it had no answer to.
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The thing with existing metaphysical systems is that they, too, evolved from something at some point - unless you are one of their proponents who believe that moral knowledge was literally passed down to [First Human] from [Divine Authority]. What is the source? All I know points to "animal intuition", which I expect to only differ from person to person as much as other animal aspects of us do: not that much.
I think the key advantage existing metaphysical systems have is that they've proven themselves to be capable to be followed by a civilization that survives longer than one generation (or X generations, depending on whatever new metaphysical system you're talking about). Past performance isn't a guarantee of future performance, especially in what appears to be a particularly volatile time like right now, but lack of past performance is even less of a guarantee. And certainly, with the power of our intelligence, we could fast-forward through the trial-and-error of tradition and get to a superior system that's equally based off of animal intuition but more refined and "better" for some meaning of "better," but it's also true that hubris is one of the most powerful forces known to man, and the empirical proof of this system at the very least allowing civilization to survive, even if not thrive perhaps, is a huge advantage compared to any new system. Probably not insurmountable, but certainly a huge one, given how many ways there are for civilization to crumble relative to how few ways there are for it to continue forward.
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Sort of. I'm a Christian now and as I understand the Christian perspective it's a bit different. Christianity posits that God is apparent in nature, modulo the Fall; that creation is fundamentally good (i.e. in alignment with God's good nature). That humans can perceive much of divinity simply by observing nature and ourselves. And then, on top of that, there's direct revelation of the type to which you seem to be referring, e.g. divine entities directly communicating with humans.
Actually something which surprised me is that in my church there's a strong sentiment that Taoism is ~Christianity sans Christ. That is, Taoism is as far as human beings can correctly discern the nature and order of things without the direct revelation of Jesus. There's even a pretty cool book about it which definitely changed my perspective on a lot of this. The Tao <-> Logos connection is sublime.
I don't know about that. If the Fall did subtract from nature, it subtracted quite a lot, to the point where most of creation we can access is far from fundamentally good.
Which is to say, the order of things in nature absent our, the humans', vigorous actioned disagreement, does not always seem very good for us.
That take requires all sorts of assumptions which I not only think are unwarranted from any standpoint but definitely don't match up with the broader picture of Christian philosophy.
For one, do you imagine that most humans who have ever lived would have considered it evil for a fish to be eaten alive? Indeed there are plenty of extant cultures which eat live animals habitually. The real question is why it seems evil to us.
For another, it conflates evil with suffering, or pain, or even unpleasantness. This is often a locally-useful conflation but in the big picture it doesn't make a lot of sense. Neither does it make sense to equate platonic goodness with pleasure.
It assumes that animals are having the same sort of internal experience as we are. While they certainly have minds like ours, it's not clear that they have consciousnesses like ours. Indeed one take on Eden and the Fall is that the 'Garden' was a state in which we existed just like we do now but for awareness of such evil; that we weren't intended to take on the burden of temporal sapience until some future point at which such problems would have already been solved.
But what really bugs me about it is that it assumes that anything ought to be other than as it currently is, which implies telos, which implies a creator. Only by standing on the shoulders of God can one conceive of making moral complaints about the universe, and deciding that we see the full picture and are capable of independently evaluating such things occurs to me as downright conceited and petulant. Prideful, would be the Christian term.
What ought Man to be? Is a future in which we're all reduced to constantly-euphoric sludge a worthy one? I consider the Super-Happies of Three Worlds Collide. On the other hand, if Man is intended to become divine and unite with God, reducing morality to avoiding pain and enjoying pleasure would seem to be contraindicated.
When Christian philosophy starts reaching towards "but is suffering and dog-eat-dog actually evil?", they typically lose me. Accepting that all morality stems from God requires, as I'm sure you understand, a prior belief that there is a God and he knows best for us and he wishes best for us. In absense of such belief and a reason to submit to it, I must judge human reasoning sufficient for my purposes. Not to mention of course that religion is purely human reasoning until I personally see convincing evidence of any other source.
No, we do think those things are evil. The question is why you do when so many others disagree.
And the answer is that the whole mindset you have toward the question is rooted in Christian metaphysics. You can't even see it any other way. However, having absorbed some of that but not the rest, you're playing with half a deck as it were and not making any sense.
Sure, but what is Christian metaphysics rooted in, then?
I sense an implication in your words that I am less correct than you are because my belief is less coherent. But your coherency doesn't look valuable to me because from my perspective, some guy just picked a bunch of beliefs he and his acolytes had 2000 years ago and arbitrarily declared them to lie along one axis (God).
The coherency and the sense-making of religions is artificial, even if the ones that stood the test of time were the ones that tied together the beliefs that produced the most stable, desirable and powerful societies. However, that does not give them the credit for being the source and the metaphysical origin of those desirable traits humans exhibit.
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This appears obviously incorrect. Pretty much the entirely of traditional western morality (and a good chunk of eastern morality) seems to be oriented around reigning in or redirecting our "baser" (ie more animalistic) impulses and intuitions.
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Society? Going backwards modern western morality is basically reformation, germanic conversion to christianity, roman conversion, greek + judaic philophy, fertile crescent society, etc. Thousands of years of iteration that animals don't have?
Animals do iterate, they are just slower about it because their memory is strictly genetic as opposed to civilizational.
Also, what was the first society then and where did it come from?
Well I think the most advanced societies that we know about that existed the earliest were in the fertile crescent, presumably they have some kind of lineage going back. I agree animals iterate but the question is whether they have some kind of upper bound which our lineage surpassed, which I'd argue we did, probably around when we learned to make fire and passed that knowledge on to our descendants
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When I first read about neoreaction, I thought it was really interesting that Bay Area computer scientists were getting into monarchism and treating it seriously. Then I read more deeply into it, and realized it was this bizarre monarchical system where kingdoms compete like corporations under a CEO and the fittest survive, like somehow social darwinism but worse, a capitalist abomination of monarchism. They make no reference to the actual historical reasons people support(ed) monarchies, like divine right of kings, providing a social ideal, which are just cooler and more passionate reasons someone might like monarchism. As it stands the neoreaction people offer nothing to the heart, belying its engineering origins. I regard it as what happens when libertarians who read Hacker News and Ayn Rand stop believing in liberty.
With respect to our rationalist posters, I think of the broader rationalist sphere as a bunch of very crazy people, most of whom have bad ideas that rarely diverge from their social mileu. People will disagree with me on this, but Scott is the singular exception, and the only one I respect: he seems like a basically normal, if very intelligent, guy who got caught up with the wrong kinda smart people and let them rot his prodigious knack for observation and empathy.
Back in the late 00s and early 10s there was a professor who lived in Santa Clara and would throw some of the most interesting house parties in the bay area
These house parties were arguably some of the earliest in-person rationalist meet-ups, but because this professor was a gregarious outgoing sort with eclectic interests as well a man of import in the the West Coast SCA and BJJ communities, the crowd at these parties tended to be wildly diverse.
As a result early LessWrong had a lot of weird overlaps, Navy SEALs, Catholic Priests, UFC fighters, and Rocket Scientists all sharing a space, talking to (and occasionally getting high with) Silicon Valley billionaires, work-a-day code monkeys, and activitist college kids.
That was the environment in which rationalism got its start, but as rationalism became increasingly exclusive, trans, poly, and frankly "culty", and those with more diverse views relative to the bay-area activist set who formed the core clique quietly cut ties, and either returned to or started thier own groups resulting in "evaporative cooling" of the rationalist sphere and increasingly cult-like dynamics.
CFAR and Ziz are names that i haven't thought about in 10+ years and it feels odd to think that i used to know some these people, and simultaneously gratifying and tragic to have old intuitions confirmed.
David Friedman did BJJ?
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No, it's more that they stop believing in the ability of democracy to deliver liberty. The whole point of competitive government is that exit is a better guarantee of liberty than voice.
Sure- what does liberty mean? This question quite literally isn’t rhetorical.
In this context, the unmolested enjoyment of one's Natural Rights. In particular Private Property. In particular of oneself.
The observation that monarchy can better secure such things than democracy isn't even a novelty, it dates back to Aristostle and it's the foundational belief of one of the major currents of the enlightenment. What history would come to call "the right wing" because of where they sat.
You can read Bastiat and Jefferson make very similar points to Hoppe. The characterization of that skepticism of both democracy and equality as a newfangled libertarian affabulation is without merit. It's been in a constant battle with republicanism in the hearts of people who love freedom forever.
I find it odd to claim that one's right over oneself is private property. Does that mean that you can sell the right (or have it confiscated to pay a debt)?
No. This is what it means to say that it is inalienable.
You can read Locke if you want the full extant of the argument, but natural rights being derived from self ownership is the classical Liberal position.
Some people believe in such rights being transferrable (to the State, typically), but they are on the "left wing" of the Enlightenment.
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You can not sell it permanently (at least not since slavery has been abolished), but you can rent it out. That's called having a job.
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Awesome fiction tho
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I'm sure I'm not the first one to notice that this has usually been the case from the beginning. Apart from obscure conservative or alt-light-adjacent sites and blogs, nobody reports on antifa activities or portrays those in the most favorable light possible.
The weird thing is that he gets called a grifter.
That's the worst take possible. There are a million ways to grift that don't involve exposing oneself to bodily harm or murder from cultists. More accurately, he should be called a hero.
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I was long in falling out with my antifa/goth/LARP friends but I think the call of, "death to Andy Ngo," was the final straw. If he's wrong...show the world he's wrong. Instead they prove him right over and over and over.
I had nothing to do with his beating, wasn't even within 2000 miles. I don't hold truck with any antifa people anymore either. And yet I feel a deep shame for the violence that was enacted upon him. It's likely similar to the shame some folks felt at watching the George Floyd videos. Good people...bad people--a true person should feel sadness at the death at another, not delight.
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Ziz is like a real life Light Yagami, except instead of punishing criminals he murders everyone who doesn’t support trans vegan communism, and instead of having an all-powerful Death Note he had three trans friends with a fake samurai sword, and instead of being Japan’s top student he’s an internet schizo.
His game theory is retarded. Five trans cultists aren’t going to successfully terrorize hundred of millions of landlords into giving tenants free rent, or 7 billion people into becoming vegans, or whatever. They aren’t going to respect and fear the almighty Ziz for his game theoretic commitment to murder, they’re simply going to call the police, or simply shoot him and his companions. Even having a game theoretic commitment to murdering anyone who slights you will mean that only psychotic people are even willing to hang around you, and greatly increases your chances of ending up murdered or imprisoned.
Indeed, I suspect that had he tried to form this cult in the median American city he would have just been murdered by hardened criminals. This is probably why San Francisco is the only place these cults seem to bloom.
Or shot by an intended victim.
That happened to another of the cult members: three of them got together to try and murder their 80 year old landlord by stabbing him multiple times with a fake samurai sword, knocked him out, couldn't figure out how to decapitate him and dissolve his body before he regained consciousness, and then on coming to he shot two of them, killing one.
Well, at least he is definitely making it to Valhalla.
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Several of them were in fact killed in self defense by intended victims. As it turns out, transgender vegans are not very good at fighting.
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Several of these cult members did manage it. The victim was quite a badass.
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One of these cultists described as an "Oxford trained computer scientist" recently (17th of january) killed the 82 year old landlord who previously fought off an attack by Zizians and survived a sword through his chest. He had a gun, of course.
https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/28/man-accused-of-killing-witness-in-vallejo-could-face-death-penalty-da-says/
It's a seemingly pretty irrational cult as these guys first attacked a guy with knives and then stabbed him to death. Quietly poisoning him with something that'd look like a natural death seems far more rational and within the abilities of computer scientists, yet..
One of their beliefs is that unrelenting violence against oppressors such as BBQers, landlords, and elderly parents who keep calling you their son is justified even if it's not effective, because it can improve your ideology's bargaining position averaged across every other reality in the multiverse.
It's sort of like dying in a game of chicken and saying "yeah but committing to that head-on collision helped me win in other worldlines"
It worked for Islam. Because Islam has a lot of people behind it. Some of which kill detractors. Make a documentary criticizing Islam at your own risk.
Violence from minorities also works because progressivism has paralyzed the threat response mechanisms. As long as one party can accumulate points in the progressive stack, it is forbidden to actually address invalidities of the presented positions. So long as progressives hold levers of power, especially mindspace discourse via the universities and its agents of transmission in the media, there will be no way to communicate objections to stack abusers. Note that as we can see with Big Techs shift that many modern 'conservatives', and I dare say a fair few on this board, are ex-progressives who paused too long at the line for the koolaid and realized something eas going wrong. This means that antiprogressives who are proximate to the levers of power progressives are in charge of are naturally a subset of progressives, and in a time weighted distribution will never have enough numbers to stop the insanity.
This is literally as old as Reconstruction, or older. It comes and goes in cycles.
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I guess this social equilibrium works as long as there do not arise minorities sworn to unrelenting violence against each other?
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It always worked. Sectarian revolts predate Christianity, let alone the Enlightenment. The Romans lost cities to chariot racers.
Edit: my mistake—the Nika riots were in 532 AD. I think they still support the general point, but I guess another example would be better. Maybe Rome’s Social War?
There was a major Jewish revolt against the Seleucids- it's an interesting set of books in the (Catholic and Orthodox)bible in which Judas Maccabeus kills an elephant single-handedly.
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The Social War was core vs. periphery, not sectarian - socii is the Latin word for ally, and in context referred to citizens of what were de jure independent Roman client states in Italy, who rebelled because they wanted equal rights with Roman citizens.
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The difference being that Islam already has a critical mass of adherents, a sufficiently large subset of whom are willing and able to do violence on its behalf.
The entire global population of self-identified rationalists could probably fit into a single stadium with plenty of room left over; the proportion of them who are willing to do violence to further the community's goals is vanishingly small; the proportion of them who are able to do violence is smaller still.
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On the other hand, Mohammed drawing competitions seem pretty safe.
That ended in a shootout with two would-be mass killers shot to death by the police. And of course it was an FBI op with FBI agents following them to observe the mass killing.
So I would not say it is all that safe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Culwell_Center_attack
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Unless you're holding them at Charlie Hebdo, that is.
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The.insanity of the presented beliefs honestly is one of the more baffling aspects of Educated Cultists. A similar thing can be seen in girls who get REALLY into witchcraft and astrology, delving deep into objectively insane woo like your Third Eye being opened to the Aura around you and how shamanistic spirituality reconnects one to the astral plane. It is way too easy to attribute this to irreligiosity among the educated finding another conceptual escape valve, and the common thing I notice is that the Educated who buy into this woo never ever hang out with the original lower class practitioners of the art. No wiccan feminist ever speaks with an actual Louisiana or Haitian Voodoo witch doctor, no dharmic spiritualist ever prays at a shrine next to the old grandma burning hell notes, no Rajneesee actually interacted with ayurvedic doctor.
I don’t know very much about Wicca but voodoo is not a particularly lower class phenomenon in Louisiana; it’s solidly in the domain of weird shit, yes, and black coded, but usually associated with batty old women with more money than sense(this may not be a particularly large amount of money) or else grifters separating tourists from their money, not the sort of thing normal people have anything to do with.
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Do you have the correct religion here? This is the first thing I found when looking up "hell notes," and it's more a Taoist(?) thing.
Im just halfassing the different terms. Point is that irreligious PMC practice their interpretation of pseudoreligion apart from the people that practice the religion to begin sith.
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? I've never known wiccans to think of themselves as having anything to do with voodoo. If you're going to liken it to a traditional form of witchcraft it's much more like satanism with all the goth stuff taken out.
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And how many angels can fit on the head of a pin, anyway?
From the outsider’s view, the unreasonableness isn’t exactly limited to folk paganism.
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This whole line of thinking looks taken straight out of the trilogy of visual novel/escape room/choose-your-own-adventure games 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, Virtue's Last Reward, and Zero Time Dilemma. Especially that last one, which has a sequence where you are tasked with rolling a 3 with a roll of 3 standard dice or else you are shot to death, and the game progresses with the explicit note that this is one of the 1-in-216 timelines where you did roll 3 ones. ZTD is also where I learned of the Sleeping Beauty Paradox, IIRC.
For people who enjoy bizarre time travel/alternate universe shenanigans and/or classic point-and-click adventure game puzzles and/or anime trope characters, I recommend them highly, though the middle game, Virtue's Last Reward, stands out to me as the only one that's truly great. VLR has the prisoner's dilemma as a core gameplay/narrative device.
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Wait, is this actually what they believe, or are you exaggerating? This is Scientology levels of completely delusional.
From the dive I did, I'd say that sounds reasonably accurate. I linked the glossary below if you want to dive yourself. That, combined with the report on the attempted murder of their landlord and the personal accounts related to it, were more than enough to identify Ziz as ten pounds of crazy in a two-pound sack.
I'm not sure "timeless-decision-theoretic-blackmail-absolute-morality theory" is the term they actually used, but I'm not sure it's not the term either, and it seems like a reasonably accurate description from what I recall.
Thanks, I appreciate it. I did look at the lesswrong post and I was bewildered at how seriously the commenters took the ideas of alternate personalities and behavior modification; for people who declare themselves scientific and anti-superstition they seem pretty stitious to me. Family systems therapy pervades the commentariat, which I find rather disturbing; I was sold that this was a tool to help people deal with mental illness and not a means to manipulate or explain the world in real terms, but they're treating it like they're talking about real-world magic. If this is what people mean by "therapy culture" then I agree wholeheartedly with the criticism of it. At this point, I'm ready to declare family systems therapy a cause of psychogenic illness, whatever good it might have done it's now clearly driving people mad.
That being said, I try to avoid prying too deeply into either delusional thinking or true crime; the former I fear might infest me (though I don't have a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia) and the latter just makes me angry. I have finite grey matter and I'd rather spend it on things that don't make me feel like the only sane man in an insane world. We need connection to reality and to other people and to average people and to people of different perspectives to remain sane, and this is a great example of why.
In and of itself, there is nothing particularly weird about having fictional characters in your head: many famous authors talk to their characters while they're out and about in order to round out said characters' personalities. Children have imaginary friends, artists have muses. And it seems entirely plausible that if you go on doing it for long enough, you will start habitually supporting this kind of 'virtual machine' of another person in your head in the same way that docker environments run on a virtual machine inside your pc. I tried it for a couple of weeks with my favourite character from the novel I was writing, until I realised that actually I didn't want to never be alone in my own head. It works, more or less.
Of course, the true believers run away with it. 'My tulpa is real in the sense that this thought pattern currently exists in my brain' becomes 'my tulpa is an entity deserving of respect and ethical treatment' becomes 'I am a system of 32 personalities, none of whom claims precedence'. Imaginary friends, being imaginary, become whatever you imagine them to be. And if you're asking your imaginary friends to help you perform self-therapy on the already warped and delusional brain that spawned them, that isn't going to end well for anybody.
[pushes up glasses]
Well actually, virtual machines and containers are different things. It is certainly possible to run containers inside a VM, but a VM is not strictly necessary.
(OK, in fairness, I think Docker in particular relies on features of the Linux kernel, namely cgroups and namespaces, so e.g. Docker Desktop on Mac or Windows will indeed spin up a Linux VM)
/pedantry
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Scott had a whole book review where he strongly suggested this was true. One of the main practitioners of family systems therapy wrote a book claiming demons are real and he was literally exorcising spirits. Scott thought he was just creating psychogenic illness in people.
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These don't sound particularly anti-scientific to me. At least, not magically so.
Technobabble is indistinguishable from religious invocations. Chanting to the a Machine God is silly to us because the recognizable words we understand are mutated, but stringing technological sounding terms together into a single compound word like german gone wild is exactly that. Dressing up a wrong scientific concept, like 90% of your brain is unused or biohacking through blood transfusions, is just misreading of reality, like sacrificing virgins on the solstice for a good harvest.
See, your examples sound silly to me because those specific ones are implausible/debunked. Behaviour modification, on the other hand, sounds like this quaint "building a habit" thing.
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They called it timeless-decision-theoretic-blackmail-absolute-morality theory on lesswrong
Related discussion on LW, with linkbacks to the blog in question. The actual article titled "The Multiverse" somehow missing from every archive snapshot (but definitely existing at some point, judging by linkbacks from the post) is too ironic to be put into words, I'm actually curious now.
Thanks for killing a few hours of my wageslavery, fascinating rabbit hole.
Thanks for the link. Slimepriestess
(★ Postbrat ★ Ex-Rat ★ Anarchist ★ Antifascist ★ Vegan ★ Qualia Enjoyer ★ Queer Icon ★ Not A Person ★ it/its ★) is the main ziz advocate on LW, and is the one whose YouTube podcast I linked above who supported them murdering the elderly man.
What I expected / What I got
In seriousness, I instantly knew from le quirky nickname before I even checked the vid but it's not any less sad. Starting to think I really prefer gamepad-eating """nerdy""" girls of yore over the nerdy """girls""" of today. Monkey paw curls.
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What does that mean? Is it using the term in a BDSM context, or referring to the Charli XCX album?
TV Tropes needs an update.
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Lol someone reported your comment.
I looked it up.
Of course they reported it lol. Thanks for the extended cite, I was still looking for it in this giant pile of tabs
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His reply seemed indistinguishable from sarcasm to me, I thought he was inventing a term to tar them with. But you brought the receipts, and it does seem they are as disconnected from reality as he suggested.
At the same time, like all mass killers, the actual content of these people's delusions is irrelevant, and the only appropriate response is to medicate until sane and confine until natural death.
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I'm pretty sure that's not how it works, since almost anything to do with timeless decision theory is basically incomprehensible and could never be dumbed down into something as concrete as stabbing your landlord with a sword. If you're killing someone in the name of Wittgenstein or Derrida, you're doing something wrong (on several levels). Maoism on the other hand smiles upon executing landlords.
As the meme goes, you are like a little baby. Watch this.
Alternatively, an extended Undertale reference that feels so on the nose it almost hurts (yes, fucking Chara is definitely the best person to mentally consult while trying to rationalize your actions).
Once you make "no-selling social reality" your professed superpower, I imagine the difference in performing Olympic-levels mental gymnastics to justify eating cheese sandwiches and coming up with legitimate reasons to stab your landlord is negligible. (I know the actual killer is a different person but I take the patient zero as representative of the "movement".)
Good points and I appreciate you bringing up the lore, I now understand better why people are repulsed by rationalists if this kind of thing is what they think of.
I still think this isn't real timeless decision theory though, this looks like a severe case of antifa syndrome with a heavy dose of being defective as a person. Timeless decision theory is about basilisks and multiple universes and real proper game theory not 'kill nazis'. The galaxy-brain version of antifa syndrome with all these weird blog posts about being an obnoxious creep and a weirdo that are hard to decrypt more specifically is still only antifa syndrome.
Like what is going on here? I think this is schizobabble, it sounds like schizobabble. Timeless decision theory is incomprehensible but seems vaguely meaningful in certain rare circumstances, like advanced science. Maybe wrong science, who can say? But there's something in it more than this. If you put weird inputs into a bad piece of software and it glitches out, it's not the fault of the input but of the software (in this case Ziz and gang).
I already dumped most of this schizo shit from my mental RAM so I can't be certain, but s/he does explicitly touch on this in the extended Undertale reference above:
<...>
Given this evidently failed to induce any disbelief, I parse e.g. the sandwich anecdote above as revealing one's focus to not actually be on the means (I am a vegan so I must not eat a cheese sandwich), but on the ends (to achieve my goals and save the world I need energy - fuck it, let it even be a cheese sandwich). Timeless ends justify the immediate means; extrapolate to other acts as needed. Sounds boring, normal even, when I put it this way, this is plain bog standard cope; would also track with the general attitude of those afflicted with antifa syndrome. Maybe I'm overthinking or sanewashing it, idk.
On the other hand, quoth glossary:
...I admit I have no idea what the fuck that means but I do see related words...?
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I'm not very well versed in Undertale lore, so can you point out how this is an extended Undertale reference?
[cw: spoilers for a 10 year old game]
In brief, Chara is the most straightforwardly evil entity in all of Undertale and the literal embodiment of soulless "number go up" utilitarian metagaming. One of the endings (in which your vile actions quite literally corporealize it) involves Chara directly taking over the player avatar, remarking that you-the-player have no say in the matter because "you made your choice long ago" - hypocrite that you are, wanting to save the world after having pretty much destroyed it in pursuit of numbers.
Hence the post's name and general thrust, with Ziz struggling over having to do evil acts (catching sentient crabs) to fund a noble goal (something about Bay Area housing?):
It really can't be more explicit, I took it as an edgy metaphor (like most of his writing) at first reading but it really is a pitch-perfect parallel: a guy has a seemingly-genuine crisis of principles, consciously picks the most
evilself-serving path imaginable out of it, fully conscious of each individual step, directly acknowledging the Chara influence (he fucking spells out "override by true self"!), and manages to reason himself out of what he just did anyway. Now this is Rationalism.More options
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I think you're seriously underestimating rationalists' capacity to rationalize.
Timeless decision theory is (and always has been) an excuse to do what you were going to do anyway.
It's the old leftist fallacy of "society is to blame" writ at a metaphysical level. You can't blame me for the consequences of my actions, I was mearly a pawn of universal forces.
Rationalist here. Timeless decision theory was never explicitly designed for humans to use; it was always about "if we want to have AIs work properly, we'll need to somehow make them understand how to make decisions - which means we need to understand what's the mathematically correct way to make decisions. Hm, all the existing theories have rather glaring flaws and counterexamples that nobody seems to talk about."
That's why all the associated research stuff is about things like tiling, where AIs create successor AIs.
Of course, nowadays we teach AIs how to make decisions by plain reinforcement learning and prosaic reasoning, so this has all become rather pointless.
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My understanding of timeless decision theory is that you are deciding for every entity sufficiently similar to you. So, you’re making decisions for yourself at different points in time, as well as anyone else who might be sufficiently similar to you at the same time. Well, technically, this would make backwards causality… Kind of a thing you could think about, it really doesn’t seem all that relevant to how you would use it to actually make decisions. Instead, it adds weight to the decisions you’re trying to make, by spreading the consequences farther than you would normally expect them to go.
But that was from over a decade ago. It’s entirely possible that it’s become a lot more insane since then.
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Big yud did chime in on one of the LW posts to say they got it wrong, so I wouldn't be surprised if they were playing fast and loose with the philosophical side
Big Yud plays fast and loose with everything. If he says someone is wrong then I'm willing to strongly consider their position.
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Islamists so the same thing but I doubt they have such sophisticated sounding justification for it.
It'd be working out pretty well for Zizians if there were 50 million of them.
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There’s a periodic right wing Twitter meme that goes like this- Blacks and transgenders both use the threat of violence to discourage calling them the wrong thing. The difference in effectiveness is due to, well, duh.
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Poison's hard to get away with. I know enough toxicology to know I don't know nearly enough toxicology to poison someone and get away with it.
But yes, there is obvious evidence of a lack of imagination there. I will note that it's possible there might be sanity-eating effects from some of the cult indoctrination Ziz does.
Can't you use insulin or something else that metabolizes fast to kill people innocuously ?
I'm not going to discuss murder methods in depth on an open forum that has a bunch of murderous lunatics on it. I think that that would come in at #1 or #2 on the list of "most -EV things m9m has ever done", and I'm ashamed that it even has competition.
But suffice it to say, I'm pretty sure you don't know enough toxicology to get away with a poisoning murder either.
This is a sound policy and I endorse it.
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You’re talking about The Motte here? I would assign extremely high confidence to the assumption that not a single poster here has ever murdered anybody. (I know we have some military veterans, and it’s possible that one or more of them have contributed either directly or indirectly to the deaths of other human beings, but that’s not the same thing as “murder”, nor in any case would you posting about effective ways to surreptitiously kill a specific individual in a non-military context be likely to have any value for those specific posters.
I don't know of anyone here who's committed murder. I do know of multiple people here who've shown interest in committing murder in the future. I chose my words carefully; I said "murderous lunatics", not "lunatic murderers" or "murdering lunatics".
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It's not an area of interest of mine, but I'm pretty sure I could pick up the relevant knowledge and not leave incriminating search queries for the police to discover. Which gets so many people these days, it's incredible.
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Damn. I was just reading up on Ziz a couple weeks ago; a commenter here linked their blog and I spent an evening dipping into the raw crazy. Reading through their glossary, the Rationalist influence was inescapable. Pure dark-mirror Scott, and deeply chilling.
Will you link the blog you’re talking about?
Here's the Glossary from the site linked above. I wish I'd taken the time to write more on the subject while doing the trawl, but the short of it is that Ziz is very, very clearly doing Rationalism just as hard as they can, and Rationalism is in turn doing its thing: converting human flaws into impending disaster.
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There's a link to it in my post, but maybe not the specific article fc saw
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I spoke to someone who got to San Francisco in 1962 and stayed there through some of its weirder history.
He independently agreed that it's mostly a matter of what sorts of people the city attracts.
The other factor he raised is that there were entire communities there where working a real job was social death: if you had one you desperately tried to hide it. Everyone was a writer, a musician, an artist, living off family money, side jobs, government handouts, drug dealing, or some sort of grift. Those environments become a breeding ground for exploitative cults as the Beatnik Geeks give way to Hippie Mops and Sociopaths.
Guys would show up, become gurus, and instantly end up running a cult living in someone else's rent-controlled apartment and spending the family pocket money or welfare of the loser marks who joined up.
Of course these days the pattern is totally different because everyone is a Freelance Journalist, a social media corp Inclusion Evangelist, or Serious AI Human Extinction Risk Theorist...
Its damning, because any serious creative will move to LA / NYC. The ones left in SF are the untalented and fickle kind.
t'wern't always so
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I have more to say about Ziz's horrible decision theory framework. From zizians.info:
It is superficially compelling, however, everyone can sense that something is not quite right about the argument, and it's this (among other problems) - For functional decision theory to work, it has to be possible for other parties to infer your strategy/"policy". In Newcomb's paradox, Omega is capable of inferring your strategy through advanced technology or magic. In the real world, other people have to guess based on your words or actions.
So option one is to make a verbal commitment: "If you cross me in any way, I'll kill you!" But there are some problems:
So your own real option in action - That's right, for somebody to be convinced that you will kill them, you're going to have to kill someone else first. But we face the same basic problems as above:
So you are still screwed. Either you keep your strategy a secret, so nobody believes you and crosses you anyway, or you exercise your strategy openly and go to jail (or get killed in retaliation by someone else).
If you are still committed to this strategy, you are essentially forced to live the life of a mob boss: Other people kill and take the fall on your behalf, and even though everyone knows it was you, it can't quite be proven in a court of law that you were responsible. It is a precarious situation to be in, to say the least. Maybe Ziz is in this zone now, but it doesn't seem to going very well.
Lastly, even if somehow you execute the above perfectly, you still have the problem that nobody sane will want to associate with you. Most people actually don't want to be around people that will murder them if they make a mistake that is perceived as a slight.
My read was the landlord was going to rat one of 'em out for murder and stabbed with a sword.
Thanks for the Ziz analysis. I was blissfully unaware of these turkeys.
You're conflating the incidents.
The first time, they attempted to kill him because he was trying to evict them for not paying rent.
The second time, they murdered him because he was about to testify in court about the first time (which was a murder charge, because he killed one of them in self-defence, and then the felony murder rule kicks in and makes all of them guilty of "murdering" their accomplice).
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I mean that's ultimately the problem, right? It's a disgenic ethos. It leads directly to compromise or death.
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Yesterday I collected my very first Reddit Warning for promoting "hate": noting on /r/slatestarcodex that said individual didn't look like an "Emma". I had hoped that Reddit's "transocracy" didn't extend as far as SSC. Guess I was wrong.
You're not safe anywhere on reddit -- anyone you happen to offend can report a post to admins, and anything to do with noticing insane trans-stuff is one thing that the admins are perfectly willing to just bannhammer.
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I was reading about the case and it's funny reading a sentence like "Emma owned a katana". I was telling my girlfriend it's funny, because what the fuck kind of woman owns a katana? I've met dozens of nerdy females in my life, including some trans men, and not one of them owned a katana or any similar kind of decorative weapon. Then I look it up, and it turns out the kind of "woman" who owns a katana is a nerdy autistic man. My girlfriend got a good laugh out of that.
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Is it deadnaming or misgendering to call a transwoman’s cartilaginous protuberance around the larynx the “Adam’s apple”? Should we call it an “Eve’s apple” instead? Or perhaps we should go with “primordial human’s apple” to be extra safe
"Lilith's apple" might be more appropriate statistically
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If there's "female penis" then there's also "female Adam's apple". If you rename the latter, you'd have to rename the former too.
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"/r/anything" is Reddit, and the whole Reddit is woke. There are niche communities which are not actively woke - i.e. culture war topics wouldn't be featured there normally - but there are pretty much no communities where the "wrong" side of the culture war is tolerated. At least not any of the prominent ones. You'd need to go to a different site for that.
There's still the oasis that is Political Compass Memes, and LibsOfReddit (though that one is just as obnoxiously partisan on the right as the rest of Reddit is on the left).
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Do you think these guys could have been saved somehow through information? Like if you had the magic ability to sit them down for an hour, what would you tell them? It’s scary that a group of apparently intelligent people could have their explicit aim as improving the world, and know that rationalists exist, and then just do… this. Note that the glossary is huge, and that developing new words is a hallmark of cults, probably because it allows you to define all of the connotation and ambience and dimensions of words which affect cognition invisibly.
Rationalists have always had the ability to rationalize their conclusions. It's in the moniker, even as leagues of human behavioral science and decades of examples have demonstrated that rationalization is often done to justify what people wanted to do anyway, i.e. rationality is often a cover rather than a cause of behavior. People who pride themselves on their ability to rationalizeare in some ways more vulnerable to self-deception or rationalizing their irrationalities due propensity to confirmation bias on the basis of their own presumed rationality/IQ compared to those opposing them, particularly those who don't engage on the paradigm they're claiming from the start.
Just like it's hard to convince people who believe they will go to heaven for an eternity of bliss if they die killing the right people that living in the flawed reality is better, it's hard to convince people who have abstracted their actions and consequences into independent / imaginary spaces (parallel world lines, abstract group-level competition) that they are working against their defined interest. It doesn't matter if the consequence negatively affects this current context- the promise / payoff is outside your bounding context.
Of course they do not.
Rationalists pride themselves on their ability to spill oceans of ink denouncing rationalization, trying to figure out how best to uncover one's own past rationalizations, and trying to come up with ways to avoid rationalizing.
You could argue that they're not completely successful at this (and they'll agree), or that they're not at all successful (and they'll hear you out), but to argue that they're doing the opposite is just weirdly wrong.
My opinion is that, per another commenter's allusion to geeks, MOPs and sociopaths, the rationalist community currently comprises three groups:
What's interesting is that some people who are scrupulously in group 1 most of the time can fall into group 2 only for certain specific beliefs, typically if the social pressure is great enough. Coming out and saying you're not onboard with gender ideology is a great way to get yourself disinvited from parties in the Bay Area.
I suspect that every sufficiently large community eventually undergoes such a process of degeneration, in much the same way that the moral principles explicitly endorsed by Christianity don't necessarily tell you much about the moral character of the religion's adherents. And rationalists, of all people, should know better than pulling the No True Rationalist schtick - a community is only as good as the people in it, and this episode makes it abundantly clear that the rationalist community (just like any other sufficiently large community) contains some pretty odious people who can hide in plain sight by adopting the vernacular and parroting the appropriate shibboleths. See also effective altruism and Sam Bankman-Fried.
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Rationalism is a rationalization.
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It wasn't a lack of information that drove them to this, but a sense of humiliation and resentment.
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As I understand it, there may be genuine self-induced brain damage in play, so probably no.
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It looks like they're all biologically male except the actual killer, which I find surprising. A 21-year-old computer science student named Teresa who is part of a rationalist-adjacent cult screams "transwoman", but it seems from the reporting that she's a transman ("Milo").
Teresa certainly looks like a transwoman to me, but I couldn't be sure from this profile picture.
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Climate is a big part of it. There are a lot of people who like it hot and won't admit how nice the SF climate is.
But it really is. Apr-Oct there's no rain, no heat, no cold. Just sunny days with pleasant breezes. You can just wander around in a light jacket in a dreamy state without nature ever forcing you back to reality.
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Which person awarded a grant was a member of this cult?
The one highlighted in the grant link.
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https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/303603/1/303603.pdf and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skoptsy are relevant and interesting.
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Nobody talking about it? I saw it on the SSC subreddit for obvious reasons. Source appears to be a garden-variety local news site, though I suppose it could have some connection to Mr. Ngo.
I can only hope you’re aware of the irony. Twenty thousand Americans murdered each year, and the only one you’re talking about is the one which best flatters your politics.
George Floyd, the antifa protestor who was intentionally ran over were both merely one person each, but both received mainstream media coverage far exceeding this victim of veganocommunism.
That the subreddit closely associated with the subculture from which that cult spun off, has a post on the murder, is the weakest possible claim to coverage there is.
From my understanding of American media a murder is considered a notable enough event that each one is reported in local media. The question is how far up will the coverage spread: will the state-level media report it, will the US-wide media report it. If the answer to both is no, then I think it is fair to consider forgotten by the journalists. Reasons ranging from truly unremarkable, unique but overlooked, to unique but buried.
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Is the one done by a community member who many people on here have actually met.
I can only hope you're aware of the irony of whining about this after years of us being subjected to "reactionary incel motte users sure to commit a mass shooting any day now" takes.
I got my start in this sphere thanks to being exposed to Rat Tumblr and Scott Alexander in the 2010's, I for one have never even freaking heard of Ziz until now.
Im online-only and Ive heard of it years ago, even read some of the blog when it was still up. Not hard to find from the Vassarites.
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The really funny part is they're still trying to blame motters for their own terrorists. Remember this guy? https://old.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1id8pd7/string_of_recent_killings_linked_to_bay_area/m9xjb5h/
The dedication to realty-warping spin is incredible.
Man. I think we had an account with that name on here somewhere. Wonder if he got himself banned?
https://www.themotte.org/@Iamtotallyjermleeds
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