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I agree with your criticism of Steve, but come on, Trace isn't what he always said he is. Trivially, he's not a "Lee Kuan Yew liberal" in any sense that doesn't make the label deceptive. His grievences with this forum also can't be taken at face value.
I don't know how much of a "Lee Kuan Yew" liberal he is, only knowing a little about Lee Kuan Yew, but if he ever called himself that (I don't recall), in what way is it deceptive?
What he says he is nowadays is a center leftist who favors the Democrats and dislikes Trump, but he also dislikes woke extremists. He's a gay furry with lingering Mormon sensibilities despite having left the church. That all seems very accurate to me.
I wish he had not left the forum the way he did, but I understand his grievances. Years later, he's still getting flack and being accused of being an entryist or something for starting the Schism. Now, I think the Schism was a bad idea and didn't like it at the time (and said so), but he was always pretty honest about his intent. I don't think it was a secret plot to destroy the Motte.
Calling him partisan just seems pointless and obvious. @FCfromSSC is a partisan too (and the proximal cause of TW creating the Schism). Like TW, FC is quite honest about his partisanship. People are still butthurt that Trace went off because of all the civil war fedposting that FC and a few others were doing at the time. (I think even FC admits he was not in a good headspace at the time.) But FC is popular here (I like him too, despite being much closer to Trace in my beliefs than FC) , and honestly, folks like @SteveAgain like fedposting. So Trace got endless shit and finally left.
I wish he hadn't and I wish he was less bitter, but I see no dishonesty or grift in his game, and he's certainly not, as Steve implies, telling his followers that actually the only problem with trans extremism is that it scared the normies.
I mean, just do a search on his profile, it comes up quite a lot (1, 2, 3), and I don't know how you want to invoke his name without either implying authoritarian measures, or being deceptive... and I'm pretty sure Trace is not about to start advocating for the execution of drug dealers.
Yes. I don't care about him starting The Schizm (it was no worse an act than the spinoff of /r/CWR, and no more successful for that matter), nor do I care about him being a partisan (aren't we all?). What bothers me is that I feel like I've been played for a fool by taking his complaints seriously. Originally I understood his grievances were about being mistreated, "muh miserable scolds and ankle-biters", and as far as complaints go it's pretty valid. People got pretty jaded here, there's a background radiation of hostility to anyone with his views, fair enough I wouldn't want to hang out in an environment like that either, if the roles were reversed. So when someone raises an objection like that I try to hear them out, and see if there's a way individual users could do something to make posting here more tolerable (funnily enough I never seem to get much of an answer for the latter, or there's a clear implication of "no - get rid of the background radiation, or bust").
So now some time has passed and I mulled over some of the conversations with him, and my only conclusion is that the mistreatment was at most an excuse, and the grievance was actually about the ideological distance. "Oh noes, you guys didn't like my LOTT hoax (please forget that the B&R audience had pretty much the same reaction to it)", or "oh noes, FC doesn't want to live in the same country as me". When I do the role-reverso on that one I come up empty. If I could politely listen to him as he unironically defended surrogacy, I'm sure he can handle hot takes like "I don't want to share a political jurisdiction with people opposed to my core values".
"Porque no los dos?", you might ask, his issue might both the ideological distance and the mistreatment. Sure, and I'll even grant that the background environment here absolutely is an issue, the problem is that given who he picked to found his "better" alternative to the Motte, we know he doesn't really care about people with other viewpoints being mistreated. This leaves us only with the second complaint, which, as far as I'm concerned, leaves us with nothing. Now maybe it's all a big misunderstanding and I'm a big dum-dum for not noticing what the core of the issue was about, but like I said I feel like an idiot for taking the bait.
I know Trace personally and he is in fact in favor of executing drug dealers. Your inability to understand his politics makes me skeptical of your ability to psychoanalyze him.
Did he ever express that publicly?
In my defense he's not making himself easy to understand. When you get the chance, can you ask him why he's in favor of executing drug dealers, but against lethal self-defense when faced with a lynch-mob?
I don't know if he's said it publicly, but you had it right here, Trace invokes LKY to imply authoritarian measures. You got most of the way to understanding it and I think this was because it was easy.
I think you are strawmanning because I don't understand him to be against self-defense from people faced with a lynch-mob. If I'm mistaken about this you can provide a link to him saying so, but otherwise I'm comfortable assuming this to be another case of you imagining your political enemy to hold beliefs he does not actually hold.
The argument I got in with him, that he has since pointed to as one of the bigger impetuses for creating the Schism, was specifically over whether it was appropriate for a law-abiding individual to use a gun to defend themselves from mob violence. I really do not want to misrepresent him, but his position very clearly seemed to be that it is better for the mob to be able to attack an unarmed person, than for an armed person to defend themselves from the mob with lethal force. He claimed (correctly) that since mob violence tends to be less lethal than gunfire, letting the mob brutalize helpless victims would result in fewer overall deaths. He claimed that the obvious best solution was for the authorities to crack down on the mobs in the first place, but when pressed with the then-current situation of the authorities ceding the streets to the mob, he stuck, as it were, to his guns.
I've seen a lot of morally-repugnant arguments here in my time. I'm quite sure I've seen many worse arguments than his. That one, though, is probably the widest spread between repugnance of argument and regard I had previously held for the arguer, ever. I've always respected Trace a great deal: I've spent enough time conversing with him over the years to know that he's a thoughtful, considerate, intelligent person. The lesson I drew from that conversation was that those qualities are insufficient for functional cooperation; it is, in the end, values which ultimately matter.
Here's the thread in question, read it for yourself. I'd be interested in your assessment of the arguments presented.
I would describe his overall argument as "Rittenhouse shouldn't have brought a gun to a skateboard fight precisely because something like that might happen." There seems to be a factual disagreement about how likely Rittenhouse was to die there with Trace thinking it was a 1-2% chance, and also a moral disagreement about what likelihood of death you need to be facing before you're allowed to use lethal self-defense, with Trace's answer at "more than 2%, less than 100%".
Granting Trace's facts, I'd say he supports lethal self-defense for people faced with a lynch-mob, and simply doesn't think Rittenhouse was facing a lynch mob. Granting some other set of facts I suppose you could frame it as "But it was a lynch-mob, and Trace opposed it, therefore he opposes self-defense from lynch-mobs in cases where he mistakenly believes them not to be lynch-mobs", but that seems like a boring semantic argument.
The obvious next step in Trace's argument and a sentiment I remember him expressing is that rather than letting himself get beaten, Rittenhouse shouldn't have been there at all. Suppose there's a maniac with an axe standing in the middle of nowhere shouting "If you walk near me I'll kill you", and you have a gun. The libertarian says you have every right to walk near him and then, when he tries to kill you with his axe, shoot him in self defense. Trace says killing is bad and you shouldn't pick a fight with that guy when you could just walk around him. I expect Trace would be a lot more sympathetic to Rittenhouse if he got mobbed while walking home from work, rather than having gone out of his way to show up at a riot.
That is certainly how I understood his argument.
For my part, I think (and thought at the time) that his assessment of the chance of death is entirely reasonable. I can also readily agree that the label of "Lynch Mob" is questionable unless the clear intent of the mob is murder, with the proviso that I have absolutely zero expectation or belief that this distinction will be applied in a principled fashion anywhere, ever. I also agree that Trace's core argument is "Rittenhouse probably wasn't going to die, so self-defense is inappropriate".
I find it insurmountably difficult to believe Trace or anyone supporting him would accept members of their ingroup receiving a compulsory invitation to a "skateboard fight" that the police simply stand aside for. I find it insurmountably difficult to believe Trace or anyone supporting him would accept access to public spaces and the exercise of their constitutional rights being treated as consent to a "skateboard fight" that the police simply stand aside for.
I also do not believe that Trace is a liar, nor do I believe that he's too stupid to understand the obvious implications of his argument. I notice I am confused.
My conclusion is that Shiri's Scissor is in fact real.
That passage is a reasonably accurate description of my subjective experience of that period generally and my argument with Trace in particular.
At the end of the day, the part that confuses me the most is how he can believe that his preferred strategy is actually going to work. I, personally, will never trust or cooperate with him ever again. I will never stop holding his position against him so long as he holds it, and I will use it as an example of why other people should not trust or cooperate with him or anyone like him ever again. More generally, he has joined Ozzy and Zunger as prime examples of why mistake theory dooms us in the long-term: even with the best intentions, even under the best possible conditions, values incoherence is simply unsurvivable.
There are many frustrating parts here, but one of the notable ones is that people seem to read the above as an expression of personal animosity; as in, I dislike Trace as a person, and so I am framing that dislike as opposition to his policy positions. In fact, it is the exact opposite; as with Kulak, I quite enjoy debating with him and respect his intellect a great deal. But also like Kulak, he advances policies incompatible with peaceful coexistence.
The difference, of course, is that Trace's proscriptions were actually implemented.
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