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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   35360 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Do we want each other dead?

True, I may not want your idea or voice in the world.

I might be happy if it just went away.

If all those like you went away, think what my side could achieve unopposed!

But I would not support what would be needed for you to 'just go away'.

Moreover I know that there are countless other aspects to you (hypothetical asshole) that I might not find as tiresome as your online persona.

No doubt if I met you we could find something to bond over.

If I watched you with people you love, I might warm to you.

Even if I saw you, a stranger, being hurt, I would doubtless hate to see that (let's assume there is no slapstick element; admittedly that might change the equation).

But I can't see any of these things.

All I can see are the asshole-ish parts of you that peek at me through the distancing device that is my laptop.

And if those parts vanished, I might be able to convince myself to forget about all the other putative parts.

And perhaps depending on how my day and life were going, I might be glad of whatever must have happened to make your asshole-ish online parts disappear.

I perceive all this more or less symmetrically.

You'd be happy if my ideas and voice went away too. Be honest.

Your contempt for that which I share with you through our screens is evident.

Or maybe you're a supporter of someone who expresses contempt for me.

Someone who views everything as combat.

If I just went away, he'd be good with it.

You'd be good with it.

Hell, maybe people like me are an obstacle to your goals, and if we all went away, all your dreams would come true.

But still. You're like me.

You wouldn't want anything done to me really.

Actually, if you met me, you'd probably like and respect me.

It's true – even if you say you're done with the concept of empathy.

We'd probably disagree on a lot of things, but we'd make it work.

You'd probably even wince if you happened to see me fall over, unless it was an especially hilarious fall.

Nonetheless, in your weaker moments, you might be glad if something happened and the news reached you that my voice was to be no more.

So I don't think we're so different.

There's nothing more to solve than our respective asshole-ish parts clashing over distant, linked screens.

Sort that little issue out and we can be friends.

The only problem is, it's not just the two of us here.

No, we don't want each other dead. Most people are really peaceful, to the point that even in some of the most extreme times in history countries have to conscript and draft able bodied youth to fight for them because they won't do it willingly. Even in self defense like Ukraine, a country fighting for itself against an invading force is still something like 1 volunteer for every 3 drafted.

We have all sorts of phrases expressing a similar sentiment "bark is worse than their bite" "talk is cheap" "all talk and no action" "actions speak louder than words" "paper tiger" "keyboard warrior" etc. This sentiment is that people say things to sound tough and cool, but in reality the large large large majority won't ever actually do it.

It's basically all signaling, a person who says "Look at me support super controversial in-group aligned thing" signals how dedicated they are without ever actually having to do shit. It's just as believable as other bullshit like "I'd do anything for you" in a newly formed relationship. Also of course a great SSC piece on this type of thing

In the same way, publicizing how strongly you believe an accusation that is obviously true signals nothing. Even hard-core anti-feminists would believe a rape accusation that was caught on video. A moral action that can be taken just as well by an outgroup member as an ingroup member is crappy signaling and crappy identity politics. If you want to signal how strongly you believe in taking victims seriously, you talk about it in the context of the least credible case you can find.

Publicizing how we're all basically the same and peaceful doesn't signal too much. Publicizing the hate you have for out-group and how you support the Thing Others Won't Support is lots of loyalty signal.

..

I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because of the PETA Principle. It was controversial. A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defense as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage. Everyone got a great opportunity to signal allegiance to their own political tribe and discuss how the opposing political tribe were vile racists / evil race-hustlers. There was a steady stream of potentially triggering articles to share on Facebook to provoke your friends and enemies to counter-share articles that would trigger you.

Also of course, a bit of Moloch

Under Moloch, everyone is irresistibly incentivized to ignore the things that unite us in favor of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive. Race relations are at historic lows not because white people and black people disagree on very much, but because the media absolutely worked its tuchus off to find the single issue that white people and black people disagreed over the most and ensure that it was the only issue anybody would talk about. Men’s rights activists and feminists hate each other not because there’s a huge divide in how people of different genders think, but because only the most extreme examples of either side will ever gain traction, and those only when they are framed as attacks on the other side.

People talk about the shift from old print-based journalism to the new world of social media and the sites adapted to serve it. These are fast, responsive, and only just beginning to discover the power of controversy. They are memetic evolution shot into hyperdrive, and the omega point is a well-tuned machine optimized to search the world for the most controversial and counterproductive issues, then make sure no one can talk about anything else. An engine that creates money by burning the few remaining shreds of cooperation, bipartisanship and social trust.

All this is true, and yet most people aren't all people.

The world is full of keyboard warriors. The real ones are in the military or prison.

Now you know why each political party wants to put their warriors in the streets.

No, we don't want each other dead.

Callous indifference continues to be an underrated descriptor complicating perception and reality of how much one side hates the other.

Only a small fraction want each other dead. Of those that do, only a tiny fraction would do anything to achieve those deaths. But there's a much larger fraction who are at best indifferent to deaths among The Other. Fine, to some extent that's signaling (of an extremely sick culture), but that still matters!

It's basically all signaling, a person who says "Look at me support super controversial in-group aligned thing" signals how dedicated they are without ever actually having to do shit.

The catch to this attitude being that ignoring how much someone hates you can have, relatively rarely but importantly non-zero times, quite disastrous results. I think there is very little to be lost following the adage "if someone says they hate you, believe them," and potentially a lot to be lost by ignoring clear signals of danger.

Callous indifference continues to be an underrated descriptor complicating perception and reality of how much one side hates the other.

Only a small fraction want each other dead. Of those that do, only a tiny fraction would do anything to achieve those deaths. But there's a much larger fraction who are at best indifferent to deaths among The Other. Fine, to some extent that's signaling (of an extremely sick culture), but that still matters!

Most people not giving a shit is common, but also not particularly bad. Do you know anything about what is happening in Sudan or Myanmar or whatever else? I don't! The average American doesn't!

I don't even know what's happening in the next street over and frankly I don't really care that much if it doesn't impact me. I'm not gonna intervene if I overhear someone say "Oh did you know Joe on 123 next street over beats his wife sometimes?" I just want the police to show up and arrest Joe, but I ain't getting personally involved and I'm not blaming Joe's neighbors or coworkers for his actions.

Does that make me evil? If it does, it's an incredibly common very banal evil that basically everybody has about something.

that much if it doesn't impact me

That's the big catch. The likelihood of anything in Sudan affecting me is basically zero. The likelihood of, say, inappropriate police behavior caught on video going viral and affecting me for months or years is not high, but significantly non-zero.

We have a culture that prioritizes concern based on identity, and in some ways it's a banal evil (cueing Hannah Arendt?), and in some ways it's an encouragement for people to violate or otherwise ignore their stated principles.

I don't want my enemies dead, but I do want them to think twice about expressing their ideas. Maybe I even want them to be afraid to express them. I want TPTB to run a propaganda campaign to associate people who express those opinions with foolishness, cowardliness, malice, perversion, and disloyalty. My enemies can go back into the closet and stop spreading their intellectual contagion. They will eventually dwindle in number and influence as they are no longer able to convert others.

Will this work? For a while at least, yes. I know because it worked on my side. But I think it will be more effective when we do it, because aristocracy is more stable and intuitive than bioleninism, and we have all the strong gods on our side (blood and soil, ancestral religion, family, unvarnished truth).

Then we can be friends and grill together in peace. No killing required.

I know you consider the woke to be your enemies, but who is not your enemy? Rather, what are the most leftist ideas that you consider tolerable?

I ask because you use the bioleninist framing to describe the woke. Under that frame, the woke cannot simply "go back in the closet", as their cause approximates a fight for survival. It is foolish to think that the entire lumpen-PMC will meekly accept the dismantling of their HR departments and the devaluation of their degrees, let alone to think that their foot-soldiers will go along with the revocation of their gibs and incarceration of their brethren; the spiteful mutants will not go quietly.

Of course, the above is only predictive insofar as the bioleninist framing is true. Perhaps the black bloc can be persuaded to police their own, perhaps the LGBT can be encouraged to shut down the bathhouses and keep to themselves. I just want to make the point that the desire for griller peace cannot co-exist with the dissident-right framings that you gesture at.

I don't think they will meekly accept it, no. But under the bioleninist framework, they are only strong because they are organized and their opponent is not. If the normie right begins to organize, it will successfully oppress the left. Probably not only via peaceful means.

I'm not sure how to define the "most leftist" ideas I accept. Probably some economic policies. I have some sympathy for protectionism, labor unions, and reducing income inequality.

Actually, if you met me, you'd probably like and respect me.

It's true – even if you say you're done with the concept of empathy.

We'd probably disagree on a lot of things, but we'd make it work.

Um, this is lovely and all, but have you ever actually been in a serious conflict with another person or group of people? Especially with a militant Leftist?

I have, as it happens. I sent an email offering to meet up and find a compromise that worked for us, and got an email back that said, to the best of my recollection, "There is nowhere that we will compromise and discussing things with you would be a waste of time".

People in the real world, actual aggressive self-righteous goal-oriented people, don't compromise because they're nice and they want what's best for everyone. They compromise only if they have to in order to get what they want. (And often not even then, look how the trade unions caused the decline of British industry rather than compromise on ideology).

This is approximately why I'm now ironclad in my belief that I do not want to share a country with anyone left of, say, Bill Clinton. I don't want them dead. I want them to leave. Preferably of their own accord. I don't even mind paying for the tickets, as long as they're one-way and they aren't coming back. And if they won't leave, I want them to generally be as miserable as possible until they wish they had left.

Lefties are just not suited for sharing a country with other citizens who have differing belief systems; they cannot be trusted to cooperate (or 'not defect') on core issues regarding the country's safety and security, and they will generally prefer foreigners over their own neighbors in any dispute, it seems.

Yes the famous 'heat map' study is very flawed, but the point made by said heat map has been confirmed in varying ways by different studies. Lefties try to sympathize with 'everyone' (and often entirely non-human things, or abstract concepts, like "the environment.") and as a result often end up sacrificing those that would 'actually matter' to them.

Lefties also have far, far less diversity of thought within their circles than righties. It is in fact safe to assume that whatever any given lefty says they believe reflects very precisely what all of the other lefties believe. And they'll henpeck their own into line as needed.

This crystalized for me when I watched everyone on the Dem side fall into line behind Kamala Harris as Biden's successor in one day, even ones who had, that very same day, said she was the wrong choice.

Lefties are far more likely to cut off family, friends, and other relationships over 'minor' political squabbles. So you can debate them in good faith, and still find that they come away hating your guts if you don't capitulate, and then cut you off so you have no hope of ever changing their mind. This concept is so absolutely backwards compared to how I try to manage my relationships that TO ME It reads as entirely alien and incomprehensible behavior.

Lefties have no good theory of mind for their political opponents. They believe they know what their opponents believe, but they tend to fail the ideological Turing test badly. So its that much easier for them to demonize opponents for things said opponents do not actually believe. See aforementioned point about intellectual diversity.

Lefties also have that distinct tendency to claim intellectual superiority and scientific backing for their views, but also tend to be completely wrong on some of the most important, core facts about reality. The most egregious one being blank-slatism as it pertains to human beings and their mental development. Their battle against reality on this point has done untold amounts of harm, and its impossible to even have a discussion on the degree of nature vs. nurture in their framework. I don't want to be forced into their framework, I want to have the actual debate. Which probably requires removing the people preventing it.

And of course as we have now seen, it is pretty much incontrovertible that more lefties than righties tend to support, or at least excuse violence as a means of settling political disputes, up to and including murder. Not all of them, but a significant amount, and these members are NOT policed by other lefties so they have an outsize effect. My first encounter with this was back when the Charlie Hebdo murders occurred, and I went on Reddit's /r/anarchism subreddit to find them twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why killing a bunch of cartoonists wasn't exactly the moral abomination it sounds like. You can still find some remnants of their discussion.

In my view, it shouldn't be so hard to say "murdering non-violent people is BAD" regardless of how offensive they are.

I can back up each of the above points with various studies, but I apologize I'm not taking the time to do that at this moment since I don't have them all immediately handy. I'm not trying to just 'boo-outgroup' here, I think that observable, reliable facts of the world are reflected in what I said, and this informs my own belief on why I don't want to be around them. Maybe I'm the one with the twisted morality and worldview.

Ding me for that if you must, mods. I'm not calling out any particular persons on the site with this, I swear.

And while I don't immediately give righties/red tribe a pass, by any means, I could throw together a comprehensive explanation of why I prefer to live around Red Tribers rather than Blue tribers, and maybe will throw that together at some point. Ultimately it comes down to Righties being more 'genuine' in how they comport and portray themselves, and more in touch with baseline 'reality' where it counts.

I consider myself red-tinged Grey tribe, and it has become clear to me that I cannot, over the long term, co-exist with blue tribe, for reasons I have no control over, and I'm leaning a bit more in favor of 'conflict' theory over 'mistake' theory these days.

Note, I am literally only stating my own personal beliefs on the issue, and I still inherently wish to treat any individual person, even if they identify as left-wing, as an individual who has worth and dignity in their own right, even if they're hopelessly compromised by their ideology and will never have their mind changed.

I'm not calling for any particular actions against any persons, and I've already arranged my life so I don't encounter many blue tribers as I go about my daily business, so I'm not going to take any different personal actions.

But if you're asking me to make policy recommendations, I can't very well carve out exceptions for the few that I personally like.

I think you are greatly underestimating how centrist most people are. Harris' shortcomings, and Biden's/Clinton's before her, were well known and widely acknowledged, even though it is certainly the case that Dem commentators, as expected, fell in line.

I'm talking about stuff like Aaron Sorkin suggesting that the Dems should pick Mitt Romney as their nominee (an EXTREMELY Centrist proposal!), and then walking it back THE EXACT SAME DAY, with zero indication that this caused him any mental distress.

Tons of folks saying "we must have a convention, its the only way!" shut up the instant Kamala was 'announced' as the successor.

That's a level of group cohesion you NEVER, EVER see on the right.

I don't know about that. Do you seriously think that Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Romney, etc., are ideologically or temperamentally down with Trump? I would say the Republican party has cohered around MAGA far more effectively than the Dems have managed to cohere around... anything. Republicans who have not come around have essentially been booted from the party, while a notable Dem example would be Manchin's more or less victorious showdown with Biden over BBB. (Manchin is no longer senator, but he lost from the right, not the left.)

On Sorkin, again, we are talking about someone so clearly dissatisfied with the putative nominee and VP in Harris that he writes an op-ed suggesting that Dems nominate a Republican, but you are somehow shocked that they later write a tweet endorsing Harris over Trump?? Do you want him to get mad and endorse a third party or something? Either a) he genuinely got caught up in the idea of Harris or b) he simply wants to convey enthusiasm in order for Trump to lose. His editiorial's thrust was very much that Trump's 2nd term would be very bad; once a nominee has been picked or settled upon, surely it would make no sense to be publicly milquetoast about that nominee.

I would say the Republican party has cohered around MAGA far more effectively than the Dems have managed to cohere around... anything.

This seems just patently incorrect to me.

In 2016-2020 there was zero penalty to defecting from Trump as a Republican, talking against him, voting against him (I still recall McCain casting the decisive vote to BLOCK the repeal of Obamacare. When he died he was still given full accolades by his fellow Republicans). They did work together long enough to not impeach and remove Trump, I guess.

In 2020-2024 you have the entire edifice of the federal Democratic party working together to ignore/cover up Biden's increasing cognitive decline. Although plenty of people noticed it, there were ZERO leaks until it was decided he needed to be replaced. And they've been working even harder since then to deflect and diffuse any responsibility now that they've had to admit what was going on. It is truly awe-inspiring.

Compared to how virtually every Trump appointee that quit or got booted immediately went and wrote a tell-all book about how inept and chaotic the administration was.

And now, post 2024, I still don't think the GOP has really conglomerated around MAGA. Its more like they've become content to just sit back and let him do things via the Executive order process and re-arrange deck chairs while he tries to steer the ship.

But you are somehow shocked that they later write a tweet endorsing Harris over Trump?

No, I'm "shocked" someone would spend such mental effort to try to create a persuasive essay in hopes of convincing others to take a particular course of action that... apparently, they themselves didn't find compelling.

Then literally say "whoops, I take it all back, ignore what I said earlier, I'm on the team again" without even a hint of mental distress.

Its like he didn't even believe his own words when he wrote them. So why should anyone else take him seriously on anything ever again?

HAVE THE COURAGE OF YOUR CONVICTIONS, MAN.

You are a martial arts instructor, right?

What do you do when a liberal comes to your dojo? It must happen, and while in my experience, most people try to avoid politics on the mat (for good reason!) you're often going to get clues about people's affiliations.

This isn't a gotcha question or anything. I just really want to know how you deal with people you literally don't think should coexist with you, when you are in a position of trust and authority and with responsibility for their safety. As a former instructor myself I'd be very concerned about someone who feels they can't teach people with the wrong politics. This sounds nearly as bad as all those psychologists and therapists reportedly distressed at the idea of having to provide help to Republicans.

martial arts

Let me hijack this to relay an anecdote from last Saturday. I.e., about one day after Charlie Kirk's murder. It is a useless anecdote that goes nowhere, and I'd like to get rid of it because it serves no purpose.

Having spent far too much time on the motte, on Friday, I ended up dreaming in the night that people all around me would finally pick up whatever weapons or improvised weapons they could to go, meet up, and beat do death their political opponents. In my dream, that ended up subverted by my old instructor, who turned those violent impulses into a peaceful tournament. I awoke in the morning poorly rested, reminded myself not to dwell so much on American culture war issues, and packed my stuff to go to the day's actual real-world fully-awake HEMA tournament.

Where I met a gaggle of fighters from a "workers' sports club", who were fully decked out in gear sporting images of raised red fists, anarchist signs, "FCK AFD" and the usual far-left symbology. They were perfectly decent and civil people and nobody said a word about politics.

That is all.

What do you do when a liberal comes to your dojo? It must happen, and while in my experience, most people try to avoid politics on the mat (for good reason!) you're often going to get clues about people's affiliations.

Teach them what they want to know, basically. Then decline to hang out with them much outside the gym.

Its not like there's a hard and fast rule against discussing politics in the gym. But the transaction is simple, they are paying to be a member of the gym, they attend classes, they get the instruction they paid for.

And let me say, I'd argue that I'm a tad left of the median for members' political affiliation. Like I said, I'm grey tribe. Some of these folks are full on Q-anon adjacent, giant-truck driving, gun-nut red tribers.

I walked into the gym on Wednesday and multiple people, including the owner of the gym, were asking me about the Charlie Kirk thing, unprompted. Some of them are extraordinarily livid.

It is good thing that one of our more open lefties (who doesn't confront people about it, to be clear) was on vacation in Texas this week.

This sounds nearly as bad as all those psychologists and therapists reportedly distressed at the idea of having to provide help to Republicans.

Let me point out that I also used to work as a Public Defender, where my entire job was... defending people who were probably guilty. And I took my job very seriously in that respect, even if I found the people themselves distasteful, i.e. people I would not want to live around.

The way I solved that issue was:

A) never actually asking them if 'they did it.' I always just said "whatever story you tell, make damn sure it is consistent."

B) If it was clear and obvious that they did it, or they said they did it, I treat my main goal as making the state do their job properly. If the state screws up or lacks evidence to convict, my job is to point that out and try to create a valid defense. If the state fails to convict... that's on them.

From a sheer professionalism standpoint, I can set aside any feeling I have about an individual to provide them a service that they are 'entitled' to due to my contractual obligations. That is perfectly in keeping with my principles and social norms.

Separating my personal feelings out and teaching a lefty how to fight is easy, in that paradigm.

Also, getting buff and learning to fight is one of the things that can make a guy more right wing. SO I like to think I'm keeping the politically moderate guys from falling into Leftism, even if I'm not winning over lefties.

I have no intentions of confronting any individuals who do not confront me first.

Hence my point:

I still inherently wish to treat any individual person, even if they identify as left-wing, as an individual who has worth and dignity in their own right, even if they're hopelessly compromised by their ideology and will never have their mind changed.

I would not join a gym where the majority of the members were lefties. Freedom of association. I don't think the lefties at my gym want me dead.

But I do not want such people to have political authority over me in any way.

And because I live in one of the reddest areas of a Red state, they simply do not have political authority over me, so no lefties I know personally read as a 'danger' to me. But as a whole, coherent group...

I can live with that arrangement, blue tribe completely politically neutered and fringe enough that they are unable to ever effect any outcomes. If any get violent, they get exiled instantly. That's tolerable to me. But we're a long way from that arrangement at a national level.

This is the most depressing part for me. I classify myself as a libertarian, and I disagree with the left way, way more than I do with the right, but I'd completely fine living aside them - including communists, despite my ancestors suffering a lot from the communist regime and me hating all that relates to that - I am willing to set that aside for the sake of having a pleasant, peaceful society. If only the Left agreed to play by a simple set of rules - no violence, no destroying the country, no destroying the culture. I am willing to only "destroy" them like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro did - by showing, with fact and argument, again and again, how utterly ridiculous their views are and how disastrous the consequences of them - including for them themselves - they are. But there's no way I can have this. Every time they feel they are losing the power, they become violent. I don't see how this violence can be dealt with in a peaceful framework.

And of course as we have now seen, it is pretty much incontrovertible that more lefties than righties tend to support, or at least excuse violence as a means of settling political disputes, up to and including murder. Not all of them, but a significant amount, and these members are NOT policed by other lefties so they have an outsize effect. My first encounter with this was back when the Charlie Hebdo murders occurred, and I went on Reddit's /r/anarchism subreddit to find them twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why killing a bunch of cartoonists wasn't exactly the moral abomination it sounds like. You can still find some remnants of their discussion.

On charlie hebdo, I was a fedora tipping atheist back then and even I found the comics profane. I didn't like islam either, infact I had a burning passion of hatred for it. These days when I see those comics again I think to myself, good, fuck those guys. Should they have been killed? Probably not, but I would have been done for them getting their faces punched in.

  • -12

Should they have been killed? Probably not

Probably? That's how you know your moral compass is malfunctioning. When you ask yourself "how do I feel about brutally murdering a person that said something offensive to me?" and the answer is not "fuck no, not murder!" but "well, maybe no, maybe yes, he was really annoying so kinda murder sounds right but those people around me say murder is bad... so hard to figure this out... should I err on the safe side? Should I hedge more? It's really a tough conundrum!".

And, of course, you should only talk about punching other people's faces in if you're willing to have your own punched in for your opinions. Yes, I know yours doesn't smell. But that's how it works. I wouldn't accept this deal, I'd rather have a deal where nobody's face getting punched in, but maybe some people enjoy their faces being punched in?

Probably not? Not no? Like maybe you could see an argument justifying their murders over cartoons? That's disgusting mate.

I'm hoping you were just caught up in couching because it's the motte, because 'they deserve to get their faces punched in' is a more respectable position than that by several orders of magnitude, and I assume anyone who disagrees has never had their face punched in.

"Oh, I can know what he's referencing I can add some helpful links for this post. A little context, too." Oops. I guess I didn't not add helpful links or minor context. I have allowed myself to get lost in the textual sauce. An LLM, but worse.

Lefties are far more likely to cut off family, friends, and other relationships over 'minor' political squabbles...

This one is a trend that's been polled and surveyed for over a decade. It's bad. If we're pointing fingers I think this is one of many potential indicators of finger pointing direction.

Lefties also have far, far less diversity of thought within their circles than righties.

The Heatmap is more interesting than the "ideological diversity" (ooo nodes) study. This one does not grab me like The Heatmap and instead I concluded, "Sure thing, social science. Run it back." For sake of brevity, this study asked 8 questions (n=400ish, 25%ish Republicans) and I'll share 3: (1) "Abortion should be illegal", (4) *"The federal budget for welfare programs should be increased", and (6) "The government should regulate business to protect the environment".

I don't think these are definitive type questions to accurately measure "diversity" -- a word the authors do not use -- of political temperament or ideology. The fun part is at the end where the authors remind us:

According to the present findings, Democrats (more than Republicans) tightly centre their belief-system around a set of positions at the extremes of these particular items, implying that people who deviate from these positions are likely to be considered as outgroup members (extremity should thereby be understood as a function of both, the formulation of the item and the response). It is possible that holding extreme (and thus unnegotiable) attitudes on important social-political issues has become increasingly identity defining for Democrats, not least in response to Donald Trump's controversial presidency.

Ah

The pattern does not imply that Republicans are more tolerant than Democrats, nor that Republicans could deal better with attitudinal uncertainty. It does imply, however, that –at this particular moment in time– Democrats and Republicans are constructing and managing their partisan identities differently in relation to the topics reflected in these questionnaire items. Research suggests that social category membership (e.g., being White, Christian) is more important for the construction of Republican identity than it is for Democrat identity (Mason & Wronski, 2018).

When academics invoke But, Trump, White, Christian in a context is important tone one must resist the temptation. Ah-ha! These inconvenient findings must be evidence for why the paper is correct. I, on the other hand, once again recall that science science is sham. Do it again, bozos, and do it better.

Yes the famous 'heat map' study is very flawed, but the point made by said heat map has been confirmed in varying ways by different studies.

What other studies are you thinking of? This one got me good. What started as "helpful link":

This references the "heat map" study which you call flawed. For The Heatmap, or Ideological differences in the expanse of the moral circle, the study compares how liberals and conservatives express and/or extend "moral concern." The authors find liberals are prone to extend moral concern in a loose "universalist" fashion, whereas conservatives distributed moral concern a tighter "parochial" shape. They then mapped these response in concentric circles for our benefit. These circles start from the category of immediate family at the center, out to all of humanity, lifeforms in the universe, and finally everything that ever exists including space rocks.

People, like me, interpret "moral concern" as a synonym for units of caring. Which is not wholly accurate. This is a stated preference, but not a tested preference. A polite interpretation is that liberals are capable, or would like to be, of loving all of humanity and beyond to a greater extent than conservatives. From there, the "liberals love space rocks as much as their kids" dunks write themselves.

One of the exercises has the participants distribute their moral concern as a zero-sum resource. Liberals were more likely to apply concern to things far away from the center than conservatives, although they still applied concern to the center. That maps the same direction as the non-zero-sum, unlimited distribution which brings liberals and conservatives closer, but still distinct in pattern. Conservatives, even when told that moral concern is not finite, won't ascribe much moral value to space rocks. The gradient for conservatives shows they don't consider space rocks worthy of concern at all. In the study they stop giving moral concern points, regardless if they're finite, much sooner when extending outwards. They do so to the point where the outer circles are closer to non-existent.

If I can believe that these exercises can provide insight, then I would very much like to see the study repeated, then simplified, and finally standardized. I want to see this deployed across cultures and through time. What would populations in Somalia, South Africa, or Spain land if we replicated the study in those population? Does safety and prosperity change the disposition and by how much? Race/ethnicity? Climate?

A million questions. How does this interact with other parts we know to be (at least partly) hardwired like temperament and preferences? If the finding that liberals generally have a higher IQ is true, then might it be related? I know the findings are not so broad, but it's hard to not think there could be costs (and benefits) in processing the world in such a way. So long as we can consistently clamp down moral temperament as dimorphic across culture and time.

How exciting! Of course, because it's exciting, triggers my imagination, and was made into a meme then I assume it won't hold up. The limited/unlimited sample sizes for the exercises were 131 and 263 people respectively, however each only had about 35 conservatives. Maybe this should have been its own post, but I figure someone smarter and most handsome could do it better than I.

This crystalized for me when I watched everyone on the Dem side fall into line behind Kamala Harris as Biden's successor in one day, even ones who had, that very same day, said she was the wrong choice.

Dems are more conformist if we take the Do It Again, Bozo science at face value. This would suggest they're at least a little better about backing Their Guy. As a counter-point, the above quoted text sounds like an obviously bipartisan phenomena to me. It is normal for the average politically interested voter to vote for plainly partisan reasons.

What behavior should we expect from Dems when their election plans fall apart? "Yesterday I said it would be a mistake to let the Californian machine "brown and a woman" candidate takeover, but the party fucked it-- oh well we'll get you guys next time." Nobody wins elections by telling the opposition they are right on the tepid candidate. No way, that billion dollar campaign is gonna happen. It may as well be spent on a fun, joyful Brat! campaign.

This is exactly the kind of example where we -- you, me, everyone else -- are programmed to notice the enemy's transgressions, but forget our own. Your average MAGA voter was railing against TikTok a year ago. Now? All quiet on the big bad Chinuh! front. Difference in degree, not kind? Maybe. Team Trump can turn on a dime. I consider this as an uncontroversial statement without comparison to anything else. The D machine's effort in 2024 was absurd and, yes, it worked to an extent. It had to work. It was always going to work. You can't just give up at the end of democracy. [Which should put in perspective the monumental and historical fuck-up of Democrats in 2024.]

All the consensus backs the Republican candidate no matter what some writer at National Review said ten minutes ago. Trump has some in-house resistance, but how'd that work out? How many Republicans backed Trump after calling him some name or even disavowed him? Many, including Vance. Democrats have seen this and they've called it out! "People can change their minds, you know?" Yeah, yeah, some more than others.

The mainstream Dem machine is impressive and has some unique advantages. Concepts of optics, messaging, and narrative are more prominent in the minds of Blue voters and, to some extent, this has trained them. Maybe the Republicans don't get as close as Kamala did if the parties swapped position and infrastructure. Falling in line behind Kamala for the party -- or whoever it is -- can be your expectation next time. No surprise or condemnation or special accusation necessary.

it is pretty much incontrovertible that more lefties than righties tend to support, or at least excuse violence as a means of settling political disputes

Political disputes at the moment, but more righties than lefties tend to support violence as a means in other general settings. Is this the same? No, it's frequently not the same. There are many qualities of American leftism that are in not mirrored or symmetric to the right. That is another fundamental problem with the left-right paradigm not solved by another axis. There are qualities of leftism that I also find frustrating, abhorrent, or special. Nature nurture blank slateism is a huge fundamental contradiction in liberal and leftist ideology.I share many of the same grey tribe suspicion of lefty thinking, culture, and politics. I still* think you lean too far in your condemnation of people.

In terms of ideological conformity, you can also take a look at organizations and institution that have become more left wing over time (almost all of them) and those that have become more right wing (good luck finding ANY).

What happens with Righties when they notice they've been pushed out of a space they like is... they go build a new one, start a new foundation on which to build a new institution. Note this is how Charlie Kirk got his start.

Look at how the Ratio of Conservatives to Liberals as College Faculty has dropped off a cliff since the 60's.

Note, this was precisely the sort of thing Charlie Kirk was trying to combat.

Of course, the left will simply say "Conservatives aren't as smart/don't believe in science/are anti-intellectual" as an excuse for this, as part of that whole "intellectual superiority and scientific backing" shtick. But amazingly the place where Conservative presence is the strongest tends to be the math, physics, and engineering departments, WHERE BEING CORRECT IN THE REAL WORLD continues to matter the most.

It was NOT because the share of conservatives in the population dropped off sharply that they took over colleges. It was attributable to the intentional attrition of activists over a long period of time actively favoring their ideological peers for hiring, and actively making life unpleasant for righties, to ultimately cement control over the valuable institutions. They are very open about the strategy and tactics they were employing. Conservatives/righties generally don't use these strategies to co-opt functional institutions.

And believe me, I can get almost as critical of red tribe politics and belief if I choose. But the central point, borne out by decades of living around both sides... is that Red Tribe will actually leave you alone/accept you as you are much, much more readily than blue tribe, provided you don't start conflicts. Grey tribe is easily the most accepting of all, but tends to lose out to blue tribe operatives due to having no/poor antibodies to their entryist tactics.

the place where Conservative presence is the strongest tends to be the math, physics, and engineering departments, WHERE BEING CORRECT IN THE REAL WORLD continues to matter the most.

Well, the place where the Republican-vs-Democrat ratio is highest is in Economics, but that's not so much because there's especially extensive high-stakes testing that Applied Economics gets. It's probably because our best theories, starting in literally the first Microecon 101 classes, have good, simple explanations for why many populist (and historically leftist-aligned) economic ideas end up worsening the very problems they were trying to solve. You can still say those explanations are too simple, and make an economics research career out of trying to justify that, but having to add and defend precisely the necessary epicycles can't be entirely comfortable.

I'd also point out that it's common for a math professor to take pride in how disconnected their research is from real-world applications. Maybe in the back of their mind they expect some applied math guys to snatch up their work and use it eventually, but the more decades that takes, the more ahead-of-its-time their work must have been! There may also be some counter-signalling, where the shakier your reputation is, the more your grant applications have to look like "this could advance cancer research, somehow, because graph theory I guess" rather than "this builds on my work that finally proved the long-open Guys-Youbarelyheardof Conjecture"? The trick with trying to subvert math is that even if it's not empirical, it's still objective. Other mathematicians may disagree over how important the Guys-Youbarelyheardof Conjecture is, but even if some of them dislike you that doesn't make it any easier for them to find flaws in your proof.

how disconnected their research is from real-world applications.

I don't think it's about real-world applications so much as in the sense of “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

It doesn't matter if you pass a law saying that pi should be 3, or write a very well-written and persuasive paper, or murder your co-worker and throw them off a boat.

I don't do it anymore but for some of the earlier parts of this insanity I would speak up. At a party, at family dinner.

I'm large and I'm calm and I'm reasonably well spoken, and because I spend time here I'd seen the arguments for both sides.

Every time I'd try, every time! The leftist would storm out - no matter how calm I was, no matter how well I dodged some of the common pitfalls. When challenged and they realized they couldn't bully me into shutting up...they fled. And we are talking doctors, lawyers, and so on.

Eventually I decided that the risk to my social life and professional life was too much and stopped.

And that was over five years ago, the extremism has only been getting worse since.

I'm sure the militant right would do the same? But I have no access to them.

The way you're feeling is indicative of how I think a lot of conservatives feel. So many are being told that there isn't a problem, or that the statistics say "well right wingers are more badder," or that my side aggrieved them so I have no standing.

None of it is any assurance against this extremely palpable feeling that their neighbors would cheer if they died. I now know for a fact that if I were murdered - and my identity wasn't reported, only my politics, somehow - many people I consider "friends" would cheer. The feeling is not mutual! Even Charlie Kirk himself wouldn't have cheered if it happened to them.

I do not know how to reconcile this, and I understand even less why so many think they help their case when they try to deflect from this conversation. None of the ones I know seem to understand how this comes off to me, and it feels like it should be pretty obvious. Instead, we need to reframe the conversation. What about a mass shooting? What about FBI statistics? What about something a nazi did ten years ago that we both agreed was terrible the day of?

Okay, can we talk about that after we acknowledge that a bunch of people I trust are implicitly saying that they want me dead and even more are trying to minimize this issue by? I'm not alone in this, and it's not just my problem. What good they expect to come of this is beyond me.

Eh, I think it's easy to carry this too far.

If the Lefty version of Kirk was killed in similar fashion, a lot of rightwingers would also be gleefully dancing on the grave. (Especially right now, when the risk of leftwing cancellation is the lowest it has been in a very long time.)

It's very hard to estimate which "side" is "worse" on an issue like this (whereas on some issues, there is a clear asymmetry, like publicly expressed racism against whites and sexism against men).

Though I must say that, right now, as an "antiwoke" atheist classical liberal, many on the Left would certainly celebrate my death as a racist/sexist/fascist/transphobe and probably the Right wouldn't as a godless heathen, though I have only voted for Democrats for president and have harshly criticized the Progressive Left and the MAGA Right while holding social views roughly consistent with a typical 2012 Obama voter.

I'm not rushing to condemn anyone left of Stalin to death, but the "What did you think we meant by revolution" crowd currently has the mic, and thr atmosphere I sense really does feel like libs in general find this to be a profoundly uninteresting point of discussion if they aren't joining in on it or trying to spin the story anothet way. I would say 60-70% of my lib friends have honestly been compassionate and met me in the middle, but the others have called for my death or tried to reassure me there is no problem. I think the latter is often because they don't want to contribute to a freakout but it comes off as dismissal sometimes.

I am not really trying to purity test anyone beyond a general notion of figuring out how dead we want each other, and when an alarming number of people come up short, the third group that starts trying to haggle with me comes off as worrisome

I agree that the mainstream left typically is blissfully unaware of the hard left and when it's forced to look at it usually makes excuses.

If the Lefty version of Kirk was killed in similar fashion, a lot of rightwingers would also be gleefully dancing on the grave.

Presumably a leftist similar in some way to Charlie Kirk has been killed at some point in the last ten years (and if not, is that an interesting datapoint in its own right?). Can you point to an example of "a lot of rightwingers" who were "gleefully dancing on the grave"? For the left, I can point to four examples of this phenomenon happening with murders and attempted murders within the last year and change: the attempted assassination of trump (with some of his supporters killed/wounded in the attempt), Luigi's assassination of the healthcare exec, Anthony Karmelo's murder of a fellow student at a track meet [EDIT - Bad example, see discussion below], and now Kirk's assassination. I think you should point to an actual example if you are going to make this comparison.

You might be right that if this happens in the future, right-wingers might respond in kind. But this pattern occurring four three times in the last year-and-change one way, and zero times the other way since the invention of social media, is the sort of data from which it seems to me we ought to be able to begin drawing conclusions.

The best counterexample I can think of is the death of Osama Bin Laden. A lot of right-wingers very publicly celebrated that death on social media. If your argument is that leftists view Charlie Kirk roughly the way rightists view Osama Bin Laden, you wouldn't get disagreement from me, but I'm not sure it would help your argument.

Has a prominent lefty social media star been murdered of late?

I'm not aware of any and so I was presenting a hypothetical. The way the right reacted to the Pelosi hammer attack seems to indicate things won't be all that responsible.

Please don't pretend that the party that elected Trump is all about decorum and dignity and not speaking ill of the dead when it's someone they detest. If Hasan Piker gets merked tomorrow there will be a lot of the same nonsense from the Right.

The best counterexample I can think of is the death of Osama Bin Laden. A lot of right-wingers very publicly celebrated that death on social media. If your argument is that leftists view Charlie Kirk roughly the way rightists view Osama Bin Laden, you wouldn't get disagreement from me, but I'm not sure it would help your argument.

Is this really a remotely good example? Bin Laden was held directly responsible for the deaths of thousands. Kirk, to my knowledge, wasn't.

A lot of left-wingers cheered the death of Osama bin Laden also. Especially in the NYC area. You can have a general rule against celebrating deaths and still make exceptions for mass murderers and other especially horrible people. But if you do, you have to start punching sophists who insist on blurring the line.

It's a great example of what Red Tribe enthusiastically celebrating a killing looks like, which we can use as a measure for the scale of Blue Tribe celebration of Kirk, and Red Tribe celebration of other killings.

If we can accurately say that Blues are celebrating the death of Kirk the way Reds celebrated the death of OBL, that's an interesting data point about how Blues as a tribe see the world.

If we're going to look at claims of Reds celebrating the deaths of other people, it should be reasonable to examine the scale and intensity of that celebration. Is it "a couple people made mean tweets", or is it "the entire internet lights up with celebration, which spills over into the real world in numerous cases"?

Presumably a leftist similar in some way to Charlie Kirk has been killed at some point in the last ten years. Can you point to an example of "a lot of rightwingers" who were "gleefully dancing on the grave"?

How a Young Activist’s Murder Has Been Gleefully Distorted Online

It took only a few hours for the death of Ryan Carson, stabbed before dawn in a random assault as he waited for a bus in Brooklyn, to become an indictment of his politics so vitriolic that it threatened to overwhelm the grief. In the view of his online adversaries, Mr. Carson, a 31-year-old progressive activist, died at the hands of his own misbegotten ideology — “brainwashed” into believing he could help the poor and wayward.

The morally vacant critics on what we used to know as Twitter were not alone in attacking him and the girlfriend who witnessed his murder. Writing in The American Conservative and attempting to claim a place on the frontiers of decency, Declan Leary offered that he would not “celebrate” Mr. Carson’s death, as others were doing. Still, he expressed the belief that Mr. Carson carried partial “blame” not just for what happened to him but also for the death of “countless others killed by the chaos he defended.”

To this day right wingers on Twitter still bring up the image of him trying to run and tripping on the bench right before he was stabbed as a sort of Always Sunny meme. A lot of them took a similar line that leftists took with Kirk - "I don't agree with this but he did".

Anthony Karmelo's murder of a fellow student at a track meet

It seemed like the Left as a whole just avoided this like the plague. It seemed to be a specifically black tribal thing.

I looked into that yesterday and curiously enough most of the RW glee came from a guy being hoisted by his own defund petard, and after having celebrated the death of Rush Limbaugh (among others, iirc)

One thing that's come into STARK relief over the past week, is there's a pretty noticeable difference between making jokes at the expense of the deceased, which can be bad taste ("too soon!") but isn't a hard taboo, and making jokes that celebrate the person's death directly/condones the act of murder.

It's a noticeable difference, yes, but particularly troublingly I think that in cases like this there's a lot of grey area between the two. Very scissory, or as Adams would say "two movies one screen", in that for many offensive comments someone left-wing will say it isn't condoning the act of murder while someone right-wing will say it is, and I don't think either of them are lying per se.

The big difference is that Carson's killing was not politically motivated at all, was it?

Neither was the murder committed by Karmelo Anthony.

The difference from Kirk's murder, I mean.

There are two sort of related conversations going on at the same time.

One is that leftist violence is out of control because a leftists killed Charlie Kirk.

The other is that in general the left is blood thirsty, as evidenced by the way leftists responded to the killing of Charlie Kirk.

These two points can stand independent of each other, and several people explicitly said as much when the political motivations of Charlie Kirk's killer were more nebulous. That, even if it was a random crazy or a groyper, the real problem was how so many leftists responded to it.

It is this second conversation, the group response thing, that was the focus here, as such, what matters is how the right as a group responded to Carson's death, not the motivations or political associations of his killer.

These two points can stand independent of each other, and several people explicitly said as much when the political motivations of Charlie Kirk's killer were more nebulous.

These may have been nebulous political motivations but were almost certainly still political. I'm sure that can hardly be said about Carson's killer.

Also with Carson's Killer it's hard for anybody on the Leftwing side of the fence to poke that particular hornet's nest without immediately self-defeating so...

Archive link to above article

politics so vitriolic that it threatened to overwhelm the grief . . . misbegotten ideology — “brainwashed” into believing he could help the poor and wayward . . . morally vacant critics

Sharing emotionally manipulative and outright deceptive writing is not an ideal way to service your point. The criticism of Carson was because of his activity on X. I could link any one of his posts, I'll link this one. At the NYPD, to which he replied "Your cops are subhuman." He was such a kind man, he only cared about garbage.

As someone who keeps a close eye on those righty circles and who doesn't shy from graphic content, I couldn't tell you the last time I saw his murder shared, but this could be selection bias. What I have seen are plentiful criticisms of his girlfriend for her behavior continuing from that night.

But really, this is accepting framing, and I don't do that. The righties criticize Carson for his belief that socioeconomic conditions precipitate the willingness of an 18 year old to wander a city and murder a stranger by repeatedly stabbing him. His beliefs directly related with and contributed to the circumstances of his murder. That's not why lefties are criticizing Kirk. Had Kirk agitated for and supported violence against his opposition -- actual violence, not the child's "you said mean words" -- he would have lived and died by the sword. He didn't. He hurt their feelings, and they say that's a reason to say he deserved it as they dance on his grave. These are not comparable.

I don't really understand why we need to tear down Carson some more. He's not a saint but neither was Charlie Kirk. Kirk also has a mountain of quotes that the left can mine to justify celebrating his death, and I believe they are wrong to do so too.

Had Kirk agitated for and supported violence against his opposition -- actual violence, not the child's "you said mean words"

Joe Biden is a bumbling dementia filled Alzheimer's corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.

Granted, not extra-judicial violence, so maybe not exactly "living and dying by the sword," but the following is not exactly that either:

The righties criticize Carson for his belief that socioeconomic conditions precipitate the willingness of an 18 year old to wander a city and murder a stranger by repeatedly stabbing him. His beliefs directly related with and contributed to the circumstances of his murder.

That's like arguing Charlie Kirk argued for escalation and turning up the temperature, which produced a political environment that precipitated his assassination. The cause and effect between Carson's beliefs and his murder are just as far removed.

Granted, not extra-judicial violence, so

This is like the Monty Python sketch about non-illegal robbery. Granted, they're not actually doing the thing people are complaining about, but....

It's still advocating for violence.

Sure, "my political opposition should be tried for treason and then shot" may have a thin veneer of plausible deniability to chronic overthinkers like you or I, but most people from both sides are just going to hear "my political opposition should be shot".

More comments

I appreciate the example. In my experience, symmetry comparisons across the tribal divide are almost always fruitless, but it seems to me that this is the sort of thing that absolutely has to be possible if we're to have any hope of peace at all.

I have no memory of or experience with right-wing reactions to Ryan Carson's death. It sounds like you do. In your view, was the right-wing reaction then comparable to the left-wing reaction we saw with Kirk, in terms of scale or significance or whatever axes seemed relevant to you?

It seemed like the Left as a whole just avoided this like the plague. It seemed to be a specifically black tribal thing.

...I think that is a fair rebuttal. Even accounting for the close alliance between Black tribe and Blue Tribe, they really are not synonyms. Mayor Pete's poll results recently were another point of a similar divergence.

It sounds like you do. In your view, was the right-wing reaction then comparable to the left-wing reaction we saw with Kirk, in terms of scale or significance or whatever axes seemed relevant to you?

It's similar to the segment of left-wingers claiming that they wouldn't kill Kirk but his dead is an outcome of his policies and behavior and/or that a lack of respect are the norms he himself lived by when others were in trouble (e.g. wrt Nancy Pelosi's husband). As I said the line is usually "he agreed with this, not me"

Doesn't work for anyone who outright says he should be killed for opposing the Civil Rights Act but most have more deniability.

In terms of scale of course it isn't similar. But then, it's hard to think of a similarly prominent media figure on the Left being killed or even coming as close as Trump. Kirk is basically as high as it goes for RW influencers. Given the use of Karmelo Anthony (that news is significantly more avoidable than Kirk or Luigi I think) I figured scale wasn't the sina qua non

In your view, was the right-wing reaction then comparable to the left-wing reaction we saw with Kirk, in terms of scale or significance or whatever axes seemed relevant to you?

I was not there, but here’s some examples of the reaction on the right to Ryan Carson: The Voice of Thy Brother’s Blood - REVEALED: Murdered leftist activist Ryan Carson has history of celebrating death, violence towards conservatives

I will leave it up to the reader whether this is comparable to the reaction on the left to Charlie Kirk’s death, such as this article: The World Is a Better Place Without Charlie Kirk In It

I've seen rightwingers talk about Carson, as a volunteer for the Leopards Eating Faces Party. No real sympathy for him, and a great deal of contempt for his fellow volunteer girlfriend that veered into exaggerating her own sins (No, she did not call for the release of the murderer and instead cooperated with the police to prosecute him. OTOH, she is a Zohran supporters, so she kind of is with extra steps.)

The rhetoric from the right is vaguely comparable to the people just bashing Kirk for supporting the 2nd, but knowledge of the case is still pretty limited.

There also is just a difference between someone being randomly murdered (or dying of natural causes) and politically assassinated - people spitting on Rush Limbaugh's grave did not have the same connotations as people spitting on Kirk's do.

Yes, fair point.

Ryan Carson

This is actually a solid counterpoint. I had forgotten about this guy, and I am somewhat ashamed to admit that I was not exactly sad when he died. I can't remember posting anything about him online, and I definitely didn't take to Facebook, but it's quite possible I made some insensitive remark about him in one of my previous accounts.

It's a bad example because the right had nothing to do with his death at all. His death was ironically viewed precisely because the right's preferred policies might actually have saved him.

In terms of people celebrating political opponents' deaths, it does have something to do with it. I am moderately right leaning, and I remember how I felt when Carson was killed. The reaction on the right wasn't nearly as widespread as the Kirk shooting was on the left, but there undoubtedly was some thinly veiled rejoicing occurring on the right. The scale of it though was not the same as Kirk's death from what I remember. If you want to redirect the focus of his death to it being about policy and who killed him then ok, I'd probably agree, but that's not what my comment was talking about.

To this day right wingers on Twitter still bring up the image of him trying to run and tripping on the bench right before he was stabbed as a sort of Always Sunny meme. A lot of them took a similar line that leftists took with Kirk - "I don't agree with this but he did".

If Charlie Kirk was killed by a spray and pray tactic taken up by some switch modified AR-15 this might be a valid comparison along the lines of, "this was his stupid prize for playing the stupid game of supporting the 2nd Amendment," but this was nothing like that. None of the laws Kirk opposed would have saved his life even with perfect implementation.

This is a routine problem of people pretending non-like things are like, or like things are non-like. Its silly.

If there's an asymmetry with views on death, it's a difference between right and left wing attitudes to groups vs individuals. The left is interested in systems and groups of people, so things like Studio Ghiblifying a crying immigrant or whatever read as incredibly callous to them. Such a post is read by them as 'I'm totally unaffected by migrant pain, even if hundreds of millions of them are suffering I don't care even slightly'. However when it's an individual they don't like or an individual member of a group they don't feel well disposed to, they are way less empathetic. The right conversely are sometimes quite proud of showing good manners in person but will say absolutely awful things about groups apparently without even having the inkling that another person might be upset on behalf of their group.

Presumably a leftist similar in some way to Charlie Kirk has been killed at some point in the last ten years (and if not, is that an interesting datapoint in its own right?).

There indeed was such an intentional hit-and-run in Portland in 2019, although it was supposedly not politically motivated.

The killer seems to have been a cipher -- aside from mention of an argument at a bar that happened beforehand, I can't find any claim of a motive, political or otherwise. Only other interesting thing is he may have been a rapist as well.

I found one pseudonymous right-winger dancing on this grave on X... in 2022.

A lot of right-wingers very publicly celebrated that death on social media.

It was definitely not just right wingers. The fear of another 9/11 hung over large urban areas for a long time and there was more than a little celebration in New York and Hollywood (Zero Dark Thirty). Especially since President Obama was the one that did it.

If the Lefty version of Kirk was killed in similar fashion, a lot of rightwingers would also be gleefully dancing on the grave. (Especially right now, when the risk of leftwing cancellation is the lowest it has been in a very long time.)

I doubt this. First of all, there is a reason there is no leftwing version of Kirk, which is because lefty influence is distributed. If someone kills all the presidents of the Ivy League + AOC + the NYT editorial board, that is a lot of killing to get to the kind of impact that one bullet achieved here.

Secondly, we've seem Republican reactions to violence, and they are not positive. At worst you can sometimes see things being joke-worthy and the right making some crude jokes, like the Paul Pelosi homosexual prostitute situation.

If Hasan Piker gets killed tomorrow you think it will be well-behaved reactions in general from the Right?

I just don't understand a model of today's right that isn't crass.

If Hasan Piker gets killed tomorrow you think it will be well-behaved reactions in general from the Right?

Yes. You will get nothing like the sadistic glee that came from the left. The most you'll get in terms of similarity will be "wait, seriously, we're doing it for this guy?" if the left chooses to go full national mourning over it, the way the right did for Kirk (and even then I'm not sure, because Hassan Piker is a way better choice for a saint than George Floyd was).

No one knows or cares who that guy is. Maybe some frogs would be rude about it. Fox News certainly won't be platforming people who speculate he was killed by his own fan celebrating.

If he's executed at an "Appalachian outreach" event there'd be somber reaction from the right. Perhaps some jokes if he gets killed ironically. Like by a Palestinian

If Hasan Piker gets killed tomorrow you think it will be well-behaved reactions in general from the Right?

Mostly "Who?"

More seriously, your model is not evidence.

Buddy why are you conflating a hypothetical with evidence? Obviously my model is not “evidence” and I never claimed it was.

My evidence that the American Right would not act with restraint were the tables turned is that it’s the kind of people who liked Rush Limbaugh and elected Donald Trump and mocked Paul Pelosi.

Propriety and restraint is certainly not a standard part of the MAGA package and it’s remarkable to me that such an obvious fact is being contested, as if the Left is full of hateful hooligans and the Right is just peaceful folk who mind their own business.

If you think it so self-evident, it should be trivial to point to the evidence. You mentioned the mockery of Paul Pelosi. In what ways was this comparable to what we've seen with Kirk's murder? Was it similarly widespread? Was it similarly vicious? Are the incidents themselves comparable? Where the people engaging in the mockery comparable?

I definately will argue that the left is full of hateful hooligans, because they have repeatedly engaged in widespread celebration of ideological murders and attempted murders committed by their percieved allies. Luigi's trial is going on right now in New York, and there are large numbers of people celebrating his tactical legal victories in court.

I have not seen the right do that. If you think you have seen the right do that, please point to what you're seeing and explain why you think it is equivalent.

Luigi's trial is going on right now in New York, and there are large numbers of people celebrating his tactical legal victories in court.

Do note that as Ben Shapiro found out, that large number of working class right wingers are also pretty much on board with Luigi. It is not a right/left issue it's a working class issue. Ben's video (which he even had to change the title on) got 8.5K likes and some 45K dislikes, on his own channel. Very different than his usual ratios. I think Charlie Kirk had a similar thing with his comments but given all the noise about his murder I can't find that right now.

Check the comments about it if you don't believe me. That's why Luigi is getting so much support because struggling with health insurance is a bi-partisan activity.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=uJC_2zh21YI

Some excerpts (and this after they start deleting negative comments, but obviously gave up as their were so many).

My dad has voted Republican in every local, state, and federal election since I was born in the 1980s. I was with him when this news came out and he said “about time”. Read the room, Ben.

Ben, you're rich. Enough. Stop. You do not experience the implications of what denial of healthcare means for poor Americans.

I have never seen the left and the right be so united since 9/11,

Bro’s getting roasted here for defending a scam health insurance CEO. Did Ben actually think we would take his side?

Voted trump 3 times in a row and laughed my ass off at the news This isnt a left or right thing, its a populism vs establishment thing. You can't complain about the government wasting the tax dollars we put in, and then turn a blind eye to insurance companies denying necessary care from a pool we pay into. It's the same thing, and it's been happening for too long

Ben you're waayyyy out of touch. "Just don't choose United healthcare" " just don't work for an employer that has United healthcare". is the same thing as saying. " Just don't be poor" "just don't struggle in life" its your choice.... It is not because the reality is I have to pay bills in order to survive!!! I cannot just pick my health insurance!

I'm MAGA, I guess I'm a leftist now

So odd when you say ''the left celebrates'' but i've seen legit everyone laugh at this CEOs death since we've all been fucked over by health insurance, It really shows how out of touch you are with blue collar workers who pay for insurance for years then don't get anything since even a minor health issue can get you denied.

Conservative California here, this is not a left or right issue but every varied political ideology coming together celebrating the victorious policy made from the people and not the ruling class.

It’s not only the left dude, all my coworkers voted for trump and reposted artwork of the shooter in their Twitter.

I’m not going to lie. I don’t feel bad for this guy and I’m as conservative as it gets. I get it’s not all him by any means and he didn’t create the system. But they’ve denied sooooo many claims for greed. While yours or my mother could have passed because of it. This was overdue. Sorry for his children and wife. But these insurance companies are the worst of the worst. If you feel pity you either haven’t researched the issue. Or you’re privileged and never had to worry about healthcare. Watch your mother die before your eyes because an insurance company deemed her dispensable to their bottom line. This is the result sorry not sorry

Not Left yet I Celebrate !

Ben, I’m an avid right winger and this is just a bad take. This is a working class issue! It’s not just the left.

Im a conservative and I completely agree with the Democrats on this one the healthcare system in our country is a disgrace and the fact that luigi killed a mass murderer is not a form of terrorism Just because the wealthy say so

The left? I'm a 3 time Trump voter and I'm celebrating

Idk, I’m a Trump voter and I’m not sad about him dying. Our health insurance in the U.S. is dangerously greedy, resulting in many deaths.

Im on the right and admire Luigi. Media wants us all separated. I just unsubscribed. My grandmother was tortured byUnited all the way as she died. She was Republican too.

Not Ben accidentally uniting us 💀

And so on and so forth.

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Please unfilter the post.

Paul Pelosi was attacked and it was very common to propagate a false narrative about it being a relationship issue and jokes were rampant. Very bad taste. Seems suggestive of the Right’s attitude toward violence against its political opponents.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-11-01/editorial-gop-responds-to-pelosi-attack-with-cruel-baseless-jokes-its-shameful

You’re hilariously trying to establish a required level of evidence that must be equal, instead of being able to extrapolate from incomplete evidence. The counterpart of this would be for me to point out you can’t prove the negative if an exact case on the other side has not yet happened. I suggest you try reasoning from impartial evidence instead of trying to incorrectly try to win a logical argument.

Here’s an interesting fact that turned out to be a bit predictive:

The most recent December 2021 poll by Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe found increased justifications of violence from the left: 21% of Democrats (and 16% of Republicans) thought punching members of the other party was justified, while 13% of Democrats (and 9% of Republicans) justified killing at least some members of the other party.

https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2022/03/the-rise-in-political-violence-in-the-united-states-and-damage-to-our-democracy

Also there’s the fun phenomenon of GOP officials fearing right wing violence.

https://www.pbs.org/weta/washingtonweek/video/2025/04/retaliation-is-real-why-republicans-in-congress-wont-stand-up-to-trump

https://apnews.com/article/house-speaker-jim-jordan-threats-54eeecef0188edfcb9903e45019f190f#

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/07/politics/threats-us-public-officials-democracy-invs

I don’t believe this is common among Democrats.

So yeah, I think it’s preposterous to pretend that the present American Right doesn’t have a political violence problem, even if it’s not exactly the same or as large as what we are seeing from the Left re: Kirk.

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There aren't any hardcore libs in my filter bubble. There's democrats, sure, but of moderate factions who have boring, coalition politics reasons for supporting democrats. No progressive activists, no one pro-trans, none of that.

I don't hate these people and want them dead, although I suppose there are some progressive-approved behaviors I think should be a crime. I don't believe they're any different- yes they want to take my guns away but they don't particularly want to hurt me, even if they might out of ignorance and stupidity. Oppressing people is a lot of work and it seems like not how people are.

You need to up your game, I know a hardcore lib and we occasionally swap jabs over discord about the latest shitstorm, it's very sportsman like.

I find myself looking back on the history of YouTube anti-woke politics in light of the whole Charlie Kirk thing. Because I never really knew or cared who Charlie Kirk was, and my first exposure to him led to a reaction of "oh this is just Stephen Crowder but as a smug Christian."

This led me to reflect on the declining quality of human being in the...words fail me. Alt media? Internet political influencers?

I have a lot of nostalgia for The SkepticsTM and that entire era of YouTube talking head. (Often not even a head, just an avatar pic.) Now whenever I fish around for that level of quality, it simply isn't to be found. We are all infected. We are all dumber than we used to be.

Some of this is downstream of the YouTube algorithm in the sense that it incentivized shorter more quickly-produced low-effort content. Back in the day people used to make video essays, or cringe compilations. If they did something live, it was a Hangout, an informal podcast involving people who sure look like genuine friends having genuine discussions. Often with no live video feed. These days it appears to be some guy pontificating off the top of his head, repeating himself often, talking in circles. Kyle Kulinski now does the same thing that Tim pool was doing a few years ago. Hassan Piker appears to just be an LA nepo-baby himbo socialite, and he's very much a step down from whatever Vaush is/was, who was in turn a step down from Chapo Trap House (these are all things I dislike, but I note the decline in quality).

I've also noticed the trad motive decay. Originally, "based" was a punchline and no one pretended to actually be socially conservative, in the same way that Marilyn Manson isn't actually a Satanist, all the upside-down crosses are just there to trigger the normies. I suppose this shouldn't be surprising; the original anti-woke thesis was "look I'm liberal/democrat just like you, but you're so smug and obnoxious and factually wrong I find myself becoming conservative just to spite you."

(That was the original troll op: trying to make the point that the other party is so thin-skinned, fragile and unreasonable that they'll very predictably flip their shit over "it's okay to be white.")

In particular, Twitch seems to be full of fucking townies. No one talks philosophy or has a dignified intellectual persona. The era of Sargon, Dr Layman, Dev, Kraut, and Vee shooting the shit as genuine friends is long over, it's just influencers chasing clout all the way down now.

TL;DR: Asmongold is a shittier Sargon, and current-year Carl is also a shitty caricature of himself.

This is a rambling drunken phonepost, so forgive me. I mourn for the lost Internet of yesteryear. The only place on YouTube I see anything like that old level of genuine quality is EFAP.

...

Grading on the curve of being a leftist podcaster/streamer I think Vaush is quality. He is legitimately funny and doesn't give off the kind of feminine energy that typically drives men away from the left.

It was fun watching him tee-off on the snowflakes in his chat about trying to get Jesse Singal banned from Bluesky for... something I guess?

He is legitimately funny but in part because he comes up with whole new levels of reddit: argumentum ad Marvel Movie for instance.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kVuqXQYwD30

So strange that Chapo Trap House is popular. I tried listening to a couple episodes and it is egregiously bad in every aspect.

I could honestly never get into it either and I was very sympathetic towards that side of the Left. I think I did hear one full episode on Robin DiAngelo.

Going off that and my general sense of that side of the left: it all seems to be about feeding a demographic left behind by to the longhousing/PMCing of the Democratic party after the Hillary/Bernie fight, combined with a deeper resentment about the state of the economy from the downwardly mobile middle class types who read enough theory to be able to make it a socialist issue.

Now that you see that it is only shadows on the wall, get out of the cave! Sorry the tragedy is entertainment and you just found out that it isn't entertaining. None of these talking heads are there to inform you or improve your life, they are there to entertain you, to distract you and to passivize you while the future is being stolen by subscriptions.

Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?

Maybe Mark Klein?

I'm not sure what would have been an equivalent excess to blow the whistle about before the Bush administration, just from a technical perspective.

So as long as the internet was a niche thing you could be comfortably detached and ironic. I miss it too.

But the normie masses came and took everything seriously. It basically became a even lamer and gayer form of the real world.

Nowadays, there's no distinction between real life and the internet, and that hasn't been to the benefit of either.

The old soul of the internet is dead, or if it is still alive, it is only in little isolate pockets in communities too small to be relevant. Alas.

As a thought experiment, the Internet in some ways looks like large-scale direct democracy (literally upvotes). Beyond the tractability questions of direct democracy a few centuries ago, the form of government is also generally acknowledged to suffer from known issues like tyranny of the majority, or even by particularly motivated minorities. Which seems a lot like what we see going wrong in online culture, in my opinion.

Jordan Peterson is another example of steep decline in quality.

Even people who comment in writing have seen decline. For example, Scott himself. I don't mean to say he's bad now, or that his stepping back from the spotlight wasn't justified or even wise. But nonetheless, AstralCodexTen is no SlateStarCodex.

But further, I think there's a reason for the decline in good commentary: there is a deep crisis of faith in western institutions. I don't want to say "We all just need to clap our hands for Tinkerbell and believe!" because I believe this loss of faith is, at least to some extent, justified. Take the Epstein files. Half of Trump's cabinet made numerous public statements about releasing these files and clearing everything up for the public, only to backpeddle in the most pants-on-head, clown-world fashion once they came into office. And let me not mince words about what popular perception is about the Epstein affair: people believe this is Israel blackmailing US politicians, quite likely including Trump himself (who is almost daily seen with Epstein's next-door neighbor, Howard Lutnick).

And it's not just the Epstein files. Everything is suffering this same crisis of faith. Take the HHS with RFK Jr.. Or the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Or even the Federal Reserve itself. Across all these institutions, we see accusations of at best policy motivated by partisan politics, if not outright criminal fraud.

Even areas that should be free of this sort of thing are not. For example, Larry Summers says inflation was crazy high in the early 2020s, we just changed the metric, while CATO says this is uninformed madness and you should definitely not pay attention to Larry Summers. Let me remind you, Summers is not a WoW streamer blabbering about a topic he knows nothing about; this is the former president of Harvard, with a PhD in economics, who has been a top-level advisor to multiple administrations on this very matter.

Finally, take the gorilla in the room: immigration. Third-world immigration is no longer perceived as a matter of "oh, there's some people who just wanted a better life, and some people think we should let more in, and some people think fewer." That's... soooo 2010s. No, today at best the contention is "you are importing people with the intent that they will influence elections by one day voting for you", and even that's the nice right-wing position; the bad-boy position is "there are people who are outright trying to replace the native demographics." These are no longer fringe positions confined to obscure image boards. This is now mainstream. And the tacit question making the air so thick one can scarcely inhale is: "and what is going to be done about it?"

So I ask you, how exactly is someone supposed to give measured, insightful commentary about this? Go ahead, read Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature. Sound like fitting commentary today, with Ukraine and Gaza all over your feed? Well, that's why we don't have commentary like that anymore.

only to backpeddle in the most pants-on-head, clown-world fashion once they came into office

It fascinated me to see some here start backpedaling before I heard the admin do so.

The weirdest thing is the administration brought this on themselves. It's not like Epstein was a grassroots thing that they were forced to confront. It is specifically their making noise about it during the campaign that revived interest in the affair in the first place. Keep in mind Epstein died during Trump's first term, and yet somehow the fanfare then was minimal compared to what we see now. Why would they drum up attention about it, only to backpeddle? I mean, they did the same thing with auditing the Federal Reserve and Fort Knox. And annexing Canada. And Greenland.

Like what is sincere analysis of this stuff even supposed to look like? Because the most charitable interpretation I can give is "Ah, don't worry about it, they just say dumb shit for attention," which should already be a sharp indictment of officials entrusted with enacting national policy, and even that's not what I really believe.

The new generation has nowhere left to discuss politics or philosophy in a way that actually encourages discursive skills. Forum culture is dead; Reddit’s new UI prevents longterm discussion by hiding all replies automatically and showing few comments + algorithm promotes short form content + mod culture promotes consensus with severity. Facebook / YT have comment UIs that discourage long discourse by making it impossible to keep track. Discord is either too localized or too populous for long arguments. Three more things work against the youth: (1) the popularity of Hip Hop culture with its proud disdain of any kind of thinking, making middle class Whites more likely to respond with an emoji or a SYBAU when confronted with an argument. (2) The increase in economic and academic competition, meaning kids have less time discuss freely and for fun. (3) The increase in addicting content online, sapping attention.

I could live with YouTube comments if they didn't randomly get deleted by the algorithm.

It would be a much more worthwhile post to delve into why these YouTube 'philosophers' of yesteryear stopped doing what they were doing.

One thing to note would be that almost half of these creators stopped doing what they were doing because of altercations with voices that were further to the right.

Such as Kraut organizing a secret discord server to finally lift the veil on scientific racism once and for all, and in the process torching every single 'liberal' ethos one can think of. Down to meticulously deleting every single negative comment on the videos he made on the topic. Videos that were full of errors, both factual and conceptual, that left one wondering how on earth this man ever captured anyone's ear.

Or Sargon, who championed the freedom of speech of rape jokes all the way to national television in the name of an already established political party. At a time where most right of center minds were fixed firmly on the mass rape of young British girls at the hands of immigrants. Becoming publicly known as 'UKIP rape joke man'. A mass rape that Sargon claimed was always going to happen regardless of immigration. As if there was some invisible hand in the sky that doled out rape to meet a quota. I think it's fair to say Carl Benjamin has moved on to much greener pastures with traditionalism rather than holding on to his half baked 'Liberalist' philosophy.

To that extent it's hard to understand how most of these guys ever got anywhere outside of just being loud voices that spoke against feminism in an appealing accent (or not, Vee and Layman sound terrible). But considering how obviously out of depth they were when it came to anything that wasn't a howling feminist, I think we are better for them being gone. Hell, maybe they didn't even do anti-feminism all that well either. How would one know?

Regardless, Asmongold does the slop better, and there are plenty of right wing voices that do genuine political content better. I don't miss the awful political commentary at all, which was only designed to tactfully place somewhere safe from the 'extreme right' and the 'lunatic left'. Without ever saying or believing anything relevant or real.

No one talks philosophy or has a dignified intellectual persona.

The number of living humans who are actually interested in "talking philosophy" is minuscule. Even among people who are otherwise highly intelligent and capable. Even TheMotte these days is more interested in the concrete play-by-play of current events than anything theoretical. (Although frankly, this is probably not too different from the historical norm on TheMotte. Current events have always dominated the discussion. We went through an anomalously philosophical period around 2022-2023 due to the advent of AI, and since then have regressed to the mean.)

buried

I didn't think the motte hide comments with lots of downvotes the way reddit does. Does this mean something else?

Don’t express the virtues of collectivism.

That's a natural bias in any community of free-thinkers.

Don’t say anything critical of Zelensky.

The Motte on average is much more critical of Ukraine in general and Zelensky in particular than your average subreddit.

Don’t say anything critical of Zelensky.

All those but are bullshit but I'll pick this one out to prove you wrong cause whenever am I gonna get a chance to talk about this again?

I think zelensky is a fucking moron prosecuting the war entirely wrong for political reasons. He dismissed his best commander because he was getting too popular and might defeat him in the next election. He replaced him with an unpopular commander that wouldn't threaten his political career, problem being the reason this new commander isn't a political threat is because he's incompetent. He keeps pointlessly throwing his best troops into meatgrinders in order to achieve a "win" which he believes ukraine desperately needs but he never explains what good any of these "wins" would do even if they ever materialized. Zelensky has put his own political career ahead of the life of his own country. I think ukraine would be much better off if zaluzhnyi was president rather than zelensky.

Don’t express the virtues of collectivism. Don’t criticize the preference for libertarianism or small government. Don’t say anything critical of Zelensky. Don’t doubt the inherent virtue of unnamed people.

What? I don't know what you mean by the last one, but I disagree with all the other ones, and I'm pretty sure I could write something doing all thr things you're telling people not to, and get lots of updoots.

I'm not questioning a bias existing, but you're getting in comically wrong.

Your most downvoted comment ever was this one, which as far as I can tell is trying to say that intelligence is a bad trait because being intelligent increases your ability to do things and some of those things are bad? Not really sure, some of the context is deleted comments.

Your second most downvoted comment ever is the comment I'm replying to right now, complaining that people downvote you for bad reasons.

It does seem like your takes on Ukraine in particular don't land with this audience. Aside from that it seems like you mostly get downvoted when you make low-effort dunks. And you just genuinely don't have that many downvoted comments.

All that said it seems like you genuinely do have different perspectives. I don't know that we have very many people who are fully immersed in Russian culture on here. I bet a lot of your stuff would land better if you expanded a bit on the things that seem obvious to you but which the rest of the people here seem not to be taking into account, particularly the things where mottizens are pushing for policies where there's common-knowledge russian history of how that went horribly wrong.

I'm not sure if any of the pro-Ukraine posters are particularly committed to Zelensky the Man, unless he's meant to symbolize the entire Ukrainian cause here.

...plenty of us have, indeed, "stepped outside of the pro-US-centric narrative", ie. considered the arguments of the pro-Russian side and their interpretations of the various events, and found them, to put it mildly, wanting.

The number of living humans who are actually interested in "talking philosophy" is minuscule. Even among people who are otherwise highly intelligent and capable.

And that's for a good reason. Philosophy is by and large pointless intellectual wankery with anything real world applicable either few and far between or already invented centuries or millennia ago.

It's a bit like the number of living humans interesting in talking math except even higher mathematics has plenty of useful or even revolutionary real world applications.

The best things in life are pointless.

Masturbation is pointless too, but damn if it doesn't feel good.

Much like masturbation, I'd be much happier if philosophers kept it to themselves.

Have you ever been in any "philosophy" circle? It quickly becomes unreadable because every single person will come up with their own definition for already defined words to match one of their theories, and then will use them in concert to try to make their thesis a mathematical proof. You end up with sentences that look like plain English, but are completely unintelligible. This is the antithesis of good communication and discussion.

I'd be much happier if philosophers kept it to themselves.

There are plenty of other types of academics (in both STEM and the humanities) who are also doing work that has roughly the same level of impact on you and your life (~zero). Philosophers don't seem to be much different from those guys. Why single philosophy out for such ire?

Have you ever been in any "philosophy" circle?

Several (both online and irl).

It quickly becomes unreadable because every single person will come up with their own definition for already defined words to match one of their theories, and then will use them in concert to try to make their thesis a mathematical proof.

I don't believe I've ever seen anyone actually do this. I can imagine what it would look like, but I've never actually encountered it. The greatest and most common danger is that you run into people who are just kind of dumb and don't have anything interesting to say. But that happens in everything, not just philosophy.

There are a number of papers in the analytic philosophy literature that try to present themselves as having achieved a "mathematical" level of rigor. Maybe this is what you're talking about. But you're incorrect to say that those papers are "unintelligible". Usually it's just a matter of understanding how the key terms are defined; hopefully the author will define terms that they're using in an unusual or idiosyncratic way, and if they don't, it's probably because they assume that you already know the definition of the term based on prior experience with other relevant literature (physicists do not use the word "work" in the way that people do in ordinary conversation, but that doesn't mean they're obligated to define it for you every time they use "work" in the physics-sense).

I would love to talk about theory, but I'm not sure interesting discussions of theory are available. The overwhelming amount of theory has always been apologetics - start with a desired bottom line, derived from vibes which were absorbed from or imposed by the environment, and reason backwards until a good theory that just so happens to prove the bottom line (or, "surprisingly", more of the bottom line than anyone dared to ask for before) is formed. I don't see how this could be avoided structurally - unlike scientific theories, philosophical theories have no ground truth to answer to, so there is no competitive advantage forward reasoning conveys. Even so, this could be fine for a discussion environment, as even if no individual theory-builder ever changed their mind due to theoretising, a number of theory-builders with diverse bottom lines could compete over theory-consumers on the elegance of their apologetics, and even on the aesthetic appeal of the bottom line that they already were living. However, this requires an actually diverse set of people willing to theoretise; and neither society at large, nor this forum in particular, has done anything to rein in the forces that compel people to just assimilate to one or another existing bottom line rather than hold onto their idiosyncrasies alone and weather hostility from all. As a result, the only innovation in theory we would be getting is different contortions reaching either a conclusion that we need between 1 and 50 Comrade Trumps, or 1 and 50 Comrade Hitlers, or maybe very rarely between 1 and 50 Comrade Mills.

The overwhelming amount of theory has always been apologetics - start with a desired bottom line, derived from vibes which were absorbed from or imposed by the environment, and reason backwards until a good theory that just so happens to prove the bottom line

Sure. But, what else is there to do but press onward anyway?

In order to get an actual understanding of the Culture War, which is this forum's raison d'être, you have to theorize about the psychological and material motivations of different factions and individuals, you have to produce a unified narrative of historical causes, you have to take an accounting of the ethics and implied metaphysics of different positions, you have to have some notion of the aims of political activity in general... in short, you have to do philosophy.

Without a theoretical account of the Culture War and its constitutive elements, the forum is reduced to simply giving a factual account of current events, along with perhaps some strategizing and some sentimental commiserating with people who are on the same "side" as you. In other words, you'd just be fumbling about in the dark without any understanding of what's going on. A mere subject of historical forces rather than someone who might hope to know them.

unlike scientific theories

Science is not exempt from politics and emotion. Otherwise, empirical research into race and sex differences, or even just IQ, wouldn't be as touchy as it is. Researchers get invested in their own theories all the time even when there's no overt political content, "science advances one funeral at a time", etc.

philosophical theories have no ground truth to answer to

We just went over this. It certainly seems to be the case that philosophical claims are either true or false, just like most of the other ordinary types of claims that we're familiar with. MTF transsexuals are either women, or they aren't. There are either mind-independent ethical facts, or there aren't. There is either at least one conscious entity, or there isn't. The ground truth that these claims answer to is the same ground truth that everything else answers to: the facts of reality.

Of course, there have been many attempts throughout the history of philosophy to show that individual philosophical questions or classes of questions are in fact meaningless (in the neither-true-nor-false sense), contrary to initial appearances. But these types of arguments too depend on their own non-trivial assertions about reality.

However, this requires an actually diverse set of people willing to theoretise; and neither society at large, nor this forum in particular, has done anything to rein in the forces that compel people to just assimilate to one or another existing bottom line rather than hold onto their idiosyncrasies alone and weather hostility from all.

It's true, our present lack of intellectual diversity isn't really conducive to good discussion. But we still have substantial disagreements on this forum regarding AI, race and immigration, the ethics of sexuality, etc.

MTF transsexuals are either women, or they aren't.

This seems like the worst possible example - “Are transwomen women?” seems to be a question where 90% or the disagreement about the meaning of the word “woman” and only 10% about ground truth.

If you exclude people who believe in intrinsically gendered souls (for whom the question, “Can female souls be incarnated in male bodies?” is meaningful even if the correct answer is unknowable with mortal technology) I don’t think you would get any disagreement on questions like “Does Caitlin Jenner have testicles?” or “Does Caitlin Jenner have a considered, sincere belief that she is supposed to be a woman?”

This seems like the worst possible example - “Are transwomen women?” seems to be a question where 90% or the disagreement about the meaning of the word “woman” and only 10% about ground truth.

How is the meaning of the word "woman" separate from the ground truth? The argument of the gender critical side is that the trans definition of woman is simply incoherent and anything close to the traditional definition simply returns false for the TWAW claim.

If anything, the idea that these things can be split has been mercifully killed by trans activists themselves: they claim some sort of sharp distinction but in practice what's happened is that anyone claiming the right to the term "woman" has at least a claim on all female privileges and rights no matter how self-evidently absurd it is.

So either the definition of trans is self-evidently incoherent or it's making a claim about the underlying facts (e.g. trans-identifying males are closer to females in their offending patterns in prison).

The trans-inclusive definition of "woman" is self-evidently incoherent. But pointing that out is an argument about the meaning of words, not about what Caitlyn Jenner is.

I don’t think you would get any disagreement on questions like “Does Caitlin Jenner have testicles?” or “Does Caitlin Jenner have a considered, sincere belief that she is supposed to be a woman?”

Oh but you would!

Mereological nihilists deny the existence of testicles because they deny the existence of compound physical objects in general (often because of the same Sorites-style arguments that people use to attack conservative ontologies of gender in the first place).

Eliminative materialists deny the existence of beliefs, so they would deny that anyone believes that they are a man or a woman.

So, it turns out to be rather difficult to cleanly divide sentences into two groups of "these are the nice empirical truths that we can be certain of" and "these are the nonsensical philosophical claims that just come down to verbal disputes", because it turns out that almost every sentence you can think of is ultimately the subject of philosophical disagreement.

If you think there is a ground truth of the matter over whether testicles and beliefs exist, in spite of the philosophical disagreement concerning their existence, then it's not clear why you wouldn't think that there is a ground truth of the matter over whether women exist too (along with, presumably, some sort of criteria for determining whether an entity counts as a woman or not).

Mereological nihilists... deny the existence of compound physical objects

Eliminative materialists deny the existence of beliefs,

Both of which are extreme minority views held by a tiny number of people that even other philosophers mostly think are wankers.

Mereological nihilists deny the existence of testicles because they deny the existence of compound physical objects in general... Eliminative materialists deny the existence of beliefs, so they would deny that anyone believes that they are a man or a woman....

... and mereological nihilists and eliminative materialists have negligible relevance to any actually existing argument about this subject. Certainly below the lizardman constant.

"I don't think you would get any disagreement on" doesn't mean "literally 0.0000 percent disagreement".

This seems like the worst possible example - “Are transwomen women?” seems to be a question where 90% or the disagreement about the meaning of the word “woman” and only 10% about ground truth.

Its not really a disagreement about the meaning of the word "woman" because if it was, the trans movement would have a consistent and coherent answer to the WIAW question.

And you just refuted the transactivist point of view by making an obviously correct argument about the meaning of words.

Science is not exempt from politics and emotion. Otherwise, empirical research into race and sex differences, or even just IQ, wouldn't be as touchy as it is.

They're not "touchy", there's just an effort to censor one (or more) side. Maybe because there is in fact a fact of the matter one can appeal to.

The claim was not that the process of science cannot be corrupted. The claim was that there's at least some theoretical yardstick some evidence that could be offered on many issues or some prediction that could be validated. The people who do things like try to stop genetic data being available for intelligence research or studies being done on smoking or gun deaths aren't evidence for the other side, they are proof for the claim: both sides seem to have some sense of where the confirming or disconfirming evidence is, one side has simply decided to defect.

And nothing can really eliminate the risk of defection so it's hardly damning for science that some do.

Maybe because there is in fact a fact of the matter one can appeal to.

There is (seemingly) no (obvious) empirical fact that will settle the debate over whether MTF transsexuals are women, and yet the claim "Caitlin Jenner is still a man" would be censured very aggressively in lefty spaces.

The same goes for religious claims, ethical claims, all sorts of claims for which no empirical verification is possible.

The claim was that there's at least some theoretical yardstick some evidence that could be offered on many issues or some prediction that could be validated.

I previously argued that a sentence need not be empirically verifiable in order to be meaningful or truth-apt in general. So, if you're trying to assert that "being able to answer to a ground truth" just is the same as "being empirically verifiable", I would reject that.

The same goes for religious claims, ethical claims, all sorts of claims for which no empirical verification is possible.

I think there's a difference between censoring speech made for claims that we cannot really settle beyond raw power or tolerance and censoring research that theoretically can settle those claims. It leads to a strange agreement between the censor and their victim on the stakes in a way that doesn't have to be true in other case.

Maybe Frankfurt's distinction between lying and bullshit - lying at least acknowledges the concept of truth even as you point people away from it, bullshit denies that the truth is meaningful in the first place.

Yes, statements can be truth-apt without being empirically verifiable in practice. OrAnd there are cases where the stakes or what would settle the issue are themselves in doubt. In which case there's nothing for it but philosophy I suppose , since that's the role it can maintain in a world where science is ascendant.

I think a lot of the actual culture war debates do not escape empiricism in practice though, even if people try to insist that it's just a matter of differing definitions floating in the ether.

I would love to talk about theory, but I'm not sure interesting discussions of theory are available.

I do find myself thinking about abstract political questions (usually steeped down from current issues, but abstracted from the immediate contextual details) from time to time. Maybe I need to start a list and write a couple of paragraphs to make a top-level post occasionally.

Dewit.

I for my part would certainly appreciate such a post.

Can I just say I think you're just factually wrong about all of this.

First, I'm not sure if this 'Charlie Kirk was apparently just a shock jockey' shtick is genuine ignorance or some kind of bit, but for instance here's the Vice President of the United States taking over his long-form podcast. I honestly can't understand people who comment 'who is this guy' or 'he doesn't seem important' without doing any basic research. He was probably the most important political operative on the right, supposedly one of maybe three people who had the President's ear, and likely also won the election for Trump by being the most significant organizer of Republican's ground game. But instead you watch a couple of TikToks and conclude he's "just Stephen Crowder but as a smug Christian". Don't you have any curiosity at all?

On the idea that there's no long-form content on Youtube anymore, I have to imagine you're just not looking. That's basically all I watch! In fairness, the main topics I follow are religion, various political channels, and some misc nerdy topics (All videos I've watched in the last week). So you may be correct that in the topics you're specifically interested in there's no long-form content anymore, but I kind of severely doubt it.

Yeah I’m literally watching a high quality two hour documentary on the conquest of Greece by Rome while working out, right now. On YouTube. For free.

I think the lament says more about the OP than reality; long form and high quality content is broadly available it’s just increasingly not produced by the typical blue tribe producers.

If you’re deeply embedded in that cultural narrative, yeah sure it might feel like we are declining culturally. Lots of cultural institutions output have been horrific for the last 10-15 years.

But my access to high quality information and educational entertainment has never been better.

If you’re deeply embedded in that cultural narrative, yeah sure it might feel like we are declining culturally. Lots of cultural institutions output have been horrific for the last 10-15 years.

Is that something people really dispute these days? 2025 surely doesn’t seem like the high tide of high cultural achievement to me. I’d encourage people to give me their best vanity pitch for the western world today and among those who’ve answered me thus far, the results haven’t been very encouraging.

it’s just increasingly not produced by the typical blue tribe producers pushed out by enshittified recommendation algorithms trying to force feed everyone with the worst clickbait the mankind has ever seen.

I have to be extremely meticulous about deleting any watched video that even slightly deviates from my regular feed of photography and musicianship related videos as well as hit "hide" on any recommendation that deviates from those or my feed will inevitably be invaded by shit tier clickbait crap. Just the other day simply watching one astrophotography video was enough to make a bunch of "nobel winner warns about new voyager discovery" crap videos enter my feed.

The same way if I try to find anything with search, I have to add "before:2026" or within a page or two the results are polluted by clickbait shit.

The same way if I try to find anything with search, I have to add "before:2026" or within a page or two the results are polluted by clickbait shit.

Wait wtf why does this have any effect? Not doubting that it does, I just struggle to think of a mechanism.

Wild ass guess: It switches to a different internal search engine that's more classic style instead of "recommendation" based.

Maybe it's piggybacking on the cluster of people who use before:2022 or before:2021 to exclude AI SEO slop? Perhaps you have found a way to make yourself look like a sophisticated search user without actually invoking any sophisticated search functions.

I think you end up with MASSIVE selection effects over the medium term.

I want you to think, REALLY think of any 'popular' political streamer who is known to have a healthy home life, wife/husband, kids, no social drama bubbling up.

Probably hard to come up with more than, say, 3, right?

I'll give you Joe Rogan right up front but he's not primarily political, really, and he's now so untouchable that he isn't subject to 'normal' pressures by any means. Also Jesus Christ Joe Rogan is almost 60.

ShoeOnHead is maybe the only one I know who managed to escape the pits and make a fulfilling life for herself relatively unscathed... and she had some close calls.

Charlie Kirk was arguably one of the few who had his life together from the start and maintained his popularity while still being a solid family man. And see where that got him.

The fact is that people who have the time and inclination to do this as a 'career' are less likely to have their life together in other ways, and won't really be able to devote efforts to keeping their domestic life on track if they are serious about staying relevant. And if they are not already in a stable relationship when they get popular, think about the types of people they're now likely to attract by having their face out there next to extreme, controversial opinions. You're arguably selecting AGAINST good partners, maybe even permanently killing your chances of having one.

In short, the ones who will actually stick around (before crashing and burning spectacularly) are already likely to be the most unhinged/unbalanced, and the general pressure is towards more extremism to maintain relevance. The ones who are stable and manage to get a family going will probably fade out naturally when other things just become more important to them.

And you see what that leaves us with.

Consider that one of the secrets to maintaining relevance in the attention economy is to constantly be embroiled in drama and controversy, and thus people who have stable home lives are not only at a disadvantage is how much effort they can commit to the bit, but also having less 'natural' controversy disadvantages them.

And the filters for who gets popular in the first place are arguably worse too. Rather than a celebrity working their way up to prominence doing movies, TV shows, and having to get through a lot of gatekeepers, it is essentially some 'random' ordinary person getting elevated to stardom, and they probably have a lot of personal issues already, which won't get better with fame. Give these people tons of attention, adoring fans, sexual access to women, and the feeling of having power, and expect their worst traits to eventually manifest in full, and there is NO real limiting factor on them, nobody who can tell them 'rein it in bud' and actually enforce that edict.

I have a lot of nostalgia for The SkepticsTM and that entire era of YouTube talking head. (Often not even a head, just an avatar pic.) Now whenever I fish around for that level of quality, it simply isn't to be found.

I'm old enough to remember the time TheAmazingAtheist got in trouble for a leaked video of him sticking a banana up his ass. There are a lot of words one can use to describe that era of YouTube influencer. "Dignified" is not one of them.

What the fuck?

I’ll always remember the hilarious Encyclopedia Dramatica write-up on him and their dredging up of now deleted videos they recovered, of him making legal threats against them and other parties for criticizing his content.

Inspired by this tweet, a thought experiment:

Imagine a a country with a two-faction democratic political system. Faction A is anti-free speech. Faction B is (currently and historically) pro-free speech. In the current environment, both factions are approximately equally matched, with majorities in government seesawing between either faction much like in our own government.

Question: Should Faction B also become anti-free speech?

I am interested in both, “would this be good for the country?” and “would this be good for the party?”

Some arguments I would imagine to hear as part of Faction B’s internal debate over the subject:

  • “We’re suckers for letting Faction A speak when we control the government. They don’t let us speak when they are in charge, so why should we let them speak when we are in charge?”

  • “We already get half the vote letting Faction A speak openly in favor of their policies. Imagine how much better we could do in the next election if we didn’t let them speak!”

  • “When people aren’t worried about consequences for their speech it makes them feel more free. We get more votes when voters think we will make them feel more free than Faction A will.”

  • “It is important for us to have honest feedback on our policies and the state of the country. If we didn’t let Faction A speak we would be flying half-blind.”

In case you need me to spell-out the subtext: a lot of discussion has been treating the free speech issue as a bargaining chip, rather than a straightforwardly good policy. I’m not sure how much I buy that argument. It sounds a little convenient, like people are looking for excuses to descend into an orgy of vengeance.

Btw the subtext here where republicans are the principled free speech party is historically incorrect. There were a long series of religious right-motivated censoring movements in the 90s (and not to mention the Dixie Chicks and Freedom Fries stuff following 9/11). If you came of age during the late 2010s or early 2020s you won’t have the visceral memory of what this was like but I assure you this was a major thing at the time.

The only consistently free speech people have been the centrist democrats (Liberals who want higher taxes) and centrist republicans (Liberals who want lower taxes).

The Dixie chick's were never censored. Bush said they are free to speak their mind. Their label kept selling their albums, their concert tours continued, and major media gave them plenty of press to explain themselves and get their ideas out.

Some of their fans didn't buy more CDs. That's not censorship.

Renaming French fries to freedom fries in the congressional cafeteria isn't censorship either.

The Dixie chick's were never censored...Some of their fans didn't buy more CDs.

That's not how I remember it; I recall that 'Clear Channel' EDIT: 'Cumulus' radio removed them from the airwaves, many people sent them nasty letters, and one pundit told them to "shut up and sing" (how would that work, even?).

So a single struggling group of radio stations decided to stop playing the Dixie chick's. The big one (clear channel) did not.

Certainly not a situation like, e.g., Kanye getting cut off by his record label, radio, social media, streaming and his bank.

I'd definitely call the latter censorship, particularly given that we know the govt is often pressuring these "private" companies behind the scenes. (I am not aware of Bush doing that, though Obama + Biden definitely did.)

Rashomon is bullshit; there is an objective truth. Clear Channel did not ban the Dixie Chicks, though a different company called Cumulus Media took them off the air for 30 days. There was a congressional investigation into this.

2010s and 2020s Democrats are not 2000s and 1990s Democrats. If they were, we'd all be calling antifa a terrorist organization, and we'd all be putting tremendous pressure on universities to deal with the mouthy brats and unqualified professors picking at the scabs of the past, and we'd all recognize that the collective campaign to demonize certain "intersectionalities" is unacceptable and we'd all (at least superficially) be demanding border security, and we'd all be drawing the line at compelled speech surrounding transgenderism. If we had 2000s and 1990s Democrats, we would still have a coherent identity and a purpose and an agreement about the American experiment. We would bitch and complain about taxes and healthcare, and there would be problems to contend with, but those problems would be debatable and reconcilable.

In the limited scope of history you reference, yes, Republicans were actually quite bad in some ways. Democrats had their issues too, but they were culturally sane. 2010s Democrats shifted on a fundamental and cultural level to win an election, and they hitched their wagon to progressives that hijacked the Overton window and took America's culture hostage and irrevocably (thus far) changed it. Mitt Romney never had a chance. He was a racist to the Democrats. Clearly, Democrat behavior is not the only factor for why things changed, but it is the most salient to the average American who has not been heavily captured by progressivism.

It’s my eternal disappointment that Romney ran in 2012 and not 2016. He would have been fantastic in that moment in my opinion. Not a realistic hypothetical because he also ran in 2008 primaries, but Obama was a monster and I think Romney would have done pretty well in most other times and against most other candidates (maybe even 2008, ironically! I could see people trusting him more to handle the financial meltdown that was just starting to happen in the middle of election season than McCain was, who didn’t really seem to have a clue)

In hindsight, yeah I think that would have delayed cultural division, but this would have played into the left's hands. My doubts about Romney in 2016 is that he wasn't the type to directly or effectively challenge the exploding Wokeism that was sweeping across the country. He was probably a much better choice on bread and butter issues, but he was no match for Woke culture. Trump's election created massive division, but the only two real choices in my opinion were division caused by the right putting their feet down, or the left gaining an even more powerful stronghold over our institutions in the long term.

Romney was preference, whereas Trump was necessary.

There were a long series of religious right-motivated censoring movements in the 90s (and not to mention the Dixie Chicks and Freedom Fries stuff following 9/11)

The Dixie Chicks can barely even be called a boycott, let alone censorship, and "freedom fries" is just a way of saying "fuck France", again I fail to see how it prevented anyone from speaking their mind.

The only consistently free speech people have been the centrist democrats (Liberals who want higher taxes) and centrist republicans (Liberals who want lower taxes).

The moment you start criticizing the core ideas of liberalism, liberals start doing the same deplatforming campaigns that the far left does, using the exact same arguments.

To be frank, I'd probably still consider myself on the left if the Dems were the same as they were in the 90s. Back when they were against racism (instead of for targeted racism/sexism against, well, me), somewhat areligious (instead of cheering on Islam, of all things), and enthusiastically for free speech (without the mile-wide "except for hate speech" loophole). Yes, I disagreed with them on the size of government, but it's not like Republicans were much better on that front.

An argument can be made that they still are as they were in the 90's, because that's when critical theory was being born; it was also the last major push for censorship in the universities.

The only consistently free speech people have been the centrist democrats (Liberals who want higher taxes) and centrist republicans (Liberals who want lower taxes).

I dunno, Al Gore was a southern democrat and his wife was pretty clear about how she felt about naughty song lyrics.

This is a version of the Prisoner’s dilemma where if one side allows free speech, but the other doesn’t, the side that opposes free speech will win. So, if one side starts opposing free speech, that forces the other side to also oppose free speech, or they will lose.

Eh, kinda, but mostly not. To me the “hole” in OP’s setup is we aren’t really told how effective the intrinsic presumed bias towards free speech the government itself has. I think that plays a major role in how it all games out: does party A actually and factually use their time in power to effectively muzzle free speech? Is it an attempt but one that usually fails? How complete is their control, and how effectively does it get reversed if party B shows up?

So you can’t really escape some degree of fact and truth that affects the answer. (Also, point 4 is actually a good one that potentially puts a big thumb on the scale, despite the timeframes required for the benefits to mature and deliver)

The canonical solution to the prisoners dilemma is tit for tat with forgiveness.

I think we’ve got the tit for tat part. I’m not sure if we’re down with forgiveness yet.

Against defectbot, plain Tit for Tat beats Tit For Tat with Forgiveness. Actually the best strategy against defectbot is to be defectbot; you can do no better.

The point isn't about the best strategy knowing your opponent's strategy. If you knew your opponents strategy then just copying their move is the best.

The usual metric for rating success is one that works against the success-weighted average set of other strategies.

In US politics, there's essentially only two players at any given time. Which means only one opposing strategy out there to consider.

I think the cast of characters is a bit wider than that. Trump certainly isn't the same player as Cruz or Rubio.

Rubio is part of Team Trump at the moment, and Cruz isn't in play.

Just picking primary contenders.

Iterated prisoners dilemma absolutely involves knowing your opponent's strategy -- you need to figure it out first is all.

I suspect if you ask Nybbler he will be inclined to frame the American Left (collectively) as playing defectbot; personally I'm not sure that P.D. problems map well to national politics at all.

But human beings are almost never actually literally defectbot. A defectbot is not intelligent, it does not adapt or respond, it cannot be reasoned with or bargained with, it cannot change its behavior. It is an automaton, it always defects. A defectbot in real life is a killing machine, and I agree that the only response is to kill it before it kills you. If your opponents are humans, they are not pure defect bots. And if they were close enough to round off the difference then we would already be in a civil war killing each other. If they start marching the streets gunning down every conservative they can identify, then I agree we shouldn't sit there and let it happen. But we're not there yet, we're not very close all things considered. Maximum defect-defect leaves us with 170 million corpses minimum, likely more. Tit for Tat with forgiveness is likely to lead to far fewer.

But human beings are almost never actually literally defectbot. A defectbot is not intelligent, it does not adapt or respond, it cannot be reasoned with or bargained with, it cannot change its behavior.

The machine the progressive left has built has humans as parts, but it is not human. It can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear. And it only talks about tit-for-tat with forgiveness when the 'tat' to all its 'tits' finally comes around.

Except, because it is not a literal machine but is actually humans implementing complicated emergent behavior, it does not fully embody any of those. It can be bargained with, because the humans that compose it can be bargained with: both individually and collectively. It can feel pity and remorse and fear, because the humans that compose it can feel pity and remorse and fear.

It is currently engaged in a strategy of encroachment: defecting more and more often and more severely in order to exploit the forgiveness of its opponents and see what it can get away with. But this is NOT what a defect bot does. A defect bot defects: always. A defect bot cannot pretend to be anything other than a defect bot, because it has no degrees of freedom with which to signal anything. It does not pretend to cooperate or tit for tat in an attempt to fool its opponents, it just defects.

Again, look at the world around us. Are we currently in the middle of a civil war gunning down each other in the streets? No. That's what maximum defection looks like. We're not there yet. I hope we never get there. And strategic, proportional punishment to defections without escalating maximally is a good way to fight off the encroachment without immediately getting to that state. Even if your opponents are engaged in bad-faith behavior and you need to stop them, deceiving yourself into thinking they're something other than what they are is not strategic. Exaggerations don't help you learn or prepare effective strategy. Maybe you think the appropriate punishments need to be much harsher than they currently are in order to more strongly disincentivize future defections, but this only works because the opponents are not actual defect bots (who ignore punishment and can't stop defecting ever, and can only be solved with death).

It's a machine. However, it's not entirely defectbot, and it's not politically inclined either way. Currently it leans left.

It's not literally defectbots. It's worse.

So are you picking a strategy to deal with "the machine the progressive left has built", or the humans it has as parts?

The machine. The humans have added their biological distinctiveness to the machine's own.

If Faction B remains pro-free-speech, Faction A can speak at all times and Faction B can speak only when they are in power.

If Faction B switches, each faction can only speak when they are in power.

Assuming being able to speak helps both factions (sometimes it doesn't; e.g. letting the Dreaded Jim faction speak likely wouldn't help their electoral chances. But usually it does), Faction B should definitely behave anti-free-speech.

The opposite argument is basically the bicycle cuck argument. It's better for your enemies to have free speech and you to not than for neither of you to have free speech, because it increases the total amount of free speech in the world.

All this is true whether or not free speech is a good policy.

I'm not really worried about the "orgy of vengeance". I think that's fine and a lot of vengeance is called for. I am worried (but not surprised) about the right taking on cancelation not just as reprisal or revenge, but as a good thing in itself. But the no-cancel/no-cancel state appears unavailable; the left will cancel when they are in power because they believe that is good policy.

Listen, if it's just me, and you, and we are trying to figure out our relationship with one another, whatever. I have my principles about how it's appropriate to treat someone, you have yours. Maybe yours hurt my feelings, but I refuse to reciprocate because I think it's wrong. Maybe it works the other way around. We could both be commended, or not, depending on how well we stick to our principles of how we believe people should be treated.

But this isn't that. This is a subject of institutional policy and legal precedent. I can be absolutely against certain behavior, but if it's actually written down in a binding document "Anyone who hurts the feelings of another at this institution, or makes anyone feel unsafe, will face disciplinary action", why should I not avail myself of the full protection of that binding document? It's sure as shit going to be used against me. Why should I not take advantage of it's protections?

The time to argue about principles and the sorts of nation we want to be is before these binding policy documents are enacted. Your leading hypothetical was the moment 10 years ago, before the rules are literally written. After that, where we are now, it's not a matter of principles, it's a matter of the rules. I may not have written them, but I'm going to follow them, and make damned sure you do too.

Your hypothetical should be "Faction A passed a law banning speech that makes people feel unsafe. When they are in power, they enforce that law against their political opponents. Should Faction B also enforce that law?"

In a world where

  • Both factions care only about winning and not about the fate of the country
  • A faction can in fact adopt a free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee policy and stick to it

then obviously the winning move is to suppress your opponents speech. But this proves too much - obviously the winning move is to go full Sulla, execute your opponents, steal their stuff, keep half of it and use the other half to reward your supporters, and use the temporary lack of opposition to amend the Constitution to permanently install your preferred policies. This doesn't happen because all factions in real-world politics rely to varying degrees on the support of normies who care more about the fate of the country than about their preferred faction winning.

The more serious issue about "is speech suppression tactically wise" is that empirically movements which don't support free speech can't stick to a free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee policy, and end up suppressing their own internal debate as much as they suppress the enemy. Whether it's the Nazi Night of the Long Knives, the various Communist purges, McCarthy turning on right-aligned institutions like the army, woke cancel culture purging far more lefties (whether for heresy or just mis-speaking) than righties, political movements which start suppressing speech mostly end up turning speech suppression from a weapon against the outgroup to a weapon for resolving intra-group personal beefs. And then you have a culture of fear which gums up your own internal decision-making processes and you end up doing something self-destructively stupid like Arische Physik, Lysenkoism, or defunding the police.

Liberalism didn't just win in the debating club, it also won at Hiroshima. There might be a reason for this, and I think resistance to self-destructive purges is a big part of it.

The problem is the fate of the country often depends on who does win. In large parts of American society there’s been a huge and growing quiet withdrawal from certain demographics that even the Brookings Institutions has published books about, simply because the people steering the helm of the cultural ship excludes and doesn’t partake of the vision of society that would include these people. You won’t get people to participate if they feel there’s nothing in it for them. That’s why it’s so imperative that your side win out. Because if the other side wins, you don’t just lose, you lose everything, including a reason to keep trying.

Sulla’s proscriptions were actually successful, and he didn’t have to be overly concerned with ordinary people because ideology isn’t always relevant to most of what people had to do to get along with their daily lives thousands of years ago. And information also had a much shorter range and traveled much slower.

A society can often only please one party at the expense of another losing out. It’s why every society that exists on Earth, liberal or not, consists of winners and losers. Effective ones can figure out a way for people to make do with their unhappiness or until a political pressure valve allows them relief of their anger and frustration, which is difficult to manage. But it’s better than a liberal society that tries to please all parties involved because a society that tries to please everyone will end up pleasing no one in the long term.

Sulla’s proscriptions were actually successful, and he didn’t have to be overly concerned with ordinary people

Sulla wasn't successful at anything other than enriching his cronies and buying enough breathing room to not have to face revenge for his actions.

His reforms were soon rolled back and the power of the tribunes returned. Apparently, despite the lack of telecommunications, the Roman people understood what it meant to hobble that office and wanted it so badly that even his own former cronies played along to their advantage.

It's actually a story with the opposite moral: he was right about being wronged, right about the problem and put in a situation where taking the high road would mean he personally lost but his own escalation destroyed any chance for his solution to work, no matter how much everyone could see something had to give. Even if you can pull off the coup de grace, it won't necessarily end the way you hope. Taking the L may be the best move.

Sulla wasn't successful at anything other than enriching his cronies and buying enough breathing room to not have to face revenge for his actions.

By what standard of the ancient world are we judging him according to this? That’s practically how ‘all’ these societies were ran back then. By a modern more objective metric, sure, Sulla was as you describe him. If we’re grading him on a curve and placing him in the context and circumstances he lived with, he was pretty ‘good’ for the most part in governing a system where that kind of nepotism and cronyism went by the rule of law 2,000 years ago.

Part of the problem is looking back on this with the benefit of hindsight. I don’t like Sulla as a leader in virtually any capacity, but he was quite effective when it came to running the show and conducting the orchestra of the power brokers he was a part of.

By what standard of the ancient world are we judging him according to this?

His own? He manifestly failed at his self-appointed task of reform and was criticized even within his time for his behavior. Which, even then, was necessarily norm-breaking for a republican.

@Sunshine's point is damning actually: proscription worked for Augustus because he wanted to permanently destroy the constitutional order. Sulla was trying to fix a republic and picked the tools of a tyrant and expected it to work out.

I think you and I will just fundamentally disagree on this. Caesar also ultimately failed at his task of reform and picked the tools of a tyrant to do it. Things didn’t exactly pan out for him either. Sulla wasn’t the guy the Republic needed at the time, but he was the one they got nonetheless. And as I mentioned earlier, I’m not a guy that readily defends Sulla and I don’t like him, but I don’t think this is an appropriate criticism of him.

To my point he was brilliant, to your point he was ruthless. Two things can be true at the same time. His main failure as a reformer came from him not being able to stay in power long enough to cement them. Something that I don't point to as proof of his incompetence or idiocy. At any rate he was a guy who thought the ends justified the means. Plenty of people not his equal thought the same way and yet he stood head and shoulders over many of them. I regard that as quite impressive. The man died peacefully in his own bed.

His first march on Rome was in response to Marius's use of the Tribunate of the Plebs to essentially usurp the authority of the Senate. It's difficult for me to decide whether this move was actually a good or bad one. On one hand the citizens and plebeians of Rome lose a say in the governance of the Empire and therein the ability to protect their self interests. Any few senators who did genuinely care for the welfare of the people would have been hard pressed to help them in an apathetic Senate. On another hand the plebeians were easily manipulated by wild demagogues like Gracchus, Saturnius and Sulpicius who had only self-interest on the agenda.

His proscribing of his political enemies was more testimony to his character, utterly ruthless and unforgiving. (Sulla's epitaph was literally "No better friend, no worse enemy.") In that respect he was greatly feared by both Senate and people and was allowed to retire when he had enacted his laws with very little political opposition.

I think you and I will just fundamentally disagree on this.

Probably not but at least we validated the stereotype that men are always thinking about Rome.

His main failure as a reformer came from him not being able to stay in power long enough to cement them. Something that I don't point to as proof of his incompetence or idiocy.

Nobody said he was incompetent. Like Caesar he was obviously a great man. I admitted from the start that he was wronged and that he could clearly see some of the problems in the constitution as it stood.

I said his program was hindered from the beginning by his means and probably ill-conceived because of the fundamental contradiction. This defense, imo, is just leaning on the same contradiction. This worked for Augustus because he was trying to institute monarchic rule.

A Republican system depends on others buying into it and continually making the choice to restrict their own use of power. This cannot necessarily be achieved by Sulla just hanging around. If anything that increases the chance for the system to collapse into monarchy.

Sulla revealed the secret of the Republic - that generals can order their men to commit violence against the state and thus capture it - and somehow thought he'd put it back in the bottle. It went about as well as the realization that the emperor could be made outside of Rome.

I suppose we can say that this is all in hindsight. That it's easy to say it's wrong now precisely because we can appeal to Sulla's experience. Maybe, at the time, it seemed just as likely that he'd be a new Cincinnatus.

But it is what it is. We should also consider that his motives, like Caesar's, were not pure. Both of them did what they did to defend their own dignity and interests. I'm more sympathetic to Caesar, since the risks were so much greater for him. But in both cases it wasn't just concern for the Republic.

On another hand the plebeians were easily manipulated by wild demagogues like Gracchus, Saturnius and Sulpicius who had only self-interest on the agenda.

As opposed to the rational decisions of people like Cato whose level of obstinacy precipitated the very outcome they were supposedly against? Even when people like Pompey tried to respect at least the form of republican politics they were blocked and so made common cause with the populists. If anything one could argue that the Senators were playing games with things that were essential to the livelihood and comfort of the plebes. If they had been willing to take steps to address them rather than vetoing their enemies things might have been different.

The man died peacefully in his own bed.

He died, what? A few years after resigning? If Cicero had died within a similar timespan he would never have faced a reckoning for killing Catiline and it might have looked like a move with all upside too.

Probably not but at least we validated the stereotype that men are always thinking about Rome.

I'm pretty big into ancient history and consequently Roman history. Good to know there's others here like that.

Nobody said he was incompetent. Like Caesar he was obviously a great man. I admitted from the start that he was wronged and that he could clearly see some of the problems in the constitution as it stood.

Well. Seems we agree then. That's much closer to the conclusion I wanted to emphasize. Not that his reforms weren't quickly reversed after he withdrew into retirement. They obviously were.

A Republican system depends on others buying into it and continually making the choice to restrict their own use of power. This cannot necessarily be achieved by Sulla just hanging around. If anything that increases the chance for the system to collapse into monarchy.

There is a question in here as to whether the Republic at large was just at the end of it's natural lifespan as it was transforming into something that was already beginning to look and feel different. I'm not saying the solution would've been for Sulla to linger around on the sidelines only that it was ultimately concluded more prematurely than it should've been. As far as collapsing into monarchy goes, you could argue Octavian's proscriptions were worse than Sulla's (a controversial statement, but one I've seen people make) but people are more willing to overlook it because it concluded with the Pax Romana, whereas Sulla's ended having enriched his friends and further solidified their positions among a corrupt ruling class.

It went about as well as the realization that the emperor could be made outside of Rome.

Septimius Severus did that. There have been more than a few provincial emperors, albeit that they came at a bad time; being at the tail end of a dying Empire.

But it is what it is. We should also consider that his motives, like Caesar's, were not pure. Both of them did what they did to defend their own dignity and interests. I'm more sympathetic to Caesar, since the risks were so much greater for him. But in both cases it wasn't just concern for the Republic.

I'm also more sympathetic to Caesar by a long shot. With him however, I think his motives ultimately were questionable as to whether he wanted to become king or not. It's not as cut and dry as people think it is.

Here's the fun epilogue: Two generations later, Augustus Caesar pulled a reverse-Sulla. Augustus realized that the office of Tribune was so powerful that it was the only office he actually needed to hold in order to rule Rome with an iron fist. He kept all the forms of the Senate in place, but he turned every office from Quaestor to Consul into powerless ceremonial roles he could use to reward his supporters while he himself ruled as a 'mere' Tribune.

Sulla weakened the Tribunes to shut the common people out of power, whereas Augustus weakened everything except the Tribunes to shut the Senate out of power. Unlike Sulla, Augustus' 'reforms' actually stuck.

Sort of? I’m not a super Roman expert so I could be wrong and welcome corrections, but IIRC Augustus himself in practice spent a lot of time fighting in the several civil wars after the assassination. He was also patient and clever and politically savvy not to rush things or look too dictatorial? I was also kind of under the impression that by the time he was firmly in control it had been like a century of unrest and many of the big players already had played their hands so the Senate was already weak in practical terms not just because of legal or political maneuvers. Even then, it took like 40 years of rule to solidify things, so to me it looks more like good timing and skill of one rather than his approach necessarily being better, but again I could be wrong.

I was also kind of under the impression that by the time he was firmly in control it had been like a century of unrest and many of the big players already had played their hands so the Senate was already weak in practical terms not just because of legal or political maneuvers.

This is correct, but when people say "the Senate was weak" they elide a key factor: Augustus had himself elected consul 13 times. 11 of them were consecutive, meaning that Augustus was consul for 11 straight years (with various cronies as his co-consuls). The Senate was weak, but also, Augustus was monopolizing the power of the Senate.

After his 11-year term Augustus mostly stopped ruling as consul and started ruling with the powers of a tribune instead. This was in large part to free up the other consulship to give to his supporters as a reward, since the consulship was still prestigious even with all the real power stripped out of it. You can identify the exact time the consulship lost its power, because that's when Augustus no longer felt the need to hold it personally.

to shut the Senate out of power

The thing about the Senate is that it held almost no legal power at all. It was basically a club which every notable Roman was a member of. It had power as long as its informal methods of influence worked: elected public officials had to align their values with the Senate norms or they would be badmouthed and never win any important election. It was their version of "the Cathedral".

When political outsiders realized they could bypass the Senate by dialing up their populism without violating the letter of the Roman law, the whole republican system started crumbling. It took them a hundred years to get from Tiberius Gracchus to Augustus, but Israel in 4BC had no mass communication Rome had no mass media, let alone social media.

the Senate is that it held almost no legal power at all

The actual heck are you talking about? The Senate had almost unlimited power through the Republic and well into the Empire (in theory if not in practice). The Senate could declare the Senatus Consultim Ultimum to suspend the constitution and grant the Consuls unlimited power, which Cicero used to execute a high-ranking Senator. The Senate could appoint a Dictator. The Senate appointed the governors of provinces. The Senate could declare someone an enemy of the Republic. The Senate could declare war.

To be clear: Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus usurped all that power, but they did it by packing the Senate. Julius Caesar added 300 of his supporters to the Senate, including non-Roman Italians and Gauls. This is like if Trump added 10 diehard loyalists to the Supreme Court and told them how to vote on each case, and someone came along 2,000 years later and said "the Supreme Court held almost no legal power at all." The Senate had lots of power, that's why Julius and Augustus spent so much time usurping it!

The Senate could declare the Senatus Consultim Ultimum

It was not a legal power, the difference is subtle: they were not saying, "by the power of the Senate, this man is above the law". They were saying, "the members of the Senate have agreed to never prosecute the man for his actions in the service to the Republic". And since every public official was a senator, this approach worked. It's like the blue wall of silence.

I have been happy to see right-wing commentators call our Pam Bondi on her "hate speech" comments:

https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1967948684886450235

https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1967950157095530518

Bondi later clarified that she meant incitement to violence: https://x.com/matt_vanswol/status/1967939882980085980

I have also seen push back on Libs of Tiktok posts where she calls on people to cancel those who simply didn't like Kirk.Unfortunately, those don't have as many likes as her posts calling for the cancellations.

”You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as ‘free speech.’”

What did she mean by this? I guess she’s referring to posting somebody’s address online, but that isn’t illegal! It’s not even about constitutional issues, you could probably get a narrowly-tailored anti-doxing statute past judicial review (factual circumstances have changed since Cox Broadcasting v. Cohn), but nobody’s done that yet. Does she think posting someone’s address is incitement to violence?

In context, I guess? But right wing commentators are calling for Trump to ax her over all this mess.

Thank goodness for this blowback. What a dumb statement by her.

I think the definition of cancel culture and censorship used commonly is too narrow to explain what this actually looks like to the right.

Cancelling could (and should, IMO, to capture the whole means and goals of it) be defined as attempting to impede someone's ability to live a normal life as punishment for speech considered beyond acceptability by the canceller. It's never been just the workplace that's a target, it's also pressuring friends and family to cut ties, pressuring the school the kids of the person go to, etc... By that definition, an assassination is the ultimate cancellation (and a normal cancellation is a limited "character assassination"). What the right sees right now is that a long term campaign of implying that the milquetoast right wing beliefs that Kirk had made him Turbo Hitler made enough people believe that he was Turbo Hitler that the always statistically possible but usually unlikely person with the mix of ability, opportunity, recklessness and belief necessary to succesfully carry out an assassination actually turned up, and then as a response a large contingent (and I'm happy to note it's not all of them) keeps it up, even while saying something they obviously don't really believe like "I didn't really want anyone to kill Kirk..." they keep the cancellation/dogwhistle going with "... but let's not forget he was Turbo Hitler". If you see it that way, then it's not so much that the right has full control of the cancellation apparatus and is using it unilaterally to punish the left, but more of a messy struggle.


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