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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 27, 2025

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I was reading Does the social contract even exist any more?. It starts out with some typical stuff about questionable business models, some people being inconsiderate, some (left-leaning) politics. It mostly seems like a replacement-level post, until we get to the example of Daniel Naroditskys suicide.

Starting in late 2024, Naroditsky received repeated accusations from former world champion Vladimir Kramnik that he cheated in online chess tournaments. There is basically no evidence that this was true - Kramnik threw some slapdash statistics together that were roundly rejected by other experts - but Kramnik kept loudly repeating the accusations in interviews, on social media, and generally to anyone who would listen. As a former world champion, he had a large audience, and he specifically used it to harass Naroditsky without any real basis other than his own paranoia.

This mostly fits the theme (not that paranoid-delusional chess grandmasters are particularly new), and then comes:

Spurred by Naroditsky’s death, the chess community is demanding action. Some are calling for Kramnik to be investigated for ethics violations, stripped of his grandmaster title and kicked from FIDE, the sport’s governing body.

Holy shit, thats the normality youre missing? This is the only thing in the post that was actually unthinkable for me, though in retrospect with the amount streamers in the game, maybe it shouldnt have been. Still, in a post about how things used to work, presenting this as the obvious thing to do would still cause some whiplash, even if I thought to anticipate some people calling for it. The author here is an /r/neoliberal alumnus who frequently bangs the "You can just be center left, wokeness is a distraction" drum, and this feels like Ive just seen the manchurian punditate activate accidentally.

I might be a bad reader here and misunderstanding, but I see that article as 3 distinct pieces:

  • Does the social contract even exist any more?
  • Did Cheating Accusations Kill This Grandmaster?
  • Twitch Can’t Protect Streamers

I don't read the latter two sections as in any way related to the former.

Social contracts broken, bad behavior leads to more attention, keep doubling down, never apologize, etc - it’s the same playbook in every case. FIDE has been slow to act,

In the Chess part

It’s yet another way in which social contracts are crumbling in front of us, and I honestly have no idea what I’d do about it if I was a woman who had to be on camera in front of the internet for my job.

In the Twitch part

Okay, you're correct and I am a bad reader. To my credit (and as you said), those examples are so bad that they short circuited my brain and I could not relate them to the opening thesis.

The social contract never existed, or at least was never really a contract. The terms can be varied at will and are enforceable only by one side; if the other side complains, mere toleration of their existence in society is considered both agreement and sufficient compensation.

I don’t understand the complaint here. Unranking him for ethical violations is a normal thing sports have done for a long time. Pete Rose was one of the greatest baseball players ever and permanently* banned from the Hall of Fame in the 80s for betting on games. Whether you agree or disagree, I think the idea of having ethical standards in competitions that aren’t directly related to cheating is nothing new.

The bit in the article about the Twitch streamer is ridiculous to me. She is a form of prostitute and was kissed by one of her simps. This in turn did nothing but boost her career. I promise she is overjoyed by this and maybe even arranged it herself, she isn’t some vestal virgin.

Im not familiar with baseball, but from what I can tell the Hall of Fame is entirely done by voting. I think thats obviously different from something recording an objective achievement.

Pete Rose wasn't just banned from the Hall of Fame, he was banned from baseball, he couldn't coach and he couldn't work for a team and he was very rarely featured as one of the greats of the game along other legends of similar stature. This stance softened over the course of my life, and you started to see him acknowledged more as he got older and his sins faded into memory. But it wasn't that the voters never voted for him, like they have refused to with steroid users, but that he was never eligible on the ballot at all.

Reminiscent of this discussion on whether to list Lance Armstrong's objective achievements on wikipedia; https://www.themotte.org/post/3311/friday-fun-thread-for-october-10/375101

Although this thread is more about ethics outside the game (steroids are in the game) and chess. So maybe Bobby Fischer is a better comparison? His achievements aren't hidden but there's often an asterisk

This sounds like the debate over if wokeness is just a list of object-level political opinions, or if wokeness is also a set of social conformism techniques.

Maybe the author agrees with Cancelling People, but just haggles over the price. Woke rebuttals to "wokeness is a set of social conformism techniques" include that Hollywood blacklisting communists was also cancel culture, and that we have always lived in a cancel culture. From here, we should see wokeness as just a list of object-level political opinions, including novel high speeds of vibe shifts.

The problem with "cancel" as a strategy was always that it was an argument in favor of bringing back blacklisting communists. Which I thought we all agreed was a bad thing, but apparently not, so here we go...

The problem with "cancel" as a strategy was always that it was an argument in favor of bringing back blacklisting communists.

Only if you treat tactics as inherently good or bad. "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." "Good guy with a gun" and "bad guy with a gun" are very different things, morally.

Which I thought we all agreed was a bad thing

No bad tactics, only bad targets. HUAC and the Hollywood blacklists were bad not because the tactic was inherently wrong, but because it was Evil Right Wingers wrongfully persecuting poor, innocent, well-intentioned Communists; the same tactic is good when used by Good Left Wingers to rightfully drive out the deplorable bigots.

It's simple: there are Good Guys, and there are Bad Guys. Anything the Good Guys do is good, anything the Bad Guys do is bad… even when those are the exact same actions, because the morality of deeds is determined by who is doing unto whom.

Only if you treat tactics as inherently good or bad.

I believe the traditional phrase is "once you pop, you can't stop." You can socially normalize a direction but not a concrete set of standards.

Nobody's ever in complete control of how trends develop. And only a fool would concern himself with the philosophy of a mob.

once you pop, you can't stop.

Yes the notorious Epstein quote.

The comparison to pervious conformism isnt relevant here, because this is not about Who Started It or is violating political norms or such. The vast majority of things wokeness has canceled people for, "normal" leftists agree that it would have been better not to do that thing, at least by a little. They disagree what to do about it, and object-level opinions about surrounding facts certainly play a role in that, but just increasing the willingness to demand conformity gets them to play along with whatever the wokes do (whether or not that makes them woke themselves is, again, not relevant here).

Theres also a difference in which things you enforce conformism on, and what you enforce it with. Removing the title here seems to me like something that used to be out of bounds. And I doubt anyone was removed from chess over communism - there literally where competitions with the USSR at the time.

feels like Ive just seen the manchurian punditate activate accidentally.

Maybe this is a specific reference I didn't get. I understood you as saying: "This author prides himself with being center-left and not a woke psycho, but he still demands a formal cancellation by an institution for personal moral shortcomings." Was I misinterpreting? All I was saying was this author could think Kramnik's offences rise to Cancellable but (say) the Young Republicans don't.

So it's really hard for me to find examples of FIDE revoking titles for moral failings! Andrejs Strebkovs appears to be the only example I could find, and that is recent.

Still, in a post about how things used to work

This might be the issue! Johnson is barely talking about the past, and indeed he says returning wouldn't fix everything; he also explicitly says some norms are bad and should be changed. He is just venting about things, and all this 'social contract' stuff is just to give his opinions some sense of legitimacy.

I do appreciate you bringing this up. I do not like people's willingness to Mean Girl their way into what ought to just be objective accomplishment-tracking. I wonder if it is more generally related to the Great Feminization.

I understood you as saying: "This author prides himself with being center-left and not a woke psycho, but he still demands a formal cancellation by an institution for personal moral shortcomings." Was I misinterpreting?

Yesnt. I think a lot of left-leaning people arent "actively woke", but will go along with it, for various reasons - no enemies to the left, "but come on all the people agruing against this are bad", etc. They say they dont have the woke beliefs, and they dont, because those decisions arent made based on those. They would/could not, themselves, start it, but they will be one the woke side, when it starts. And that case seems to me like that programming triggering somewhere non-political.

The manchurian candidate is not a secret agent hiding his true beliefs, he is sincere but can be mind-controlled with a passphrase.

I'm not sure what should happen to Kramnik. The FIDE handbook has a section on false accusations:

https://handbook.fide.com/files/handbook/ACCRegulations.pdf

Reckless or manifestly unfounded accusation of chess cheating is a serious violation of the requirement of fair play. False accusation in chess is an abuse of freedom of expression that is prohibited by the FIDE Ethics and Disciplinary Code.

FIDE did investigate Magnus Carlsen over a similar complaint in relation to his activity with Hans Nieman. But found him not guilty except for a charge relating to his withdrawal from a tournament which I believe is not allowed without good reason. I think Magnus was able to avoid sanction because it didn't make a direct accusation but I suspect Kramnik has walked closer to this line even though he will claim that he is just asking questions or looking at statistics if he is ever challenged.

The other problem I see is this starting to normalize suicidal threats. David Navara made a blog post that can be uncharitably summarized as 'do something about Kramnik or I'll kill myself'. However, I do urge you to read the whole blog because I think the situation is much complicated than that and I think its very difficult for someone in his situation to express how he feels without it coming across as a suicidal threat or emotional manipulation (https://lichess.org/@/RealDavidNavara/blog/because-we-care/fauAwr9r). He even has this to say:

I want to stress that I firmly believe that a suicide is a wrong decision in a vast majority of situations, including mine one. I do not write this to criticize people who were desperate and saw no other solution, I just stress this to discourage depressed people from damaging themselves in an irrevocable way. The human life has a great value. It is a gift and gifts should not be given back.

Kramnik has been making cheating allegations for well over a year now, and i doubt he has been giving evidence. He has already received some kinds of punishment, kinda: I think Chess.com muted his ability to use it as a blog, since he was being annoying or something.

If he gets punished further, it won't actually be because of cheating allegations, it will be because The People Demand Something Be Done because of Naroditsky. (I think its ironic that we take it for granted that he killed himself. You'd think with this topic in particular, we would wait until we have evidence before saying things!)

To my point, its not particularly important what the FIDE policy is currently, its about what Johnson considers reasonable. Unranking someone over... basically anything other than cheating himself, theres no practical reason for this besides "well, we could use this as a stick". Imagine making a list of the 10 fastest marathons ever and omitting someone because he got into a fight with the federation. In line with the point of the post, this sort of thing used to be sacred, now "something must be done".

I guess if FIDE has provision for doing something like that, then that a risk a player undertakes when they violate the rules. But I do agree that it is a bit weird to strip people of results like World Champion that have legitimately earned for unrelated unsportsmanlike conduct that occurred at a different time. Stripping people of titles like Grandmaster seems more reasonable because it sounds more like an honorific even though it is purely based on an objective criteria. It does actually look like a strict reading of the code would allow FIDE to strip Kramnik of his World Championship result (https://handbook.fide.com/files/handbook/EthicsAndDisciplinaryCode2022.pdf). They basically have a bunch of sanctions, and a bunch of offences and there doesn't seem to be any guidance from the FIDE code on which sanctions are appropriate for which offences.

FIDE even has the damnatio memoriae option:

Removal of a player’s historical data from the FIDE database: The deletion, from the FIDE official database, of all data about participation and past results for a player and ratings progress during his/her chess career (in the event of a lifetime ban).

This doesn’t go far enough. We need to remove his games from Chessbase. Books on opening theory should contain the line, “and then one day in late 2000, for no reason at all, people started playing the Berlin defense.”

omitting someone because he got into a fight with the federation.

Joey Chestnut has entered the chat. Although he was allowed back into the championship (and won) this year.

Mostly a funny anecdote: I don't follow the competition generally.

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