Dean
Flairless
Variously accused of being a hilarious insufferable reactionary post-modernist fascist neo-conservative neo-liberal conservative classical liberal critical theorist Nazi Zionist imperialist hypernationalist warmongering isolationist Jewish-Polish-Slavic-Anglo race-traitor masculine-feminine bitch-man idiosyncratic party-line Fox News boomer. No one yet has guessed a scholar, or multiple people. Add to our list of pejoratives today!
User ID: 430
I'll start by noting I was probably editing in additional paragraphs of how validity interacts with trust in the time you replied. I will let that stand as a general point.
But why suppose an atheist who says "I don’t believe your religion is true, but according to your religion you should act this way" is more likely to be someone who uses 'arguments as soldiers' (any more than e.g. a co-religionist)?
You are arguing against a(nother) claim that was not made. There is no argument or claim that the atheist is 'more likely' to be someone who engages in arguments as soldiers than a co-religionist. There is not even a claim that it is worse when they do.
The athiest, however, is engaging in arguments as soldiers when they make an argument from a basis they do not believe valid, and attempting to have the other people act to their preference as if it were.
Arguments as soldiers, in turn, is a strategy with a spectrum of applications. There are egregious abuses of it, and there are unremarkable utilizations of it.
Where a particular instance of arguments as soldiers resides matters in some ways, but in other ways does not for the point of whether it decreases validity. The introduction of the variable itself changes the warranted level of faith in good faith to be taken as default, and compounding context- such as reason to believe the person is engaging in the argument in bad faith- magnifies the impact.
They could be prioritising logical validity, you don't know until you listen to them.
If they were prioritizing logical validity, they wouldn't be making the argument from (religious) faith that the meme pre-supposes they find illogical.
This, in turn, doesn't require to know what the specific argument is, merely the nature of the argument and the arguer. If parts of this are known in advance- such as knowing the atheist is an atheist- all the better.
I will also turn back to the earlier post I provided, which itself ties the Boy Who Cried Wolf part of the previous post about why personal credibility / intent matters for validity.
And that point can be by balanced by other points that they would not raise because they do not share your basic goals. Such as how they do not share your basic goals, and are merely using arguments as soldiers to get their goals instead of yours... and that their goal is to obstruct yours.
In a context-less vacuum, the meme Atheist and the Christian do not necessarily have oppositional goals. This is why the meme works as a meme- it's unspecific and vague enough to allow the viewer to assume their own interpretation that is more innocuous to their preferences.
For example, their desires could be orthogonal or even overlapping, like Christian wants to spend charity in way A, like supporting widows, and Atheist wants way B, say orphans. Atheist using an appeal to religion in shaping the shared priority might still be a case of arguments as soldiers, but it doesn't challenge the basis of faith in good faith in the way a more hostile demand might. As a result, the Christian comes off as more unreasonable for such a tepid contradiction.
But there are Atheists who might not be interested in orthogonal co-existence, but active obstruction or even harm. If this were the case, and this was known, then the recognition of arguments as soldiers does considerable harm to the validity of that Atheist's arguments. They would- appropriately, rationally- not be warranted the sort of external faith that they are engaging in good faith, since good faith is at odds with a pre-commitment/desire to negate other good-faith actors.
And this leads back to the meme being raised in the context of anti-ICE actors. There are anti-ICE actors who are orthogonal actors who just want more effective immigration enforcement. There are also anti-ICE actors who are directly oppositional to immigration enforcement categorically, even if they try to deny such because it would discredit their public validity. An orthogonal actor may propose a change on the belief that it will actually make for more effective, and be willing to not only implement said compromise but also change it if that change does not actually meet their claimed priority of improving effectiveness. A directly oppositional actor may advance the same change with the expectation/intention of deliberately foiling the implementation and resulting in a decrease in immigration enforcement.
One is a possibly valid way to improve immigration enforcement, and one is an invalid way. How does one evaluate the validity of whether the anti-ICE proposer is proposing a valid improvement to enforcing immigration?
Well, it helps if the previously identify themselves as categorically opposed to the validity of immigration enforcement, and thus warrants low social faith-based validity, much as it helps the meme Christian to know that the aetheist categorically does not believe in the religion, and does not merit social faith-based validity. In the meme, the atheist is clear. In the United States, the disband ICE types are unclear... not least because only a few years ago the same general coalition had the defund the police movement, with similar dynamics.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
I am just noting I agree with this argument in general / don't feel we were disagreeing over anything in particular as much as emphasis or some order of operations, and have nothing else to add.
A rationalist might also be expected to recognize that 'reduce the validity' is not the same as 'ignore arguments from people in different camps to you,' and would not strawman accordingly. Fortunately, as you say, this is only nominally a rationalist forum.
Validity incorporates many factors, such as logical soundness, factual soundness, or so on. These are aspects that must be judged externally, either taken on faith or evaluated at more extensive effort. One of the aspects of people who use arguments as soldiers is that they are not prioritizing logical soundness, or factual soundness, but merely effect. Effect-prioritizing approaches will happily skip steps of logic, or ignore inconvenient facts, in order to achieve their desired effects.
Arguers who adopt styles of debate that routinely smuggle in unsound logic, or ignoring inconvenient facts, do not merit as much faith that their arguments are being cultivated for sound logic or sound facts. Thus, their validity is reduced, even if the more onerous evaluation supports them in a particular circumstance, because the specific instance is independent from the meta-context of who they are and why they are adopting a particular style of argument.
Or, in other words- validity results from a combination of both formal support or faith in their good faith. Few people provide or can evaluate because of how hard it is to work from first principles each time. Good faith is reduced when someone is knowingly presenting arguments from a position of bad faith.
This, in turn, is part of why rationalists have put a great deal of attention to the matter of credibility in conflict-bargaining and conflict analyst. The same message- be it promise or threat or something else- has different credibility/validity when offered by different actors, even if those actors use the exact same words.
To pull from a classic word-manipulator fable, since that is what arguments as soldiers is a style of: the boy who cries wolf and the boy who doesn't cry wolf may both say the same thing when there is a wolf, but the validity for disregarding the warning of the boy who cries wolf is much stronger. After all, he has used his false warnings as arguments as soldiers repeatedly to gain his desired effect of riling the villagers to his amusement. Logical and factual soundness were never his priority, and would have been known sooner had he been known as the boy who cried wolf from the start. Once these became known, he no longer maintained the faith needed to be a valid messenger of warning.
None of which means / implies that his warnings should be ignored entirely- the wolf still exists and does harm the town- but the moral of the fable is not 'he should have been seen as valid no matter what he said or why.' Why you say what you say absolutely matters for the faith people take your word at, which is a foundation of the validity of your arguments.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Identify / appoint judges willing to support the federal action, and process the actions through them specifically. If chokepoints exists, create redundancies that are more favorable to actions.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
The structural insurgent groups he believes are forming are a problem. But they're a second order effect of the broader media campaign that is rallying these groups under a banner.
My only... quibble? addition?- is that there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg of whether the structural groups are caused by the media, or cause the media. Journolist and Ezra Klein of NYT fame was deliberately trying to shape the media framing of things as far back as the later 2000s. This doesn't even go into The Resistance phase of Trump 1, in which various media actors were willing partners in coordinated instigation, or some of the Biden-era totally-organic media campaigns.
I can agree that the structural insurgent groups in this discussion are downstream of the broader media campaign, but the structure with intent to resist had media allies/participants/collaborators from the start. The broader media campaign in this context is itself a product of structural insurgent groups. Even if the nature of the media insurgent groups is different from the whistle-blowing groups, that itself is consistent with the nature of those GWOT networks-of-networks.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
Do you think I'm wrong that this was an LLM's output? Why do you disagree?
It's more that I don't find those three particular points as particularly strong evidence. I've been known to use all three myself, particularly if I'm trying abide by a relatively limited format like twitter, and as you seem confident enough that I'm human. Then again, other people online (typically in other spaces where I don't have a reputation) occasionally accuse me of being a bot, so...
I am ambivalent about whether the overall post is LLM. I wouldn't be surprised one way or the other, but LLMs typically write about what's been well written in the training data. That sort of description of mid-2000s insurgency cell structure isn't impossible to find, but it's not exactly particularly common either. Parts of the text- what you refer to as the 'it's not X, but Y' tell- was a not-uncommon style of upfront caveats I loosely recall being more common from the era. Part of the challenges of counterinsurgency was trying to get (often senior) leaders to break their analogies or default framing devices. 'It's not familial complicity, it's a tribal dynamic' sort of distinctions. These tended to be more rhetorical than written, since you often needed to find the metaphor/analogy that would work for your audience.
So could I see an LLM picking up old reports for some prompt trying to analogize anti-ICE protests and the Iraq insurgency? Sure. But I could also see it being a rhetorical hangover of someone who actually imbibed in that language-culture back in the day, which would match their basis for claiming to recognize the patterns being discussed. And since I haven't seen a particular flood of media sketching out the structural similarities between anti-ICE protest groups and insurgency groups, it weakens my priors that a colon: list is 'just' AI output. Not enough to discount the possibility, but not enough to presume it either.
I do find it kind of tangential to addressing the point of the post, and the sort of thing that I occasionally see as a way to dismiss grappling with the argument entirely in a 'it's just AI, no reason to consider the argument.' I don't think that was your intent / purpose, but rather that you were focusing on a particular aspect of the post's composition, which I consider valid enough. I just raise an eyebrow only at a particular part of your part that I've been accused of being a bot over.
If you agree with me, what is the purpose of your comment? To point out to me that em-dashes existed before 2022? I'm aware. Thank you, Dean!
Any time. For my next trick, I'll point out that em-dashes and such are still used by non-LLMs after 2022 as well.
Dean
Flairless
1d ago
^^this one's a doozy. Em-dashes, "not x, it's y," and a list in a series all in a row.
LLM's didn't invent that rhetorical style, you know.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Does that meme actually reduce the validity of what the atheist says though?
Yes.
Someone from outside your group may not share your basic goals but might still have a point.
And that point can be by balanced by other points that they would not raise because they do not share your basic goals. Such as how they do not share your basic goals, and are merely using arguments as soldiers to get their goals instead of yours... and that their goal is to obstruct yours.
Dean
Flairless
2d ago
Besides the summary part, which is a matter of time not indicated here, and execution brings implications not yet established.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Kyle Rittenhouse was the guy who decided it would be a good idea to open carry at a protest, as if that would help anything. The results were predictable.
The results, and the protest, and the chase that led to his self defense, were also not situations he created, let alone went out of his ways to create.
I'd agree to be less contemptuous if I saw anyone take their own side to task in this area.
Then you haven't looked well enough, possibly because you are contemptuously looking down on people you are actually at the same level as.
Note that you will not hear the right say this about Kyle Rittenhouse
You really want to start your list with the kid who was running away from the people who chased, and who didn't shoot first, and who didn't create the situation of the fiery but mostly peaceful protests in general that led to escalation?
Not a particularly good list in general, but that one in particular is a weak foot to start off on if you intend to leave off with contempt. However low you think the MAGA-right is, you are at eye level.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Minneapolis has clearly become a clusterfuck with no real win condition for the ICE side.
Law enforcement in general has no real win condition. As long as there are profit, personal, or partisan reasons to commit crimes, there is no point where it is 'done.'
However, there is a fail condition for law enforcement, and that is to stop enforcing laws at heckler, and violent, veto.
You 'answered' by trying to ignore the premise of the question- evidence that doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion- and then tried to insist you need to know ahead of time, at which point you transitioned to questioning future prediction. This is a deliberate inversion of the framing of something known into something not known, in order to insert your deflection of a question of future prediction.
Future prediction is not needed when you already have reviewed evidence to determine what it does or does not support. Removing evidence that neither supports or refutes an outcome is not bias towards one outcome, because it supports neither outcome.
Yours was a transparent dodge, for a transparent purpose of giving a non-answer after earlier concessions that you didn't want to answer the question. First the evasion you denied you were avoiding, before you conceded you weren't answering but insisted it was because it was a leading question, and now this attempt to change the question.
Thank you for the public demonstration. At this point I suspect anyone knows what your answer in that dark alley would be, however incriminating it might be for you. Feel free to take your last word and zinger if you'd like.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Yes, they have an agenda. But I couldn't find the detentions and arrests bar chart anywhere else.
The availability bias is truly a wonder, and an easy tool to exploit.
Cause aside, 7 deaths in 15 days is anomalously high and warrants explanation.
Sure. But also questions. Among which- what would have been the death rate in 2023 had the Biden Administration surged ICE differently? After all, a core premise of your critique is the (in)competence. Incompetence requires a baseline of competence, which in turn requires a baseline of 'acceptable' failures across an institution.
And also- what would the death rate in January 2026 have been had the Obama and Biden administrations not taken their benign neglect for over a decade? Had they changed policy, would the downstream factors of January 2026 been possible?
But also- 115 compared to what base number? Not only what is the base numbers in January 2026 versus 2023, so that you can have some % comparison, but also what is the 'acceptable' number of deaths in general?
And this is if we concede 'cause aside.' Someone might- quite reasonably- believe that cause must not be put aside. It matters quite a bit for discussions of competence if deaths in ICE detention are because ICE beats the detainees to death, or if the prisoners kill eachother, or if they die because of heart attacks but previous administrations didn't have such figures because they were ideologically opposed to deporting people at risk for heart attacks when stressed.
That's usually how it goes. The dirt is usually unearthed by those who want to bring you down. Back during the excesses of the work movement, opposing statistics required swimming through doomer incel sewers. Just because they wanted to radicalize me into giving up didn't mean their numbers were wrong.
Ah, but numbers are wrong. Quite commonly. Especially numbers provided for the primary purpose of propaganda- and especially numbers presented to prime emotions. As they say, lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
b) "Don't talk about it until you have sufficient information to reach a conclusion" at best thought-terminating and at worst bad faith. You could indefinitely not talk about anything you choose forever, I'm not going to listen to people who tell me to not to think about and discuss things.
Fortunately I am not telling you to not think about or discuss things.
Your paraphrase is this-
"Don't talk about it until you have sufficient information to reach a conclusion"
And my position is this-
Refrain from judgement until you have sufficient information to reach a sound conclusion.
Do you recognize that the the later is not only not the former, but is itself a justification to talk and seek information to reach a sound conclusion?
c) New information could come to light 5 or 10 (or 500) years from now, take the recent example we found out of the Chinese officer who refused to march on the Tiananmen protestors in the 1980s. I'll discuss with what current information I have and continue to update it as I get more information.
Discussion was not what was being discouraged.
You continue to evade a foundational question, this time by trying to smuggle a change to the premise of the question in order to answer the question with a question, and leave with the final jab. So you were predicted on two of the three, so you shall be. Toro indeed.
That said, you have made a mistake in your attempted retort. A question that makes you look bad if you give a particular answer it is not necessarily a leading question. Some answers just reveal flaws the respondent would rather obfuscate. However, there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with first principles.
Do you disagree with the principle that if evidence doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion, it should not be used to support or deny a conclusion?
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Either way, ICE's operation isn't particularly effective either. The number of convicted criminals being detained has remained unchanged.
...you did catch at least a half dozen of the ways that link was trying to manipulate the reader, no?
Like, there are way more than a half dozen techniques being used. A common one was making a big deal of % increases without giving base numbers, or whether % increases they don't like correspond to % increases in things they don't care to admit. The 'Annual Deaths in ICE Custody' chart takes the deaths in the first half of January- without establishing any cause of death or even alleging they were a result of ICE mistreatment- and then multiplies them by the time for the rest of year to claim 122 'projected deaths' for 2026.
It's also notably including in the 2025 death count the migrant detainees killed by anti-ICE people trying to shoot ICE.
I particularly liked how the 'Systemic Accountability Failure' accepts "billions of dollars in claims" against ICE as the baseline (invented by people opposed to ICE no less) for which 'less than $1 million in settlement' is the systemic accountability failure in question to make the reader upset... and then goes on to blame / concede that acts of congress, longstanding judicial policy, and the sovereign immunity of the state. Only not in that order, of course, because sovereign immunity is the scary boo word, and the New Deal law passed by the Democratic Party and regularly used over the last half-century is to be last-noted and without such context.
The sort of people who will be moved by that website are not the sort of people whose opinions would be changed if and where ICE behaved particularly differently. That is an advocacy/propaganda website, and there will always be propaganda to make anything come across as a travesty. The only thing that would change the position of the people so easily moved by such blatant propaganda is if they didn't get propagandized.
This, in turn, would require the propagandists in question to not see a need to generate the propaganda. Which would primarily be if ICE wasn't doing deportations, as opposed to if ICE was doing deportations differently.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
You do seem pretty insistent on avoiding a rather foundational question that should do the opposite of stir an emotional response. Speaking clearly, this is likely because you recognize that answer it directly will either make your first attempt to ignore it in favor of passing judgement come off as bad faith, less than competent, or both.
But since I will keep asking the question until you answer, or until you get tired of trying to avoid it while also trying for last word / parting jab...
Do you disagree with the principle that if evidence doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion, it should not be used to support or deny a conclusion?
You are neglecting the principal agent problem. 'The left' is not a unitary entity to learn, or judge success for failure.
A lot of people got very rich from BLM and associated advocacy funding. A lot of agitators got experience, social credibility, or organizational relationships and boosts to their careers in the party-NGO patronage complex. That BLM-unrest harmed the Democratic Party, or even 'killed wokeness' outside of the democrat political machines, does not mean that those inside the political machines felt it was a failure. Survivor bias alone, mixed with the bromides of 'lived experience,' gives a basis for many to go 'it worked well enough for me / here.' It's not like there's ever a shortage of socialist-adjacent politicians arguing this time will be different.
'The liberal establishment' is in the midst of a party civil war only barely papered over by Trump as a unifying antagonist. That civil war is because of a lack of consensus on what went wrong, or what is wrong.
Dean
Flairless
3d ago
Oh, hey, you seem to have tried to dodge the original question. Again. What a surprise- who could have seen that coming? You even took more time to avoid answer it than it would have taken to answer. I do appreciate the commitment to the 'I'm not avoiding' evasion, though that sort of Marvel-esque irony is a bit dated.
Thankfully though, you did take the bait for brevity and answered the others. Let others make of them what they will, while we can move on to the question you may still try to evade.
Do you disagree with the principle that if evidence doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion, it should not be used to support or deny a conclusion?
Good points, and I'll raise another aspect for audience consideration.
The ground aspect of a Taiwan invasion is definitely a massive challenge. The other side of the issue is if it will be necessary if Taiwan can be blockaded and starved into submission. China could absolutely bungle an invasion, a D-Day failed, and still end up with the win if it just successfully blocks ships from coming in and landing to unload long enough. Taiwan has something like a third of food self-sufficiency in peace time.
This is where the question of the naval war, and war length, comes. While it's typically framed in terms of whether China can keep the US Navy out, and that does matter for letting China try that very difficult landing scenario, the actual needs in the war regarding Taiwan ports change depending on if the war is a short conflict or a long conflict.
In a 'short' war, China just needs to keep the US out long enough to make the naval invasion, which- even if it can't sweep the island- might have the political shock effect of a political capitulation by the Taiwanese. I generally take a dim view of 'and then the enemy loses the will to fight' scenarios, but they aren't impossible. From the Taiwan coalition situation, the key interest is maintaining enough naval / air power in the area to deter / undercut / critically weakening the landing threat so that it trips and drowns, until the PRC accepts a status quo ante end to hostilities. However, the shortness of this war makes Taiwanese ports relatively unimportant beyond a defense objective. They don't have to work, just not be captured to facilitate PRC logistics.
In a 'long' war, China and the US are now involved in a global-scale power struggle with global economy cracking implications even as dynamics prevent a status quo ante resolution. One of the reasons this might endure is because the PRC get enough of a bridge head that they have a toe hold on the island that can neither advance nor be driven into the sea, but it's not the only one. In this format, the Taiwan ports- especially those on east of the northeast of the island become a critical facilitator for supplies, both military and, well, food. Except ports can be shut down via missiles or cyberattacks or other things. So now it's the Taiwanese coalition that has to overcome the 'how do I get men and material onto the island,' where instead of hostile terrain and a defender they are facing hostile terrain and a major regional airbase trying to enforce a naval blockade.
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