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Ban or not, I stand by everything I said. (As the great rhetorician Adolf Hitler proves (regardless of what you think about his politics), sometimes you must breathe fire and brimstone to communicate the righteous fury necessary to get your point across, and I'll take the upvotes as a sign that I made that point in a rhetorically effective way that induced the intended response in most readers. With that said and my prior point made, I will take a different approach in this post.)
Now I think it's also clearly worth pointing out that, even if you advocate for (as I'm seeing all over this subthread) the "This weaponization of someone's expressions/speech/beliefs to deprive him of employment/civil status of basic respect/social media accounts/etc. is a terrible thing and should be off the table for all sides." position (which I actually happen to agree in large part would be the rule of an ideal society, at least in regards to working as a cashier at Home Depot and not as a teacher or in a high-profile government position, which is also why I take the practical position on the necessity of retaliating now that I do, as I'll explain), then you are still simply being rather naive if you think the present right-wing retaliation is a bad outcome/choice in regards to achieving your long-term goal.
Do you know what the best way is to get a child to stop pinching you, thus ensuring no pinching for everybody? Pinch him back just as hard (if not slightly harder), so he understands how it feels (and the precarious dynamics of getting into a pinching fight). No pinchy child has ever thought, "Well I've been pinching this adult all day and he's kindly not retaliated every time even when he could have, so I guess I should just stop pinching him forever. Peace has been achieved for our time."
That is, even if what you really want is the end of both tits and tats forever and entirely, you can rest assured that you are not going to get that through insisting that tits ("tit" being the part of the phrase "tit for tat" that I am interpreting as the retaliatory action, based on the phrase "eye for an eye") be banned. All you're going to get from that is even more confident tats all the time, increasing in frequency (which is exactly what we've experienced with politically-motivated firings/retaliation/"cancellations"/"deplatformings" etc. for the past 10 years proportional to the right's inability (and it's mostly been unable) to respond in kind), which is the absolute worst outcome. Going based off of the old formulation about "rules applied fairly" etc.:
No tits or tats (peace) > Tits and tats applied evenly (war, affecting both sides in an even/fair fashion, so not a massacre) > Only tats (massacre for one side only without any possibility of retribution for them)
Point is, magnanimous inaction is rarely if ever a winning strategy. Your serial killer may appreciate you generously not resisting, but that's neither going to do anything for you nor make society any safer from murder.
So if you think (or pretend) you're trying to achieve the end of both tits and tats evenly, but your practical suggestion to achieve that is just to let the tatters run wild without response because goodness deary it would be so undignified and hypocritical for the titters to tit after complaining so much about the tatters and their tats, then I can only see you as either a disingenuous undercover tatter trying to sabotage the titters for your own personal ends, someone who smugly (and wrongly) believes himself to be above all conflict in all cases (until it comes to their doorstep, as it often does), or again simply very naive and suffering from sloppy, short-term thinking (as opposed to being "principled").
Going based on the above, I absolutely resent and reject the notion of @FiveHourMarathon below that those advocating for retaliation in this case are therefore not "principled libertarians". If "principled libertarians" had managed to overthrow the Soviet Union, that would not mean that they would have immediately had to apply the NAP to Joseph Stalin the moment they had him on the ropes for a bit or supposedly suddenly lose their principles. It does not mean that after you get punched in the face you must out of principle strictly avoid punching back because "After all, my right to swing my fist stops where their nose begins."
Principled libertarianism is not (or at least doesn't have to be) absolute "Turn the other cheek." Tibetan-monks-praying-for-the-souls-of-their-killers-while-CCP-soldiers-gun-them-down absolute non-violence. (Though I personally am not super attached dogmatically to libertarian(ism) as a philosophy/identifier, even if I do identify with it somewhat, the notion that reasonable retaliation is incompatible with it is at a minimum essentially a de facto rejection of the existence of contracts with penalties (as any contract must have, explicitly or implicitly, if its performance is to be enforced and its violation sanctioned) for one, which is basically the whole foundation of the ideology. So that's why I chose to highlight specifically that attacking people over supporting retaliation here on alleged libertarian grounds is utterly absurd.)
I'll echo the post below of @FarmReadyElephants (which I suggest everybody also read) too and quote the most important line from it:
[Note that he writes, contrarily to me, interpreting the initial action as the "tit" and the retaliatory action as the "tat", whereas again, after considering the phrase "eye for an eye", I decided that the initial action should actually be the "tat" and the retaliatory action the "tit". I tried asking an AI about this, and it could not tell me whether there was a consensus about whether or not the tit or the tat is universally intended to come first, nor could I find anything about the query on basically useless modern search engines. But I prefer to ally with the tits (which is not to say women necessarily), so that's how I wrote it.]
And he's entirely correct. Even going based on what I said above, you must remember as he points out that this is still mostly a massacre of tats (or tits in his formulation) with only the briefest respite of tits (or tats in his formulation) thus far.
So I just don't get the anti-retaliation side at all. I just don't. Do you apply this logic to other aspects of your lives?
If you see Little Timmy, who is near his lowest because he has cancer (that he is recovering from... maybe), get his ass beat by Brad on the playground every day, and then one day some unique circumstance happens, say Brad breaks his arm playing football and it's in a sling, and Little Timmy briefly gets the upper hand and gives the bully a small taste of his own medicine, you'd really start indignantly lecturing him about how hypocritical and unprincipled it is that he went after Brad in his time of weakness after all of the complaining he's done about his own present weakness being exploited? That it proves that Little Timmy was always just as in favor of violent confrontation as Brad is? Even when there's a very good chance that the moment Brad recovers the (attempted, likely successful) ass-beatings for Little Timmy are only going to intensify, that it's not any sort of a permanent victory?
He doesn't deserve to celebrate or luxuriate in his one respite/triumph in a long time at all? He should have just ran out the clock on his brief moment of strength by peacefully meditating on how evil and inconsistent with his prior expressed non-violent principles it would be to take advantage of the circumstances by having poor ol' Brad be the injured party this time instead? (I'm not just slinging around rhetorical questions, but genuinely asking what the general principles on retaliation should be here.)
"But he didn't just go after Brad directly! He also attacked Sarah, who never directly touched him to my knowledge. As far as we know, all she ever did was subscribe to the mutual ideologies of Bradism and anti-Timmyism, cheer on Brad beating up Timmy every day in the background, and post on social media about how disappointed she was that Timmy's mom [who is seen by Little Timmy as his primary defender, as she's been advocating for the obviously unfairly biased teachers/administration to stop being so clearly prejudiced against him and punish Brad for his own bad behavior] didn't die in the car accident she had the day before. She's totally irrelevant, a minuscule fish in the larger pond of the overall affair. Even if you think retaliating against Brad or some more prominent members of his bully posse like Brock is understandable, going after innocent little Sarah is nothing more than pure sadism!" This meanwhile, IMO, is basically the equivalent of defending that cashier at Home Depot and others like her specifically. (No I'm not saying that any of the people defending her formulated their arguments exactly as I did or trying to put words directly into their mouths; the quote is just how I characterize their position myself, simply rephrased.)
Even Scotty engages in what I can only see as absolutely facile logic here. Observe this (what I would characterize as) nonsense:
"You admit that being pinched by this annoying child has made you think it might be a good idea to pinch him back; so you admit that being pinched hasn't even taught you as an adult that pinching a child is wrong; so what makes you think that a child being on the receiving end of a pinch is going to teach him anything!?"
Zero acknowledgment of the difference between unprovoked aggression and responding to unprovoked aggression already in progress. This is supposed to be one of our top rationalist game theory gurus? Give me a break. (I'm not even going to bother dissecting the rest of the article, because it is similarly flawed from top to bottom, as most modern barely-worthy-of-engagement Scotty (ever since he let himself be fully chastity caged by Ozy and co., with Alexandros Marinos showing him to be a fraud being the final nail in the coffin) writings are.
If there is a world where tatters (absolutely convinced of the righteousness of their tats in this case as we must be reminded) generally choose to put their tats away without the effective exhibition of tits creating a credible threat of more tits in return, then I'd like to see it, but I haven't yet. And it is precisely those like the Home Depot cashier who cheer on the tatters and their tats that gave them their perception of absolute imprimatur in the first place. How can you address a behavior without addressing such a deeply-rooted cause of it? If you deal in tats, whether by dishing them out or cheering them on, then you must expect an imminent tit to the face (or to the job in these cases). That's the only way to incentivize fair behavior.
tl;dr: By my reckoning, whether you simply like tits or even if you seek an eventual future without them (and tats), the only productive path for either side at the moment that I can see is to free the tits. Get your tits out boys. Otherwise you're committing a mistake much like someone with a cockroach infestation focusing their energy instead on killing the house centipedes chowing down on them.
Here's perhaps a better analogy: somebody keeps screaming at the top of his lungs and disrupting things. Which is more useful: screaming back at him, or handcuffing and gagging him so he can't scream anymore?
Scott is suggesting doing the latter, breaking the teeth of the cancellation monster by throwing HR ladies and others in jail until they stop executing the will of the mob. This is not rolling over and playing dead; it's in some ways an escalation. But it's an escalation that accomplishes something and which doesn't burn the commons.
Okay, but the problem is that throwing the HR ladies in jail is presently impossible.
If you can handcuff and gag a person who is screaming at you, then yes, that's the superior option. (Of course it's worth noting that handcuffing and gagging people is in most cases illegal, even if they're screaming at you.)
But if you can't, then screaming back at them is at least superior to doing nothing. I'm pretty sure that, probabilistically speaking, someone who is screaming at somebody else is more likely to stop or at least be interrupted if they're screaming back as opposed to just sitting there and taking it. That's my entire point.
The commons being depleted for the exclusive gain of one side < The commons being depleted evenly for the gain of both sides < The commons not being depleted at all
So that argument is irrelevant too. If someone else is destroying the commons, you're not going to stop them by just appealing to the commons (which they're perfectly happy with the state of, because you're giving them a monopoly on abusing it) and refusing to demonstrate to them how it feels to have the commons depleted for somebody else's exclusive gain. That's just more for them.
Quite frankly, I just feel like some people here (not necessarily you @magic9mushroom, but just the anti-retaliation case in general) are almost game theory denialists, like some Flat Earth stuff. Tit for tat is a well established as a ridiculously effective strategy there. That's why it's used productively even in entirely non-political contexts like bandwidth allocation algorithms for decentralized networks. You can come up with as many hypotheticals as you want, as many different ways of phrasing things, but you're not going to make tit for tat bad anymore than you will prove that 2 + 2 = 5.
Indeed, you do not have real power. Your goal should therefore be to get real power, and it mostly looks like the easiest way there* is a coalition with liberals. Liberals don't like cancel mobs, though.
Indeed, this does not suffice. But that's not what Scott or I are suggesting. We're merely suggesting that you retaliate in an asymmetric way that does not burn the commons - not all retaliation does!
*Well, the easiest reliable way there. The easiest way there is to wait for WWIII to incinerate your enemies for you, but that's not guaranteed to happen.
A "coalition" with people who don't want you to actually fight back (other than in some future magic fairy tale "right moment" where every star has perfectly aligned, which they will almost certainly keep finding a reason to declare hasn't come yet, but just you wait!) because "Nooo be civil, don't be so grossly hypocritical as to attack the people who attacked you first, because remember, if you kill your enemies, they win, and muh commons, so just wait until you're magically in charge of all corporations and can fire all your enemies directly instead (because that's somehow ethically superior)!" (even though if that ever comes to fruition it would have to mean that the right's already won and tactical considerations of seizing power would be irrelevant then anyway, basically making such advice "Don't even try to make any gains until your victory is already fully assured anyway. Surely that'll work right?") is a classic "With 'friends' like these, who needs enemies?" situation, not a path to "real power".
If "liberals" want to interpret liberalism to mean game theory denialism that pretends that tit for tat is not just and effective, then as far as I'm concerned they can keep their "coalition" to themselves and try their luck with the lefties. Surely you'll be able to convince them to shut down their attack mobs, right? Don't think so. (That is, liberals need us more than we need them. Almost no true liberal has ever been attacked in the modern era by right-wingers over it, whereas they tend to share institutions with lefties who love taking their scalps constantly for supporting insufficiently many Stalins. The right has been the only modern refuge for true liberals. If you want to reject the only shred of protection you've got, the only people who have ever gone to bat for you, because they're actually choosing to fight back against their and your mutual enemy now during an obvious opportune moment that's actually presented itself in the real world (instead of waiting for a hypothetical Death Note keikaku from a Substack post to play out), so you can jump out of "principle" on grenades for lefties who already think you're the same "fascists" as us too anyway (and still will after they reward your generosity by gulaging you themselves later), then be our guests. Just don't expect us to jump with you though.)
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So you're not a libertarian, but you feel resentful that you've been labeled as less than a principled libertarian. No doubt you'll also resent not being called an observant Muslim, or an implication that you had a less-than-stellar academic record at the University of Padua.
So let's address one of your examples. I honestly lost a track of who deserved how much tat so I'm just gonna stick with the first one.
This assumes that your opponents are the children, while you picture yourself as the adult. This strikes me as wishful thinking. At best, these are two co-equal parties, neither of which has strict escalation dominance. At worst, this scenario is the reverse: a child, tired of being spanked, sees that just this once, his father has bent over to pick something up, and now he has the chance to spank his father and see how he feels getting spanked for a change! Do you think that any father, spanking a child he found to be acting out, has been hit back by the child and thought "Now I understand how it feels, I guess I should stop spanking him, peace has been achieved in our time."
Because this isn't a permanent turning of the tables, it is a momentary advantage to the right. For completely random reasons, for this moment, the right has a limited power to hit back. What scalps have they taken in the process? Not nearly enough to deter their enemies, but enough to lose the moral high ground in the eyes of people who think it is acceptable to make any kind of joke you please. I'm cancellable either way for a party with sufficient surveillance of my life: I've made nigger jokes and I've made jokes about politicians deserving death. Hell, I've made serious philosophical arguments about trans people and justifying the assassination of politicians, call the thought police! I may not be the perfect Libertarian, but I am going to note how people behave.
When the child hits his father, he won't cause his father to change his mind about spankings. He won't inflict enough pain on his father that his father will be deterred from hitting him in the future. What he will do is convince onlookers that his father was probably correct to hit him, even retroactively, because clearly a kid that would hit his parent is acting out and needs to be put in line.
Well, sure, if you intentionally cut out the part where I say I do somewhat identify with libertarianism regardless (in that I by no means discount the abundant importance of liberty as a crucial value), even if I don't consider myself an absolute dogmatist (though realistically I'm probably still more libertarian than much if not most of the US population), then I guess my words do sound somewhat stupid, don't they? I'm not a dogmatic "animal rights" supporter either, but yeah I'd probably chafe as well if you suggested that my viewpoints mean that I'm not generally a principled opponent of random dog slayings too. (But yes, if left-wingers came specifically at right-wingers' dogs, part of the solution would be...)
And in fact, though I'm certainly not a communist to any degree, I would still object if you suggested that "principled communists" should oppose something for spurious reasons that have nothing to do with communism. That's just called defending reason.
In any case I will note for the record that other than trying to snark at me with a "gotcha" about me not wanting to box myself in as whatever your definition of "principled libertarian" is (which you probably aren't either for many definitions I could come up with, as I'll demonstrate below), you did nothing to challenge my claim that retaliation is perfectly compatible with and in fact necessary in libertarianism.
It's rather humorous that you ask this as if it's inconceivable, because in a more accurate (as an analogy) and only very slightly tweaked formulation of your scenario, the answer is absolutely... yes! Many physically abusive parents have definitely been chastened by their children showing them that they are grown enough to now beat the parent's ass instead. It's as common of an anecdote as it is a media trope, the 13-17 year old boy who gives his rough stepdad his first black eye to fiercely let him know that he's never going to hurt him or mom again.
Now you may protest that you were talking about presumably justified spankings (assuming spanking can be justified, as much research on childhood discipline says it can't) here, not physical abuse, but since the referent in the analogy is leftist "cancellation" (which I believe even your own argument admits is unwarranted), my change for it to be physical abuse instead of mere spanking (which would be more akin to some neutral, order-keeping activity of an official authority like a cop or judge) is more accurate to the real case the analogy references. (It's worth nothing that in the real scenario there is also nothing analogous to the right coming after the left merely because it happened to come across themm innocently bent over (unlike the innocent gamers who really were doing not much other than enjoying their preferred medium when leftists attacked them in one of the earliest shots of the culture war, Gamergate) as opposed to, you know, openly cheering on the assassination of their current political leader...)
So yes, if you're a child who is unfairly physically abused a parent, whether it's in the ostensible form of spankings or not, you should absolutely, definitely beat that abusive parent's ass in return as soon as reasonable to try to deter them into stopping. And I certainly question the morality of anyone who is against that statement on a moral level (as opposed to saying on a tactical level that it's not a wise time for it yet).
Along the lines of my parentheses, you might further object to this that the right cannot be sure that it has truly become a big enough child to hold off its parent for good. A little temporary retribution now, no matter how satisfying, might just lead to a bigger, angrier ass whoopin' from daddy later, right? But that is merely a question of tactics, not ethics. Who is the parent, who is the child, and if the child has become large enough to challenge the parent-- that is all still to be decided. Yet it's a well-known fact of martial strategy that you can lose a war by being too passive and not taking advantage of a situation just as much as you can lose it by being too eager to take advantage of one. Evaluating the risk/reward, I think the opportunity here is worthwhile. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but again that's not a moral judgment.
Again, I completely question not only the morality but in fact the "principled libertarian" bona fides (given the inherently hierarchical and coercive nature of parental authority over children, though I won't be as much of a shit (yet) as to question you if you're allowed to consider yourself a "principled libertarian" if you're not against it) of anyone who sees a child driven to physical violence against their own parent and automatically assumes the child is 100% in the wrong without appropriate additional context.
Yes, we've apparently lost the "moral high ground" in the eyes of "principled libertarians" who, in my reckoning, seem to think something at least like the equivalent of that you should be allowed to physically assault your kids with impunity and them fighting back at all is merely automatic proof that they deserved it in the first place (which I think is a reasonably fair interpretation of your words in the quote above the most recent). Somehow I think we'll live.
Well, I guess we'll see what happens then. One set of facts about the world will turn out to be correct, but not for years.
Okay, great, as long as you're not sticking to your story that retaliation is incompatible with any notion of libertarianism. Also don't automatically assume the child is wrong in conflicts between child and parent; some parents are legitimately abusive.
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It is probably also worth pointing out that, for males, the ability and willingness to do this (to parental figures or to authority more generally) is the ultimate dividing line between child (who can't and aren't) and adult (who can and will).
For females, this dividing line comes when they can successfully convince an adult male to exercise that capacity for violence on their behalf.
If your opponent has more capacity for violence than you it will result in your subhumanization/demotion to child (relative to the more powerful) 100% of the time given infinite time, though whether anyone happens to care is another question entirely.
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Upvotes for wall-of-text polemics about how much you hate your enemies are usually just a sign that you got a lot of seals to clap for you. There are quite a few people who regularly nominate the most toxic rants for AAQCs, and people who write very calm and well-reasoned arguments for a very unpopular (usually leftist) viewpoint often get heavily downvoted.
This place isn't as bad as reddit, and sometimes upvotes and downvotes do reflect the quality of a post. But no one should delude themselves that the average Motter isn't prone to using upvotes/downvotes as "Fuck yeah!"" or "Fuck you!" buttons.
If they are intelligent enough to recognize the obvious correctness and virtue of what I wrote (in my view), then I'm happy to have them as clapping seals.
Seals are hardly uncivilized anyway. The delightful tricks they can do often greatly supersede those of my adversaries, such as the many Reddit (since you brought it up) mods who yet possess comparable if not superior amounts of blubber.
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I'm on the left and I find the "retaliation" angle here somewhat odd. If done solely or primarily out of retaliation or spite - like Cernovich with Sam Seder - where you do not think someone did something bad for real but you just want to give them a taste of their own medicine, then it feels like stupid, emotional, warmongering bullshit to me and I agree with all of the criticisms of the "right wing cancel squads" that I've seen in the past few days.
If you genuinely think it's really bad to support the attempted assassination of any major political figure, then while there can certainly be a retaliation motive, you're still broadly acting in good faith by trying to get people cancelled. If there's some sort of "I have a principle of supporting freedom of speech and opposing cancel culture but the desire for just deserts is temporarily overriding that at the moment" going on as well - sure, whatever. But if you actually are disgusted and outraged by people endorsing assassination attempts, I really see zero issue with any of these cancellations, because 1) that part of the motive seems "pure", and 2) I personally agree that it's bad to endorse assassinating politicians (including Trump, who I detest) so I feel fine with it.
I'm assuming most of these pro-cancellers on the right aren't just looking for some excuse to cancel annoying leftoids and gleefully jumping on the opportunity. As Scott points out, such behavior is bad and dumb for many reasons, including that one has no evidence any of these assassination-supporters endorse the sorts of cancellations the canceller despises, even if it could be likely. I figure most of the pro-cancellers in this situation just share the logic of most pro-cancellers on the left: they see something they find sickening and corrosive to society and antithetical to morality, and they're doing something about it.
(There's some wiggle room here: a liberal making a joke about the shooting does not necessarily genuinely think the shooting is good or desirable. For the sake of argument I'm speaking about the people who clearly sincerely are saying and believing "I wish the shooter hadn't missed".)
It's not necessarily pure spite, for some pro-retaliation people it's about making it stop. In my opinion it's a valid approach, but requires better targets then random Home Depot workers.
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Is it warmongering to wage war against those who have already started a war with you? Or if it is, is warmongering still a vice in that case?
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Wow, an angry rant talking about how the libs really do deserve hatred. Enjoy your trip to the QCs.
This is not a ban message or even a warning, because what you’re saying here is within the rules. At least, I’m fairly confident that’s the case; my eyes glazed over somewhere around the third agonizing metaphor. But compared to your previous screed, it’s positively restrained, so you’re getting credit for improvement.
You’re still missing the point.
Contrary to what certain critics believe, the point of this forum is not to emulate Hitler. It should be abundantly clear that all Hitler’s self-righteous fire did not keep him from being a fuckwit. No, he wallpapered over his incoherent philosophy by speaking to the anger and desperation in his audience. That is not conducive to truth-seeking. If you care about that at all, that feeling of righteousness should be a warning, not a point of pride.
Hey look, more proof of a point from my subsequent post:
Completely uncharitable and overly simplistic, putting words in my mouth summary of what is essentially a post about game theory and the broader implications/necessity of retaliation to prevent defection? Check. Coming from a mod, so totally kosher and okay? Check. (Would a user have ever been guaranteed to be modded for such a thing? No (as again it depends on who they are anyway). Could they readily have been modded, especially at least with a warning, for such a thing over the course of this forum's existence? The exact probability depends on the time period and who was mod at the moment, but absolutely. As always though the mods here fire confidently and freely on the posters, safe in their nests, while the rest of us fight it out in no man's land waiting to see if a machine gun will suddenly take us out.)
Agreed, in many, if not some of the most important ways, unfortunately. :(
It shouldn't be to emulate anyone, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from them.
Your mistake is apparently assuming that history, even the "good" history, isn't mostly littered with "fuckwits" or that even the best figures in history weren't "fuckwits" in their own way. I mean, though Hitler made many bad decisions, luck is also a factor. Some of the least "fuckwitty" figures in history were actually still just "fuckwits" with better dice rolls.
If you can't learn from the best aspects of "fuckwits", then you're not really trying to learn IMO. Arrogance is the cousin of ignorance.
Well, that's fine. His philosophy was somewhat incoherent at times (which is often basically inevitable when you have to be an actual leader in the real world who has to unite disparate factions like German Protestants, German/Austrian Catholics, Aryan mystics, vehemently atheist racial science enthusiasts, etc. into unsteady coalitions instead of just posting the Internet). Mine is (mostly) not, I believe. Must it be only the incoherent who wield anger and desperation? Should only criminals have guns?
Truth-seeking, maybe not. Truth-sharing, yes. What's the point of the first without the second? I thought I had a truth, so I coated it in the medicine that I also thought would best make it go down others' mental throats smoothly.
If somebody, like maybe for example you, had posted some amazing logical rhetoric that soundly refuted my central point, then I would have read it with rapt attention, admitted they were right if so, and that would be truth-seeking. (Or perhaps truth-baiting, its cousin. That's what you do when you post something on a forum like this that you think is true. You bait a possible counter-truth, the realer, better truth. I think that's a perfectly valid form of truth seeking.)
Instead I was entirely prevented from speaking for a little bit for communicating the truth a bit too spicily. And now from the same police force I'm receiving similar spice back for pointing that out. Oh well. A lost opportunity for truth-seeking, perhaps?
Pray, where shall I seek the truth you believe I need if none shall put it out there to find? Is your anger at me the real truth, as opposed to my anger at left-wingers? Are you truth-seeking/baiting and/or truth-sharing with your post? Enlighten me.
Or feel free to respond to my original post again, without the mod hat (which seems highly superfluous in this case given that you say you're not even warning me (though it sure seems to me like using a mod hat at all is inherently at least a "quasi-warning", which itself elaborates upon the weird political/power dynamics of this place) and my post is entirely within the boundaries of the rules), and actually engage with my real argument this time. I mean, sorry for the "agonizing metaphors". Feel free to skip them if they don't add anything to your understanding. But the whole post is still only about 12K characters, hardly a novel, and I promise you I didn't waste my time writing it with the intention that it be entirely without substance.
So if you think it doesn't represent the truth that should be sought, perhaps you could present the truth, for the benefit of all of us, that we should be seeking instead of just apparently raging that I invoked the Great Satan? Again, enlighten me.
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IMO, this represents everything wrong with what the Motte has become.
Maximizing your "rhetorical effectiveness" is literally just a fancy way of saying "I'm waging the culture war". You're not in traffic - you are traffic. You are intentionally optimizing for heat rather than light and you're proud of it.
The fact you got "upvotes" merely proves that other people on this site are also angry - that you are in an echo chamber. What an achievement.
I remember when expressing anger and hatred wasn't considered a virtue back in the good ol' reddit days. Alas.
Well said. I don't upvote very often, but I feel this deserved one. The purpose of the Motte was always supposed to be light rather than heat, but it is often... not the best at shedding that, and sometimes attracts posters more interested in raising the temperature. Let's bring it back down.
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Thank you for putting this to words.
This community is unusually good at resisting the urge. On the other hand, it’s a really strong urge, and it benefits from feedback loops we can’t really control. The site would be boring with zero fire, which is part of the reason Deiseach and Hlynka were so well-known. Can’t keep them while trying to enforce civility. Can’t keep their critics if we bend the rules for charisma. Lose-lose.
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Many people here over the course of years or even decades were probably incubated in the idea that anger or hatred were not virtues, and should be avoided despite our occasional, personal lapses. Your parents, teachers, and media all probably echoed the same sentiments, and this was sold as non-negotiable bedrock. Over time, you realize this isn't actually how things work, and that many of your moral instructors have a hard time even bothering to keep up the act. And so you go from having a sincere belief, to an abstract ideal, to lip service, and it has now bottomed out entirely. A fairy tale has lost its spell, and we are all Spider-Man now.
I don't think this should be license for infinite rudeness or malice. But if we're going to talk about modern cancel culture dynamics and explore the idea of 'revenge' being compatible with 'justice' (for real, not snapping up the drawbridge at "eye for an eye" platitudes), then this ire is a very legitimate data point, and it is ignored at everybody's peril.
I see where Scott is coming from, and it is not even close to overcoming the war memorial I can visualize of victims shitcanned for transgressing progressive values in the most milquetoast ways. And I don't know why I should have to reflect in the mirror and assume I'm the one getting warped because I feel a bit cross.
(Hear, hear! I think this is the first comment I've upvoted on this site.)
There's a lesson to be learned in the idea that justice and hate aren't so clearly delineated. It just needs to be contemplated by more people from more walks of life first.
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My point is that this space and its precursors (Less Wrong, slatestarcodex.com, /r/slatestarcodex, /r/themotte) all believed that charity and knowledge-seeking were virtues - and that venting your anger was not. The expectation was that, when participating in those spaces, you made a good faith effort to pursue those virtues - however imperfect. The person I was responding to was, to my reading, effectively saying "I didn't fail to achieve those values by mistake - I intentionally pursued opposing values and see that as the correct course of action" - the literal opposite of the original founding values.
I'm not expressing an opinion on what "The Right" or "The Left" should do or should value. I'm expressing an opinion on what this website should value.
I disagree with this - the entire reason LessWrong got as big as it got was that Eliezer very much "brought the fire" in the name of advocating for his vision of correct thought. I don't think you can read, say, the Zombies sequence and argue it's cold and passionless.
"What does the god-damned collapse postulate have to do for physicists to reject it? Kill a god-damned puppy?"
I upvoted the parent because I think it's entirely in keeping with that rhetorical lineage.
I’m not saying you should never be angry - I’m saying being proud of your anger is the antithesis of rational thought and shows you aren’t operating in good faith. It turns this website into “let’s all vent about the outgroup”.
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The idea that there is some state of pure discourse free of even the hint of antagonism where humans merely discuss, unmolested by concepts like personal interest or context, the culture war without waging it to any degree is a fantasy, unless they're Spock (in which case they aren't human) or some secret time traveler posting from 3050 who finds the whole thing irrelevant. Maybe it's an important or necessary fantasy to prevent a discussion forum from entirely turning into /pol/, so maybe me getting banned for stretching kayfabe a little too much with my prior post was necessary (not that I really think so, but I have no idea where the Culture War Roundup community went or how I can participate in it), but it's still a fantasy.
But no, I wasn't optimizing for heat instead of light in that post. (That's more like a genre of post not uncommonly made on /pol/ that says something like "All women like to be dominated, therefore all Israeli women secretly want BHC (Big Hamas Cock). Only JIDF shills disagree. Prove me wrong, if you work for Mossad. Also, God doesn't exist, and Nick Fuentes is confirmed gay. But don't post in this thread if you have an American flag, because I don't want to talk to mutts who can't stop getting themselves shot." (Pls don't ban me mods for accurately imitating a /pol/ poster like you previously banned me for accurately imitating a black person. It's genuinely just an example to illustrate the difference between what I posted and what actually optimizing for heat is.)) I simply acknowledge that there's no light that doesn't also produce heat, and sometimes the best way to get the kind of light you need effectively is to turn up the heat a bit (whereas with my current post I instead tried a more logic-based rhetorical approach). Again, only in a fantasy world is this never the case.
The only thing strict adherence to the absolute most literal letter most rules here gets you is the culture war still being clearly waged, just in an infuriatingly indirect, passive aggressive fashion, like when Andrew Yang fans would pretend they were entirely non-partisan even though they obviously leaned heavily to the left. (And this is why the strictest literal letter of the rules here is rarely/only selectively enforced, though who gets the privilege of bending them the most can differ based on mod fiat.) I prefer my direct approach, though it's of course necessarily limited by the venue.
And I am traffic as opposed to merely in it? Good. I appreciate the compliment. The only thing that gives me pause about the current state of this world is that I'm not getting in its way enough, not that I'm getting in its way too much. You know who also acted as really infuriating traffic for the drivers on the road once? This guy. Traffic can be a noble thing.
So am I just waging the culture war? No more than basically anybody else here, even if I acknowledge it a bit more than some. Maybe I'll get popped extra/again for rejecting the polite fiction that this is a venue inherently opposed to that, but again if that happens given the pretty anodyne tone of my current posts then that's just a matter of selective enforcement, not reality.
In any case, if you think my prior post was wrong, then you should be happy with the mods here, who banned me and incentivized me to use a different rhetorical strategy this time. Your Motte lives, or at least its naked emperor has not yet ended his alleged fashion show.
That's good for me. They should be in my view.
Yes, I'm happy to confirm that some reasonably intelligent people agree with me. (Though according to the OP's count, almost a quarter of voters still disagreed with me, so hardly an echo chamber. Perhaps I just made a good point, even if it wasn't dressed up all fancy in pretending that I have no dog in the fight?)
I remember those days too. They were called the '90s when I lived them. Alas, they've changed some things since then that have affected people's propensity for anger and hatred.
I'm not saying your original post represents "everything wrong with what the Motte has become" - I'm saying that particular paragraph I quoted does.
I don't expect unbiased discourse.
I don't expect an unadulterated pursuit of perfect knowledge.
I don't expect every single post to be an epitome of kindness.
I used to expect that the above was the desire. I used to expect that we had a shared desire to be unbiased, knowledge-seeking, and kind. That, when we fell short in this space, it was considered a mistake rather than something to be lionized. This is why the most important part (which I italicized) is you're proud of it.
That is what has been lost in my opinion. It used to be that the consensus was that we had ideals rooted in charity, curiosity, etc - however imperfectly rendered in practice. IMO, those ideals are no longer the consensus on this website.
"Kind", no. But I do desire to be relatively unbiased (other than by what I see as the truth) and knowledge-seeking (and it's worth noting that it's the pursuit of "kindness" that often inhibits those two more important values), and I think that I'm at a reasonable level of both and that the quoted paragraph in controversy by no means contradicts that. If effective rhetoric invalidates truth and knowledge-seeking, then there is not a truthful or knowledgeable person on this planet (or if there is, he has zero tools to communicate any of it to the rest of us or at least is apparently not supposed to use them, which seems a bit unproductive to me).
That's the rub, isn't it? Any time you make a venue to attract intelligent people founded on a certain set of principles, if you succeed, those principles will inevitably be challenged, because intelligent people (who you wanted to attract) always challenge principles and ideas. Perhaps by its original standards this place would have stayed better if it had stayed dumber, because dumb people listen and obey.
But yeah, I'm fine with being proud of not being lockstep in agreement with communicative norms inspired by weird Berkeley polysex people who have for the most part collectively accomplished nothing, even easy layups like all getting rich on Bitcoin so they could influence everything with money, other than mostly ruining their reputation in the mainstream. They don't have a monopoly on truth or knowledge-seeking any more than I do, and their blog posts from 2014 or whenever about Edwardian Salafi Confucius Lite etiquette or whatever are not the gospel for all time.
As mentioned too, the people who most adhere to the commandments of "niceness" on this site and other places like it overwhelmingly aren't actually that nice deep down either (including its alleged enforcers, if you'll look at the angry response left on my post by a mod here who chose to don their hat for it despite declaring it not even a warning) I often find. At their best, they're better at keeping the knife hidden behind their back. At their worst, they're merely sneakier about pulling it out and plunging it into your throat before you've even noticed.
That's why I'd rather hear it straight and say it straight, even if pesky human feelings and shocking realities like "conflict" and "People often associate negative emotionality with sociopolitical and cultural issues, especially when those who oppose their preferred beliefs and have hurt them over it appear." end up involved. That to me is helping the pursuit of truth and knowledge. Revealing that I'm biased by what I see as the truth in a particular evidentiary or even emotional (yes, we are not Vulcans, not even the rats) direction is helping the conversation stay overall less biased (or at least transparent about it, which realistically with humans involved is the best you can hope for). Everything else is a smokescreen of little imperial court mandarins just desperately trying not to rock the boat. Boring and pointless.
There may be a correlation between intelligence and contrarianness, but I think you're going a step beyond that and asserting a correlation between intelligence and aggression, or between intelligence and lack of charity.
I find that much more doubtful.
I will repeat my recent reply to a very similar objection for efficiency's sake in response to you:
So while I was perhaps asserting such a correlation (not sure if I want to commit to that or explain more nuance, but it's not super important), and I am perhaps wrong if I was, it's still worth nothing that no such correlation is required for "aggressive", "charity-lacking" (by your standards, as by my standards the mods here often lack the most charity when modding others' posts) people to be all up in your intellectual discussion venue (based on subjective frequency of appearance).
I haven't asserted that agreeability correlates with intelligence either. In fact, I just said that I think plausibly intelligence correlates with being contrarian.
But being contrarian, or even just disagreeableness simpliciter, is not the same thing as being a passionate culture warrior who seeks heat rather than light. I don't particularly care to discuss moderation here, particularly since, in my experience, culture and implicit norms are vastly more important than explicit rule enforcement.
Where I object to what you're saying is that I think you're defending a pugilistic, uncharitable approach to discussion, which I think is opposed to a goal like actually learning. I think a measure of charity, of good-faith curiosity and desire to understand different perspectives, is necessary for intellectual growth, and that's what I think is lacking in what you advocate.
That doesn't mean I think people should be dishonest, passive, or should feign agreement. Forthrightness is an intellectual virtue. But that is still a long way away from a Hitler-like "fire and brimstone" approach.
It may be that fire and brimstone are more persuasive - indeed, if your goal is to sway the public, they almost certainly are. In your top comment, you described Hitler as a 'great rhetorician', and indeed he was. But rhetoricians optimise for persuasiveness, rather than truth-seeking. 'Winning' in the sense of swaying more of an audience is something you may sometimes want to aim for. But here is supposed to be a place about 'winning' in the sense of learning and increasing your understanding.
That's why I think the aggressive, militant approach is wrong here. Soldier mindset, to use Galef's term, may be great for soldiers - but we're not soldiers. This is not a barracks.
I think the main conflict between us here is I don't see my "pugilistic" (good description) approach as inherently uncharitable. Can you point out where you think I lacked sufficient charity in terms of inaccurately or mendaciously characterizing things?
If I attack someone fiercely for what they've actually done that's truly terrible, then I've given them as much charity as they deserve, which is none, which means I've still been optimally charitable. Nor has the revelation of the truth been harmed. In fact, it's been enhanced by accurate characterization.
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Sounds like we agree there has been a shift - just not on whether the shift is desirable. C'est la vie.
Personally, I don't think disagreeableness is all that tightly correlated with intelligence, and I certainly don't think that people who feel a need to vent on social media are more intelligent than those who don't.
Maybe not, but I'm not sure that the agreeable are generally more intelligent than the "disagreeable" (assuming in this case that a mere propensity for dissent and adversarial analysis is equivalent to the psychological trait of disagreeableness, but I won't get into the weeds of dissecting that now) either. That means that at a minimum, if you try to draw intelligent people to your platform, you will attract both kinds. In fact, if even just 5% of intelligent people are somewhat "disagreeable" (or actually disagreeable), that's still enough people in raw terms to force every janny online into a jumble daily.
If there is no correlation, then intelligence doesn't have anything to do with it, and your claim reduces to "as new people come to a platform, values drift unless they're all super agreeable, because some of the new people disagree with the original values". This is (I think?) obviously true, but doesn't pad our egos in the same way.
Re the 5%, my opinion is that the most confrontational 5% of users are net-negatives in terms of overall discourse quality and discourse quantity (i.e. they drive other users away). It seems like you don't agree?
I didn't say there's no correlation, just that I was unsure of how to characterize it (as I was involved in a lot of other conversations in other subthreads at the time). And I will say now that there probably is a correlation, just that I don't think "disagreeable" is the right word to describe it. "Intellectually autonomous", "prone to questioning authority", "less vulnerable to pure peer pressure", etc. I think are all better phrases to describe the trait I'm talking about. And yes intelligent people are more likely to illustrate those traits, because why wouldn't they be? Again, it is the less intelligent who are more prone to listening and obeying, because they have less of an ability to internally formulate their own alternative ideas and behavioral schemes anyway.
It's also just a matter of the basic bell curve. There's no reason to think that on any given venue like this that the moderators are going to be the most intelligent people around, because some research has actually shown that management ability does not linearly correlate with intelligence but in fact drops off after around an IQ of 120 or so, because you as you get more intelligent than that you lose your ability to easily relate and communicate to people with lower IQs. So inevitably more intelligent people than the mods are going to show up (which isn't to say that everyone opposing the mods is automatically smarter than them), and why wouldn't they question them if they're literally smarter?
Not at all. First of all, driving other users away means absolutely nothing inherently and is often a good thing (quality over quantity any day IMO). 100 quality posters (whether they drive other people beyond them away or not) who are capable of generating new ideas and posts is far better than 50,000 posters who are not. (And indeed a community with the first configuration could be quite a livelier than one with the second, as the 100 posters are capable of driving the conversation forward, whereas the community with the 50,000 posters may just straight up die if none of them are even capable of generating any content for the others to respond to unoriginally.) Or if you want to talk about something like Reddit, it's still far superior to 5 million people who are only capable of generating and responding to fake Jerry Springer-esque personal stories, bot-posted AI slop and endless reposts, cheap political bait, etc. The people who want to manipulate them ensure there's plenty of new activity, but most of it sucks.
Other than that, I don't see what would possibly be bad about confrontation. What is the essence of discourse if not the confrontation of ideas and claims?
Personally I think it's the top 5% of those who insist on an adherence to imaginary standards who cause the problems and reduce the discourse quality (which is not to necessarily say quantity, but quality is obviously superior).
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The anti-retaliation side assumes that there are more groups than the two monoliths, of which one is actively doing the titting upon all tatters and the other has only now gained a reprieve to briefly tat upon all titters.
If I'm someone who dislikes the left at their current level of cancel-happiness, yet would dislike the right more if they were in power and would be just as cancel-happy, then blind, cathartic retaliation from the right as soon as they can teaches me that I actually don't want to give them a chance to prove they'll stop canceling as soon as they get the catharsis out of their system.
So again, per my post, do you apply this logic universally? Do you recoil at Little Timmy punching Brad, because you imagine that in all of his resentful little fury he'd probably be just as bad of a schoolyard bully or worse if he had Brad's status?
If "I believe you would behave badly if you were in a position of strength, therefore I can't support your retaliation from a position of weakness in the present moment." is a solid argument against retaliation, then retaliation is basically off the table entirely, because, as the old saying goes, power corrupts. If anybody who might take inappropriate advantage of a position of strength is banned from defending themselves from a position of a weakness, then almost everybody would be banned from defending themselves from a position of weakness.
Among the victims of mass shooters, for example, haven't there almost certainly been some who themselves fantasized about going Columbine occasionally? The types of young men who perpetrate these massacres have also not infrequently been their victims. So if one of these potential victims who likes to indulge in a little GTA and might even do so IRL if they had the power to do it without consequences (as unlike an actual mass shooter they're not willing to give up their life over it) manages to wrest control of a gun from an actual current mass shooter and end him, we should object?
I think this is just a bad assumption. Yes, left vs. right is somewhat reductive, but in regards to the issue of Donald Trump's assassination, splitting people into those two camps is hardly inaccurate.
Your mistake is assuming that "their unprovoked assault, our retaliation" is a correct take on the situation in the first place, because you once again reduce the two coalitions to monoliths. A better analogy would be Little Timmy "retaliating" by punching Kyle, who actually didn't touch him other than standing next to Brad and looking complicit. What is Kyle going to think now? Likely that if he's going to be assaulted anyway (perhaps for some verbal insult against Timmy), he might as well join in on the beatdown.
My argument is "if you don't like the side I'm closer to, how about you start your retaliation with the people who have wronged you most, not the people who are the easiest targets, such as myself. Otherwise, you'll find me closing ranks". If you don't care and see yourself as a perpetual Little Timmy, then be my guest and flail around. I'll keep the enforced pronouns.
Which Kyle has been attacked? Because if we consider who has been highlighted as the most innocent victim (the Home Depot cashier), she wasn't targeted for merely "standing next" to anyone or "looking complicit". Nobody is going after people who just happen to merely identify as left-wingers or Democrats, simply automatically assuming they support Trump's assassination (even though of probably many if not most of them do based on their "stopping Hitler" rhetoric), and proceeding from there (as left-wingers meanwhile have often done in the past with anybody who identifies as right-wing in relation to their most hated right-wing beliefs, as anyone who has ever tried to post on Reddit can testify to). She made a direct comment supporting Trump's murder. She is, as I characterized her, Sarah. She cheered Brad on openly and wished for the death of Little Timmy's mom.
This just gets into my broader point about tit for tat though. If left-wingers had taken your own prescribed medicine and focused their efforts exclusively on the Trumps and Musks of the world instead of the random people using the "OK" hand sign, then we wouldn't be here. But if you go after our cashiers, as you have for years, why shouldn't we go after yours? Are you just going to stop without any retaliation looming over you? Again, I doubt that.
And we'll keep up the aggressive "misgendering" then. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. If not, then the gander has no reason to ever let up on the goose.
So I don't even really see where you're contradicting me.
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You already thought that, though, since you said you would dislike the right more given the same actions.
The right currently claims their principles are against the same actions, though. I'm explaining how being flippant about the Home Depot lady makes me disbelieve that they will act according to those stated principles if given the opportunity.
Can your principles not be against certain actions then if you would ever make use of them as demonstrative retaliation to prove their malice (or just to actively quell a threat/as a deterrent to further harmful actions against you)? If somebody punches me in the face and I punch them back, do I lose any credible claim to being basically more or less against punching people forever then? (Or, to specifically address the Home Depot lady, if I've been punched in the face repeatedly for years, and I punch somebody in the face for being a punchist who posted on social media that they're upset I didn't get punched so hard I died.)
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