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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   30516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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The McGregor verdict and modus ponens

Hypocrisy goes both ways

If you know anything about mixed martial arts, I’m sure you’re familiar with the name Conor McGregor. He’s a titan in the field, perhaps the single most famous sportsperson from this island since George Best, and a rare sportsperson who can honestly claim to have achieved the status of international household name, right up there with Cristiano Ronaldo, Venus Williams or Michael Jordan.

If you only know him from his MMA career, you may be unaware that he is scum. Scum of the lowest order: a narcissistic, immature, pathologically thin-skinned, emotionally incontinent, short-tempered, bullying, coke-addled, vicious thug and rapist. Despite having made a name for himself through his career in MMA, the “controversies” section on his Wikipedia page is nearly 500 words longer than the “professional mixed martial arts career” section, and includes such charming anecdotes as the occasion on which McGregor assaulted a man in his fifties in a pub, prompted by the outrageous provocation of the man politely declining a glass of whiskey McGregor had offered him. Until very recently, his laundry list of well-documented episodes of violent assault, sexual misconduct and general scumbaggery have done nothing to slow down his career, as he pivoted into the film industry with this year’s remake of Road House, and recently announced his intention to run for President in next year’s election.1

It need hardly be said that I think he would be just about the most atrocious ambassador for the nation imaginable, and after running through the list of Irish citizens I most despise, I’m honestly struggling to think of one I think would be a poorer fit. Leo Varadkar? Gerry Adams? Marylou McDonald? Maria Bailey, of Swing-gate fame? Barry Keoghan? Ryan Tubridy? Aisling Bea? Bono? Bob Geldof? The 2 Johnnies? Jacksepticeye? One of those interchangeable (and insufferable) post-punk “musicians” clogging up the airwaves? Jedward? Dustin the Turkey? Any of these, I believe, would represent the nation far better than McGregor.

And what unnerves me most is that I don’t think this is some far-off hypothetical: I think that McGregor has a decent chance of being elected. For anyone who thinks that such an outcome is preposterous, the fact that known gangster Gerry “The Monk” Hutch recently came within a hair’s breadth of being elected to the Dáil should prompt some earnest (and alarmed) reconsideration.

Within Ireland, McGregor is particularly well-known for his mistreatment of women, having been accused of rape and sexual assault on multiple occasions in Spain, Corsica, the US, and of course in his home country. Criminal charges have never been brought against him, owing to lack of evidence (an unfortunately perennial problem in cases of this type); but one complainant, Nikita Hand, was brave enough to sue him in a civil action, and the jury has recently found in Hand’s favour. Now that the trial is over, the injunction on the media has been lifted and they are permitted to disclose various details about the case, including the fact that Hand alleges that, after she filed the civil action, masked men broke into her home and stabbed her partner. McGregor finally appears to be facing some meaningful repercussions for his misconduct as, in light of the ruling, various brands (including IO Interactive, Musgraves and Wetherspoons) have announced that they are cutting their professional ties with him and/or refusing to stock his licensed beer and whiskey.

One reaction to the outcome of the trial I found particularly sharp was from Waterford Whispers News, a satire website which aspires to be sort of like the parochial Irish equivalent of The Onion. Between 2013-16, the website would reliably have a wittingly biting take on virtually every major news story in Ireland (this one was a particular favourite). After that golden era, the website kind of fell off and stopped seeing nearly as much traction on social media. Much like their main source of inspiration, they dropped all pretensions to neutrality and pretty much openly announced that their satire would only be a means to advance a socially progressive worldview, to the point that, earlier this year, they were literally selling merch with the dictionary definition of the word "woke" printed on it, defined as "1. Alert to prejudice and injustice 2. Not a prick" - what is this, 2014?

But occasionally, WWN can still knock the ball out of the park, as with this post:

"Keep Women Safe": Hundreds of Far Right Nationalists Protest Outside Rapist Conor McGregor's House

The joke is sharply observed. There are many working-class activists who are opposed to inward migration into Ireland, and who will often justify said opposition on the grounds that they are concerned about immigrants sexually assaulting Irish women. With very few exceptions, such people tend to be fervent admirers of Conor McGregor. It would not surprise me if at least one of the men who allegedly broke into Nikita Hand’s house with the goal of intimidating her into silence subsequently attended an anti-immigration protest at which he chanted the slogan “keep women safe”. The hypocrisy is indisputable: either such people only get up in arms about Irish women being raped when it’s foreigners doing the raping (but turn a blind eye when it’s one of their own); or their opposition to immigration is driven entirely by racial animus, and the ostensible concern about sexual assault is a fig leaf. Sharp take, no notes.

Well, maybe one.

Are you familiar with the phrase “one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens”?

This is a concept in formal logic that it took me awhile to get my head around. A modus ponens argument takes the form “if A, then B; A; therefore B”, while a modus tollens argument takes the form “If A, then B; not B; therefore not A”. In other words, if someone is saying you should believe B because A is true, the success of that argument hinges on whether or not you believe A is true; if you don’t believe that A is true, their argument immediately backfires. The concept is best illustrated using examples (all of which are sourced from this article):

  • Spencer Case explaining what finally caused him to leave the Mormon church

I continued to discuss my doubts with my dad and with my new bishop, Bishop Olson, both of whom admonished me to go on a mission. At that point my departure would have been imminent. I recall one phone conversation with Bishop Olson in which he inadvertently nudged me to part ways with the church. He said the fact that I was still in the church having these conversations with him, seeking the truth, was proof that I really did know that it was true. Otherwise, what was the sense in my still going to church? Why would I continue seeking? He had a point. He ended the phone call with “See you in church this Sunday.” I never went back.

  • If it’s wrong for people in Asian countries to kill and eat dogs because they can suffer and are intelligent, does that imply that we shouldn’t kill and eat pigs either? Or conversely, does it imply that we should eat dogs too?
  • XKCD’s The Economic Argument. (At some point I’d like to write a post about an implication of this comic which Randall perhaps did not intend.)

Perhaps you’ve guessed where I’m going with this. As I said, it is inarguably true that if you’re up in arms about immigrants assaulting Irish women, you should be equally outraged when an Irishman like Conor McGregor does so. But the reverse is also true: if you’re up in arms about an Irishman like Conor McGregor assaulting Irish women, you should be equally outraged when an immigrant does so.

Cast your mind back to January 2022. The country was reeling from the shocking, inexplicable murder of Ashling Murphy, a primary school teacher who went for a run along the Grand Canal near Tullamore, only to be brutally stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. In the week following her murder, social media was agog with insinuations or outright accusations that all Irish men were indirectly complicit in her murder; that her murder was the result of a toxic Irish rape culture which knowingly ignores, downplays or minimises male violence towards women. Both President Michael D. Higgins and then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar offered their condolences to the victim’s family. Rape crisis organisations called on the Department of Education to implement a national policy on sexual harassment and assault in schools.

Then, less than a week later, they arrested the murderer, and he turned out to be a Roma man from Slovakia named Jozef Puska. Everyone immediately shut up about it. Overnight, it went from being the most talked about story in Ireland to being a page four story at best. The silence was deafening, particularly in light of the furore that had preceded it the week prior.

Google Trends chart showing interest in the case over time. As usual, Google Trends bears out my gut feeling recollection of the period.

Ask yourself: in what universe can it be that a murder case is the most talked-about news story in a particular country, and the arrest of the perpetrator results in the amount of traffic it generates falling to 43% of its peak? That should have been the peak of interest in the story: the murderer brought to justice, the heroic denouement. A sharp drop like this is not what it looks like when a news story organically runs out of steam, the conclusion of one news cycle leading into the next. This is a society collectively choosing to ignore the news story while it’s still ongoing, avoiding thinking about it because it makes them uncomfortable.

Before Puska’s arrest, numerous activists on social media had decided, sight unseen, that a crime like Murphy’s murder doesn’t happen in a vacuum: the perpetrator must have grown up in a culture in which men feel entitled to do as they please with women’s bodies, in which male violence towards women is downplayed or minimised. This is not at all an unreasonable presumption to make. Nothing about Puska’s identity or ethnic background should have changed that supposition: it’s still the same guy doing the same crime for the same reasons. So why, after his arrest, didn’t we hear that argument trotted out quite so often in armchair psychoanalysis of Puska’s motivations?2

Oh. Because that would imply that it’s not (just?) Irish culture which is toxic, misogynistic and dismissive of male violence towards women, but Roma culture. Well, we can’t have that, can we? Wouldn’t want to be accused of being racist, or “legitimising” arguments made by the “far-right”.

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, consider the media’s reaction to the victim impact statement Murphy’s boyfriend Ryan Casey made at Puska’s trial. Casey can fairly claim to have been more bereaved by Murphy’s death than anyone, save her immediate family. Regarding Puska, Casey asserted:

It just sickens me to the core that someone can come to this country, be fully supported in terms of social housing, social welfare, and free medical care for over ten years, never hold down a legitimate job and never once contribute to society in any way shape or form, and commit such a horrendous, evil act of incomprehensible violence.

This statement was conspicuously omitted from the Irish Times's and Newstalk’s coverage of the murder trial. When the statement came up on the BBC current affairs programme The View, journalist Kitty Holland (in a real mask-off moment) criticised Casey for his comments, arguing that his remarks had been “not helpful”, “not good” and had been “latched onto” by the far right.

Imagine it. Your girlfriend has been unexpectedly murdered by a complete stranger, but you can take some solace in the fact that not only your friends, family and community have rallied around you, but the entire country. Then it turns out that the perpetrator is an immigrant, and the entire country immediately drops the case like a hot potato. At the perpetrator’s murder trial, you have the temerity to criticise the legislative framework which enabled the murderer to commit his horrific crime (criticisms whose factual accuracy, to the best of my knowledge, no one has yet disputed) - and your criticisms are either ignored, or you are smeared in the press as a xenophobe for having made them. It would be funny in a Kafkaesque sort of way if it wasn’t so sickening. Casey is suing the BBC for defamation, and I hope he wins.

Always and ever it’s like this when an immigrant to Ireland commits a serious crime. Three months after Ashling Murphy’s murder, two gay men were viciously murdered in Sligo because of their sexuality. Obviously this is proof of a lingering culture of homophobia among Irish people - whoops, turns out the killer is an Iraqi Muslim, time to shut up about it forever. After the unprovoked, indiscriminate stabbing of a five-year-old girl and a care assistant which prompted last November’s Dublin riots, “respectable” outlets like The Journal, the Irish Times and the Irish Independent refrained from mentioning that the assailant was Algerian-born (something known to the tabloids and alternative media by that stage), although the Independent was plenty keen to tout the fact that the man who intervened was BRAZILIAN, in literally the first sentence of the article. I distinctly recall seeing, on the same day of the stabbing, a commenter on the r/ireland subreddit saying something to the effect of: "Imagine hearing about a horrible crime like this and your first instinct is to wonder what colour the attacker's skin is. Despicable." You mean, exactly like you're doing right now?

Irish Twitter and the r/ireland subreddit a few times a year (artist’s rendition).

The media and the chattering classes will come up with all sorts of sophisticated and self-serving justifications for why they’re so recalcitrant when reporting on these issues, why they’re adopting a clear double standard depending on whether the perpetrator of a crime is Irish or an immigrant. They’ll assert that they don’t want to unfairly tar the entire community of immigrants in Ireland by fixating too heavily on a crime committed by a single member (even if they’re perfectly willing to tar the entire community of, say, UCD agricultural science students with a baseless accusation since acknowledged to have been invented from whole cloth). They’ll say they don’t want to “legitimise” far-right talking points by bringing them up or grudgingly acknowledging that a stopped clock is right twice a day.3 They’ll claim that it isn’t fair to expect a recent Syrian refugee to adhere to the same standards of behaviour that we expect from someone like Conor McGregor, who grew up in Ireland (the soft bigotry of low expectations, as ever).

But at the end of the day, what it ultimately boils down to is wilfully ignoring or downplaying crimes when they are committed by a member of one’s in-group, or someone you see as a member of a political faction whose good side you want to stay on. Which, you may have noticed, is exactly what anti-immigration protesters are doing when they turn a blind eye to Conor McGregor’s sexual misconduct.

None of all of the above is to imply that I agree with any and all criticisms of Ireland’s policy on immigration, or that I am personally opposed to immigration into Ireland - I am not. All I’m saying is: before you lecture anti-immigration activists on their hypocrisy, first ask yourself whether you’re guilty of the exact same hypocrisy in the other direction.

1A clarification for international readers: the President of Ireland is a largely ceremonial role, and the holder wields no actual political power.

2Indeed, why did we hear more armchair psychoanalysis of the perpetrator’s motivations before we even knew who the perpetrator was, compared to after? Isn’t this completely backwards?

3One might reasonably ask: if the act of making a truthful assertion constitutes “legitimising” a complaint made by the far-right, doesn’t that suggest that the complaint might be, you know - legitimate? Either a topic is legitimate to discuss, or it isn’t. It doesn’t simply become legitimate because the “correct” people are talking about it, and remain illegitimate as long as they ignore it. There’s something weirdly nihilistic about this, the idea that the “legitimacy” of a specific grievance or complaint is a purely social matter (like whether or not distressed jeans are in this season), and wholly untethered from any claims of fact or ethical standards.

The country was reeling from the shocking, inexplicable murder of Ashling Murphy, a primary school teacher who went for a run along the Grand Canal near Tullamore, only to be brutally stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. In the week following her murder, social media was agog with insinuations or outright accusations that all Irish men were indirectly complicit in her murder; that her murder was the result of a toxic Irish rape culture which knowingly ignores, downplays or minimises male violence towards women. Both President Michael D. Higgins and then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar offered their condolences to the victim’s family. Rape crisis organisations called on the Department of Education to implement a national policy on sexual harassment and assault in schools.

Then, less than a week later, they arrested the murderer, and he turned out to be a Roma man from Slovakia named Jozef Puska.

It's a matter of prejudice and one's inability to examine or even notice it in oneself. I'm sure they felt it earnestly in their hearts as self-evident that the perpetrator is a toxic heterosexual white man, in the same way when they cannot conceive of a world where hate crimes against Asian-Americans are committed by anyone else but toxic heterosexual white men.

the perpetrator is a toxic heterosexual white man

Strictly speaking, he was. Just not the right kind.

I guess they’re mixed-race white and Indian, but I’ll leave deeper classification to the genetics forum nerds.

They're an ethnic derived from a mostly criminal vagrant underclasses. Originally some low Indian caste, they interbred along the way with people who liked them and probably lost people who didn't like it. No doubt women ran off, maybe men too.

They're extremely patriarchal, routinely violent towards women, shun education.

Their entire culture was based on deliberately isolating from others (Gajos) who were believed to be unclean and could be exploited mercilessly through confidence tricks and stolen from. Yes, they have a myth how it's not immoral to steal. God himself gave them dispensation for theft bc s gypsy stole nails from Romans so they could only put the two in him.

Once they worked also as tinkers and farriers, but they were always quite malicious because the genocidal edicts pronounced on them in western Europe were simply unprecedented. Jews were hated but recognized as useful. Roma were literally declared vermin in Germanies, Netherlands.

The travellers who are genetically white iirc derived are similar. A behaviorally distinct roving criminal ethnic.

I care about male athletes in women's sports, actually. I think allowing male athletes to compete in women's sports is an outrage.

As to your first paragraph, I agree with the general thrust of it. I conceive of immigration as a privilege, not a right. When a country has agreed to host you at its pleasure, you have a responsibility not to abuse that privilege and to treat the host country and its residents with utmost respect. When I heard about the Syrian refugees groping women on the streets of Germany in 2016, my first thought was "how ungrateful". While we might be exasperated or furious with how certain of our fellow native-born citizens behave, we're stuck with them - it's not like we can just deport the repeat offenders, much as we might like to.

All that being said, I think there's an important distinction to be made. It's one thing to get outraged when an Irishman mistreats women, and getting especially outraged when an immigrant does so. That I can get behind. What I can't get behind is "being outraged when an immigrant mistreats women, and turning a blind eye when an Irishman you admire does so".

Similarly here, even if some divine entity revealed that immigration made women safer/more in danger, who would be persuaded?

It's true, sadly. As I say, a large chunk of people who are opposed to immigration are just doing the "women's safety" bit as a fig leaf to cover up their real objections. And conversely, many social progressives have decided that immigrants commit crimes at the same rate as native-born Irish citizens; and if they commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Irish people, then that's Irish people's fault for being so racist and exclusive that immigrants feel like they have no choice but to commit crimes and sexually assault women; and whatever studies I might provide to show that this is untrue will be dismissed because the authors are biased (because if they weren't biased, their study would have come up with the "correct" answer, but it didn't, so it's biased)...

being outraged when an immigrant mistreats women, and turning a blind eye when an Irishman you admire does so

Does victim selection play a role in the perceived public response?

Frequently the difference is women out on her run attacked at random opportunity vs liquored or drugged up good time girl who changes her mind or realizes too late the sort of rake she's followed to his room.

While recognizing this distinction is often seen a victim blaming, victims are often careless with their own safety.

I am willing and able to decouple in my head "it was despicable of that man to take advantage of you when you were in that state" from "it was careless of you to get drunk and go home with such an obviously shitty person", and I think this is a skill that everyone should master.

Many people decouple this way.

Do you also decouple when instead of being the victim of another person, they're the victim of an animal, tree, swimming pool, trampoline or hotel balcony?

Being drunk or drugged in an unsafe environment is inviting unnecessary risk in a way that getting your steps in on a local walking path should not. Should the culture not recognize this difference and treat the individuals in these situations differently as a result?

Of course, I am markedly more sympathetic to a victim who was entirely blameless versus partially a victim of their own carelessness. A person who gets mugged on a busy street in broad daylight surrounded by witnesses vs. a person who meets a crypto scammer on a dating app and voluntarily sends him €7k - both have been stolen from, but the latter is partially a victim of their own greed and lack of forethought.

But the thing is, even if the algorithm by which to apportion sympathy that you're describing is an appropriate one, it isn't the algorithm any of the people under discussion are using. It's not like the far-right are thinking "Ashling Murphy was just minding her own business so I'm outraged, whereas Nikita Hand got drunk at a party and brought it on herself". And it's not like woke people are thinking "Nikita Hand was brutally raped by a man she trusted, whereas Ashling Murphy should have known better than to go for a run by herself in an isolated location with no witnesses". Both groups are just thinking "(Ashling Murphy)/(Nikita Hand) was assaulted by a member of my outgroup, so I'm furious; (Ashling Murphy)/(Nikita Hand) was assaulted by a member of my in-group, so I'm going to look the other way and downplay it" (delete as appropriate). This is plainly demonstrated by the fact that Conor McGregor's admirers turn a blind eye to all the other horrible things he's done, in which the "you got too drunk and brought this on yourself" defense clearly doesn't apply e.g. assaulting a middle-aged man because he refused a glass of whiskey he was offered.

it isn't the algorithm any of the people under discussion are using

I think this is uncharitable. I don't claim to know their minds but I suspect at least some would apply this algorithm. Also I believe the

entirely blameless versus partially a victim of their own carelessness

distinction is a natural cultural tradition, on par with many situations that result in adverse outcomes that can be described as 'natural consequences' or 'mess around and find out'. People holding to this tradition may not apply the algorithm knowingly but it's baked into their tradition and culture.

It's not like the far-right are thinking "Ashling Murphy was just minding her own business so I'm outraged, whereas Nikita Hand got drunk at a party and brought it on herself".

Isn't this a common framing that is labeled as victim blaming?

not like woke people are thinking "Nikita Hand was brutally raped by a man she trusted, whereas Ashling Murphy should have known better than to go for a run by herself in an isolated location with no witnesses".

I'll agree here, this isn't a framing I've frequently seen or encountered.

assaulting a middle-aged man because he refused a glass of whiskey he was offered

I'll disagree slightly here, knowing when to accept the drink you don't want to save the interlocuteur a loss of face is a useful life skill as is not being unnecessarily antagonist in your refusal to partake.

There are lots of places

I don't want to drink that shit, I don't want your drink

might get you hit.

I don't mean any of this as support for Connor McGregor or his fans. From the reporting he seems unpleasant. It's not a sport I follow. Nor do I believe this sort of behavior or outcome is extraordinary. The press routinely reports on the poor behavior and alleged crimes of many high profile individuals, professional athletes especially.

This is an excellent and rarely integrated point in these discussions.

As I said, it is inarguably true that if you’re up in arms about immigrants assaulting Irish women, you should be equally outraged when an Irishman like Conor McGregor does so. But the reverse is also true: if you’re up in arms about an Irishman like Conor McGregor assaulting Irish women, you should be equally outraged when an immigrant does so.

This isn't the modus ponens/modus tollens reversal. This is the converse.

Sorry for sidetracking (great post btw) - I've just realized that you are FTTTG. Loved your "Contra DeBoer" essay, I still link it everywhere DeBoer and trans issues are mentioned together.

Thank you! Still the most popular thing I've ever written lol

Google Trends chart showing interest in the case over time. As usual, Google Trends bears out my gut feeling recollection of the period.

Does it? It looks to me like the whole affair happens within one data point, telling us nothing about the shape. You also cant tell where dates are exactly, and where are your 43%?

I hope this link works for you: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2022-01-01%202022-01-31&geo=IE&q=%2Fg%2F11smrv49bn&hl=en

Yes, that looks like you said.

McGregor is a public figure, and it’s reasonable for a news outlet to blast him while ignoring random scumbags like Pulka.

The problem comes from ignoring some random scumbags based on their ethnicities. Or, as was done here, criticizing Schrodinger’s Perp for his male privilege up until the waveform collapses and he is revealed to have immunity. That’s despicable, but it’s got nothing to do with how one treats McGregor.

That's a fair point. I still think Waterford Whispers News was being hypocritical though, given that they are perfectly happy to pay attention to random named scumbags when those scumbags are white Irishmen:

Searching "Ashling Murphy", "Jozef Puska", "Aidan Moffitt" or "Michael Snee" in their website returns zero results. There's an article about the riots in Dublin last November, which does mention the crime which precipitated the riots but doesn't specify the perpetrator's name or ethnicity.

his is a concept in formal logic that it took me awhile to get my head around. A modus ponens argument takes the form “if A, then B; A; therefore B”, while a modus tollens argument takes the form “If A, then B; not B; therefore not A”. In other words, if someone is saying you should believe B because A is true,

I think you're missing a more direct link to something like this. For many people the (subconscious) thought process goes like this as far as I can tell: Only bad people support rapists. I support Conor/immigration. I am not a bad person.

So if Conor is a rapist (A), I am a bad person for supporting him (B). I don't want to see myself as a bad person (Not B) therefore Conor is not a rapist (Not A)

Substitute as desired. It happens most frequently among family members in my experience (I love my brother there is no way he could be a rapist). And can break down under significant levels of evidence, but is very psychologically stressful the stronger your feelings were. So in a world of para-social relationships with celebrities, or where people are projecting onto famous people (OJ Simpson for the black community for example), or feel very strongly about a position it can be common.

See even various attempts to reconcile the existence of evil with an all loving God and sometimes very visceral reactions from Christians that their God may be wrong about something. If God is wrong about homosexuality being a sin, then I am a bad person for disowning my gay son, therefore God has to be perfectly right. My uncle who disowned my gay cousin turned even more fanatically to the Church after he came out, and can't tolerate any criticism about it. Because if it is flawed in any way, then it might be wrong about the very difficult thing he had to do. And if it is wrong he destroyed his relationship with his only son over it, which would make him a bad father. He is very invested in that being right.

It also explains the: That is not happening and if it is happening it would be good anyway pipeline. If A is bad, and I supported it, then I am bad. I don't want to be bad so A is not happening. If confronted with proof that A is happening then I have to rationalize it as being good, so that I can maintain my self-image.

I think this is exactly the thought process underlining all of these apologetics, very well articulated.

(At some point I’d like to write a post about an implication of this comic which Randall perhaps did not intend.)

A bit of an aside, but I'd be interested to read this. (The unintended implication that strikes me as funny is that dowsing works!)

Funny aside - while I was doing research on wells, plumbing, and septic systems(for reasons), I was honestly surprised at the author quoting a multitude of people whom bluntly state some variation of 'Yeah, I use dowsing when searching for water, and it works.' Alternatively, 'It may or may not work, but I'm still gonna use it'.

Then again, I have a dim view of XKCD and think he isn't really all that, so...

Edit: Corrected 'sceptic' to 'septic', because I am not a smart man and my fingers often get away from my brain. Though one could argue both systems handle the same thing...

sceptic systems

Surely a true sceptic system would require RCTs to determine the efficacy of dowsing?

Alternatively, 'It may or may not work, but I'm still gonna use it'.

I am reminded of the apocryphal tale of Niels Bohr’s horseshoe

The logic doesn't work that way. The proposition Randall makes is "dowsing works" => "companies would use it". If that statement is true (let's just say it is), then the contrapositive "companies don't use it" => "dowsing doesn't work" is also true. But your proposition is the converse of Randall's, which is not automatically true when the original proposition is true.

My personal favorite implication which Randall almost certainly didn't intend (and I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of those @Folamh3 has in mind) is that his logic disproves the gender pay gap (as stated by feminists anyways). If companies could in fact hire equally effective women for 70% of male wages, they would hire only women if at all possible. Every company would jump at the chance to cut their labor costs by 30% with no drawbacks! But they don't, which means that there is some drawback to hiring women, which means the gender pay gap isn't explained by just sexism.

But your proposition is the converse of Randall's, which is not automatically true when the original proposition is true.

Sure – the implication is there, though. It seems to me that Randall is nudging readers towards believing that relativity and quantum electrodynamics are true. And Randall doesn't put the check-mark next to the dowsing (or the hexing/cursing!) even though, arguably, he should.

My personal favorite implication which Randall almost certainly didn't intend (and I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of those @Folamh3 has in mind) is that his logic disproves the gender pay gap (as stated by feminists anyways).

Very close. What I was actually thinking was that it disproves a particular variety of the "female underrepresentation in STEM" claim. If women are just as interested in pursuing careers in STEM as men, but are systematically turned away from jobs in those fields because of a culture of entrenched sexism, then those companies are leaving money on the table by refusing to avail of great talent. Any company which made a point of hiring female coders would make a killing by hiring all the talent that their competitors are turning away for stupid reasons.

Suffice to say, I don't think there is any persuasive evidence that there are millions of talented female CS grads who can't find work as coders or similar because the hiring managers in STEM companies walked in off the set of Mad Men (a particularly implausible claim given the gender breakdown of human resource managers). To my knowledge, tech companies are champing at the bit to hire female talent, if only as project managers, product owners etc.. Female underrepresentation in STEM could still hypothetically be caused by other kinds of institutional sexism (e.g. women applying for CS programs but being turned away by sexist course coordinators, women being passed over for career advancement because tech is an old boys' club etc.), but the claim that female underrepresentation in STEM is caused by sexism at the hiring stage essentially requires us to believe that STEM companies collectively are more committed to misogyny than they are to making money. Which I find rather incredible.

Oh yeah that's a good one too! And:

To my knowledge, tech companies are chomping at the bit to hire female talent...

This is absolutely correct in my experience. Having a vagina is pretty much a cheat code for your career, from what I have seen. You aren't guaranteed to get jobs just because of that, but you have an automatic edge over everyone else. Ditto if you are black, and I would imagine the effect stacks if you're a black woman.

And the CIA really did have an occult warfare unit for curses, hexes and remote viewing.

The real issue with that line of the table is that "the military" is very much not a ruthlessly efficient capitalist enterprise, and accusing the CIA of being such is downright laughable. It is hard to imagine an organization less accountable to its supposed stakeholders.

It still casts doubt on XKCD’s central thesis though. “Lol well if it’s real why isn’t the military using it? Checkmate.” Well they did or at least spent a lot of effort and taxpayer money trying.

But that's not XKCD's central thesis. I think Randall would be the first to point out that the public sector routinely wastes fortunes on useless extravagances or projects which were doomed to failure from the outset, whereas private sector companies that devote too large a share of their budget to such projects eventually go bankrupt.

The claim is not "no companies are investigating this to see if it works, therefore it mustn't be real"; the claim is "if it was real, at least one company would have found a way to make money out of it". Even if you expand it to include public sector bodies, Randall's argument still holds: it's not "no companies (or public sector bodies) are investigating this to see if it works, therefore it mustn't be real"; the claim is "if it was real, at least one company (or public sector body) would have found a way to make use out of it, either by making money or by securing a competitive advantage".

If that was his point he wouldn’t have mentioned the military.

I think it's reasonable to conclude that the CIA (despite their best efforts!) never succeeded in securing a huge, unanswerable competitive advantage over their enemies using remote viewing. (One presumes if they had a functioning remote viewing unit in the 1970 or 80s, it would have taken them less than ten years after 9/11 to track down bin Laden.) The fact that they spent a fortune on something that didn't work proves nothing. Thus, Randall's thesis holds.

Or maybe remote viewing is 100% real, but the CIA doesn't have a huge, unanswerable competitive advantage over their enemies because those enemies have their own remote viewing programs.

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What makes you think the CIA wanted to track down their “former” asset and comrade in arms? The one who’s existence justified all those lovely imperialistic wars? Even without remote viewers, they had a ton of other resources that they were aggressively not using to find him.

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Did they (or the Soviets) accomplish anything of note using said unit?

Supposedly.

This article doesn't even credit the CIA's remote viewing unit for accomplishing this. It says the CIA consulted a psychic, which to me sounds like the CIA paid someone who wasn't a staff member.

I think at least some of the people in the "CIA remote viewing unit" were on a contract basis. As I understand it, the intelligence agencies (reasonably!) had a lot of questions about if remote viewing was a thing that would work, so at least part of their M.O. was to go out and get people who were supposed to be good as psychic stuff and test them. I don't think this involved making them full-time employees. Maybe you wouldn't consider them part of the "CIA's remote viewing unit" even if they were getting tasked by the CIA (or whoever) to do remote viewing as part of the ongoing remote viewing project, I dunno.

Obviously Jimmy Carter is reporting something somewhat vaguely that he wasn't directly involved in, and perhaps the CIA went and got a psychic in a manner that was completely unrelated to the ongoing investigations into remote viewing, I haven't dug into it. The entire saga of the government's remote viewing project is kinda convoluted to me and I don't claim to be very familiar with the ins-and-outs of it – it moved around between different agencies and departments, with different sources of funding, and then was supposedly shut down, and then some people who were supposedly former staffers then came out and talked about the program, and who knows if they are telling the truth or not.

But that seems to me, off the top of my head, as the best example of "the CIA used a psychic to accomplish a tangible intelligence task" that seems somewhat credible because Jimmy Carter verified it.

The remote viewing program supposedly did. They identified a new type of Soviet nuclear submarine before it was deployed and before any other intel sources knew about it. They also found the location of an American general that had been kidnapped by a left-wing paramilitary in Italy. They were used to locate Iraqi surface to air missile sites during the Gulf War, with partial but incomplete success.

The occult warfare program (MK OFTEN) is more heavily classified and we know less about it. Probably for good reason: based on the personnel it employed it likely involved human sacrifice. In any case, it was probably being used for missions that would be illegal or violations of international law regardless of the method used to achieve them.

Both of these programs have ostensibly been shut down. That could definitely be true, but there are a lot of intelligence agency programs that get “shut down” and moved somewhere else before the congressional subcommittee hearings can kick into gear.

I don’t really know anything specific about the Soviet program if they had one.

Do you have a source for the remote viewing program?

Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that the CIA discovered the new Soviet submarine, the location of the general etc by other means, and attributed them to their remote viewing unit as a cover story? (See also the British Department of War covering up the existence of radar, using the cover story that British anti-aircraft gunners were able to spot Luftwaffe planes because they had exceptional eyesight as a result of eating lots of carrots.)

There’s an entire non-fiction book about it called The Men Who Stare at Goats. Regarding your point, I definitely don’t rule it out, but I would think if they were going to do that they would pick a less ridiculous cover explanation.

Doesn't sound significantly more ridiculous to me than "eating lots of carrots enables you to spot fighter jets from miles away, at night".

The other possible explanation is that after the A-Bomb, both the US and the USSR were willing to throw a lot of money at things that sound like bunk on the small off-chance that they’re not. A lot of Nazi German higher ups thought that nuclear weapons were fanciful sci-fi bullshit or intentional misinformation planted by Jewish physicists, and they got screwed out of a potential war-winner as a result. And magic might be especially tempting in that regard, since you don’t need a gigantic, Manhattan Project-tier investment to give it a try.

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Correct. Seems like the Soviets did as well.

Dowsing works?

Oil companies use it (or at least did in the past) so the implication is that it works, yeah.

Are you sure this is not some kind of parallel construction scam where for some reason someone in the pipeline is trying to hide how they really made the discovery?

I don't think so but I can't prove it's never been used that way. I don't think the oil companies need parallel construction, though, they have a lot of other methods of searching for oil that are public.

If you hang around people in the oil and natural gas industry for long enough, you will find one who says ‘oh, we hired a Russian guy who’s the only one who can still do this technique and he found us our big strike’. This sounds like parallel construction to me, and I’ve never heard of dowsing being bragged about.

Why do you think they would be parallel constructing, to protect unknown technical knowledge?

I'm pretty confident dowsing been used to (attempt to) find oil in the past, though. I know someone who used to work in the industry, a very long time ago, and he talked about dowsing in that context, although it might have only been for water.

If you get any of your pals to cop to dowsing (or to know of dowsing being done) you should report back.

I think it’s parallel constructing because the mechanism is often something physically implausible, like ‘he knows how to run an x-ray with a gamma ray laser’ or some other Soviet super science fallen into a lone individual type trope. These are smart enough people to understand why you would want a gamma ray laser X-ray but rely on nobody wanting to double check whether it’s physically possible to build. It wouldn’t shock me if one of them came up with a story like that off of not wanting to admit using dowsing though.

And there’s a lot of small companies who’ve specialized in buying wells abandoned by the big dogs and getting the last drop of oil or gas out of them; they’re not going to want to disclose how they figure out which ones they make money off of.

The kinds of people involved in the oil industry probably would not use dowsing as the parallel construction.

Mcgregor is an ass. But he is right on immigration and he is right on how evil the Irish government is on trying to use to force to shut up its critics.

Mcgregor would in a vacuum be an awful presidential pick. But it isn’t a vacuum.

I really like your comments on culture war and I disagree with this take for a few reasons. My intention is not to be rude, in case my response sounds off, please let me and I can reword it better.

None of all of the above is to imply that I agree with any and all criticisms of Ireland’s policy on immigration, or that I am personally opposed to immigration into Ireland - I am not. All I’m saying is: before you lecture anti-immigration activists on their hypocrisy, first ask yourself whether you’re guilty of the exact same hypocrisy in the other direction.

Will quote a celt in response here, Aidan Maclear

Just reminding everybody that the Left has nothing to do with principles, and you cannot defeat it by attacking its purported moral principles as hypocrisy. Power knows no hypocrisy. Claims of hypocrisy only work when they are used by power against the weak and principled. Because if you’re weak, the only thing backing up your claim to power is said principles.

Claiming your powerful enemy is a hypocrite is simply a claim that they are powerful- because otherwise they could not get away with hypocrisy.

While the forces of darkness steadily advance their power, people like Ben Shapiro make a lot of money snarking off from the sidelines about their lack of principles. It sells well because it makes a lot of gangly college Republicans feel smug and superior for an hour or two. It changes nothing and has the potential to change nothing.

The pursuit of political power is not fair and anyone abiding by moral principles the other side does not keep is outright incorrect. You cannot cooperate with those who defect. I am neither a nationalist nor am I Irish but I would much rather lean towards waht keith woods says on the topic of migration. Even if you dont have crimes being commited, suppose the people migrating are very smart, you still would have some levels of soceital breakdown after the number exceed a threshold. I know people irl who are scamming their way and getting their relatives and friends to ireland, they dont see themselves as irish and explicitly move out because they can reap benefits from the taxes the actual irish pay and live in a society they created which they could not back home.

On the topic of Conor, this was a civil proceeding, not a criminal proceeding where a girl retroactively took back her consent. I am not sure if we can even call him a rapist legally since he did not serve time in jail, in case it does turn out after a fair trial that he violated her consent, I will hope for justice for the girl involved.

The anti-migration people doing what any political movement that wins always does, it is not ideal behaviour in some place like this forum or in ones family or house but if the people who are against you start doing underhanded things, the only way you can get any peace is by winning against them and that cannot be done via morals. There are examples of the political class letting go of rapists, this case in England for instance. I am obviously against having rapists or other criminals in any movement but he has not been judged to be a rapist by the criminal court. I am not a rape apologist but there is nothing wrong in being a hypocrite in my opinion if you are up against people who routinely do the same thing. You defect against those who defect.

The pursuit of political power is not fair and anyone abiding by moral principles the other side does not keep is outright incorrect.

I thought Tit for Tat with forgiveness did a lot better than spam defect strategies?

Point of order: TfTwF does mostly spam defect against defectbots (just not 100% as true TfT does).

Objection, relevance?

The pursuit of political power is not fair and anyone abiding by moral principles the other side does not keep is outright incorrect.

I thought Tit for Tat with forgiveness did a lot better than spam defect strategies?

TfTwF doesn't "abide by moral principles the other side does not keep". It occasionally extends an olive branch, but then goes right back to defect-spam if it's not taken.

There is room for counterargument to @mrvanillasky's position, but it's entirely based on disputing the IPD frame; TfTwF does not do what you're arguing for and pure CooperateBot is not a winning strategy. This is why I said "point of order", as I was disputing the analogy rather than the conclusion.

TfTwF doesn't "abide by moral principles the other side does not keep"

I think it does? The moral principle of occasional forgiveness. The other side does not have such a rule. Is the key word here 'abide'? Is it incoherent to say someone abides by a rule that is only implemented say 10% of the time? Like, we abide by a rule of spot checking 10% of our products? Or is abide not important and there is some other reason you think it is not an example of a rule the other side does not keep?

  1. We're operating in meta-land here, where "co-operate" = "abide by principles" and "defect" = "ignore principles for partisan gain". Or at least, that's the frame @mrvanillasky was using. Talking about abiding by principles of how often to co-operate vs. defectors is thus not addressing the point because that's another meta-level up.

  2. I would indeed make that claim about "abide".

  3. I will note for the record that TfTwF only actually beats TfT against things extremely similar to "TfT plus noise", and that in the TfTwF mirror the one that's slower to forgive wins.

Given that the left has won since the 1500s, I'm less inclined to believe that. You turn the other cheek but you do fight back once that's no longer an option

This reply, from @mrvanillasky, seems to be saying he wants to move from a cooperate bot into some kind of TfT bot, because he is tired of hitting cooperate only to get burned because the other side didn't.

It seems at least somewhat germane to discuss the kinds of strategies for defecting that the right is going to take, when making a general call for the right to start defecting more.

  1. I am not sure if I am really on the wrong meta level.

  2. I think we will just have to agree to disagree, TfTwF is a program, it is hard for me to imagine anything being more capable of 'abiding by a rule', as that is the very nature of the beast.

  3. I quoted the specific phrase I did for a reason, outright incorrect seem to me, to say something more like 'This strategy is never correct' more than it says 'In this specific situation this strategy is not correct'.

  4. (1+3)If you narrowly define 'abiding by moral principles' to mean 'cooperating with a defect bot' then sure, but I don't think it was unreasonable of me to not define it that narrowly, given the actually discussion was of real world politics and these toy models are just abstractions anyways.

edit: formatting

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Given that the left has won since the 1500s, I'm less inclined to believe that. You turn the other cheek but you do fight back once that's no longer an option

I understand where you're coming from and I don't think you expressed yourself rudely, but this entire comment seems very "boo outgroup" to me. "It's pointless pointing out that your enemies are violating their own principles because they have no principles: the only appropriate response to their lies and deceit is to destroy them and ground them into dust" - I mean, it's fair to say this doesn't pass the intellectual Turing test, now does it?

Of course I'll never persuade the person who wrote that Waterford Whispers post about McGregor that they're being hypocritical, but I think there are people on the margin who could be persuaded that the way the news media covers crime is a bit dishonest and demand them to change accordingly.

On the topic of Conor, this was a civil proceeding, not a criminal proceeding where a girl retroactively took back her consent. I am not sure if we can even call him a rapist legally since he did not serve time in jail

Legally McGregor cannot be called a rapist, having never been found guilty of rape in a criminal trial. But while the burden of proof may be lower in a civil proceeding than in a criminal trial, it's not nothing. OJ Simpson was found not guilty of murder in a criminal trial, found guilty of murder in a civil proceeding, and now no one feels bad about calling him a murderer, even if news media avoided doing so during his lifetime to avoid getting sued for defamation. I'm applying the same standard to McGregor, who I think is exceptionally unlikely to sue me for defamation or to firebomb my house.

In the case of conor, the girl was as hammered as he was and her texts were later removed from her friends phones. A womans honor is a pious thing in my society but I do have some suspicions in this case since we have seen rich and famous get accused of rape, in case the evidence out there is sufficient enough to prove that he did rape her then I would absolutely want him punished but these encounters. Conor got accused in the past in Miami too, my statement still stands since rape apologia is not a hill to die on.

I understand where you're coming from, but this entire comment seems very "boo outgroup" to me. "It's pointless pointing out that your enemies are violating their own principles because they have no principles - the only appropriate response to their lies and deceit is to destroy them and ground them into dust" - I mean, it's fair to say this doesn't pass the intellectual Turing test, now does it?

It is boo outgroup because hypocrisy is not a bad thing if the people you are up against are that low, Moldbug has echoed similar sentiments and I stand by them. Mass migration protestors are doing what their opponents would do instead of punching right which is very rare.

Conor got accused in the past in Miami too

Doesn't the fact that McGregor has been accused of sexual misconduct by so many different women, completely independently, in different countries or even continents move the needle for you at all? Isn't this exactly why people are so confident that Bill Clinton is a sexual predator, despite (to the best of my knowledge) never having been found guilty even in a civil proceeding?

hypocrisy is not a bad thing

You've lost me there buddy. If at any point you find yourself thinking "my enemies are so vicious that I must preemptively become more vicious than them before they destroy me outright", I think it's worth taking a step back and asking yourself if that's an accurate appraisal of the state of affairs, or if you're just coming up with some half-baked ham-handed rationalisation to do something you know is bad but want to do anyway. Note that your reasoning is word for word the same as that employed by woke people to justify deplatforming, cancelling or beating up conservatives.

Moldbug has echoed similar sentiments and I stand by them

I have never understood the appeal of Moldbug or why he's considered such an intellectual giant. So many of his allegedly profound insights just seem like trite (or even tautological) truisms dressed up with needlessly circomlocutory or obfuscatory language. I think Scott hit the nail on the head with Moldbug's whole approach in 2013:

Reactionaries have to walk a fine line. They can’t just say “people consider liberal policies, decide they would be helpful, and form grassroots movements pushing for the policies they support”, because that would make leftist policies sound like reasonable ideas pursued by decent people for normal human motives.

But they can’t just say “There’s a giant conspiracy where the heads of all the major Ivy League universities meet at midnight under the full moon”, because that would sound ridiculous and tinfoilish.

So they invent this strange creature, the distributed conspiracy. It’s not just people being convinced of something and then supporting it, it’s them conspiring to do so. Not the sort of conspiring where they talk to one another about it or coordinate. But still a conspiracy!

Doesn't the fact that McGregor has been accused of sexual misconduct by so many different women, completely independently, in different countries or even continents move the needle for you at all? Isn't this exactly why people are so confident that Bill Clinton is a sexual predator, despite (to the best of my knowledge) never having been found guilty even in a civil proceeding?

It says that he's a horndog. As is Clinton. I would not have high confidence in asserting Clinton committed any sort of sexual crime, as opposed to simply taking advantage of his own charisma and the attraction many women have to power.

Well then I'm sure you will have a very different take on this article than I did.

I don’t think a distributed conspiracy is all that weird. The machinations around power and the seeking of power have not really ever changed, except that they’ve become more sophisticated as knowledge of psychology and technology has allowed for greater social engineering capabilities. In the bad old days of feudal societies, thing we’re done fairly openly because there really wasn’t much knowledge about how to do so quietly. You’d openly scheme that you and your faction want power, find Allies whose wealth, power and influence you could use to take power, and off you go, sitting a Lannister on the throne of Westeros. Not everyone involved would be part of a conspiracy. Maybe you stood to gain a trade deal if you had someone on the throne who shared your interests. In that instance you might well support the movement even if you’re not in on the conspiracy. You might well jump on social trends that increase your power. This is how power always works.

I think by the point at which a conspiracy is "distributed" it can no longer meaningfully called a conspiracy, and is just an ordinary political coalition. The concept of a "distributed conspiracy" just seems to be (neo-)reactionaries attempting to tar a political coalition they don't like by describing it using a scary word. No different, really, from woke people calling everyone they don't like a fascist.

What would distinguish a distributed conspiracy from a political coalition for me is methods and goals that the conspirants would not willingly disclose in the open. Without secret communications, coordination on those would be based on ideas that emerge naturally, that are downstream of memes shared by the distributed conspiracy. In a way this is like encryption, people with the correct key (sequence of memes) will decode the coordination instructions correctly. The left often accuses the right of this in the form of dogwhistles. If you want, for instance, to get widespread cheating in an election but don't want to say it out loud because that has consequences, you push very loudly memes that would justify cheating ("the other side will end democracy", for instance), so that without having to organize (at least not in large conspiracies), susceptible people will naturally wink, nod and act in support when they see hints that another person might be cheating in the direction they support.

This seems functionally identical to "dog-whistle politics" and/or "stochastic terrorism". As with those concepts, I could certainly see how something like this could be true, but in practice it only ever seems to get trotted out as a stick with which to beat one's enemies.

In any sufficiently large political faction, you'll have leaders who make impassioned speeches about the importance of accomplishing their goals, and subordinates who take this to heart and end up bending or breaking the rules in an effort to accomplish those goals. If caught, the leader will inevitably claim that he never explicitly instructed anyone to bend or break the rules. Should we believe him?

I predict that if we agree with the leader's goals, then the movement is only guilty of having a few overly literal-minded bad apples who have been swiftly dealt with; if we disagree, then the movement is really a "distributed conspiracy" in which the leaders use "dog-whistle politics" to escape culpability for "stochastic terrorism".

I am sceptical of the utility of any political term so susceptible to Russell conjugations.

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Collition is a distributed conspiracy. Lobbying is a distributed conspiracy. I’ve never really noted that the NRx groups would not have considered a rightward leaning lobby or collition as not being a distributed conspiracy. Distributed conspiracies are simply the building and wielding of a power base. And really the biggest difference in modern times is how the influence peddling works due to how we perceive the legitimacy of a power base. In modern liberal democracy, legitimacy flows from the deimos— all of us, so power is wielded by creating the appearance of the public being for something and creating propaganda networks.

Why do they only use the Cathedral in reference to the "distributed conspiracy" of left-leaning academia, news media etc.? Why, to the best of my knowledge, is there no equivalently ominous term in NRx circles for conservative lobby groups, the Koch brothers etc.?

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Not really. If mcgregor was a nobody, then yeah absolutely. But all things equal I would expect a famous person to have more accusations against them since the cost of making the accusations are low (even the accusers name is shielded) and the upsides are there (payout, excuse for cheating etc).

Not saying these are false but count doesn’t really do it for me.

But all things equal I would expect a famous person to have more accusations against them

How many rape accusations does e.g. Barack Obama have against him? What about Chris Pratt? What about JD Vance? What does it say about McGregor that plenty of prominent men have approximately zero rape accusations to their name?

My guess is it says Mcgregor engages in more trysts. I’m unwilling to say he is a rapist based solely off of accusations.

I’m not saying all famous people Will have these claims but I’m saying they are less reliable indicator of guilt compared to non famous people.

This seems like a weird heuristic which no one ever applies in any other context. If a company is accused of fraud once, well, that happens; twice, well, accidents happen. But I strongly suspect that you would avoid doing business with a successful company currently facing five or more independent concurrent investigations/lawsuits for fraud. Sooner or later you have to start wondering if there's fire in addition to smoke.

It's also plainly untrue that every sufficiently famous person will eventually face an unfounded accusation of sexual misconduct. There are celebrities who've been in the public eye for decades without once being accused of misbehaving.

I suspect it depends on what business they're in, Accountants probably have a one strike rule, contractors probably need about 20 or you're not going to find one to work with!

Apples and oranges. When someone is accusing the company of fraud, it isn’t a relative free ride. They ca. easily be sued for defamation. If it is a hedge fund, they lose reputation if there isn’t fraud. If it is an insider, they have a lot to lose.

That is, there is significant skin in the game. But accusations of rape against celebrities? He’ll look at the Bauer situation. Dude was summarily kicked out of baseball over a claim where due to discovery it was determined the whole thing was a made up exhortation scheme and the AP still refuses to name the perp’s name because it is their policy not to release the name of accusers when it comes to sexual assault. The power these women wield is enormous and the downsides are relatively narrow — especially if they don’t leave obvious incriminating evidence like the claimant in the Bauer situation.

I guess what I’m saying is I wouldn’t simply take the word of Samsun that Sony TVs are bad.

Doesn't the fact that McGregor has been accused of sexual misconduct by so many different women, completely independently, in different countries or even continents move the needle for you at all? Isn't this exactly why people are so confident that Bill Clinton is a sexual predator, despite (to the best of my knowledge) never having been found guilty even in a civil proceeding?

Fair and people are divided on mcgregor since most of the behind the scenes evidence of the case is not as public, once that is the case and it is fairly clear that he voilated her consent, I will wish for him to be seen as an offender.

You've lost me there buddy.

If people will go out and doxx Scott Alexander, a good-hearted lib who did no one wrong, get Charles Muray cancelled for Milque Toast hbd and have laws that punish any reactionary statements at all, then I have no issues with others using whatever means they have at hand. You cannot expect to win against people who want your life destroyed, scott was hounded by the NYT, that reporter is still doing whatever he did and a bulk of the people who cancelled NYT subs happily agree to go on their podcasts and talk to their journalists. Boo outgroup is the only solution in many cases, not a defence of conor though since if he is indeed a rapist then you dont want such people around but boo outgroup is a completely fine thing imo.

You cannot expect to win against people who want your life destroyed, scott was hounded by the NYT, that reporter is still doing whatever he did and a bulk of the people who cancelled NYT subs happily agree to go on their podcasts and talk to their journalists.

This is the problem with stipulative framings and sorting people into arbitrary buckets to suit the rhetorical needs of the moment. No one here disputes that the Grey Lady was wrong to attempt to dox Scott. What on earth does that have to do with how Irish journalists who've lived in Ireland their entire lives cover migrant crime? What does that have to do with how an Irish satire website cracks jokes about Conor McGregor? "Because an American newspaper tried to destroy a blogger I greatly admire, I must show no mercy and give no quarter to Irish journalists who've never worked at said newspaper and have never heard of said blogger" sounds functionally indistinguishable from "I must murder prostitutes because my dog told me to".

You have no evidence that the Irish journalists under discussion are utterly lacking in moral principles, or that they couldn't be shown the error of their ways and gently be persuaded to properly live up to the moral principles they do in fact possess. Not a single one of the examples you cited were from Ireland; two of them weren't even from Europe. Your entire argument rests on the transitive property of "these journalists have demonstrated that they are part of my enemy's team; members of my enemy's team have been known to do bad things and disregard their stated principles; ergo, these specific journalists have no principles and want to destroy me, so I must destroy them preemptively". Compare "@mrvanillasky is Indian; India has a higher rate of sexual assault than many other nations; ergo @mrvanillasky is a rapist, no further evidence required". Obviously you wouldn't like someone drawing that inference about you, so try to extend the same courtesy to members of your out-group.

Fair enough, I was a little too uncharitable there.

although the Independent was plenty keen to tout the fact that the man who intervened was BRAZILIAN

Is that even remarkable? From my very limited experience, like half of Ireland's population is Brazilian already.

It's not remarkable that the man who intervened was Brazilian. The average reader, upon hearing that the man who intervened was a Deliveroo driver, would probably have immediately inferred as much.

I personally thought it was suspicious that they were so keen to emphasise that the man who intervened was Brazilian while being so tight-lipped about the ethnic background of the assailant.

Coulter’s Law never fails. Their quote was amusing

It is understood he is an Irish citizen who had lived here for many years but was not born in Ireland.

It is understood he is an Irish citizen who had lived here for many years but was not born in Ireland.

This is actually even more misleading than it sounds when you know the local context. Many Irish people emigrate to the US, the UK or Australia in their twenties, have children, then move back to Ireland a few years later. Given the size of the Irish diaspora, there are tens of thousands of Irish people meeting that description, and offhand I personally know at least five people meeting that description exactly (including several cousins and nieces and nephews).

The central example of "an Irish citizen who lives here for many years but was not born in Ireland" is an Irish man who was born to Irish parents (ergo entitled to Irish citizenship from birth) in Boston or Melbourne, who then moved home in time for their son to attend primary school; as opposed to an Algerian man born in Algeria to Algerian parents who subsequently moved to Ireland and applied for Irish citizenship. Utterly shameless.

Yeah, 100%. I previously noted with some morbid fascination that the Southport stabbing played out almost exactly the same way as the Dublin stabbing eight months earlier: a mentally unstable man of African descent stabbed one or more underage native girls, the news media were enormously cagey about the identity of the assailant, and riots ensued.

How partisan is the Irish media, would you say?

I'm aware that in the US, 'print' media is solidly left-wing, as is TV, with the notable exception of Fox news.

In the UK, TV and radio are ostensibly neutral, although the BBC and Channel 4 lean left while GB news leans (almost explicitly) right. However, our print media is genuinely mixed, from the left (Guardian, Independent, Mirror, New Statesman) centrist (Times, FT, Economist) to the right (Telegraph, Spectator) plus the populist tabloids (Daily Mail, Sun).

I'm wondering how possible it is for the media to move in lockstep so quickly to silence coverage of foreign criminals.

Ireland's national TV and radio broadcaster RTÉ aspires to be Ireland's BBC, with much of the same left-leaning stance. There is no direct equivalent of GB News (in the sense of an explicitly conservative TV station) in Ireland.

The print media follow a similar breakdown as in the UK: the tabloids are just as populist as their British equivalents (in many cases they're literally the same paper e.g. the Irish Daily Mail, the Irish Sun). The two main broadsheets, the Irish Times and the Irish Independent, are broadly similar in editorial direction and tone to the Guardian or Independent in the UK, with the NYT trick of having a roster of token conservative columnists to maintain a pretence of balance (e.g. Breda O'Brien has a weekly column in the Irish Times). The Irish Examiner is probably the most conservative broadsheet in the country, although it's arguably more of a regional paper than a national one. The Business Post is probably the closest equivalent to the Financial Times. The Journal, while being online-only, is probably the closest equivalent to the Guardian or the Observer.

To be pedantic, I gave one example of a foreigner murdering an Irish woman or child. Aidan Moffit and Michael Snee were men, and the woman and child stabbed in November of last year survived.

Why is even one foreigner murdering the indigenous people not enough to sway your mind?

That's not how I perform cost-benefit analyses. A few iatrogenic deaths per 100k population per year doesn't mean we abolish the healthcare system.

Would you be content with a lower standard of living if your country could avoid this?

Out of curiosity, have you ever actually been to Romania?

How much extra murder? 1-2 per 100k per year seems reasonable. This is an extra murder risk per person of 10-20 micromorts per year. Your risk of dying in an accident is roughly 1 micromort a day, so 365 a year. So this increased murder risk is about 3-6% of the risk of accidental death you already experience each day and is in the grand scale of things absolutely nothing to worry about (presumably you don't worry on a regular basis about dying in an accident).

This number corresponds to 50-100 extra murders per year for Ireland's population of 5 million. Looking at statistics for the past few years Ireland has about 60-80 murders overall committed by all sorts of people. Hence at current migration levels the additional murder rate because of immigration is something not even worth thinking about.

I have been to Romania and other parts of Eastern Europe. I feel markedly more safe there than major cities in Western Europe. Perhaps Dublin is also still safe, I've never been, but its trajectory is tracking towards Berlin and Birmingham rather than Bucharest and Budapest.

Might I humbly suggest that your subjective feeling of "safety" might be belied by the facts on the ground? Romania's murder rate (1.109/100k) is nearly double Ireland's (0.654/100k), and Hungary's murder rate (0.774/100k) is likewise slightly higher than Ireland's. Germany's (0.823/100k) is likewise lower than Romania's. The only part of your claim that really stacks up is that the UK has a higher murder rate (1.148/100k) than Romania. "Dublin's trajectory is tracking towards Berlin and Birmingham rather than Bucharest and Budapest" - any of these four would represent an upward trajectory from Ireland's current murder rate.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

On the other hand, Bucharest specifically was ranked quite far ahead of Dublin in a list of safest cities in the world, so I take your point. (On the other other hand, Munich was ranked ahead of Bucharest on the same list; and anyway this list is based on user surveys rather than criminological data, a methodology they defend here.) But I strongly suspect that the primary driving factor for how safe a city is is its demographics, and I think it's fair to say that those are primarily controlled at a national rather than local level. If X% of Ireland's population is Roma/Syrian/Algerian etc., there's only so much Dublin city council can do to stop them from living in Dublin (and likewise if a Roma family wants to move from the Romanian countryside to Bucharest).

Much of the opposition to inward migration to Ireland and the UK is based on negative (but, in my view, accurate) stereotypes about Roma people (e.g. Jozef Puska is from a Roma background). In which case, Romania is a spectacularly bad example to use to illustrate your point: Roma people make up about 0.3% of the population of Ireland, but 3.4% of the population of Romania. And they are likewise massively overrepresented in crime, making up 17% of Romania's prison population.

"You Irish should stop letting in so many Roma people and become more like Romania" - like, what? Those two things are mutually exclusive. Where do you think the word "Roma" came from?

Where do you think the word "Roma" came from?

From Sanskrit or a related Indo-Aryan language, possibly from an earlier Dravidian or Munda borrowing. From here:

From Romani roma, plural of rom (“man, husband, Romani man”). The latter probably comes from Sanskrit डोम्ब (ḍomba, “lower-caste person working as a wandering musician”), which may have been borrowed from a Dravidian language.[1] Folk etymology pointed to a legend that the ethnic group were an exiled people from Imperial times.

And from "Romani:"

From Romani romani, feminine form of romano (“of or pertaining to the Roma”), from rom (“man”). See also Roma.[1]

Not related to Romanian.

See also the related Domari and Lomavren languages, spoken by the Dom and Lom ethnic groups (the former "scattered across the Middle East and North Africa," and the latter in the Caucasus), with "Dom" and "Lom" both cognate to Romani "Rrom/Řom/Rom" (spelling systems vary) — it comes down to how the respective languages changed the Indo-Aryan retroflex stops.

Where do you think the word "Roma" came from?

Roma is an endonym that derived from something in the gypsy language; to the best of my knowledge, Romanians do not call them that very often.

And gypsies themselves migrated into Europe from India, they’re not native to Romania(which has a very negative view of them, just like everyone else).

Your selective use of the murder rate

To add to the point, it's not like no one has looked at crime by ethnicity and reached some very unsurprising results. The fact that the native population, and immigrants from more peaceful countries can make the average rate look reasonable, doesn't mean that immigration from certain countries won't cause an increase in crime.

What the hell is going on in Georgia?

The caucuses are more like a continuation of the Balkans by other means than normal euro countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War

See also the Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, and God knows what other conflicts in the region.

Your selective use of the murder rate

You're performing a Gish gallop Chinese robber fallacy by citing a dozen emotionally loaded stories of violent crimes committed in Europe by people who aren't European (conveniently ignoring all the violent crimes committed by Europeans) - and you're accusing me of "selectively" using the dispassionate, objective metric of the murder rate to make my case that Romania is in fact significantly more dangerous (and Ireland significantly safer) than you're claiming? Physician, heal thyself.

I don't dispute that migrants to Europe are overrepresented in crime stats. I don't even dispute that immigration policy into Europe may have been too lax in recent years and may be need to be restricted somewhat. But I am not persuaded that Ireland or any other western European country ought to be an ethnostate. Hell, this entire discussion was prompted by me complaining that Anglophone news outlets cover migrant crime in a dishonest and knowingly misleading way. Why are you so mad at me, of all people?

If Ireland maintains its current immigration levels and the birth rate doesn't increase, the indigenous population will be effectively extinct before the end of the century and in its place will be some amorphous Brazilian blob. I gather you don't care about racial identity, but there are plenty of people who do and don't want to see Western Europe die.

Correct, I don't really care that much about racial identity. Pointing out that other people care about it does nothing to persuade me. Persuade me why I should care.

That’s not really what a Gish gallop is. Nor is a Gish gallop a formal fallacy anyway. Crying Gish gallop against a list of arguments is less than a meaningful response

Fair enough, I'll amend to Chinese robbering.

And now he's deleted his Gish gallop/Chinese robbering anyway, along with all of his recent comments. "Don't mind me", indeed.

You're performing a Gish gallop by citing a dozen emotionally loaded stories of violent crimes committed in Europe by people who aren't European (conveniently ignoring all the violent crimes committed by Europeans) - and you're accusing me of "selectively" using the dispassionate, objective metric of the murder rate to make my case that Romania is in fact significantly more dangerous (and Ireland significantly safer) than you're claiming? Physician, heal thyself.

He's more right then you are. I added a reply to Hus comment with a link to a breakdown of German crime numbers by ethnicity, which is a better metric than the general murder rate.

If he asserts that Romania is safer than Ireland, I provide evidence to show that Romania in fact has a higher murder rate than Ireland - how does a breakdown of violent crime by ethnicity prove me wrong? I don't dispute that a disproportionate share of violent crime in Europe is committed by recent migrants from outside of Europe. That doesn't change the fact that Romania's murder rate is higher than Ireland's.

More comments

I agree that people are often miscalibrated regarding safety levels, whoever, I think we tend to overfixate on murder as a crime statistic. Murder is, obviously (or perhaps not so obviously, given recent events), very bad, but it is thankfully pretty rare. Below some fuzzy threshold, people's feeling of safety will be more tied to overall crime rate than murder rate (particularly as murder seems to be very concentrated in certain areas and demographics).

It's fair that only looking at the murder rate might obscure otherwise meaningful differences in safety levels. However there is also a very good reason that murder is often used in discussions of crime rates (including by historians); it's the most straightforward and most unbiased statistic, for the simple reason that it's hard to hide that someone has been killed. Once you get into other crimes, you start getting much more bogged down into things such as reporting rates, definitions, etc., which make comparisons rather fraught.

Fair enough. Per this list:

Country Crime Index (Numbeo) per 100k Overall Criminality Score (GOCI) Safety Index (Numbeo)
Romania 32.8 4.58 67.2
Ireland 46.1 5.08 53.9
UK 46.9 5.75 53.1
Hungary 33.8 4.62 66.2
Germany 38 5.33 62

It really does not seem to me like the differences are as stark as is being implied. Germany has slightly more crime than eastern Europe, and Ireland and the UK have slightly more crime than Germany (although even then Ireland ends up with a lower GOCI score than Germany, where lower GOCI is better). It looks like a trade-off, where in exchange for significant economic growth you get a marginal bump in crime rate. None of the cities under discussion are Detroit or Baltimore (or even, to the best of my knowledge and perhaps more relevant to the discussion, Malmö).

It looks like a trade-off, where in exchange for significant economic growth you get a marginal bump in crime rate.

The economic differences are a lot older than the ones in immigration, and the crime used to go the other way.

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