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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.
Will quote a celt in response here, Aidan Maclear
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
I would indeed make that claim about "abide".
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.
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.
I am not sure if I am really on the wrong meta level.
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.
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'.
(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
can you please tell me what TfT, TfTwF mean here?
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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
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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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.
Indeed, at object level they tend to just be unfalsifiable claims against the other side, but I think at least it offers a credible rebuttal to the idea that conspiracies cannot exist past a certain scale.
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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.?
Because until very recently the only conservative lobby groups that had any degree of success were already Cathedral-friendly. Financial liberalisation tempered (controlled) by light government regulation is quite popular among the great and the good. Not amongst deBoer and his ilk but he is clearly a heretic.
The original right wing Cathedral was, literally, the Cathedral. An alliance between priests, lords and burghers, all of whom came from similar backgrounds and had a shared interest in keeping the peasants down and the aristocrats, bureaucrats and propagandists up. Thus the French revolutionary saying: “France will not be free until the last lord is strangled with the entrails of the last priest”. I.e. until the Cathedral is destroyed.
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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.
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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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