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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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“You were potentially deceived by a poster trying to manipulate the forum, therefore it was your ideology that deceived you” is an impressively silly thought.

I don’t know what’s going on with the OP poster. The world’s worst crypto- white supremacist? The opposite, attempting to get the topic banned? Someone doing “intelligence gathering” on users who agree with this or that? Whatever it is, it’s obviously annoying. Maybe mods should start using AI to check posting styles and ban the next alts.

He did it for your ideology, so yes, your ideology did it to you. If you valued the truth more than your ideology, you’d make it pay. But more important to me than the relative worth of random ideologies is: if we all counted his dishonesty as a demerit against his WN ideology, he would finally shut the fuck up (since his motivation is to make it look good).

if we all counted his dishonesty as a demerit against his WN ideology, he would finally shut the fuck up

But you'd be throwing the baby out with the bathwater - this approach is bad and leads to bad outcomes even when people aren't actively fucking with it. You're giving random bad faith actors an opening that grants them astonishing amount of power and influence over what you believe.

If you disagree, let me know - "fuckduck9000defender" seems to be an available account, and if you think people acting like shitheads in support of one particular ideology is a mark against that ideology, you're going to be changing your mind on everything real soon.

This itself opens up an obvious attack vector.

We’ll cross that vector when we reach that plane. He has successfully promoted his ideology by abusing the sub’s charity so far. We are way out of balance, too trusting, and he has been defecting at zero cost. Of course if you let in a defector in a theoretically curated always-cooperate club he’s going to make bank. We don’t need to condemn his ideology all equally and unequivocally for it, it would be enough if we imposed enough costs that he would be unsure whether his actions help or harm his ideology.

This is non-sequitur and nonsensical. Ideologies are true or false completely independent of any random bad actors on random forums. Someone “doing something for your ideology” does not negate an ideology, not even 0.0001% of its validity or lack thereof.

if we all counted his dishonesty as a demerit against his WN ideology

And what makes you think he isn’t anticipating this?

his motivation is to make it look good

So far he has only succeeded in annoying the user base, making them more reluctant to post and engage in anything WN-related. If he were actually invested in promoting WN he would immediately stop posting and just upvote SS or something.

I'm not talking about some alabaman WN who’s never heard of him, I'm talking about you, reader of this forum. Your view is shaped, in this case corrupted, by what you read here.

And what makes you think he isn’t anticipating this?

Because it isn’t what happened the previous eight thousand times he did this.