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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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This is an extremely accurate description of the phenomenon, and it's prevalent here as well, contributing to Hlynka's observation that a surprising number of the commenters here have built their positions on the same fundamental ground as the progressive left, though they want to vehemently deny it, as well as my observation that this turn to stealth moral relativism packaged in confusion came, in large part, due to New Internet Atheism convincing a lot of folks to at least claim a jettison of moral realism, but not knowing how to handle it philosophically, and leading pretty directly into the dominant frame being one of pure power politics along the lines of cancel/deplatform/shame woke-style culture.

So far, when I've prodded, I've seen one commenter embrace the conclusion in a clear-eyed manner, but more often, folks just lean in to the mire of completely confused meta-ethics. After seeing your excellent trilemma, it makes sense that it seems common to appeal to game theory, even if it's still a confused appeal, because I'm starting to think that the appeal to game theory is basically a variant of "the right side of history". One doesn't need to do any of the hard work of showing why an iterative game theoretic process will actually converge to the "right" solution (because one cannot commit to positing a "right" solution), but you can see in those threads that they are utterly allergic to embracing a straightforward appeal to power or preference. So we get weaksauce meta-ethics that make it obvious to any real, existing agents who actually understand game theory and can think through the process of unilateral defection (perhaps at the level of a movement/group of 'insiders') and realize that no one is able to present a meaningful argument against pure exertion of cultural power, so the obvious game theoretic response is to do precisely that. It's like they sort of realize that they're playing something akin to prisoner's dilemma, but weirdly think that invoking "the right side of history" or vague "game theoretic concerns" will certainly result in cooperate-cooperate, but simultaneously not understanding game theory enough to know that it actually leads to "the wrong side of history", defection, and pure power.