Actually I do sneer fulltime, where's my fucking check btw

The weird thing was that the moment he knew where I was coming from he shut down completely into that “villains” mindset you describe, and yet here he is playing the nice guy who just wants to talk Make a fucking choice!

Do you think he saw this and is now wracking his brains and scouring his commenters to guess who you might be

I meant it as a personal security flaw in this case btw, seeing as how neo-reactionaries seem to be fan of talking to famous people (or at least important industry people, which fits their ideology of course). For example if I know you hate anti-semitism, and want you to listen to me and join my team (and not care about traumatizing you again), I will dig up more examples of the other side being anti-semites. If I wanted Rowling on my side, I would show her more examples of trans people doing bad things. And well, here is [Richard Spencer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mNQ2SpHkNI) talking about how being pro free speech is radically pragmatic for the short term. And there is also the point that attacks on free speech never get signal boosted by people if it isn't an attack on the right. (At least not recently. I do remember people being angry about [the free speech zones in 2004](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_zone). Another example is the recent trans-phobic book which was released, people were complaining about it being transphobic, and some publishers decided not to sell the book anymore, which free speech warriors all took up as an affront to free speech (there is a debate to be had here if this is censorship or not, but lets not have that debate, as that is part of the whole tactic, it is still a debate over a transphobic book). So much so that it was no longer about the transphobic anti-science content of the book anymore, but just about the free speech. In ways that you never get when progressive causes get banned (see for example all the problems lgbt content creators have not having their works demonitized/hidden/restricted etc on youtube (Just including the word 'trans' is enough, sorry transhumanist)). If you look at centrists there always is a lot more talk about rightwingers being suppressed than leftwingers. And always more worry about the censorship than what is actually said. (See how often when somebody asks about examples of things actually being censored by the left the only example is 'the n-word'). A nice recent 'gaming' example is Caves of Qud. A science fantasy roguelike epic steeped in retrofuturism (their words). It was recently reviewed on youtube by SsethTzeentach who is a bit of an edgelord (he larps being an african warlord for example), with worse fans. Caves of Qud has a lot of unplayable factions, one of them is a genocidal fascist eugenicist faction (iirc), which because edgelords always do it, is a bannable offense on the discord to as to be playable (Sseth also offensive shit on the discord and was banned for it). Which is clearly listed in the rules. Of course after the review, predictably edgelords joined the discord, asked to be able to play science fantasy nazis and got banned. Which [created reviews like this](https://steamcommunity.com/id/quodlibet_/recommended/333640/) this review is by somebody trying to be the 'move beyond tribalism' centrist while defending people being space-nazis in a place which has a clear 'no space-nazis' policy (the devs said they don't care if somebody creates a personal mod that makes space-nazis possible iirc btw). Now I don't know if Quodlibet (the name of the reviewer at this moment) is actually a honest centrist, a free speech larper neo-nazi etc, but this is an example of people trying to weaponize (or having weaponized) the idea of free speech to allow people to be (space-)nazis. This of course sucks ass as an example, but it is what I have as an clear example of the process. Stuff like "I saw neo-nazis talk about how they want to weaponize free-speech and are disappointed in liberals not standing behind 'I will defend your right to free speech to the death' enough" isn't that convincing without links. (which I sadly don't have, I never thought my old hate reading of this kinda shit would be relevant). Hope this helps. E: another reason this all sucks, just look at how much context I needed to add to the caves of qud example. While the 'free speech' warriors can just say 'caves of qud banned us for doing a feature request'. And another thing is just how fucking predictable this is, when I heard caves of qud was reviewed I already went 'well that sucks for the caves of qud community, here come the chuds', the chuds didn't disappoint. (E2: and yes if you look at the steam reviews most of the people were not convinced by this obvious 'muh free speech' bullshit and it got a big spike of positive reviews while it was being review bombed for this, so most people aren't culture war poisoned by all of this)

Wait hold up

We are a loony.

Russell didn't think Marx was wrong so much as he didn't like the way he expressed himself. (Russell never could make up his mind about the actual issues, after all.) I doubt that Aaronson, for his part, has read much if any of Marx's work; most people who take his position have just mashed together a bunch of reasonable but misdirected objections to "orthodox" Marxism (i.e., Marx must be bad because gulags) with second- or thirdhand knowledge of Marx's writing (like Russell's "motivated by hatred" jab). It's telling, I think, that even staunch anticommunists who have seriously and in good faith engaged with Marx's work tend to regard him very highly ("a giant among thinkers" per János Kornai, for instance). "Rational" justification of leftism is definitely a fool's errand (too many hypotheticals, too much hedonic calculus pulled out of asses) but criticizing neoliberalism isn't. It is obvious that 1) the climate is being dangerously destabilized, and the neoliberal system is incapable of responding in a timely or effective manner; 2) our government's domestic policy serves the elite at the expense of the masses, particularly the least privileged and most vulnerable; and 3) our government's foreign policy breeds terror and extremism while inhibiting democracy and sustaining tyranny. (We could really say "our governments' policies," especially in the latter case, to encompass most of the developed world, but the United States is both the most extreme and the most influential example.) The burden of proof should be on the system's supporters to explain that, actually, what's happening in Libya, Yemen, Mexico, etc. is good, or at least that *worse* would be happening if we hadn't toppled Libya's government, poured weapons into Saudi Arabia and the UAE, stubbornly pursued a proven failure of a drug policy for 40 years straight, etc. And that actually the market will solve the climate crisis any day now, with no further excess loss of life, and that actually it's good to have half a million homeless and twelve million children living in poverty in the richest society in human history, because things would be worse, somehow, if we didn't let the vast majority of wealth accumulate in the hands of a tiny rentier class. They *will* argue all of these things, of course, but not in a rational or well-supported way. It'll be, in the first case, that China is bad and scary and would be an even more tyrannical and antidemocratic hegemon than we are (baseless projection); in the second, that [insert cockamamie technological scheme here that would probably never work and will never be attempted anyway because there's no way to make it profitable for anybody, the expense of climate destabilization all having been externalized onto the poorest, least powerful people in the world] will save us (pure Pollyannaism); and in the third stubborn acceptance, either of the liberal flavor (if not for the rentiers' pocket change trickling down, we'd have *twenty* million children living in poverty) or the conservative (they're lazy and they deserve it).