SIO260: Aaron Rabinowitz on James Lindsay and Monster Island

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Not Philosophers in Space. This is Serious Inquiries Only, probably episode 260, but

0:00:35 Aaron: You were gonna go and do it. You were going to do it, really

0:00:37 Thomas: I'm joined by one Aaron Rabinowitz, co-host of the famous podcast, Philosophies in Space, how are doing?

0:00:46 Aaron: Pulling against muscle memory there, huh?

0:00:49 Thomas: It's all the same button I push and mic I talk into. I really, it really shouldn't be that hard, but yeah,

0:00:55 Aaron: Oh, I see how it is. It's the same no matter what. It, it's

0:00:58 Thomas: You're all the, the same to me. Oh,

0:00:59 Aaron: Not even special anymore. That's fine.

0:01:02 Thomas: Wow, well, um, Aaron is on the show. Among many reasons, I mean, we got a lot to talk about, what with, uh, James Lindsay. I, you know, are you sitting down, Aaron? I just want to make sure you're sitting down for this bombshell. New everybody, sit down in a chair, and then put that chair on another chair to make sure you just maximum sitting down, because what I'm about to say isn't going to surprise you. James Lindsay is going to vote for Trump. I just, how did it come to this? I thought he was a staunch stalwart liberal, just devoted to equity, but just, but just hated, you know, critical race theory. I thought it was all about being a liberal, but just, you just, those, the noisy ones get too annoying. So I never could have guessed that he he would actually vote for Trump. How are you taking this news?

0:01:14 Aaron: Mm, I am.

0:01:31 Aaron: Yep, yep.

0:01:58 Aaron: I mean, I'm overjoyed in the sense that when I put down my marker back in August claiming that he would endorse Trump before the election, it was, you know, I, I didn't think that I was going to win. I'll be honest, I didn't think I was going to win the pool, because I thought at the end of the day he would be smart enough to realize that endorsing a giant dumpster fire as it crashes down from space is not the right way to further one's personal projects.

And so he would do the normal human being thing, which would be, you know, implicate that he, you know, make it implicit that he was going to be, if not voting for Trump, then sitting out voting for Biden and encouraging others to sit it out as well, right? Rather, so that, you know, later on he could say, well, I didn't actually ever fully endorse Trump. But no, he was really, really incompetent enough at whatever it is his project is at this point that he decided to yoke himself to Trump when I think any reasonable person would probably bet that Trump is not going to be president in a couple of months.

0:02:25 Thomas: Yeah. Mm-hmm.

0:03:03 Thomas: I don't think that matters. So I have a different take on it. For one, you did nail the call. So credit where credit's due. I mean, I don't remember you saying that, but I'll take your word. I assume that's recorded somewhere and you can flaunt, flaunt where it was. Was it here? I don't know. Anyway, I, I, uh, oh, good. Okay. Yeah. I, um, I just, you know, that'll be fun to, to, to share. Um, not that I was doubting. I was just saying, it's just to, did you, did you tweet out a good, uh, a good dunk on that or where can I, okay.

0:03:07 Aaron: Okay. Mm-hmm. Mm-huh. I have Twitter receipts, yeah.

0:03:33 Aaron: I'll have to see if I can find it. At some point, certainly in mid-September, I was already saying it, but I feel like there was a point in early August, probably around the retweet, where I was like, yeah, he's definitely just going to go full endorsement before the end.

0:03:39 Thomas: Nice. Yeah. And I do remember that last time we talked about James Lindsay, you know, I, I said that like, I all just believe him when he says he's a liberal otherwise. Now I don't, I don't think he's such such a liar that it doesn't matter. Like, I don't, I don't think he has any internal, um, consistent principles of politics other than hating. It's negative partisanship. Now it's just a, and that's All of the right. That's why the right is united with Glenn Greenwald, is united with James Lindsay is united. United with, you know, even people on the Bernie left who hate the Democratic Party, negative partisanship toward the left is the strongest force in all of this. But go, go ahead, you were going to say something. Oh,

0:04:29 Aaron: Well, yeah, I don't know if you were aware, but he gave a State of His Horrible Ideas address today on YouTube where he spent an hour or so rambling about how this actually all makes perfect sense as long as you accept the idea.

0:04:38 Thomas: Oh, Sorry, are you saying he's spending an hour rambling about the decision that's a very private matter that nobody should be asking about or caring about? Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah.

0:04:49 Aaron: Yes, exactly. Yeah, and I didn't listen because I can only listen to James at times two speed and I can't put the present on times two speeds, so I didn't actually listen while it was happening. Um, but I was told that amongst the hilarious things that came out of it was there's a quote, uh, "Trump, for all his faults, loves America. Biden is controlled by the woke activists." I don't even care about the second half of that sentence because the first half of it is a, is a disqualifier. You are off the artistic roll call forever, my friend.

0:05:20 Thomas: All of all of it is couldn't be more wrong. There's nothing more wrong. Like, I love how they had to adjust so many Trump, and so many of these, these people were, I guess, maybe ready for us to nominate a progressive, or I don't know how it would have worked with Bernie, because there's some weird overlap there that might have made things different. But I think they were ready to say, "Look at who they nominated, the far left extremists have taken over." And then we nominate Chex Notes, Joe fucking Biden, and they still had had to go with it. They're like, well, that's weird.

0:05:21 Aaron: Yeah.

0:05:50 Aaron: No, pivot. No pivot whatsoever. Yep.

0:05:55 Thomas: Well, Joe Biden is controlled by the radical left. Oh, God. Yeah, sure. He sure is. But I wanted to go back because I so my account of James Lindsay and what he's doing, I was looking at him kind of like Dave Rubin in that I thought he was just going to occupy this spot for a while because I OK, here's my not tinfoil, not so tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. I think this may be linked to some Peter Thiel money, possibly.

0:05:55 Aaron: Yep. Mm.

0:06:24 Thomas: I know. Well, I know he's got the Christian nationalist money, but at least when it comes to Dave Rubin, we know explicitly that Dave Rubin is funded by Peter Thiel. And I didn't back when I first heard that, I didn't really know much about Peter Thiel. I was like, oh, that's weird. And I actually just read an article about Peter Thiel. He is a piece of shit. He's like a super wealthy piece of shit funding, like help Trump get into power. Also, Also, yes,

0:06:30 Aaron: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Doesn't Eric Weinstein work for him as well?

0:06:49 Thomas: I was just about to bring that up. So I'll get to that. But also, by the way, it's interesting with Peter Thiel and with Dave Rubin, they're both gay men who are married to men, but are totally fine with enabling people like Trump to, you know, nominate justices like Amy Coney Barrett, who are inevitably, inevitably going to, you know, get rid of Obergefell. It's, it's mind blowing to me. So I, there could be some influence and, and yes, you brought up Eric Weinstein. He works at Thiel Capital. He's not just like, you know funded by Thiel or anything. He actually, that's where he works. Um, and God, that guy's a fucking idiot. And he, he and James Lindsay are coming up. You want to tell everybody, buddy, about their uh InCon thing that I think

0:06:50 Aaron: Okay. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Yeah, log cabin Republicans. Yeah mm hmm. Oh

0:07:33 Thomas: Was him? What?

0:07:33 Aaron: Man, Incon. I have so much. Yeah So, for folks who are not clear on what this means, InCon stands for Involuntary Conservative. Conservative. So they took all of the like uncomfortableness of the incel concept and like made it even more awkward, somehow.

0:07:49 Thomas: Is It with these Weinsteins. I can't remember if it's both Eric, or both of these, were Eric. If the other one was Brett, but one way or the other, they're incredibly good at coming up with the shittiest nicknames and adopting them, like "intellectual dark web." Yeah, you know, the dark web with all the child porn and stuff, yeah, let's do that, but for us, for intellect, yeah Now they're like, you know, incels, you know, and love incels. Well, that's us, too. But with conservatism.

0:07:50 Aaron: Yeah, Worst We're the smart version, yeah.

0:08:18 Aaron: No, it's really amazing that folks who spend so much time talking about individual personal responsibility think that if you just put the word letters "I N" in front of something, you are just no longer responsible for any of it, so yeah, I'm, I'm an "in woke" now, uh, Thomas, I don't want to be woke. I would rather be asleep right now. I am so tired, but yeah, I've been I've enforced it. Yeah, I'd just been forced to wokeness.

0:08:30 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, Trump drove me to it. Yeah.

0:08:41 Aaron: I'm sorry, um, yeah

0:08:42 Thomas: It's funny how that that argument never that's nowhere. Why is that? What's the asymmetry there? There's always the well, I'm such a I'm liberal to my core. I voted for Bill Clinton, voted for Obama. I'd I'd vote for him a third time if I could. There's Always that. And then But sorry, I just can't with the radical left and the critical race. And now I have to vote for Trump. Do you ever hear? I don't know if people try to do it the other way where they're like, well, I want to just be a moderate, middle of the road Democrat or even a conservative. Would they be like, I'm a conservative, but now because of Trump, I am actually into critical race theory.

0:08:48 Aaron: I

0:09:24 Thomas: Maybe that just, does that happen? Maybe it happened. I don't Oh, you don't hear those same.

0:09:28 Aaron: I know a few folks, yeah.

0:09:29 Thomas: Yeah, go ahead.

0:09:29 Aaron: I know some people who, in in private at least so far, have discussed to me their, their feelings of, of breaking marxist a little bit, um, where they, they really wanted to be sort of moderate liberals, but they are being increasingly radicalized as their moderate liberal criticism is treated as if it is far-left criticism.

0:09:47 Thomas: Yeah. Well, and, and I'm sure stuff like this can happen both ways in individual people, but I guess I mean like media personalities. Like I don't, I get you, you

0:09:55 Aaron: No there's certainly no one making this argument publicly, of course, not.

0:09:57 Thomas: Would say the Lincoln Project, I guess, would be kind of that, like, but, but they still don't go anyway. I, uh, what I was going to say is I thought that James Lindsay was going to occupy that Dave Rubin territory of always being like, "well, I'm, I'm the true liberal and I just blah, blah, blah," and not really saying the thing. But I actually wonder, I wonder if your prediction would have been rendered wrong if Trump hadn't retweeted him. Right after Trump retweeted him, it just gave him this Trump boner, and he just cannot stop falling over himself to try to like tweet more and more ridiculous things that'll appeal to Trump and maybe get another retweet, and blah, bla, bla. And, and that started a really rapid process toward outright voting for Trump that I don't know that that would have happened otherwise. We'll never know, I guess.

0:10:47 Aaron: Well Let me, let me say, if there was to be a case made against your position, and you're right, of course, we can never know for sure, right, can't understand kind of, no, can't know the counterfactual. But that being said, I would argue that his increasingly radicalized tweeting about violence in Portland and Andy Ngo retweets and stuff like that actually precedes the retweeting by Trump and leads up to the retweeting by Trump. And that while it is probably true that Trump was a major accelerant for him in this sense I think it's still the point you made earlier about Christian nationalist money is I think where this is really all coming from I mean for example James Lindsay recently flew down to Florida to attend another sovereign nations event with all conservatives and there are like pictures of them you know hugging without wearing masks and stuff and so like I think I think it's just fair to say that human beings you know gravitate towards the people who they are interacting with and he has been interacting with a bunch of extremely conservative far-right radicals and that's why he's becoming radicalized

0:11:07 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I think, well, yeah. And I also, I usually use the term reactionary, which I assume, you know, like would be a distinction You would even probably know more about than I would. But somebody corrected me a while back, like four years ago, because I was calling some of these people radicals and it's more reactionary politics. And maybe you get to a point where your views become radical in another way, you know, like going going so far out the other end. But anyway. Yeah, I think maybe we all can from time to time underestimate the power of this negative partisanship.

Like it always because when it comes to James Lindsay, a guy who I've talked to on here and we've been all through this, sharp guy, powerful intellect in certain ways. And like you, you want to think like, well, he's got to just be full of shit, you know, and and like Bill Barr and all those people, you're like, they got to just be full of shit. And then you, you find out they're voluntarily exposing themselves to covid and stuff, and you're like, well, I guess they really do believe all this stuff, you know. You don't want to believe it, but I think the power of negative partisanship, they, they share so much in a common enemy that they hate that it distorts their worldview. It distports the news. They're actually seeing the sources they trust to the point where they really do believe all this stuff. It's, it's mind blowing.

0:11:53 Aaron: Okay yeah yeah I thought you were going to say that they end up exposing themselves on zoom but other than that I was totally on board with everything there

0:13:20 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, no, that's yeah. Oh, my God. That's a whole side topic. I yeah, I what what the hell else is that? I guess that's all. Yeah, I just wanted to, you know, I just want to see how you're doing in the wake of this very surprising news that she. Oh, I know what was. Yeah, James, look. It is still insulting, though, like despite all of this, it would be one thing to make the argument. It's still stupid and all that about the, you know, Antifa gone too far in the critical race there. But to do the thing of saying, well, Trump actually loves America. And

0:13:26 Aaron: Yep I like the derail right

0:13:59 Thomas: Also I'm voting for Trump to protect the Constitution. Like, come on. Like, you Know, even with your current beliefs, James Lindsay, like you have to know you're full of shit on this. I know you know your full. The guy violates the emoluments clause every day. He's making money off the presidency. He has his own siblings, his own, you know, children employed in ways they are not legally allowed to be employed. He thinks Article Two gives him power to do anything in the entire world. Like, the the idea that you're protecting the Constitution against radical leftist Joe Biden, I mean, come on, there's, I still think not even he could believe that, but who knows.

0:14:05 Aaron: Yeah I think we can all be quite confident that Trump loves exactly one thing and it is not the Constitution and it's not the America America and it's EVEN IVANKA BECAUSE HE DOESN'T LOVE HER HE JUST WANTS TO SLEEP WITH HER RIGHT IT TURNS OUT

0:14:49 Thomas: It's actually the federalist papers he's really a fan of the federalists papers reads them all the time, do you think he knows what the federalistic papers are, I don't know that he does

0:14:54 Aaron: HE'S A BIG BIG MADISON FAN SUPER WEIRD UM NO I I DO NOT THINK SO I THINK THAT'S HIGHLY I'M NOT sure he knows what Hamilton is buddy um but like yeah I think I think this this is a a perfect reductio ad absurdum of James Lindsay's entire act and I think that it can now be proper like the circle is now complete and he can be placed on the shelf with all of the people who like live in tucker carlson's world and it's Valuable, I think that we've talked like this just for folks. Folks, I want to understand, this wasn't just 15 minutes of us just complaining about James Lindsay. It is, I think, a useful validation of the inclusion of him in our main discussion today about the role of the mainstreaming of a bunch of really dangerous right-wing conspiracy theory bullshit for the sake of profiting off of attacking the left, essentially.

0:15:04 Thomas: Yeah right yeah The last thing I'll say on this, and then we can we can go on to Monster Island, which I really am curious to hear about and have you tell the story on here, but the last thing I'll say about that is I also am not sure I agreed with your initial framing that this is some sort of mistake or something, because I I think these people may even fare better in a liberal controlled government, like there it's a naturally a position of and trump is too it's naturally a situation of everybody in control is corrupt and the blah blah blah, it'll be easier. And actually, they'll probably get more willing liberal ears once, if, you know, assuming Biden can win and we can take control of the Senate or something, there will be more willing, liberal listeners who are like, well, everything isn't fixed immediately, so they'll be maybe more willing to hear criticisms of the current administration.

And I think all this kind of stuff may fare better even in an environment where Trump isn't president. I could be wrong. There also could be, you know, like a lot of Trump Trumpist energy that could go away if he disappears kind of thing. And maybe that. But like, I don't know. I also think he'll do just fine. It may even it may even be better for his purposes,

0:16:20 Aaron: Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

0:17:09 Thomas: For James Lindsay's purposes to have liberals in control or Democrats in control of government, because then you can do even more of the complaining about liberals, and you know, it seems more rational

0:17:19 Aaron: No, I totally think he's going to be better off with that with Biden in government. And I also like I don't you know, like I think it's a poor choice in the sense that I think it's it's deeply embarrassing. But I think, you know. He's not going to suffer serious consequences for this in the sens that like he will be much better off as a bomb thrower, you knows, sitting back attacking the the Democratic majority. And, you know, it's like it is what you said about the negative politics stuff that like, like there's always going to be a market for like short of him, you know, like completely flaming out Peterson style, though, of course, Peterson's back now. But, you Know, short of Him going through that scenario.

0:17:20 Thomas: Right yeah I saw that topic for another show yeah

0:17:57 Aaron: I know there's so much. There's so Much, man. You know, I think I think it's a mistake in the sense that if he played his cards better, he could hold this middle position more effectively in a way that would allow him to cherry pick from both sides more than he is. But like certainly he will he will do a brisk business on Fox News for the rest of his life. And like that's that's fine, I guess. And I'm just I'm happy that we called it. And like, I'm sad that another angry white male was radicalized online.

0:17:59 Thomas: Yeah yeah well

0:18:34 Aaron: But yeah, or reactionized, I suppose would be the term here.

0:18:37 Thomas: Kind of speaking of that, let's let's talk about Monster Island. You wrote a fantastic article for the Skeptic uh that got shared, it literally just blanketed my feed after after you wrote it and after I shared it, which was a good thing, everybody was really interested in it. Um, so if you haven't read that, you know, maybe go check it out, but also I'm sure Aaron's gonna tell us the story from the horse's mouth, so why don't you tell us about the curse of Monster Island? What

0:19:06 Aaron: Yeah, so Monster Island started as a debate group, essentially. And it arose because during the 26, leading up to the 2016 election, I was doing a lot of public debate on my, you know, my normal person Facebook page before I moved like 99% of my Facebook activity over the Philosophers in Space group.

0:19:30 Aaron: And it was getting, we were drawing in some individuals who were fairly far right, who were engaging in some really like fairly explicit flame war kind of stuff. And that it was like, you know, getting splashed onto a bunch of other normal people's pages. And I was getting messages, can you please do something about this? So we, a couple of us got together and thought that, you know, like what we could do is just create a space called Monster Island where everybody could go and argue as freely as they wanted to. So the goal was unfettered, uh, free debate, but it was still aimed towards debate, right? We weren't trying to set up a place for people to just flame each other, we were trying to setup a place for people too argue about all of the topics that people are always telling us are too taboo for anybody to argue about. Um, so there ended up, of course, being a lot of discussions about race and, uh, you know, uh, crime, and are black people predisposed to crime, because the conservatives are obsessed with this idea, and so, yeah.

0:20:33 Thomas: About uh were there any extreme left topics that came up, or did it already just seem to divert toward those kind of topics you

0:20:42 Aaron: Well so it was, there was a lot of extremes from both sides, for sure, and this is something that, um, some folks who were on the island have criticized the article a little bit, I take it, I take this fair criticism, that the article is my perspective, so it does tend to focus fairly heavily on how much of a pain in the ass the right individuals were for me as the person trying to run the group and eventually bringing on other people to try to run it. And I do think there is an asymmetry there, but I think it is very important to note that there were also far-left people in this group who believe very extreme things, in my opinion, and love to sort of rile people up with those extreme views.

And it's hard to know how much of that was trolling, but I do certainly – there were times where I was very frustrated with liberal individuals. And so, you know, the experiment started as, like, we're not going to create any official rules other than you can't delete – well, no, sorry. We literally had no official rules to begin with, and then we added in almost immediately, like you

0:20:57 Thomas: Quickly realized

0:21:43 Aaron: can'T delete things. Immediately, immediately realized we needed some. You know, in response to people trying to delete things, we made it so that you couldn't do that

0:21:44 Thomas: You needed some, oh like selectively edit things they already said to trick people into looking like they argued a different thing kind of

0:21:55 Aaron: Yeah right, or if they feel like they screwed up a line of argument or something, deleting it so people couldn't quote it and make fun of them later. Um, so, you know, we did that, and I think some of that initially, you know, involved people on the left also doing things like deleting things, or going and looking up people's information on their Facebook and not doxing people, but bringing private content from people's family lives into the group in various kinds of ways. So you immediately just see all these kinds of escalation in all sorts of different directions. And, you know, we tried our best to like limit only needing to make rules when it seemed absolutely, absolutely necessary. And we ended up making, you know, half a dozen or so rules. And at the same time, it was unfortunate that, like, the fact of the matter was the discourse for the most part devolved very quickly.

There was not, you know, you couldn't really have a functional debate because individuals would just bomb it with a bunch of memes immediately, and, like, it was really just like, like a meme fest of the, just incredible. And, like, there were some folks on the

0:23:11 Aaron: Left who were posting things, but it was spam from people on the right. And there were rules about, you know, not blocking. We initially sort of had norms about you can't block other people. Eventually that broke down to you just can't lock the moderators. In the group.

0:23:26 Thomas: Yeah Why?

0:23:27 Aaron: Because some folks just blocked each other, and that was the end of that. Um, but, like, as a moderator, you know, I couldn't block people and people couldn't lock me. And so my feed just filled with just the worst stuff you ever, you've ever possibly seen. Um, and let's see why. What's

0:23:44 Thomas: So Like, what's the point? Okay, I mean, I have a lot of questions. First off, I feel like I was invited to this, but there was a debate that I was in around this time that maybe soured me to this sort of free speechy debate stuff, so I don't think I ever took up the Facebook group invitation, but but

0:23:47 Aaron: The point? Yeah. Okay. I believe This was right around, um, your Sargon debate.

0:24:01 Thomas: Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I was like, I don't really need to hear that. I've already been through that. But I but it's funny. Had I not done that Sargon Carl debate, I probably would have joined, actually, just because, you know, being naive.

0:24:04 Aaron: Yeah, yeah.

0:24:20 Aaron: Andrew showed up for two seconds and was like, "Fuck this, nope, I'm out."

0:24:21 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, Andrew did. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So I guess a lot of questions so far on the story, which is, for one, was anything, you know, this article and what you're talking about here talks about what seems to be, in retrospect, a very predictable downfall of this. Was there anything good that you witnessed in this? Was there ever like people actually had an argument, you Know, and how did that go? Did you ever witness any product productive behavior out of this? Yeah.

0:24:56 Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. And this was the other pushback, and it wasn't like pushback, but it was elaboration on the article when, I, you know, when this got shared around in the groups of people who are still friends from Monster Island. So a lot of folks migrated from Monster Island at one point to a different private group, and Monster Island has since been destroyed, but that group continues. And those folks, you know, raised a bunch of stuff that they personally felt was a positive thing for them coming out of the experience, that they felt more comfortable expressing themselves in various ways, felt more uncomfortable sometimes coming out about sort of very personal facts about their lives that they were keeping from a lot of other people. But they weirdly, paradoxically, felt comfortable sharing it in this particular community.

0:25:43 Aaron: There were people who felt like they did better understand the other side more, to some extent, or had met people on the other side who they feel like they are still friends with, despite all of this conflict and differences. So, you know, my experience was, broadly speaking, I think negative, but I think there were people who had sort of a more mixed to positive experience of it.

0:26:10 Thomas: And I guess I also want to ask, like, did this destructive behavior come from just maybe if one or a few people where, you know, had you not adopted a no rules policy or whatever, had had had you just blocked certain people or gotten rid of expelled certain people out of the group? Do you think there would have been something better or some sort of productive experience? Experience.

0:26:36 Aaron: Possibly. And this gets to your question earlier about just God, why? You know, the why for me personally was this was during a time where, you know, it was it's already bad. It's really bad now. But even back then, you can imagine there was a lot of like all we need is more free discourse, Free discourse, course, free discourse, free discourse is the solution and all of the censorship is the problem and everybody's trying to stop people, so it really was supposed to be, you know, not like a formal experiment, but for me, a a little test of that philosophical proposition, right. And the result was terrible. And yes, everybody can line up and say, oh, we all knew that was going to be the result, except for the large number of people who are still arguing for unmoderated spaces on the the internet in this kind of way. So, like, clearly it's not a universal truth that everybody buys into.

And even the people who do buy into it, I think, also still have trouble acknowledging the degree of moderation that might actually be needed to make the internet functional, you know, and not just Monster Island at scale, which is essentially what it is right now. Um, so to me, that that is an important thing to prove, and it's more important to me than, you know, that this space succeeded as debate space. There

0:26:55 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:27:55 Aaron: Are lots of debate spaces in the world that I think are valuable, and you can go out and, you know, engage with people in them, and that's really great. This was supposed to be a test of, is it really true that if we just let people do their own thing, like, they will form up eventually into a functional, you know, informal social contract by which they engage in more valuable, more robust debate? And the answer just seems to be no. So, like, at some point, you've got, got to do some sort of filtering, and that can take place in lots of different ways. Right, you can decide who's allowed into the group, you can decide you're going to kick people out of the group if they engage in certain kinds of behavior.

Like, there are ways that you can control this, but at the end of the day, and this was another point for me of it, there's always going to be a significant contingent of people who are going to say that the moderation is unfair, that the people being being excluded is unfair, and that, you know, if we just changed things slightly in some unclear jingly keys kind of way, we would need zero moderation and we would still be able to,

0:28:57 Aaron: You know maximally engage on complicated questions.

0:28:57 Thomas: Boy, that sounds like a very libertarian mindset. Is there an overlap there?

0:29:05 Aaron: Yeah. No, it is a very libertarian approach to the marketplace of ideas. And I think the moral of the story here is that a heavily regulated marketplace of ideas is a much more productive marketplace of ideas. It's

0:29:18 Thomas: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, I don't really want to, mean to suggest that this was like a dumb idea or something, because, like, I, you know, I get it when you talk about, especially Especially, well, maybe a dumb idea to not like have any rules or kick certain people out if they're just showing that they're not going to, you know, be productive. That could be a big waste of time. But no, like I definitely can relate to even now, like after all of this, I still feel like I don't know what the answer is. You know, as much as we're like, well debate doesn't seem to work, you can't change people's minds, blah, blah. And then you're like well what are we going going to do? You know, are we just hoping to get by, you know, uh, and, and scrape by with enough elections to not have to worry about, you Know, the, the 30, 40% of people that are in this horrible ecosystem of crap or what, like, is there, I just did the deconversion process seems so difficult and unattainable

0:29:29 Aaron: Fair. It's a dumb idea Yeah.

0:30:19 Thomas: That I don't, I don'T fault people for thinking like, well, well, maybe we can debate it out somehow in some form. I don't know. But I don't. It strikes me that maybe. Did you have any big conversions out of this? Did anybody really change their mind on anything that you remember?

0:30:28 Aaron: I would say they were not like, you know, somebody went from the right to the left so much as there were certainly conversions on specific subjects where I think people better saw the other side of it and so were more open to it. I think, in certain abortion and gun control debates, I will say in my experience, most of the moderating was happening from folks on the left and that they were more open, generally speaking. And that, like, if we had, we had a real trouble keeping like a healthy population of right-wingers on the island. And so, like, if we had started to kick them for all of the terrible chain memeing, like, we would have had even fewer of them.

0:30:46 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:31:18 Aaron: And I think that is an important feature of what's going on on the right. I think we can't ignore that, you know, not just the Trump presidency, but the opposition during the Obama years involved a lot of self-selecting on the right for people who are fairly low empathy and not really interested in debate. And I think your point about the deconversion is really important.

Like, I do, I, I'm still pro debate, I still do debates on my show, I think debates in the right context and discussions in the right context are one of the few tools we have to make any sort of change, even if it's a very, like, weak instrument a lot of the time, it's better than nothing, I think, um, but I think when it comes to deconverting people from a cult of personality like what we have with Trump and the GOP, it's, it's a very daunting task. Like, psychologically, it's just we, like, we should not be optimistic about, like, easily turning people back in this way, or even, like, you know, with a lot of work turning people back, I think it's going to be very difficult to reclaim a lot of these individuals.

0:32:14 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:32:27 Thomas: And when you think about debate, you know, in some pretend world, hypothetically, you're like, well, OK, we got two groups of people broadly speaking in this country, and they have very different base assumptions, very different opinions on stuff. If we get one of each of the groups, you know, one person each of group to debate, they'll, they'll be forced to do some sort of battle that way, you know, grapple with each other's ideas, that will produce something. But what I think the presidential debates, and, and I don't know, every possible debate that's happened in the last four years, what it shows is that, like, like, I don't know, maybe there's a way of enforcing rules or something that would fix this. But I guess I never would have understood how much two debaters can just go up and just say things from their own ecosystem at each other.

0:32:28 Aaron: I

0:33:21 Thomas: And then you realize by the end of you're like, well, there was there wasn't a debate. Like if I say, you know, that Russia is if one person's like, well, yeah, it turns out Russia did hack these emails about whatever the topic might be, you know, and then the other person just gives their like, Well, no, Hunter Biden, Burisma, blah, blah. There doesn't matter like nothing happens. You just go up there and each person says their thing. And like, while I believe that the truth is on, you know, a certain side of that, and I'm confident in the sources that I read and stuff that I, to some extent, so I have some confidence in what I believe the facts are, but it doesn't, there's no rubber meets the road. It's not like gravity. It's not like science where something actually happens that enforces, you know, consequences on saying a false thing. Both, both people just go up and say their thingies separately. And then the audiences hear what they want to hear or translate the facts or the statements into their set of facts or whatever. And nothing happens.

0:33:38 Aaron: Mean

0:34:24 Thomas: So, like, I don't, I don't know how to fix this. I don't know if there is a way to do it that will actually work. Yeah.

0:34:32 Aaron: I do think there are ways to improve the situation. You can, and, you know, if you have a strong moderator, for example, who manages to press people on specific claims and control the situation more, that, that actually makes a difference. And, like, as naive as it sounds, right, if both debaters go into it with the goal of making it a productive debate, then you can really have a very interesting, valuable, productive debate. And I think that is something that is possible. And when it happens, it's really glorious to watch. It is fairly rare, I think. And I think it's also, I think, a good point that, you know, we should de-emphasize debates in favor of discussions, right? So take away the point scoring and make it really about trying to produce a valuable synthesis, even from competing positions.

0:35:24 Aaron: And then I think if you reframe it that way, you can start to see more sort of give and take, you know, again, it still depends on, to some extent, the goodwill of the individuals involved. I think the important takeaway from stuff like Trump is, you know, if one person is really interested, I think I said something like this in the, in the article, where, like, the people who just want to watch the world burn have the easiest goal of all, right? Like, that's the easy job, everybody else has the harder job, so we're always fighting an uphill battle in this kind of way, but it is possible, I think, to create structures that make it a little harder to burn the world and a little easier to build and build, but those structures are always at risk of the people running around starting fires, people

0:35:52 Thomas: Yeah Well, speaking of, why don't we get to the, uh, culmination of your article and the experiment and what happened? Yeah. So

0:36:19 Aaron: Running round starting fires, uh, Yeah, no, so a few, you know, like a bit, a year or so ago, I was done with this, um, there were particular individuals on Monster Island Island who were levels of toxic that I couldn't, I just couldn't have in my life anymore, so I handed it off to other people who wanted to continue to engage with the island, and I stopped being involved until, you know, this was a couple of months ago, now someone posted and tagged me into some posts about an individual who had been on the island who'd been one of the most prominent members on the right on the island, a guy named Ryan Balk, who was very ethno-nationalist, very white supremacist, overtly so, posting memes about standing against the left nuke world global order with their Templar and Viking iconography and all this, like full on, all the, like just straight Nazi all the way, right? Right. Like not even it's not even worth discussing what flavor of Nazi we're talking about at this point.

0:37:29 Thomas: They they did did they ever try to pass it off as satire, or, you know, something that we've, Okay?

0:37:30 Aaron: It's just no, no.

0:37:35 Thomas: So that has been a major source of frustration over these past several years, is the gaslighting involved, you know, oh, it's just a joke, but is it, you know, kind of thing, written

0:37:42 Aaron: Yeah, no, he, he was very serious about this, as we now discovered, because, what, what people posted was an article. This was originally the Southern Poverty Law Center noticing that Ryan Balk had been involved with Ritiker during the Kenosha shooting incident, that written house, excuse me, oh god I did it

0:38:07 Thomas: House, it's uh not a recording with one Aaron Rabinowitz without you mangling someone's name, it's Just, that's fine, I just, you snuck it in, you always find a way.

0:38:12 Aaron: Without without a name mangle. Yep. It's required I, I gotta stay on brand, man. Brand management is the most important thing in the world, uh, yeah, so he was there, he claimed that he was the tactical advisor for the militia group that Writtenhouse was involved with, leading up to the event where he ends up shooting to protesters. And we also found this out because there is now a court case against Rittenhouse and Bulk and Facebook and various militia groups for essentially inciting violence online. Now, you know, you can have Andrew debunk that case

0:38:22 Thomas: Yeah yeah well, I can

0:38:59 Aaron: Pretty quickly.

0:38:59 Thomas: Do it right here, as Andrew would say you're allowed to say anything in a complaint, so you could write a complaint that's completely wrong, and it would be, in, you know, nobody enforces the truth on a complaint. You find the facts as you go. But I don't think that there's any reason to believe this is entirely fake, right? Mean, yeah.

0:39:00 Aaron: Yeah, right. Right.

0:39:22 Aaron: No, no, I think, you know, I don't think it's a fake case. I think it is a case they are almost certain to lose, but I think the details of the case that are relevant for our discussion, which is that, uh, Bulk, you know, involved himself in this with the pretensions of being, because he did frequently talk on Monster Island about, like, he was going to use his understanding and expertise in the coming race war kind of stuff.

0:39:48 Thomas: Jeez.

0:39:49 Aaron: Like just not hiding it in the least, and yeah, I think he, he literally went out and tried to do that and and fucked around and found out. And so, yeah, I think this to me was a good, valuable reminder that the boundary between virtual, you know, shit talk and people in the streets shooting other people is very, very thin and, like, treating that stuff as if it isn't important. And, like, I see it so much with people, like, being dismissive about the Proud Boys and these other kinds of groups, when at the same time, like, the FBI is breaking up attempts to kidnap governors and such, like, I'm genuinely nervous about all of the Ryan Bulks that are out there in the world who, you know, especially when Trump loses and especially when When Trump rejects the results of the election and especially when, you know, like all the shit that's coming, I'm really nervous about what these people are going to do with their heavily armed militia groups. And that's that's where we are.

0:40:37 Thomas: Yeah.

0:40:53 Thomas: It was scary to read that any of you involved in this group were this close in any form to somebody like this. You know, like it, it's, it's crazy. Um, and for the record, the complaint, by the way, is is uh, the the lawsuit, the plaintiffs are some of the victims and victims, um, significant others, kind of thing, so it's not, this isn't like a criminal complaint, it's a civil thing. So anyway, uh, yeah, like the idea that this person, who, and there's, you know, because you and I interact with these people every day, and And I say interact loosely, but we see people like this all the time online.

And, you know, up until a certain time ago, you would have just always been like, yeah, they're just an asshole. They're just a whatever. But now it's like, are they that asshole? Are they, you Know, are there any like a Rittenhouse-level person? Are they just, yeah, this is serious stuff. And it, youknow, I Guess odds-wise, you're probably not dealing with a right wing terrorist every time you get a troll on your, in your mentions, but it does make it scary to be like, wow, it could so easily just be a right-wing terrorist in my mentions right now.

0:40:59 Aaron: Mm hmm. Mm hmm, mm hmm. Right. Mm hmm yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm Yeah.

0:42:07 Aaron: Speaking of the odds, I wanted to be clear. Monster Island never got above 300 members or something like that. This is not a group with thousands or tens of thousands of members. We're talking about one out of 300. So, like, obviously it's just one case, so you can't deduce too much from that. But I do think it is a little chilling that it is that small a group to be then having someone involved in a national level shooting, right? Like, and there are a lot of these groups.

And this is why, right, the Department of Homeland Security has again restated for 2021 that like violent white nationalists are the greatest threat that our government, that like our society currently faces in terms of like threats to law enforcement, threats to social stability and such. And I think this is really important.

And to tie it back to James a little bit, I think it's important because you have dumbasses like James saying that the Department of Homeland Security is exaggerating the threat because they've been overrun by fucking critical race theory, as if the Department of Homeland Security has ever heard of critical race theory, right?

0:42:15 Thomas: Yeah, yeah Yeah,

0:43:17 Aaron: Like it's ever going to implement these far left ideas. Like the definition of violent white supremacist on the Department of Homeland security site, I've looked it up. It is as, you know, this person literally believes in using violence and does it, right. Doesn't just say it. They say that even expressing oppressing things, again, to quote Andrew, right? You can say whatever you want, right, you can, the, you know, the DHS is not even just talking about people who say online, you know, somebody should do something about these Jews, they literally mean people who actually go out and do things about these Jews.

0:43:17 Thomas: Yeah, which makes me think we, we really gotta have a more of an eye on this, like, we're probably under counting the, the threat that there actually is out there, yeah.

0:44:01 Aaron: Yeah, I don't, I don't know how to assess that threat, I'm going to be talking with Samantha Pritchard, I'm butcher everyone's name who I try to reference on the show, right. She did the Proud Boy whisperer stuff, um, she was on Skeptics with the Pub recently, and so, like, I'm curious to ask her about her assessments, like, how do you actually measure the threat level of these groups, because I don't, I don't think, for example, that we're on the hinge of a civil war or something. I don't think that, uh, Americans really want to take up arms in a large scale against other human beings, but I do think there are small groups of individuals who are exceedingly devoted to that idea and could cause, you know, some amount of suffering and harm as the rest of us are trying to dig our way out of this COVID situation.

0:44:12 Thomas: Yeah, I don't think we're, I agree, agree with you on the civil war, although, uh, I've been reading a book recently, maybe you've heard of it, it's called, uh, The Parable of the Talents, and it, it paints a picture that's, uh, not civil war quite well, I mean, there's, there is kind of a war involved, but that doesn't matter, for the point I'm making is, like, without short of civil war, there can still be really, really bad things that go on, and it's not as though that, uh, the civil war is like the everything's fine until that, um, so if you want to hear us talk about a time traveler who wrote a book in the 90s that somehow perfectly predicts what we're going through right now, in ways that are eerie, um, yeah, check out Philosophers in Space, future upcoming episodes, uh, patrons get that first as always, but anyway, um, it's really relevant, like, I cannot wait to have our discussion on this book because so much of this is so parallel to, to what she wrote. It's Octavia, sorry, Octavia Butler.

0:45:03 Aaron: Yeah.

0:45:48 Aaron: Octavia Butler. Yeah, yeah.

0:45:50 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy that she wrote these two books in the 90s, but, but anyway, yeah.

0:45:53 Aaron: It's perfect election coverage material. Yeah so

0:45:57 Thomas: What closing thoughts on this whole process?

0:46:02 Aaron: I'm not deterred in believing that debate and discourse is valuable. I am, I'm reaffirmed in believing that we need a strong social contract and that includes norms and rules around discourse that make that discourse acceptable, you know, accessible to more people. That doesn't, you now, drive people out of the discourse. It doesn't make room for abusive behavior within the discourse and, like, I'm not at all excited about how that process is going to go because we're talking about really large-scale moderation. So it's likely to be heavily automated with AI's that are not very good or, you know, outsourced in ways that are potentially harmful, depending

0:46:44 Thomas: Well, I think people should look to, I've said this before, I'll say it again, look to Reddit as an example. Reddit, you know, within subreddits, things are actually like, Like depending on the subreddit, but, but reddits are heavily moderated and they are very successful. A lot of them are very successful if you want to go on a reddit, I've said it before, you want to read it on a Reddit that's just, you know, I, I'm trying to think of a breath of the wild. That's one of the ones that I subscribe to, you Know, like you're going to see awesome breath of the wild stuff. Now I don't know about having a free for all debate reddit. I'm not sure.

I'm sure those exist. I'm not sure how they've gone. But, you know, one thought I actually I know I asked for your clothing closing thoughts, but I just wanted to get your your thought on something. I just just occurred to me. I also wonder, you Know, a lot of these people make the unregulated capitalism version of the market. You shouldn't regulate the market, you Now, the marketplace of ideas, the debate, blah, blah. And I was just thinking about it.

0:46:50 Aaron: On the subreddit, right, yes.

0:47:43 Thomas: It's like Monster Island is not an unregulated marketplace of ideas. You know, like if you were take all the people that were in this Monster Island Facebook group and put them in a gymnasium and say, we're doing here's what we're going to do debate and it's all whatever. Whatever, there'd be a very different outcome. You know, the person who is just spouting racist memes or like is over there shouting a bunch of racist crap, there's going to be a very different reaction to that person. And they may just get shouted down by other people who like, you know, why don't you shut up with your with your racism that like and I'm so I'm sitting here wondering, like, which is the more unregulated market? Market. You know, is that actually kind of an unregulated market where people would react to these bad ideas by saying, well, boo, you know, like just boo them to the point where they shut up.

0:48:38 Thomas: Like that's kind of a more, and I'm not saying that will always be the best outcome either. That could also have very bad effects if, you know, let's say if the one person is someone who's in favor of gay rights or something that the group is not in favor of that, of course, like there could be bad effects there too. But the idea that, like, the internet is almost, and these forums and these groups is almost like an unfair, um, how would I put it? Like it gives, it gives each voice like an unearned amount of room to talk that maybe is not like an unregulated market.

0:49:01 Aaron: Yeah.

0:49:11 Aaron: I guess I would put it like, I agree with you, and I think it's, I would put it in terms of like, like, if you think a Hobbesian state of nature is really bad in person where people can, like, murder each other and stuff and steal their things, there is almost a sense in which a virtual Hobbesian state of nature is even worse because it takes away one of the very few constraints in the state of nature, which is someone can club you to death if you say something.

And, you know, so there's literally nothing constraining sort of the most harmful behavior, especially if you're on an anonymous account, right? Right. Then it's like sort of, I mean, obviously, the Internet is never fully anonymous, but people in these situations where they feel anonymous are really, really, I think you're right, fully comfortable going all in in the worst kinds of ways. Now, that being said, I Think if you took the people from Monster Island and put them in a gymnasium and let them do what they did on Monster Island, there probably would have been escalation to violence. So, like, I'm not sure. I think a lot of people assume that if you put people in the room together, suddenly they like chill out and act a little nicer. And I'm not honestly convinced that

0:49:56 Thomas: Yeah,

0:50:16 Aaron: That would be the case with these particular individuals.

0:50:16 Thomas: It, I could, I Could really see it either way. I, I'm not

0:50:19 Aaron: I could, too. I generally like genuinely I could see people backing down and being, you know, because human beings are conflict diverse in person up to a point. But I also think when human beings were divided into in groups and out groups and they egg each other on, it's pretty easy to escalate to violence.

0:50:20 Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Yeah Yeah.

0:50:40 Thomas: It would really depend on the people you chose. You know, like if, if we're really talking about one troublemaker who even people on their side would be like, all right, shut up, man. You know, like I think it would really depend, but, but yeah. So I interrupted you in your final thoughts. So if you had anything more to, to add there, why don't you go ahead?

0:50:58 Aaron: Um, I could say finally, you know, I want to reiterate no one has a moral obligation to engage in these kinds of activities. I think people sometimes gaslight other people into suggesting that it's their moral obligation to engage with these folks to try to convince them or disprove them or something like that. And while I have a crippling addiction that makes it so that I will never stop having these conversations, I do not think it is something to be praised or rewarded in any kind of way. I think that it is perfectly fine for people to go about their lives being in Facebook groups that bring them joy and very little stress. And if you want to argue with people about this kind of stuff, great, um, but there's so much of that going on in the world, I don't think we're at a lack for it at the moment. That's

0:51:19 Thomas: Yeah.

0:51:50 Thomas: I was going to say no one has a moral obligation to do this, except you. I think we can all agree. Aaron has to, he's going to be imprisoned like Sisyphus strapped to the, remind me of that. I don't know if you saw that.

0:51:56 Aaron: Fair I Have A personal Just Rolling Nazis Up a hill all day long. And

0:52:06 Thomas: Yeah, there's that tweet that went around that was like, look, we're in a pandemic. No one, you know, like people have a right to get behind and to not be productive and blah, blah, and then it said, brain, except you. Yeah, except me. Like someone just like making them still not accepting that they could like be unproductive. It was really funny. So it reminds me of that. You, Aaron, have an obligation as a podcaster to do this. Sorry, you have to morally under the under the framework. I just decided right now. Debate me, bro.

0:52:36 Aaron: You Don't Have to let Nazis hang around in your group. You just you just do not. It is not required.

0:52:38 Thomas: Yeah, all right Well, thanks so come, uh, thanks so much for coming on, Aaron, I really appreciate it. Again, great article, everybody should read it if they haven't, I'll link it, um, it's fantastic stuff, well written, and uh, gosh, kind of scary, I gotta be honest, a little bit scary with that guy James.

0:52:41 Aaron: Oh, Final thought, if you are engaging with somebody who uses Knights Templar iconography, Viking iconography, or Roman or Greek busts for their avatar, there is a, a high likelihood, and in the case of the Templars, it's almost 100% chance that you are dealing with somebody who is deep into white nationalist iconography. Whether they know it or not, in the face of James Lindsay, that is exactly the iconography that they're reproducing, and you should be aware of that fact.

0:53:27 Thomas: Lindsey would never tweet out something with that iconography, right? Never.

0:53:31 Aaron: No, no, certainly not. And you certainly can't find a picture of him in the article doing that.

0:53:31 Thomas: Oh, Wait, he Did? Okay. Yeah, And Now he did. All right, thanks so much for coming on, everybody, of course, check out Embrace the Void, Philosophers in Space. Do you have any other shows now? Okay. Good.

0:53:45 Aaron: No I'm sticking to two, unlike some

0:53:46 Thomas: That's A good policy, uh, thanks so mucho for coming, I'm in.

0:53:47 Aaron: People. My pleasure.

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