I'll just post some general thoughts on argument I've been running through, after sharing this thread with some people.
I think this thread is very interesting not for the particulars of what anybody's saying, but as an opportunity to observe how bad arguments form and play out. The particular problem I see here is Guest's professed notions of who he's talking to. In the shoutbox this was just referred to as 'monolithic', but I disagree. The problem here is not that Guest has too solid and broad a picture of who he's talking to. It's that the picture is so loose and selectively adjusted that he's not talking specifically to anybody. And is instead re-arranging modular pictures of who he's arguing with thought to thought to whatever he thinks he can score a point against. This is kind of common online, especially in spoken
debates because it's both easier to lose track of your own train of thought, harder to follow someone else's, and the audience will also be more fickle and having a harder time keeping track, so it's both harder to be consistent and less necessary to hold yourself accountable to any kind of standards. Just say what feels like an own in the current second even if it contradicts what you were saying a minute ago.
But of course, this is all in text. It's very easy to read back across the entire thread and see that there's no coherent course running through Guest's posts which could be called thought. He types like someone like Destiny talks. Only this isn't a Twitch channel and you can't win by putting on a superficially impressive tone to get more meme reacts from excited enby 12 year olds.
The thought I just want to get down here is a general one on how people argue online, how much apparently
devious and dishonest behaviour is actually just people being stupid and succeeding because everyone else is also stupid? I've never really listened to him at length but that
Destiny character interests me because he's talked about sometimes like he's a cynical master manipulator who assembles brilliant dishonest arguments. I listen to scraps now and then and study his character a touch, I don't think he's actually very good at consciously manipulating people. I think all of his most brilliant dishonest successes were relatively earnest attempts at argument, and he's just bad at keeping his thoughts coherent. And then successors like Vaush. Again, this is just how dumb people talk.
The comparison that comes to my mind is guerilla warfare. Something a lot of less than stellar human specimens have pulled off more or less
successfully. Some people make a show of talking about the tactical ingenuity of a Mao or a Viet Minh, Mugabe, the Algerian NLF, the trend across all of these cases is these guys are playing with international institutional support, and get away with having catastrophically low standards compared to their opposition. When your victory condition doesn't require any kind of building or maintenance it's much easier to
"succeed". But then of course when you win you're king of rubble and you and your retarded thug minions are only capable of building a toilet-society on top of that which everybody wants to flee.
I've been thinking that stupid and low people are natural guerillas, and that their preferred "tactics" are just them following their nature. Mao's
genius, his tactics of guerrilla warfare, could have been invented by anybody who read
Ways That Are Dark. It's just the habits of being a degenerate piece of shit early 20th century behavioural sink Chinaman applied to warfare. Take whatever you can get whenever you can get it, commit to nothing that can be taken from you, never expose yourself to harm, Mao just fought a war the same way Chinamen had conversations back then.
Maybe you see where I'm going now, there is no tactic to Guest's posts or coherence, he's just posting in accordance with his nature. And anything which looks like strategy or an edge is just an emergence of having no standards to which he can be held accountable. When you have nothing to lose, you can't really lose. In the context of an argument, what we have, which in a way burdens us, is sense, ideas, and integrity. Not having these things affords a kind of formlessness which can be very useful if you just want to argue and annoy people with no regard for intellectual standing. Think of how Goebbels described Jewish argument tricks. Deliberate tactic, or nature?
Are bad and frustrating arguments dishonest, or merely stupid? I am inclined to think that in the 21st century we have destroyed and failed to cultivate so much human potential that the number of people even capable of sophisticated bad faith argumentation has crashed through the floor, and that nine times out of ten when someone says something which is frustratingly hard to argue with, it's not because they're some trickster mastermind, but instead because they're the intellectual equivalent of a mad dirt and shit covered terrorist who lives in a cave eating worms who lives to blow up things he could never build himself.
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