Should MMA fighters stop whining? re: Rohan Ghostwind on Aella

bonus content.

Rohan Ghostwind wrote a response to my article on Aella, so I figured I’d address it here rather than writing a comment.

He is, of course, invited on my podcast.

You can read his article yourself; I’m going to paraphrase bits here and respond to them.¹

DLA writes a 5,000 article on something he doesn’t find important. Curious!

Well, yes, I am loquacious. But I think it’s ok to make the positive case for why we shouldn’t engage in a moral panic or crusade against a sex worker, even if that case is long and cumbersome.

DLA claims that starving children in Africa prevents us from criticizing pedophilia, but this is a false dichotomy.

This isn’t my argument. I complain about insignificant things all the time. My criticism is not that we don’t have the right to complain about insignificant things — my criticism is that we shouldn’t go on crusades about insignificant things. In this case, the “insignificant thing” isn’t actually pedophilia, but alleged implications which could lead to a slippery slope if taken to the implementation of the logical conclusions of the virtual production of… blah blah blah. You can read my article and see if I am going on a crusade myself.

DLA claims that conservatives are deranged, and this is not a valid argument.

I disagree. The attacks on Aella are deranged and religious in nature. They claim she is a pedophile funded by Peter Thiel to normalize pedophilia. I have posted the screenshots in my article. That is what I am attacking, and I am accurately describing that behavior.

It’s a false dichotomy to claim that we shouldn’t go on a moral crusade against Aella, but should care more about underage prescription drug use.

This isn’t a false dichotomy — it is two valid opinions. I’m demonstrating that conservatives aren’t motivated by a desire to reduce harm, but to defend the sacredness of their sexual values. Those are two different things. Read Haidt.

Aella’s argument for CP is bad

In my essay, I say “For the record, I am not persuaded by Aella’s prescription...” If I wasn’t me, and I was reading your essay, I would be under the prescription that DLA, Aella, and Eliezer Yudkowsky all have the same opinions on blowing up AI data centers and spreading CP everywhere. To clarify — we do not.

I don’t see what the argument is here. I don’t think she deserves negative backlash — if Rohan think she does, he should make the case for it.

Rohan seems to have this “you deserve to be raped attitude” about incendiary posts. Yes, if a woman goes out dressed in a bikini, she might be more likely to be sexually assaulted than a woman in a burka. But sexual assault is bad in both cases. Whether or not Aella makes incendiary hypotheticals has no bearing at all on whether she deserves to subjected to moral crusades and conspiracy theories. Saying that she is making that behavior more likely is not a defense of that behavior.

This is a common mental defect of conservatives:

“If you do X, people will hate you, so you shouldn’t do X.”

Then I respond, “I disagree with the haters. This is not something we should hate people over.”

The conservative responds:

“But she knew she would be hated, so she should have expected it, and therefore deserves it.”

Yes, Aella should expect to be hated for her edgy posts. My case was to distance myself from the mob hating her and to declare my disdain for conservatives. Rohan hasn’t addressed whether or not my case was correct, but engaged in a circular logic to excuse the hatred.

Personally I would compare sex work to an MMA fighter, in that you need to have a particular psychology that's a little bit “off” from the general population — and very likely you’ll do uncomfortable things to your body in order to be successful.

I agree with this.

This isn't to take a dig at his personal beliefs, but rather to point out a common trend with a lot of the leftist/rationalist/Elite Human Capital™ bloggers.

I have never described myself as a rationalist and I have written against EHC. I’m obviously not against rationality as a concept. It’s just guilt by association here. I am not in favor of infanticide, although that would be quite traditionalist.

Lately, I've noticed they will go to great lengths to defend killing babies (not fetuses, but actual babies who have been born), as well as defending things like bestiality, and stuff involving underage people — but then they’ll turn around and question the moral intuitions of someone who thinks that sleeping around with hundreds of partners is at least a little bit degenerate.

I have not “gone to great lengths” to defend any of these things. I do question the moral intuition of people who think that the biggest problem with western civilization today is the legality of prostitution. That seems bizarre and hysterical to me. I don’t think even St. Augustine had these attitudes — I think these ideas are anti-sexual and profoundly petty. These people have a severe and terminal case of Last Man cuckery, where they are obsessed with the vaginas of sex workers to the point where they fixate on them and their supposed “evilness.” It’s the attitude of an old hag who resents the young. People should have contempt for such ideas and call them out as inferior and lowly.

Rohan can accuse me of writing a long essay, but how many comments have been written attacking Aella as the Whore of Babylon, as if she is going to destroy the world with her pedophile cabal? In comparison with that, my comments are a drop in the bucket.

For all that they claim to be part of the high IQ subset, they seem to have a very hard time modeling the intuitions and beliefs of someone who has a different starting value framework as themselves. But I digress.

No, my disagreement isn’t an inability to model the values of others. I understand that some people’s lives revolve around the Epstein files and Aella’s tweets. I think such people are deranged, but I don’t have trouble modeling their beliefs.

All of these people have readerships somewhere between six thousand and sixty thousand people. They effectively make a living by giving edgy and heterodox opinions on the Internet — and yet, when I saw how quickly they banned me (literally seconds after I posted) and how innocuous the offense was (no slurs, no spamming, not even really an insult) — I was left with the impression that these folks are incredibly fragile.

There’s nothing fragile about blocking people. Logically, as a business decision, having a comments section full of haters is not a good look. The best way to grow a platform is to make it look like you are on the winning team, with a sea of adoring fans. Blocking people is an effective part of a marketing strategy.

I don’t block people² because I am pathologically committed to “free speech,” but that doesn’t make me a stronger person than someone who blocks people.

Not wanting to see unflattering photos doesn’t equate to fragility.

As much as they talk about the “free market of ideas” and how all the right-wing chuds are in their little bubble, they seem to want to live in a bubble of their own. They can't seem to handle even the most lighthearted and playful criticisms of their ideas.

For a guy who loves to talk about false dichotomies, this is a whopper. Blocking people who post unflattering memes isn’t the same as “living in a bubble.” Unflattering memes are not “the free market of ideas,” they are sewage with no positive value.

That being said, if you’re a fully mature person over the age of 25, and you make your living by giving controversial opinions on highly charged subjects, then you can’t suddenly get mad when you receive backlash every so often.

This is a moralistic judgment without value. Let’s say an MMA fighter fights in a fight, and he gets hurt, and his injuries cause him pain. So he takes 6 months off fighting, to recover. Then Rohan tells him, “you can’t feel pain, you signed up for this!”

Yes, the MMA fighter signed up for this, but that doesn’t change the fact that the MMA fighter is in pain. In Aella’s case, it is emotional pain (anger, Rohan claims) not physical pain. I find Aella’s pain to be entirely reasonable and “mature.” Claiming otherwise comes from your lack of ability to model the experiences of others.

As such, I think he fails to appreciate the degree to which a lot of these larger bloggers (who make a living by being terminally online) post things with the express intent of farming as much engagement as possible.

No, I don’t, and I literally say that is Aella’s strategy in my post. And Rohan acknowledges that I acknowledge that, “Even DeepLeft himself acknowledges at the end of his post: This [Aella] episode has caused people to pay attention to her, like me, who would otherwise not. In the attention economy, that’s a W.”

This is a very weird and obvious contradiction, claiming that I am claiming something which you yourself admit I do not claim. I am baffled.

I understand that Aella is engagement farming. I appreciate the fact that she is engagement farming, in the same way that I appreciate the fact that MMA fighters get beat up for a living. That doesn’t mean that when I see a person in pain that I shrug my shoulders, fold my arms, laugh smugly, and say, “well, you signed up for it!” Yes, they did sign up for it, but a beaten and bruised person deserves some respect. They are fighting in the arena.

I prefer Aella 100x over Mr. Beast slop. A world full of Aella’s would be a better world. Engagement farming over sex is more useful and morally impactful than a swimming pool full of Jolly Ranchers.

These terminally online people are fully aware of the dynamics that play out on these platforms. It’s quite hypocritical want³ to benefit from the dynamics while simultaneously being shielded from the downsides.

This isn’t hypocritical at all. Again, this would be like telling an MMA fighter to put his hands down in a fight, because “it’s hypocritical to want to beat up your opponent and not get beat up!”

There’s nothing hypocritical about wanting to farm engagement and not be subject to conspiratorial derangement.

To take the example even further: I post things to the internet. A percentage of people who read my essays hate me. I do not desire people to hate me, but that’s the consequence of posting my opinions to the internet. I am aware of that dynamic: I post, some percentage of people will hate me.

If I were to say, “man, all this internet hate has me down today,” that would not be hypocritical. It would be a statement of fact. Rohan seems to be moralizing that people deserve bad things to happen to them if they understand what they are doing is risky.

Another example: let’s say I were climbing a mountain, and I fell down and died. As my friends gather around, crying over my crushed body, Rohan comes along and say,

Erm, acktually, you’re not allowed to cry, because he knew the risks when he started climbing that mountain!

This is a nonsensical argument. Whether or not people are permitted to feel bad over the consequences of their risk-taking behavior has nothing to do with the riskiness of their behavior. The end result of Rohan’s logic is to attack risk-taking itself, which is bad and lame.

If she wanted to shield herself from criticism, she could easily do so. All she would have to do is paywall the majority of her content, and move from Twitter to BlueSky.

But that would be less fun, because there would be less right wingers to dunk on, and less people to market to.

The weird thing about Rohan’s essay is that he is paraphrasing my own arguments as if he is arguing against me. Then his audience agrees with him, thinking he has BTFOed me with my own logic.

I mention Bluesky directly in my essay: “I would be interested to see how that would work out. It certainly wouldn’t be Bluesky — if I go on Bluesky, there’s a legion of leftists there telling JK Rowling to kill herself.”

I’m quoting myself now:

Ideally, there would be a safe space for Aella where she would never be attacked — however, if there were such a space, it would have many fewer users, and I think Aella would be disappointed at how much her audience and cashflow would shrink under such conditions.

Can you see the exact parallel between what I’ve said and what Rohan has said? It’s almost as if he has copied my arguments and pretended that we’re disagreeing here. It’s odd and somewhat disingenuous. I don’t think it was a malicious choice to misrepresent me to his audience — I’ll chock it up to some sort of misunderstanding.

I enjoyed seeing my former subscriber, Dave Greene, claiming that he can’t imagine what anyone would ever like about me. Well Dave, the essay you just read is literally a commentary on me, and you liked it enough to comment on it, so apparently, I’m entertaining you well enough!

Dave is welcome to come on the podcast too.

1. I could do exact quotes, but it’s more snarky this way.

2. outside of death threats and stalkers who post hundreds of hate comments about how they want to violently hurt me

3. People accuse me of not editing, but…