the time machine hitler fallacy

and the high-move look ahead sorting hat

a common midwit position is “if i had a time machine, i’d go back and kill hitler” as though this would have changed the world and stopped ww2. the more clever and witty of this bunch frame it as “well i’d just make sure he got into art school!” both are wrong. that’s not how history works.

hitler was not some rogue human who got control of a whole country and bent it and all the people in it toward fascist war. hitler was a product of his times, a bad time of weak france trying to suppress strong germany under the crushing reparations of the treaty of versaille, of communist incursion, and of fascism around the world. it was a powder keg of racial and economic tensions. it was a time a lot like today.

“killing hitler” or sending him off to watercolor class does not change any of that and removing him might well make it worse. it would have been someone. maybe it would have been someone more capable and possessed of less restraint, someone who knew things like “don’t start a two front war with russia.” that could well have been a “weinerschnitzel in london” kind of outcome along with who knows what else.

and that does not even take into account what might have happened in weimar if “hitler was killed by our political enemies.”

stop for a moment and imagine what hyper-radicalized genies THAT might have let out of the bottle. not the happy nice ones, that much i assure you.

and that brings us to certain recent events.

charlie was a peaceful man and a big tent moderate.

that’s not the guy you take out to calm things down. he was the one protecting you.

when you violently and publically assassinate this:

because the inflammatory agents of media, social and otherwise, filled your head with outright lies about who this man was and what he stood for, the game gets very dangerous very fast.

the situation is not at all what the dance on the grave faction of the left thought.

i know people get all bunched up about “the left” and they say things like “well not all lefties” but this excuse to do nothing is way past threadbare and into transparency.

this youtuber satirizing “the view” gets it exactly correct.

in essence, his point is this:

sure, every time someone from the left tries to kill or burn or loot someone, you squawking bobbleheads look somber and sad and say “what a tragedy” and “we deplore this and do not condone violence,” but then a week later, you’re back on TV saying “my political opponents are literally hitler” and “fascists” and once more engaging in the mass hypnosis of your tribe to get them all thinking that they are re-living the 1930’s and need to kill the nazis before it’s too late.

not only do none of them actually know what this means or that trump and musk are also highly moderate versions of what else could stand in their place,

this is stochastic terrorism.

you don’t cause the violence or tell anyone to do it.

the propoganda complex is just upping the probability until it crosses the line into certainty.

the praxis is endlessly messaging until you find the weak minded or the virtue seeking vicious, whip them to violence, then call the burning of cities and killing of anyone you do not like “well deserved” and act like it’s the height of morality and how to get tribal merit badges.

then when the next atrocity occurs, you once more don your sadface and lament this terrible tragedy as though you had no hand in inciting it and are, of necessity and of course “the good guys.”

this is actually a classic marxist playbook for the emotive thinker in both semantic manipulation (as above) and in social practice.

it works like this:

if i want to encroach upon you, i’ll do it little by little, insistently. i will move into your space and take it, i will press against you. when it becomes too much and you say “stop it!” i will. just for a minute until you calm down. then i will press again. i will lean on you all the time so that any moment you are not directly resisting, you are giving ground.

i am at war with you, but every time you say “hey, why are you attacking me?” i say “i’m not!” and stop attacking just until you calm down, then i start again.

the only way you can stop me is to punch me and knock me down, but it never seems quite worth it for each of these small incursions.

i keep them below your response threshold.

this is a classic pattern for emotive, low move lookahead actors.

it’s perfect for them. the ringleaders just wind them up by saying “that guy is literally worse than a nazi and hates people like you and free speech and fluffy bunnies!” and off they go. they love it. there is always at any given time someone willing, ready, and enthusiastic to press on you.

it never gets tired.

these people live for the immediate reaction to all emotional stimuli and have little thought for what comes next beyond the power or goodies grabbed right now.

it’s a simple call to action complete with the ability to feel self-righteous about being beastly to others and it comes with a whole tribe of fellow travelers with whom you can virtue signal and backpat. it’s a way to build communities for high time preference (prefers immediacy) emotional thinkers riddled with cluster B traits.

where this gets interesting is when it runs into low time preference (values future, can pass marshmallow test) logical thinkers who prefer ideas like “social contract,” “non-defection in itertive priosoner’s dilemma,” and play on multiple move lookahead and consider 3rd and 4th order effects.

the low look ahead crowd just follows the simple press then relent, press then relent strategy of encroachment. it looks and feels like winning because they keep gaining ground.

meanwhile, the high look ahead crowd says things like “if i go to war with these people, it will be hard. life will change. i will not like it. people will get hurt, applecarts will be upended.”

if the group they are being encroached upon by look to be in power, this gets worse as now you are considering ideas like “what would going to war with the state entail?”

this is why the response threshold is so high. you’re dealing with persistent, low level incursion from low order low rationality people who cannot be dissuaded except by extreme response.

and so the “it’s not worth it just for this little encroachment” game is lost over and over iteratively.

but these losses pile up.

and high move look ahead low time preference people eventually say something like “i do not like where this road is going and it has gone too far.” this occurs rapidly if the folks with whom one is contesting start to lose power and the “hey, wait, maybe we do not need to fight the state and the center” moment occurs or around a specific flashpoint that drives home just how far from OK the world has slowly been bent.

this is the power of the cancel culture abilene paradox of preference falsification: it keeps the high move look ahead gang gaslit into thinking that the cost of resistance is too high or that chance has not been so great or so bad or maybe even that it was good and that “everyone thinks so but you.”

this has changed.

then as this new math of “hey, i think we’re the majority” and “this was never good/normal/ok and almost nobody thought so” gets applied, the one move look ahead gang cannot adapt tactics and they have no idea what they are playing with.

all they know is push and push harder.

they keep playing at attack and relent, encroach and pause, but now the high move look ahead player is saying “they’ll just keep doing this forever until i stop them, so it might as well be now. the price seems worth it even over a small thing because each small thing begets the next 30 and i now assess the equation in its totality, not in tiny pieces.”

and this acts like a binary.

you flip the switch and “war” goes from zero straight to 11.

add in some violence to show the incredibly bad faith of the low look aheaders, wipe out the moderates, and now you have a real powder keg.

that’s how things go “komatsu D355A.”

“nice town hall you got there…”

and this is where things REALLY go wrong for the low look ahead crowd. “we stopped!” they say. “you need to relent!”

“LOL, not a chance,” says team lookahead. “we know your game and can predict your next moves. the only safe strategy for us is to take you out of play.”

this result requires multi-move look ahead to predict so the low lookahead player cannot see it coming. they think “relent” will always result in “stop” for reaction.

and suddenly they are very, very wrong about the dominant game strategy of an opponent they never knew how to model.

and then the streets run red on and on until the threat is gone. not quiet, gone. the people who do this do it with strategy, organization, and agency.

they do it with finality.

they salt the fields to prevent future regrowth of the weeds that sought to choke them.

they are the men who just wanted to be left alone who got pulled across the rubicon and now fight with raw hate and implacable purpose. all the rules change and those who have played at culture war get their first look at what a real war machine looks like.

and by then, it’s too late.

there is no back.

there is no stop.

“but we promise to be good this time” goes nowhere.

there is no trust or empathy.

there is just “see this through to the bloody and bitter end.”

lines are crossed.

and they become event horizons over which no return is possible.

this is what drives the non-linear FAFO curve and the “find out” part is always a big surprise for those who experience it.

and this is why the center left is probably the only relevant political group whose movement affects the outcome anymore. they are the ones who can pull away, isolate the zealots and disavow the endless maligning of political foes that feeds the stochastic terror machine.

the hard left is locked in and cannot change course even if it wanted to.

the right is galvanizing and teetering on the edge of crying havoc and letting slip the dogs of “we simply will not allow you near us anymore.”

“the moderate right died with charlie” is a common refrain.

it carries truth.

they are incredibly tired of living under attack and the fatigue is past real and into surreal.

no one can take another round of “you are literally hitler” accusation leveled by actual fascists who seek to censor, suppress, and kill while telling you that you have to look at this guy and and say “oh, ok, that’s fine for my kids” or that the people being radicalized by it have not become violent and dangerous.

the whole thing has been an assault and i think the smart ones on the left are realizing that they allowed some truly deranged and dangerous people into their tent.

now is the time to disavow and move away. you cannot just “stay silent” about this anymore, not after the things that have happened.

i think that probably about the only thing between the US and something that expresses like civil war and communists getting thrown out of helicopters is most of the left disavowing its extreme wing and joining the right in opposition to these zealots.

they have been the victims of the same game of press and relent that we have. this extreme left wing hates everyone and lives for struggle sessions, “how many fingers winston?” and taking you out behind the paint shed to shoot you. they have been edge-lording and pushing the sane left out of power and battering them into submission for decades as the game of “more marginal than thou” dominated politics.

they faced the same “is each encroachment worth it to fight against?” math that the right did and lost for similar reasons.

the eyes down fiction that this was OK or “not such a big deal” or manageable is over.

the moderate left cannot keep providing air cover for the loons dancing around in the skinsuit of pluralism in search of dictatorship by the damaged.

it’s time for the sorting hat to once more work its magic this time along the lines of low time preference high move look ahead golden rule social contractors, around authoritarian vs liberty.

this is not a delination that respects left or right. it spans both.

and if both come together against the high time preference, low move look ahead radicalized loons of weaponized libtardia, this will be a walk over that can be handled with minimal fuss and wide scale institutional recapture and a bottoms up re-imposition of sound societal mores.

but if the center continues to aid and abet the awful awfuls of the land of ideologically broken toys and their violence and persecution fantasies, then there’s going to be conflict in earnest: bad, everyone gets hurt conflict.

this means, as under covid, the last big resorting project, opening our minds and tent to those who are and should be on our side.

it’s time to build the team that we want to take into the fray.

i will again quote charlie:

“i will always stand against people who wish to establish their own personal values as a reason to kick others out of our movement.”

civilization, like politics works better by addition than subtraction, but it must also be governed by the “must be this tall to ride” standards of “will you agree to be bound by the social contract in order to be protected by it?”

that’s the only real question on the table.

“protected but unbound” is civilizational solvent. it’s wreckers anointed as sacred and placed where builders should be.

if you want to build this team well, this is not the time to go tribal feral, it’s the time to be sure to whom and about what one is talking.

hold the strict standards, call out the fouls, especially from those you’re closest to, and let’s build the biggest tent we can without compromising the society we want to inhabit.

the time of choosing has come.

choose well.

the sorting cat has spoken