> There’s a catch-22 here. Discussing these things (both the crime itself and the way it could cause a copycat effect) is important. But the more attention you bring to it, the more likely it is to breed copycats. So there’s a weird Roko’s basilisk quality to the discussion, where the more aware you are of the copycat risk, the more likely you are to summon it.
I am of two minds on this, and my values conflict. I don't know how to resolve it
On the one hand: I am a free speech maximalist absolutist. I believe that every person should have the unqualified right to communicate any information they want, at any time, to any one (conditional on any one having the right to reject that communication to themselves, whatever that means in context). I believe that I should have the absolute right, if I wanted to, to not only signal boost these crimes, but to advocate for them.
The reason I believe this, there's a bunch of reasons but here's the three main ones
1) Letting any authority decide which communications are legitimate immediately gives that authority a fully general tool to exploit, and I'd rather a handful of innocent people sometimes die, than the government be able to control our minds.
2) Silencing people doesn't stop their ideas, it just prompts them to hide them. If people are openly communicating abhorrent things, we know who the bad people are, and we can all point at them and mock them and then ignore them. If you silence their bad ideas, they just communicate them in secret, where they can spread with you being unaware until they build to a critical mass
3) Crime is already illegal. In fact, every citizen of the United States has both a moral and a legal obligation to not murder people, _even if someone tells to you_. And I think that any moves to silence speech on the grounds that it might encourage crime, is shifting the responsibility of crime away from the people who did it, and on to other people who didn't do it. I think this is both bullshit in a "I didn't do it, why are you mad at me?" way, as well as a dangerous risk of making the people who actually do crimes feel less responsible for them, which will increase crimes at the margins (eg "hey, I'm just the vessel, carrying out the will of that guy who told me to do it")
ON THE OTHER HAND THOUGH, in the context of mass shootings specifically, they are freak rare events. As freak rare events, they're basically random, and there's not much we can do proactively to stop them. And so, if our highest priority is stopping them, then we need to use whatever tactics are effective, and if silencing speech is effective, well, maybe that's what we have to do.
At the moment I square this circle by saying "yep, sometimes innocent people die. That's the price you pay for living in a community of more than 100 people". But, I can totally understand why other people might vehemently disagree with that.
There's a nuance between socially discouraging sharing copycatogenic info and making it illegal. Making it illegal is the go-to for authoritarians, on the basis (as you described) that it makes people safer. So then the discussion becomes about a tradeoff between freedom and safety. But the track record of those tradeoffs shows that they reduce freedom *and* in practice they're ineffective at actually increasing safety. So banning speech is bad for both freedom and safety, then it's just a roundly bad idea and you don't even have to reach the harder question of whether it would theoretically be worth trading away some freedom for a lower risk of violence.
Wow, I am such a contrarian that in one paragraph you have baited me into arguing against one of my most strongly held worldview beliefs. That's funny too.
That belief is that there is a large category of things that are currently illegal, but that shouldn't be illegal, but that are still bad, people shouldn't do them, and they should be socially shamed. I think, for example, drugs and abortions fall into this category. I am frequently arguing that we should NOT make these things illegal, even though they're bad. It sounds like you're making a similar argument.
But as soon as I read you making that argument, my gut check was to rebut it with another idea I have, but which I have never applied to my own viewpoint apparently. And that idea is that this is not a stable equilibrium.
It seems to me, that "these things are bad, and should be heavily socially discouraged, but the government should stay out of it and they should be not illegal" rapidly decomposes into moral panics which lead to making them illegal. I have some examples coming to mind but they're all too controversial for this blog so we'll leave it abstract. I would push back against any public social campaigns of shaming this kind of behaviour, on the grounds that it appears to inevitably, eventually, lead to the government making such behaviour illegal.
----
As an aside, one of the other things I think which interacts with this is an observation that so many of these issues go away trivially if we roll back the clock to pre-2014. (which again, we can't do, because we used to be in pre-2014, and those conditions led to the current state of affairs, so they were also clearly not a stable equilibrium)
What I mean by that is, so, do you remember when your Twitter timeline was a list of all-and-only those accounts you chose to follow, in the order that they posted? Almost _all_ of these speech moderation issues just go away if we live in that world. Because if we live in that world, then a) you only see the things you opted in to seeing; and b) you can trivially avoid seeing anything you don't want to see.
In that world, all of these issues regarding "saying things in public that people might take the wrong way" go away, because, well, in a sense, you're not saying them in public. You're saying them to people who already specifically chose to listen. So the risk that someone crazy might hear it and be inspired is nearly zero. The only case in which it's not zero is if they're someone you already know who chose to follow you. And in that case, I'd argue, it's not reasonable for someone other than the speaker to say "don't talk about this with them", because it would be akin to censoring someone at the dinner table because their teenager is unstable. While a person _at that table_ might decide that, a third party bursting into the house and telling the person at the table that, would be widely seen as unreasonable.
----
I guess that's maybe my blind spot here. The way I use the internet, I would consider very little of what I do to be _public_ speech, and honestly, I don't really care about _public_ speech. I know technically, for example, these comments are public. But I don't think of them as public. I'm writing comments to specific people who specifically chose to look at them. The fact that some third party can come in and look at it is not really a concern to me.
If I was speaking in a capacity that had a high likelihood of being seen by people who didn't specifically seek it out, I might feel differently. I haven't really thought about that
Your first point is elegantly concise. There is a real cost to freedom (to speak, to self-defend, to travel, etc) and sometimes that cost must be paid in blood.
Talk is cheap though, and I can't say I'd be of the same mind if I lost my brother or sister in a shooting. This is why pathos is such effective rhetotic for limiting freedoms. But if we use some logos and look through history, we are living in one of the safest and most prosperous times ever. The grass is always greener on the other side of the valley.
> Talk is cheap though, and I can't say I'd be of the same mind if I lost my brother or sister in a shooting.
I agree, but I also don't care / Don't think that's relevant
One of my many quirky philosophical worldviews, I don't have a concise way to describe it, but I call it social general relativity.
A lot of people when talking about society, policy issues, or what we should do, kind of take for granted an assumed universal God's eye view where everything has to be consistent with each other. But just like how in general relativity there is no privileged objective reference frame, I think that there is no such privileged objective reference frame in society either. The fact that I might believe something different if I was in a different position does not invalidate the beliefs I have in the position that I am.
And this is symmetric. The exact same argument applies in reverse. Everything I have said in these comments would not convince a grieving parent to stop grieving and consider the greater good, nor is it intended to. Their grief is valid. I'm just not going to use it as a factor in my opinions and decision making because it's not my grief.
I'm pretty frustrated at how many people I'm seeing online expressing shock at the fact that people would be supportive of this action.
I understand thinking that this action was bad and I understand being opposed to the people expressing support for this action. But I don't understand people who are surprised at these comments, and I suspect that all of them are disingenuous in their surprise.
I moved to the United States in 2012, and from the moment I moved here until the moment that woke anti-racism and LGBT stuff took over the collective conscience, rhetoric advocating exactly what this guy did was everywhere. Living in the Bay Area, every day ob my walk to work I would see stickers, posters, and graffiti that said things like "eat the rich" and "die teche scum" and "death to all landlords". These sentiments were so widespread and popular that even people who disagreed with them would smile and nod and pretend to agree with them because they understood it was socially expected to do so.
Society spends ten years saying these kinds of things, and then a guy acts on it. It's like everybody assumed the whole time that all of those comments were sarcastic or impotent or otherwise not literal. I don't think it's reasonable to ignore the things you see and hear every day for a decade, and then act surprised when you find out someone actually meant them.
For that matter, I think that's doubly unreasonable to anybody who would express ideas along the lines of "We can't even talk openly about this because there are crazy people out there and copycats are a thing". I'm not accusing anyone here of doing that, its just a convenient example. If one's threat model of this is that it's essentially stochastic terrorism and there are a handful of crazy people out there who will just do it if encouraged enough, so we need to do everything in our power to avoid encouraging them. If that is your threat model, then it doesn't even matter if all of those things people were saying in the 2010s were sarcastic because the random crazy person is going to take them seriously regardless of their intent.
So anyone who is sincerely surprised now on the grounds of, "holy shit, I didn't realize they were serious", is holding an unreasonable position if they believe that the risk of crazy people being encouraged to violence is a real thing.
> Living in the Bay Area, every day ob my walk to work I would see stickers, posters, and graffiti that said things like "eat the rich" and "die teche scum" and "death to all landlords". These sentiments were so widespread and popular that even people who disagreed with them would smile and nod and pretend to agree with them because they understood it was socially expected to do so.
Where do you think all the people saying things like this on Twitter live?
I heard that so many times when I lived there, "that's just the Bay Area". Well, ever since the internet was invented, the Bay Area leads the culture. The Bay Area decides what is popular on social media. Then the people in other cities who want to be popular ape that.
This has been ongoing for 10 years. I left the bay area 7 years ago and everywhere else I've been, all bougie upper-middle class 20-40 y/os who are all good liberals all say the same things
If you were to tell someone pumping up a story about a mass shooter that doing so will likely assist in encouraging another person to commit the same atrocity, the response will likely be something to the effect of denial and a wholehearted and honest hope that it does not.
However, from the discourse I've seen online related to the CEO shooting, the response to such a concept is typically along the lines of, "Hell yeah, I hope it does. Those corporate execs better watch their asses."
Reading this article led me on a wonderful wikipedia dive. The Roko's Basilisk link led me to read up on Pascals's wager, Information Hazards, Potemkin Villages, and Marie Antionette. Although the subject of the article is dark, it led me to a fresh set of ideas to explore this afternoon. Thank you for that.
As for the CEO event specifically, well, all I can say is, I think a world in which every CEO has to weigh "will someone try to kill me for this decision" before making decisions, is a better world than one in which he does not. I think that a lot of social dysfunction happens because our leaders are disconnected from boots-on-the-ground reality of regular life, and so make decisions that bode poorly for regular people. This is primarily a function of their social class and wealth, and consequently implies that at a structural level, it's not practically possible for leaders to have that kind of connection to reality.
So, given that their day to day lives make it impossible for them to properly weigh the consequences of their decisions on regular people, it seems to me that the threat of assassination would be a decent alternative. The CEO might not actually understand how his decisions impact normal people. But that threat forces him to spend a lot of time and effort trying to simulate that understanding in order to avoid a psycho blasting him in the face.
This is rather personal to me, because last year I got laid off halfway through a green card sponsorship, which has more or less completely ruined my prospects for the future and will likely result in me going back to Canada and applying for MAID in the next few years. I'm very serious about this. Everything I've been working towards for 15 years is down the shitter, because the CEO wanted to juice the stock price a week before their quarterly earnings report. And because this happened in 2023, I was laid off because of my skin colour. They more-or-less openly said so in the email.
I'm sure the decision the CEO made seemed reasonable to him based on the information and circumstances he had. But I don't think his personal net worth is worth more than my life. I am not stupid enough to go do something stupid to him. But if he had to contend with the very real threat that someone else might, perhaps I'd be a permanent resident by now, and my life would look a lot more optimistic. And perhaps they wouldn't have over-hired incompetent, counter-productive employees in a bid to make their diversity numbers look better, and they'd have the cash flow to cover the salaries of the people who worked there, without layoffs. My life would be better. Their company would be more stable. Society would be receiving more value from them. Hell, the CEO would _probably_ make more money in the long term due to the increased prosperity.
To put it another way, flippantly, I saw a commie meme the other day and it made me laugh. It said something like: "socialists explaining to Americans that they can shoot CEOs instead of school children" and I have to say... shooting CEOs instead of school children, while still evil, is marginally less evil than the other way around.
Please don't do that. That really sucks about the layoffs, but don't let them win that easy. Things will swing back the other way for you, even if you have no idea right now how they could. You just have to keep showing up. I've experienced so many turnarounds like that.
Appreciate the sentiment, but I am not going to be a broke unemployed 40 y/o with no future prospects. So here's hoping it doesn't come to that.
To get personal for a moment, my life has been in a collapsing dumpster fire since 2019 and despite herculean efforts, not one thing has improved. If I lose my life in America and have to leave, I know it's never improving back to where it was before 2019, and where it was in 2019 wasn't where I wanted it to be in the first place. I don't play losing games, I gracefully resign. So here's hoping that doesn't happen
Incidentally, might as well throw this out there: For a while now I have had a sneaking suspicion, not based on much, that you might be a person who used to know me irl, and might have a very detailed idea of some of what I'm referring to. That would be quite funny.
----
EDIT: Thinking about it, the only reason why I've had that sneaking suspicion is because I get the sense that you're either a rationalist or rationalist-adjacent, and the intersection of "rationalist" and "pro-gun" is very small and heavily localized within a ten mile radius of where I live. By any chance, do you, or have you ever, owned a Kar98k? Or a Mosin Nagant? I forget which one it was, but if you do, my priors that you are a specific person I used to know are skyrocketing
> There’s a catch-22 here. Discussing these things (both the crime itself and the way it could cause a copycat effect) is important. But the more attention you bring to it, the more likely it is to breed copycats. So there’s a weird Roko’s basilisk quality to the discussion, where the more aware you are of the copycat risk, the more likely you are to summon it.
I am of two minds on this, and my values conflict. I don't know how to resolve it
On the one hand: I am a free speech maximalist absolutist. I believe that every person should have the unqualified right to communicate any information they want, at any time, to any one (conditional on any one having the right to reject that communication to themselves, whatever that means in context). I believe that I should have the absolute right, if I wanted to, to not only signal boost these crimes, but to advocate for them.
The reason I believe this, there's a bunch of reasons but here's the three main ones
1) Letting any authority decide which communications are legitimate immediately gives that authority a fully general tool to exploit, and I'd rather a handful of innocent people sometimes die, than the government be able to control our minds.
2) Silencing people doesn't stop their ideas, it just prompts them to hide them. If people are openly communicating abhorrent things, we know who the bad people are, and we can all point at them and mock them and then ignore them. If you silence their bad ideas, they just communicate them in secret, where they can spread with you being unaware until they build to a critical mass
3) Crime is already illegal. In fact, every citizen of the United States has both a moral and a legal obligation to not murder people, _even if someone tells to you_. And I think that any moves to silence speech on the grounds that it might encourage crime, is shifting the responsibility of crime away from the people who did it, and on to other people who didn't do it. I think this is both bullshit in a "I didn't do it, why are you mad at me?" way, as well as a dangerous risk of making the people who actually do crimes feel less responsible for them, which will increase crimes at the margins (eg "hey, I'm just the vessel, carrying out the will of that guy who told me to do it")
ON THE OTHER HAND THOUGH, in the context of mass shootings specifically, they are freak rare events. As freak rare events, they're basically random, and there's not much we can do proactively to stop them. And so, if our highest priority is stopping them, then we need to use whatever tactics are effective, and if silencing speech is effective, well, maybe that's what we have to do.
At the moment I square this circle by saying "yep, sometimes innocent people die. That's the price you pay for living in a community of more than 100 people". But, I can totally understand why other people might vehemently disagree with that.
There's a nuance between socially discouraging sharing copycatogenic info and making it illegal. Making it illegal is the go-to for authoritarians, on the basis (as you described) that it makes people safer. So then the discussion becomes about a tradeoff between freedom and safety. But the track record of those tradeoffs shows that they reduce freedom *and* in practice they're ineffective at actually increasing safety. So banning speech is bad for both freedom and safety, then it's just a roundly bad idea and you don't even have to reach the harder question of whether it would theoretically be worth trading away some freedom for a lower risk of violence.
Wow, I am such a contrarian that in one paragraph you have baited me into arguing against one of my most strongly held worldview beliefs. That's funny too.
That belief is that there is a large category of things that are currently illegal, but that shouldn't be illegal, but that are still bad, people shouldn't do them, and they should be socially shamed. I think, for example, drugs and abortions fall into this category. I am frequently arguing that we should NOT make these things illegal, even though they're bad. It sounds like you're making a similar argument.
But as soon as I read you making that argument, my gut check was to rebut it with another idea I have, but which I have never applied to my own viewpoint apparently. And that idea is that this is not a stable equilibrium.
It seems to me, that "these things are bad, and should be heavily socially discouraged, but the government should stay out of it and they should be not illegal" rapidly decomposes into moral panics which lead to making them illegal. I have some examples coming to mind but they're all too controversial for this blog so we'll leave it abstract. I would push back against any public social campaigns of shaming this kind of behaviour, on the grounds that it appears to inevitably, eventually, lead to the government making such behaviour illegal.
----
As an aside, one of the other things I think which interacts with this is an observation that so many of these issues go away trivially if we roll back the clock to pre-2014. (which again, we can't do, because we used to be in pre-2014, and those conditions led to the current state of affairs, so they were also clearly not a stable equilibrium)
What I mean by that is, so, do you remember when your Twitter timeline was a list of all-and-only those accounts you chose to follow, in the order that they posted? Almost _all_ of these speech moderation issues just go away if we live in that world. Because if we live in that world, then a) you only see the things you opted in to seeing; and b) you can trivially avoid seeing anything you don't want to see.
In that world, all of these issues regarding "saying things in public that people might take the wrong way" go away, because, well, in a sense, you're not saying them in public. You're saying them to people who already specifically chose to listen. So the risk that someone crazy might hear it and be inspired is nearly zero. The only case in which it's not zero is if they're someone you already know who chose to follow you. And in that case, I'd argue, it's not reasonable for someone other than the speaker to say "don't talk about this with them", because it would be akin to censoring someone at the dinner table because their teenager is unstable. While a person _at that table_ might decide that, a third party bursting into the house and telling the person at the table that, would be widely seen as unreasonable.
----
I guess that's maybe my blind spot here. The way I use the internet, I would consider very little of what I do to be _public_ speech, and honestly, I don't really care about _public_ speech. I know technically, for example, these comments are public. But I don't think of them as public. I'm writing comments to specific people who specifically chose to look at them. The fact that some third party can come in and look at it is not really a concern to me.
If I was speaking in a capacity that had a high likelihood of being seen by people who didn't specifically seek it out, I might feel differently. I haven't really thought about that
Your first point is elegantly concise. There is a real cost to freedom (to speak, to self-defend, to travel, etc) and sometimes that cost must be paid in blood.
Talk is cheap though, and I can't say I'd be of the same mind if I lost my brother or sister in a shooting. This is why pathos is such effective rhetotic for limiting freedoms. But if we use some logos and look through history, we are living in one of the safest and most prosperous times ever. The grass is always greener on the other side of the valley.
> Talk is cheap though, and I can't say I'd be of the same mind if I lost my brother or sister in a shooting.
I agree, but I also don't care / Don't think that's relevant
One of my many quirky philosophical worldviews, I don't have a concise way to describe it, but I call it social general relativity.
A lot of people when talking about society, policy issues, or what we should do, kind of take for granted an assumed universal God's eye view where everything has to be consistent with each other. But just like how in general relativity there is no privileged objective reference frame, I think that there is no such privileged objective reference frame in society either. The fact that I might believe something different if I was in a different position does not invalidate the beliefs I have in the position that I am.
And this is symmetric. The exact same argument applies in reverse. Everything I have said in these comments would not convince a grieving parent to stop grieving and consider the greater good, nor is it intended to. Their grief is valid. I'm just not going to use it as a factor in my opinions and decision making because it's not my grief.
I want to add one more thought.
I'm pretty frustrated at how many people I'm seeing online expressing shock at the fact that people would be supportive of this action.
I understand thinking that this action was bad and I understand being opposed to the people expressing support for this action. But I don't understand people who are surprised at these comments, and I suspect that all of them are disingenuous in their surprise.
I moved to the United States in 2012, and from the moment I moved here until the moment that woke anti-racism and LGBT stuff took over the collective conscience, rhetoric advocating exactly what this guy did was everywhere. Living in the Bay Area, every day ob my walk to work I would see stickers, posters, and graffiti that said things like "eat the rich" and "die teche scum" and "death to all landlords". These sentiments were so widespread and popular that even people who disagreed with them would smile and nod and pretend to agree with them because they understood it was socially expected to do so.
Society spends ten years saying these kinds of things, and then a guy acts on it. It's like everybody assumed the whole time that all of those comments were sarcastic or impotent or otherwise not literal. I don't think it's reasonable to ignore the things you see and hear every day for a decade, and then act surprised when you find out someone actually meant them.
For that matter, I think that's doubly unreasonable to anybody who would express ideas along the lines of "We can't even talk openly about this because there are crazy people out there and copycats are a thing". I'm not accusing anyone here of doing that, its just a convenient example. If one's threat model of this is that it's essentially stochastic terrorism and there are a handful of crazy people out there who will just do it if encouraged enough, so we need to do everything in our power to avoid encouraging them. If that is your threat model, then it doesn't even matter if all of those things people were saying in the 2010s were sarcastic because the random crazy person is going to take them seriously regardless of their intent.
So anyone who is sincerely surprised now on the grounds of, "holy shit, I didn't realize they were serious", is holding an unreasonable position if they believe that the risk of crazy people being encouraged to violence is a real thing.
> Living in the Bay Area, every day ob my walk to work I would see stickers, posters, and graffiti that said things like "eat the rich" and "die teche scum" and "death to all landlords". These sentiments were so widespread and popular that even people who disagreed with them would smile and nod and pretend to agree with them because they understood it was socially expected to do so.
That was just the Bay Area.
Where do you think all the people saying things like this on Twitter live?
I heard that so many times when I lived there, "that's just the Bay Area". Well, ever since the internet was invented, the Bay Area leads the culture. The Bay Area decides what is popular on social media. Then the people in other cities who want to be popular ape that.
This has been ongoing for 10 years. I left the bay area 7 years ago and everywhere else I've been, all bougie upper-middle class 20-40 y/os who are all good liberals all say the same things
Interesting facet to the copycat effect:
If you were to tell someone pumping up a story about a mass shooter that doing so will likely assist in encouraging another person to commit the same atrocity, the response will likely be something to the effect of denial and a wholehearted and honest hope that it does not.
However, from the discourse I've seen online related to the CEO shooting, the response to such a concept is typically along the lines of, "Hell yeah, I hope it does. Those corporate execs better watch their asses."
Reading this article led me on a wonderful wikipedia dive. The Roko's Basilisk link led me to read up on Pascals's wager, Information Hazards, Potemkin Villages, and Marie Antionette. Although the subject of the article is dark, it led me to a fresh set of ideas to explore this afternoon. Thank you for that.
🫡
As for the CEO event specifically, well, all I can say is, I think a world in which every CEO has to weigh "will someone try to kill me for this decision" before making decisions, is a better world than one in which he does not. I think that a lot of social dysfunction happens because our leaders are disconnected from boots-on-the-ground reality of regular life, and so make decisions that bode poorly for regular people. This is primarily a function of their social class and wealth, and consequently implies that at a structural level, it's not practically possible for leaders to have that kind of connection to reality.
So, given that their day to day lives make it impossible for them to properly weigh the consequences of their decisions on regular people, it seems to me that the threat of assassination would be a decent alternative. The CEO might not actually understand how his decisions impact normal people. But that threat forces him to spend a lot of time and effort trying to simulate that understanding in order to avoid a psycho blasting him in the face.
This is rather personal to me, because last year I got laid off halfway through a green card sponsorship, which has more or less completely ruined my prospects for the future and will likely result in me going back to Canada and applying for MAID in the next few years. I'm very serious about this. Everything I've been working towards for 15 years is down the shitter, because the CEO wanted to juice the stock price a week before their quarterly earnings report. And because this happened in 2023, I was laid off because of my skin colour. They more-or-less openly said so in the email.
I'm sure the decision the CEO made seemed reasonable to him based on the information and circumstances he had. But I don't think his personal net worth is worth more than my life. I am not stupid enough to go do something stupid to him. But if he had to contend with the very real threat that someone else might, perhaps I'd be a permanent resident by now, and my life would look a lot more optimistic. And perhaps they wouldn't have over-hired incompetent, counter-productive employees in a bid to make their diversity numbers look better, and they'd have the cash flow to cover the salaries of the people who worked there, without layoffs. My life would be better. Their company would be more stable. Society would be receiving more value from them. Hell, the CEO would _probably_ make more money in the long term due to the increased prosperity.
To put it another way, flippantly, I saw a commie meme the other day and it made me laugh. It said something like: "socialists explaining to Americans that they can shoot CEOs instead of school children" and I have to say... shooting CEOs instead of school children, while still evil, is marginally less evil than the other way around.
Please don't do that. That really sucks about the layoffs, but don't let them win that easy. Things will swing back the other way for you, even if you have no idea right now how they could. You just have to keep showing up. I've experienced so many turnarounds like that.
Appreciate the sentiment, but I am not going to be a broke unemployed 40 y/o with no future prospects. So here's hoping it doesn't come to that.
To get personal for a moment, my life has been in a collapsing dumpster fire since 2019 and despite herculean efforts, not one thing has improved. If I lose my life in America and have to leave, I know it's never improving back to where it was before 2019, and where it was in 2019 wasn't where I wanted it to be in the first place. I don't play losing games, I gracefully resign. So here's hoping that doesn't happen
Incidentally, might as well throw this out there: For a while now I have had a sneaking suspicion, not based on much, that you might be a person who used to know me irl, and might have a very detailed idea of some of what I'm referring to. That would be quite funny.
----
EDIT: Thinking about it, the only reason why I've had that sneaking suspicion is because I get the sense that you're either a rationalist or rationalist-adjacent, and the intersection of "rationalist" and "pro-gun" is very small and heavily localized within a ten mile radius of where I live. By any chance, do you, or have you ever, owned a Kar98k? Or a Mosin Nagant? I forget which one it was, but if you do, my priors that you are a specific person I used to know are skyrocketing