(@walterveit)’s Article on objective and subjective morality — which one of the two is real.

Walter Veit

To Hell With Moral Realism

I haven’t written a blog post in a while. My apologies, I’ve been quite busy working on a book. But since several of you have taken out paid subscriptions to support the newsletter, I feel compelled to remedy the lack of a new post now. Not because I think there is a moral fact, a duty, or anything of the sort, but simply because I…

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a month ago · 14 likes · 27 comments · Walter Veit

(@walterveit)

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Steven:

When I am in a moral quandary, and I need guidance for figuring out what to do, I think “What would a rock do?” and then I remember that I’m not a rock. And whatever I do, is on me—not the rock.

That, to me, is the part moral realism often tries to escape. It wants morality to be discovered like geology, when most of the actual work of morality feels more like judgment under responsibility. The rock does not care. The universe does not sign the permission slip. We still have to choose, justify, revise, and live with the consequences.

“Mocking, or ridiculing fascists is one of the most effective, non-violent ways to combat fascism.”
— @andr3wsky @ TikTok^↗️

@andr3wskyThe term for this is “tactical frivolity” btw

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Can’t See? Watch on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@andr3wsky/video/7664727498734800141^↗️

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Steven:

I’d agree with this on any given Sunday. The other days, too. I think if history and Mel Brooks can teach us anything, it’s this.

Fascism doesn’t merely spread false beliefs; it demands submission to absurdity as a demonstration of loyalty.

Some people may need Jesus, granted. But everybody needs Orwell.

Read your Orwell, people — not just the two you know the names of.

He’s heavy, though. Heavier still, the more you pay attention. Take your Orwell with liberal doses of Chaplin, Brooks, Carlin—and a little Gianmarco as a treat.

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The point of @andr3wsky’s video above is expressed beautifully—preposterously—by Mel Brooks’s “Springtime for Hitler”

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Laughing at the Führer Is Good for the Soul

My personal take is that humour, alongside its role in mocking and ridiculing fascists, can have an important healing function. The ability to share in grief through good humour—not only abject sorrow—is an underappreciated superpower of our social-loving primate brains. Laughter is love-adjacent1.

Here is a 1.3-minute video worth watching:

| “The Holocaust itself is not funny — but what it takes to survive involves humour”

—Rob Reiner

The Move » Status Moves » Rank / Prestige Moves

First, say something intentionally cruel, dishonest, or obscene. Then, when someone reacts with normal human disgust, shock, or moral clarity, point directly at their reaction instead of your provocation.

“Awww, are you triggered, Snowflake?”

This is an active assault disguised as a composure test. The goal is to enforce a dominant rank through fake psychopathy, signalling that they are entirely unbothered by their own ugliness while you are weak for having basic human reflexes. In the illusion they are trying to put in place: they’re the serious ones dealing with facts, and you’re over there ‘stuck in your feelings’, unwilling and incapable of taking part in a serious facts-based conversation.

Wielding the pen requires thought, dexterity, and structural precision. When a bad actor drops raw malice and answers your natural human recoil with “Lol, triggered!”, they are swinging a blunt sword because they lack the cognitive competence to match your precision.

This maneuver is an act of rhetorical violence through attempted epistemic castration. It is a deliberate effort to strip away personhood and mute your voice by framing a healthy human reflex as a pathetic defect. They are not proving you are fragile; they are directly admitting their own cognitive impotence. They went with an intellectually flaccid maneuver because it was all they had to work with.

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The Victim’s Trap

The trap springs the moment you accept their fake rule: If you show emotion, you lose the argument.

If you waste a single breath trying to prove how calm, detached, and objective you are, you have already surrendered your standing. You have allowed the offender to transform the conversation from an audit of their malice into an investigation of your sanity. You are playing on their terms, begging for a certificate of composure from a troll.

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The Counter-Strike

Refuse the scale. A reaction cannot be audited for oversensitivity until the audience has measured the exact force of the boot.

If someone insults the colour of your shirt and you spend three days weeping in a dark room, your response is disconnected from reality. The reaction is the problem. But if someone kicks your dog into the stratosphere, shouting is not a sign of mental fragility. The shouting is empirical evidence that you understood the situation perfectly, and are reacting accordingly.

To execute the counterstrike, you must bypass the composure trap entirely and force their actual frame to stand trial in plain English. Analyze what they are laughing at and follow it through to its logical conclusion. If they mock your outrage over an act of raw malice, they are declaring that the capacity to care about cruelty is a design defect.

The troll trying to recast expressing your outrage as weakness lacks the basic psychological maturity to recognize moral conviction as strength.

They are attempting to dehumanize you, using a laugh track to camouflage a complete deficit of human empathy and distract from their refusal to advance their own positions or defend any of them from any criticism.

If “you reacted emotionally” automatically means “you lose”, then any cruelty can protect itself by provoking the very response it deserves.

Don’t defend your flinch. Strip away the camouflage, expose the performed psychopathy underneath, and audit their boot.

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Eleven days and a half gone, and I have crossed three thousand miles of the perilous deep. Instead of a democratic government, I am under a monarchical government. Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle [Ireland]. I breathe, and lo! the chattel [slave] becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult. I employ a cab—I am seated beside white people—I reach the hotel—I enter the same door—I am shown into the same parlor—I dine at the same table—and no one is offended.... I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people. When I go to church, I am met by no upturned nose and scornful lip to tell me, 'We don't allow niggers in here!'

— 27-year old Frederick Douglass in Ireland, 1845

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This quote is one of the most vivid examples I can think of, of a lived expectation — the background assumption of how other people will treat you — that I cannot really hold in my head empathetically, because I can’t accurately simulate it. It’s too alien from my own experience. My imaginings of “what it would be like” have extremely low reliability because the reality is both so extreme and so far outside anything I’ve ever experienced.

But even trying to get close enough to imagine that mental state… is viscerally revolting. With modern sensibilities, and Douglass’s words, you can feel how innately wrong even the direction of humans owning humans is.

It’s interesting to me, how clearly that feeling can come through, despite an inability to embody myself into what he went through in my mind’s eye. I think there’s something about being broken that leads to you coming back with a steel few other men can fully grasp.

Someone’s mindset, their experiences, and their assumptions about how the world will treat them have an incredible effect on not only WHAT they think, but HOW they think. Not “think” as in right or wrong. Think as in: from what direction.

Often, people in an argument are not simply disagreeing about the same thing. They are arguing from undeclared opposing directions, each passionately defending a different nuance, thinking they are arguing against each other when they are actually arguing parallel to each other.

What’s happening here?

This is not an argument against a real position.

It is a cartoon of a position, dressed up as a person nobly choosing to die for moral purity.

That is the move.

The opponent is not merely made wrong. They are made ridiculous, theatrical, sanctimonious, and self-sacrificial. They become someone who would rather roast alive than adapt to reality, because they are too trapped inside their own moral story to pick up the obvious umbrella.

That is not steelmanning. That is not even normal strawmanning.

That is building a straw-martyr.

• A strawman is a fake opponent built to lose.

• A straw-martyr is a fake opponent built to look like they are sacrificing themselves for a stupid moral performance.

The real air-conditioning debate is not:

America: use air conditioning.

Europe: die for the climate gods.

The real debate is more like:

Air conditioning is useful. Sometimes necessary. Sometimes lifesaving. Also, mass air-conditioning increases electricity demand, dumps heat outdoors, strains grids, and can worsen the broader problem if powered by fossil-heavy energy systems.

That does not mean “never use air conditioning.”

It means the serious answer involves better buildings, heat pumps, cleaner grids, insulation, public cooling infrastructure, smarter urban design, and not building a civilization where survival depends on every indoor room individually fist-fighting the atmosphere.

But that version is harder to ridicule.

So the opponent gets replaced.

Instead of engaging the tradeoff, the post invents a little moral lunatic and beats him to death with an umbrella.

This is why so much public discourse cannot move. People are not answering each other. They are manufacturing the version of the other side they most enjoy defeating.

The argument disappears.

The puppet remains.

And everyone claps because the puppet looked so stupid when it lost.

Despite these impressive non-qualifications, the Engineer of All Trades is afflicted with a persistent need to understand how things work. Machines, arguments, workflows, websites, jokes, institutions, plumbing, dinner plans, social norms, Lego structures: all become systems with load, tolerance, failure modes, maintenance costs, hidden assumptions, and some poorly inspected little bracket everyone else is trusting with their lives… or their bathroom towels.

Engineer of All Trades

noun phrase — but I’m not going to waste your time pointing out something as useless as that - you can see what it is. You can read. You know how to use it.

• The term is not a credential claim.

• It’s a temperament claim.

An Engineer of All Trades is someone who, upon encountering nearly anything, immediately begins asking what it is doing, what it is bearing, what it is hiding, what will break first, and whether the whole arrangement can survive contact with the universe as currently configured.

Used in a sentence: “I invented the term ‘Engineer of All Trades’ because when I call myself one, it really annoys the real ring-bearers.”

pointed to a pattern I’ve seen, but never named: people making a point, conceding it when challenged, then moving to another point, conceding that too, until none of the individual claims survive scrutiny — but the original confidence somehow remains intact.

That is the,

Argumental Hermit Crab

The claim keeps abandoning one shell and crawling into another whenever the current one becomes uncomfortable.

This is not exactly Goalpost Moving. In Goalpost Moving, the standard changes after it has been met. It is also not exactly Motte-and-Bailey, where a provocative claim retreats into a safer, more defensible version. The Argumental Hermit Crab is slipperier than both. Its core move is not retreating to a stronger position. It is preserving the same emotional certainty while changing which claim is supposed to justify it.

The Argumental Hermit Crab Scuttle:

1. You inspect Claim A.

2. Claim A fails.

3. So the argument crawls into Claim B.

1. You inspect Claim B.

2. Claim B fails.

3. So the argument crawls into Claim C.

Eventually, you are no longer examining a coherent argument. You are chasing a creature through a pile of discarded shells it no longer cares to defend, much less acknowledge..

The diagnostic question is simple:

If someone’s certainty survives the collapse of every reason offered for it, then the reasons were probably never doing the real work. They were just temporary housing.

Watch for the little scuttle sideways: “Okay, maybe not that, but what about…”