Bentham's Bullshit

Exposing the intellectual poverty of Analytic midwits

Yesterday afternoon my talented young friend Bentham’s Bulldog (hereafter BB) published a lengthy article explaining what he finds annoying about me.

This article was released around the same time as BB’s appearance on my podcast, in which we hashed out our various disagreements and BB schoolmarmishly called me barbaric for valuing the life of one American child over the lives of every child in Haiti.

In the wake of BB’s article and pod appearance, the Walt Right fam in my subscriber chat largely expressed contempt for his supercilious and pedantic style, but I can’t help but be charmed by this precocious young man.

He reminds me ever so much of myself at that age, and conversing with him makes me appreciate all the people who chose not to break my nose back then.

It’s also quite endearing how much he sounds like Mandark from Dexter’s Lab, or the Yellow Shirt Kid from Polar Express.

Anyway, in this piece I will address the points of his article sequentially, but since I write in a continental style I will actually be entertaining and rhetorically impactful.

1 - Moral Confusion

In this section BB fails to understand the point I was making in my original article defending the concept of slave morality.

This is probably because he only has an IQ of 119:

…and also seems afflicted by his generation’s infamously short attention span!

Interestingly, BB’s cognitive performance is only slightly above the mean for Ashkenazi Jews. It’s easy to imagine that in a nineteenth century shtetl he wouldn’t cut the mustard for rabbinical training because of his mental rigidity and inability to flexibly move between different intellectual domains. His Anatevka Analog would be hilariously outclassed in Talmudic debate by someone like Ben Shapiro, but today he can study something like analytic philosophy and act like he’s smarter than everyone else because he’s very good at pedantically following the rhetorical conventions of a practically irrelevant subset of academia.

But this also makes it frustrating for BB when he encounters someone like me, who scored 138 on the very same test and whose real-world accomplishments are correspondingly more impressive. I too majored in analytic philosophy, but I started college at 14 after getting a 99th percentile SAT score, and ended up completing my program with a 4.25 GPA. Then when I was BB’s age I helped to mainstream white nationalism and brought tens of thousands of people into the Alt Right, making such an impact that I was featured in Washington Post.

I then made hundreds of thousands of dollars job stacking in a STEM field, before returning as a public figure and becoming a Substack bestseller in less than two months.

Compare that to poor BB, who has been publishing prolifically on Substack for more than two years now and still hasn’t secured himself an orange check. Based on the figures he gives in this article he only makes around half of what I do. Sad!

Please understand I’m not bringing this up to bully the kid. I’m making the point that my style of rhetoric is demonstrably more effective than his because I have sufficient intelligence to operate in multiple intellectual domains simultaneously.

Unlike BB, who says he doesn’t value art (go to 1:44:47), I know how to provoke an emotional reaction in people by writing in an artistic and compelling way, which is why two of my first essays on here went viral almost immediately. I also know how to use AI tools to produce engaging thumbnails and catchy jingles for my podcast that “hook” the reader and prime them emotionally for my rhetoric. Compare that to the bland and uninspired google image jpegs that BB uses in his own publication:

Unlike BB, I understand how things like prestige coding and implicit power relations subtextually curtail what we’re allowed to talk about, and am talented at manipulating the Overton Window using oblique rhetorical tactics. That’s how I massively grew the Alt Right back in 2016, and these days it’s how I got a bunch of affluent married forty-something liberal women actively participating in the Walt Right community and binge watching my convos with tradcaths and white nationalists.

I don’t deny that BB is much better than me at playing by the pedantic and tiresome rules of analytic philosophy. If you practice nothing but the deadlift you’re gonna get really good at deadlifting. But I think those rules are pointless and gay and will happily break them if it suits my long term metapolitical objectives.

I’ll also bully dullards like this who think a strict adherence to those rules is somehow a prerequisite for intelligence:

Like BB, this person is probably around 115 IQ, so he simply doesn’t have the mental horsepower to comprehend that my intersubjectivism is substantively different from moral subjectivism, and likewise doesn’t understand how concepts like distance and dimensionality stem in a trivial way from the limits of human cognition and sensory processing. But trying to help midwits understand these things is like trying to explain linear algebra to the average resident of Detroit.

Analytic Philosophy is an intellectual cancer that produces boring and impotent thinkers whose repugnantly autistic rhetorical style ensures they will never make any money, never seize political power, never have any cultural influence, and never get laid. It is obvious that Ben Franklin, Voltaire, Nietzsche, and Machiavelli were better thinkers than Saul Kripke and Daniel Dennett.

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Anyway, let’s clear up this kid’s misunderstandings.

He begins his post by getting mad at someone holding a sign expressing disapproval of NASA for building space programs rather than feeding inner-city kids. Bismarck spends a lot of time expressing his outrage at that woman’s values. And then, bizarrely, he spends the rest of the post mostly criticizing me for criticizing others’ values.

As expressed on the pod, I don’t care if you criticize others’ values. I just think that moral realism is a retarded and unworkable philosophy because it doesn’t leave you practical legroom for building coalitions or dealing with intractable moral dilemmas stemming from temperamental differences. But I suppose that isn’t really your goal.

I specifically object to you doing the soyjak philosophy professor thing and saying “racism is obviously bad” without providing any interesting justification.

Now, Bismarck is not advocating for racism. Rather, his point is that you pick your values and we can’t use reason to decide upon them.

I said nothing of the kind. My position is that “values” (i.e. Haidt’s moral dimensions) are mostly intractable products of temperament stemming from genes and early childhood experiences. When you have a disagreement over values you either need to A) use brute force to impose your values on your interlocutor, B) reach a middle ground, or C) form a transactional accommodation via asymmetric preferences.

But then why does he spend the first part of the article criticizing someone else’s values? If values are beyond rational criticism, what’s he doing? Emoting?

I am expressing the sentiment that when faced with someone like that NASA protestor as my interlocutor I would choose Option A as specified above.

This is one big problem I have with Bismarck: I get the sense that he’s just sort of an elaborate troll. Not in the sense that he’s unserious—he means what he says—but in the sense that his positions seem maximally geared to sound edgy. The edgier position is “people caring about welfare suck, and also Nietzsche is right about values,” so that’s the one he has. I don’t claim, of course, that he’s being deliberately dishonest, just that he allows himself to lean too much into trollishness and is consequently frequently unserious.

This is what boring writers who churn out pages of tedious dross no one cares about always say about interesting writers. I have countless opinions on trade and monetary policy and housing that are painfully mainstream and boring, but obviously I am only going to write about the opinions I have that are interesting and novel, because that is what people want to read. Perhaps if BB were slightly less autistic and understood this elementary principle of human nature he might have an orange check by now.

The funny thing is that a lot of BB’s positions are actually much edgier than my own. For instance, he believes that society is too harsh on non-offending pedophiles. This is a brave stance, and I commend him for having the balls to write about it, but I would never be so edgy myself. When I wrote about girls going through puberty too early I made sure to couch it in several interviews with female podcast guests to insulate myself from public opprobrium. That’s why (unlike BB) I never had a bunch of hysterical chuds and feminists calling me a pedophile for broaching a delicate topic.

Anyway, utilitarianism and specifically effective altruism are straightforwardly more “unserious” than anything I believe.

What’s wrong with appealing to the obvious irrationality of racism? Just as it would be irrational to judge someone based on whether they’re left-handed, it’s silly to judge someone based on their race. It involves caring about obviously unimportant things. This is, I think, the project of moral philosophy—showing that certain views imply other unsavory conclusions, like caring about obviously unimportant things.

I hate to be that guy, but this is very clearly begging the question—you’re saying that racism is irrational because race is “obviously unimportant.”

Millions of people all around us think race is obviously important—especially black people, who vote as an ethnic bloc and consistently give the Dems Saddam margins.

Most people don’t think that race itself is morally relevant. Not even racists do.

Wrong.

Pretty much everyone thinks race is relevant when it comes to who is allowed to say certain words and express certain opinions. And that is why conservatives and libertarians fellate any “based black guy” like Glenn Loury or Thomas Sowell who publicly expresses obvious truths about black people—the popular moral sentiment is that white people aren’t allowed to say these things themselves.

Few people think that if they themselves woke up with black skin, they’d suddenly begin mattering only half as much. Instead, people notice that race correlates with other things, and argue those other things are morally relevant. But that only justifies differences in treatment in regards to the other things, not race intrinsically.

Horrible and small-brained take.

We form heuristics based on patterns and clinally distributed variations between groups (e.g. sex, class, profession, region of origin…) all the time.

Race is likewise a fantastic proxy for a lot of things that are obviously significant.

Bismarck also made a bunch of statements about my view that are obvious egregious errors. For example, I argued that one has a moral obligation to donate to effective charities. This is, I claim, in line with Singer, analogous to saving a drowning child. Just as you’d be morally required to save a nearby drowning child, even if doing so would ruin your expensive suit, because you’d be able to save a life at minimal cost, you’d be morally required to donate to effective charities to save lives. The fact that the child is far away is obviously morally irrelevant—you’d still have an obligation to save very far-away children.

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I said that how far away a person is isn’t morally relevant. Bismarck replies by saying that whether someone is a fellow countryman is morally important, as is whether someone is a family member. Question dear reader: are either of these the same things as how far away someone is?

BB is being painfully obtuse here. Singer’s argument is intended to compel wealthy westerners to donate to starving kids in Bangladesh or whatever by saying that it’s no different from ruining your suit to save a child who is drowning in front of you.

This argument is obviously retarded because you have a competing and vastly superseding obligation to various ingroups like your family and countrymen. The idea of spending one dime on starving Haitians when kids are dying of Fentanyl in America is viscerally repulsive to me.

Nobody gives a fuck about geographic proximity—we care about relational proximity. Geographic proximity only matters insofar as it makes a moral dilemma personally salient because it’s more pressing / individuated and probably involves some antecedent duty obligations (i.e. when you are a guest in a foreign country you are obliged to extend some unusual degree of courtesy / altruism to the host population).

If you could wade into a pond to press a button that would save a far-away drowning child, you’d obviously be required to, just as you’d be if they were nearer. This is so even if the person is a Haitian non-family member. So the same is true of one’s obligation to give to effective charities.

This is the core of Singer’s argument: that our decisions not to donate to effective charities are very much like a person’s decision not to wade into a pond to save a drowning child. In both cases, you can save a life at minimal personal cost. Any morally relevant difference can be added to the drowning child case, and it seems like one would still have an obligation to save the child. For example, if you argue the difference is less great because they’re not a member of your country, we can imagine that the drowning child is from some foreign country.

First of all, this take is far edgier and more onerous to the average person’s sensibilities than literally anything I advocate.

It also reflects the fundamental problem with any universalist concept of morality. Humans have tribal neolithic brains that extend moral personhood at the level of village—see the psychological concept of Dunbar’s Number. Beyond that people are abstractions / archetypes, and can sometimes fit into our concentric circles of tribal loyalty (nation / race / religion), but otherwise aren’t morally pertinent. That’s why you don’t care when 10,000 people die in a mudslide in China or whatever.

People want to save the drowning child Singer talks about because to our neolithic brain he is embodied as a flesh-and-blood human with moral personhood. It is inappropriate (and by my intuition deeply wicked) to project this impulse onto abstracted Bangladeshi orphans and demand that someone part with his earthly possessions to solve the problems of all and sundry subaltern populations.

BB says that I am “inconsistent” or “confused” because I treat these situations as different, but he is just being painfully autistic and pattern-matching where it is deeply inappropriate.

Second, Bismarck claims that he’s refuting me by saying “people don’t give a shit about kids in Africa dying in cobalt mines to make our iPhones, because out of sight is out of mind.” But this is obviously not a response to my argument. Even if people don’t practically act to stop bad things that are happening far away that are not salient, it’s obvious that salience isn’t morally relevant.

Stop saying things are “obvious” when the vast majority of people disagree with your intuitions. This is really annoying.

If you could save a drowning child, the fact that they weren’t literally in front of you wouldn’t make a morally relevant difference.

Yes it would. People don’t exist as fungible algorithms in a giant pool of data. We have organic ties to specific individuals and communities, and these personal ties produce emergent duty-bonds that are a lot more compelling to people than your cringey hedonic calculus that will only ever appeal to unusually cosmopolitan autists.

Bismarck says that utilitarianism is a weak paradigm. This is very confused and indicative of not knowing what one is talking about. Utilitarianism is not a political platform so it does not need to be widely adopted.

If a worldview isn’t widely adopted (or at least adopted by powerful people to the extent that it can be imposed by fiat on the rest of society) then it is irrelevant to anyone but an intellectually masturbatory college student. If getting your views widely adopted isn’t your goal then I see no purpose in even having this discussion.

His description of it as weak shows this confusion. There are basically two conceptions of morality, and on neither conception does it make sense.

One conception is moral realist. On this view, utilitarian moral claims are objectively true. It really is true that you shouldn’t torture people. Calling a truth claim impotent and gay and weak because normal people don’t adopt is is obviously confused—you wouldn’t say that believing Goldbach’s conjecture is a “weak paradigm,” for instance.

A second conception is anti-realist. On this view, morality is basically a preference. You like chocolate, I like utility. Again, calling a preference weak is super confused. Oh, you like chocolate? Weak and gay!

In my original article I explicitly reject both traditional conceptions of morality in favor of a third position called Intersubjectism. You completely ignore my explanation of this view (probably because you got bored halfway through and wanted to get back to browsing TikTok), but I describe it as follows:

• Politics is transactional and coalitional, but “morality” is basically an ideological Esperanto we created to more painlessly scale human behavior through larger and more abstract agglomerations in the neolithic / agricultural / industrial eras. It isn’t “real”, but we treat it as though it were real, same as the fundamental laws of thought or axioms of mathematics (meta-ethical / epistemic intersubjectivism).

• The use of “morality” naturally reaches a hard limit when you get big temperamental divides in openness and conscientiousness that vary by occupation and region and subculture, at which point you must enter the fully transactional realm of politics and broad coalitions.

• Specific moral codes are very useful as a means to an end: creating a robust incentive structure that rewards people for being more agentic / productive and punishes indolence / self-destruction. The idea should be to assume that individual selfishness guides behavior and promote the general welfare around that (i.e. Smith’s “Invisible Hand”). This as a happy medium between universalist philosophies like Utilitarianism (which fatally ignore personal incentive structures) and something like Objectivism which is clearly autistic and unworkable.

Contra BB, morality is neither a preference nor an objective fact about the universe.

It’s a way of understanding human behavior at scale that should inform the creation of societal incentive structures, but is practically quite useless when you start to encounter big temperamental differences between groups.

(I also am opposed to using gay as a pejorative because I don’t think being gay is vicious, and I don’t think Bismarck does either?? So I think it’s just him being edgy again).

This is how men talk outside of California.

Where, pray tell, does being a moral realist who doesn’t think the moral facts have a source mean one derives an ought from an is? If this were so, then a sizeable chunk of moral philosophers would have been making straightforward logical errors for decades!

They are. Believing in objective morality without religion is obviously dumb.

(Also, Bismarck does not have anything approaching an argument for his more robust and flexible meta-ethical intersubjectivism, while I have spent many pages arguing for moral realism…but I digress).

I provide in my original essay as complete an argument as I believe the topic merits.

My goal is to give myself a framework for transactional politicking.

Beyond this I find that moral philosophy is an enormous waste of time.

2 - Why is Bismarck right-wing?

In the next section of his shitpiece BB outlines where he thinks I go wrong in my political views, taking a very Yglesian stance of maximalism re: object-level policies:

Walt has an article where he explains why he’s right-wing. I think the article demonstrates Walt’s totally incorrect approach to politics where he cares a lot more about vibes, with occasional arguments as a relish to put on top of his emotional screed. If I were asked to explain why I’m left-wing, I’d say something like the following:

I’m left-wing because I think the left generally has better policies. I, like the left, support defending Ukraine, immigration, a foreign policy that has values, a decently robust welfare state, and so on. I think the current Republican party has a deleterious effect on institutions and am alarmed by Trump’s clear attempt to overturn the election. I also think Democrats are generally more stable, and thus better at reducing existential risks.

Walt begins his piece by talking about hierarchy being good and inevitable and talks later about how “Individual vitality requires pain and struggle.” This is all very abstract and indicative, I think, of Walt’s tendency to focus more on these sort of abstract notions than on very specific policies.

The first thing BB misses is that the purpose of the cited essay was to explain why I am not a centrist despite having substantially more libertine and cosmopolitan social values than your average right winger. My objective was specifically to outline a difference in fundamental values and principles. It seems he completely missed this in his reading, so it’s a good thing he’s planning on taking the GRE and not the LSAT.

But I will concede that one of the core tenets of my worldview is indeed that object-level policies aren’t that important compared to underlying principles and far-reaching objectives. My particular stance on things like immigration or trade is going to vary a lot based on macroeconomic conditions, technological advances, geopolitical and international developments, and so on. I am therefore mostly uninterested in talking about things like tariffs and interest rates.

It’s a lot more interesting to me to discuss my long term goals and the overall values I want to promote. Within that context I can throw out occasional suggestions for short-term policy initiatives, but I prefer to leave that to other people. Thankfully there are a lot of incredibly talented guys in my sphere who are a lot better at this than me.

In his article criticizing my article on slave morality, Walt accused me of being more interested in abstraction and moral philosophy than actually having a successful political coalition. Now, this is true—I’m not trying to launch a political coalition. But Walt’s political views seem mostly about abstraction and moral philosophy, rather than actually getting good stuff done.

This is going too far and indicates that BB has not actually browsed my oeuvre.

I have offered a whole host of creative policy suggestions for how to fix specific problems America is facing. These suggestions include:

• Giving black people slavery reparations to dismantle white guilt

• Opening the borders to Russians to cripple Putin and racially bleach America

• Moving our capital to the midwest to strengthen national unity

• Throwing a Straight Pride festival to give heterosexuals better dating options

These tracts are a lot more “kooky” than the wonkish policy essays you’d get from a Noah Smith or Matt Yglesias, but again, my goal isn’t to advocate for specific object-level policy positions on tariffs and the like. I am much more interested in “kicking down the door” to make room in the discourse space for bold and creative ideas.

A big reason for this is that the GOP is currently dominated by Trump and MAGA, and that doesn’t leave much space for a right wing version of Yglesias-style wonkishness. If DeSantis had won the primary I’d be taking things in a vastly different direction, but as it stands I am looking at 2028 and to that end am mostly focused on A) further shifting the Overton Window to accommodate a banal, non-toxic, and non-hateful species of white identity politics; and B) creating cultural space for smart young conservatives to propose novel solutions and employ oblique tactics in pursuit of right wing values like vitality, hierarchy, and differentiation.

Now, I agree that vibes-wise, the right is much more about big aspirational projects. But policy-wise, it’s the left that’s much more about those projects (Trump cut NASA’s budget, for instance, and Biden grew it). Furthermore, I think that Biden is way better than Trump on existential risks, being much better at working internationally to reduce nuclear risks and safely regulate AI. If what you care about is having a party that’s performatively tough and interested in grand projects, then be a Republican. But if you care about actually having those projects, then you should be a Democrat.

You gotta love that when BB thinks of “grand projects” he immediately goes to “working internationally to reduce nuclear risks and safely regulate AI”.

This is why the left is cucked and gay and soy. They get excited about things like regulation and restriction. This is the attitude that needs to be crushed at all costs.

The rest of Bismarck’s post is philosophical—it focuses on the different outlooks of Democrats and Republicans rather than policy. But if you’re deciding which political party you’re going to be part of rather than which country club to join, then rather than focusing on philosophy, you should focus on the things the parties actually do.

The problem is that in practice coalitions are based a lot more on vibes than they are on policy. That’s why even black conservatives who want lower taxes largely vote Dem.

Culture is likewise downstream of vibes—vastly more so than policy.

And when you take the Policy Maximalist line it’s easy to embrace obviously retarded ideas. For instance, on his podcast appearance I was able to get BB to confirm he’d still vote for Joe Biden even if he started publicly talking about hating Jews:

I think to most normal people this example will illustrate why I care so much about vibes, aesthetics, and underlying values. Sometimes raw sentiment and sturm und drang is just straightforwardly more important than the marginal tax rate.

Anyway, in the next two sections I will explain why I disagree with BB on gay people and white nationalism, but if you want to read any further you need to pay me.