This Week in Discourse
Why is MMA filled with right wing online weirdos? Plus - AI bros, incels and more.
Welcome to This Week in Discourse, where we stroll through the most interesting and bizarre social media of the week. The format will evolve over time, so please give any feedback you’ve got in the comments!
Brain Damage may be involved
If I had a nickel every time a retired-MMA-fighter-turned-right-wing-culture-warrior embarrassed themselves online this week… I’d only have two nickels, but it’s weird that it happened twice. First we have Ben Askren, best known for involuntary planking, doing his wife extremely dirty:
I get what he’s trying to say, but work on your phrasing my dude. Maybe consult a friend before you hit send. Implying your wife is a hag, but like, it’s fine… is certainly a relationship choice. Still, while Ben spends his days retweeting Tucker Carlson and other right wing accounts, this is mostly just social awkwardness. Maybe even a little wholesome in the follow-up tweets! Oh you rascal, you!
Meanwhile, Jake Shields:
Not sure I can find a wholesome angle on this one! Shields, post-retirement, has turned into a nasty culture warrior obsessed with ‘woke ideology’. This isn’t even the first time he’s specifically called to execute teachers who help trans kids.
And because we can’t go a week on the internet without some sort of Elon/Twitter angle, there’s an Elon/Twitter angle. Twitter removed Shields’ post, but also appears to be censoring screenshots of the post that documented the bigotry, as well as screenshots of the hordes of blue checks agreeing with it. Not great!
A theory of right wing martial arts
It’s curious how much MMA and other combat sports are a breeding ground for right wing influencers. Both Askren and Shields have active social media presences built around anti-woke, culturally right wing politics. Jorge Masvidal, the fighter in the clip above who turned Askren into a ragdoll-physics simulation, gives interviews on Fox News about why he loves both Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump. UFC president Dana White is a well-known Trump supporter, and long time UFC commentator Joe Rogan’s podcast is famous for platforming extremists like Alex Jones. And of course there’s Andrew Tate, who in addition to being a misogynist influencer, sex trafficker and Gollum-cosplayer was also a legitimate championship level kickboxer.
Why are so many fighters becoming right wing influencers? There are a number of potential reasons:
Fighting, especially for men, is an ultra-masculine or ‘macho’ pursuit and leads to traditional views on gender.
Martial arts often preach a doctrine of rugged self-reliance (which can be good sometimes!) and is highly individualistic.
Fighting is a violent sport and could encourage a world view more inclined to view the world as dangerous, lean towards guns, harsh reactions to crime, etc. Also, you know, brain damage.
The influence of Dana White specifically - he’s been close with Trump for decades, and some of this may be contingent on the UFC’s long time CEO being a huge Trump Guy.
Trump specifically is a very professional-wrestling style showman, as are many fighters. The personality type that is good at self-promotion and selling pay-per-views in combat sports is very similar to Trump’s personality.
Because of the showman-factor, it’s also not surprising that so many fighters go on to become influencers peddling disinformation, QAnon, and more. MMA fighters are used to being in the spotlight in a sport where attention equals money.
It’s also not clear which direction the influence is going - does participating in MMA make fighters more right wing, or does MMA simply attract people who are already right wing? I don’t think we have a definitive answer here, but for more check out the excellent work documenting the link by Karim Zidan.
The AI Folks are At It Again
Roko Mijic is a prominent rationalist and AI doomer. He’s most famous for inventing the idea that a future evil AI will torture your future clones as punishment for your present self not helping to invent the AI, which is of course a very rational thing to believe. In typical rationalist fashion (and with all the confidence of an engineer learning a new subject for the first time) he’s single-handedly solved the economic calculation problem - just throw more compute at it!
Admittedly this is fairly niche, but #EconTwitter drama is always close to my heart. Hundreds of economists predictably tried to explain why he was wrong, after which he doubled down and accused them of having a ‘religious taboo’ on the subject. The amount of computing power isn’t the issue - the issue is having a mechanism to collect billions of people’s preferences continuously in real time without a price mechanism or markets. In other words:
This is also completely separate from the political economy problem that you can’t control the entire economy and society to that degree without becoming an authoritarian nightmare state, but I digress.
Beyond the very entertaining ratio which I encourage you all to go check out, the entire episode is an interesting window into AI-brain. If you weren’t already aware, there’s a not-cult (cult?) of people convinced that AI is going to near-inevitably kill all of humanity. You can peek through the windows here and see the baseline assumption that AI is somehow… magical? Not bound by any constraints, physical or logistical. The worldview is dismissive of nearly every other field and the experts from those fields. A gentle suggestion for the AI doomers: perhaps more people would take you seriously if you didn’t grossly misunderstand basic concepts from other fields so often. It does not send a strong signal about your 'AI is going to kill us all' theories.
When is an incel not an incel?
I regret to inform you that incels still exist. In a bizarre bit of discourse, one of the most prominent incels in the incel community finally had sex - and while some parts of the incel community celebrated on his behalf, others were less pleased. Content warning: incels being incels?
What’s fascinating about this episode is that it exposes the weird dichotomy at the heart of inceldom (and frankly, a lot of online movements). Incels claim they are involuntarily celibate and that this is a massive injustice and a significant burden on their lives. It’s something being done to them which they resent and wish would change. But once one of their leaders actually gets laid, he’s accused of never having been a real incel, having betrayed his brothers, being a traitor, etc. It’s a view of inceldom as an identity - under this view, a real incel wouldn’t sleep with a woman anyways because being an incel is simply who he is. In this interpretation it’s actually voluntary celibacy, which would be a delightful little enigma if we weren’t talking about violent unhinged misogynists. Planning to write more about identity formation online in future updates.
Bad Tweet of the Week
See a bad tweet? Send it my way.
Stuff
Tucker Carlson may have been fired because Rupert Murdoch’s religious fiancée thought he was a prophet
Elon Musk might have accidentally revealed a burner account where he pretends to be his 3 year old son and replies to his own porn jokes
We talk about a lot of deranged things here, so every This Week in Discourse ends with a happy thought. Here are six small friends
Uh, first? Is that how you do this?
Anyway, looking forward to this, Jeremiah.
I really only have thoughts on the MMA front. I'm a standard issue center-left neoliberal who also does BJJ at a gym owned by a former UFC fighter and trains some others. You are absolutely correct that these places are packed to the gear-soaked gills with with people who have a right wing bend. Some of it is, like you said, the individualism that martial arts can breed in people, but I think at least part of it is because these places are also filled with cops, firefighters, ex-military, and other sorts of professions who have their own "thin [insert color] line" flag available for purchase.
I just go there to train, I don't get sucked into any kinds of discussions on that kind of stuff, and not coincidentally I have like 10 unresponded-to friend requests from people at my gym sitting in my FB notifications, never to be touched.