For a long time I have been urging the left to engage in dialogue with us. I complain that they will neither listen to us nor speak to us, and that this will end in war, and mass murder.

Well, suddenly they have started to talk at us, with leftist NPCs showing up on reactionary blogs and lecturing right wingers on twitter and facebook. Listening, not so much. Their stuff tends to be robotic and spammy. Attempting to interact with them is like talking to an NPC (Non Player Character) in a video game. To some extent they actually are NPCs – we are seeing stuff that looks as if generated by Google’s AI, and that AI programmed by someone who has no understanding of, nor interest in, the ideas of the people he is supposedly addressing. Looks very like a hasty makeover of a similar operation and similar software directed against Muslims, with the major change in the software being a global search for Mohammed, and a global replace with Moldbug or Heartiste.

To some extent it seems to be actual humans who are mechanically following a script written for them by someone else, and who are not allowed to deviate from the script, which sooner or later results in them being endlessly repetitious, somewhat resembling a non player character in a video game, but more resembling one of those highly unhelpful telephone help systems, where one is talking to an actual human, but if your problem is not one of the very limited set of problems covered by the script that that human is required to follow, you are sol, and find yourself trapped in the same script over and over.

It is an improvement, a genuine attempt to get off the path leading to civil war. Not really an adequate attempt, since to the extent that it is actual humans, those humans are not permitted to show comprehension of the ideas that they are attempting to rebut, and crimestop genuinely prevents them from comprehending the ideas that they are attempting to rebut. In place of dialog being totally forbidden, we are getting the superficial appearance of dialog, but so severely supervised and tightly controlled that it is not genuine dialog.

They make their preprogrammed argument, you make the obvious and well known counterargument, which is not covered by the script, even though it was first made one hundred and seventy years ago, and they repeat their original preprogrammed argument, claiming to observe and to have experienced the reality that progressives are trying to wish into existence.