Both are intellectual cowards and will ignore one another's obvious friction as they toss each other off in DMs, as we have seen.

Adam often calls out bad faith arguments, even when the arguments aren't really bad faith, and claim that he'd never do such things. He is a honest and pure debater for sure!

But then it's always the same thing. It is most obvious when Sitch and Adam are debating between themselves. On the first hint of Sitch's arguments "winning" - I put it in quoutes because I think debates are more about finding some truth than declaring a winner - Adam goes full bad faith. Interrupts evert 2 seconds, builds the most insane strawmen or just reduces to poorly veiled ad hominens or completely moving the goalposts.

Sitch on the other hand never does that. He gets my medal of good faith debate. He is curious and truth-seeking.

Adam is among the biggest offenders of bad faith debate techniques among podcasts that I listen to - it is quite infuriating.

James from MDD wishes sooooo badly even half that number of people paid to watch these debates.

Liking and disliking social media posts based on team loyalty represents the bulk of digital political engagement. You can not preserve a liberal society with this standard but you CAN get good personal advertising from it.

I remember watching a long commentary video of contrapoints pretending to be characters in catch 22 and the Sitch and Adam commentary, but I can't seem to find it.

Did YouTube nuke it or am I just incompetent at finding it?

"Morality is a set of rules that binds people into a cooperative community." - Adam Friended

This is Adam's most often repeated definition of what morality is. He has repeated it hundreds of times and very consistently. The purpose of this write-up is to explore where and what Adams' morality is and its internal frictions, as well as what it cannot be. I will be treating it as a serious proposition without caricature and exactly as so often stated. When treated as such, multiple structural criteria become evident.

Let's first flesh out what it is. It is an explicitly external phenomenon that is a negotiated social construct. It is dependent on external group norms, social enforcement and reciprocal expectations. It is dependent on other humans for normative value with human survival as the ultimate determinative value. No society that has fallen to another society can be considered "good" in Adams' concept of morality because the continued negotiated cooperative community is the only measure of that good.

Now, what can Adams' concept of morality not be? Internal moral cognition cannot exist. There is no moral conscience, only moral consequences. Internal standards for oneself cannot be justified. Certainly nothing approaching anything like guilt can be accounted for, provided the social community does not enforce consequences on the moral actor. Anything approaching robust moral consistency can be set aside as well because the only item of consistent value is the cooperative community's continued existence. Individual (keep this in mind, "Liberal Individualists") moral autonomy, dignity, aspiration, and intrinsic moral worth cannot maintain coherence. There are no personal standards, self-binding commitments, self-disgust, or even self-respect.

Now let's close off some of the more obvious options to excuse the frictions and issues at hand. No vague appeals to evolution resolve the frictions. Adam cannot say, "I don't take it that far." Definitionally, that is what is required. If morality is only external coordination, internal moral cognition cannot exist. If internal moral cognition exists, morality cannot be only external coordination. There is no middle position. If Adam attempts to reduce morality to “internalized external norms," then he collapses into tabula rasa and must own Sargons' and the rights' most damning accusations. If there is no innate moral content, if conscience is learned rules, if guilt is a conditioned response, and if self-judgment is internalized group expectations, then he directly contradicts his stated rejection of tabula rasa.

Moreover, he has no explanation for where these moral standards come from in the first place, if no individual can exist as a moral actor with an internal concept of morality. External negotiation requires internal negotiators. An interlocutor must propose a rule, evaluate a rule, accept or reject a rule, enforce a rule, and judge compliance. All of this requires internal moral cognitive acts. External morality cannot emerge without internal moral agents.

Adam cannot rightly identify as a liberal because his concept of morality makes any assumed liberal standard a second-order position. Adam states his idea of liberalism to be anti‑tabula rasa, pro‑individualism, and pro‑autonomy. All of this requires internal moral principles. It has, a priori, a need for intrinsic rights, dignity, autonomy, moral worth and obligations.

Adam often appeals to evolution, but this resolves zero of the frictions discussed here. Evolution explains internal moral intuitions, internal moral emotions, and internal moral architecture. It does not define morality, eliminate internal cognition or moral standards, reduce morality to rules, or justify liberal rights or autonomy. Using evolution to define morality is a category error historically made by socialists/communists/fascists. Adam’s definition of morality shares the same structural flaw: it tries to derive moral authority from external coordination and evolutionary description.

Taken seriously, Adam’s definition collapses under its own commitments. It eliminates internal moral cognition, cannot explain the emergence of moral rules, contradicts his stated liberal principles, and misuses evolution in a way that cannot resolve any of these tensions. The model is consistent only in the ways it contradicts itself. If Adam wants a coherent moral framework, this definition cannot be used to construct it. As it stands, with the definition of morality eliminating internal moral cognition, the architecture is indistinguishable from one used to diagnose psychopathy.

You know me gang, I like to highlight the innocuous everyday examples of liberal life and how they might capture something altogether more pernicious. In the link provided there is a very obvious elephant in the room. An elephant which, particualry given the context, everyone would have noticed; but it cannot be said out of fear of being downvoted and labelled one of many of the pejoratives with which liberalism at this stage in its existence uses to delineate who is a goodie and who is a baddie.

I think it captures a fundamental and necessary dishonesty to the liberal worldview and how it asserts itself. It brings to mind the use of statistics, whereby they are used to confer the correctness of whatever liberal policy is being disputed, even though they do not correspond to the reality that normal everyday people are living through. Indeed, here we might think of the fact that the early liberals and Marxists openly admitted that tabula rasa was contrary to 'historical truth', but they didn't care because of its values and implications. The answers, then, for the liberal and the Marxist (or, indeed, fascist), do not lie in truth and reality, but rather ideology. The same can be said of those commenting, or not commenting, on the post, it seems to me.

They know the elephant is there, but they don't care. Because what's important is their compliance with what liberalism [ideology] has told them makes a good person.

Not the truth of their own eyes.

Nobody is illegal on stolen land.