Certainly flukes happen. But they are flukes. If activists were weak, their victories would be isolated and of short duration, quickly reverted.
Which is why the long hypothesized WWI did not happen after a fluke like a Serbian terrorist assassinating someone important, because all flukes are isolated and of short duration.
(Is that a simplified and facile claim? Yes. Is it more simplified and facile than your argument? No.)
But if I lose some rounds, win one spin, and keep on winning thereafter, then something funny is going on. Or maybe I own the casino.
What's winning in this context? Blacks becoming wealthy, respected, functional, equals of whites and not remaining the permanent lower-class? I see... Clearly those blacks and their white allies really succeeded in their missions and just kept on winning after putting that small-town sheriff in his place!
But oh right, I forgot, Moldbug is a complete conspiracy theorist that has an explanation for that too: the blacks are constitutionally inferior, yes, but the reason for the absence of their success despite their tremendous power is that it really serves the white elite's true purposes and the blacks are just their shock troops, whatever they might bleat about 'equality' and 'rights'.
In passing, I'll note the irony of arguing 'the powerful are by definition those who win' in writing about the suicide of someone aligned with and feted by these supposedly powerful folks; yes, he attacked the wrong folks, hence the complete absence of any backlash or widespread mood affiliation among elite Cathedral types like The New York Times.
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz.html
Summary: Moldbug on the Aaron Schwartz affair. Power is a very real thing with real consequences for activists, yet many people don't understand the nature of power in modern times. People like Noam Chomsky get great fame doing bad epistomology about who has power, and as a result do great harm to idealistic nerds who don't read between the lines to selectively target their attacks at weak institutions (Exxon, Pentagon) instead of strong ones (State, academica incl. MIT).
Here he returns to a theme that is one of his real contributions to blogospheric political thought: that victory in political competitions provides Bayesian information about who has power and who doesn't. If your worldview has the underdog somehow systematically beating the overdog, your epistemology is simply wrong - in the same way, and to the same extent, as a geocentrist who has to keep adding epicycles to account for anomalous observations.
This means that activists like King, Schwartz, and Assange are only effective in bullying the weak, not standing up to the strong (despite conventional narratives that misassign strengths to institutions). When such activists stop following the script, and naively use the same tactics to attack strong institutions, reality reasserts itself quite forcefully: