FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
9mo ago
"My neurodiversity makes me exciting, quirky and unable to be held accountable for any of my moral shortcomings; your neurodiversity makes you nerdy and lame; his neurodiversity makes him a creepy rapist."
FtttG
1yr ago
It was crazy how up in arms all of the women on my Instagram were about Aisling Murphy and how her murder was a huge indictment of Irish culture and how Irish men are socialised and how we need to #stopblamingwomen - up until the exact moment it turned out the killer was Slovak, and then they immediately shut up about it.
Trans communities encourage trans people to cut loved ones out of their lives entirely if the loved one in question doesn't uncritically affirm the trans person's gender identity, push for legislation which would ban any forms of therapy which don't uncritically affirm a trans person's gender identity (on the grounds that a failure to affirm it is tantamount to "conversion therapy") and push for legislation which would make a parent's failure to affirm their child's professed gender identity a factor in determining custody in divorce cases. The idea that this only resembles Scientology's suppressive persons doctrine "if you squint" is absurd.
To struggle sessions?
The phrase "death before detransition" returns 600k results on Google. Jehovah's Witnesses have a policy of shunning former members who leave the faith. I really don't think it's a reach to notice the parallels here.
Cui bono? Who is the Jeff Divine, the Marshall Applewhite, the Jim Jones? That’s not to say a cult has to have a charismatic leader.
I know Scientology was founded by L. Ron Hubbard, but I don't know who its current charismatic leader is, is or if it even has one. I still have zero qualms about calling it a cult.
And even if gender ideology lacks a charismatic leader, there are still many people who bono from it: mediocre male athletes who'd never win anything if they weren't allowed to compete in women's sporting events, convicted perverts who'd rather serve their sentences in a women's prison, and pharmaceutical and medical professionals making a killing in the provision of "gender-affirming care" (surgeries in the US alone were valued at $2.1 billion, while hormones are worth $1.6 billion). I'm not going to go quite so far as to claim that "gender ideology is a conspiracy by Big Pharma to sell more T", but I do find it weird what a huge blind spot so many leftists seem to have: critics of capitalism who correctly recognise that pharmaceutical companies have a financial incentive to encourage pathologisation and medicalisation of as many conditions as possible, but surely they'd never stoop so low as to persuade teens and young children to believe that they're really members of the opposite sex, perish the thought.
FtttG
2yr ago
This precise example occurred to me awhile back, but with stepfathers rather than stepmothers.
"Father" has two meanings, biological and social. A father is the male person who impregnated the child's mother (biological). It is usually expected that this individual will also be the child's primary male role model and jointly responsible for raising and/or providing for them (social). In certain cases the child's primary male role model and the male person who impregnated the child's mother may be different people, in which case we disambiguate them (stepfather, biological father).
In some instances, the stepfather has been so present in the child's life and has formed such a strong bond with them that we refer to them as the child's father. This is a social fiction done in the interests of convenience or courtesy, and nobody really finds this objectionable. There may be a few instances in which we must defer to the child's biological father, but for most intents and purposes the stepfather is the child's father.
But this polite social fiction can be stretched too far. If the stepfather came to literally believe that he was responsible for conceiving the child, and pointedly asked us if he could see the resemblance between him and the child, we would have to push back and say, no, I'm sorry, you are not literally the child's father. Claiming that there is a familial resemblance between you and the child when you have no DNA in common is pseudoscience. If the stepfather were then to become distraught, lash out and accuse us of "invalidating his lived experience as a father", that would surely bring his mental state into question.
You're looking at this wrong. The policy isn't expected or intended primarily to pay for itself via fines. The policy is intended to pay for itself by deterring fare evaders from evading fares i.e. a visible police presence will encourage people to buy tickets who otherwise would not have bought them.
Let's take the middle of your cost estimate, $72m/year. Per the NYT, the typical New York subway fare is $2.90. To get a return on investment, in the course of a calendar year, 24,827,586 passengers who would otherwise have avoided paying the fare need to pay the fare. That works out at 68,021 passengers a day.
3.6 million people ride the NYC subway every day, of whom (again per NYT) 14% refuse to pay the fare - 504,000 people a day. If a visible police presence convinces 68,021 of those people (a mere 13.5% of the total number of daily fare evaders) to pay the fare, the policy has paid for itself. Sounds doable, frankly.
Using the lower bound of your cost estimate works out at 44,402 passengers a day (8.8% of people currently evading fares on the subway); the upper bound, 91,639 (18.2%). None of these sound like fantastical pie-in-the-sky figures: at most, you have to persuade a fifth of people currently jumping the turnstiles not to do so, and you're done. Anything above that is pure profit.
A tweet from June 6th:
Riddle me this MAGA: how has Biden weaponised the Justice Department if his own son is on trial and he's saying he will not pardon him if convicted? Your whole argument kinda crumbles, doesn't it? Embarassing.
Oh.
Sure enough, in his final month in office, Joe has pardoned Hunter, after repeatedly promising not to do exactly that. No less than the Guardian and the BBC are calling Joe Biden a hypocrite and saying that this latest action legitimises some of the criticisms Trump has lobbed at Biden.
A few weeks ago there was a discussion here on what Biden might do with his final few weeks in office to ensure his legacy, knowing that he'll never hold public office again. Negotiate a last-minute but inevitable peace deal in Ukraine, to snatch that opportunity from Trump's grubby claws? Recognise the Armenian genocide at last? Pass a bill mandating the creation of a new national park? Step down so that Kamala can legitimately claim to be the first female POTUS, if only for ten minutes?
I guess we have our answer as to what he'll do with his legacy: piss all over it, exposing himself as no less of a corrupt nepotist than Erdoğan.
The rational part of me believed I was dooming my career by writing this novel. Though I had to write the book anyway. We do not have a choice in such matters.”
sobrave.jpeg Reminds me of John Boyega saying that he expected his acting career to be over as a consequence of his heroic decision to speak at a - Black Lives Matter protest, in London. Okay buddy.
I heard about the central stylistic gimmick of this novel (the entire book is told in one unbroken paragraph) before I heard about the premise, and based on that alone I knew I'd never read it. I've read some books which experimented with the form and presentation of the text in interesting ways (e.g. House of Leaves), but I find it impossible to imagine any way in which this gimmick would be anything other than an annoyance. Upon hearing the premise I'm even less inclined to read it than previously.
You're entirely right to point out that concerns about a far-right authoritarian takeover of Ireland are about as unfounded as it being taken over by pixies and unicorns. Even the idea that such a scenario is implausible in Ireland, but would be plausible in the US or Canada, is fanciful - just as in Ireland, it's the parties who present themselves as woke centrist neoliberals who pose the greatest threat of initiating democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. As @KulakRevolt will remind us, it wasn't a far-right Canadian prime minister who froze the bank accounts of anyone even tangentially connected to an oppositional political movement (the kind of thing we'd expect from Erdoğan or Putin) - it was Justin Trudeau, Mr. "Because it's 2015" himself, on whom Leo Varadkar unabashedly models himself.
To be slightly more charitable to Lynch, I wonder if he's fallen victim to some kind of The Last Psychiatrist-esque "telling yourself one story as a protection against what's really bothering you" psychological defense mechanism.
Any remotely politically aware person living in Ireland in the last five years would have good cause to be concerned about Ireland falling victim to democratic backsliding and authoritarianism. The lockdowns instated in response to Covid-19 represented an unprecedented seizing of control by the state and an incursion into the private lives of Irish citizens, and were some of the longest in the world. Likewise, nobody ever expected the introduction of vaccine passes to get into bars and restaurants: the denizens of /r/ireland scoffed at me when I said I was worried about them being brought in, and assured me they never would - then they did, and the same people scoffed at me for being concerned about this unprecedented invasion of privacy. Earlier this year, a piece of "hate speech" legislation (which, among other things, would make it an offense punishable with jail time to have a racist meme stored on your phone, even if it was sent to you by your annoying uncle in a family WhatsApp group chat) passed in the lower house of parliament, despite only 27% of the public supporting it. It has not yet passed the upper house, but of course the architects of the bill are using last month's race riot as a pretext for pushing for it to be passed (even though it would have done nothing to prevent the riot). All of these policies or pieces of legislation were introduced by a coalition government which presents itself as woke, centrist and neoliberal. Meanwhile, the far-right politicians in the country are so marginalised that they might as well not exist for how involved they are in the democratic process - no politician who could be characterised as far-right under even the most generous interpretation of that term has ever held public office.
Now, you can scoff and roll your eyes at anti-lockdowners and accuse them all of being anti-5G nutters who'd step over their own grandmothers' corpses for a pint in a pub with their mates, but on some level, any thinking person must experience some measure of concern about these developments, if only on a subconscious level, no matter how much they might try to deny it. Perhaps Lynch reacted to the political developments of the past five years with the same alarm I felt about Ireland's future. The problem for him is, he can't imagine a world in which a socially progressive government could also be authoritarian. I don't mean the possibility of such a thing coming to pass has occurred to him, but he's dismissed the possibility as too remote to merit serious consideration - I mean that he can no more conceive of such a thing than he can a triangle with four sides. For most educated Irish people, "right-wing" and "authoritarian" go hand-in-hand, and the concept of a "left-wing authoritarian state" is an empty set, a term without a referent. They've never heard of the Holodomor, or the Khmer Rouge - they think of Cuba as "that place with great healthcare" and nothing else. I've even had a Trinity graduate patiently explain to me on Facebook that Josef Stalin was actually far-right, and accused me of doing a disservice to real socialists by inaccurately characterising Stalin as far-left.
So, Lynch notices he's concerned about the possibility of Ireland becoming an authoritarian state in the near future. He can't bring himself to confront the possibility that Fine Gael could ever be the instigators of such a state (how could they? They have their pronouns in their bios on Twitter!). So the only way he can express his concerns in a way that feels psychologically safe for him is by contriving this absurd scenario in which the far-right seizes power and instates all of the policies he's worried about Fine Gael bringing in (presumably along with some token anti-LGBTQIAA2S+ and anti-immigrant legislation, to improve Lynch's plausible deniability). I don't think Lynch is lying to the readers about what his book is about - I think he's lying to himself.
FtttG
2yr ago
I once got into an argument with a feminist, and when I brought up the homelessness thing, she countered that female homelessness tends to be less "visible" as it more often takes the form of couchsurfing than actual rough sleeping.
In other words: if you're a woman and you become homeless, friends and family will let you stay with them temporarily. If you're a man, you're on your own.
FtttG
2yr ago
I can't tell if this is completely ridiculous or not.
"Coloured people" - outdated and offensive.
"People of colour" - woke and progressive.
I will never be persuaded that rearranging the order of the constituent words of a phrase is the difference between "racist" and "not racist". Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
Now available in Substack form!
Last week there was an interesting discussion about a brewing backlash against polyamory in rationalist circles. I theorised that this was an inevitable result of the rationalist movement growing to the point that it included many “normies”, and that while polyamory might work pretty well for the first-generation rationalists who were abnormal on one or more axes (gay, trans, asexual, autistic etc.), it will probably not work for people who are comparatively normal: just because something works well for oddballs, that doesn’t necessarily generalise to it working well for the more conventionally-minded. Specifically, I think that polyamory is unlikely to work well for anyone who experiences a typical amount of sexual jealousy, a category that asexual people almost definitionally do not fall into (or so I assume).
This got me thinking about Rob Henderson’s theory about luxury beliefs. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the gist is that Henderson thinks that the greater affordability of material goods and democratisation of fashion styles means that Veblen goods are no longer an effective signalling mechanism that a person is a member of the elite (when cars are so expensive that most people can't afford them, owning a car is a costly signal that you are rich; when they become so cheap that everyone can afford them, the only way you can stand out is by buying a really expensive one, and the visual difference between a Tesla and a used Honda isn't half as distinct as the difference between have and have-not). As an alternative signal of how cultured and educated they are, elites instead promote outré-sounding ideas which sound crazy to the average person, but putting these ideas into practice has devastating consequences for anyone who isn’t an elite. The reason these ideas aren’t devastating for elites is either that:
- while they promote them in the abstract, they don’t practise them themselves e.g. Ivy League-educated people talking about how marriage is an oppressive patriarchal construct and praising people who experiment with “alternative family structures” – while they personally waited to get married before having children, and have a family structure which would seem unsurprising to a time-traveller from 1950s America; or
- they do practise the ideas themselves, but their wealth insulates them from the consequences that would befall a poorer person who practised them (it's easy to be an advocate for defunding the police if you live in a gated community)
Regardless of what you think of the luxury beliefs concept (I know that @ymeskhout, formerly of these parts, vociferously disagrees with the entire framing), the discussion about polyamory has got me thinking of a related idea, the general case of which polyamory is a specific example. Essentially, it boils down to alternative social practices or lifestyle choices that share the following traits:
- if practised by a person who is weird or abnormal,1 it will work better than adhering to the status quo
- if practised by a person who is comparatively normal, it will be disastrous compared to adhering to the status quo
- weird and abnormal people start doing the alternative lifestyle choice, find that it legitimately works great for them (much better than the “normal” thing they were doing before, or could have done instead), and become proselytizers for the cause, effusively telling everyone they know how much the alternative lifestyle choice has improved their lives and encouraging them to give it a try (optionally being a bit more cautious and responsible about this, admitting that it might come with downsides or acknowledging that it may not work for everybody)
- the alternative lifestyle choice takes off in popularity, but some people quickly find that it isn’t improving their lives as much as they were promised, or may be actively ruining their lives
- but because our society glorifies being weird and different, and scorns being conventional (using terms like “normie”, “basic” etc.), lots of people refuse to admit that the reason the alternative lifestyle choice isn’t working for them is because they’re a relatively conventional person, and keep trying to “push through” their initial discomfort in order to reach the point at which the lifestyle choice actually will improve their lives. This quickly leads to a sunk-cost fallacy, and by the time they realise they’re a normal person for whom the alternative lifestyle choice simply doesn’t work, the damage may be severe and irreparable.
Offhand, I can think of a few alternative lifestyle choices other than polyamory which I think meet this description:
- Gender transition: In spite of my undisguised incredulity towards gender ideology and towards the hysterical claims about how medical transition is “lifesaving treatment” (and hence that denying it to someone who wants it is no different from denying chemotherapy to a cancer patient) – in spite of all that, I do believe that there may be rare cases in which certain people stand to benefit from medical transition, and may see an attenuation of mental distress and improved quality of life as a result. The operative word in that sentence being “rare”. In the West, the rates of people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria have skyrocketed over the past two decades, and even medics who work in this space are belatedly coming to recognise that, for many of their patients, medical transition isn’t the silver bullet they advertised and may even exacerbate their suffering (a realisation they are struggling to rationalise away). Eliza Mondegreen catalogues some of the mental gymnastics said medics will resort to, along with heartbreaking examples of people who’ve undergone some form of social and/or medical transition and found their dysphoria worsening and their psychic distress increasing – but when they turn to communities of like-minded individuals for help, they are inevitably gaslit about how it has to get worse before it gets better (and how detransitioners are traitors to the cause upon whom death is wished – you wouldn’t want to be one of those people, would you?). I am comfortable saying that, for the majority of people who have medically transitioned in the past two decades, their quality of life has probably disimproved, whether marginally or drastically; while a minority has seen their quality of life improve.
- Sex-positive feminism: Closely related to the original polyamory example, there is a widespread set of cultural messages which present casual sex, kink, group sex, multiple concurrent sexual partners etc. as the path to female empowerment, and which encourage young women to experiment with them on that basis. While I have no objection to women engaging in these behaviours on moral grounds, and don't doubt that there are some women out there who derive just as much pleasure from casual sex as the modal man – nonetheless, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that such woman are atypical, and that the modal woman’s self-esteem takes a hit after a one-night stand, while the modal man sees a boost to his. But because so much of sex-positive feminism explicitly or implicitly tells young women that being uninterested in casual sex is indicative of prudery (a message reinforced by every horny young man in their vicinity) and that regretting a one-night stand is indicative of “internalised misogyny” or whatever, many women continue practising casual sex long past the point at which it’s obvious that it’s making them miserable, as sadly documented in this post by a young Arab-American woman who avoided losing her virginity in college, while all of her female friends were repeatedly used and cast aside by their male peers. As much as I might deride the silliness of the term “demisexual”, I do understand that it might be the only way in the current cultural climate that a woman can express her preferences without being accused of being a “bad feminist”, or of slut-shaming her peers by implication.2
- Drug liberalisation: I believe this was one of Rob Henderson’s canonical examples of luxury beliefs, but it fits here just as well. There are some people who can experiment with psychoactive substances without becoming addicted or developing psychotic symptoms, but these people are rare, and addictive pathways for normal people are predictable and well understood. For most people, experimenting with psychoactive substances will be a net-negative, and you should not gamble on being one of the weird people who can take a lot of LSD and see no ill effects. Ergo, drug liberalisation is almost certainly a net-negative for most people and hence for society as a whole. But our society shamelessly glorifies drug use as exciting and transcendent, so lots of people who should know better keep doing drugs long past the point at which they know they’re in the normie camp (and it’s not just the usual physical and psychological addiction causing them to stick with it, but also a whole host of modern messages about how drug use is the way to open up your third eye, that people who aren’t “420 friendly” are squares etc.).
- Therapy: A hobby horse Freddie deBoer has been beating for years. Ever since Freud, therapy was generally understood as medical treatment, and going to a therapist when you weren’t mentally ill would have seemed about as logical as going to a GP when you didn’t feel sick. But in recent years, the idea that everyone should go to therapy, regardless of whether or not they’re in acute mental distress, has been growing in popularity. Hand-in-hand with this idea is the more or less explicit denial that therapy can ever result in iatrogenic harm, a concept that everyone understands perfectly well in the context of any other kind of medical treatment: “either therapy will help you,” these people argue, “or at worst it will be ineffectual”. (I’m sure some people in the “everyone should go to therapy” camp would flatly deny that there exists a person, anywhere, who isn’t mentally ill: after all, if everyone has trauma, then by implication everyone experiences post-traumatic stress and in turn suffers from [complex] post-traumatic stress disorder. This may be a weakman but it is not a strawman.) In my opinion, we were right the first time around and therapy should be understood first and foremost as medical treatment for people suffering from mental illnesses (even being in mental distress isn’t in and of itself evidence of mental illness, as anyone recently bereaved can tell you, and the mental health industry’s casual conflation of the two is irresponsible and appalling). For those people, therapy may be hugely beneficial. Most people, however, do not suffer from mental illnesses as generally understood, and hence do not stand to benefit from therapy. If you’re one of the many people who doesn’t suffer from mental illness, therapy is likely to have either no impact on your life at all (aside from being a huge waste of time and money), or actively detrimental to your well-being (obsessively analysing and ruminating on all the things in your life that make you unhappy doesn’t sound a great recipe for happiness) and/or the well-being of people around you (e.g. narcissists who go to therapy and learn lots of handy tricks and terminology for how to manipulate the people around them and rationalise away their own bad behaviour). But because our culture shamelessly glorifies mental illness3 and heavily implies that people with mental illnesses are more exciting and interesting than people without (the new term for people with autistic traits is “neurospicy”, for fuck’s sake), lots of people keep going to therapy long past the point at which they should know full well that they’re not mentally ill and are just an ordinary person with ordinary problems.
- “Follow your dreams”/do what you love: Sound advice, if you’re one of the tiny minority of people talented and/or attractive enough to make a living from acting/writing/music/sports/video game streaming/modelling/influencing etc., for whom working in a regular job would probably be a lot more frustrating and dissatisfying than it would be for a normal person. For most people pursuing careers in these areas, the erroneous belief that they are one of these rarefied individuals results in them neglecting to develop productive life skills which would serve them well in the event that they turn out to be a normal person with normal (i.e. unremarkable) levels of skill in one of the aforementioned domains. But because our culture glorifies working in the sports, fashion and entertainment industries, and scorns working in a normal job like a normal person (bullshit jobs,4 soul-crushing desk job etc.), lots of people keep pursuing their dream job long past the point at which it’s abundantly obvious that they’re not talented enough to make a living as a rapper or streamer. As documented in The Disaster Artist, there are few things more heartbreaking than a talentless wannabe actor still pursuing a career as a leading man well into his forties – and unlike Tommy Wiseau, most such people don’t have millions of dollars from real estate investments tucked away. This one is particularly interesting in that, unlike the previous examples, it has the appearance of a zero-sum game, and as such one would naively expect that successful actors, musicians etc. would be incentivised to discourage others from pursuing careers in their domain, or engage in rent-seeking behaviour like guilds and so on. But there may be an alternative dynamic at play, in which moderately talented actors etc. are savvy enough to know that flooding the market with talentless hacks will make the legitimately talented stand out all the more. For years I’ve been convinced that this may be a contributing factor to the recent “body positivity” trend, which I may write a separate post about.
- OnlyFans: Sort of, but not exactly, a sub-point to the above – I doubt there are many women for whom making a living from amateur pornography is their first career preference, or who would say they love making a living from pornography – but certainly there are lots of women who’ve been sold a bill of goods about how making a living from amateur pornography is much easier and more lucrative than doing so via a more conventional vocation, and being able to say that you're attractive enough to make a living from your looks is certainly a bigger flex than making a living from working in accounts receivable. In the case of women who forgo developing real professional skills in favour of setting up an OnlyFans account under their own names, the outcomes can be particularly disastrous. Not only do they quickly realise it’s a much more labour-intensive job than they were led to believe; not only are they quickly subjected to the rude awakening that they’re nowhere near as attractive as they thought they were (and therefore that all of their friends telling them that they were 10/10 bad bitches were just yasslighting them); not only are they quickly made aware of the diminishing returns inherent in the fact that a woman’s attractiveness is heavily determined by her youthfulness; not only do they quickly learn that the more attractive women have the vanilla corner of the market stitched up, and hence that the only way to stay competitive is by appealing to the fantasies of the gross fetishistic perverts – but on top of all that, images of their rectum paired with their name are now splashed out across the entire Internet effectively forever, potentially curtailing both their professional and romantic opportunities for years to come. (To note: I’m not disputing that this latter point may also be true of women who succeed in making a living in pornography. Just because there are some women who make bank by so doing, doesn’t mean that it’s globally a good decision even for them. My point is only that there’s no way someone like Lily Phillips could hope to have made nearly as much money from a more conventional job as she did from her pornography career, and hence that, from the narrow perspective of remuneration alone, the alternative lifestyle choice was better than the conventional one for her.) But because almost everyone thinks of himself as above-average in attractiveness, women continue trying to make OnlyFans work for them long past the point that they ought to understand that they are rather mid in appearance, and hence earning somewhere near the middle of the OnlyFans monthly income distribution, hundreds of dollars below even the lowest US minimum wage.
Any other examples come to mind? The more I write about this, the more trite and obvious it sounds, making me wonder if I’ve put a foot wrong somewhere.
One point that occurred to me immediately after posting this: this framework is distinct from the luxury beliefs concept insofar as not everyone who stands to benefit from the alternative lifestyle practice is an elite, and not everyone who stands to suffer from it is a non-elite. There are many women from working-class backgrounds who could stand to make a great deal of money from pornography, and many women from wealthy backgrounds whose reputations would take a hit were they to do the same. There are many people from working-class backgrounds who might benefit from therapy, and many people from wealthy backgrounds for whom therapy would only serve to make them more neurotic than ever before.
1 Not intended as a criticism or insult: per the expansive definition I’m using here, it includes people who are unusually intelligent, talented, physically attractive, fiscally responsible etc. but also people who are diagnosably and severely mentally ill.
2 I must here mention a favourite anecdote from Holly Math Nerd, who learned the term “demisexual” in a university lecture and explained it to her therapist:
Me: “Today I learned that I am deeply and profoundly oppressed by my status as a sexual minority.”
Therapist: (raises an eyebrow).
Me: “I in fact fit under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. A is one of those extra letters, and I am in fact a type of Asexual.”
Therapist, laughing: “What?!”
Me: “I am, I’ll have you know, an oppressed demisexual.”
Therapist: “What does that mean?”
Me: “A demisexual is someone who only experiences sexual attraction when they have formed a close emotional bond.”
Therapist: (nods, several times, thinks for about thirty seconds.) “When I was a boy, we had a different word for people like that. We called them, ‘women’.”
3 No doubt there are many who come to believe that they are mentally ill in part because they are seduced by the idea that it relinquishes them of being held responsible for their bad behaviour, along with providing them with a convenient excuse for why their lives didn't turn out the way they hoped. Regrettably, I speak here from experience, certainly on the latter point if not the former.
4 Based on a study which, like everything else in the ideologically motivated social sciences, failed to replicate. One can only assume the notoriously scummy and dishonest David Graeber was putting his thumb on the scale somewhere.
I've been meaning to write a blog post which touches on this topic for months. Here's the bullet points:
- Being morally good and being likeable on an interpersonal level are orthogonal traits. Many people are both, many people are neither, but it isn't hard to find examples of people who are likeable but unvirtuous (e.g. charming con artists), or who are morally upstanding but hard to like (e.g. socially awkward and arrogant nerds who join EA and donate vast sums of their own money to charitable causes).
- The assumption that people who are likeable are also morally upstanding (and vice versa) is so widespread that it might as well be instinctual (for evolutionary reasons). How often do you hear people say "I like him, he's a really nice guy", as if the former by definition implies the latter? It takes immense courage to assert, without a trace of irony, that you like someone even though he's an actively nasty dickhead.
- We assume that our friends and lovers are decent people who only occasionally behave badly under unusually stressful circumstances (i.e. the fundamental attribution error), whereas people we don't like are assumed to be actively nasty (even if we've forgiven our friends for worse crimes than our enemies have ever committed).
- Many people are extremely poor judges of why they find someone attractive (either platonically, sexually or romantically). Asking people to enumerate the kind of friend or husband they want is a task extremely susceptible to being confounded by social desirability bias. Most people (especially those lacking in self-awareness) will list off a bunch of socially commendable traits and fail to notice that none of the people they've been involved with historically have ever met that description.
- If you've internalised the idea that anyone you like is good and that anyone you dislike is bad, if you're approached by a person who's obviously attracted to you or wants to be your friend, but you don't feel the same way, the only way to resolve the cognitive dissonance will be to decide that that person is a bad person.
- Sometimes the person will, by coincidence, be a genuinely bad person (because interpersonal likeability and personal virtue are orthogonal), but sometimes they'll be a morally upstanding person guilty only of being physically unattractive or somewhat lacking in social graces. For this eventuality, there's the all-encompassing cop-out that "he just gave me creepy vibes". If a woman says that a guy is "creepy" or "gave off creepy vibes" but is unable, when pressed, to provide a single specific example of a creepy thing that guy said or did (e.g. groping her, being pushy, making inappropriately sexual conversation on a first date etc.), you can reasonably assume he did nothing wrong besides not being the kind of guy to whom she's attracted. I don't care if it's been memed to death, this comic is a 100% accurate depiction of the behaviour of modern Western feminists in particular and the human species in general.
- As I said, sometimes you might find that a person you don't like is a genuinely bad guy, but don't think the cart is before the horse - likeability comes first, then assessment of personal virtue. If a person says "I don't like him because he did XYZ", you may well later find him or her explaining away the XYZ committed by someone they like (platonically, sexually or romantically). XYZ isn't the reason you dislike so-and-so: you dislike him because he's boring or has an irritating laugh, then you tell yourself a story that the real reason you dislike him is because he did XYZ (even if you'd be perfectly happy to excuse XYZ if committed by someone interesting with a normal laugh).
- This is most pronounced in the case of sexual/romantic relationships, but all of the above applies just as much in platonic relationships too. If someone wants to be our friend and we don't like them or enjoy their company, the human default is to insist that they are morally bad, not just boring or lacking in social graces. Many socially maladroit people end up with the erroneous belief that they are morally bankrupt on the basis of not having many (or any) friends, because they've fully internalised the "likeable = morally good" framework and all it implies.
And before anyone starts urging me to secure a mail-order bride, I'm in a happy relationship with a conventionally attractive woman. You don't have to be an incel to empathise with them.
My subjective observation would be that that attitude - women are liars, women are picky, etc. - about women leaks out into interactions with them, and, understandably, they, or I supposed “we”, do not want to get romantically or sexually involved with someone who thinks so poorly of “us”.
I hope you don't feel like you're being dogpiled, but this hypothesis of yours is not new (in fact, it's at least a decade old), greatly lacks for predictive power, and I'm tired of seeing this half-baked hypothesis being trotted out every time the topic comes up.
For most of the last 10+ years, this theory has taken the form of "Nice Guys™/incels don't realise that their misogyny is the very thing preventing them from getting laid. If they just stopped hating women and became feminist, they would have no trouble getting girls to go out with them." Sounds intuitively plausible. I can understand why Alice wouldn't want to date Bob if she gets the impression that he hates her because of her sex.
But on the other hand, the people making this argument tend to argue that the following people are also misogynists: Donald Trump (married 3 times, five children), Ben Shapiro (happily married, three children), every PUA, every man who beats his wife/girlfriend.
I'm not claiming that these characterisations are inaccurate, and I pretty much endorse the idea that a man who beats his wife probably doesn't respect women as a group. My point is, the hypothesis "incels are incels because they're misogynistic" is incompatible with the hypothesis "Donald Trump is a misogynist who has no trouble attracting women" or the hypothesis "men who beat their wives are misogynistic". Misogyny alone cannot explain both "men who are pathologically lonely, who no woman wants to date" and "men who marry a woman in a non-arranged marriage, and go on to beat her": this is a panchreston. Either one of the groups in question isn't misogynistic, or there must be some other factor(s) influencing the outcomes.
Are incels misogynists? Some of them, sure. Are the people on this site misogynists? Some of them, sure, maybe. But don't give me the pat answer "if you just started respecting women then women would be falling over themselves to date you" when this argument has been hashed out a thousand times in the last ten years, and we both know full well that there are innumerable men who have far less enlightened views on women than the average poster on this site who have absolutely no trouble attracting women.
Probably unnecessary clarification: I don't consider myself a feminist, and the typical Western feminist would probably accuse me of being misogynistic. In spite of this, I haven't had any trouble attracting women at any point in the last ~five years, have had an unusually high number of female sexual partners (including several women who explicitly told me that they disagreed with many of my opinions on gender politics), and I'm currently in a relationship with a woman I respect.
My anecdotal experience would tend towards men who are feminist having a harder time getting women to date them than men who aren't. Consider a group of four male friends. The first is me; the second is quite conservative and paid money to see Jordan Peterson live; the third admits that he finds Andrew Tate's content amusing; the fourth is rabidly feminist, who has argued with me at length that female underrepresentation in STEM is principally caused by misogyny among the men who work in those fields, and that any appeals to biological sex differences to explain differing career outcomes is sexist pseudoscience. Three of these men are in relationships with attractive women; one of them had a dry spell lasting at least two and a half years - no prizes for guessing which is which. I know I refer to it a lot, but Tony Tulathimutte's short story "The Feminist" rang incredibly true for me.
Years ago I had an idea for a goofy story concerning two characters independently plotting mass shootings in the US. The first character is a misogynistic incel who wants revenge against the Stacies and roasties who've rejected him all his life in favour of Chads. The second character is an Islamic fundamentalist who believes the West is fundamentally, irreparably rotten and degenerate, and the only thing that can save it is the immediate imposition of an Islamic theocracy.
All the logistics and planning for the two mass shootings are ironed out. There's just one problem. The first protagonist is of Arab descent and is named Muhammad Assan: he's savvy enough to realise that, even if he publishes a manifesto long enough to rival Elliot Rodger's, the motivation for his mass shooting will be attributed to Islamism (even though he himself is an atheist) purely on the strength of his name and ethnic background. The second protagonist, meanwhile, is of Chechen descent, is named Adam Abubakarov, only became a zealous Islamic convert in college, and is ambiguously Slavic enough to scan as "white": even if he screams "Allahu akbar!" before commencing his rampage, he realises that his name and skin colour means that his rampage will be assumed to have been motivated by far-right extremism, hatred of women, James Holmes-esque psychosis or similar; his religious beliefs will be a footnote at best. So both would-be murderers are stymied by how to ensure that the underlying messages for their respective rampages are interpreted as intended.
The solution? It's 70 years old and no less effective for it: they'll swap rampages. Adam will publish Muhammad's manifesto under his own name immediately before shooting up a sorority house, and Muhammad will blow up a synagogue immediately after distributing pamphlets containing passages from the Qur'an.
I think the artistic innovations of the 1960s are largely attributable to the technological innovations of the era. There was a huge amount of low-hanging technological fruit which was first picked in the 1960s, and it's much easier to create a fresh and exciting record when you're the first person to use a particular musical instrument or recording technique. The 1960s saw the introduction of:
- The Moog synth (the first commercially available synth)
- The Mellotron
- The wah-wah pedal
- The whammy bar
- The fuzz box
- Direct input of guitars
- The cassette tape
- The 8-track tape
- Drum machines (the first pop song to use a drum machine was in 1969)
- Multi-mic'd drum kits
Practically every time the Beatles entered the studio, there was a new game-changing invention waiting for them to play with. I've spent far more of the last ten years than I care to mention in recording studios, and the process for recording and mixing a rock song has not significantly changed in the last ten years. Whatever innovations there are tend to be incremental.
FtttG
1yr ago
My read on all this is that it is a human psychological tragedy, Ballard got lost in his own masculine heroic fantasy. Good men nearly all carry the fantasy of, as they say, wishin' a nigga would. We want a reason to give our World of Cardboard Speech. We have the urge to engage in violence and adventure, but we want justified violence, righteous adventure. We want to fight, but fight for the right.
I'm not proud to admit how often I'm on public transport with some scumbags in their late teens/early twenties being generally obnoxious loudmouths (playing music through their shitty Bluetooth speakers, vaping, yelling at each other etc.) and find myself thinking "man, I wish one of these fuckers would start some shit so I could punch his lights out with impunity".
But I don't think we have any good reason, right now, to believe that this was part of Ballard's motivation/rationalisation. I suspect that he was both sincere in his desire to rescue children from sex trafficking, and also a horndog. Maybe he believed that his "heroism" entitled him to some strange - he'd earned it, hadn't he?
In 2022 there was a horrific case in Ireland where a young teacher in her twenties named Aisling Murphy was murdered by a complete stranger while out jogging. It dominated news headlines for weeks, and all the usual bromides made the rounds on Irish social media: demands to "stop victim blaming" (I don't recall seeing anyone, ever, suggesting that Murphy was in any way to blame for her murder); accusing all Irish men for being complicit in her death, either for making jokes about sexual assault, or for not calling out their male friends when they did so.
Then they arrested and charged a recent Slovakian immigrant with her murder, and the feminists got real quiet about it, of course.
A few months later, there was an even more horrific story in which a mother set her car on fire with her and her two young children inside: she survived, they didn't. This didn't get half the attention as the previous case. I couldn't help but wondering - why is it that I would be castigated if I said "if you're a mother and you've ever said 'ugh, my boys are driving me up the wall, I could just kill them', you're complicit in the deaths of these two children"? Oh no, it's really a mental health issue, actually the system failed her and she felt she had no choice but to attempt a murder-suicide, someone else should have noticed the warning signs beforehand. It's all so tiresome.
Edit: misremembered the perpetrator as Romanian, he was actually Slovakian. Misremembered the sexes of the two children. Amended.
FtttG
2yr ago
I think this is mostly explicable by the extremely strong link between being trans and being autistic https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/largest-study-to-date-confirms-overlap-between-autism-and-gender-diversity/
Autistic people are disproportionately likely to become coders and disproportionately likely to become trans.
FtttG
2mo ago
There IS a UK demographic in which knife crime is a huge problem. There IS a UK demographic in which systemic mistreatment of white teenage girls is a huge problem.
Neither of these demographics are the demographic to which the aggressor in Adolescence belongs, and I refuse to accept the claim that this was accidental.
This article annoyed me, because Freddie has had two non-fiction books published by major American publishers, routinely flexes about how many prestige publications he's been published in, and has mentioned on several occasions that his combined annual Substack and freelancing revenue is in the $250k range - and then he has the nerve to turn around and say that he's "never been in the position" to say that he's successful and he knows it?
This is not being humble or modest - this is literally word for word the exact behaviour he wrote an entire article decrying. I would have called him out on it but the comments are only open to paid subscribers.
I don't think I've seen LGBT activists fabricate incidents
"Fabricate" is the wrong word, but the Obama administration passed a law against anti-LGBT hate crimes which was widely referred to as the Matthew Shepard Act. Matthew Shepard was a drug dealer who was murdered by a couple of rival dealers, and there is zero evidence that homophobia played any role in his death (he'd had sex with one of the men who murdered him).
Holly Math Nerd (by her accounts a victim of rape as a child, and hence hypersensitive to this kind of thing) has argued that child gender transition is a covert attempt to normalize paedophilia/child rape by alternate means. Her argument goes: if you think a small child is mature enough to consent to a mastectomy, surgery which will permanently sterilize them, and hormones with a host of side effects - why wouldn't you then think that they are mature enough to consent to having sex? Having sex with someone (even someone twice their age) seems like small beer compared to sterilization.
A few years ago I'd probably have scoffed at this argument as a paranoid far-right conspiracy theory. After learning that a senior member of Mermaids, a widely praised* UK charity for trans children and teenagers which has received public funding, is an outspoken pro-paedophilia advocate, I'm not so sure.
There could be a bit of a bootlegger-baptist coalition going on. The baptists are people who sincerely believe that trans children are in immense psychic distress for whom medical transition is the best option available. The bootleggers are the medical and pharmaceutical companies who stand to make a packet off surgeries, puberty blockers and lifetime hormone prescriptions; and people like the Mermaids guy above, pursuing the agenda for ulterior reasons.
*By everyone from Emma Watson and Harry & Meghan, to Starbucks and Wagamama.
If Muslims decide to be more vocal about their opposition to leftist social agenda, they will find that MINOs will be invited to speak over them, and will succeed in drowning them out. We will be treated to a barrage of ludicrous op-eds that posit Islam as a LGBT friendly religion ("How Muhammad Was The First Queer Activist", etc) as well as profiles of camera-friendly gay Muslims who claim to find no contradictions between "their Islam" and homosexuality. The more intelligent among the MINOs might attempt to put a more theological spin on it with a few cherry-picked quotes from hadith or the Quran, or perhaps bring in some historical flavor by blaming colonizers for anti-gay legislation in the Middle East. "True Islam", it will be revealed, is a religion of Peace and #Pride.
One of the most vacuous debates I ever got into on Facebook (before I realised that debating with anyone on Facebook is almost invariably a complete waste of time) was when a friend-of-a-friend who lived in the UK shared a post on their* Facebook profile with a list of people that Pride is "for". The list included trans women, disabled people, Muslims etc. (Note that this post didn't say "LGBT Muslims" were welcome at Pride, which would certainly be commendable - just "Muslims".) Bankers and police officers, by contrast, were explicitly demarcated as persona non grata.
I pointed out, fairly politely in my view, that it seemed weird to say that Pride is "for" a particular group when half of that group think that homosexuality should be illegal - not merely societally condemned, but a criminal offense. If the point of Pride is to celebrate LGBT people, why would you make a point of inviting a specific group, a majority of which think LGBT people are sinners and should be punished for their crimes? There was certainly no concomitant effort to invite homophobic Christians.
I was immediately dogpiled, with numerous white non-Muslim Brits simply denying the claim outright and insisting that the poll on which I was basing my assertion must be faulty and have poor methodology and actually Allah is queer and so on. In unrelated contexts I've seen plenty of mental gymnastics about how homophobia wasn't a thing in the Middle East until after white Europeans got there, and actually men in the Middle East hundreds of years ago used to rape little boys in addition to little girls, so how could they possibly be homophobic?
God, the lengths some people will go to in order to quell their cognitive dissonance. It was only then that I realised that Pride was no longer about "gender and sexual minorities" at all, but a general celebration of wokeness as a concept. Funny how mission drift sneaks up on you.
*Funny the amount of people who only "realise" they're "non-binary" immediately upon starting in art school.
In 2016 I kept reiterating that the alleged parallels between Trump and Hitler seemed like incredibly weak sauce to me, whereas Berlusconi (not a dictator - that's part of my point) seemed like a much more obvious referent.
But most Americans don't know who Berlusconi is, so. TV Tropes calls this small reference pools - much as Mozart and Beethoven are the only classical composers whose names Joe Sixpack can be assumed to recognise, Hitler is the only historical dictator meeting that description (maybe Stalin, at a push. Mussolini? Forget it.). So if you want to criticise a politician by way of comparison to a historical dictator, and you want that comparison to be legible to a mass audience, you're going to see a lot of square-Trump-in-round-Hitlers until the average person becomes a lot more historically literate.
In the trans debate, I encountered an argument the other day which to me reads like a textbook example of an unfalsifiable hypothesis. I would like to run it by you good people to see if there's something I'm missing.
My woke, far-left sister was complaining about a male person she knows who claims to be non-binary, and yet behaves in a manner entirely consistent with certain negative stereotypes about masculinity, specifically "mansplaining", the tendency of certain men to condescendingly talk down to women, even if the women in question are more knowledgeable about the topic in question than the man himself is. She said it was abundantly obvious from his demeanour that this person was a man, not something intermediate between male and female.
I thought to myself "wow, my sister's gotten redpilled somewhere along the way" and enthusiastically agreed with her, arguing that I think the concept of "gender identity" has essentially zero predictive power, and that self-declared trans people almost invariably behave in a manner more consistent with their natal sex then their claimed gender identity. The specific example I gave was that trans women are 6 times more likely than cis women to be convicted of a crime, and 18 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime. Which is exactly what you'd expect on the basis of their sex, not their gender identity. If trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, why do they commit crimes at the same rates as men?
My sister's rebuttal was that, even though trans women are women trapped inside men's bodies, they were still socialised to be male prior to their coming out as trans, which compels them to behave in a manner consistent with the masculine norm.
This strikes me as a perfect example of the adage "if a theory explains everything, it explains nothing". If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a female person to behave, that demonstrates that she's really a woman. If a trans woman behaves in a manner consistent with how you'd expect a male person to behave, that demonstrates that she was socialised into behaving like a male person against her will. Under this framing, there is literally nothing a trans woman can do which can ever point away from her "really" being a woman.
What would it take to falsify this hypothesis? Is there some piece of the puzzle that I'm missing here? I'm sincerely looking for a steelman.
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