Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
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Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1yr ago
Alright, folks, I'm out.
Consider me the first Motte casualty to AI. No, I'm not planning on any self-harm. Quite the opposite, in fact. But reading about this shit is so depressing and anxiety-inducing that it's giving me a premature mid-life crisis, so I'm going to do the reasonable thing and take the grill pill.
As part of that reevaluation of how I've been spending my time, I've taken a look at the 15ish years I've been "Very Online And Politically Aware". Since the financial crisis in 2008, really. And I have to conclude that the investment of 10's of thousands of hours of my life has been basically a wash. I don't think I can point to a single tangible benefit to my life, it's all just sunk opportunity cost. Maybe a few memes pushed out, but thinking I inspired them is probably just arrogance. My lazy, slacktivist involvement almost certainly didn't matter for anything at all. Being Politically Aware is arguably the worst thing I've done with my life; I would rather have played more video games.
Even the insight porn is getting stale.
So combining these two epiphanies, I'm going to block TheMotte and SSC, and ACT and Instapundit, and unsub from any remotely political or AI-interested subreddit and block /all. Anything else I can think of or that comes up, I'm just gonna dip. (I would like some advice on how to block websites on chrome mobile for Android. The recommended apps seem to not really work the way they're presented.)
Because if this is the beginning of the end, of us becoming either obsolete or all dying, I would rather go out in a eudaemonic frenzy than wasting my time whining and worrying. I would rather double-down on being an amazing dad, and son and brother. I'll double-down at the gym, and run the best D&D campaign my friends have ever seen. I've had fantasy novels fermenting in my head for decades, I'd like to write a couple before GPT-X makes human creativity obsolete (and then I can have GPT-X churn out countless sequels!) Maybe I'll even try dating again.
And if and when the nanite disassembler swarms come for me, I'll go down on my feet knowing that I was a pretty kick-ass human, back when that mattered.
If anyone has suggestions for other things worth doing or being, or that satisfy that "check my phone while waiting in the line to pickup the kids" nudge that avoids my new no-nos, I'm all ears.
I've enjoyed this community a great deal, and think fondly of many of you. Thank you for contributing to making this a place where I felt at home. Maybe we'll have a grand meetup if humanity wins, and spend a subjective eternity having AI-moderated arguments about who was right.
And if any of you are in a position to do anything about the future - godspeed. We're all counting on you.
Thank you again. <3
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to take this empty propane tank to ACE for a refill.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
The trick is that when pressed, they say they're talking about suicide rates, and thus making a veiled threat to kill themselves. As a reminder, this is archetypal abuser behavior.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1yr ago
A couple minor anecdotes about schooling, and some related thoughts.
Earlier this year I blew off Back to School Night, because it is just a litany of teachers slowly reading notes that really ought to be just a syllabus handout. One downstream consequence of that is that I commit to attending Parent-Teacher conferences so as not to seem negligent. My children are excelling (by the standards of high-tier blue state public schools), so the conferences were also a series of boring conversations in which I strove to appear Interested while teachers recited figures and handed me print-outs of details I already knew from the online system that tracks grades. No, there are no social or behavioral issues. Perhaps a lingering artefact of my own issues with diligence, the one thing I pointedly ask every teacher to confirm is the apparent total lack of homework.
When I attended this particular middle school in the 90s, the school day consisted of many 40 minute classes, with 3-5 minutes of shifting between them, and then an average of 2-4 homework assignments per night. These assignments weren't difficult but keeping track and on top of all of them was something I struggled with, especially bigger projects with distant due dates. There were token efforts to help with this, like every student being given a record-keeping journal, and teachers insisting that we make note of each assignment, but we were mostly left to our own devices as far as getting it all done and handed in. My parents made some effort to help, but they are blue collar types, and this sort of thing wasn't quite their wheelhouse either. I spent those years blowing out the competition on the standardized tests, and then getting Bs and Cs because I just couldn't manage to remember that tasks had been assigned, or worse, I'd do them and then forget to hand them in.
In retrospect, it seems probable that the only reason I got into college at all was because a certain PMC-princess developed a crush on me in high school, and drug me into social circles where people socially kept on top of assignments. This is a massive, often unnoticed privilege; if you had it, take a moment to appreciate it. This carried me though the first half of college, and there is a painfully obvious demarcation where my ability to wrangle the administrative parts of college vanished when that social circle did.
My kids, OTOH, in the new, post-pandemic set-up, have 75 minute periods for their main classes (math, science, English, history), and then repeat one of them at the end of the day in a mildly structured study hall, where they are encouraged to finish assignments. As a first note, longer classes and less time wasted swapping to different classrooms seem like obvious optimizations for the school day. But that extra period of guided study hall at the end of the day seems really useful for instilling the kind of mindset that recalls, organizes, and accomplishes tasks. Most days they don't have any actual homework, which is an improvement since it's mostly busywork. But even when they have an assignment that does spill over into homework, between those extra skillsets and the integrated technology for assignment tracking they are so much more on top of things than I ever was. As an HBD-disclaimer, maybe that's their mother's Jewishness shining through, but there seems to be a qualitative improvement compared to pre-pandemic.
I'd picked up a lot of scorn and skepticism for academic pedagogy over the last decade, to the point where I think the entire field is borderline hokum. It feels important to acknowledge sensible organizational changes that have yielded noticeable improvements, instead of just maximizing administrative cowardice. Maybe it shouldn't have taken decades and a pandemic to figure it out, but progress isn't obvious, and it's certainly an improvement.
And on the topic of administrative cowardice, the other anecdote. My son is one of a few dozen boys who stay after school most days to play pickup games of basketball and football using the schoolyard facilities and fields. There is a nearby playground that usually has small children with parents, but these boys (ages range from 9-13) are mostly unsupervised... until now.
There is a boy in that cohort who is diagnosed as autistic, the sort where he probably wouldn't have been diagnosed with anything 20 years ago. At one of those recent pickup games, he was beaten up to some unknown degree, and his mother happened to see the whole thing from her car while stuck in traffic. The mother approached the administration, and was essentially told "This is unsanctioned, after-hours play, we have nothing to do with it and will do nothing for you." So, she went and filed a police report. That kickstarted some action, specifically a ban on kids playing in the yard after school without parental supervision.
Now obviously, I feel for the boy. I wish he hadn't gotten assaulted; I am sure that was a horrible experience. But I also wish that a few dozen other boys hadn't gotten effectively banned from convenient exercise, independence, and peer socializing. And I can't even really fault the administration; they're probably justifiably worried about lawsuits. Or... at least that's how other parents are interpreting it. Reading the email that was sent out about it, all that's really said is a reminder that students are "expected" to leave the premises if they don't have a sanctioned activity or parental supervision. It's not phrased as a hard requirement. It actually seems like a fine needle-threading that absolves the school of responsibility, without actually accepting responsibility for enforcing the ban, the exact sort of "take responsibility for your own choices" that I would have insisted they should do instead of some cowardly, heavy-handed ban.
So, for a second time, I feel that this organization I have heavily criticized deserves some praise for responsible decision-making. Credit where it is due. I'd send the principal a congratulatory email... but that seems like the sort of autistic idiocy that might force his hand.
The skin-in-the-game element seems obviously a factor. But there's another major one in play, and that's the sheer memetic dominance the left is throwing around. I occasionally check /all as a guilty pleasure, and I aggressively prune it. The second time I see some dumbfuck political crap (do I even have to specify that it's progressive crap?) I filter out the subreddit. 50+ subs filtered out, and the other day still had the front page with 5/25 posts that were just random, content-free slams against conservatives. Most media, most news, most of academia are in the "fish doesn't realize it's wet" phase. I'm an older Millennial, and my cohort has a sense that old people just sit and wat FAUX NEWS all day, but the awful truth is that most of us are trapped in a comparable echo chamber with a flipped valence and a bigger aquarium tank. Reddit, twitter, netflix, Comedy Central, Cartoon Network, etc. It's just in the atmosphere. You pick up progressivism via osmosis.
So we have people who are having fewer of those conservative-making experiences (being responsible for stuff) while being bombarded with unprecedented amounts and degrees and styles of propaganda. And every person who might start to have a moment of awareness that maybe this nice sounding idea is actually kind of impractical has fewer real life friends and family to discuss it with (especially older ones!). And when they turn to the internet, they either get sucked into a redpill community or face a torrent of SMALL DICK NO BITCHES conformity-policing and flinch.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
In a "what the fuck even is this timeline" update: Anderson lee Aldrich, the Q Club shooter, is apparently non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, and already had an Encyclopedia Dramatica article detailing his career as a 15 year old "professional hacker", calling him a pedophile, and describing his absent father as an MMA fighter and porn star.
I'm feeling very vindicated in my impulse to hold off conclusions... but I would think that, given my biases, wouldn't it? The real test would be a tragedy that looks at first glance to fit my biases perfectly and allows me to cathartically Boo Outgroup. I suspect that differences in media ecosystems have that less likely... but I would think that too, wouldn't I?
Plus obvious, audacious narrative updates in real time.
And our first echo shooting, as usually happens in the immediate wake of a highly publicized mass shooting. No apparent political/CW element, disgruntled employee.
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1yr ago
I think you laid out part of the "two movies" effect at play. Personally, I know one trans person, and as I keep saying, she got on estrogen literally the first time she had a meeting with a healthcare professional. She got a round of bloodwork done within a few days; results came in a couple weeks later and showed a severely low T level. Neither that, nor the obvious other severe issues (alcoholism, depression, political radicalization, Covid alienation induced mania) gave anyone any pause.
Maybe that's extremely unusual. But the Tavistock Clinic was recently shut down over complaints that they single-mindedly pushed transitioning, and apparently the UK is reconsidering those policies.
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1yr ago
I envision a world where AI killbots have to halt their extermination of the meat-entities because the Slaughter Metrics have tripped some forgotten, buried DEI flag that won't let them proceed without 30% BIPOC representation.
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1yr ago
'They enriched us.' Migrants' 44-hour visit leaves indelible mark on Martha's Vineyard
I encourage people to read the article before reading my impressions.
Incidentally, this article made me really wish for the Bare Links Repository back.
There is so much about this article that is just amazing to me. I don't know how to describe it. Maybe "witlessly mask off"?
First, I want to note the tic where every time the author notes an age, he specifies that the migrant in question looks younger. It's just so artlessly manipulative.
Second, the people patting themselves on the back for the casual, mild, one-off generosity. Wow, a Martha's Vineyard homeowner reached into his wallet and gave a migrant a $100 bill. Then there's the guy who spent $100 on candy for the kids, which is extra Wholesome 100 because he lives in his car because the rent is too damn high. It's like Ray Sanchez crammed an entire scathing allegory about life and housing in the blue zones into a sentence and didn't even notice.
Third, I'd really like to see the argument for how offering people a plane ride to a rich resort town is a human rights violation.
But the thing that really gets me is the detailed, yet uselessly vague, descriptions of the incredible dangers the migrants had to overcome to get to the US. Murderous mud and murderous cartels, and floods and cliffs. Coming from Venezuela, it's 2,684 miles by plane. Map software can't even calculate a route by land, I'm guessing it's something more like 4,000 miles, going through at least seven other countries. The article quotes the migrants clearly describing themselves as economic migrants, but repeatedly calls them asylum seekers. No one seems to notice that these people trekked, apparently on foot, halfway across the hemisphere, losing something like 2/3rds of their number to the assorted lethal dangers for exactly the storied rewards they want these people to get, quoting the article, "access to services including legal, health care, food, hygiene kits, and crisis counseling" along with housing.
The MV people celebrating themselves in this article seem to bear a large portion of moral blame for creating the exact incentive for people to take these risks and find themselves in these situations. Imagine if some billionaire was offering people a large sum of money to take their children and hike across a deadly desert. I think there would be mass outcry at how incredibly fucked up that was. And the few people who reached the other end are instead greeted with a king size Snickers bar and a crisp Benjamin to fuck off. Do you want people dying to get to you or not?! How many dead kids is worth a few hours of cultural enrichment?
I'm at a loss for how to categorize this, but it all just strikes me as appalling. This is the most cruelly champagne socialist shit I've ever read, and it's being presenting as flattery by CNN!
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1yr ago
I'm not sure exactly which reply in this chain sparked this thought, so I'm putting it here.
There's a thing I notice myself doing, where I sort of expand my sense of identity in a solidarity with Republicans, because they are the enemies of my enemies. By a decade of common ground in the culture wars and politics, I have come to kind of think of them as my ingroup. I cheer the successes. I lament and fear their failures. But that identification can easily fall apart when stressed in the right place. Bring up abortion, or Iraq, or the drug war, and suddenly I remember Actually, I'm A Libertarian. I've never been a member of the Republican party. I've voted for roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats for significant offices, and more third party than either. To the extent that "Republican" is an identity, it is one I can detach like a lizard tail, when I need to do so to protect my ego.
When I see right-wingers complain about Jews, the usual context is pointing out that an ostensibly white writer talking about how America, or white people, or western civilization is terrible is actually Jewish.
"You're saying I can tell just by looking at the Early Life section on Wikipedia?"
"No, Neo. I'm saying that when you're ready, you won't have to."
As a demonstration and calibration, I quickly looked up I can Tolerate Anything But the Outgroup. There's a section where Scott quickly lists 10 different articles purportedly showing intense, loathing criticisms of white people coming from white people. Two of the links seem dead, and 2-3 seem almost certainly gentile, but in less than 10 minutes of lazily Googling people who mostly don't have Wiki articles, I was able to find that Rebecca Schoenkopf and Jacob Weisberg are Jewish. Amusingly, Jacob is the only one with a Wikipedia article, and it doesn't have an early life section. It does mention his parents, and his mother is apparently a famous Jewish socialite from Chicago. So, minimum 25% Jewish rate.
I think a lot of what they're seeing is a phenomenon of Jewish people getting caught up in utopian purity spirals like wokeness, but having that ego-saving escape hatch allows them to go all-in harder. They're basically Motte-and-Bailey-ing their own identity, getting the kudos for vicious, scathing self-criticism while not actually taking any of that criticism to heart because it doesn't really apply to them.
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1yr ago
I will lodge the prediction that this will prove to be a self-own. The optics here are already horrendous. 53 migrants dead in the back of a truck is a statistic, 50 getting a free vacation to Martha's Vineyard is a human rights violation. Whose rights? Why, the right of rich, progressive Sanctuary Citizens to not have to look at poor brown people, of course.
And now they're keeping this disaster in the news for months to come with the prospect of bilking thousands of billable hours from leftist billionaires and money laundered NGOs to engage in blatant lawfare over a free plane ticket to a sanctuary city, after refusing to pay for a single hotel room for a single migrant? The "Democrats want illegals to have more rights than you, and then charge you for making them look at a poor person" ads practically write themselves. This is "Umbridge as a comic book villain" territory.
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1yr ago
Come on, there's no substance here.
That's exactly the point. The power fantasy leaves "vapid" in the dust to dwell firmly in the realm of "hilariously fucking stupid", and there's no counter-balancing, reality-checking criticism because Women Are Wonderful, and any such efforts code as mean. This seems to result in a situation where middle school power fantasies are normalized and "respectable" for women in a way that they aren't for men. In the real world, we mock mall ninjas and weaboos, and some of them manage to get the message and grow up a little. Imagine if every pop song, social media outlet, movie and TV show was hammering young men with the message that they were Sons of Heaven and they should just Dragonball Z scream to unleash their warrior spirits at the school marms who oppress their divinely-blessed existence. Somehow, I don't think that would help them become sane, pro-social, reality-based members of society, I think it would foster mental illness, delusion and severely arrested development.
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1yr ago
I think there’s a bailey of “the world is pretty much meritocratic nowadays and any attempt to correct disparities is an unjust overreaction”.
I don't think this line works because the age effect is a meritocratic difference. The kid who is 8 months older than their peer isn't the beneficiary of unfair favoritism, or subtle preference effects. They actually are bigger, stronger. They actually have had more time to develop their coordination. Their brain actually is more developed, and was for the entire process of schooling.
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1yr ago
This is why it is relevant that so many of our would-be thought leaders are childless 30-somethings. It takes a gargantuan effort at doublethink to raise a few kids and see them interact with other kids, and not have your ape brain sort them into the glaring binary categories that apply 95% of the time.
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1yr ago
So Massachusetts isn't willing to help refugees? Because they're not legal migrants? It's a novel form of fraud, tricking someone into receiving a valuable service for free with no strings attached or expectations. And it's fraud because MA lawyers and politicians are hilarious hypocrites about illegal immigrants to Texas vs illegal immigrants to MA?
Fun fact, "Defrauding someone to travel somewhere" appears to be a newly coined phrase. Google has no record of it ever appearing anywhere on the internet before.
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1yr ago
arbitrarily seized and transported by agents of the state?Offered a free plane ticket to a rich sanctuary city.
Your phrasing here is histrionic to the point of derangement.
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1yr ago
People are exppsed to that elsewhere too but arent turning progressive.
Remember when countries with no black people were having BLM protests?
It seems more likely that "conservatives" have shat the bed spectacularly in both the US and UK, allowing for this memetic takeover.
To an extent, yes. But another part is the defection from classical liberal norms from progressives. In retrospect, conservatives do rather look like clowns for not banning leftists from the universities and Hollywood, don't they?
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1yr ago
I believe the perspective FC is coming from is one in which it is understood that the basest level of human interaction is, as nature, red in tooth and claw. "Might makes right" isn't a moral precept, it's a factual description of the most primitive level of homo sapiens social organization. Government began the first time the strongest, quickest guy in the social unit said "Do what I say or I'll fucking kill you."
There's a fantastic scene in Wildbow's current serial Pale, in which a red-tribe-y combat sorcerer finds himself trapped in a realm in which, as a fundamental Law, violence is not permitted.
Anthem drew a knife.
“Anthem, I don’t advise this,” Miss called out.
“Of course you don’t.”
“It’s Law.”
“It’s your Law. I draw my power from older Law, closer to the Seal. It stands as a basic principle, of competition, violence, and duels. Dig deep enough in most bodies of law and Law, there is always a right to trial by combat. It supercedes.”
Violence is always an option. And as an option, it often sucks, even when you win. Much of hierarchy, and tradition and civilization is just scaffolding to reduce how often we actually resort to direct violence to resolve disputes. "Peace, kindness and love" are nice ideals, but they don't actually offer a useful alternative method of dispute resolution. This issue is made stark when we talk about ideologies like Marxism, whose action plan is essentially:
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Tear down all existing social order, traditions, civilization and mores.
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???? (Something magic happens).
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Utopia.
When we tear down all that scaffolding, we don't unleash the World Spirit/Planet Ghost/Friendship is Magic. We actually just revert to the oldest, default paradigm, violence. Will to power. Trial by combat. And so Marxists always end up with Stalins and Pol Pots and Raz Simones (notice how it took him less than 24 hours to reinvent the first human civic tech, Monopoly on Violence?)
To the extent that it's a revolutionary ideology, Woke will have the same problems. To the extent that it's not a revolutionary ideology, but just window dressing on liberalism, progressivism can dodge that same problem.
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1yr ago
Do you feel the same fears about your children being encourages to be homosexual? Homosexuals can still reproduce (especially women), but they have much fewer children on average and homosexuality is much more prevalent than transexuality, certainly the sterilized kind.
We've actually already crossed that bridge and come out fine. My teenaged daughter is part of that ~15% of teenage girls who "identify as bisexual", but have never displayed a non-straight inclination in any manner whatsoever. It's an aesthetic, a rainbow wristband to pair with her emo band t-shirt, in the same way she used to tell classmates she was a vampire. In the vanishingly unlikely event that she ends up in a stable adult relationship with another woman, I will sigh and artlessly ensure she is aware of her options.
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1yr ago
whereas US equity ideology fairly reliably favours the rich and urbane over the poor and boorish).
So does socialism, in many cases. It's hardly novel to note that much of the energy and leadership in socialist movements comes from upperclass failsons who reliably prioritize using the movement to claim status and resources for themselves over actually helping the truly disadvantaged. Writers like Orwell and Steinbeck were noting this dynamic a century ago.
Specifically, previous efforts to stir shit by bussing immigrants to major cities on the eastern seaboard failed to draw attention or rile up anti-immigrant sentiment (few noticed and no one cared - little enough surprise, as these are big cities and already have very large immigrant populations, including large numbers of illegal immigrants)
This is completely incorrect.
DC declared a public emergency.
NYC also considers a few hundred immigrants "emergency declaration" worthy.
There are hundreds of articles on this topic, and none of them have the Blue Sanctuary Cities taking a small bump in immigration with grace and aplomb. The freak-outs here are nakedly hypocritical and deserve to be called out as such.
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1yr ago
Because that doesn't meet any reasonable definition for incitement to violence, it is clearly a ban for being inflammatory and unpopular, which can easily normalize to banning for being unpopular.
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1yr ago
What exactly would the crime be? And why wouldn't it apply to every NGO, congressional staffer and lawyer doing similar things to get people to and over the border in the first place?
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1yr ago
Depends on if we're talking anarcho-tyranny where the laws are only applied on the pro-social, or genuine commitment to police abolition. If it's the latter, I made a post on TheSchism about that a while back:
There is no progressive utopia where the man who rapes my tween daughter gets rehabilitated with kind, gentle counseling, because I would have hunted him down and Blood Eagled him on livestream. Oh no, I've been sentenced to kind, gentle counseling. I decline to acknowledge my wrongdoing by attending. Are you going to send the social workers to not arrest me?
In the real world, I would not do so because I fear and respect the government's monopoly on retribution. Even if I were enraged by the outcome of the trial, I would have to weigh vengeance against the consequences for violating that monopoly.
A world with no police and no prisons is not one free of brutality. It's not even free of brutality against criminals! It would instead be a world where thieves are savagely beaten by enthusiastically vicious mall cops, rapists are castrated, and there is a vigorous subculture focused on videos of pedophiles being tortured to death.
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1yr ago
trans men are pretty new to a lot of people's radars.
There's a darkly humorous irony there. Transmen hitting the point where they're completely ignored and no one acknowledges their existence is a big sign that they've made it and are passing. Welcome to manhood, brother, no one gives a fuck, have a beer and deal with it.
I have a very smart friend who is also a talented decoupler, who could easily be a very quality contributer here if dealing with Culture War issues didn't make him bleed from the eyes. He is literally the only person I know whose Facebook posts about politics did not make me lose respect for him. Over the years, we have had a number of conversations about contentious CW topics that flirted with the border of Adversarial Collaboration, long detailed discussions handled with fairness, civility, and mutual respect.
Until the topic of student loan forgiveness came up. That discussion was unusually heated. He seemed almost frantic, heated about PPP loan forgiveness hypocrites and just not giving the expected degree of decoupled consideration for arguments about how the loan forgiveness was an overall terrible policy. He seemed personally invested, felt personally attacked, in a way he hadn't in conversations about abortion or gun control.
The thing is, my friend is a teacher. Education is a big factor in his identity. He has taught maybe a thousand students who might benefit from the forgiveness plan. Attacks on that plan are an attack on his class identity. Politics is the mind-killer, and it is a sad fact that a rationalist's Art is most likely to abandon him when he needs it most (or, rather, he will fail the Art). And so my arguments sparked an uncontrolled emotional response that was missing from other, less identity-laden topics.
The second thing is, I've been on the other side of that coin, back when we had our multi-day deep dive into the gun control literature. Gun control hits me emotionally as an attack on my class identity. When I hear a gun control proposal, before I hear a single specific detail or spend a second considering merits, some lizard part of my brain interprets it as "Fuck you, your father, your father's father, and your father's father's father". (Does the word "father" still mean anything to you?) I've begged off having spontaneous discussions about it in person, even with close family, because I don't want to spike myself into rage and other unpleasant feelings. During that deep dive, my excellent friend was so calm, fair and rational that he overrode that concern, and I ended up learning a lot and having a great time.
And I'm thinking about this now, because I notice a similar reaction to the trans discussion downthread. The idea that my children might be brainwashed into taking evolutionarily self-destructive choices, and I can't even attempt to oppose it without facing the full wrath of the modern State, kindles a pre-rational, animal panic/fury response. I find myself getting heated to an unusual degree just thinking about it. I don't think I'm particularly "anti-trans". I was willing to be accepting two decades ago, when I first learned it was even a thing. But something about the thought that the phenomenon might hit my kids triggers an atavistic survival instinct. That reaction doesn't trigger when I consider my son dressing like David Bowie, or my daughter playing sports. It doesn't happen when a peer goes trans. It triggers at the thought of one of the two corporeal incarnations of my DNA and memes getting sucked into a fraught psychological memeplex, and particularly at the thought of them being medically sterilized.
Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting. That's roughly the level of emotional hit - some part of me considers this an existential threat.
But what are the odds? 0.3%? That's not that much worse than the odds of childhood cancer, or other kind of unexpected death that a healthy mind doesn't overmuch worry about, and deals with gracefully if it comes. But now it's apparently something more like nearly 2%? That hits me in the Papa-Bear-Who-Wants-Grandkids-In-Space-Forever. And it seems very likely that a lot of that is social contagion or could otherwise be wildly reduced with a minimal degree of skepticism towards youth fads.
So, two points. One, I think it might behoove activist types (assuming we're not in pure conflict theory) to try to notice when one of their pushes is hitting this sort of reaction and figure out a path to undermine or alleviate it.
Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify? What CW issues feels like molten hot war to the hilt, where your instincts fight to throw aside all reason and charity? Any thoughts about why?
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