MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
the line between extremely effeminate gay men who regularly exist in a form of light drag (eg. makeup influencers like James Charles) and HSTS transwomen can be blurry.
This is a big-picture issue worthy of an effortpost, but the line is fully blurred in many cultures. The pro-trans lobby has spent a lot of time and effort looking for examples of culturally normative trans identities in non-Western cultures, and they have found quite a few - kathoeys in Thailand, hijras in India, what used to be called berdache but are now lumped in the broader label of two-spirit in many (but by no means all) Native American tribes. The malakoi who Paul condemns in 1 Corinthians were probably a similar phenomenon in the Hellenistic Greek culture of the eastern Roman Empire. But these aren't examples of woke-Western choose-your-own-gender - they are specific "third genders" with just as restrictive rules as the two main genders. And they are all basically the same third gender - effeminate androphilic AMABs who are (from a secular perspective) licit sex partners for straight men - equivalent to Blanchards HSTS.
Of course, the fact that this group exists and is regularised in a middle-income country like Thailand makes it possible to poll them. And what we find out is that "Are kathoeys really women?" simply doesn't matter that much to the people it affects. And we see the same thing with African-American gay culture before it assimilates to white gay culture - was Marsha Johnson really a trans woman, or was she a drag queen? Very obviously, she didn't care.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The obvious problem is that boys will ultimately reject the role models given by the school whether fictional or real or other children. Boys want to become men and they have a strong bias against boys or man-babies who are not real men. And this is why they aren’t gravitating to liberal adult male role models (and the boys who will be selected for the program) — they are not anything like a man.
I profoundly disagree with this statement as written, but I suspect this is not a real disagreement. Boys don't want men as role models - they want older boys (edging into young men as they get older), who they perceive as manly. This is based on my experience of being a boy, teaching boys, and being a father of boys. Someone who is more than 10 years older than me is a poor role model for that reason alone (this applies less to historical and public figures whose youth is well-documented - in that case your role model can be the Great Man when he was younger). The institutions which are best at turning boys into men (traditional boys' schools and the military) work on this principle.
The role of man is pretty specific: self-possessed, strong both physically and mentally, responsible, self-confident, a leader, and so on.
All of this is helpful at the margins, but in a healthy male-dominated community, prowess is necessary and sufficient. Boys and young men respect people who are good at something they value. A huge part of the role of the teachers (and particularly the younger teachers who are the right age to be role models to the older boys) at a traditional boys' school is to maintain a culture that values the right things - academics, athletics, fieldcraft (developed through the cadet corps or through adventurous school trips), male-coded fine arts, effective public speaking. Sensitive new-age guys and nerds who were high status in my school included the virtuoso solo cellist in the school orchestra, an internationally competitive fencer, two geniuses who won national competitions in their subjects, and the guy who repaired hi-fi equipment to a professional standard using the school workshop.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
8mo ago
Reading the whole brochure as a Londoner, the most interesting thing is just how much of a personality cult the Greater London Authority is trying to present itself as. The name "Greater London Authority" is only used on internal-facing documents - to the public, the brand is "Mayor of London", and the mayor is photographed at every opportunity while his staff and other politicians are unpersoned. The key aim of the brand guidelines is that GLA publications should create the impression that Sadiq Khan is solving every crime and fixing every pothole himself, or at least hands-on supervising the front-line workers who are. Unfortunately, I think this was the intention of London's Scottish colonial rulers when they set up the GLA - I have heard lots of serious people saying that the secret to fixing local democracy (i.e. getting voters to vote on local issues) is to personalise it. And the previous mayors were Ken Livingstone and Boris Johnson, so Khan has to do a lot of PR-mediated cult of personality stuff to compete with their media personas.
Specifically on the race issue, there are plenty of pictures where Khan is the only non-white person in shot held up as good examples, so I don't think the intended message is "fewer white faces". Interestingly, a lot of the white faces in the examples are police - there are good reasons given the politics of policing in London why if I were the Mayor, I would choose my PR shots to make the Metropolitan Police look more diverse than they are, but showing the police as almost-all-white doesn't bother Khan's PR team. I do worry that someone seems to think that the only person in London over the age of 50 is the Mayor.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
I sometimes wonder if Saddam Hussein was aware there were no WMDs in Iraq - up to the point where resolution 1441 passes the UNSC, he acts like a man who has WMDs and expects to lose power if he gives them up.
I also think that W would have received a sufficient amount of stovepiped intelligence to convince anyone who doesn't start out with the prior that the entire US national security elite are lying liars that there were WMDs in Iraq. Apart from the fact that the national security establishment are lying liars who knew what the White House wanted to hear and were happy to provide it, Cheyney and Rumsfeld were exceptionally able DC power players, partially controlled the flow of intelligence to the Oval Office, and wanted the war even more than Bush.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11mo ago
I call it the Unculture. This originally came from an article about culture shock in the launch issue of Monocle magazine (incidentally an utterly Unculture rag) which complained about the "global unculture of international chain hotels and airport business lounges". It works because the people who live in the Unculture believe (falsely) that they don't have a culture (which they express as "white people don't have culture") because they see "culture" as funky ethnic foods and costumes, not Shakespeare/Rembrandt/Mozart/etc. My wife also sees it is a pun on the Culture in Iain M Banks' Culture novels, which was intended as a techno-utopia but reads as a dystopia to people who don't live in the Unculture.
On this site, the most usual term is "Blue Tribe" per Scott Alexander's I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, but that only really works in the US culture, and globohomo/Unculture is (as it's name suggests) global
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
This thread has been hugely educational about how non-idiots see race relations in America. Thank you to KMC and rallycar-jepsen for having an incredibly polite conversation about an incredibly fraught topic, and to everyone on the Motte for creating a community where they feel safe to have it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
This worked for Cornel West at Harvard (or at least when Larry Summers did call him out for not doing his job, it was Summers who was fired and not West). I don't see why anyone should be surprised that it worked for Kendi.
I suppose you can argue that Cornel West did pretend to do his job.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
The main thrust of American policy regarding Russia since the end of the Cold War has been to keep Western Europe in line.
Not quite - there are two conflicting goals. America wants a stronger Europe so that they don't have to bear as much of the burden of defending Western civilisation (a slightly silly but clear example - America was annoyed that Europe couldn't police its own back yard in the former Yugoslavia) but at the same time they don't want a Europe that is strong and united enough that it can act in a co-ordinated way to oppose American interests.
Meanwhile this all looks like nothing but roses for China
I agree with you that this is all a net positive for China (yes their ally is being humiliated, but Russia's ability to give China what China wants is unaffected, and Russia's ability to say no to china is reduced). But there are two new pieces of information that are negative for China.
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Western weapons actually work when used in anger. This was not entirely obvious given how long it had been since the last non-COIN war.
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The West's willingness to actually do things to honour a soft security guarantee is stronger than expected. If China attacks Taiwan and fails to achieve a quick Blitzkrieg victory they have to assume that Taiwan will get even more western help than Ukraine did (because Taiwan is more valuable strategically), that nuclear threats won't stop the West helping Taiwan, and that minor economic disruption isn't going to force a change in policy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
These threads tend to be risk assessments, with some people thinking there is a serious risk of nuclear exchange, and some people seeming to discount that risk.
I'm curious about what kind of risk assessment people typically engage in.
I am also a professional risk manager, and trying to model what people are thinking, I think the big difference is not in our assessment of the existential risk from Russia going nuclear. It is in our assessment of the potential risk from conceding to Russian nuclear blackmail.
Given that Russia has chosen to wage a war of unprovoked aggression under the umbrella of nuclear blackmail, the civilised world has two fundamental options (I am deliberately oversimplifying here):
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Call Russia's bluff by credibly threatening serious consequences if Russia tries to use nuclear weapons to win the war in Ukraine. This creates the existential risk that Russia is not in fact bluffing, that Russia treats the serious consequences as nuclear escalation leading to armageddon.
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Fold, and tell Russia (and China and any other future barbarian nuclear powers) that they can use nuclear blackmail to get whatever they want (up to and including NATO's blessing to reinvade other countries they have just been driven out of after launching an unprovoked war of aggression and losing conventionally). As well as the immediate cost to Ukraine and Ukrainians, this aggravates two existential risks:
a) Loss of credibility Neville Chamberlain style leading to an increased risk of nuclear armageddon due to a future miscalculation.
b) Massive nuclear proliferation in a world where the ground rules no longer include "nuclear states do not invade their non-nuclear neighbours under the umbrella of nuclear blackmail" the way they did in the Cold War (remember that Truman sacked MacArthur for threatening nuclear escalation against North Korea). If Russia gets enough of Ukraine (and the four provinces they have just purported to annex counts) then acquiring nukes yesterday is a matter of basic survival for countries like Poland and Vietnam (and arguably Iran and Saudi Arabia). And if every medium sized country has nukes then the armageddon risks of both a Cuban Missile Crisis and a Stanislav Petrov event increase by orders of magnitude.
As far as I can see, we all agree that risk 1 is a low-probability high-impact risk we would prefer not to take. Some of us thing risk 2 is low-probability low-impact because Russia should make only reasonable demands on Ukraine and then go home. Others (including me) think that risk 2 is a high-probability high-impact risk because massive nuclear proliferation is a racing certainty if nuclear blackmail works. And some people seem to think that there is a low-probability high-impact risk that Russia is going to drive straight to the Rhine once we tell them that we won't resist if they say nuclear boo.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
That would be bride-price, not dowry. More than token bride-price is normally a feature of polygynous societies where demand for brides exceeds supply - the market value of a wife in a Malthusian society with a monogamy norm is negative (dowry being a payment from the bride's parents to the groom, or in India his parents) because there are more women than men who can support a wife.
In other words, in our society, women entering marriage with debt is stupid.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
7mo ago
I think support for Ukraine is more of a pro/anti-establishment issue than a left-right one. The anti-establishment left (Chomsky, Greenwald, Corbyn etc.) are at best lukewarm in their support for Ukraine and more normally both-sidesist. AOC got in trouble with her hard-left supporters for supporting Ukraine - arguably part of the process where here anti-establishment card is heading for early expiration. The small number of pro-establishment Republicans who are not afraid of a MAGA backlash (e.g. senators McConnell and Graham) and the various centre-right commentators who went NeverTrump in 2016 are fairly strongly pro-Ukraine.
As various people have pointed out in the thread, the pro vs anti establishment lineup on Ukraine is consistent with the pro vs anti establishment lineup on every other foreign policy issue going back to the New Deal era - the establishment supports US hegemony and the "rules-based international order", which in this case means that Putin must lose. The moderate anti-establishment view is that trying to maintain hegemony wastes resources which could be spent domestically and provokes unnecessary conflict. The rabid anti-establishment view is open support for America's rivals on enemy-of-my-enemy grounds.
The main reason it has become partisan because the anti-establishment right has crushed the pro-establishment in intra-right political battles since 2016, and the pro-establishment left has been dominant in intra-left battles since Biden won the primary in 2020. So pro-establishment vs anti-establishment can now look sufficiently like left vs right to trigger a Blue vs Red happy tribal death spiral - the same thing happened with COVID-19 vaccines despite Donald Trump's attempts to promote them as a Trump administration success story. The factions lined up the same way over the Iraq war (Bush/Clinton in favour, Buchanan/Chomsky against) but with the opposite partisan valance because the anti-establishment left had a megaphone and the anti-establishment right did not.
There are also moron-in-a-hurry culture war factors (Putin has been marketing Russia as white Christian country with strong gender roles and no queers for a long time) and dodgy domestic politics reasons (Russia helped Trump with opposition research in 2016, Ukraine refused to in 2019), but I think the pro vs anti establishment angle is a necessary and sufficient condition for support to Ukraine to be partisan in today's climate.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
11mo ago
If the Mongols felt that it was deserved, they would happily massacre a six-figure number of people after sacking a city (700,000 in Merv, which was the biggest single Mongol massacre). The high-end estimates of the total death toll of the Mongol conquests (military deaths, massacres, and war-related famines) are about half the population of the conquered territory, which is notably worse than Hitler. The macro-demographic impacts of the Mongol conquests can be detected in Arctic ice cores. Once you remember that the Holocaust was mostly the killing of conquered people (the German Jews were encouraged to emigrate, and the majority who did survived), I think you can see the industrialisation of it as the application of modern technology to the old problem of carrying out a wartime massacre.
I think Genghis Khan would have considered the Holocaust militarily stupid, but not ethically fucked up.
Mass murder is as old as humanity, we can wrap our heads around a conqueror setting our cities on fire, looting our treasure, and basking in the lamentations of our women ...
I deliberately put Alexander the Great in my post to make the point that at some point in the past "Conquer the World and kill everyone who resists" was considered OK if it was our guy doing it. But that had ceased to be the case after WW1, and arguably earlier than that. The idea that the 19th-century British Empire required a better moral justification than the sheer rapacity used to justify the 18th-century one seems to have been held pretty universally by the Victorians.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
It isn't an "elite culture" - it is an international business culture. It is what Scott Alexander calls "universal culture" and what the alt-right calls "globohomo". It isn't just an elite (although it skews whiter and wealthier than the indigenous cultures who host it) - it stretches all the way down the SES hierarchy to the masked microphone girl and the baristas at your local indie coffee house. Its capital is distributed between the business class cabins of the airliners flying between New York and London, and the people who fly in them call the North Atlantic the "Pond" and treat it as narrower than the Hudson or the M25 median barrier. When my work situation improves, I am planning an effortpost on this point.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
It does not mean they will allow an Eastern European country to be against gay marriage.
It looks to me as though most Eastern European countries are in fact against gay marriage. The EU has no problem with this as long as allow gay-married EU citizens to move freely through the EU. The European Court of Human Rights (which is not an EU body) has said that countries which grant rights to unmarried cohabiting straight couples (either automatically or through some kind of registered civil partnership) should extend them to unmarried cohabiting gay couples, but has explicitly not required gay marriage.
The EU is not run by American lefties.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
I was doing my PhD back when the "Science Wars" (i.e. the application to the sciences of the 1990's era PC which had completely taken over most non-econ social sciences and a substantial minority of the humanities) were living memory. The pushback from professional physicists was organised, effective, and in the case of the Sokal hoax, hilarious. The biological establishment ended up getting involved in a classic Illuminati megaturn, where Big Pharma used the Orbital Mind Control Lasers to turn the Revolutionary Communist Party into a Libertarian-aligned card, giving them a +4 bonus to take control over it. They then used the Revolutionary Communist Party to take control of the Science Communicators.
I am out of academia now, but my impression is that this time round:
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The attack is less dangerous - the 1990's science warriors wanted to demolish physics' claim to intellectual authority whereas the 2010's wokists just want us to take on a few token diversity hires. And this is something physics is very used to dealing with - the rows between physicists and women-in-STEM advocates over the number of women in physics are an ongoing nuisance that never went away even during the 2000's lull in the culture war.
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The pushback, to the extent there is one, is much quieter. I can't tell whether or not this is because the threat is perceived as less dangerous, or because in today's campus climate it is not possible to organise against PC crap.
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The response of working physicists to this sort of thing is basically "Bend over here it comes again" - it is annoying, but it doesn't stop you doing science the way having your lab burned down by anti-GMO protesters did.
History class was life-changing for me, so I feel duty bound to defend it. Why? Because it is where I learned to write. And in my school, it was the only subject apart from English where I could have learned to write. This Paul Graham essay is basically an attack on the idea of teaching writing entirely by getting kids to write about English literature, and I agree with it.
Why is history a good class to teach analytical/argumentative writing in. Firstly, because it isn't bullshit (in the Harry Frankfurt sense). There have been times and places where the history curriculum was full of lies, but it is only full of bullshit in late-stage totalitarian regimes. Literary criticism, on the other hand... This means that the teacher can insist on a distinction between valid and invalid arguments, and between good and bad use of evidence. Secondly, history is traditionally an "essay subject" so the teachers have the skills required to teach writing, which (say) geography teachers generally don't. Thirdly, the skills you need to "do history" at a high school level - i.e. assessment of documentary sources and developing a functional understanding of a complex sequence of events - can be tested through essay-writing (a pop quiz on dates and facts is a useful formative assessment, but the final summative assessment is all essays), whereas even if they include essay questions a geography exam is mostly mapwork and a physics exam (at least at high school level) is mostly demonstrating understanding by working out the correct formula to apply to a problem and plugging numbers into it.
You can learn to write in school, and it is a transferrable skill. In fact, it is one of the few transferrable skills you can teach (to the minority of kids who are able and willing to learn) in school at all. For me, it was history class where I did - and I strongly suspect that I am not the only one.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
I am not a fluent AmE speaker, but my understanding is that "douchebag" refers to a generally obnoxious person with a side order of toxic masculinity, whereas "wanker" refers to a generally obnoxious person with a side order of pretentious self-centredness. I would say that Elon Musk is a wanker but not a douchebag, and that Donald Trump is a douchebag but not much of a wanker.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
But energy policies - the bulwark of prosperity, are absolute shambles. Shale gas is not exploited at all. Nuclear is barely supported.
This isn't a statement that things don't work in the EU. It is a not-yet-fulfilled prediction that they will cease to work in the future - to be precise a prediction that they will cease to work in the future in wartime, due to enemy action. As of October 2022, heat and electricity are still available at the push of a button in the EU, and are marginally more reliable than in the US.
Seriously, the key marker of a first world country is that a lot of things essential to civilised life just work in much that same way that MacOS just worked at a time when Windoze didn't. The EU absolutely passes this test - that is what Borrell is talking about. As you point out, basic public safety just works in Europe to a greater extent than the US (or at least is perceived to by both Americans and Europeans - I am aware that US crime is lower than most people think it is). So does access to healthcare. So does urban transport. On the flip side, the only thing I can think of that just works in America but not Europe is clothes driers (and I lived and worked in America for three months - I have some experience). All these things also work in rich Asian countries, but Borrell is almost certainly forgetting they exist, as most European and American pundits do when engaging in civilisational blowhardery.
The US is an extremely successful society, but how that manifests is that the middle class have moar - bigger houses, bigger cars, larger portion sizes etc. It isn't that the US delivers a first world experience that other medium-high income countries can't.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
29d ago
Scotland also has an abundance of natural resources and low population density. The SNPs two-faced messaging of "Taking back the North Sea Oil from the thieving English will allow an independent Scotland to have Scandinavian public services with British taxes" and "Independent Scotland will be a green superpower" is darkly amusing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
5mo ago
Not that I care about fertility itself - the only problem as far as I am concerned is that a society with extremely low fertility might eventually be outcompeted by societies with higher ones.
Low fertility can destroy Western civilization through population aging as well. The idea that democracy is unworkable because the poor will vote to eat the rich turned out not to be true in practice, but the old voting to eat the young seems to be a live issue.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
6mo ago
The latter, obviously. Last time I was in Australia the attitude I was picking up from young educated Australians was "This is obviously a racket, and someone who isn't Pauline Hanson needs to sort it out before she gets a chance to." The cultural display put on for us included a bunch of whitefellas (presumably with the requisite blood quantum - I didn't check) performing traditional Aboriginal dance in a way which was cringe for everyone involved, although I assume the fake abos were getting paid.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
Several British MP's who wrote memoirs said that party whips blackmailing MP's not to vote against the leadership was common. This page is a rare on-the-record discussion of what was in whips' black books of kompromat on their own MPs.
I am not aware of any British MP publically saying "this named whip blackmailed me on this vote".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
If Donald Trump was aggressively censoring media comparing him to an Orange Cheeto, I would be calling him The Orange Cheeto-in-Chief at every safe opportunity.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
I interned in finance at Ford. The dirty secret is that nearly-new sales through franchised dealerships are a key part of the business model (effectively as a form of price discrimination between the idiots who happily new prices and the price-sensitive customers who want a new-car quality car but without paying the premium), so a dealer is relatively happy to repo that car in a way a bank isn't. So they care less about creditworthiness as long as you have a down payment that covers the difference between the "new" and "nearly new" valuations.
I don't think the events we are seeing now change the basic structure of US (or Anglosphere more generally) opinion on Israel-Palestine:
With a Democrat in the White House, the pro-establishment left controls the government. If support for Israel on the pro-establishment left was weakening, we would see a change in government policy. What we actually see is the bog standard pro-establishment line on Israel since before Oslo - give them everything they ask for (modulo aid being blocked in Congress) while gently pointing out that American Jewry would prefer a more secular Israel, and that Israel could provide its allies with political cover by pretending to support a two-state solution at some unspecified future date.
Or it suggests that the pro-establishment left isn't willing to engage in a public intra-left slap-fight in an election year when they can just support Israel quietly.
Conventional wisdom in British politics is that the median voter hates the anti-establishment left sufficiently that a Labour leader can only win an election if he is visibly fighting against his own base. (This is most obvious viz-a-viz Blair, but the conventional wisdom dates back to the Foot era). Every Labour Prime Minister except Atlee is a hate figure on the activist left.
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