TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
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User ID: 616
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Copying over @RenOS's post from the old thread because I want to talk about it:
Let’s assume you’re a car mechanic. You love your job, even though it is dirty, hot and physically straining. You go through a bookshop, and stumble over one book in particular: “Why being a car mechanic is great”. It explains the importance of the job for society, it talks about the perks, and so on. You look up the guy who wrote it and yep, he runs a car shop. You buy the book and recommend it to many of your friends, maybe even some teens who might consider the path.
Fast forward, the writer is on some talkshow. Somebody asks him how he handles all the grease. He reacts, uh no, of course he doesn’t get greasy, that’s his staff. He just really likes talking with customers. Maybe he does one car once in a while, if the work isn’t too hard and the car is really nice.
I can’t help but think this after reading Scott’s latest book review of “Selfish reasons to have more kids”. No, we don’t have nannies and housekeepers. In fact, almost nobody we know has them. Some have a cleaning lady coming … once per week, for an hour or so. Tbh, this significantly lowered my opinion of both Scott and Caplan. If you want a vision of a more fertile, sustainable future for the general population, it should not involve having your own personal staff. Two hours is nothing.
And I find this especially frustrating since I think it’s really not necessary; Yes having small kids is really exhausting - after putting the kids to bed around 8-9, my personal routine is to clean the house for two hours until 10-11 every day, and then directly go to bed with maybe an audiobook on (but often I’m too tired for even that, and enjoy falling to sleep directly) - but it’s doable, and the older the kids are, the less work they are, at least in terms of man-hours. The worst is usually over after around 3 yo. And the time before that in the afternoon can be a lot of fun.
At least for me, one of the biggest draws of kids is that it’s, to use poetic terms, “a glimpse of the infinite” that is available for everyone. Everyone wants to leave something behind, political activism is sold on making a change, careers are sold on becoming a (girl-)boss managing others. Yet, the perceptive (or, less charitably, those capable of basic arithmetic) will notice that only a tiny sliver of the population can ever cause the kind of innovation that really changes culture, or who can come into positions of substantial power over others.
Kids, however, everyone can have them. And they really are their own little person (especially my stubborn little bastards). And they will have kids as well, who will also carry forward some part of yourself. I’m not just talking genetics here, though that is a large part, the same will go for how you raise them. Unless you leave that to the nannies, I guess, but that’s your own fault.
I wouldn’t have written this since it’s mostly venting tbh, but I’ve seen some here mentioning wanting to discuss it, so I thought may as well start. What do you think?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Absolutely! She actually has a section describing some of the arguments she's dealt with, and good Lord it sounds awful:
Imagine every time you started or ended a relationship, you had to establish every social norm from scratch.
Is it OK for partner to have sex with your best friend?
Is it OK to kiss somebody else in front of your partner?
What about them having sex in your bed when you're out of town?
Is it OK to have sex with another person then tell your partner the details?
Is your partner allowed to bring his lover to Christmas with your family? What about your kid’s birthdays?
If your partner’s lover is having a mental health breakdown, is it OK for your partner to go comfort her when it’s your day with him?
The list is endless, and so will your arguments about it.
I especially don't see how you can raise kids in a poly relationship, without having all sorts of humongous issues and problems. With both parents typically needing to work nowadays, having kids is already extremely demanding on a family's time. Add in other relationships on top of that, and it basically seems like a non-starter.
I agree with the net negative on society, for another reason though - polyamory being seen as even slightly social acceptable destabilizes every monogamous relationship. Now monogamous people have endless thoughts and temptations about "oh maybe we should be poly" which fractures and already crumbling marriage rate. It really is just... bad, in my view.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
It seems lately that within the rationalist / post-rationalist diaspora on twitter and elsewhere, polyamory is starting to come into the crosshairs. I've seen a few 'big' accounts in the tpot space come out against polyamory, but the biggest one has to be the recent post that Kat Woods put on the Slate Star Codex subreddit, Why I think polyamory is net negative for most people who try it.
I wont summarize the whole article, but recommend you go read it. The TL;DR is:
- Most people cannot reduce jealousy much or at all
- It fundamentally causes way more drama because of strong emotions, jealousy, no default norms to fall back to, and there being exponentially more surface area for conflict
- For a small minority of people, it makes them happier, and those are the people who tend to stick with it and write the books on it, creating a distorted view for newcomers.
Also, a rather hilarious quote from the middle:
When your partner starts dating a new person, that person can’t just have drama with your partner. They can have drama with you. And your partner can have drama with their other partner.
It gets complicated fast.
I remember once I had drama caused by my boyfriend’s wife’s boyfriend’s girlfriend’s girlfriend (my meta-meta-meta-metamour)
In general, I think this is a continuation of the vibe shift against social experimentation within the rationalist communities, trying to push them back a bit more towards 'normal' social standards. It has been happening for quite a while, and I'm not surprised it continues to happen. My basic view is that while the experimentation and willingness to shrug off societal norms led to a lot of fascinating and good new ideas within rationalist groups, unfortunately, as always happens with these sorts of things, issues arose that reminded people why these ideas were fringe in the first place.
For those not steeped in rationalist lore, there have been many 'cult-like' groups that have hurt people arising in the rationalist and especially EA space. Some of the early and notable ones were Ziz, the whole Leverage fiasco, and then of course later on you have the highest profile issue with SBF. But these are just the most notable and even news worthy. On top of these there are dozens, probably hundreds, of smaller scale dramas that have played out in day to day life, similar to what Kat talked about above.
I actually think her point about drama scaling with more surface area in polyamory to be quite salient here. In general one of the purposes of societal norms and rules is to make sure everyone knows how they and others are supposed to act, so that arguments over constraints and less annoying and difficult. When you throw out major parts of societal norms, things get complicated very quickly.
Of course the whole polyamory issue ties into the broader culture war in many ways - notably the push back we've seen against wokeism, and the radical left more generally. I think overall the appetite people have for radically changing social norms has shrunk dramatically over the last few years. Sadly, I am not sure that necessarily means we'll go back to a healthy, stable balance. Looking at the people on the conservative side, the loudest champions of a traditional moral order seem to be grifters, or at least hypocrites where they say one thing, and do another in their personal lives.
That being said, I am hopeful that the uneasy alliance between the new conservative, Trumpian movement and traditional Christians is finally fracturing. To bring in another CW point, Trump recently posted an AI generated image of himself as the Pope. This understandably pissed off a lot of Christians, and led to them ending their support for Trump's antics. (I happen to be one of them.)
To which his response is, basically, "why can't you take a joke?"
Anyway, I am curious to see where all these social norms shake out, especially with regards to relationships and dating.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Resurfacing another old comment from @functor about Conservatism as anti-ideology. I think it's interesting to reflect back on now that we're in Trump 2.0:
Keith woods says it better than me
Conservatism as Anti-Ideology
There was much debate online recently over the political beliefs of country music singer Oliver Anthony. Anthony captured the hearts of conservatives with his “Rich Men North of Richmond”, which took aim at out of touch fatcat Yankees who have abandoned people like him. At first there was no question to conservatives, Anthony was definitely one of them. After all, he railed against welfare queens, taxes, and complained about elites not relating to regular folk. Anthony did alienate some of his newfound following when an interview of him appeared where he affirmed the “diversity is our strength” mantra. Then the first question at the first of this years Republican Party primary debates was the hosts asking the field for their interpretation of Athony’s masterpiece, to which an indignant Mr. Anthony then responded with derision for the entire field, reminding Republican partisans that these politicians were actually part of the elite he was singing about.
Still, most conservatives are not in any doubt that Oliver Anthony is one of them, and I think they’re correct. The fact that he is almost indistinguishable in his rhetoric from a Berniebro Democrat is a feature, not a bug. Neither is it a problem that the message in his song seemed inconsistent - targeting rich capitalists as the source of his problems in the same song that he complained about taxation and welfare spending. Conservatism in recent years has lost any positive content, it is now best understood as an anti-ideology, a vague, paranoid and inconsistent critique of a nebulous “elite”, the only point of which is to spread a general mistrust in whoever happens to be in power. ... Modern conservatism in the English speaking world developed out of the cadre of conservatives who formed the National Review in 1955, led by William F. Buckley. Buckley believed he had found a program to unite the two camps who dominated the right, but had been up to that point adversarial: the Burkean conservatives, led by figureheads like Russell Kirk, and the increasingly expanding camp of libertarians, who had been influenced by works like Friedrich Hayeks The Road to Serfdom. The program that would unite them was the “fusionism” of Frank Meyer, a German-Jewish immigrant to the United States who himself abandoned communism after reading Hayek’s work while serving in the US Army. Frank S. Meyer: The Fusionist as Libertarian | Mises Institute .... Since at least the 2000s, the conservatism of Reagan and Thatcher has been in retreat, while it found a resurgence with the Tea Party program during the Obama administration, this trend was swept aside by the muscular populism of Donald Trump. Since then, conservatism has lost any vestiges of whatever positive content it had remaining. Free market economics are still central to the establishment GOP politicians, but many conservatives now sound like economic populists, seeing rich capitalists as part of the same elite class as liberal politicians. While many conservatives still stand firm on abortion, there is little else in the way of the social conservatism that used to define the right: Trump was the most pro-gay US President in history, and modern conservatives are all too happy to embrace their own, based versions of “trans women” like Blair White if they affirm them back. Alex Jones asks Blaire White if "the chemicals" made her trans | Media Matters for America -... So what’s left? Well, there’s definitely a strong belief that the elites are evil - ridiculously, cartoonishly evil, to the point that they poison the water and the skies, intentionally derail trains, and start wars just to make common people suffer. There is also a strong cynicism about politics and idealism generally, not only is the conservative anti-ideological, but they are convinced everyone else is too, and that people that profess to believe in leftist ideals like egalitarianism are just cynics who don’t really believe it. As saimleuch, conservatives will often critique leftists for being inconsistent anti-racists or say things like their affirmation of trans rights is rooted in a hatred of women. Oliver Anthony engaged in some of this on his recent appearance on Joe Rogan. Rogan pointed out that Democrats in the early 90s “sounded like Nazis”, Oliver Anthony recognised the argument and immediately pointed out that Democrats like Hillary and Obama didn’t even support gay marriage in the 2000s! .. It is of course an eternal source of frustration to people on the radical right that conservatives attack the left by holding them to the moral standard the left itself has established, thus enforcing the leftist moral framework on the whole political spectrum. This seems obviously counter-productive, until you realise there is no alternative program the conservatives are advancing anyway - all that matters is getting people to share the same sense of cynicism and mistrust of power, so an accusation of racism or homophobia works as well as anything else.
https://keithwoodspub.substack.com/p/conservatism-as-anti-ideology
Conservatism lacks ideology, vision and a moral compass. At this point it is just angry ranting against cartoon vilians who are satanically evil. There is little systemic analysis instead there is an over emphasis of conspiracies. If the populist conservatives took power, they would be incapable of wielding it since their policies lack depth beyond SJWs bad but trans people with MAGA hats good. Conservatives are too negative, their entire focus is on what they dislike. Rich people bad, welfare queens bad, Klaus Schwab bad but what is good?
My life sucks, boo out group isn't really lyrics that inspire or offer novel insights. It isn't surprising that the anglosphere right has greater problems attracting young people than the right in the rest of the west. AfD, Sweden democrats and national rally do fairly well among young voters. The rather aimless right in the anglosphere fails at attracting young people and successful people. A young highly educated person is simply going to find the aesthetics and the values of mainstream conservatism boring and unappealing. It isn't a uniting message, it is a message with no vision that is anti PMC. I simply struggle to see a well travelled, highly educated person fitting in to the conservative movement at all. The right is making itself culturally toxic defenders of boomer rights.
I'll say from my perspective, this view actually seems validated after what we've seen from Trump so far. With the exception of tariffs, which are already being struck down, there's much more of an emphasis on destroying than actually building anything.
That being said, I'm generally conservative myself and weakly pro-Trump, so I'm not trying to just take cheap potshots. I genuinely think this is a huge problem the right needs to face in order to create a more compelling and useful platform for the future.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
4mo ago
Feels like the government is just dismantling the world I’ve spent my life working to become a part of, and I can’t say that I quite understand why.
The academy allowed itself to be hollowed out and started playing politics instead of searching for truth. Yes, hard sciences included.
No, just wanting to keep your head down and “do the science” is not an excuse. I’m sorry for you personally, but academia made its bed and now it will have to lie in it.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
My point at this point, which I think is quite clear, is that ownership is essentially and definitionally the right to deprive others. That's it. I don't like that. In fact, I detest it with passion and rage. I hate it. So, I want an alternative.
You can detest it all you want, you still didn't answer @aqouta's question, which is what is your alternative?
There is a reason we have property, and why it's central to all human civilization. Provide literally any alternative and we can discuss, but you are just saying you hate it and then asking antagonistic questions here.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
4mo ago
I can understand people on the left being worried about Trump based on how speech has changed. Personally I don't think it's because Trump is censoring speech, in fact I think it's the opposite.
The progressive left heavily censored speech in the U.S. for the better part of a decade, ramping up especially in the last few years. We have the receipts, it's common knowledge at this point that the FBI and other government organizations colluded with social media sites, news outlets, et cetera to push a pro-progressive message, and sideline or outright ban even relatively centrist people with dissenting views.
If there is a lot of genuine concern, I think it comes from people on the left getting a distorted view of what the information landscape looked like, via their censorship. As things bounce back towards a more representative information environment, of course people will feel shocked.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Ahaha much appreciated. And yeah, as I said in my own comment I very much agree:
I also lost a lot of respect for Scott! It sucks. I definitely have some ressentiment for him and Caplan because they're both rich famous writers, and while I don't put a TON of effort in my blog, it would be nice to be rich and famous hah.
Ultimately though I think this is the classic problem with a lot of rationalists, that we were talking about with the poly stuff earlier last week. They are extremely privileged in all sorts of ways, and go on to assume that everyone else is just as privileged or idiosyncratic. They basically just have a very poor theory of mind for even other rationalists a standard deviation closer to normal than they are, let alone an actually "normal" person.
I hate to be bitter and negative about this sort of thing, but man I'm starting to understand the progressive urge to scream "EAT THE RICH!" This sort of complaining despite being EXTREMELY, like top .15% privileged, makes me quite angry.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Yes! Make teenage babysitting great again!
I think the fact that the modern school system gives teenagers a lot less free time in than in the past hurts this.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3mo ago
This was one of the paragraphs I almost added in the initial thing. Tradesman is sort of an option. It's not as bad as coffee barista, but breaking six figure incomes seems pretty difficult.
On the ubiquitous internet advice to do this, after getting fired from my tech sales job I applied and worked as an electrician's apprentice for two months last year.
It was absolutely awful. Backbreaking work, in extreme heat. Digging ditches all day to run pipes and wires. Being in crawlspaces, just the worst. Long, loooong hours.
Also, all of the older men had horrible health, tons of injuries, were addicted to drugs and missing teeth, etc etc. The trades are not nearly as glamorous as they are made out to be online.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
I decided to go back to my saved comments on here, and found a great one on the FDA and progress that made me think. Here's the text:
Gleevec was approved to treat acute leukemia and was a major breakthrough
Okay? The FDA does not perfectly impede progress isn't a contentious claim. How about bromantane from my last link (An Iron Curtain Has Descended Upon Psychopharmacology):
My guess is the reason we can’t prescribe bromantane is the same reason we can’t prescribe melatonin and we can’t prescribe fish oil without the charade of calling it LOVAZA™®©. The FDA won’t approve a treatment unless some drug company has invested a billion dollars in doing a lot of studies about it. It doesn’t count if some foreign scientists already did a bunch of studies. It doesn’t count if millions of Russians have been using the drug for decades and are by and large still alive.
Does that count as impeding progress?
A generic EpiPen was approved in 2018 https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-first-generic-version-epipen
It only took them nine years! Congratulations to Teva Pharmaceuticals on their achievement.
I suppose it also comes down to the baseline we're discussing. Does the FDA impede progress relative to what, and by how much?
I think that the FDA impedes progress relative to a theoretical-within-punishing-the-elites pharmaceutical regulator, and the difference is enough to make a material impact on a decent fraction of people.
endquote
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that I'm very curious how the Trump admin has been doing tackling regulation. There's a lot of things going on, and regulation seems to have lost the spotlight, but I'm very much hoping that we walk away from the next few years with dramatically reduced regulatory agencies.
Anyone have thoughts on how the promised regulation reduction is going?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3mo ago
To build on this, I want to just quote Kelsey Piper's tweet discussing jobs programs versus domestic manufacturing https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1907980342272852436:
"well, we need to bring manufacturing back" this isn't how to do that. "well, how would you do that, then?"
First, think about what you are hoping to accomplish. Is this a jobs program? Is the point to have high-paying factory jobs for the non-college men who used to work in those jobs, independent of whether the output of those factory jobs is cost-competitive or quality-competitive with foreign-made goods? You can run a jobs program, if you want - America is absurdly rich, we can really do absolutely anything at all that we choose to make a priority - but you can't serve two masters here. If the point is a jobs program don't expect high quality goods or goods that are competitive on the export market, because that requires embracing automation and new mechanical processes and the people working these jobs have no incentive to go full speed ahead on that, and since you've chosen to give them a captive market you don't have a good way to push them on quality or on price.
To my mind, if we're going to do a jobs program it's silly to make it a factory jobs program. Factory jobs kind of sucked. My own quixotic dream of a jobs program is to put our national muscle behind fixing our perilously broken education system. Kids benefit a lot from one on one tutoring; hire a million Americans to offer one on one tutoring to every student between the ages of 5 and 9 to fix our horrifying collapse in general reading ability. Boys learn better if some of their teachers are men, so make sure half of your hires are men. There, jobs program, and the work isn't 'undercutting Vietnam in the garment industry', it's raising the next generation. If you don't like my personal idea, fine, but I think if you list the pros and cons of five different jobs programs you thought of in ten minutes apiece 'take back the textile industry from Vietnam' isn't going to be the most appealing of any of them.
What if your aim isn't a jobs program? What if it's defense? That's also fine, but keep in mind you still can't serve two masters; if this is about defense then we are going to laser-focus on defense production, and we're not treating this as a jobs program at all. Go to every manufacturer of munitions, planes and cars in the country. Ask them for all their suppliers. Acquire those companies, or partner with them, or hire a bunch of their leadership, and pay them to start up a plant in the US. Instead of scaring our allies with bizarre threats to add them to our territory, which has made many of them back away from commitments to the American defense industry, build those ties very strongly and start asking them for purchase agreements. Find really good CEOs who grew a complex logistical business in a related industry rapidly - yes, Elon Musk absolutely qualifies here, frustrated as I am with him - ask them to take responsibility for a supply chain and 10x production in the next two years, and give them the resources they need to do it. Send Ukraine an obscene amount of materiel, enough to actually win the war instead of just be stalemated in it. Make advance commitments to buy the munitions to do that, to support those companies in growing capacity.
What if your goal is neither jobs nor defense, but fostering the growth of an industry in the US that could stand on its own two feet once it existed but will never get started? Here's where tariffs actually make sense, but they should be relentlessly narrow, specific and targeted. What do you want to sell? Who in America is trying to build it? What inputs do they buy from abroad? Make it a priority of our trade policy to get them those inputs cheaply. Most of what you're doing is, once again, buying bits of the supply chain and hiring people who know how to do it, plus subsidizing them, but tariffs will be part of the picture. The CHIPS act was this done well. Every single tariff and every single subsidy should have an incredibly specific objective in mind, and if it isn't working to achieve that objective should be adjusted.
What if your goal is to negotiate a free trade agreement? Well, we've successfully negotiated lots of free trade agreements, it's not exactly a totally unknown art form. Have smart, competent, skilled negotiators with knowledge of the other side's constraints, resources, political concerns, and where we have leverage. Have bilateral negotiations; emerge with a deal; have Congress ratify it. Trying to do many-to-one negotiations doesn't work because it is so visible that a country's behavior to date has nothing to do with the tariffs that were imposed, because the way the tariffs were imposed puts many other countries' leadership in a position where doing what we want would be deeply unpopular at home, and because no one involved knew anything about the countries they were throwing tariffs at.
Again, we can do any of these things. We are not a country on the brink of becoming a failed state; we can execute on ambitious, ludicrous, serious things, and we absolutely should. We just have to figure out what we want and then line up the levers to get it done. I've always found something beautiful about the capacity of healthy societies to change gears on a dime, to set down their knitting and go do a shift at the munitions factory, to build cities in the dust overnight. We can reshore
Endquote (I'm too lazy to do the block quoting for all that.)
I actually disagree with her - I think we have proven relatively definitively that jobs programs in the United States currently do not work. Not because jobs programs are a bad idea in a vacuum, but because the government and the way we as citizens interact with the government has become so corrupted, that major government programs are doomed to fail horribly in my opinion.
Then again, perhaps a blatant jobs program would be better than the corrupt crap we have going on today?
Also, I don't think that manufacturing in the U.S. would lead to low quality. Yes we would have automation, but we would also need people to staff the plants. And the fact is, young men just tend to enjoy and be more drawn to working with their hands than working on computers all day. For the most part, at least.
Her take reads to me as a very well thought out, but stereotypically feminine and coastal elite view of the problem.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3mo ago
Yeah this is just another piece in the endless stream of propaganda blaming all social ills on violent white boys and men. Not even very interesting or a new take.
Fails to have any nuance into the root of the problem it seems, basically just blaming the kid for being gullible enough to fall for evil propaganda. Boring.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
if practised by a person who is weird or abnormal,1 it will work better than adhering to the status quo
See here's the thing... I don't even think it works better than the status quo for almost anyone. I strongly believe if these poly people had good marriages, a tight knit community, and children, they would be happier and better off.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3mo ago
Kudos to you for updating after seeing a particularly bad case of massaging the science for political outcomes. I also genuinely don't know how you reform academia and medicine when they are willing to be this blatantly political in their "science."
It's a shame because I love the Academy as an institution and an ideal, but it has become so corrupted it's shocking to me even on the 100th example. I hope for all our sakes we can find a way to save science without burning down too much.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
5mo ago
It seems that the vibe has definitely shifted in politics and general social spaces, as many folks last week commented on here. People are more open to using language that used to be termed offensive, right-wing political statements are more in vogue, etc.
I'm curious specifically what all of this means for feminism, and the gender war subset of the larger Culture War. I saw an interesting piece which blew up on X lately, that, in discussing the Neil Gaiman situation, argues:
Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich's behavior (including the "it was wonderful" text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that's just because women do be like that sometimes.
Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I'm more interested in what happens to women when they're cast in this role of society's unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.
The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they'll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it's not just sex they can't reasonably consent to. It's medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world's adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can't have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn't mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.
Now many linkers and commentators on X are basically arguing - why yes, women don't have agency, and that's why most cultures have reflected that in law and social practice. I think this sort of smugly satisfied mocking of women is in quite poor taste, and not likely to be productive, but there is a deeper point in there. Unfortunately it seems that, even after decades of propaganda, rewriting of tons of laws, giving women voting power, dismantling "oppressive" cultural structures like religion, etc. etc., we still as a society are not able to treat women as adults with agency, and consequences for their actions.
Now a progressive might come in and say - ok, fine we do still struggle with this issue, but hey, it's because of bad social programming! Just give us another 100 years and we will totally hold women responsible just like men, we promise!
That has basically been the progressive line to justify going further and further to the left with social and legal programs. Problem for them is, with the vibe shift I mentioned earlier, I think that argument is running out of steam. The average person no longer seems to be convinced that this is just a cultural problem which will go away.
So, where do we go from here? Do you think feminism will actually be rolled back in a meaningful way? I'm skeptical myself, but I'm also skeptical we will magically start holding women accountable. Not sure what happens next...
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Cleanly lady and full time nanny are VERY different things my friend.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
4mo ago
Increased drug use is one suspected reason, but I think it might just be brain rot from being on right wing twitter too much. It should be noted that left wing social media contagion has similarly destroyed rationale thinking in the last ten years.
I think another, more charitable argument would be that the media environment is saturated with so many lies and false reporting, slanted journalism, etc etc that it's easy to discount things you don't like and focus on things that seem correct.
The journalistic / expert class brought this upon themselves, as far as I'm aware. Elon doesn't have time to do the enormous amount of checking that is required in this environment to verify every claim. Perhaps he could hire someone, which would probably be a good idea, but doesn't seem like how he operates.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Couldn't agree more. High agency is often just a code wood for tearing down mores and norms for personal gain. I said something similar in a tweet myself.
Are you on twitter? DM me I'd love to follow you hah. Your writing is solid.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Yes sadly that’s the case, and I also think it’s a related problem. That being said, once you figure it out once with one person you’re ideally “done” for the most part.
As Kat says, when you bring poly dynamics in you exponentially increase the amount of conversations you have to have.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
4mo ago
Another spicy new idea from the Trump administration: Gold Cards!
The idea, as I understand it, is that global citizens will be able to pay a one time fee of $5 million USD, and enjoy a much shorter and less strenuous vetting process to become U.S. citizens. The gold card will effectively function like a green card that is paid for.
In the hearing they mention they want to use this money to pay down the deficit, which I actually think is a great idea. I'm sure it will filter for much higher quality immigration than our current setup of mostly illegal immigrants, anyway.
I'm sure the left will hate this and see it as privileging the rich. And to be clear, it absolutely is! It's extremely unfair for people who want to immigrate and don't have the funds, will never even possibly have the funds, to pay $5m USD. That being said, I like the idea because it very much singles the U.S. shifting towards wanting immigrants who actually pull their weight, and provide something to the country.
While yes of course not all rich people will be a net benefit to the country, by and large I would have to imagine if they can apy 5 million dollars they will be relatively high quality. Plus, as Trump points out, this will massively incentivize people to move their businesses to the U.S. You're a wealthy founder in China, Europe, or Latin America? Just buy a gold card and move your business over!
Anyway, I know we have a lot of libertarians here so I'm curious for thoughts on this? I was personally quite surprised he went ahead and did it - didn't even know this was on the table.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3mo ago
Suppose that Trump's tariffs contract the economy to the point that lazy unemployed 20-30 year old men find it much more difficult to comfortably survive off their standard combination of day trading, intermittent gig work, and freeloading off their families. Suppose it gets to the point that their only option is to begin filling the vacancies left by the deportations. Isn't that just... wonderful? Isn't that exactly what Trump's base voted for? Isn't that, quite literally, how you make America great again?
I absolutely agree! I'm tired of people acting as if we don't have a labor force. We clearly do, we have just decided to let them not work and survive on handouts and other people's largesse. It's high time the situation is remedied.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3mo ago
Yeah this is definitely a culture war issue. I just feel like being excessively harsh on illegal immigration is punching down
They broke the law. You can't just have people flagrantly ignoring laws, especially ones as big as illegal entry into a country. It devolves trust in the entire system massively.
There's a fun dramatic little scissor statement happening in the rationalist / post rationalist corner of twitter at the moment. Started by @_brentbaum talking about his girlfriend's high agency:
I, and many others, chimed in saying hey wait a second... this is actually kind of concerning! Some of the negative responses:
and my personal favorite:
As I said though, this is apparently a scissor statement because a ton of people also had the OPPOSITE reaction. Some examples:
etc etc.
Now the reason I find this fascinating is that it's one of the clearest breakdowns between consequentialists and virtue ethicists I've yet seen in the wild. Most people defending the girl of 'scarfgate' are basically just saying "what's the harm? nobody ever goes back for those scarfs. besides they're like $20 most of the time anyway."
Unfortunately a lot of folks get drawn into this argument, and start saying things like well, what if somebody comes back for it later and it's gone? Or what if someone's grandma knitted them that scarf?
To me, going down the consequentialist route is doomed to fail. You can justify all sorts of horrible things in the name of consequentialist morality. (Same with deontology, to be fair.) My take is that this is wrong because she directly lied to someone's face, and then proceeded to steal someone else's property. The fact that most people think it's cute and quirky is probably down to a sort of Women are Wonderful effect, imo, and then they use consequentialism to defend their default programming that women can't be bad.
Either way, curious what the Motte thinks? Is scarfgate just salty sour pusses hating on a highly agentic women? Or are there deeper issues here?
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