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User ID: 2225
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10mo ago
I agree, but I'd go one step further: the best would be to stop worrying not only about conserving vs changing things, but about what counts as "right" vs "left". Align yourself with What Is Good and work for that, regardless of whether it is present or absent in your culture, ancient or new, "left" or "right", progressive or reactionary. The moment you take your eyes off The Good and start choosing your values based on political alignments is the moment you lose your way. Politics ought to never be anything more than merely instrumental.
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11mo ago
the extreme slave morality Nietzche criticizes in Christianity is just plainly present
Do elucidate, because it seems like at least one of the following is true:
- People making this criticism just have moral intuitions that I find alien and abhorrent.
- People criticizing what they call "slave morality" can't keep track of what the thing they are trying to criticize even is.
- People claiming that Christianity exemplifies "slave morality" have a ludicrous caricature of Christianity in their head, and hate that rather than the real thing.
I'd previously assumed that it was just a matter of (1), but from Scott's post and some of the commentary on it I suspect that the others are at play here.
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11mo ago
Hot take: Philosopher's Stone is the best Harry Potter book. As the books go on, the worldbuilding and plotting stand up less and less well to the more serious subject matter (this becomes very clear by the end of Goblet of Fire), and the tone shift is dertimental to the series overall. (Yes, I get the idea of "books and audience grow up with the character", but it just doesn't work all that well.) Philosopher's Stone is an excellent children's book; the later books are still probably better than average for YA (not that I could be sure; most YA is of the sort that I've never been interested in reading), but are only as beloved as they are because people liked the first book(s).
(My wife agrees with me that Philosopher's Stone is the best, but has a higher opinion of the end of the series than I do.)
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1yr ago
I wouldn't expect you to be able to empathize with it, any more than... well... with people who want to have sex with men.
I can't be certain, but I strongly suspect that the vast majority of men saying this have at least a touch of autogynephilia. The sense of "it could have been me" is less "I, as a perfectly ordinary man, could have become socially hypnotized into wanting to be a women" and more "What if that part of me that already -- at least somewhat -- wanted to be a woman had been socially encouraged, been amplified, been given a (positive-valence) identity category; what if I'd been encouraged to indulge in this, been offered "specialness" and affirmation and a ready-made memeplex, all when I was young and socially and emotionally vulnerable? Then I could see myself having gone down that path."
It's so common because some degree of autogynephilia is probably about as common as homosexuality among men. (I remember -- I think it was in Men Trapped in Men's Bodies? -- seeing a reported study estimate of 1-3% of men for erotic cross-dressing alone, and that's almost certainly a substantial underestimate of the fraction of men with any amount of AGP.)
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1yr ago
Isn't it the case that a lot of the legacy youth orgs have, whatever their past reputation, themselves been drifting left over time? The Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts in particular are no longer considered safe by a lot of more conservative religious people (and it's not just about allowing gay scouts) and several more explicitly conservative Christian (Protestant, of course...) versions are, at least judging from some families I know, gaining in popularity because of this.
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1yr ago
I too am a member of this club. (Actually, although I quoted Lewis in my top level comment downthread, I'm not sure if I've actually quoted the others in my few Motte posts yet. It's only a matter of time, though.)
What struck me so strongly is that the reference was just dropped in with no explanation, as one might a Biblical or mythological allusion, or a reference to some other ubiquitous cultural touchstone. The implication that the readers would be expected to actually follow the reference absent a citation was... well, about the only place I'd be confident of that landing for most of the audience is in a Lewis society.
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2yr ago
Because Hasbro decided that they could make lots of money by having standalone card sets based on random other fantasy IP. The main "multiverse" is still its own setting with no crossover, AFAIK.
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2yr ago
You can't conserve an idea if you don't conserve a people, that's my argument. Civilization is not an idea, it's a people.
To which the obvious solution is: let the people consist of those who embrace the idea. Which is exactly what the Christian Church did, by the way: "There is no Jew or Greek..."; and also "church fathers", "ancestors in the faith".
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1yr ago
Transsexuality isn't about delusion - it's about desire.
And no one escapes desire, no matter how smart you are.
This. I think most Mottizens' model of the situation would be much improved my thinking of trans as primarily an unusual set of desires/preferences rather than as delusion or attention-seeking (or even, directly, an attempt to get one's rocks off). The thing that most transitioners (and a whole lot of others who don't go down that path) have in common is that they want, very badly, to be the opposite sex. The delusion, if it's there, is probably a consequence of that desire. Is that desire is born of a fetish or fetish-like sexual thing (AGP), or some emotional thing, or some complicated combination of these, or even of some external source like trauma? Probably each of these for different people (my money's on the complicated combination for most, though). But I strongly suspect that things almost never start with delusion.
Somewhat of a side note, but I find it relevant that quite a few philosophies and religions teach that mastering or overcoming your desires is a key to living well. Stoicism, Buddhism, and Christianity don't have too much in common philosophically, but they are all in agreement on that point. (Even then there are major differences -- Christianity teaches that some desires must be expunged and the others rightly ordered, while my understanding is that Buddhism thinks that they all have to go. But the common point is that if you can't rule your desires, they will rule you, to your detriment.)
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1yr ago
The explanation you are looking for is "great circles". Your flight probably took close to the shortest route.
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1yr ago
Surely most of that (in the paper, I mean) is selection effects? I expect that there's a substantial barrier to entry for completing SRS at a university hospital (the selection criterion for that paper) and that the barriers are higher for AGPs since they don't match the stereotypical / ideologically acceptable profile. (I also suspect a similar effect causes these studies to underestimate AGP in that population. People who want a thing tend to say what gatekeepers want to hear, and those that don't... don't make it past the gatekeepers as much.)
Of course I'm also saying this as someone who suffers from AGP (though much, much less than I did in my teens / early 20s -- mental habits do make a difference) and also ticks many of the usual boxes: high intelligence, nerdy, family history both of mental illness and of joint hypermobility / connective tissue problems. So make of that what you will.
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1yr ago
6 Rituals and Sacraments
Finally we come to what might be the main point of @TheDag's original question, which is that, frankly, rituals seem irrational. Why should one make the sign of the cross here, or bow there? Why does the priest pray the epiclesis ("Make this bread the Precious Body of Thy Christ")? Doesn't that all seem...well...superstitious? Definitely not reasonable? Like, what is it doing?
There are two easy answers, both of them wrong. The first is that it is, or is attempting to be, magic. That the sign of the cross wards off evil for no particular reason, like a vampire. That the priest pronouncing the magic words is what makes the Eucharist transform. That would, indeed, be superstition, and the Church is at pains to make clear that, while miracles may occur in such rituals (reliably do, in the case of the Sacraments), it is not the ritual that effects a miracle, nor that a failure to pronounce the proper words exactly or make the proper motions nullifies it. These rituals are not enacted to do magic or to attempt to manipulate God. (This may not be true of all religions and rituals, but it is true of Christianity.)
The other wrong answer is that rituals are there as a sort of human bonding experience, that the content is irrelevant and the impact purely social. This is, it seems, a common anthropological story, and it's true that there are a lot of purely social rituals in the world. But this is not the point of religious ritual, and if you are just seeking social bonding, you will miss something important.
The theology of sacraments in particular is a giant can of worms, so I'll leave that aside and focus on something smaller. In the course of the liturgy, the people will make the sign of the cross, bow, and (on weekdays and in Lent) make prostrations. Why? None of these is magic, and they seem... contingent, perhaps? Arbitrary? Why this ritual and not another, why now and not then?
To an extent there is something arbitrary about the specifics. But there is something more than that, and it comes down to symbolism. The sign of the cross is a symbol of prayer, and of faith in Christ (hence the sign of the cross), so for me it becomes prayer and an affirmation of that faith. Thus I make the sign of the cross during the litany to participate in the prayer, or even when I am alone, at home, to make a wordless prayer. Bowing is a sign of reverence; thus when I bow I not only display appropriate reverence, but orient my emotions and intentions toward reverence. That is, the point of the rituals is not how they affect God, but how they affect our attitude toward God and others.
When seen in this light, the rituals are not irrational behavior, but a deliberate way of orienting ourselves. And this is one reason they can be healing, because giving oneself the right attitudes influences everything else.
There's a part of the Liturgy, common in east and west, called the sursum corda, in which the following dialogue takes place between the priest and the people:
Priest: Lift up your hearts.
People: We lift them up to the Lord.
Priest: Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
People: It is meet and right (in the Byzantine rite, this sentence continues "...to worship the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in essence and undivided." -- my understanding is that this is a later theological elaboration to the original rite)
Here there is a goal: to "lift up hearts" (i.e. to put oneself in a reverential and contemplative orientation to God), to give thanks to God, to worship God. And the means for that goal is this very call-and-response ritual that lays out the goal, and, as it says, this is appropriate ("meet and right"). The whole Liturgy is full of things like this -- the cherubic hymn with the words "[let us...] now lay aside all earthly cares", the litanies with "Let us pray to the Lord" -- "Lord have mercy".
Why does this work? That's a question about human psychology, and I don't know the answer, but it does, and in that light it's no less rational than talk therapy or being polite to dinner guests or any number of other things people do.
7 Final Thoughts
This turned out to be longer and more wide-ranging than I'd initially intended, and I'm sure will invite a lot of disagreement. I'm aware that I didn't do a lot of "prove this is rational/true" work above; even if that were possible to do to everyone's satisfaction, this essay is already long enough. I intend to interact with any comments in the same way -- to explain and lay out a way of thinking, not to argue that everyone else should accept it. I totally think they should, but, in line with my thoughts above, I don't believe that I've offered sufficient evidence to persuade most of you to become Christians, and I don't think that my words-on-a-screen could, unless you're most of the way there anyway.
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2yr ago
Your comment made me think: there's an essay here, somewhere, about how grand scope secondary world fantasy is a fundamentally Christian impulse. It allows one to imagine things that are facially inconsistent with Christianity but elucidate it. I think that it's no accident that Tolkien was a Catholic.
Whereas most fantasy (I except traditional faerie-stories, slightly[*]) stories set in the real world are at best uncomfortable from a Christian perspective, because Christianity itself is a thing in the real world and you have to fit that in somehow. Does anyone remember that old HPMOR meta-fanfic with the wizard-Christians? I felt that, as really awkward as it was, it was more honest than the original HP in that way.
[*] Obviously many faerie-stories have a pre-Christian origin and skate by on that. But people tried to wrestle with these things in ways that would make moderns very uncomfortable; IIRC there are some stories about Irish saints converting faeries to Christianity...
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2yr ago
Not that I can recall. I got a little of the usual crap from peers about being a nerd instead of a masculine/athletic type, but that's not at all the same thing, and they didn't know about any of my more feminine interests (I only had a few -- overall I was within normal "nerd" range). My family didn't care, but then I never did anything like cross-dressing, it was all stuff like "interested in cooking and sewing and likes pretty colors" which hardly counts when there's also "interested in math and computers and likes video games" going on even more prominently.
I just don't get forced feminization fantasies, so maybe the reason I don't find plausible is actually correct but I just don't understand other people's psychology. My fantasy was always either undergoing a magical transformation willingly, or having been female all along (i.e. including imagining a different childhood/puberty). I didn't think the thing I wanted was shameful (although wanting it was, hence why I didn't share it), just impossible. And why would I imagine something unpleasant if there was a pleasant version?
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2yr ago
I think it's a small proportion but I also think that unfortunately they are the loudest and most visible and most online.
It seems we differ in our estimates here. Maybe it would help to draw a distinction between, let's say, people with disordered sexual desires (in which group I would include any autogynephilia in natal males), and people who are "visible perverts" (you know about them because they do perverted things in public or are publicly loud about their proclivities). I agree that the latter group is rare and unrepresentative of trans people, and it's crazy that the trans lobby doesn't want to get rid of them (probably this is downstream of "pride" stuff). I think, though, that the former group includes probably the majority of MtF trans individuals as well as a decent percentage of men who don't transition. This is probably not usually acknowledged because it's perceived as unflattering to trans people, and to be fair the people loudly crowing about how "it's just a fetish" are being cruel and are not helping the matter.
I think we ought to have some charity even for the "visible perverts" crowd; they need it even if they don't deserve it -- but what I'm really referring to here is the other group. Right now all they are hearing is either total silence, "Eww, you pervert", or "That means you're really a woman deep down! You must be trans!" I think there is a need for counseling, along the lines of "So, you know how you really really want to be female? And how you find that idea sexually arousing, too? Yeah, that's a thing; it's something a bit wrong with you, but it doesn't mean either that you are disgusting or that you are 'really' a woman or should try to become one. Let's try to help you figure out how to deal with your feelings."
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2yr ago
I agree that the things you've outlined (everything is a tournament profession; success at being a man is measured in terms of impossible ideals; the previous masculine success parameters are less attainable than they used to me) are real problems. Probably solving them would mitigate the kind of gender issues that "end on incel forums" (or in suicide, another thing that's been trending up).
But I'm not sure I buy that these are root causes of a substantial fraction of MtF transitions. Are the majority of transitioners really people who have decided they should become a woman because they think they will fail (or have failed) at being a man? I'm curious as to what evidence makes you think that is the case. If you're right, that makes the problem much easier than I think it is, which is a really good thing!
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2yr ago
I confess that I am confused by this response. Who is being officially deputized by whom to kill whom? And how does any of this make sense in the context of @FarNearEverywhere's parent comment, which already posits a massive change in how the official parts of society deal with trans stuff?
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7mo ago
I dunno about schizo-post (and I don't drink) but my post in this edition was definitely written in the middle of the night because I couldn't sleep and was pissed at some people downthread (mostly Stellula) and had a harebrained idea that maybe I could persuade people to -- however much they can't stand the activists and are put off by all the trans weirdos -- respond with compassion instead of contempt. Whoever said that I was being sloppy about my usage of "empathy" is correct; I was trying to help inspire empathy in order to elicit more compassion. @urquan, as usual, had the right of it in this comment.
The odd thing is that --- and I'm surprised that it wasn't clear from the post --- I'm actually pretty far on the conservative side as regards what I think about the political/social demands of the trans activists, as well as what I think about the entire culture and ideology surrounding it as a movement. In some ways I'm probably more opposed to the trans movement than a lot of the people who were getting upset with me about the post. It's just that I both have an "inside view" about what's driving it, and I get really frustrated when people round off the experience of people they think are their enemies to the nearest sneer instead of seeking to understand and be compassionate.
I didn't respond to all the replies back when it was posted because I was not in a good way emotionally, and didn't have the wherewithal to deal productively with all the hostility I was sensing. I decided to take a hiatus from TheMotte instead (and will probably only visit infrequently from now on, to be honest). And now I'm posting this here instead of in the main thread or elsewhere because I don't want to have to get into a giant debate about it. Ah well.
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7mo ago
this is the same thing as saying 'men who commit to physical transition don't do so for AGP reasons'
No, this claim (not the one you place in quotation marks, but your claim that that statement is equivalent to the claim that transitioners are not "just acting out a fetish") is exactly what I'm disagreeing with! Saying that AGP is "just a fetish" --- at least as a blanket claim; it may be for some cases --- is reductive to the point of being nearly as wrong as the people who deny its relevance. You might as well say if someone is sexually attracted to their spouse that they only got married just because they're horny.
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7mo ago
The voice is, yes, usually a giveaway. But there are a lot of masculine-looking actual women out there (even some with deeper voices) due to genetics / endocrine issues, to the point where I'd be often be uncomfortable guessing --- certainly from looks alone --- whether a given person is a lucky MtF or an unlucky actual woman if encountered out of context.
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7mo ago
You... may be an outlier. (Not disagreeing that it's good to keep men out of women's bathrooms, even with stalls, though.)
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7mo ago
Matushka Olga of Alaska (1916 - 1979), who's community considers her a saint
As of last year, this includes the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America. I'm not sure if all the proper preparations and rite have taken place yet, but soon (if not already) she'll be considered a saint by the Orthodox Church more generally.
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10mo ago
A lot (most? all? I've not read some of the originals) of these seem to parody individual famous poems, not the poet's style in general. E.g. Blake "The Tyger", William Carlos Williams "This is just to say", Shakespeare "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day", Poe "Annabel Lee", Burns "To a Mouse", Frost "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", Edward Lear "The Owl and the Pussycat", Dylan Thomas "Do not go gentle into that good night", Edna St Vincent Milay "Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare", etc. etc.
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10mo ago
You got me completely hooked on Only Connect with that post, by the way. I have watched so many back episodes these last few months.
Red hot CW, but it's a limited-scope question (I hope).
How can I find out the profile(s) for marginal MtF transitioners?
A few definitions:
I'm not asking for your personal theories (unless you uniquely have an insider or reliable source of knowledge about it); I have my own and most people's ideas about this are half-baked at best and ludicrously ideologically motivated at worst. What I want to know is where I can find one of:
So far I've read through a bunch of stuff on the sorts of subreddits where I'd expect to find such people, such as /r/mtf, /r/trans, /r/egg_irl. But I suspect that may not be a representative slice of the population I'm interested in.
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