I, like the rest of the country, feel like nothing good will come of the election. However, I feel this way for a slightly different reason than your average person, and probably closer to the average Mottezian.
I actually don't really care too much who is president. Either one of them would IMO do a good enough job. I mostly care whether the president impacts my everyday life or causes nuclear war. However, though it isn't his fault directly, having Trump in charge would impact my everyday life negatively, mostly because it would fuel another 4 years of incessant leftist whining all around me, from all my friends and family, along with people starting to (erroneously, IMO) see and declare that racism and sexism is everywhere again. It'll start causing fights between me and my wife again. My workplace and all local institutions will start making statements about how they're standing up to Trump and racism. Under Biden, I have truly enjoyed some nice peace and respite from politics.
However, I find this state of affairs to be very irritating. It feels like the left, or at least the leftists in my life, are taking an infantile tactic: we better win or we'll whine and complain for 4 years. I don't respect sore losers, and moreover, I don't like the fact that there is no path forward for the right.
Scott said this back in 2016:
If the next generation is radicalized by Trump being a bad president, they’re not just going to lean left. They’re going to lean regressive, totalitarian, super-social-justice left.
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out. But what option does this leave the non leftists with? If the Democrat wins, then the currents move left. We get leftism enshrined into law over the next 4 years, because to the victor go the spoils. If the Republican wins, then the undercurrents move left, and more and more people get radicalized towards the left.
Is there a way for the currents to move right without the undercurrents moving left? Or is Trump just uniquely bad at making that happen? I'm tempted to say that this is just the fact that Trump is a polarizing figure, but at the same time, all the leftists I know scream bloody murder whenever a Republican is in command. They were infantile under George W Bush. And though I wasn't around then, I know many people who are still salty over Reagan and act like he was the worst.
The recent obesity post on the Motte got me and my (progressive) wife talking about the fat acceptance movement. Ultimately, I was mostly driving at "Even if I don't like when I see what I believe to be undue hatred of fat people, I think the fat acceptance movement is primarily a bunch of hatred-filled people who want to control other people's desires and shame everyone else in order to fill the empty void in their own lives". My wife (as she usually does) was going with the argument of, "That's not what it means to me, and it doesn't matter if there are hatred-filled people in the fat acceptance movement, because I've personally gotten good ideas from the fat acceptance movement. I've taken away the concepts that we shouldn't cast moral judgements on people. And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly. And also standards of beauty change over different times and places". I basically replied that I believe she is sanewashing a movement that primarily works based on hatred, not love and reason, and I suggested to my wife that people like her are "laundering credibility" in social movements like this.
This idea of laundering credibility is nothing new to me, I've been thinking about it in one form or another ever since I had my anti-progressive awakening over a decade ago. I have often talked in the past about a similar concept, what I call a "memetic motte and bailey", which I believe to be more common and more insidious than normal motte and baileys. In a normal motte and bailey, as Scott describes it, it's a single person retreating to the motte, but harvesting the bailey. But in a "memetic motte and bailey", there are many people out in the bailey who believe the bailey, and there are a few credentialed or credible people in the motte who probably believe the motte. And those people provide the deflection for those in the bailey.
I call this memetic because this system seems to arrive naturally and be self-perpetuating, without anyone being quite aware of the problem. If questioned at all, people are easily able to say (and seem to truly believe), "those crazy bailey people don't actually represent the movement. You can't claim a movement is hateful or worthless just because of a few fringe crazies". And they point to well-credentialed professors and the like, who take more academic and reasonable stances, as the actual carriers of feminism, etc. Meanwhile the supposedly "false", hatred-filled, bailey feminism sweeps through the hearts and minds of every other progressive, and captures the institutions that actually matter and enforce policies.
I've seen other people engaged with the culture war, who dance around the idea of "laundering credibility" in one form or another, but I'm not certain I've seen it called out as such, and I don't think I see it focused on nearly as much as I think it should be. In fact, I remember one time when people either here or on ASX had gotten mad at me for "misusing" the term motte and bailey to mean this memetic-version. But if you ask me, this version is much more prevalent, insidious, and difficult to deal with than the standard single-person motte and bailey. It truly is a memetic force. It's self-perpetuating. It spreads because it doesn't even register as a thing to those who benefit from it. They by and large don't seem to even notice the discrepancy. And it's very difficult to stop, by those who want to stop it. Even those who don't benefit from it and can sense that something is wrong may be entirely bemused by the tactic, enough to make them be unable to actually speak up and properly fight against it. I've never really known how one can deal with it, but I've always felt that the first step is to notice it when it's happening and call it out as sophistry on a grand scale.
Perhaps most importantly... is there any possibility at all that the phenomenon isn't blatantly deliberate agenda-pushing?
I think probably many of the examples you gave are an example of agenda pushing. I haven't seen Elysium or A Man Called Otto, but based on your description, they probably are. Especially A Man Called Otto, because Hollywood is saturated with agenda pushing these days.
But I didn't think Gran Torino was leftist agenda pushing. It was just a tale of a man who finds at the end of his life that he doesn't really like his own selfish family, and that he can make new ties and help the immigrants he previously resented. The reason I don't think this is agenda pushing is:
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In the movie, the main people he's saving the immigrant family from is other immigrants. He doesn't portray all southeast Asian people as flawless but needing help, only the family he grows to like.
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He helps the boy by teaching him to be a stereotypically American man. This involves fixing houses, standing up for yourself, and making friends with car-people by talking about how you've been metaphorically anally raped by previous mechanics (it's been a 15 years since I saw this, but if I remember correctly, he literally taught the kid to say that he's been "bent over and fucked" on previous deals or something)
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There's a lot of Christian symbolism, like Clint Eastwood dying with his arms out in a cross, if I remember correctly.
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Isn't Clint Eastwood conservative or libertarian?
haroldbkny
5mo ago
Your point of view makes sense, but it would make more sense to me if we haven't had 100 years of infrastructure that treats the operation of that heavy machinery as a given. It's really hard to live without driving a car in all but the most densely populated cities!
haroldbkny
6mo ago
I live in a very progressive part of the US. I had a moment earlier today when I was surrounded by some Jewish community members/friends, and they were talking about how difficult it's been at work for them this week, because they have to put up with many of their coworkers saying "horrible things" (read: things that they don't agree with regarding the recent events). These community members are the same people who went spouting all manners of progressive talking points in so many inappropriate and unnecessary contexts over the past 5 or so years, from BLM, to covid, to Trump derangement syndrome, and so many more issues.
I'm sure I wouldn't like what these people's coworkers are saying, but I find myself feeling more than ever wanting to say to these people, "So what? You can't have everyone agree with you". I guess I'm now an expert at being around people who say things that make my blood boil. I put up with progressives at work, in my social circles, in my local community events, in stores, who constantly barrage me with their unsolicited progressive message. I not only never say anything anymore, but I act as if I'm completely unbothered. As a result, I find myself having very little sympathy, but a lot of empathy for these pro Israel progressives. I'm sure the irony is completely lost on them, but it makes me wonder how certain people can go through life with so little perspective that they feel so put upon by people with different viewpoints, yet cannot fathom that they may make others feel that way with their own, and that maybe they're wrong to do so.
I don't know if men in our society would have a problem with having more responsibility than women, provided that women admitted this. If the messaging was "men need to protect women because men are stronger and have more agency", that might be acceptable. It was acceptable for almost all of recorded history. That's the tradcon way.
The problem is that feminist messaging refuses to say this. Instead they say that women are just as capable as men, except for the fact that men are holding them down, and therefore it's men's responsibility to help women, in order to apologize and make women more powerful. It villainizes all men, most of whom have never wanted to hurt women and have always wanted to protect them.
FWIW, I'm not a tradcon, I probably think something in the middle. But mostly, I think women are strong, and need to embrace this and take responsibility, and actually act as such, and stop blaming men for their problems. How does that look for rape situations? Dunno, maybe they should start carrying around guns so if they find themselves in compromising situations, they have the actual firepower to overcome the man's brute strength. But that's for more of the violent rape situation. For the "I'm too drunk for my decisions to matter", I think the solution is for women to actually take responsibility. And I think that feminism's focus on victim-based empowerment isn't helping them.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
I think this post was great, though much different than the previous ones. I thought the previous ones were more clever, though this one was wacky, which was fun.
But I think the best part of it was Scott's treatment of Trump. Though the events depicted are obviously unrealistic, I feel like Scott nailed Trump's preternatural ability to play to his crowd and ultimately come out on top no matter what the situation, while still also somehow being completely buffoonish, crass, and an embarrassment to just about everyone he deals with. Scott may be one of the few people who "gets" Trump.
Is this really worth paying attention to any more than the last 17 times Trump was supposedly nailed for some criminal activity, and half the country said "got'im!" The last time was just like 2 months ago, and I haven't heard anything about it since then! This is so exhausting. I'll pay attention to this and study up on it once it actually seems different than any previous instance of him being brought under charges.
I think you're correct. From everything I've ever seen of her, I don't think she's anti-trans, I think she's anti-men. That then cascades over into some anti-trans positions because she hates men, especially those who she deems as a threat to women, and she believes that trans women are actually just men who are infringing on female space.
But this is all a moot point, because in the court of public opinion, if you don't believe any person that they're trans, or if you say anything even remotely construable as questioning trans ideology, then you "hate trans people". And as you say, this simply becomes repeated until the point that no one questions it, and it becomes "truthy" (in the sense that Colbert used to talk about "truthiness").
haroldbkny
1mo ago
Sneaking in new definitions while still maintaining the previous emotional attachments of those definitions is necessary? In rationalist communities, I think we have words for things like this, such as motte and bailey. And I think that most of us are in agreement that such tactics are sneaky and underhanded, and make it unnecessary difficult to argue against, and very easy to turn into mob mentality and moral panics.
haroldbkny
7mo ago
I don't even think you need implicit bias to account for this! It's quite overt. I remember seeing some video from one of the big MGTOW/anti-feminist guys back in like 2014 when I was first being awakened to anti-wokeness. In it, he talks about how he was a psychologist, I think, and he used to give seminars on gender relations or something many years prior. He'd go to a chalkboard and write "women are..." and people would complete the sentence. Overwhelmingly, he'd get the crowd all chiming in with "hard-working", "caring", "empathetic", "smart", "strong", and every other positive affirmation you could get, and he'd write it down. Then he'd write "men are..." and people would chime in with "pigs", "assholes", "stupid", "lazy", etc. And then he'd ask the crowd, "so what does this show you about the true nature of sexism?". And then everyone in the seminars would hate him.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
There's a lot of good hypotheses put forward in the thread, many of which I hadn't considered before. I have generally thought that that reason they're having less sex is largely due to that generation having internalized the prudish leftist messaging that "sex is harmful, you're likely to harm women if you don't ask for permission every minute, no wait, 30 seconds, no wait 10 seconds, no wait just don't ever stop asking for permission just to be safe. Or just avoid fucking alltogether because only jerks and potential rapists feel like they need to have sex in order for a relationship to be fulfilling, and if you feel that way then you're just someone who thinks that women owe you sex, and you might as well be raping them."
In addition I've felt like there's a component by which younger people (and even millennials, too) kinda feel like bodies are gross. This has been a trend for a long time, with promotion of obsessive cleanliness to the point of it probably not even being useful, like people feeling they need to take showers multiple times per day, and also wear deodorant and cologne/perfume. I hear about historical views towards sex, like apparently Napoleon might have written a letter to Joséphine telling her not to bathe for 3 days before he came home to her from war, because her smell turned him on. The modern reaction to that story generally disgust and confusion. But think about how much the world much have smelled strongly like people's bodies, and bodies must have smelled really strong, for milennia before regular bathing was a thing, and people still has lots of sex back then.
Sex is very connected to bodies, sweat, fluids, and smell. People are raised on porn these days, with tissues at the ready to mop up any fluids shortly after their release. Sometimes when I watch porn, I think about how different it is to watch these recorded sex acts than it probably was for the actors to make them. Just thinking about the smell is interesting, considering that that sensation is completely absent when watching porn. I suspect that many people these days may have watched so much porn from a young age that the thought of sex being so much more messy and smelly with someone else's body that they'd rather just keep their nice, contained, fairly clean method of getting off to porn instead.
haroldbkny
2d ago
I'm glad you posted this, because I wanted to rant about this, since it's the most irritating feminist trend I've seen since 2017ish, but I didn't know how to phrase any of it in a way that would be "leaving the rest of the internet at the door".
I do think that, like other commenters have called out, the trend is childish and virtue signaling, and no one is being sincere. I think takes like this:
If a bear attacks you, people will believe you, if a man attacks you, people will not believe you.
do more to show exactly what feminists think about men, as opposed to how women are actually victimized by men in society.
What is the difference between a bear and a man? Maybe that men are people and bears are not? Men have other people who love them, and trust them, and care about them. Is that perhaps the reason why people may give men the benefit of the doubt in the case of an ambiguous he-said-she-said situation, but not give such benefit to a bear? Do men not deserve such a benefit over bears, because, you know, they're actual people and bears are not?
This reminds me very heavily of what I wrote last year regarding how I believe that movies like Knives Out are basically trying to implant progressive "brain worms" into people's heads, to kind of overwrite their perception of famous people:
The movie just seemed like a pulpit for Rian Johnson to talk about how much he hates Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and various other people. I almost feel like the entire plot is really the secondary goal. The main goal of him making this was to implant and grow a brain worm in the audience that every famous rich person is connected, really part of a cabal that got what they got through no talent of their own, took advantage of individuals and the world at large, contribute nothing, and are evil, vile, worthless, and bratty pieces of shit.
And here
The redpill manosphere streamer character also doesn't really fit Rogan. Rogan of course didn't 'lucky break' his way into prominence, he had a lengthy career as a comedian and hosted mainstream TV shows before starting his podcast.
This is all a part of how I think Johnson is trying to implant brain worms. It's not the truth he's written, but people will walk away from this feeling like they understand Joe Rogan and Elon Musk better, even though they're just watching fictionalized versions of them. They'll feel inside like they can just write them off as well-connected lucky backstabbers. Whether the characters are actually similar in deep ways to Rogan and Musk doesn't matter, because they're the first people who will come to mind for the general populace when they see this movie, due to their cultural prominence.
I haven't noticed this blatant trend so much these days, but maybe it's because I simply am checked out of modern media and the culture war.
Tell that to my friend, who's going through this right now, and for whom it's required for her mild sleep apnea. Sounds like it's required if the state deems it so for your case. She definitely didn't opt into 2 and 3 of her own accord, she's super pissed about it!
Edit: I did just check in again. Sounds like you are correct that a CPAP may not be required. But for my friend, it was required simply because it was her doctor's recommended treatment. But in my experience which also matches with what I read online, doctors recommend CPAPs for everyone who has sleep apnea. They made it my recommended treatment even though my sleep apnea was at the mildest possible level. And like I said, she didn't opt into having to send her CPAP data, the state took it upon themselves to force her to be treated in a way she does not want, for a condition that has no impact on her driving.
Whomever ZHPL is, his writing reads like a crazy political grifter. There was a lot of text, but what was all that text even trying to say? I feel like he barely even tried to tie thought threads together. For example, he went from "in 1968, leftism was taking over the world", then in the next sentence said that almost a full decade later, French intellectuals baned age of consent. Am I supposed to think something about this? Am I supposed to think that one event led to the other? Can he even try to convince me of this instead of just assuming I already agree? 9 years later, people in France did something. Okay. Maybe there's a connection I'm not seeing. If so, prove it.
haroldbkny
5mo ago
The opposition left I believe will become less engaged. How do you motivate the troops if you spend 8 years calling him the Antichrist and then the American people reject that and vote him in anyway. They would be a defeated people.
Wow, you're a lot more optimistic than I am! I anticipate that we will revert right back to everyone calling him (and actually thinking) he's the Antichrist, and the left will simply use the fact that he was reelected as proof that we're a white supremecist nation, that Trump has corrupted various institutions through dirty dealing, that Russia is still meddling in our elections, and what else.
I don't disagree with what you wrote at all. In fact, I wholeheartedly champion basically everything you said. My first exposure to that kind of feminist sophistry first got me totally tongue-tied and I didn't know how to fight back against it, but I knew that they were doing something wrong. Then when I saw people like Scott calling out this sort of thing as a motte and bailey in posts like Social Justice and Words Words Words, Another Brick in the Motte, and Untitled, I was able to recognize exactly where the sophistry was, and I grew to hate feminists for their abuse of logic, and getting large swaths of society to fall in line, because they make fallacious arguments that aren't super easy to spot and refute as such. After all, the way to win a debate with a 2 minute speaker limit is to make arguments that take 2 minutes and 10 seconds to refute.
But all of this was pointed out by tons of MGTOWs, MRAs, and other anti-feminists, along with the more scrupled people in the rationalist movement like Scott back in 2015. I'm sure that 99.99% of people posting on the Motte already know that patriarchy theory is one of the biggest divisive arguments of the past decade, and I'm sure that 95% of Mottezians would agree with you that it is pure sophistry, and one of the more infamous and abused motte and bailey arguments. This is all to say that I think that everything you said is old news, so I'm wondering, why did you bring it up? Is there some greater context surrounding your post that would be relevant to it, that would cast it in a new light, to spark debate amongst the Motte?
Sorry, I don't want to be too hard on you as a first time poster. I'm far from the arbiter of what's insightful and what's old on the Motte, and it's not like I've never said anything that was obvious to others before. It's just that people on the Motte are always (rightfully) wary of us becoming an echo chamber, and I worry about that, too. So I'd rather focus on new things that we have lots to say about as opposed to retread ground.
haroldbkny
4mo ago
What is wrong with reddit? I find that oftentimes I have a question, and I can't honestly think of any other place on the internet that I can ask that question and get an answer other than specific subreddits. But at the same time, I don't want to post on reddit because I hate it. You can't post anything there without at least half the comments being about how you're a fucking idiot for even asking the question to begin with. Every single time I'm like "I know I had bad experiences on reddit in the past, but this current post I'm about to do is so innocuous that no one could possibly take issue with it and ridicule me for it", and every time, without fail, I'm proven wrong.
Reddit just seems to me to be the judgiest place in the world. Does reddit select for this? Is this some sort of toxoplasma in action? Does half of reddit just consider themselves to be better than other people?
haroldbkny
11mo ago
The response to this (when it's not an accusation of racism on my part) is that I'm just like the creationists who wanted their psuedoscience taught alongside evolution.
Somewhat tangential to your question later in the post, but I was so saddened by seeing people I know post this meme the other day:
https://preview.redd.it/ukazfxdcn2ua1.png?auto=webp&s=5f4ebcbab0593b4432eb4bb1afaab9138caef5a5
It really made me feel honestly sad and worried for where we are, that people are honestly putting their pet gender theories, which don't seem to be based on anything more than definitional assertions and mob power, on par with physical science, and mathematics. They're claiming that their gender theories are "biology", but on what basis?
haroldbkny
26d ago
I agree with you but I also want to play devil's advocate a little bit. Do you, and I, and others actually feel like it'd be better to have a society that values the strong over the weak? It's not hard to imagine how that sort of society could be dystopian, too.
And is it a binary choice, or is there a middle, too, where we can have the strong and weak valued equally, or strong is valued over weak, but not so much that we get the effects we're seeing in society today? If I had to choose a society one way vs the other, I'm not sure which I'd choose.
haroldbkny
2mo ago
One reason is we don’t have COVID so fewer bored leftist.
I hope you're right! But I've always viewed the crazy COVID response itself as being because of leftism. I remember the leftists in my life talking about how COVID was Trump's fault and saying they need to take the pandemic response into their own hands. And people did this, making everyone think that COVID was the most serious illness ever that was going to destroy our country, which caused businesses to have everyone work from home because they didn't want to seem like they were uncaring. And before you know it, we had 3 years of lockdowns. I think that if a disease as non-deadly COVID happened 20 years prior, it's possible we wouldn't' have locked down like that, it was maybe only because the leftists had such groundswell power.
The second reason is it’s tough to cry wolf for the tenth time and still get people outraged
That's what I keep thinking, but they keep proving me wrong!
For instance, women seem more able to put themselves in the shoes of male protagonists in fiction, while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists.
I find this to be quite the opposite, personally. I'm always reading books with female protagonists with my wife (most recently mistborn and the Alanna books) that she read when she was younger, and getting into deep conversations with her about them. I grow to really like those books. My wife will consume media with me with male protagonists, but she rarely grows to really internalize it and love it. The only time she ever likes something enough to rewatch it is if it has a female protagonist. I personally blame the feminist movement for putting this mind worm in her to believe that there's something inherently better about female led media.
haroldbkny
1mo ago
You're probably right. But I dislike this behavior of expanding the definition of rape. At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else. Not something someone could do by accident. Mens rea was almost definitely necessary for a rape to occur.
Expanding this definition makes it so that people who probably haven't done anything that terrible or didn't intend to do anything that terrible, and maybe made a bad decision now are lumped in with violent psychopaths. It also takes away nuance from language. It may have also had the effect that you're positing, too, of making people less likely to hook up with drunk girls.
I just heard what I think is a terrible atrocity (granted on the much milder-end of terrible atrocities) that no one seems to know or care about. Apparently Maryland requires that if you have been diagnosed with sleep apnea:
Failure to do this will result in your driver's license being revoked.
This really makes my blood boil. I found out about this because my friend in Maryland is one such person affected by this, with her extremely mild case of sleep apnea (that probably 75% of Americans actually have). She didn't bother with or really need the CPAP, but now, the DMV found out, and is threatening to revoke her license, so she has no choice. Hell, I'm a person who's been diagnosed with very mild sleep apnea, but I chose to not use the CPAP machine, because I couldn't stand having an intrusive device strapped onto my face with tubes running on my bed, pushing air down my throat all night every night. Provided I didn't sleep on my back, I was completely fine, and I didn't need to use the device at all. Since then, I've lost weight, and I don't have sleep apnea anymore, or at least not as much, but I don't even know if they ever declare someone as "no longer having sleep apnea", or if I'd actually pass that threshold, or if the DMV would care. My only saving grace is that I don't live in Maryland, but man, this makes me so scared about what might come next, and how long I'll get to keep my driver's license for before this either comes to my state, or some other health-related driving restrictions start cropping up.
This seems like such rampant safetyism to me that it honestly makes me so angry, probably angrier than I should be. I guess this seems like such government overreach, much in the same way as covid restrictions. Except that these restrictions really could last forever, and expand to other states, and never go away, unlike the covid restrictions. Did Maryland honestly have rampant cases of drivers falling asleep because they were so tired from their sleep apnea that they needed to mandate an intrusive, ongoing, never-ending medical treatment to save people from crashing their cars? Does this help anyone at all, or were they just looking to do some security theater?
I really want to do something to fight this before it expands. Is this the sort of thing the ACLU would take up the fight for? Are there any organizations that would actually fund and spearhead a class action lawsuit for this sort of thing?
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