naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
16hr ago
It appears that this forum is filled with city slickers in fancy German cars.
Really? I feel like last time someone asked for car buying advice, the answers were all Hondas and Toyotas. Although even with those, "expensive" is relative. I regard Hondas as "expensive" in that they cost more than a similarly-sized Ford or Subaru or the like. But in my experience it's difficult to go wrong with a Honda daily driver. Though my household currently hasn't got a single vehicle less than a decade old, so it's possible my impressions are out of date.
I would like to have an electric car for commuting, but I need the all-in price on a gently used electric car to be much closer to $15,000 than $50,000 before that can happen. Ten years ago, I really had hoped to have a full self-driving car by 2025. But as near as I can tell, for the foreseeable future I will be driving a standard transmission Honda.
I have driven the following cars.
This is a fascinating list because it is so short. I can't even tell you the models of all the cars I have driven, much less the years--too many rentals to count! I would be hard pressed to remember with accuracy the year of every car I have personally owned. I will say that the overall "feel" or "comfort" of consumer-model cars mostly scales linearly with price, but whether you're willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for "oh wow they really got those knob clicks dialed in, didn't they, and this steering wheel feels amazing" naturally depends a lot on how many dollars you have. And the linear comfort scaling does not apply to sports cars; cars built to go very fast are often quite uncomfortable to drive.
If I had infinity dollars right now, I would probably buy a Tesla S and keep a gas-fed Honda parked alongside it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8d ago
Are you saying that to live a valuable life you need to only do what is "reasonable" as in the bare minimum of not harming others? Or "reasonable" as in "make the world a better place but you can spend moderate/reasonable costs and don't have to spend severe/unreasonable costs"?
More like the latter. Contractualism is the view that we should never violate a principle of action that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement. In practice, we want to be able to justify our actions to others within our moral community. A principle like "always act to make the world a better place" seems reasonably rejectable; not only will I rarely have any idea which of my actions will "make the world a better place," even if I have a very good idea that it would actually make the world a better place to torture a certain innocent child, I have compelling reasons to not do that. In particular, innocent children have a weighty interest--a right--to not be tortured, and making the world a little or even a lot better for millions of people is not sufficient to overcome such interests.
Of course most choices are not so stark. There is often value in doing more than is strictly required of you, but even so it's very important to notice the difference between what is optimal and what is obligatory. If morality required us to always do the optimal thing, it would be impossibly demanding. Very likely no one would ever actually do the "right" thing, on such a view--there are simply too many unknowns. It is much more reasonable to expect people to act in ways they can justify to others. Deliberately making the world a worse place is not generally something we can justify to others. But it's not hard to justify to others, say, spending some time chatting about politics on the Internet, provided your other immediate obligations have been met and you find this sort of activity interesting or relaxing or fun. Is it the optimal way to spend your time? Perhaps not! But you are not actually under a moral obligation to spend your time optimally. So long as posting on Internet forums does not violate a principle of action that no one could reasonably reject, it's permissible.
Thanks for sharing your experience (and welcome to the Motte!). There were always similar concerns in my household (my children are all adults now)--I would like to have had more children (like you, I come from a large family) but then I talk to people who were lucky to have one kid, or who struggled with infertility for years and never had any, and it makes me feel like an ungrateful whiner.
My main reaction to your post is "you don't owe a baby to the world!" You aren't overstating the magnitude of the risks--even today, though the risks of pregnancy and childbirth are much less than they were even a hundred years ago, they remain real. At the extremes, women still die in the process. Even the temporary stuff, like sciatica and morning sickness, is still genuine suffering.
But pro-natalism has arisen almost exclusively as a reaction to the rise of philosophical anti-natalism. And one of the central arguments in anti-natalism is an incongruency in ethics: there often seem to be morally compelling reasons to not have children (e.g. you know you are unable to care for a child, and know that no one else will), but (outside extreme cases of authoritarianism) essentially no one thinks anyone should be compelled to bear children (even pro-life people who think it is wrong to terminate a pregnancy don't believe it would be right to force a pregnancy on an unwilling woman). Anti-natalists inflate the arguments against childbearing toward an all-encompassing edict: humanity should voluntarily work toward its own orderly extinction.
Because I am not a utilitarian, I do not find such arguments compelling. When I say you don't owe a baby to the world, what I mean is this: it is morally permissible for you to have another child, if that is what you decide to do, despite the risks. Whether the risks are worthy to be undertaken is open to you to decide, but you are not under any utilitarian obligation to have another child even if that child would be of tremendous benefit to the world. Something that I think most ethical systems really miss is the range of permissibility; utiltiarians and deontologists frequently run into the assertion that there is always and only one truly right thing to do (the "best" thing) in any situation. It's very constraining! As a contractualist, I think that there is actually a wide range of things it is morally permissible to do, and that having children is often one of those things.
But if you do, you should do it because you want to, and because the risks are acceptable to you; or, you should not do it, because you don't want to, or on reflection you find the risks too great. Whatever you choose, it's not on you to make the world a better place. It's only on you to do what is reasonable. That's all it means, to live a life of choice and value. It's wonderful that you already have three children, and I wish you luck with that endeavor. Whether or not you continue to grow your family, I thank you for your existing contributions to the rest of the world, which we did not earn, were never owed, and can receive from you only as a welcome gift--never, ever as the fulfillment of a moral obligation.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8d ago
Not in any detail. I just googled him and he's still got a profile page at the same law firm he was at 20 years ago.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8d ago
You are no one's outgroup and everyone's far-group.
I don't think I've ever specifically had this thought! I usually say something like "the lefts think I'm too far right, the rights think I'm too far left, and the centrists think I'm way too political" but "I'm just in everyone's far-group" has a ring of truth to it... most of the time, anyway. Every once in a while I get picked to be someone's nemesis; fortunately, it rarely seems to last.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
Any chance you could drop a couple lines about him? It's an odd setup.
Sure--let's call him Dylan. Dylan is the son of a colleague, who I met briefly when he was in town visiting his parents. Long, sun-bleached hair, deeply tanned skin, very "beach bum" aesthetic. But not in a "manic homeless" way--he was clean and taciturn. I asked him what he does, and he said he picks pineapples in Hawaii. I asked if that was a year-round thing, he said "kinda." So I asked him what he does when he's not picking pineapples, and he said "play games I guess." Any games in particular? "Older stuff, my laptop is pretty slow." RTS, FPS, RPG? "Some RPGs, yeah. I play Starcraft, too." Well, I game, I played Starcraft (more than a quarter century ago, now...), so the rest of our discussion was about Starcraft. He never gave me the impression that I was getting the brush-off, or that he was especially reluctant to talk--just that he didn't have a lot to say. He seemed nice!
His parents later told me that, after finishing high school, Dylan enlisted with the army. He'd only been in for a couple of months when another soldier assaulted him, put him in the hospital. Dylan says the guy just had some unreasonable beef; whether that was Mom being cagey, or Dylan just never explaining events in detail, I don't know. The assailant faced charges, Dylan got an early discharge. Moved back in with his parents, got a job as a night clerk at a gas station. Soon after got a girlfriend, moved in with her. Split his time between working at the gas station, and getting high with his girlfriend--marijuana at first, harder drugs later. They have a scare and decide to get clean together. Six months later, six months clean, he comes home from work--she's had some old friends over. They brought drugs. She died of an overdose--some time in the early 00s.
Dylan moves back home, largely refuses to leave his room for months. Parents start talking about getting a diagnosis, maybe disability. Then one day, he says he's going to Hawaii. What's he going to do? "Pick pineapples." Where's he going to live? "They've got dorms and stuff." He takes nothing but a duffel stuffed with clothing and some personal tech.
His parents went out to visit him once, and as far as they could determine he was at that time living in a hammock strung between some palm trees. He doesn't date. He doesn't socialize. He doesn't use the Internet. He plays video games on an old laptop, which he charges whenever it's convenient. He doesn't read, or surf. He must hike, at least sometimes, because that is the activity he took his parents out to do. He'll come stateside to visit, occasionally, if his parents buy him a plane ticket. While glad he's independent, they can't help but feel a perpetual simmering concern. As long as he's not starving or doing hard drugs, they don't want to press the issue. "He's been through a lot."
I was fascinated by the story, because on one hand, it kind of sounds to me like drugs and tragedy just fried this guy--that he's a walking husk with no ambition, no particular concern for his own well-being, just barely functioning enough to earn enough money as a laborer to keep himself alive. On the other hand, I can also imagine him a sage of stoicism, someone who has so thoroughly embraced minimalism and detachment that he has transcended the weight of social expectations entirely. No wife, no children, itinerant labor, apparently homeless, but not entirely without places to go. I poked around the Internet a bit and all the references I could find to pineapple picker dormitories are dated to the 20th century; I also learned that pineapple picking in Hawaii is a much smaller industry than it has been in the past. This tempted me toward wild speculations--is this all a ruse? Is Dylan involved in secret government operations, or organized criminal activity? His parents seem confident that his girlfriend's overdose put him off drugs extremely decisively--he only, they claim, ever used with her. But maybe they are kidding themselves?
Then I remind myself--just because I have trouble imagining the life of an itinerant laborer, does not mean they don't exist. Just because a life sounds mind-numbingly dull to me, doesn't mean it's not someone's life. But he's been at it for nearly two decades, and it seems unlikely that he has been saving for retirement. He can't pick pineapples (or whatever) in Hawaii forever. Can he?
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
I think there might be a Berkson's paradox going on.
Very possibly, but I feel like just saying that employs Berkson's paradox as a thought-terminating cliche, rather than as a careful consideration of the observed clustered phenomena. Which correlation do you suspect might be spurious?
When I suggested that Lana is not just a person, but a personality, I meant it. Her post on the suicide forum made her a particularly extreme example of the type, but I know many women, including members of my family, who very much fit the type, though they haven't imploded their lives to quite the same spectacular degree. Some stay married (but often publicly declare their bisexuality), some get neopronouns, some keep their hair a natural color... but the commitment to wide-band political leftism combined with a willingness to excommunicate dissenters from their lives makes a pretty consistent through-line. Those things seem pretty obviously connected with the clustered phenomena--political leftism incentivizes sex and gender exploration, for example, and willingness to excommunicate others can extend to an unpersuaded spouse. Sociology is hard, but I'm not sure it's so hard that I should be willing to accept "nothing ever happens" as a refutation of the observations in this thread.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
It seems pretty clear to me that Lana's personal problems have nothing to do with Trump...
That is why I said "It cannot possibly have been Donald Trump's fault that Lana divorced her husband." I assume Obergefell was also not the actual inciting incident of her divorce--but yes, in retrospect, I definitely see those as coincidences in the most literal sense of the term, unrelated stage-setting events that would become relevant as the story unfolded.
It seems pretty clear to me that Lana's personal problems have nothing to do with . . . the culture war in general.
Of course I can't refute this with great certainty. I can report on what I saw myself, filling in some gaps with what was reported to me by others, and if you don't find the correlations compelling, what more can I say? I agree with you, strongly, about the results of cutting people off, for whatever reason; humans do not generally thrive under that condition.
But I know why I was cut off, in this particular story. And I know whose politics correlate more strongly with cutting people off for political reasons. The culture war in general may or may not have been the beating heart of Lana's problems (depending on one's thoughts concerning the possible psychological hazards of generic 90s feminism), but the idea that her problems had nothing to do with the culture war in general strikes me as... unlikely.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
Would you tell a penis-less cismale without phantom penis sensation "it appears you are not actually male?"
This is a non-sequitur. My point is that phantom sensations do not appear to tell us anything about the way the world is, and so cannot tell us anything about someone's "real" gender, which is what you appeared to be offering the example to do.
I don't claim there's definitive proof an individual claiming to be transgender can be proven to have the neurologic features of their self-identified gender (bailey), but rather that the known-unknowns of neurology don't allow us to disregard their claims (motte).
Yes, so far it does appear that your actual claim is "well they're self-reporting their feelings, who are we to disregard their internal experiences?" And my answer has been, and continues to be, that we make reasonable judgments about people's internal experiences all the time. You are just holding transsexuals to a lower standard on this metric than you appear willing to hold, well, apparently everyone else.
getting sexual reassignment surgery seems like compelling evidence of a sincere belief
So does murdering your children because God told you to do so. Delusional people are generally excruciatingly sincere in their beliefs.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
I doubt the effect exists if one balanced for that first.
Maybe! There are certainly confounders galore. There have been a variety of attempts to do as you've suggested, or make other, similar adjustments. The most recent one I'm aware of is here. From the abstract:
First, we examine whether the conservative-liberal divide in self-assessments of mental health remains once we control for a wide variety of demographics, socioeconomic factors, and recent life experiences. We find that accounting for these alternative explanations reduces the gap by about 40%, but that ideology remains a strong predictor of mental health self-reports. Second, we conducted an experiment where we randomly assigned whether people were asked to evaluate their mental health or their overall mood. While conservatives report much higher mental health ratings, asking instead about overall mood eliminated the gap between liberals and conservatives. One explanation is that rather than a genuine mental health divide, conservatives may inflate their mental health ratings when asked, due to stigma surrounding the term. Another possibility is that ideological differences persist for some aspects of mental well-being, but not others.
I just can't help but notice that studies along these lines keep showing up, and keep generating the same kind of response. The 2023 study showing greater depressive affect in leftist teenagers, for example, generated dozens of think-pieces explaining that this was probably just a result of differences in self-reporting, or level of political engagement, or "hey maybe these kids should be depressed, if they're even remotely aware of how terrible things are." But as one of the more thorough essays (archive link to an American Affairs article) I've found on the matter suggests:
The well-being gap between liberals and conservatives is one of the most robust patterns in social science research. It is not a product of things that happened over the last decade or so; it goes back as far as the available data reach. The differences manifest across age, gender, race, religion, and other dimensions. They are not merely present in the United States, but in most other studied countries as well. Consequently, satisfying explanations of the gaps in reported well-being between liberals and conservatives would have to generalize beyond the present moment, beyond isolated cultural or geographic contexts, and beyond specific demographic group
...
[But the] implications and applications of these realities remain wide open to interpretation.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
Yeah, I have no idea either way, though I certainly have my suspicions.
I have seen therapy work for people, including genuinely saving the marriage of a close family member, but... mostly not.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
History telling Fukuyama "We're done when I say we're done."
This is the most chillingly beautiful phrase I've read this week.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
You seem to suggest a radicalization -> divorce pipeline, but I wonder if the reverse is more true? People ruin their relationships and this leads them to a political radicalization as a way to find their true family / identity
This strikes me as related to @urquan's question about religious identity. I saw events happen in a particular sequence, but it's entirely possible that the consequences of personal change manifested in a different order than the actual causes of that personal change. This researcher has done a fair bit of work on how people's perception of their own race can change in response to their politics (most research on race and politics assumes the reverse, treating race as an immutable characteristic). So yeah, I'm certainly open to the possibility that we're talking about, essentially, a two-way (multi-way!) street.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
When you say she’s (or was?) a “religious Protestant” — what do you mean by that?
I only mean that she attended a "non-denominational" Christian (is that an oxymoron?) church in the area, but I couldn't tell you anything more specific about it than that. I probably knew the name of the congregation at some point, but I certainly don't remember it now. It's quite possible she was, as you say, "simply in the process of leaving," albeit very slowly (then all at once). From my limited perspective, the congregational falling-out seemed to be part and parcel with the divorce, but again--by then, most of my information on her circumstances was being filtered through the lens of social media posts.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
I know they shared custody initially, but the job she eventually landed was in another state, and I don't have any information on how their custody arrangement evolved from there.
Following up on this comment, I was recently working on an effort post that was loosely organized around "some people I have known." Specifically, I have been thinking about unenviable lives, people whose existence strikes me as excessively resistant to improvement of any kind, and how the way we structure society helps, hurts, or even creates such people. Some intended figures for inclusion were a man in his 50s who is a permanent American expatriate and recent convert to Islam; a woman in her 60s who lives in her car after burning through a six figure inheritance in the space of a single year; a man in his 40s whose whole life consists of playing video games and harvesting pineapples. All of their stories have culture war implications, I think, but one of them is culture war all the way down. This is Lana's story.
Requiem for a Friend(ship)
Once upon a time, before the world Awoke, I had a friend.
When I met Lana (name has been changed for all the usual reasons) she was a newly-minted attorney, freshly hired to the Office of General Counsel. A few weeks after being introduced at a university function, I ran into her at lunchtime. She was having a political discussion with another OGC employee and cheerfully invited my participation. This basic scenario played out again, intermittently, for several semesters, organically developing into a friendship that extended marginally beyond the workplace.
Over the years I learned that, when Lana first joined the OGC, she'd been married to another attorney--a family law practitioner of no particular reputation. They were religious Protestants but political Progressives. Lana's feminism was very 90s, in a way I find hard to describe today, but you can probably imagine it: makeup good, Barbie sus, "pro-child, pro-choice," but nary a mention of "patriarchy" or "rape culture" or "microaggressions." Critical theory was already a Thing, of course, but the battle of the sexes (as it was sometimes called) hadn't yet been racialized or radicalized in quite the way we see today. Anyway, Lana enjoyed--or seemed to enjoy!--that I was (approximately) an irreligious conservative. I think that, perhaps, by doubly violating her expectations (arguing against her politics without resort to Jesus, being unmoved by her appeals to Christian charity as a justification for bleeding-heart policies) I presented a novelty to her lawyerly (read: contrarian, adversarial) mindset. I appreciated her openness to discussion.
Eventually, Lana took a position elsewhere, but we occasionally caught up using whatever technology was in fashion. Email, Instant Messenger, social media. She proved to be an especially prolific Facebook poster after giving birth to a child and retiring from law practice to parent full-time (what she said then was that she never really enjoyed practicing law anyway--if memory serves, she was a literature undergraduate). Of course, social media is often a distorted lens, but what I saw was a pretty relatable mixture of joy and struggle, interspersed with the discussions of political interest that were the heart of many of Lana's friendships--including ours.
And then it was 2015.
It cannot possibly have been Donald Trump's fault that Lana divorced her husband. The problems she recounted in her Facebook overshares must have been simmering for some time: husband pressuring her for sex more than once a month, being a full-time mother had cost her her identity, raising a kid seemed like an impossibly difficult and objectionably thankless undertaking. But long-running disagreements with her Protestant friends over same-sex marriage came to an apogee in June of 2015, when Obergefell v. Hodges was decided--ten days, if I'm counting correctly, after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States. That same month, Lana very publicly, very noisily separated from her husband--as well as her religious community, which she felt had taken "his side." The extended process of an acrimonious custody dispute began.
We sometimes speak of the "Great Awokening" and pin it to 2012 or 2014, but the first time I really noticed it influencing my personal life was during the 2016 election season (and aftermath). And what I noticed was not a vibe shift, but a shocking spate of relationship implosion. I had always thought of "blocking" people on social media as a tool created to weed out spammers, trolls, and perhaps the occasional stalker or abuser--not something anyone would ever do to friends, family, or even acquaintances, certainly not over something as trivial as political disagreement. But as 2016 progressed, Lana's Facebook posts grew increasingly vitriolic, and her tolerance for dissent all but vanished. "If you support Trump, just unfriend me now," she posted once. "Because if I see anyone post anything supporting him, I will block you."
Well, I wasn't a Trump supporter, so I didn't worry too much about it. At the time, I attributed this unbounded anger to Lana's personal circumstances, but by the time Trump won the election, Lana's divorce had been finalized for months. I suppose the official "end" of our friendship came in March of 2017. After months of watching Democrats scramble for any possible way to overturn the results of the election, from inducement to faithless electors to violent protests, I made a social media post highlighting several of the absurdities of the 2017 Women's March (in particular, its deliberate exclusion of pro-life women), and Lana put me on her block list.
I was sad about that, but by then our friendship had lacked an "in person" component for several years. I still had "in person" friendships with several mutual acquaintances, however, so I would occasionally get a second-hand update. At some point in 2018, Lana remarried--this time, to a woman. She had a couple of bad starts at getting back into law practice before finally settling back where she'd begun, doing lawyerly work for a (different) university. She gained two hundred pounds (ten of that in piercing jewelry), stopped shaving her legs (and started posting pictures of her unshaved legs to social media), shaved half her head instead, and colored blue what remained. Her Facebook posting, I was told, never slowed down, but became a stable mixture of "#NotMyPresident" and "I'm having another mental health crisis today" posts. (COVID-19 apparently heightened the amplitude in predictable ways, but in substance changed little.)
Then, not long ago, I got a message from a mutual friend asking if I knew of any way to contact Lana. They pointed me toward a post (now removed) on a subreddit I'd never heard of--a "suicide watch" subreddit. It is apparently a place for people to post their suicidal inclinations and get "non-judgemental peer support ONLY," whatever that means in the context of an anonymous internet forum. Under a pseudonym I recognized from our Instant Messenger days, Lana had posted that after a year of non-stop fighting (again, mostly over sex), her second marriage was coming to an end. All her friends had abandoned her and all she had left were online discussion groups with internet strangers, where she constantly faced accusations of being an awful spouse, awful mother, and all-around awful person. Our mutual friend was seriously concerned for Lana's well-being, but had been unable to get a response via social media, texts, phonecalls, or otherwise.
My first thought was that maybe I could find a way to get in touch with Lana--surely I owed her that much, for the years of friendship we'd enjoyed? Perhaps she was still active on one of her old accounts. But my second thought was that even if I could get in touch with her, there was a good chance I would only make her feel worse, in any number of ways. That put a damper on any inclination I might have felt to make any heroic effort on Lana's behalf, which in turn inspired some self-recrimination. I had to wonder: was my reluctance down to schadenfreude? Am I such a culture warrior that I would turn a blind eye to the suffering of a friend? After all, at minimum I could roll a fresh reddit alt and just... drop Lana an anonymous message of support. Would she see it? Would she care?
I won't tell you what I did, in the end. The point of this post is not to solicit advice, much less to inquire, with fluttering eyelashes, "AITA?" I will say that if my choice had any meaningful impact at all, I've never learned of it. I do have it on good authority that Lana is still alive, her second divorce final, and another same-sex romance underway. I can honestly say that I hope it works out for her.
Boo Outgroup
It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, in a way that is difficult to discuss anywhere but the CW thread of the Motte. Lana is a person, but Lana also instantiates a personality. She is not the only friend I lost from 2015-2017, but the further we get from those days, the more closely their lives come to rhyme. I have a comfortable life, and often I think that's a g-loaded task (so to speak), but by and large these are not stupid people I see, setting fire to their lives in pursuit (or as a result) of ideological purity. I would say "status games" but they don't seem to be accruing any particular status! Swap out "lawyer" for "analyst" or "educator" or similar and much of Lana's story could be told of a dozen of the relationships I've enjoyed and lost. A cousin at a family function, a high school acquaintance on Facebook, a former student dropping by my office; all rolling in the deep, and every time a Bayesian reckoning lands me on "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness" I roll to disbelieve, because I know it can't possibly be that simple--can it?
Of course it can't--conservatives top themselves, too, after all! And this is, like, prime culture war fodder, "boo outgroup" of the most aggressive sort. I don't know whether it's "mistake theory" or "conflict theory" to assert that people who believe differently have a disease of the mind, but--
Seven or eight years ago, I had a somewhat surprising interaction with a colleague at a conference. We were having dinner and discussing politics, and it gradually dawned on him that I was not just being entertainingly contrarian--that I was honestly defending some views, mostly libertarian but some downright conservative, which I actually held. His response was presciently forecast in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
"Oh, yes indeed," Albus Dumbledore said in level tones. "Your acting was perfect; I confess myself utterly deceived. [You] seemed--what is the term I am looking for? Ah yes, that is the word. [You] seemed sane."
Well, okay, to be honest, he didn't actually accuse me of being insane. Rather, he refused to believe I am actually conservative. Weirdo contrarian libertarianism he could understand, but conservative? Never. In fairness, probably a lot of conservatives would refuse to believe it, too; my views on speech and sex and God and the like definitely put me on the outs with the diehards, but nevertheless I'm far too pro life, anti woke, pro federalism, anti public employee unions, etc. to ever fit in on the Left; it is a little difficult for me to even make a plausible bid for "centrist" without appending a caveat like "right-leaning." Even so--I simply was not believed.
That conversation got much less surprising by the fourth or fifth time it happened--most recently, just last week. I don't think I'm hiding the ball, here. I don't aggressively share my viewpoint in professional settings but neither do I bother to code switch for the benefit of others. And I have learned, over the years, that people really do just see what they expect to see. I'm a professor; once they know that, they make assumptions about my ideological commitments which even my own direct protestations are insufficient to counter. And this repeatedly inspires people to insist that I am putting on the affectation of conservatism; that I am clearly too smart, too educated, and too obviously sane to possibly see any value in right wing politics. Well, there's a lot I don't like about right wing politics! That's fair to say. Even so, I'm pretty conservative, especially as radical Leftism continues to push "classical liberalism" to the right of the recognized spectrum.
The obvious weak man here is just, you know, reddit commenters in default subs. These days it seems I can scarcely doomscroll for five minutes without encountering an entire thread of "no sane person can be a Republican" and "Republicans are all murderous sadists" and "I used to think tolerance was important, but there is no saving MAGA, we need to round these psychos up and put them out of our misery." Radical left wing violence is a thing! Presumably at least some of these posts are coming from Russian and Chinese botfarms, but most strike me as just the products of American public education.
Is there a forum for progressive cat ladies out there somewhere, where Lana is writing about her old friend, the professor? The one who used to be a mild-mannered contrarian scholar but who was radicalized by Harry Potter and My Little Pony fanfic and now moderates a forum for explicit wrongthink? I feel like, objectively, I've got the preferable outlook; I'm not suicidal, I haven't torched any marital or familial or professional relationships. I feel pretty sane, honestly. But I'm increasingly concerned that (1) I struggle to see sanity in my outgroup and (2) my outgroup struggles to see sanity in me.
In 1922, at the end of the Greco-Turkish War, about 1.2 million Christian Greeks relocated from (what is now) Turkey to (what is now) Greece, and about 400,000 predominantly Muslims relocated the other direction. There was a lot of force, and no small amount of death, involved in the process, but even so, the ethnic cleansing of the region (two regions?) has proven... surprisingly uncontroversial. Mostly forgotten, in fact. The "Cyprus Problem" is downstream from that conflict, of course, but even featuring as it does in the occasional Russian oligarch psychodrama, probably very few Americans have the first clue what a "Cyprus" is, never mind the finer details of the resolution of the Greco-Turkish War.
I do not think the United States is likely to be ideologically partitioned in my lifetime. But I am increasingly concerned about why that is the case. Greenland (population: 55,000) apparently warrants sovereignty and self-rule--but not California? Not Texas? (Not Taiwan? Not Israel? Not Palestine? Not Ukraine?) I think mostly that American citizens, fat on bread and satisfied with our circuses, are unwilling to sacrifice. Actually starting a war with the federal government of the United States would be suicidal, but I don't think the threat of military action is the primary deterrent to schism movements here--at least not yet. Rather, our prosperity is in part the result of our outsized global influence. While far behind China and India, we are nevertheless the third most populous nation in the world, an economic juggernaut despite the recent ascent of various others.
What will happen, if that changes?
What will happen, if it doesn't?
It's a problem for future generations, but at the same time I feel the desire to act, to do something about the rift that I see, to "reach out" and bridge the growing divide somehow--even though, if my actions have any meaningful impact at all, I am unlikely to ever know it. Talking about the problem (as we so often do here) doesn't seem to make it better. Not talking about the problem doesn't seem to make it better. Maybe if I were a billionaire, or a movie star, or a successful politician... but I'm not.
This is an oversimplification (inevitable, perhaps, when discussing Hegel) but Hegelian philosophy is sometimes explained through the metaphor of an acorn. An acorn is not an oak tree; a sprout is not an oak tree; a sapling is not an oak tree. And yet the oak tree is within those things, somehow. If we think of the bronze age as the sprouting of human civilization, and the renaissance as perhaps a sapling, then we begin to grasp the idea of our species progressing toward Hegel's "Absolute." The primary disagreement between Hegelians is whether we are each individually just along for the ride, or whether there is something we can do to accelerate the growth of our collective oak tree toward its final form. I am not much of a Hegel scholar--mostly I am aware of his work in connection with its influence on others, notably Karl Marx--but if I were a Hegelian, I think today I would side with those who suspect we're just along for the ride. Voltaire's Candide suggests we each tend to our own gardens, to not seek influence in the wider world. The older I get, the more I think that is probably good advice. But once Lana had a role to play in my particular garden, and now as a result of her own intolerance of diverse viewpoints, she does not. And, good or bad, inevitable or not--that makes me sad.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9d ago
I mean, you could argue it's still a particular configuration of a single "sex-and-gender" neural knot in the brain, rather than two unrelated phenomena.
Yes.
But when people say "trans isn't a sex thing" they mean "it isn't a kink pursued for sexual gratification".
I regard this as far too narrow a sense of "sexual gratification." The archetypal case for autogynephilia is something like "imagining yourself as a woman helps you achieve orgasm." But then stuff like penectomies or even HRT are known to make orgasm more difficult, or even impossible, to achieve, so you might expect autogynephiles to avoid those things, given that "achieve orgasm" was the whole point of the exercise. But there are other forms of "sexual gratification" than just orgasm; there is for example sexual gratification in simply being perceived as sexually desirable. For someone who is for whatever reason averse to sex, or indifferent to it, not being perceived as an object of sexual desire is a strictly sexual form of gratification.
All forms of sexuality, a-, trans-, homo-, hetero-, or otherwise, are by definition sexual in nature, and gratification does not refer exclusively to orgasm or even to specifically coital pleasure, but to gratification that is sexual in nature. If we accept the (questionable) move of separating them from "gender" and making that word refer only and exclusively to the sociological phenomena that supervene on sex, those phenomena still supervene on sex. Many 20th century feminists understood this, which is why they advocated for the abolition of gender distinctions, rather than merely the decoupling of gender from sex. By reifying traditional gender norms through dubious metaphysical claims about one's "real" gender, today's trans advocacy routinely operates directly against its own intellectual foundations.
How confident are you that you're not falling into a typical mind trap?
Pretty confident, because I'm not asserting something about my own experiences as any kind of baseline. I'm making a claim about the trustworthiness of internal claims for which there is overwhelming external counterevidence ("I feel like I really am a man" -> "This is not the body of a man").
~60% of transmen reported experiencing phantom penis sensations, when surveyed
This would be a more interesting result to me if scientists and society proceeded to then tell the other 40% of transmen "it would appear you are not actually trans." If "phantom penis sensations" are neither necessary nor sufficient to the definition of transsexuality in females, what's the difference? Trans identity is doubly vague, with both "gender" and "trans" subject to constant motte-and-baileying. To give a different example, if essentially all AIS-afflicted genetic males experienced serious gender dysphoria prior to receiving AIS diagnosis, that would weigh heavily, I think, in favor of the brain being "in tune" with sex and gender. But such results do not appear extant; AIS diagnosis often comes as a complete shock.
I disagree that it's more worthy of disbelief than any other internal experience.
Returning to this, then: I'm the one asserting that we should treat such claims the same as any other report of internal experience. You believe yourself to be Abraham Lincoln, or to be wolfkin, or to be talking to God? Okay, let's see some external evidence of that. Even our emotional states, which philosophers often treat as incorrigible and original, are often subjected to doubt: have you ever been told by someone, "I'm fine," when you could see on their face that they were definitely not "fine?" Psychology makes a nod to this in many diagnostic processes, look for words like "persistent" and "insistent" and "recurrent" in discussions of when to approve physician-assisted suicide, for example. See also: chronic pain! How can we know you are or are not hurting, when you come seeking drugs? "Internal experience" is very hard on medical practice! But we do at least somewhat insist on interrogating it in almost every context--in theory, even this one, though the weight of social pressure against that interrogation seems to only continue to grow.
Ultimately, I can think of ways you could, say, convince me that you're Abraham Lincoln, actually. But even if you walked me into your time machine and gave me a tour of history, it would be a goodly while into that tour before I accepted that I wasn't being fooled, somehow. Trans advocacy, meanwhile, seems entirely committed to the idea that proof is neither necessary nor sufficient for valid gender claims, even as they cherry-pick those studies which seem conveniently aligned. I have seen similarly cherry-picked studies proving the existence of miracles. In both cases, it's entirely possible that I'm wrong to doubt!
But I doubt it.
how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases?
Do you have someone in mind, here? Like, I vaguely recall an essay by Alex Byrne suggesting that the notion of "feeling" a certain gender seems incoherent, under the rubric of socially constructed gender. But that kind of thinking, with gender distinct from sex, is very mid-20th century (Simone de Beauvoir) on. Historical cases don't really deal in gender differences without also addressing sex and sexuality; individual cases differ, but the text confirms my expectation that a 1979 Playboy reader would naturally assume transsexuals to also be homosexuals. Why imitate the dress and behavior of a sexually available woman if you were not trying to attract sexual attention from men (or, perhaps homosexual women)? The endogenous feeling there would be homosexuality, of which transsexuality would be a symptom. Autogynephilia would also qualify as endogenous without being a gender feeling. Historical examples aren't hard to explain with just-so stories either way. Noticing, say, the boom in rapid onset gender dysphoria in adolescent girls is not the same thing as committing oneself to the position that transsexuality is strictly a social contagion. So it seems like you need to be more specific about which argument you think you're undermining, here.
she was born in 1939 and had transgender feelings as a child
I have never heard anyone make a claim like this in a way that seemed really believable to me--much like my expectation that people who claim to have seen miracles are more likely to be either foolish or lying, than to have actually seen miracles, no matter how honest they seem to be. I find it far easier to believe that "I had trans feelings as a kid" is a retrospective gloss, or even deliberate self deception, than that a child has specifically "transgender" feelings. Children often reject the gender roles imposed upon them, but part of the problem here is--how do you know you "feel like a girl" if you've never been one? Wanting to fill a cultural role assigned to the opposite sex is something many, maybe most people experience on occasion. Cranking that all the way to "no, I just am fe/male" simply elevates such feelings to the level of an insistent delusion. The addition of social "support" for that kind of thinking probably makes it easier to sell the obvious lie to oneself, or to sort of emotionally sanitize homosexual or autogynephilic drives.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but sexual psychology is really screwy. Humans have sex with animals. Humans have sex with trees. Jeff Bezos, a human billionaire, left his attractive and long-suffering wife for sex with a second-rate journalist made mostly of plastic. Why wouldn't there be people out there who get off on cross-dressing or whatever; that may be one of the least weird things humans have done, sexually. The trans advocacy community works really hard to insist that gender isn't a sex thing, but I think that is ultimately just empirically false. Your brain does not contain separate wiring for sex and gender. It's all one big, thoroughly interconnected mess. That is how "trans" cases can come to exist even in the absence of social contagion: the same way every other psychosexual phenomenon comes to exist! Through the interaction of reproductive drives (normal, pathological, or otherwise), personal circumstances, and cultural norms.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10d ago
Nice.
(I built a mining rig in 2010 because I thought Bitcoin was philosophically interesting, then I never actually mined anything because it was beyond my technical abilities and I was busy with other philosophically interesting stuff. My only consolation is that there is no possible world where I both actually mined Bitcoin and held it beyond a total value of, say, $50,000, which would be a nice amount of money to have, but is not really a life-changing amount.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
10d ago
Wow, this really rings true to me. In particular, I think that it meshes extremely well with my own sense of how the political right has evolved since Buckley:
[T]he Republican coalition circa William F. Buckley, Jr. was capitalists, anti-communists, and the religious right. Today it's more like "lib-right" capitalists, anti-Wokists, and the working class.
"Political Dad" was the religious right, or at least the way that capitalists and anti-communists spoke when still coddling the religious right. Strength, but also manners; he can crack open a cold one and tell off-color jokes, but only when Mom is out shopping. If Dad is stuffy and uncool it's because Dad has nothing to prove; you already know Dad fucks, that's how he became Dad. But Mom went from being a bitter church lady to being a blue haired political lesbian so she kicked Dad out and now we only see Dad on weekends when he's not on a Disney cruise with his hot girlfriend, Crypto. In short, it's like I said:
Obama's defeat of Romney (not incidentally, a religious capitalist whose prophecies Obama mocked in his infamous "the 1980s are now calling" comment) was the end of Buckley Republicanism as a going concern.
Not to overmix the metaphor but this last semester I had five students in one of my classes show up with ashes on their forehead for Ash Wednesday. The Children do not seem impressed with... whatever the hell this is, this political upheaval that is happening between the Boomers and the Millennials. (Generation X appears to be sitting on their 3% mortgages very, very quietly.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
10d ago
So, this was an interesting read...
Left-wing violence is being normalized
I doubt many people here will find the core assertion even a tiny bit surprising; we were just talking about it, kinda, last month. What I found interesting was the, uh... I'm not sure what to call it. The rhetoric of realization, maybe? The opening line:
Something has changed in America’s psyche. Violence has become more acceptable.
I immediately found myself doing the DiCaprio squint and mouthing the words "fiery but mostly peaceful", but I read on. The meat:
Well, after working through a heap of survey data and social media language trends, we’ve come to a series of startling conclusions about a change that’s happening in US society. The NCRI has uncovered more than just an online ecosystem of unsettling ideas. What we’re seeing is the rise and proliferation of assassination culture on the internet. It’s more than just a collection of jokes, symbols and memes. It’s an entirely new subculture for incubating radical and subversive ideas that are anathema to the things America has historically stood for.
Over the past several decades we have assumed that calls for political violence come from the far right, and they often have. What we never expected to see was the enormous growth in similar calls emerging from the mainstream left. We undertook a nationwide survey to understand it better and discovered that a breathtaking half of those who identified as politically left-wing agreed that the murder of public figures could be at least somewhat justified. What’s more, 56 percent of them agreed that there could be some justification for killing Trump. Just under half agreed that the same could be said about the fate of Musk. Tesla dealerships, too, merit at least some destruction, according to 59 percent of those surveyed.
You don't say!
If you want to understand America today, the most compelling explanations revolve around a cluster of personality characteristics called authoritarianism. There are two kinds: a right-wing kind and a left-wing kind. Many mainstream academics say that all our present political instability revolves around a critical mass of people amenable to behaviors linked with the right-wing type. . . .
Yet it runs against common sense to imagine only right-wing people can act pathologically when most of the postwar world lived, for a while, under the intensely authoritarian – and quasi-genocidal – domination of communist regimes. And very few of us can shake the intuition that the intense “woke” energy which has so permeated American culture over the past decade shares these hallmarks of authoritarian tyranny.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that there has been a kind of intellectual embargo on saying so lately, because most explanations coming from mainstream US academia about cultural politics have fixated on the conservative version. The godfather of right-wing authoritarianism theory, the Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer, labeled the left-wing variety as nothing more than a “Loch Ness Monster”: it doesn’t actually exist.
And people believed that! Somehow. Bob was the expert, after all. He's an expert, Bob! An expert! (Well, he was; Altemeyer died last year, too early to witness Trump's second inauguration.) Also, how does Horder know I'm not surprised to "learn" that there has been an "intellectual embargo on saying so lately?" He seems to be suggesting that it will not surprise the reader to learn that his surprising new discovery is in no way surprising to anyone who isn't a shameless partisan. How is that supposed to work, exactly?
Newer thinkers, however, have started to change their minds. Academics have begun work on a new framework that describes an emergent left-wing authoritarianism.
The article details the framework, which is basically a mirror of the extant right-wing framework (conventionalism -> anticonventionalism, aggression -> antihierarchical aggression, submission -> censorship). On one hand, I think the author is correct. On the other, I guess I'm wondering if I can get a senior fellowship at Princeton for being several decades ahead of their best researchers on the idea that authoritarian leftism is actually a real thing. The whole tone of the piece is amazing to me. Max Horder comes off as an affable buffoon; "we discovered the Loch Ness monster, guys! What a shock!"
It's a move in the direction. I don't have any serious complaints about the proposed framework. But really. Really. This is the new game? Is it because Trump is in the White House again, so academia has to go back to pretending to be "politically neutral?" "We're all good classical liberals, boss, honest! No radicals here, no sir." Or am I too cynical? Maybe it's more like--there really was an intellectual embargo, the Trump administration has directly or indirectly lifted that embargo, so all the good scholarship is creeping out into the sun. In which case, will academics admit that? Maybe send Trump a thank-you card?
I won't hold my breath.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11d ago
The denial of cert on L.M. v. Morrison was an incredible betrayal by Barrett (with additional mixed feelings on Gorsuch). This only confirms what many have increasingly feared. Roberts and Kavanaugh have always been establishment stooges so I know it's impossible to expect real constitutionalism from the Court, when push comes to shove, but I had hoped that a Scalia acolyte like Barrett could at least be counted on to get the important cases heard.
naraburns
nihil supernum
14d ago
It sounds like something omitted from your books is all the child labor. For most of human history, most of human labor was agricultural. Children grew up working alongside their parents, first through useless imitation ("play") and, as the years passed, through making small contributions, then large ones. Children qua children have been culturally loved and cherished to varying degrees depending on a host of factors, but only comparatively recently has childhood been idle. Everything really is childcare, when your work can be performed while you care for your children--and, as they grow, performed with your children. Well, in the 19th century we sort of collectively decided that child labor is bad, but was it bad because it was bad for children, or was it bad because it was exploitative? There are presumably non-exploitative ways for children to labor--otherwise there would be no children in film. Would it be a bad idea to extend that to other industries?
I'm not sure what, if anything, that adds to your analysis, it just struck me as maybe worth noting.
Well... it isn't 100% on point, given the different context, but I would invite you to read what I wrote to Kulak's exit and imagine how the substance of my post might apply to you.
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