naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
15d ago
Sorry to reverse-uno you, but I'd like a source on that.
...have you even bothered to look?
Here is Rowling's essay on the matter, published five years ago. Just one excerpt:
I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people . . . Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned.
This is a direct refutation of your "read" on Rowling, which you apparently never bothered to check. I would be very interested in a response from you detailing how you are now revising your priors, especially in connection with the credibility you will afford in the future to the sources of your misinformation on Rowling.
naraburns
nihil supernum
15d ago
I dislike the phrase "social contagion", which assumes that being trans is a negative and it's bad for it to spread.
You have this backward, I think--the phrase social contagion emerges from the conclusion, not the other way around. The phrase "social contagion" refers specifically to the vector for an illness. If we accept the "mental illness" model of psychology, then mental illness that spreads via social exposure is a "social contagion." To the best of my understanding, it is pretty well established that e.g. eating disorders exhibit social contagion. So, apparently, does suicide.
If gender dysphoria isn't an illness, then it's not a social contagion. But also: if gender dysphoria isn't an illness, then there's not really any good argument that insurance companies should be required to pay for treatment. (I know Scott Alexander has written about this, though to the best of my recollection he tends to be a bit allergic to drawing the obvious conclusions on trans issues, possibly because of his geographic bubble.) So gender dysphoria ends up in this weird superposition where trans advocates want it treated as an illness when that means they get money, but definitely not treated as an illness in any other context.
There are a variety of definitions out there for "mental illness" but the usual one is something like "a psychological condition that interferes with participation or satisfaction in ordinary, every day life." The standard goal of treatment is to eliminate that interference, but the sociological angle is that "ordinary, every day life" is a culturally constructed and often moving target. So yeah--dying your hair or getting a tattoo could indeed be a matter of "social contagion" if it interfered with everyday life--people who engage in extreme body modifications that make them mostly unemployable, for example, can probably even now be fairly described as suffering from a mental illness, possibly acquired through social contagion. But the more serious we are about pluralism, the harder it is to say what "ordinary, every day life" entails.
I don't think "the pro-trans tribe" would deny it if the name people used for it wasn't something which implies it's a nefarious process that needs to be halted.
The people who think transsexuality is (or is at least substantially) a matter of social contagion are generally agreed that it's a nefarious process that needs to be halted. Which, if it is a mental illness, seems like a fair assessment. Again, if it's not an illness, then related treatment is purely aesthetic, and very few people think health insurance or national health programs should cover body aesthetics (even when looking prettier seems likely to e.g. alleviate your depression).
But Rowling is not a good champion for that narrow, sensible point when she is clearly against social transition, and all forms of adult transition, as well.
Do you have a source for this? My understanding has long been that Rowling is totally fine with neopronouns, social transition, etc., and is indeed quite supportive of trans ideology in almost every context, far more so than e.g. a religious conservative. Rowling just doesn't think males should be permitted to compete against females in athletics, or placed in prison with them, or allowed into female-only shelters, or the like. Basically she has the classically feminist view that males, as a class, are dangerous to females, as a class, in ways that warrant giving certain unique recognition and advantages to females, which transsexuals born male are not; whether they are individually harmless is irrelevant to their continued membership in the suspect class. But if a male wants to put on some womanface and call himself Tina, Rowling seems happy to "yaass queen" him--just so long as he doesn't go flashing his penis in the girls' locker room.
naraburns
nihil supernum
16d ago
It's looking like the main option might be juvi.
A few weeks ago I got about 60% of the way through writing an effort post on "some people I have known," and it just got too long and convoluted... but this seems like a place to tell one of those stories.
I have some neighbors with a 12 year old daughter and a couple younger sons. Beginning when the daughter was 4 or 5, she would leave the house and come knock on neighbor's doors (including mine)--when the door was opened, she would walk right in and ask for something to eat, or invite adults to come play with her, or start rummaging through people's belongings. Sometimes she would ask if she could live with them. Refusal was met with pouting, bargaining, and sometimes screaming fits. Some neighbors would call the mother, some would call the police, depending on their level of integration into the neighborhood community; you would not guess from looking at this girl, or speaking with her, that she has any particular mental disability or whatever. Within a couple of months (during which time they made various attempts at education and discipline and other behavior-modification) my neighbors installed deadbolts on all exterior doors that had to be unlocked with a key from either side. Apparently nothing short of literally locking their daughter into the house could prevent this behavior.
This became particularly apparent when they sent her to school, as she would simply leave school any time something happened to upset her--and then resume knocking on the doors of houses that appealed to her. She was placed into one of those "special" classrooms for discipline cases and slow learners. Within a few years she had received an official diagnosis of "oppositional defiant disorder" with a side of "level one autism spectrum disorder." She made some friends and things seemed to be progressing in a good direction.
When the girl was 9 or 10, inspired in part by the girl's progress and by the growth of their younger sons (who were also generally "locked in" as collateral damage, and who wanted the freedom to play outside without being let outside, or let back in), the family removed the key-only deadbolts. Within a year or so (by now the girl was 11), early one morning, the girl let herself out and took a walk. She left our neighborhood; I don't know how far she walked, but she knocked on a stranger's door and asked to live with them, because her parents were sexually abusing her.
Naturally, these people called the cops. What happened next my neighbor would relate to me later--would relate to most of our neighbors, later, as he canvassed the neighborhood sharing information in hopes of preventing another such incident. From his perspective, the story went like this: after realizing his daughter was gone (maybe half an hour after the daughter had slipped away), he called the parents of a couple of her friends. When none of them knew of her location, he took a short walk around the block, looking for her. Finally, he called the police, who informed him that they had his daughter in custody and would be by the house shortly.
When the police arrived, they left his daughter in the cruiser. They arrived with a social worker. They separated him from his wife and interviewed each of them individually, during which time they asked a series of increasingly upsetting questions. Eventually it was revealed to them that their daughter had given an exceedingly graphic description of violent sexual abuse, which she reported she had suffered at the (joint!) hands of her parents. His wife produced documentation from the girl's psychologist, emails from school administrators and teachers, and contact information for neighbors who could corroborate certain events. The authorities glanced over all of this without much comment.
My neighbor said he couldn't imagine how his daughter had even learned about some of the things she'd accused him of (their internet is pretty locked down, and his daughter does not have a cell phone), but he's pretty sure it was just information gleaned from her "friends" (and their smartphones) in the discipline-case classroom. Despite grilling him to a distressing degree, he says the cops didn't find his daughter's story very credible--but as a matter of policy, child abuse allegations are of course taken very seriously even when they are clearly fantastical. When the grilling was done, they brought the daughter into the house--screaming all the while that she hated her family and was in mortal danger--told the parents "good luck" and beat a hasty retreat.
As soon as the cops were gone, the daughter stopped screaming, assumed a totally flat affect, and asked for something to eat. Her parents explained to her that she had put them and her brothers in quite serious danger, and the daughter responded that she didn't intend for anyone to get hurt, but she wished she had a family that was more "fun," and that was all she was trying to accomplish.
That is in broad strokes the story my neighbor told me, stoically, as he provided me with a color printout of his daughter's face on a list of contact information--not just his and his wife's, but also her psychologist, her school resource officer, some nearby family members. He apologized for the imposition but asked me to please call whoever I felt most comfortable calling, if his daughter ever showed up at my door or even if I just saw her wandering around unattended.
I've known children prone to fits and outbursts, prone to theft and prevarication, prone even to inexplicable physical violence. But this particular girl strikes me as exactly the kind of straight-up "psychopath" that academic psychologists have been reluctant to recognize as such. If her parents hadn't been meticulously documenting this girl's behavior for years, would they still have custody of their children? Might one or both of them be in prison, right now? And looking forward to her teenage years, assuming she continues to harbor this peculiar impulse to get away from her family, what actions might she take? At the extreme end, maybe she just kills her parents, but in lesser tragedies she might run further away than the next neighborhood over; she might very easily be lured into running away with a predator; at best I suspect she will continue to internalize the negative influences of her discipline-case peers and fall into drug use or theft or other anti-social behaviors. She's not mentally disabled; with daily supervision she could probably live a normal-ish life, but only if she could be persuaded to accept such supervision in the long term, and only if someone is willing and able to provide that supervision. Today, that's her parents, but even if she remains with them well into adulthood, she should outlive them by decades.
Cases like this are not common, I think, but similar situations ("on the same spectrum" we might say) are common enough that they capture something really challenging about living in a society. Low information, low intellect, low agency people exist in dizzying array. Their lives would generally be better if they were supervised. Some of the worst off do get such supervision; if they aren't born into attentive families, group homes and halfway houses and the like also exist. But in our relentless pursuit of dignity and autonomy and equality for all, we have made it all but politically impossible to act on the idea that a meaningful percentage of our population would genuinely be much better off if their lives were managed by someone else. Because the difficult question is always--who?
naraburns
nihil supernum
18d ago
I finished it last week; I enjoyed it a lot. It was quite reminiscent of the Final Fantasy 7/8/9/10 era, just brought up to date.
Probably my only complaint is that I don't always love the level design. Mazes and backtracking (and garbage platforming) extend play time without enhancing fun. Everything else, though--music, combat, voice acting, visuals--was excellent. It's basically everything I once hoped we might get out of an FF7 remake, plus an original story in a freshly imagined world.
naraburns
nihil supernum
18d ago
Isn't it wonderful living in an era when negative partisanship is the only political force that matters?
I don't think so, no, but... if it bothers you (does it bother you?), why engage in it?
Trump cannot seem to do anything at all without the corporate news media screaming that it is a sign of "scandals and corruption" and most of the time it turns out to be nothing. As a direct consequence, when it does look like something, I feel like the best response available to me is to wait and see. The news media has repeatedly turned out to be a bunch of shrill partisans who spread misinformation without hesitation and then run a retraction three months later at the bottom of page B17.
Particularly the New York Times--it's awfully hard to overlook their reluctance to write clearly about it when a (D) is involved. Book and film deals happen all the time, including with sitting members of SCOTUS. I still haven't seen any really convincing evidence, either way, that the Qatari plane deal is out of the ordinary (and apparently it may have been discussed with the previous administration). I'm more concerned about the cryptocurrency and influence peddling, but the only people crying wolf about it have been crying wolf for so long, that I don't feel any urgency at their alarm.
That, really, is why an era of "negative partisanship only" bothers me--because at this point, if we really did have a deeply corrupt politician in office, how would I know? I can't trust the corporate news media. I can't trust its openly partisan competitors. I can't trust the government itself, clearly. The moment journalists and FBI agents and every lawyer and judge to the left of Neil Gorsuch took it upon themselves--often, explicitly--to defeat Trump no matter what, every story, every press release, every speech and investigation and judicial declaration, became just another piece of culture war ammunition. Trump's first term was routinely prophesied to end with concentration camps for Muslims, war with North Korea, and the total economic collapse of the United States. Those prophesies were clearly idiotic at the time (at least to me), but at least they were happening in the absence of fixed priors on what a Trump presidency would tend to look like. People today lack that excuse.
I don't like Trump, I've never been a Trump supporter, I think he is perhaps the worst thing to happen to the Republican Party in living memory. But that doesn't justify the New York Times functioning as the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. If you want to live in an era where negative partisanship isn't the only political force that matters, you're not going to get there by writing posts in the Motte consisting entirely of negative partisanship.
naraburns
nihil supernum
24d ago
You should link to wikipedia rather than a new site that's inaccessible from outside of the US.
Which link is inaccessible from outside the US? (How would I even know?)
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
There’s a common thread here and it isn’t intellectualism.
Intellectualism isn't necessarily intellect. Being driven by ideas (as opposed to group identification) is not the same as being driven by good ideas.
Were they wrong? I think most riots belong in a different category from hostage situations, hijackings, and bombings.
I mean, they were literally wrong, yeah. But while I agree that "riot" is qualitatively distinct from "hijacking," they're different categories, but both can certainly also be terrorism.
many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted
Please tell me you mean political attacks rather than terrorist ones.
Hahah, yes, I certainly mean political attacks. Though now you mentioned it--there was that kid in Florida who shot up his university recently, in what seemed potentially a right-coded anti-university terrorist attack. But it's not clear that his extremism was specifically anti-university...?
To some extent talking about any of this feels a bit like trying to make sense of insanity; if sense could be made of it, then couldn't the argument be made that it's not insanity? It's entirely possible that I'm spooling through arguments about the shapes of clouds, here. Still, it seems like we are headed back in time, rather than forward, in terms of political terrorism.
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
I don't think Islamist terrorism is more identitarian than intellectual?
Anyone committed to Islam is committed to a "group or organization" in a way that lone wolf intellectual terrorists generally aren't, and Islamist terrorist groups often claim credit for terrorist acts, while the reaction from e.g. anti-natalists to this anti-natalist attack has been "that guy doesn't represent us."
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
Thanks for digging that up. I did not remember this when I wrote the original comment, but it strengthens my feeling that we should be paying more attention to this sort of thing, and preferably not memory-holing it...
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
Would you not classify Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, and abortion clinic bombers as being intellectual terrorists
Kaczynski for sure. McVeigh and "abortion clinic bombers," not so sure.
I do not see anything particularly left-wing about this flavor of terrorism.
This was part of my overall thinking (the "grey tribe" stuff at the end, sorry for burying the lede) in that comment. Anti-natalism pattern matches to leftism for me--all the anti-natalists I know are leftists--but not in an "identitarian left" way, so I am thinking about how I should accommodate that in thinking about this phenomenon of intellecually radicalized suicide bombers in 21st century America.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
Nicholas Roske
...weird. I can't decide if you're Mandela Effecting me, but I have the same memory--that Roske participated in the reddit anti-natalism sub, or something like that. It's surprisingly difficult to find this information, presumably because his identified accounts have been memory-holed by reddit.
(In today's weirdly bizarre coincidence, this document (PDF warning) identifies one of Roske's pseudonyms as HelenKiller1969. Today's Penny Arcade comic references the gamer name "HelenKillerWeed420.")
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
The FBI have Bartkus' manifesto, and based on media leaks it is generally nihilistic rather than being political in a way which could be described as left or right-wing.
This is on me, I suspect, for kind of burying the lede by walking through my thought processes chronologically, but--this is kind of what I was getting at. I think of anti-natalism as "left wing" because all the anti-natalists I know are to my left, politically. But where you see psychopathy as an explanation, I am kind of asking whether people are, in effect, intellectualizing themselves into psychopathy. Radicalization seems to generally be studied as an outgrowth of identitarianism; this writeup on the stages of radicalism leads quite explicitly with "the person joins or identifies with a group or organisation."
But with the anti-natalist bombing (and various others through history) it's more like, "the person identifies with an idea." Be that nihilism or philosophical anti-natalism or whatever, this pathway doesn't seem to be the one that governments and think tanks are really thinking about, when they speak of extremism.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
For this they have received no credit.
Right--putting myself in the shoes of their critics, I would guess that this falls under the "you get no points for being a decent human being, being a decent human being is the baseline expectation" clause. Of course, this clause is only ever applied in one direction, and also I am suspicious of the claim that there is anything "baseline" about humans being kind to one another, but nevertheless--the rhetoric is the rhetoric.
That said, I have to wonder how much of the decrease in violence against abortion doctors can be explained by pro-life activism self-policing, and how much can be explained by the successful psy-op of raising two or three generations of citizens who just don't think that killing the unborn is a very big deal, and often think that subjecting women to authority, ever, for any reason, is peak oppression.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
Can you say more about how Livelsberger was a leftist suicide bomber?
It seems like he changed his mind about those things, and indeed that the change was a sufficiently traumatic experience that he became radicalized against things he once believed. But I acknowledge that is not the only possible explanation for his actions.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
Did everyone hear about the anti-natalist suicide bombing?
I feel like this warrants a lot more attention than I have seen it getting so far. Of course, antinatalist spaces are working to clarify the difference between anti-natalism and pro-mortalism, but bombing a fertility clinic is not merely pro-mortalism (unless you count embryos as human lives, I suppose, which none of the anti-natalists or pro-mortalists I know do).
But this looks like it was a suicide bomber on American soil in advancement of a radical leftist position. If you count Matthew Livelsberger (maybe you don't, since I guess he shot himself first?) this is our second leftist suicide bomber this year. Are these just not getting more attention because they failed to produce a significant body count? Because they didn't come with articulate manifestos? Because they were "lone wolf" actors? Because we want to keep the oxygen out of that room, lest a greater conflagration result?
Considered alongside the whole Ziz cult murder thing, I feel like I am watching the tentative re-emergence of something I have long associated with the 1970s or thereabouts (when it was all letter bombs and airplane hijacking)--radical intellectualism. From the 1980s through the 2000s, painting with a broad brush, my reflexive stereotype of terrorism was Islamic terrorism. This is very American of me, of course--this was also the operating era of the Tamil Tigers, for example, but most Americans could not say what country they threatened, nor point to it on a map. Terrorism--loosely defined as violence in furtherance of an ideology--is an idea that can be applied much more broadly than it normally is, but the central case seems most often to involve a racial, religious, or ethnic group acting in furtherance of identitarian interests. The connection between identitarianism and terrorism seems to me underexplored! But as a liberal who eschews both left- and right-identitarianism ("woke" and "alt-right," respectively) of course I would put it that way.
Anyway intellectual terrorism seems like a different sort of animal. It seems difficult to really get a group of people to cohere around pure ideas. The "rationalist movement," for example, is deeply fractious despite having managed to develop into something of an identity group, at least in San Francisco. But the left-wing prospiracy appears to have advanced to the point where it is sparking an increased number of violent radicals, declaring for causes that average people seem more likely to find confusing than anything else. To the average American, bombing a fertility clinic in the name of anti-natalism is like bombing a Chuck-E-Cheese in the name of anti-baloonism. "Well, that's obviously bad, but also... WTF? Was the bomber schizophrenic? Who's anti-baloonist?"
Here in the Motte we have rules against writing posts that are purely "can you believe what $OUTGROUP did" or picking the worst, most extreme examples of a group and holding them up as representative--so I want to add that I do not think anti-natalists are usually violent, or that bombing fertility clinics is especially representative of leftist political action. But of course the corporate news media gives no such disclaimers concerning, say, abortion clinic bombings or other right-coded "terrorism." Hell, they wouldn't even call it terrorism, when George Floyd extremists went around lighting things on fire in protest of a vibe. To some extent I guess I'm Noticing this particular suicide bombing in part because the FBI is actually calling it terrorism--and maybe in part because the intellectual, rather than identitarian, nature of the terrorism makes me a little bit worried. Because on reflection that doesn't actually sound like blue tribe terrorism, quite, even if it is "radical left" coded; it sounds like grey tribe terrorism. And while I am clearly not a member of either the Zizian or anti-natalist factions of the grey tribe, I think that distinction would be utterly lost on most people.
(Actually I experience something similar when people attack universities; many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted, but sometimes I find myself wishing I had more of a platform, so that I could remind Republicans that there are still many conservative causes served by academia, and that some faculty members are broadly on their side and want to help. Please don't catch me in the crossfire...!)
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
This part was interesting from Frost:
Frost: In terms of who I’m watching for, it’s all the folks who have not yet gone on the record as being opposed to nationwide injunctions.
Who are those people?
Frost: Really everybody but [Justice Neil] Gorsuch, [Justice Samuel] Alito and [Justice Clarence] Thomas.
However, according to this CNN article:
Speaking at a university event in 2022, Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, addressed how nationwide injunctions – when coupled with forum-shopping – were hamstringing administrations of both parties, asserting that “It just can’t be right that one district judge can stop a nationwide policy in its tracks and leave it stopped for the years that it takes to go through the normal process,” Kagan said.
My sense has long been that Kagan, as the only remaining Democrat-appointed justice who wasn't purely an affirmative action pick, is an the awkward position of being a genuinely capable jurist saddled with the burden of morons for ideological allies. But when supposed court experts go on Politico to explain who thinks what, and somehow a journalist at CNN manages to know more than them about the state of play, I have to wonder whether the experts are actually ignorant, or simply crafting a narrative.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Any advice on getting one?
There are many ways, but in my experience the most decisive step toward getting paid large sums of money to tell other people to do things they would do better without your interference is to get an MBA.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
One could argue that both the Enlightenment and the later Progressive moment falsely took credit for quality of living improvements that were actually just the result of the Industrial Revolution
I mean, this is pretty much Marx's whole schtick, isn't it?
My own view is that ideas and material reality are mutually intertwined, but I doubt "it's both, really" is a position that will raise anyone's eyebrows. The hard part is explaining exactly how each influences the other, and I've never encountered a fully satisfactory approach to that question. Clearly, sometimes people think new thoughts and do new things. Clearly, sometimes their success in doing so depends on the conditions of material reality. And equally clearly, sometimes the conditions of material reality are the result of people thinking new thoughts and doing new things.
But mostly, Nothing Ever Happens, which makes the fact that anything has ever Happened at all, all the more puzzling. This is at heart the same argument Parmenides ("change is an illusion") had with Heraclitus ("sameness is an illusion"), which Plato "resolved" by saying--of course--"it's both, really."
Great post!
I don't have any problem with the idea of "luxury beliefs" in the sense that some beliefs appear to indeed be things that it is costly to believe, and that some people are able to bear the cost while others are not. I think that what makes them tricky is that the costs themselves are arguably grounded in what other people believe. Where "luxury beliefs" get controversial seems to be when it is a matter of controversy as to whether the costs are themselves a consequence of the belief, or a consequence of e.g. social norms.
Post-WWII, American culture underwent a radical shift. Progressivism to that point had mostly been about the perfectibility of mankind through social programs--public education, proper nutrition, clean water, etc. were things that many American communities still lacked circa 1920. In the century from 1870 to 1970, the percent of illiterate white Americans over the age of 14 dropped (PDF) from 20% to 1%; the percent of illiterate nonwhites dropped from 80% to around 4%--and those percentages went to about 0.5% and 2% in the ten years following. Similar strides were made in nutrition, hygiene, clean water, etc. and we were exporting these advances, too--engaging in imperialism modernization efforts around the world.
But today if you've "caught the vision" of progressivism, you needn't pursue it very long to discover that the low-hanging fruit is well and truly plucked. Of course new children are still being born (for now...) so there's always more work to be done, but the extent of visible progress achieved by the progressive project within living memory circa 1995 was unprecedented and jaw-dropping. We'd conquered nature so thoroughly that the only thing remaining to hinder our own progress was... other people!
Prototypical progressive thinkers--I'm thinking specifically of John Stuart Mill, here--were very interested in the idea that we should all have maximum liberty, constrained only by the compatibility of that liberty with everyone else enjoying liberty in similar quantities. "My right to swing my fist ends where your right to swing your fist begins," I suppose, though there is probably a more pithy version of that floating around somewhere. At the root of this is the idea that we are all the best judges of our own flourishing, provided we start from a place of adequate education.
So here in the 21st century, we have responses to your identified categories.
- Gender transition is a way for people to flourish by breaking the bonds of restrictive social constructs. The only costs are those imposed by transphobes.
- Sex positivity is a way for people to be honest and open about what actually brings them pleasure. The only costs are those imposed by slut-shaming.
- Drugs are a way for people to pursue their interest in feeling certain ways. This is more complicated and may not apply to certain highly lethal drugs, but the costs imposed on e.g. marijuana or nootropic users are predominantly imposed by moralizing busybodies.
- Psychotherapy is a way for people to flourish with the help of trained professionals. The only costs are those imposed by... psychophobes? Do we have a neat slur for people who think therapy is for the stupid and the weak?
- "Do what you love" may be the single most obvious good that any human could choose. If you read Freddie deBoer's manifesto, his whole "imagine a world where..." is a story about people being free to just do what they want, when they want to, without any consequences being imposed on them by society--indeed, with all possible consequences being absorbed, costlessly and without a single judgmental comment, by society.
I think that some of the rising conservatism I see in today's young people--which of course the Cathedral has already tarred as right wing extremism--is a growing suspicion that these claims about the source of oppression being socially constructed, which it may have been understandable for people to believe as recently as 50 years ago, no longer plausibly hold water.
- Gender is more than just a social construct, and a true sex change operation would involved extensive (impossible at current tech levels) brain surgery, to say nothing of the endocrine system. Sorry, you're going to have to wait for better tech.
- Sexual feelings are more than just a social construct; pair bonding has biological roots and slut shaming is a defense mechanism against defections from the stable equilibrium of general monogamy.
- Psychotherapy might be beneficial for the truly damaged, but most likely you're depressed (or whatever) as a result of trying to believe things your biology tells you that you shouldn't believe. Psychotherapy is a way to maintain in humans the view that their inability to thrive in the new progressive world is their problem, not the progressive world's problem.
- If we all really did what we love all the time, we would all starve to death in short order. Or if we really did manage to make robots do everything for us, our antifragility would lead to widespread psychological breakdown due to a universal crisis of meaning. Humans are evolved to do the work of humans, not to perpetually enjoy only the enjoyment of humans. Loss of the latter means the extinction of the former.
I'm intrigued by the fact that these are all actually fairly empirical disputes--they're just not the kinds of questions it is easy to get clear answers on. Sociology is tricky even when you don't have political activists thumbing the scales, and these days the scales are so covered with thumbs as to render the payloads utterly invisible.
This all applies, I think, to polyamory as well. I can imagine a society in which humans were more like bonobos--where we had sexual interactions as part of all of our social interactions. The first step, I suspect, would have to be the eradication of sexually transmitted disease! But psychologically this would require a transformation that seems to run deeper than culture. Sexual jealousy is universally attested. There are apparently people who can make polyamory work, and for whom it arguably works very well (though a question arises--if you have to make it work...). But for those for whom it doesn't work, I don't think the problem is poly-shaming or other cultural roadblocks. The problems seem more biologically grounded than that. My question is whether the rationalists now doubting the viability of polyamory will realize that this has structural implications for some of their other beliefs.
(In particular--the sneer faction of the ratsphere has always been comparative conservatives about polyamory, and yet they are if anything more progressive than the modal rationalist when it comes to, say, transsexuality. I notice that I am confused.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
This post is fine, but given its relation with CW issues, should be posted in the CW thread.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Seldom have I heard a story where I had so little sympathy for any side.
Right?
...don't be surprised if the shitstorm hits you.
A shitstorm and somehow, between the various parties, a million dollars in crowdsourced donations.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
This reminds me that I have an effort post to write about some people I have known...
I don't have any particular beef with the Mormons--if anything, I admire them on a cultural level. But my understanding is that the current leadership is pretty committed to burying anything that makes the faith stand out from the undifferentiated mass of non-denominational Christianity generally.
Really, writ large, the history of Mormonism has been a history of retreat from anything that made it interesting or unique. The continued existence of Fundamentalist Mormon polygamy (in remote cities across the western United States) is clear evidence that the LDS church could have survived a steadfast refusal to conform with the demands of the U.S. government on that score. But the LDS chose growth (and financial stability) over their own revealed doctrines. More recently, the church took a strong stand in favor of traditional marriage with California's "Prop 8," only to retreat almost entirely from the issue within less than a decade (about half of Mormons today approve of same sex marriage, in complete disregard for their own history and teachings). Indeed, for most of the 20th century the LDS indulged in quite a lot of blisteringly anti-Catholic rhetoric, and mocked the wearers of crosses and crucifixes ("if they shot Jesus, would you wear an AK-47 necklace?")--only to take up the cross and incorporate "holy week" into their worship services in the 21st.
Of course the Mormons are not alone in any of this; the Great Awokening has shifted the ideological landscape a lot, such that the boggling inanity of stuff like "Queers for Palestine" has become de rigueur. But the LDS church seems to be speed-running the history of Christianity in reverse, starting as a sect of innovative and progressive doctrines (open canon, anti-slavery, apotheosis, polygamy, theocracy, miracles) then gradually reverting to a blandly Protestant cultural mean (no more polygamy, replacing "translation" with "inspiration" in explanations of the Book of Abraham, literally whitewashing their own history by painting over artwork in their temples), then landing on their own implementation of an infallible papacy (in the form of a well-heeled corporation sole).
This... probably sounds more critical than I intend it to be. Mormons are as good as any, and better than many, at building communities. Their doctrines have never been any more ridiculous than those of Catholics, or Jews, or Muslims (and if a ridiculous doctrine produces a valuable outcome, is it actually ridiculous?). North America would certainly be a more interesting place today if the Rocky Mountains had become a polygamist Mormon Theocracy, as the sect once planned. But the way history is unfolding, I would expect the LDS to be culturally and theologically indistinguishable from, say, progressive-ish Methodist congregations, within a century or two. The LDS will eventually ordain women and wed gays because their open canon gives them an excuse to do so, and their demonstrated preference is for continued growth and prosperity, not adherence to revealed doctrines. Indeed, Conquest's second and third laws of politics seems to apply:
- Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
- The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.
I have seen the LDS do more in the last 20 years to appease its critics than to cater to its own existing membership (or teachings!). There is a commonplace that one should have an open mind, but not so open that one's brains fall out. Likewise, Mormonism's open canon was in the 19th century its evident strength, but in a world of mass media and "social justice" that same open canon has become a clear organizational liability. I am skeptical that recognizably religious Mormonism can long survive the--good, even perhaps noble--intentions of its corporate leadership.
Whether that is good or bad (or matters at all) is a separate question, of course. That parousia failed to occur promptly at the turn of the millennium came as a serious blow for many apocalyptic sects--this is, I think, an underappreciated aspect of the cultural changes that have happened since. I knew so many Christians, circa 1999, who clearly harbored serious hopes, verging on expectations, that 2000, 2001 at latest, was going to be the year the heathens burned. Churches have been forced to adapt (most have failed to do so), and the Mormons are no exception. The idea that Restorationism (of which the Mormons are an important, but not unique, example) results in "far less confusion over having to litigate and reexamine each and every piece of modern practice and belief" does not, I think, hold up to the test of history.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
One thing to note that I believe is true - the NAACP's fundraiser used this incident as an issue, but the funding was just for them.
This is actually a kind of interesting question--the reports I read initially said that the NAACP fundraiser was intended to cover presumed legal expenses for the family to pursue justice. Crowdfunding "to cover legal expenses" does seem to actually just be enterprising lawyers doing lawyer things--a very Chicago moment, if you've seen that musical.
However the NAACP GoFundMe page now claims that 100% of the money is going into a trust for the kid and his family. Be that as it may, trusts have operating fees, so there's still a grifting angle.
Remarkable how quickly you drop to a motte-and-bailey doctrine here. Here is what you said, emphasis added:
Based on her own words, this is clearly false. Then, when I tried to correct you, you doubled down and asked me to be the one bringing evidence, instead of you. So I brought the evidence, and your response was to simply withdraw to a motte:
I no longer regard you as engaging honestly in this conversation, so I guess that's the end of it.
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